Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [139]
Then silence, as Cray turned her face aside. The nervous thinness that had advanced on her during Nichos’s illness had turned brittle, as if something had been taken, not just from her flesh, but from the marrow of her bones. Over the torn uniform, grimed with blood and oil, the blanket hung on her like a battered shroud.
She took a deep breath, and when she spoke again her voice was perfectly steady. “He was programmed not to obey anything I said. He wouldn’t even get me food.”
Luke knew this—Nichos had told him. The tray Threepio had brought from the mess hall was untouched.
“Don’t hate him for being what he is,” he said, the only thing he could think of to say. “Or for being what he’s not.”
The words sounded puerile in his own ears, like a half-credit computerized fortune-teller at a fair. Ben, he thought, would have had something to say, something healing … Yoda would have known how to deal with the wretched ruin of a friend’s heart and life.
The mightiest Jedi in the universe, he reflected bitterly—that he knew of, anyway—the destroyer of the Sun Crusher, the slayer of evil, who’d defeated the recloned Emperor and the Sith Lord Exar Kun, and all he could offer someone who had been disemboweled was, Gee, I’m sorry you’re not feeling so well …
Cray brought her hands up to her head, as if to press some blinding ache from her skull. “I wish I did hate him,” she said. “I love him—and that’s worse to the power of ten.”
She looked up at him, her eyes tearless stone. “Get out of here, Luke,” she said without animosity, her face like flash-frozen wax that would crack at a breath. “I want to go to sleep.”
Luke hesitated, instinctively knowing that this woman shouldn’t be left alone. At his side, Callista said softly, “I’ll stay with her.”
Nichos, Pothman, and Threepio were in the fabrication lab outside. Threepio was explaining, “They’re quite the slowest and most deliberate race in the galaxy. To the best of my knowledge all of the Kitonaks are still grouped in the section lounge exactly where the Gamorreans put them, still discussing their grandparents’ recipes for domit. It’s most extraordinary. And yet during their mating season—during the rains—they move with quite amazing speed …”
They all turned as Luke came through the office door, and Nichos stepped awkwardly forward, holding out one hand. Cray had taken the mold for it when he was in the hospital, accurate down to the birthmark where the V made by thumb and forefinger came to a point.
Accurate like the blue eyes, the mobile fold at the corner of the lips. Like the gigabytes of digitalized information on family, friends, likes and dislikes, who he was, and what he wanted …
“She all right?” asked Pothman into the silence.
“Come on, Nic,” said Luke quietly. “Let me get that restraining bolt off you.”
Nichos’s eyes went past him to the shut door. “I see.”
Luke drew breath to speak—though he didn’t know what he was going to say, what he could say—but Nichos held up his hand, and shook his head. “I understand. I expect she will not want to see me ever again.”
As he fetched the toolkit from the locker on the wall, and the old stormtrooper brought one of the flickering battery lights to illuminate his work, Luke honestly didn’t know whether, given Cray’s parting words to him, she would want to see her fiancé again or not. He took refuge in the task at hand, which was more complicated than a simple pop-on, pop-off bolt usually employed with droids. This one was dogged in with minute magnetized catches, and, Luke could see, programmed in a number of specific ways. The Will had to have instructed the Klaggs in its installation. He ran a quick integral test on it to make sure it hadn’t been booby-trapped, then collimated the probe down to the smallest increment and began to pull the internal relays.
There was a certain amount of comfort to be obtained from purely mechanical