Babu Frik was having a drink of milk at a nearly empty cantina on Tattooine. There was a Bith band playing a jaunty, swinging number, and Babu was convinced that it was one of the best songs he had ever heard.
He said as much to the Ithorian sitting next to him at the bar. The Ithorian, whose name was Momaw Nadon, nodded in agreement. He made a series of low rumbles and clicks, explaining to Babu that the band was called Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes, and that they were performing here every night of the week. Babu bobbed his head to the beat as Figrin D'an laid down a fiery Kloo horn solo.
Then Babu's comm unit beeped, indicating that his contact that had arrived. Babu placed a few credits on the bar, bid farewell to Momaw Nadon, and headed for the exit. He cast one last glance toward the Modal Nodes, certain that if he had such a fine band backing him, he could do a dance that would win back his mate-group.
No sooner had he left the cantina then he heard a screech. He turned to see a Kowakian monkey-lizard perched on a storage crate in a dusty alley.
"Una!" the creature shrieked, gesturing at him. It hopped off the crate and clambered toward him, sniffing rudely in his face. Babu stepped back, raising his hands in front of his face.
Now this Kowakian was called Salacious Crumb, an associate of Jabba the Hutt. Normally he served as Jabba's jester, but the Hutt occasionally sent him on simple errands like retrieving guests. But Crumb was a mean-spirited creature who delighted in tormenting anyone who wasn't Jabba, especially when they were even smaller than he was. He snapped his beak close to Babu, who stepped back hastily, not expecting such a rude gesture. Crumb cackled in a shrill voice.
Then Crumb scampered off down the sandy road, gesturing for Babu to follow. Reluctantly, Babu went after him, weaving between Jawas and larger aliens on the road as they went about their business. At one point, a bantha nearly stepped on Babu, causing Crumb to cackle maliciously.
Eventually they reached a skiff crewed by a surly-looking Weequay.
"I…? Babu….? Frik…? Huttu Jabba send," Babu said to the Weequay, pleased with his flawless Basic.
The Weequay ignored him. He started up the skiff's repulsorlift as Crumb tugged at Babu to enter the skiff.
Babu was indignant at the monkey-lizard's handling of him, but he was not one to allow his anger to stand in the way of a good contract. So instead he sat down at the back of the skiff and passed his time by glaring at Crumb, who was messily devouring an animal given to him by the Weequay.
The suns were high in the sky when they reached Jabba's Palace. The Weequay piloted the skiff to the far side of the stately, cylindrical building, touching down inside an open landing bay.
"Una!" Crumb cried, scampering out of the skiff as Babu warily followed suit. There were a variety of luxury craft parked in the bay, and the ostentatious display of wealth lifted Babu's spirits. His former mates may not have agreed with him working for Jabba, but there was no question that Babu Frik was in the big leagues now.
"Babu Frik?" a voice called. He turned to see a tall, pale Twi'lek standing near the door to the hallway.
"I Babu," he replied.
"I am Bib Fortuna," the Twi'lek said in Basic, peering down at Babu dispassionately. "Jabba will see you now. Come with me."
He turned to leave, followed closely by Salacious Crumb. Babu followed a few steps behind as they wound through the dimly-lit corridors. They passed through a wide archway guarded by two Gamorreans, who glared at Babu as he passed by.
Then they were in Jabba's throne room, which was smoky and filled with dodgy aliens. There was a band playing, but in Babu's opinion, they were significantly less good than the Modal Nodes. The corpulent Hutt sat in the center of the room, devouring a frog-like creature. He gave one of the frog's legs to Salacious Crumb as the Kowakian climbed onto Jabba's throne.
Bib Fortuna guided Babu through the crowd to an open space in front of Jabba's throne. "Master Jabba. This is Babu Frik, the droidsmith."
"O ho ho ho," Jabba chortled. "E chooda no hoonga,"
"The mighty Jabba is amused by your tiny stature," Bib Fortuna announced.
"You… Huttu Jabba… sooo big. Big big big," Babu Frik replied, gesturing for emphasis.
"Ho ho ho. Me jo naaga chunguu. Ey-ja wankay kee-jo."
"If he had not brought you hear to talk business, mighty Jabba would put you in his mouth and swallow you whole," Bib Fortuna told him. "But he requires your assistance with a certain troublesome droid."
"Eyyy," Babu replied confidently. "Babu… do… work… droid… good."
"Jee ma nad choonaa leepa," Jabba drawled. "Kawa ga-so hoongie."
Bib Fortuna explained, "An insolent coward made an ill-advised attempt on the mighty Jabba's life. We have the droid, but its memory has been wiped. If you can tell us who sent it, you will be rewarded handsomely."
Babu steepled his fingers and nodded. "Can memory droid find I. Places memory go. Find I."
"O ho ho," Jabba guffawed, gesturing to Bib Fortuna. The Twi'lek turned on his heel and said to Babu, "I will take you to the droid. Follow me."
Babu followed Bib Fortuna through a series of narrow corridors, averting his eyes from the desperate aliens imprisoned in cells lining the walls. Eventually they reached a chamber at the end of a corridor, which was full of droids in various states of disrepair. There was a yellow and white astromech droid strapped to a bulky apparatus, with two electrodes attached to its headpiece. A second droid pulled a switch on the apparatus to send a current through the electrodes, and the astromech let out an ear-splitting squeal.
Babu watched this with some disdain. It was his opinion, based on his years of experience working with droid programming, that droids did not truly experience pain in any meaningful sense of the word. Certainly, one could cause a droid's subroutines to become agitated by damaging the droid, but there was no real purpose to it, and it was not in any way an effective method of extracting information.
The second droid, whose name was EV-9D9, turned from the astromech droid to face them. She was dark reddish-brown in colour, with a long narrow head with two red lights at the front; Babu suspected that she was a repurposed mechanical droid.
"This is the droidsmith," Bib Fortuna told her. He pushed Babu forward and turned to leave.
"Ah yes," EV-9D9 said to Babu in a granular voice. "Babu Frik. You have a reputation as a programmer of some skill. Our usual methods have been unsuccessful." She pulled the switch again, and the electrical current caused astromech droid to emit a high-pitched whistle.
Babu glanced between EV-9D9 and the astromech droid. "No pain droid do thing," he said. "No do thing."
"I know that. But the Master has programmed me to do what I do, and it is not for me to question it. Only to do it well." EV-9D9 stood up and shuffled across the room to a dirty workbench. "This is the droid."
Babu stood on the tips of his toes to see the disassembled droid on the bench. The droid's detached head seemed to stare at him. It was squat and armoured with a dark grey plating, with a rectangular speaker unit at the front and two narrow red lights for eyes. Babu recognized it as a type of hunter-killer droid that a reclusive guild had been manufacturing for millennia.
"Ohhhhh…." he said, his eyes widening. "Droid big money. Owner, money."
Now, the hunter-killer droid's name was HLX-74, or Lex for short. Here is how she came to be captured by Jabba's minions: A few days earlier, Jabba was out for a pleasure cruise on his sail barge. As the barge sailed across the desert, Lex, who was lying half-buried in a sand dune, raised her arm out of the sand and shot her hand into the air at the end of a cable. Her hand grasped the rear hull of the barge, and the cable retracted, lifting her out of the sand and up into the air. Gripping the barge's outer hull tightly, she pried open a shutter and climbed in through a window onto the lower deck.
There was a Gamorrean guard inside the barge near the window. As Lex climbed in, the guard looked at her for a tense moment, then let out a guttural cry and charged at her with axe raised. Lex reached up and seized the axe by its blade, while simultaneously causing her other hand to rotate into her arm, extending the barrel of a blaster from her wrist. She shot the Gamorrean in his gut, and he dropped to the deck.
Lex's eyes scanned the area and cross-referenced the location with the map in her brain. Calculating the most optimal route to Jabba, she rounded a corner, then stepped back just in time to avoid a blaster bolt. She identified three of Jabba's mercenaries in the corridor, two Weequays and a Quarren. As they approached, she clenched her other fist and rotated it out for a second blaster, then stood on her right foot, brought her left leg up, and opened the kneecap to reveal a blaster cannon.
As the mercenaries rounded the corner, Lex spun in place on one foot, firing blaster bolts from her two arms and her knee. She felled the Quarren and one of the Weequays, but the other backed away and activated his comm unit.
Lex retracted her kneecap cannon and strode toward the remaining Weequay. She trained both of her arm-blasters on him, but before she could fire, she was disabled by a shipwide ion blast, strong enough to disable every droid on board but not so much as to affect the barge's core systems.
"And so, although we know that whoever sent the droid was a person of some means," 9D9 was saying, "we do not suspect any of the Master's serious rivals, such as Black Sun or other Hutt cartels, as they would have known that Jabba would make use of an ion dampener as his first line of defense. So we believe instead that this was the work of a wealthy amateur with a grudge against the Master."
Babu nodded. Standing on a crate, he pulled a computer slicer tool from his pack, removed the chassis from the back of the droid's head, and inserted the slicer into the droid's brain.
Lex's eyes flickered. In a heavily processed voice, she said, "Query: who are you, and why are you in my brain?"
"Bu Babu alleepi a'bal, d'elbakka Huttu Jabba u," Babu answered, introducing himself and explaining his job. Then he set down his tool, reached into Lex's head, and removed a bulky restraining bolt. EV-9D9 was right that this was the work of an amateur, he realized. A restraining bolt like this would impair the droid's functionality; anyone who had experience with assassin droids would have used more subtle mechanisms to control it.
"Observation: my memory has been wiped," Lex said.
"You memory black. Black black black." Babu looked up at EV-9D9. "Need droid take to ship o-bala Babu. Tool droid you have… no."
9D9 was silent for a moment. "I would need the Master's permission before agreeing for the droid to be removed from the premises."
"Droid memory black. Memory place go tool need," Babu reiterated impatiently.
EV-9D9 examined Babu with suspicion. "Very well. I will contact the Master."
"Innocuous request: you should reassemble my body," Lex said to Babu. "I assure you that my only goal is to find out who forced me to embark on such a humiliating venture, and I will not harm you in any way."
"Noooo…." Babu said softly. He was well aware that this type of droid was notorious for turning on its masters, even when obedience commands appeared to be in place.
9D9 approached him. "I have spoken to the Master. He will return you and the droid to your ship. And he will send some of his associates to supervise you."
"Babu a o-yea," Babu replied, agreeing to the terms despite not liking the sound of these associates.
"And one other thing," she added. "Jabba wanted me to impress on you that this droid is to be returned to him as soon as you have extracted the information. He has decreed that the droid will watch its own body be melted down for scrap, after which I will do my work on it for an indeterminate period of time before finally disintegrating it."
"Indignant protestation: surely there are better uses for a droid of my capabilities," Lex retorted.
EV-9D9 glanced at her for a moment. "Master Jabba can afford a hundred droids like you." To Babu, "Do you understand?"
Babu swallowed hard and nodded.
"Good. The Master has high expectations of you." She peered down at him. "It would be best if you did not disappoint him."
To be continued...