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.”
8
Surrounded by dimness in his private office, lit only by recorded starlight from distant parts of the galaxy, Brakiss contemplated the plans of the Second Imperium.