Darkest Knight

7

From her unusual perch, Jaina surveyed the high-tech tree city and realized how much Kashyyyk looked like an organic version of Coruscant.

Here at the canopy level, surrounded by industrial structures and Wookiee living quarters, Jaina saw tall exhaust ports and crystalline windows that reflected the hazy gray-white sky. The crowns of tall trees thrust above the main canopy like skyscraper towers covered with foliage. A huge clump of majestic growth in the distance sat like an island above the leafy waves of the unbroken treetops; from this distance, it reminded her of the pyramidal towers of the Imperial Palace.

Jaina thought with a twinge of homesickness that she missed her mother. The last time she and Jacen had returned to the capital world, though, they had lost their friend Zekk, who had been captured by the Shadow Academy….

Clusters of Wookiee homes dotted the canopy, compact dwellings connected to the computer factory complex by natural roadways that extended like the spokes of a wheel across the treetops. Imported banthas trudged along the wide, wooden roads, brushing against encroaching leaves. They plodded along sturdy worn branches hundreds of meters above the untraveled and treacherous lower levels of the primeval forest.

The bantha Jaina and her friends rode from Lowie’s home to the computer fabrication complex was large enough that all five companions could ride on the padded seats strapped to the beast’s back. The bantha had a rich, spicy animal scent that tingled in her nostrils. A harness made of bright red ribbons jingled with burnished brass bells.

Her brother Jacen patted the wiry cinnamon-brown fur of the enormous beast of burden. Riding this bantha seemed to be the most enjoyable part of their trip for him so far. The driver, a mousy Sullustan with huge dark eyes that glinted in the sunlight, hunched between the enormous ridged horns that curved around the bantha’s head. The docile beast moved along the wooden walkway, paying no heed to the lush vegetation on all sides.

“Banthas were bred for desert travel,” Jacen piped up, “but this guy seems to love it here.”

Indeed, Jaina thought, the beast seemed fat and healthy, content to carry passengers from the residential districts to the main fabrication facility. They passed other Wookiees walking to work, eating up the distance with long-legged strides.

Beside her on the padded riding structure, Tenel Ka stared ahead, her expression unreadable but alert, ready for anything. Lowie and Sirra sat on the back cushions, chatting comfortably in the Wookiee language.

Jaina looked forward to her tour of the computer factory. She couldn’t wait to see the engineering marvels and industrial facilities the Wookiees had installed on their wilderness world. Lowie probably would have been eager as well, if he hadn’t been so concerned about his sister.

The bantha stopped and let them off at an outer checkpoint that gave access to the technical complex. Using handholds on the padded seats, the companions climbed down the hairy back of the bantha and jumped to the interlocked wooden deck. Since the bantha transportation systems were designed for use by tall Wookiees, the drop was a meter longer than Jaina expected. She wondered how the diminutive Sullustan driver ever managed to climb his way onto the beast’s head.

Lowie paid the driver a few credit chips, and the bantha trudged back down the cleared arboreal highway toward the residential islands in search of new passengers.

Jaina looked at the multiplatformed industrial facility, seeing decks mounted in tiers on the uppermost branches. Lowie growled in excitement and pointed to a level platform high above and behind them. From this angle, Jaina couldn’t see anything on its surface, but then a small craft rose with a grating roar of supercharged sublight engines.

“That’s an old Y-wing,” she said, recognizing the outdated designs of the craft. The Y-wing had a triangular cockpit flanked by two long engine pods that together gave the fighter its characteristic shape like the letter for which it had been named. This starfighter had been refurbished and upgraded, and its engines were loud and powerful. The craft’s afterburners kicked in behind the engine pods, and the Y-wing streaked into the skies of Kashyyyk.

Another identical starfighter rose from the platform, hovered for a moment as the pilot adjusted the controls, then streaked off after its companion. A third and a fourth Y-wing also soared away.

“How many of them are there?” Jacen asked.

Jaina watched in admiration. “Probably an entire squadron,” she suggested, then suddenly remembered something she had heard. “The New Republic needs all the military strength it can get if we’re going to fight the Second Imperium. We don’t have time to build all new ships, so I think they’re refurbishing the old ones that have been moth-balled since the fall of the Emperor.”

“What do you mean, refurbishing?” Jacen asked.

“Well, there’s nothing actually wrong with the old Y-wings,” Jaina said with a shrug. “They were great fighters during the Rebellion, but with new technology we can modernize the engines, increase their hyperdrive multipliers. Since we’re on Kashyyyk, I’ll bet they’re getting new navicomputers, guidance and tactical systems, and central processors installed.”

Lowie and Sirra nodded their shaggy heads vigorously to show that Jaina was right. She looked into the sky and watched as, one after another, Y-wings shot upward in a spectacular aerial display.

Sirra said something else, and Em Teedee translated. “Mistress Sirra suggests we remain here to watch, since the upgraded ships often test their new systems. She assures us it is quite a breathtaking sight.” Lowie bellowed in agreement. Jaina wanted nothing more than to witness the demonstration.

When twelve of the ships had been launched into the air, circling over the treetop industrial facility, they flew in tight formation, one behind the other, a chain of powerful spacecraft. Their engines boomed like distant thunder through the upper atmosphere. The pilots followed their leader, swooping down, cracking the whip in the sky.

The Y-wings formed convoluted figure eights, flying so close to each other that their hulls were almost kissing. But the new guidance systems and engines did not fail them. The refurbished Y-wings performed flawlessly, and Jaina felt a warm satisfaction inside. She held her breath, amazed.

If Qorl and the Second Imperium could see this demonstration, she mused, they might think twice before attempting to tackle the New Republic.

From one of the connecting structures that linked the perimeter platform to the central levels of the fabrication facility, a door dilated open. An excessively tall, spindly droid appeared, its legs like thin support pipes, its long arms coppery. The droid had a squarish head with rounded corners and optical sensors mounted on all sides. It strutted out, moving with spidery grace as it balanced round footpads on the deck.

“Greetings, honored guests,” the tall droid said, weaving on its leg hinges as it walked. “I am the Tour Droid, happy to serve you this morning. I have received instructions to give you the complete tour of our facilities—in fact, the expanded VIP tour. I will speak Basic, unless you prefer to converse in Wookiee, Sullustan, Bothan, or another native language.”

Jaina shook her head. “Basic will do fine, thanks.”

The Tour Droid turned a pirouette on one long rodlike leg, and Jaina guessed that the droid had been constructed so tall in order to comfortably accommodate speaking with Wookiees.

The droid strode ahead with a mantislike gait. “You’ve already seen our air show for this morning,” it said. “Now for the good stuff.”

Since Jaina loved learning about the way things functioned, every workstation inside the fabrication facility intrigued her. Interesting smells of lubricants, cryogens, and electrical solder surrounded her. The air was filled with buzzing, humming sounds against a background of white noise from thousands of complicated manufacturing labs.

Jaina looked to the ceiling high above their heads and saw embedded glowpanels that suffused the corridors with a constant white light. At regular intervals, where hallways intersected, they passed trapdoor hatches that provided access to the underside of the factory and emergency evacuation routes down into the lower forest levels.

The Tour Droid led the group into a room full of transparent cylinders that stretched from floor to ceiling, pillars filled with a bubbling fluid and sparkling diamondlike matrices.

“Here you see our crystal-growing tanks,” the droid said, raising the volume of its speaker patch to drown out the gurgling noises and whir of air-recirculation fans. “In these carefully modulated tanks we send electrical impulses in specific currents through the nutrient fluid to distribute crystalline molecules in solution. This encourages them to grow into a precise matrix with facet angles and electronic pathways mapped for our galaxy-renowned computer cores. A building is only as strong as its foundation, and these crystalline cores form the critical foundation of our computer architecture.”

Jacen rubbed his fingers against a curved tank, tracing the paths of tiny bubbles as they rose toward the ceiling. “This is neat,” he said.

“Please don’t touch the cylinders,” the Tour Droid said. “Faint electrostatic discharges from your body could disturb the crystallization processes inside.”

Jacen pulled his hand away and looked sheepishly at his sister. She didn’t bother to chide him for it, though, since she had wanted to do the same thing herself.

The next room was exceedingly cold, with puffs of white steam curling around the door frame. The air smelled of scoured metal and frost. Inside, robotic arms moved about, sloshing thin metallic wafers through baths of liquid oxygen, pools of ultracold fluid that halted any contaminants from spreading across the surface. “These wafers are delicate circuit boards,” the Tour Droid said, “a perfectly pure substrate on which we pattern complex memory maps.”

Jaina drew a long frigid breath, blinking her eyes. Even with their thick Wookiee fur, Lowie and Sirra shivered, though Tenel Ka in her scanty reptilian armor displayed no sign of discomfort. “Fascinating,” she said.

The Tour Droid turned and, with long scarecrowish strides, led them through the cold room. The next chamber was large and bustling, filled with hardworking Wookiees, each wearing a mesh bodysuit made of fine wires that held their fur in place. White cloth masks covered the lower halves of their hairy faces.

The workers looked up and chuffed greetings to the visitors. Lowie waved, recognizing his mother at her workstation. Kallabow nodded, blinking her eyes in their whorls of dark fur, then bent back to her tasks, carefully concentrating on the circuits.

“For the past few months our workers have logged extralong shifts and odd hours to meet the heavy quotas necessary to prepare our defense against the Second Imperium,” the Tour Droid said. “Here the Wookiees are installing finished chips. The mesh suits you see them wearing are electrostatic screens to prevent even the faintest stray foreign particles from drifting into the air. Any contamination could be disastrous, since these components are so complex.”

“I can believe it,” Jaina said.

The Wookiee technicians bent over their workstations, using delicate forceps and tweezers to remove minuscule chips patterned and cut from the large glittering wafers they had just seen in the cryogenic lab.

“These basic designs are used for many different systems,” the Tour Droid said. “While our specialties are in tactical systems, central guidance computers, and mainframe system controls, some of our chips are used in sophisticated droid models. Most droids are manufactured on robotic industrial worlds, however, such as Mechis III.”

“Oh my, did he say droids?” Em Teedee chirped. “Do you suppose any of my components might have been manufactured here?”

Lowie rumbled a comment, and Jaina nodded. “Chewbacca helped put you together, Em Teedee. I suspect that lots of your components came from here.”

“Oh dear, you don’t think he used defective or rejected parts, do you?” Em Teedee asked. Lowie chuffed with laughter, and the little droid scolded him. “My question was entirely serious, Master Lowbacca.”

After they walked through the chamber, Em Teedee continued to exhibit his curiosity. “Master Lowbacca, would you mind turning around so that I can see the entire room? If this is my birthplace, I’d like to give it a good look…. How fascinating!”

Lowie obliged, turning his waist so that the small translating droid’s optical sensors could record every detail. “And I thought this trip was going to be dull,” Em Teedee said. “This is ever so much more interesting than those dangerous adventures you insist on having.”

For the end of their tour the long-legged droid took them to the highest platform in the entire facility, the transportation control and shipping tower, a computer-filled room with workstations so high off the floor they were at Jaina’s eye level where she couldn’t easily reach them. Several Wookiees stood around the stations, gazing up through the transparent dome overhead. The dome was reinforced with support girders that crisscrossed in triangular patterns against the hazy sunlight shining down.

“Because we are such a busy commercial facility,” the Tour Droid said, “a constant stream of space traffic comes through this complex. Here we verify every incoming transport craft to make certain we receive no unwelcome visitors. We also have security monitoring satellites in orbit, ready to defend Kashyyyk, once they receive orders from the control tower.”

The Wookiee traffic controllers worked as a team, communication headsets mounted to their shaggy heads and voice pickups clamped to their throats. They did not divert then-attention even for a moment as the visitors entered.

Before the Tour Droid could continue, Chewbacca strode in, accompanied by Lowie and Sirra’s father, Mahraccor. Mahraccor waved at his children; his dark streak of fur stood out much like Lowie’s. Chewbacca bellowed a greeting and held out a large misshapen object, a blackened device that had once been a polished, precisely angled crystal.

“That’s the Shadow Chaser’s computer core,” Jaina said.

Chewbacca nodded vigorously and spoke low growling words.

“Chewbacca and Mahraccor here say they have been searching for you children,” said the Tour Droid.

“Excuse me,” Em Teedee chimed in, “but I serve as the translator droid here. Master Chewbacca, after returning from a pleasant visit with his family, has removed the Shadow Chaser’s damaged navicomputer central processor core. As you can see, he has spoken with Master Mahraccor, and they have successfully located the suitable replacement components to get the ship up and running again. Hooray!”

Chewie pointed to the burned pathways on the Shadow Chaser’s removed navicomputer core. Lowie’s father also spoke up, and Em Teedee said, “Master Mahraccor asserts that this is an exciting new design, an Imperial configuration he has never seen before. Fortunately, however, he is confident that the facilities here on Kashyyyk can repair it quite nicely.”

The Tour Droid bent over on its long, stretched-out body. “You are quite good at translating Wookiee speech, my colleague,” it said, “but you lack the finesse for being a true Tour Droid. You seem not to have the ability to make interesting comparisons that customers can understand. For instance, you might have said, With our facilities here we can place this damaged core in one of our crystal baths, flush out the impurities and the carbon scoring, and use our own master computers to retrace the circuits and map the electronic pathways. In short, we will provide a bacta tank to heal the computer core.”

Em Teedee wasn’t impressed. “They certainly didn’t need to hear all of that. Of course, I wouldn’t presume to tell you your job,” he said. “We have more important things to do.”

The Tour Droid did not respond to the insult, since he had no doubt been given thorough programming in tactfulness.

“Thank you for the tour,” Jaina said. “It was very interesting.”

The Tour Droid stood up straighter, and the optical sensors mounted on all sides of its boxy head brightened with pleasure. “That is the finest compliment you could have given me, Mistress Jaina Solo.”