Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [104]
“Like welding the windows shut and putting blasters on overload.”
“Yeah,” said Leia softly. She gathered the readouts, stowed them in the cupboard. “Like that. Want to come?”
Han hesitated, then said, “If we’re getting out of here soon, I think I’m going down to the Jungle Lust”—he made a suggestive wiggle with his hips—“and have a couple words with Bran Kemple. You want to come, Chewie?” There was more behind the request than friendly companionship—the last time Artoo had beaten Chewbacca at quest, the game console had ended up hurled through the nearest window, and Artoo seemed well on his way to another victory now.
“He may know something about how and when and mostly why Nubblyk made tracks out of here, and if he took a ship with him when he left. You’re not taking him with you, are you?” he added, as Leia, following him into the living room, crossed to touch Artoo’s domed top.
Leia hesitated. She had had it in mind as a matter of course, but then, it hadn’t been her scantly covered anatomy Artoo had been firing bolts of electricity at not twelve hours ago.
“Whatever his problem was last night, we don’t know if we’ve solved it yet.” Han was checking his blaster as he spoke, in spite of the fact that he’d tested and retested it not half an hour before. “If Goldenrod was here he might get some sense out of him, but since he isn’t, I say leave him here with that restraining bolt on him till we can get him checked out by somebody better than the local toaster repairman.”
Chewbacca snarled and aimed a swat at him with one enormous paw, and Han threw up his hands and grinned. “All right, all right. You did a swell job on him, Chewie; he’ll make point five past lightspeed now and can outmaneuver Imperial patrols …”
They descended the ramp together: Han, Leia, and the Wookiee. Han gave Leia a quick, hard kiss at the foot of the ramp, and she waved to them as they disappeared into the shifting rainbows of the fog. But when they were out of sight Leia turned back, climbed again to the house, and walked over to the little astromech droid sitting beside the deactivated quest console.
“Artoo?”
The droid bobbed forward, extending his front “leg,” and gave a timid whistle. His top swiveled to regard her with the round red eye of the visual receptor.
Leia often wondered what she looked like through it, and how the shape that was her—the shapes that were Luke and Han and Chewie and the kids—appeared to the astromech’s digitalized consciousness.
“You can’t tell me what happened?”
A wretched whistle, begging for understanding.
“Did someone tell you to do it?” she asked. “Program you somehow?”
His cap swung wildly and he rocked a little on his base.
“All right.” Leia touched his cap again. “All right. We’ll be out of this place pretty quick. And I’ll ask the mechanic about what happened to you. Look …” She hesitated. Yes, Artoo was only a droid, but she knew he’d been hurt by Han’s mistrust. “I’ll be back …”
No! No! No!
His desperate whistling and rocking stopped her halfway to the door.
Trust your feelings, Luke had said to her many times since she had submitted to his greater wisdom as a teacher. Raised to trust her brain, her intellect—raised to trust information and systems—Leia found this difficult sometimes, when things looked wrong but felt right. She could almost hear her brother’s voice, see him standing beside the little droid.
Trust your feelings, Leia.
Artoo had tried to kill both her and Han not twelve hours ago.
Han would choke.
But then, she thought, her love for Han was the greatest triumph she’d ever seen of “looks wrong, feels right.” So he didn’t have any room to talk.
She fetched a bolt extractor from Chewbacca’s toolkit in the next room and removed the restraining bolt from Artoo’s casing. “Let’s go. This way the mechanic won’t have to come back here to have a look at you.”
She added to herself, I hope I don’t regret this.
Due to vague uneasiness about taking the less traveled roadways through the orchards again, she turned her steps to the slightly longer route through