Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [132]
“Which means we’re long-lost cousins!”
Luke mimed a wildly exaggerated double take of recognition; they were laughing like teenagers as they sped down the trail. “C’mon,” he said. “We’re gonna be late—it’s past noon now and we’ve got to be there at sixteen hundred.” The speeder’s shadow fluttered after them, like a blue-gray scarf dragged over the rocks.
Sixteen hundred, thought Luke. Sixteen hundred. It’s past noon now and we’ve got to be there at …
Sixteen hundred!
He came to consciousness with a cry, as if he’d been tipped into an acid bath of pain. All the aches and stiffness of his struggle against the droids fell on him like a collapsing wall; he stifled a moan and Threepio cried, “Thank the Maker! I was afraid you were never coming around!”
Luke turned his head, though to do so felt as if he were breaking his own neck. He lay on a pile of blankets and what felt like insulation on the worktable in the fabrications lab just beyond his old headquarters in the quartermaster’s office on Deck 12, illuminated by sputtering yellow emergency lights. The antigrav sled floated near the floor along the far wall. Threepio stood beside his makeshift bed with the air of one who had paced at least fifty kilometers back and forth across the four-meter room, the black box of an emergency medkit in his hands.
“What time is it?”
“It’s thirteen hundred hours thirty-seven minutes, sir.” He set the medkit down beside Luke and opened it. “Miss Callista informed me that you ran afoul of the ship’s maintenance droids—and I must say, sir, that I’m absolutely shocked that even the Will could induce such disgraceful behavior in mechanicals—and gave me the coordinates to find you. In addition to changing the dressing on your leg, on her instructions I’ve administered antishock and a mild metabolic enhancer. But frankly, sir, even with proper first aid I don’t consider you in any condition to fight the Gamorreans, although I can only speak from personal observation, not being a medical droid myself. How do you feel, sir?”
“Like the last third of a hundred-kilometer road race with a busted stabilizer.” Luke taped shut the gash in the leg of his coverall over the last three perigen patches he or Threepio had been able to find. “I think I want one of those about the size of a blanket.” He gingerly moved his shoulder, which had been all but dislocated in the struggle—the shrapnel cuts on his face smarted with disinfectant and the flesh all around them was swollen and exquisitely tender to the touch. His left hand and arm, burned by shorting wires, had been clumsily bandaged and dosed with some kind of local anesthetic, which wasn’t working very well. The skin of his right hand had been cut open, bloodless, to show the glint of metal underneath.
“I don’t believe they make them in that size, sir.” Threepio sounded worried.
As well he might, thought Luke.
“I wonder if the foo-twitter is still up there?”
“It’s fine.” Her voice was in his head, clear and soft—the words might even have been actually audible, because Threepio replied, “But, Miss Callista, diversion or no diversion, Master Luke is scarcely up to taking on Gamorreans—”
“No, we’ve been going about this all wrong,” said Luke. “If the Will can program droids to think I’m garbage that needs recycling—or can program Gamorreans to think Cray is a Rebel saboteur—it’s about time we went into the programming business ourselves.”
Torches were burning all around the Gakfedd village when Luke limped through the wide doors of the storage hold. The place stank of acrid smoke and a suggestion of malfunctioning waste disposal, or at the very least too few visits by the increasingly scarce MSEs. By the light of the huge bonfire in front of the central hut Bullyak was constructing a splendid mail shirt of red and blue plastic mess-room plates and engine tape. She looked up with a fierce grunt as the slender Jedi and his gleaming servant stepped into the ring of the firelight.
She said something to him and gestured