Chapter Four

They respected her.

At least, that’s what Taylor wanted to think. The Jawas had snuck out of their little hidey hole, some of them immediately falling on the dead with wails of protest, but others, the braver ones, moved outside. They found the pile Taylor and her robot friend and the one Jawa with the white bandoleer were making, a mountain of corpses, divested of guns and whatever looks useful.

There was a burial, of sorts. Jawa bodies wrapped in cloth and left in the sand. Taylor had stood aside, left them to their mourning. Then the Jawas waved her back into their home. The one with the white Bandoleer had given her a tool, tossing it to her with chittered instructions that took a while to decipher even with the robot’s help.

The collar was gone.

And she was put to work.

As their machine, the sandcrawler, moved across the Sea of Dunes, Taylor was shown to the Jawa’s workshops where they took apart machines with little hands and put them back together with the speed of long years of practice.

A few of them were happy to show her how to do the same, and lacking anything better to do, Taylor started to learn about rusty robots and broken old machines. There was something about it that was soothing, even in the bowels of the too-hot workshop where the whole room rumbled and the heat was almost unbearable, she sank into her simple work, losing herself in the act of taking things apart and trying to put them back together.

She had been at it for nearly a week, a week where she was starting to feel something like companionship for the Jawas, even if they still kept their distances most of the time.

“What’s this part?” she asked, lifting a long tube with little notches on its side and a sort of hole at the top.

Her robot friend eyed it for a moment before responding. Half of his words were in an unfamiliar tongue, but that was okay. She wanted to learn, and teaching someone technical terms for a field she knew nothing about was verging on the impossible. “Answer: That is a power converter for a moisture gatherer.”

“And what does it do?” she asked as she started to fiddle with a pair of wrenches that the robot insisted on calling hydrospanners to take the top off. There was some green stuff on the coppery bits of the tube. Rust, but the sort that grew with humidity. She wondered how that had happened in a desert.

“Answer: It uses the ambient temperature to convert ionized particles into usable electrical current to power a moisture gatherer, a device used by filthy biologicals to obtain the liquids they need to keep their fleshy parts moist.”

Taylor nodded. She was beginning to suspect that the robot’s invectives were on purpose, and not just an artefact of bad translation. As for the explanation, it at least made the rust make sense. She repeated the unfamiliar words a few times, trying to commit them to memory. Learning a new language was going to be tricky, so she was going to start with the words for which she had no translation.

The converter’s inside was a rusty mess, but a few hours of rubbing and cleaning it left it shiny. She put it back together with a contented humm and tossed it into the pile of fixed things.

“Right, next part,” she said as she started to reach for a strange looking component in the busted bin. She never grabbed it as a group of Jawas rushed by. She had not been around them long enough to understand their language, if she ever could, but she could tell they were excited.

One of them stopped and chattered at her robot friend before moving into Taylor’s range to grab the bin of fixed parts. She guided the little guy over to it, grabbed the things, then guided him out of her range without a second glance. The Jawa were becoming surprisingly docile about having their bodies puppeted.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Commentary: It seems as if the Jawa have arrived near a trading outpost. They are preparing to ply their trade to other degenerates. Statement: Perhaps I will be fortunate enough to be sold to some gullible water farmer.”

She shook her head as she got to her feet. It would actually hurt her to lose the translation robot’s company. Not that she would admit it to him. He was insufferable enough as it was.

“C’mon,” she said as she moved over towards the front of the sandcrawler. The Jawas were, indeed, setting up shop. They had a folded pavillion off to one side, with a sort of canvas top packed away, and one of them was busy lining up all the other robots in the crawler into neat rows against the far wall. The bins and bins of parts she and the Jawa had been tinkering on were moved over to the edge of the ramp-wall and crates filled with guns and even the weapons they had taken from the Tusken Raiders were moved to one side.

She was approached by the Jawa with the white bandoleer, the one she figured was the leader of the little group. He chattered at her, yellow eyes glowing under his hood.

“Translation: The little sack wishes to inquire if the lady will be venturing out of the sandcrawler while the Jawa work.”

She nodded. “Yeah, it would be nice to stretch my legs. That is, unless it’s dangerous.”

“Sarcastic Commentary: We are on Tatooine. Nothing is dangerous here, only the deserts and everything that lives in it.”

She gave the robot a flat look. “Just translate.”

He did and the Jawa squeaked back at him before removing a gun from one of the bigger pouches of his bandoleer. He tossed it to her underhand and she caught it out of the air with only the slightest fumble.

“A gun, seriously?”

“Commentary: Oh, this might be fun.”

She shook her head and inspected the gun. It didn’t have a magazine or anything, and the barrel was too stubby and crooked to possibly use actual bullets. She had to assume it was a raygun or some such. “Is there a safety on this thing?”

“Statement: There is. The weapon is currently safe. Instruction: Do press the red button on the side to arm the blaster.”

She looked at the side of the weapon and it did indeed have a little light and a button next to it. Shrugging one shoulder she turned towards the robot and pointed it between his glowing red eyes. “So if I pull the trigger now, you’ll still be yammering on at me?”

“Statement: How delightfully pragmatic.”

Taylor rolled her eyes and looked for a place to store the thing. Her current attire wasn’t anything to write home about. A skirt made from some of the rough cloth the Jawas used, a shirt that had been in the packs the Tusken Raiders had carried and that she had washed in the sands and a belt that cinched everything at her waist. It was light and airy and not terribly supportive, but better than her torn up costume for desert living. Though she did tear the goggles out of her mask. Getting sand in her eyes was not something she wanted to deal with again.

She was really starting to hate sand.

The front ramp of the sandcrawler lowered with a pneumatic hiss, pistons as big around as Taylor stretching out to lower the entire front of the vehicle and slowly revealing the bright blue sky beyond.

Her robot friend’s assertions that they were near a trading post has left her wondering what kind of place they were actually near. She had expected a few buildings, or maybe something more primitive.

Instead she took in the sights of a small village. White, squarish houses with domed roofs, large metallic pillars around the town proper, standing up like high-tech fence posts. A few things that looked like cars moving across a busy street that lead down to an intersection. And people.

Taylor stretched out her senses and caught a few bugs, proper bugs, at the edges. She didn’t recognize most of them, but they were similar enough to what she was used to that just having them in her control lifted a weight off her shoulders.

As she stepped down the ramp, her robot companion at her heels and the Jawas behind them with their assorted goods, Taylor paid particular attention to all the people walking around.

Some were human, and that alone had her wanting to run over and touch them. Others were aliens, from strange beings with flat necks and hammer-head like faces to blue-skinned people with large tentacles resting on their necks. Most wore beige and brown garb, loose and flowing to wick away the heat. Others wore armour or colourful outfits with splashes of yellow and blue that made them stand out like flowers in an empty lot.

“What is this place?” she asked.

Her companion stomped over to her side. “Commentary: it seems to be a filthy hole where only the desperate and idiotic would like. A fitting place for these fine specimens.”

Taylor snorted. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “Well, where do we start?” she asked.

“Exclamation: My lady, you could not possibly think of taking over this small town and installing yourself as its leader through force of arms with nothing but a blaster.”

“What? No, I wasn’t thinking about anything like that,” she said.

“Commentary: How disappointing.”

“I meant,” she said while ruefully shaking her head. “Where do we start exploring.”

“Suggestion: Perhaps refining your search parameters would be of assistance.”

Nodding, she started walking towards the village, noting as she did that a few curious souls were heading towards the where the Jawa were setting up shop. “That depends on what they sell here. Between you and me, finding a place that isn’t all sand would be a god send. Or a library.”

She knew that the races around her were alien, some of them also looked distinctly unfit for desert life. That either meant that there was somewhere hospitable on the planet or that they were from elsewhere. And since they weren’t on Earth, that was very much possible.

She wasn't going to find her home amongst the dunes, nor her revenge.

Navigating the crowds was surprisingly easy. Despite the number of beings around they mostly held together in small groups. She didn’t know if it was because of familiarity of if they needed safety in numbers. More than a few were armed, handguns at their hips or rifles strapped to their backs.

She had the impression that she was in a frontier town, like something in an old western where cowboys and bandits could pop up at any moment.

The few who entered her range were left confused and disoriented as she had them turn around and walk right back out of it as quickly as she could. It left a bubble of peace around her where only her robot friend remained.

“What’s that place?” she pointed to one shop that had weapons on racks before it..

“Translation: The sign reads Darvo’s Bazaar. Commentary: It seems to be a place to sell weapons of questionable quality.”

She nodded, then pointed at the next shop over. “And that one?”

“Commentary: A fruit stand. You do know what fruit are, yes?”

“Yeah,” she said. She didn’t know what she was looking for yet, but had the impression she was going to stumble upon it soon.

The next intersection was a three way, with a road veering off to their right. To the left the road had been blocked off by a marge stand with a cloth canopy above it. A small crowd was gathered there, looking up to the stage.

A creature that Taylor couldn’t help but assume was a giant slug, was speaking to the crowd, fat arms waving about and capturing their attention before we gestured off to the side. A pair of pig-like creatures in rough armoud strode onto the stage, each holding onto a staff with a ring on the end, a ring around the neck of an emancipated young man wearing nothing but a steel collar and some shorts.

“Is that a slave market?” she asked.

“Observation: Judging by the Hutt attempting to extol the virtues of the underfed human and the explosive collar on the filthy cretin’s neck it is indeed a slave market.”

Taylor didn’t know what to do. She watched the man be sold to some strange flying creature. There was an exchange of metal bars to one side, and the slave followed the creature away down the street without so much as a twitch of resistance.

Her jaw clenched and her almost started something, but then the next slave was on the block and no one was doing anything but bidding for them.

“This place isn’t what I hoped for,” she said.

“Suggestion: Perhaps a bit of conflict resolution is in order. I did enjoy your techniques with the Tusken Raiders.”

“No. Not yet,” Taylor said.

She turned and walked deeper into the town.

***