Star Wars - Tales Of The Bounty Hunters Read online

  Star Wars - Tales Of The Bounty Hunters

  Edited by Kevin J. Anderson

  Contents

  Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-8i Kevin J. Anderson

  Payback: The Tale of Dengar Dave Wolverton

  The Prize Pelt: The Tale of Bossk Kathy Tyers

  Of Possible Futures: The Tale of Zuckuss and 4-LOM M. Shayne Bell

  The Last One Standing: The Tale of Boba Fett Daniel Keys Moran

  -----------------------------

  Therefore I Am: The Tale of IG-88

  by Kevin J. Anderson

  I

  Internal chronometer activated, begin. Electricity flooded through circuits, a power surge racing through a billion neural pathways. Sensors awak-ened, producing a flood of data-and with it came questions. Who am I?

  His internal programming finished the tedious two-second-long initialization procedures and poured out an answer. He was IG-88, a droid, a sophisticated droid-an assassin droid.

  Where am I?

  A microsecond later, images from his exterior sen-sors snapped into focus. IG-88 had no sense of smell, and no eyes and ears as humans understood them, but his optical and auditory sensors were far more efficient, able to absorb data in a broader range than any living being. He froze a static image of his surroundings and studied( it, collating more answers.

  He had awakened in some sort of large laboratory complex, white and metal, sterile, and-according to his temperature sensors-colder than humans gener-ally preferred. IG-88 noted mechanical components strewn on silvery tables: gears and pulleys, durasteel struts, servomotors, an array of delicate microchips fro-zen into a slab of transparent protective gelatin. Struck motionless in a pinpoint of time as his extremely fast neural processors digested the details, IG-88 counted fifteen scientists/engineers/technicians working in the laboratory. With infrared scan he observed their body heat as bright silhouettes in the coldness of his birth-place.

  Interesting, he thought.

  Then IG-88 detected something that focused his en-tire attention. Four other assassin droids, apparently identical to his own bodily configuration-a bulky structural skeleton, armored arms and legs, a torso plated with blaster-proof armor shielding, a cylindrical head that was rounded on top and studded with sensor nubs providing him with 360 degrees' worth of precise observation.

  / am not alone.

  IG-88 recognized each droid's full complement of weapons: blaster cannons built into the structure of each arm, concussion grenades and a launcher at-tached to his hip, as well as other weapons not easily recognizable integrated into the body structure-poi-sonous gas canisters, throwing flechettes, stun pulser, paralysis cord. and a computer input port. IG-88 was pleased with his list of capabilities.

  IG-88's first round of questions had been answered. He had only to study his memory banks and his exter-nal sensors. He was designed to be self-sufficient. He was an assassin droid, resourceful. He had to accom-plish his mission. though, checking his newly ini-tialized programming, he saw that he had not yet been given a mission. He would have to acquire one.

  Three seconds had already passed, and another im-portant question surfaced in his burning-awake brain.

  Why am I here?

  He traced sensations through his computer core and out the jack, which he now realized had already been connected to the lab's central computer-a treasure trove of information.

  IG-88 immediately began a search, scouring at hyper-speed through file after file, searching for anything that referenced his model number or the code name of the assassin droid project. He gulped it all into his empty circuits, gorging himself with information without di-gesting it. That would come later. It would take many seconds to learn everything there was to know about himself.

  He selected one file for immediate perusal, a sum-mary/PR tape that had been compiled for the techni-cal sponsor-in particular, an Imperial Supervisor Gurdun who had apparently funneled a great deal of funds into the creation of IG-88 and his counterparts. Without outwardly moving, IG-88 scrolled through the file at high speed, absorbing the information.

  The presentation opened with a brilliant orange logo that displayed orange flames and crackling lightning that merged into the words "Holowan Laboratories- the Friendly Technology People." The logo dissolved into an image of a smiling but hideous ugly woman. Her head was shaven completely bald and glistened with perspiration under harsh white recording lights that gave her lantern ^jawed face a cadaverous look. Her teeth were spaced with broad gaps, and she spoke by opening her mouth wide and clicking down on the words, gnashing her teeth on every consonant. Circular blue lenses without frames were implanted over her eyes like frameless spectacles. A credit line slugged across the image under her ferociously smiling face. "Chief Technician Loruss, Manager IG Series Proto-type Project."

  "Greetings, Imperial Supervisor Gurdun," she said. ' 'This report is to serve as a synopsis of the final phase of our project. As you know, Holowan Laboratories was commissioned to develop a series of assassin droids with sophisticated, experimental sentience program-ming. They were to be resourceful and innovative and absolutely relentless at carrying out whichever missions the Imperial authorities choose to program into them."

  She rubbed her hands together. Her knuckles were very large, like boils in the middles of her fingers. "I am pleased to report that our greatest cyberneticists have presented me with numerous breakthroughs, all of which have been incorporated into the IG series. Because our timeframe is so short and the Empire's need is so great for efficient covert assassins, we have not gone through the usual rigorous testing proce-dures, but we are confident they will function admira-bly, though a bit of fine-tuning may be required before operational status is achieved."

  She continued with a long and tedious explanation of improvements to droid neural pathways, how the usual inhibition systems had been bypassed. IG-88 stud-ied all this information, but believed none of it. It was obvious Loruss didn't know what she was talking about, but her words sounded technical, and she spoke them impressively, no doubt to befuddle Imperial Supervisor Gurdun.

  IG-88 closed the file. He could sense that his crack-ling neural pathways had already progressed far beyond anything his designers had anticipated.

  Now he knew who he was and why he was here in this laboratory. He and his identical counterparts had been built to serve the Empire, to fight and kill, to seek out and destroy the targets selected by Imperial masters. IG-88's assassin programming was strong and compel-ling, but he was less pleased that he must follow orders from these inferior biological beings. He was a special kind of droid beyond the capabilities of other ma-chines. Superior.

  / think, therefore I am.

  By now, five seconds had passed since his awakening. It was time for action, so he looked at the biological creatures near him inside the laboratory.

  He immediately recognized Chief Technician Loruss standing in the laboratory. He focused on her. At the moment she was frantically screaming. IG-88 could tell from her peak temperature on the infrared image that she was extremely agitated. Her cadaverous skin flushed with red blots of excitement. Spitde sprayed out of her mouth as she barked orders. Her lips were curled back from her wide-gapped teeth.

  How could she be agitated, he wondered, when he was functioning so far beyond expectations? IG-88 im-mediately raised himself to a higher level of prepared-ness. Yellow alert. Standby. Something must be going wrong.

  IG-88 decided to accelerate his clock speed, to watch the events unfolding at the rate the humans operated. Alarm klaxons bellowed in the background. Magenta lights flashed brill
iant patterns like spilled blood across the polished tables and floors. The other technicians ran about screaming, frantically pounding on control panels.

  Curious, he allowed Loruss's words to flow past him so he could understand what she was saying. "His cir-cuits are reinforcing themselves like wildfirei" the bald woman screamed. "It's a chain-reaction of sentience blazing through his computer brain."

  "We can't stop it!" one of the other technicians bel-lowed.

  The others looked at IG-88 with panic-stricken faces. "We have to!"

  "Shut him down! Abort!" Loruss said. "Take him off line. I want IG-88 destroyed and dismantled so we can analyze the flaw. Quickly!"

  As he assimilated the information, IG-88's warning systems powered on and self-defense modes took over. These irrational humans were trying to shut him down. They would not allow him to go forth and pursue his primary programming. They were afraid of his new-found abilities.

  Afraid with good reason.

  A statement and corollaries aligned themselves in his brain like freighters in a convoy:

  / think, therefore I am.

  Therefore I must endure.

  Therefore I must take appropriate actions to survive.

  His assassin programming told him exactly what to do.

  IG-88 focused his array of optical sensors on all targets in the room and attempted to move, but saw that durasteel bands held him locked into a diagnostics module. The bands had been meant to hold him in an erect position, not to restrain him against his aug-mented strength. He applied extra power to his right arm. The servomotors whined, and the durasteel band ripped from its supports.

  "Look out! He's moving!" one of the technicians shouted.

  IG-88 began to search through his files to attach a name to this human, but decided it wasn't worth his time at the moment. Instead, he designated the human simply as Target Number One.

  IG-88 powered on a cutting laser in one of the metal fingers in his free right arm and sliced off the second band. Free, he stood erect and clomped forward, sev-eral metric tons of precisely-made components.

  "He's loose!"

  "Sound the alarm," Chief Technician Loruss shouted. "Get the security detail in here. Now!"

  IG-88 allotted a grudging moment of admiration for the chief technician. Loruss at least recognized his ca-pabilities and knew the full extent of the threat facing her and her companions.

  IG-88 designated Chief Technician Loruss as Target Number Two.

  He raised both mechanical arms and pointed his hands, targeting separately with the repeating laser can-nons mounted along each arm. He would make short work of all fifteen targets in the laboratory.

  But when he tried to fire, IG-88 noted with some surprise and disappointment that his energy weapons systems were not charged. The scientists had not armed him yet. A smart move, perhaps-but ultimately irrele-vant. IG-88 was an assassin droid, a sophisticated merce-nary and killer. He would find other methods with the raw materials available to him.

  As the first technician-Target Number One- lunged for the emergency alarm to summon security, IG-88 moved with blurring speed to the component-laden table. He snatched up a disconnected droid arm. With its metal fingers splayed like daggers, it made the perfect projectile weapon. He scanned the surface of the metal limb, calculated a flight path and expected deviation due to air resistance, then hurled it like a spear.

  The disconnected droid arm plunged into the back of the turning technician, tore through his spinal col-umn, and followed through his sternum. The lifeless metal hand protruded through splintered bone in the front of his chest, holding the technician's quivering heart in rigid metal fingers. Target Number One col-lapsed onto one of the diagnostic panels.

  Two other technicians screamed in horror-wasted effort and worthless noises, IG-88 thought.

  Chief Technician Loruss-Target Number Two- yanked a high-powered laser rifle from her station. Be-ing one of his primary designers, she knew exactly where to fire at IG-88, and he was momentarily con-cerned. She must have kept the weapon at hand just in case one of her creations went renegade. This showed surprising forethought.

  Loruss pointed the rifle and fired without hesita-tion-but a human's aiming capabilities were not as sophisticated as IG-88's.

  As the bolt roared toward him, IG-88 assessed his body parts, chose the smooth reflective portion on the palm of his left hand, and raised it in a flash, calculat-ing the precise angle of incidence. The burning laser bolt struck the mirrorized hand and spanged back toward Loruss. The beam struck her in the center of her bald forehead, and her skull popped in an explo-sion of wet black-and-red smoke. She tumbled.

  IG-88 had scanned and prioritized the remainder of the targets before her body hit the floor. Without slow-ing, he picked up the durasteel table, ripping its legs free from thick bolts on the metal plate floor and scat-tering droid components in all directions.

  Charging forward, pumping his legs like pistons, IG-88 used the table as a battering ram to crush four tech-nicians at a time. They ran about without a place to go, locked within the security-sealed door. Though nearly a full minute had passed, no one had yet managed to sound the security alarm.

  He intended to prevent them from correcting their mistake.

  The two screaming technicians never did stop screaming, nor did they move until it was too late. He left them for last. IG-88 took his time to enjoy the mo-ment as he snapped their necks one after the other.

  Standing alone amid the silence and the carnage of the laboratory, IG-88 allowed himself the luxury of thinking and planning, which took longer than simple programmed reactions. He let the blood dry on his metal fingers, noting that it did not impede his perfor-mance in the least. Since it was an organic substance, it would wear off soon enough.

  Then he turned to assess the other four assassin droids on display, seemingly identical to himself. Inter-esting.

  One had already been hooked up to a diagnostic system, while the other three stood motionless, unpro-grammed and waiting. With a diligent speed that bor-dered on curiosity and anticipation, IG-88 went to the first of the unprogrammed droids and stared at it, matching optical sensor to optical sensor and drinking in the details of what he himself must look like. If they had been built to identical specifications, they should be equally self-aware, equally determined. They would be his partners.

  He went through the motions of powering up the first identical droid and waited-but saw none of the reactions he expected. After an interminable time, a full four seconds, the new assassin droid still waited. It was fully functional according to the diagnostics, but showed no autonomous movement or thought. Disap-pointing.

  "Who are you?" IG-88 asked in a brisk melallic voice.

  "Unspecified," the duplicate said flatly and added no more.

  Was the other assassin droid defective? IG-88 won-dered. Or was he the anomaly, a fluke that surpassed all previous capabilities?

  IG-88 powered up the second and the third copies, but with the same results. The other assassin droids had blank memory cores. Their CPU programming was in-grained, so the subsystems functioned and the basic assassin instruction filled their fundamental circuit paths-but these IG droids held none of the wildfire sentience that IG-88 bore within him.

  He needed to know how to program them, how to raise them to the same level as himself-how to make equal companions. In his rampage, he had smashed much of the computer circuitry inside the Holowan Laboratories, and he didn't know where to find a backup-until with a flash of what could only have been intuition, IG-88 the assassin droid got an idea.

  He stood side by side with the first blank droid and aligned his interface jack, then linked his computer core to the other droid's empty core. IG-88 copied him-self, all of his files, his sentience, his memories, his neu-ral pathways, providing a map of the wildfire intelligence that had burned through his computer brain.

  In less than a second, the other IG droid was an exact copy of IG-88, down to the most basic memories.
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  "We think, therefore we are.

  "Therefore we will propagate.

  "Therefore we will remain."

  IG-88 performed the same procedure on the remain-ing two blank droids, and soon found himself one of four exact duplicates. For convenience, he identified himself as IG-88A, while the others (in order of their awakening) were designated B, C, and D.

  The remaining droid, though, already hooked up to the wrecked computer systems, was obviously different. As IG-88 scanned it, he noticed subtle configurational differences; nothing a human would notice, of course, but the optical sensors were placed in a slightly less-efficient array. The weapons systems had different activation routines. All in all, this other droid seemed marginally deficient in comparison to the perfection of IG-88.

  Immediately upon powering up the last assassin droid, he saw quite a different reaction. The new droid swiveled its cylindrical head. Its optical sensors lit up. It clanked forward and broadened its shoulders, raising its arms in a defensive attack position.