Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [120]
“You don’t have to be such a hero, baby. There’s always ways of doing things without getting killed.”
Luke thought, He doesn’t want to climb up that shaft. He’s told himself there’s another way—and he probably even believes it—but at bottom, he doesn’t want to be the one who climbs through the grid while she’s using the Force to make it misfire.
And he saw this understanding, too, in Callista’s gray eyes.
“Geith,” she said softly, and in her hesitation Luke heard the echo of his previous rages. “Sometimes there’s not.”
He threw up his hands. “Now you’re starting to sound like old Djinn!”
“That doesn’t make what I’m saying less true.”
“The old boy’s too damn ready to tell other people how they should die for a guy who hasn’t been off that festering gasball of his for a hundred years! Callie, I’ve been around. I know what I’m talking about.”
“And I know that we have no idea how long we’ve got until this thing goes into hyperspace.” She still didn’t raise her voice, but something in its level softness stopped him from cutting in again. “None. If we destroy it, it’s gone. Dead. If we leave it, run for it—”
“There’s nothing wrong with jumping clear and getting help!”
“Except that it’ll lose us our one sure chance.”
“It’ll lose us our chance of getting the hell blown up along with this thing, you mean!”
“Yes,” said Callista. “That’s what I mean. Will you help me or not?”
He put his hands on his hips, looked down at her, for he was a tall man. “You stubborn fish rider.” Affection glinted in his smile.
Her voice flawed, just slightly, as she looked up into his face. “Don’t leave me, Geith. I can’t do it alone.”
And Luke saw something change, just slightly, in Geith’s blue eyes.
Pain came back to him, shredding away the scene in the hangar. He opened his eyes, felt under him the slight, smooth jostle of movement. Thin dark lines passed like scanner wires above his head, traveling from head to feet … ceiling joins.
Moving his head, he saw that he lay on a small antigrav sled, beyond whose rim See-Threepio’s grimed and dented metal head and shoulders were visible as the droid guided the sled along a hall. There was a sound somewhere ahead and Threepio froze into the perfect immobility of a mechanical. The yellow reflection of a tracker droid’s dim lights passed over the metal mask of Threepio’s face, glinted very faintly on the perfect, intricate shape of his hand where it rested on the sled’s rim.
The yellow light passed on. Threepio moved forward again, footfalls hollow in the empty corridor. Luke slid back toward darkness.
The foo-twitter, he thought. He’d misfired the enclision grid and thrust the silvery globe up ten meters of shaft, but it had been hit anyway—four, maybe five times. He’d heard the shrill zing of ricochets against the metal. Threepio had cut the comm trunk, Cray was in danger, he couldn’t lie here …
The more that hit you, the more that will.
He saw her in the gun room.
The lights were on there, too.
She was alone. All the monitors were dead, blank black idiot faces, holes into the Will’s malignancy—she was sitting very still on the corner of a console, but he knew she listened. Head bowed, long hands folded loose over her thigh, he could see the tension in the way she breathed, in the slight angle of movement. Listening.
Once she looked at the chronometer above the door.
“Don’t do this to me, Geith.” Her voice was barely audible. “Don’t do this.”
After long, long, grinding silence like years of cold illness, though absolutely nothing changed in the room, Luke saw when she understood at last. She got to her feet, crossed to a console, and tapped in commands: a tall girl whose gray flight suit hung baggy over the long-limbed fighter’s frame, whose lightsaber with its line of dancing sea clowns gleamed against her flank. She called a screen to life, and Luke saw past her shoulder the hangar, with the ruined Y-wing and the empty meters of concrete floor where the Blastboat used to be.
She toggled in a line of readings, then, as if they weren’t enough to convince