[Bounty Hunter Wars] - 01(11)
“Excuse me, your ladyship …”
That puzzled her. Neither Jabba the Hutt nor any of the others at his court had ever called her anything like that.
“But you require medical attention.” The taller droid kept its speech mechanism at minimal volume. A handlike examination module, with a fiber-optic light source mounted at the wrist, reached tentatively toward her face. “That’s a very bad wound… .”
She slapped away the droid’s hand, before it could touch the edges of the jagged line running down one side of her face. “It’ll heal.”
“With a scar.” The taller droid shone the beam of its handlight lower, down to where the wound, the physical memory of a Gamorrean pikestaff, ended below her throat. “We could do something about that. To make it better.”
“Why bother?” Other memories, nearly as unpleasant as those from the pit, flooded her thoughts. Whatever her life might have been before, the time in Jabba’s palace had been enough to convince her that beauty was a dangerous thing to possess. It’d been just enough to entice Jabba’s sticky hands-and the hands of those underlings who had been his current favorites-but not enough to protect her when the Hutt grew bored with her charms. “I can do without it,” she said bitterly.
“Anger,”
noted
the other medical
droid.
Need lessly-the scent of negative emotion was almost palpable in
the
warren
hole’s
entrance.
“Treatment inadvisability.”
“I remember seeing you.” The taller droid’s low, soothing voice continued. “At Jabba’s palace.”
The handlight beam moved across her face. “You were part of the entertainment.”
“I was-” She glanced over her shoulder toward the warren’s darkening entrance, to make sure no one was approaching, then turned back toward the droids. “But not now.”
“Oh?” An inquiring gaze seemed to move behind the droid’s optic receptors. “Then what are you?”
“I … I don’t know… .”
“Name,”
spoke the shorter of the
two
droids. “Designation.”
“They called me … Jabba called me Neelah.” She frowned. Something-the absence of memory, rather than anything she could actually recall-told her that wasn’t right. That name’s a lie, she thought. “But … that’s what they called me… .”
“There’s worse names.” Voice brightening, the taller droid tried to comfort her. “Consider my own subidentity coding-” Its complicated hand pointed to a data readout on the front of its dark metallic body. “SHS1-B. Most sentient creatures can’t even pronounce it. This one’s luckier.”
“1e-XE.” The shorter droid extruded a pill-dispensing module and gently tapped the back of her hand with it. “Acquaintance; pleasure.”
They’re working on me, thought Neelah. She knew enough about medical droids-from where?- to be aware of the soothing effects they were designed to provoke in their patients. Anesthetic radiation; she could feel a low-level electromagnetic field locking into sync with the neurons inside her head, drawing out the lulling endorphins… .
“Knock it off,” she growled. She shook her head, snapping herself free of the droids’ influence. “I don’t need that, either. Not now.” Neelah drew one hand back in a small but effective fist. “If I have to whack you again, I will.”
Like extinguishing a torch, the field abruptly cut out. “As you wish,” said SHS1-B. “We’re only trying to help.”
“You can do that by telling me where he is.” The wound across her face stung once more, but she ignored it.
“Who?”
She nodded toward the security hatch. “The bounty hunter. The one whose hiding place this is.”
“Dengar?” One of SHS1-B’s metallic hands pointed toward the warren opening behind her. “He’s back at Jabba’s palace.”
“Supplies,” noted le-XE. “Various.”
“That’s right.” SHS1-B opened a small cargo pod bolted to the side of its body. “He sent us back here with what we required. As you see-antibiotics, metabolic accelerators, sterile gel dressings-“
“Fine.” Neelah interrupted the droid’s inventory of its contents. “But Dengar-he’s still back at the palace?”
SHS1-B’s head unit gave a nod. “He said he wanted to find one of Jabba’s caches of off-planet edibles. That might take some time, though-the palace has been very badly looted by the Hutt’s former employees.”