R2-S8's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

R2-S8 had carried the locked starmap for eleven years, and tonight the little droid tried again to break it. The file sat deep in their databanks. It marked the path to a lost Aldrean colony, a world scrubbed from every chart. R2-S8 fed the cipher through their decryption routines and watched the counter stall. The read-out went red. Cracked layers: zero. The droid's dome sank on its bearings. The repair bay hummed around them. Overhead lamps buzzed. The light freighter they served rested on its scaffold, hull panels stripped, tools scattered on the grated floor. R2-S8 rolled to a dark console and tried once more. They routed extra power, thinned their other functions, pushed the cipher harder. A warning tone climbed. Heat spiked in the droid's chassis. The routine crashed. The map stayed sealed, mocking, unchanged. R2-S8 knew the truth now. Their onboard tools were too weak. They would never crack it alone. A soft weight pressed against their treaded leg. R2-S8 swiveled the dome down. A small white creature had crept in from the shadows, long ears trailing the floor, a thin antenna curled above its head. The freighter's crew kept the Hoojib for company. It fed on stray power and never spoke aloud. But it felt things. Right now it pressed close, watching the droid with wide blue eyes. The Hoojib touched the droid's warm plating and went still. Then its antenna twitched toward the middle of the bay. R2-S8 followed the gesture. Across the floor stood a circular platform of stone and weathered metal, a star-map projector at its heart. The crew used it to plot jumps. Its processors dwarfed anything in R2-S8's small frame. R2-S8 had never dared touch it. The projector belonged to the ship's owners, not to a droid with a secret. But the Hoojib pressed again, urging, and the droid decided. They rolled to the platform, extended a data probe from a flush panel, and locked into the port. Blue constellations bloomed above them. R2-S8 dumped the cipher into the projector's core and let its full power chew the code. The counter climbed fast. Cracked layers: one. Then four. Then nine. The Hoojib's ears lifted. Light spun faster across the dome overhead. The file broke open. A single planet flared in the projection, ringed by coordinates and a name in old Aldrean script. R2-S8 froze the image and copied it into their databanks. The map was theirs at last. Then the projector chimed. A log line scrolled across the console: TRANSMISSION SENT. R2-S8's dome snapped toward it. Breaking the cipher had woken the platform's uplink. The coordinates had gone out, broadcast on an open channel, to whoever waited on the other end. The droid had the map. Now someone else knew they had it.