Free Star Wars: Tales of the Bounty Hunters by Kevin J. Anderson Page B

hatches. He didn’t dare risk that a sudden explosive decompression might damage the delicate components he needed to inspect.
    IG-88 stood at the front of his team of stormtrooper droids. With his vibration sensors and his acoustical pickups, he could hear armored Imperials rushing to defend themselves inside their crippled ship. He waited as a precise munitions droid applied explosives to the expendable ship’s hatch. IG-88 didn’t even bother to step out of the way.
    A flash of light, a burst of noise, a brief ripple of heat, and the hatch to the Imperial freighter buckled inward. IG-88 stormed through, leading his white-armored soldiers like a swashbuckling pirate taking over a treasure-filled ship.
    The real Imperial stormtroopers on the other sidefired upon the droid troopers. The armored biologicals shouted confused commands to each other, not understanding what was going on, not comprehending the tactics of their attackers.
    Many of the droid troopers were damaged by blaster fire, their white armor buckling and smoking with wounds that would have been fatal on any biological—but the droids kept up the charge. The Imperial defenses crumbled into a wild firefight—but IG-88’s team maintained their ranks and eliminated any stormtroopers in their way.
    Amidst the smoke and fire, shouts and desperate transmissions, IG-88 used his hand lasers to eliminate the enemy, but he did not stay for the main pitched battle. Instead, he clomped through the carnage, intent on reaching the cargo hold where the original Death Star computer core lay waiting for delivery.
    IG-88 stood over it, caressing the lumpy component-adorned structure of the long cylinder. Lights blinked, showing its standby readiness. Soon, he would inhabit its mental labyrinths.
    IG-88 jacked in, drinking deep the information he needed on how to run the Death Star itself. For all the computing power and for all its size, the Death Star core had been designed with typical human inefficiency. The power available in this thinking apparatus was barely utilized. A minor droid could probably have done the tasks the Death Star core was required to do—but IG-88 would do so much more. So much more. Perhaps he would even manage to impress the biologicals … before he destroyed them all.
    After only a few seconds he stood up, squaring his metal shoulders, content that he had all the information he could possibly need. Taking over the Death Star would be a simple operation, and he would make the battlestation do things even its designers had never conceived.
    IG-88 waded slowly through the smoke out of thecargo bay to see two damaged stormtrooper droids, their white armor blasted away and showing a forest of servomotors and wire-sheathed neurons. They wrestled a struggling, confused, but angry human between them. IG-88 scanned the man, locked his image into data files, and searched. Even from this brief glimpse and for all the vagaries of the human form, IG-88 could see that this man’s smell sensor—the
nose
, they called it—was far larger and presumably more efficient than the average biological had.
    After a long second of deliberation, IG-88 was able to snap a name to this man’s face:
Imperial Supervisor Gurdun
, the man who had issued the “dismantle on sight” order for the IG assassin droids.
    Interesting.
    Gurdun struggled as the stormtrooper droids brought him closer, but then the human looked up and saw IG-88. He froze, his mouth open, his nostrils flaring wide enough to park a small one-man flier inside.
    “You! I know you,” Gurdun said. “You’re IG-88, the assassin droid! Am I surprised to see you here. I can’t believe it. Do you know how hard it’s been to find you?”
    IG-88’s red optical sensors blinked, but he did not reply.
    “I’d recognize you anywhere,” Gurdun said again. “I created you. I ordered Holowan Laboratories to begin your design. Don’t you have that in your files?”
    “Yes,” IG-88 said flatly.
    “Well, I