Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [142]
He took a deep breath, reorganizing his thoughts. “To the main mess hall,” he said. “I’ve figured out how to neutralize the Sand People and get at the shuttles.”
“If she’s angry at you for only doing what you had to,” said Triv Pothman, his soft bass voice echoing strangely in the utter silence of the lightless halls, “she’s not going to want to even see my face. And I don’t blame her!”
See-Threepio’s hyperacute hearing dissected the tight shrillness of anguish in his voice, and the sensors on his left hand—which the human was clasping, since the corridor was pitch dark—registered both abnormal cold and greater than usual muscular tension, also signs of stress.
That Pothman would experience stress in the circumstances was of course understandable. Threepio had learned that total darkness created disorientation and symptoms of fear even when the human involved knew that he was in perfect safety—which was certainly not the case on this benighted vessel. But he gathered from the context of the words that the darkness, the realization that air was no longer circulating on these decks and available supplies of oxygen would be exhausted in eight months—even with the small amount of photosynthesis being produced by the Affytechans—and the knowledge that Sand People occupied the vessel, were not the main sources of the former stormtrooper’s distress, though in Threepio’s opinion they should have been.
“Surely she realizes that the indoctrination process rendered you no more capable of independent action than Nichos was while under the influence of the restraining bolt?” Threepio kept his voder circuits turned down to eighteen decibels, well below the hearing threshold of either Gamorreans or Sand People, and adjusted the intensity so that the sound waves would carry exactly the .75 meters that separated his speaker from Pothman’s ear.
“I hit her, I … I insulted her … said things I wish I’d cut out my own tongue rather than say to a young lady …”
“She was indoctrinated herself, and will be familiar with the standardized secondary personality imposed by the programming.”
“Threepio,” said Nichos’s quiet voice from the darkness behind, “sometimes that doesn’t matter.”
Pale light dimmed the darkness up ahead, delineating the corner of a cross-corridor, the appalling mess that littered the floor—plates, gutted MSEs and SPs, shell casings from projectile grenades, broken ax handles, and spilled food and coffee. Morrts scuttled among the filth and their sweetish stink, like dirty clothes, added to the general offensiveness of the scene. The soft murmur of air-circulating equipment became audible, if one could separate it out from the truly appalling clamor coming from the mess hall: squeals, shrieks, and drunken voices singing “Pillaging Villages One by One.”
Pothman closed his eyes in a kind of embarrassed pain. Nichos remarked, “Well, I see everybody made it back from the battle.”
“Awful thing is,” said Pothman, “I suspect Kinfarg and his boys are doing the same thing up on Deck Nineteen. Mugshub was pretty sore at them for not doing their duty by her and getting into fights with everybody they saw.”
“Really,” said Threepio in prissy disapproval, “I doubt that I shall ever understand organically based thought processes.”
“You’d better stay out in the corridor,” whispered Nichos to Pothman. In the dim glow from the mess-hall door—the only area on Deck 12 that retained any power—the antigrav sled bobbed behind them like a dory at a wharf. The overburdening it had taken in the lift shaft had left it with a blown stabilizer, but it was still easier to tow it than to carry what Luke had instructed them to bring back to the fabrications lab.
“Threepio and I are perceived as droids—that is, something they don’t have to worry about.” Indeed, with the fine metal mesh that had covered his joints and neck torn away and hanging in rags to expose the linkages and servos beneath, he looked more than ever like a droid. “I don’t think they’ll even notice us or ask us about what we’re doing. They might recognize you as