Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [10]
“No place will be easy,” said Leia. “Because we can jump from one hyperspace point to another, we forget how much distance—how many thousands of light-years—lie between one inhabited system and the next. People can hide anywhere, or be hidden anywhere. All it takes is for one line, one collection of phosphor dots, to get dropped out of a computer somewhere, and they’re lost. Completely. Forever. You can’t really search.”
“Surely there’re backup records somewhere.” Cray looked uneasy at the concept of such possibilities for loose ends. Leia gathered that with Luke’s teaching, Cray wasn’t as firmly wedded as she had once been to the principle that all things were ultimately controllable by intelligence, but she had a long way to go. She looked over at Luke. “Have you tried to go into McKumb’s mind?”
Luke nodded, flinching from the memory. Whether because of the yarrock, or the brain damage, or from some other cause, he had encountered none of the normal human barriers that prevent invasion by telepathic force, but neither had he found in the old smuggler’s mind anything for his own seeking thoughts to link to, nothing to ask, to see. Only a burning chaos of pain, through which hideous shapes came slamming: rending monstrosities, scalding streams of acid, noise that beat and hammered in his ears, and fire that suffocated him. He’d come to shaking all over, Tomla El holding him up and gazing at him in deep concern, fractions of a second after he’d tried to go in.
“Could you go into mine?” asked Nichos. “I only remember what a child would see, but at least you could narrow down your field of search. I was human then,” he added, and remembered again to smile. “And at the time, I was able to touch the Force.”
Only Cray and Leia accompanied Luke and Nichos down the curving sweeps of narrow stairs and across the small rear garden to the suite Cray and Nichos shared. Though Han and Luke were both fairly certain now that Drub McKumb’s intent had been warning rather than assassination, Han was unwilling to assume that they knew everything he’d been trying to say. So he and Chewbacca remained in the Presidential Guest House near the children, with Artoo-Detoo hooked into a printer spilling out starcharts and calculations concerning the Senex Sector and See-Threepio standing happily on the balcony comparing the elaborate Ithorian herd ceremonials taking place in the square below to his internal records of what they were supposed to be.
“We knew that he’d—at least temporarily—lose his ability to use the Force when he was … was transferred.” Cray spoke quickly, with a slight brittleness in her voice, as if admitting that a contingency had been expected would somehow give her power over it. She glanced ahead at Nichos and Luke, walking side by side, the tall, silvery shape of the onetime student almost dwarfing Luke’s black-cloaked slightness. The terrace outside the Guest Quarters faced away from the dances in the square, and their passing footfalls sounded loud on the elaborate lapis and gold of the starmap pavement.
“I know Luke and Kyp Durron, and some of the others who studied the Holocron, think the Force is completely a function of organic life, but I don’t see how that can be necessarily so. It isn’t like he’s a construct, like Threepio or Artoo. Nichos is as alive as you or I.” She kept her head up, her voice brisk, but by the light of the sun-globes half hidden in the branches of their parent trees, Leia saw the telltale silvery gleam of suppressed tears in the younger woman’s eyes.
“Right now I’m working on crunching and cubing hypersmall micros, in order to duplicate what can be reconstructed in X-rays from the brains of the other students in the Academy. The good thing about what I’ve done with Nichos’s brain is that the information can be transferred to more efficient processors as I improve and fine-tune the design.” She touched her hair again, as a cover for a quick brush at the corners of her delicately colored eyelids. Hers was a perfection that would admit neither grief nor doubt.
“He’s only