Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [145]
Her mouth twisted, her dark eyes chill and bitter as the vacuum of space. “If you want me to I’ll make you something that’ll hold a digitalized version of her memories, her consciousness … But it won’t be the consciousness that’s alive on this vessel. And you’ll know it, and I’ll know it. And that digitalized version will know it, too.”
“No,” said Callista, and Luke, through a blind haze of grief, still noticed that Cray and he both looked at the same place, as if Callista were there …
And she was, indeed, all but there.
She went on. “Thank you, Cray. And don’t think I’m not tempted. I love you, Luke, and I want … I want not to have to leave you, even if it means … being what I am now, forever. Or being what Nichos is now, forever. But we don’t have the choice. We don’t have time. And any components, any computers, you take from this ship, Cray, will have the Will in them as well. And if you disconnected the weapons, if you disabled the motivators, if you pulled the cores, to leave the Eye floating in the darkness of space until you could find some way to build another computer, or droid, unconnected to the Will … I think the Will would lie to you about being disabled. I think it would wait until your back was turned, and seek out whoever it was that called it.
“It has to be destroyed, Luke. It has to be destroyed now, while we can.”
No, he was screaming inside. No …
She’d said that she loved him.
He knew she was right.
Cray went on tiredly. “I’ll be the one who goes up the shaft, Luke. Your command of the Force is worlds stronger than mine,” she added, as Luke started to protest, “but I don’t think you can levitate that far, and I can’t hold it off you long enough for you to make the climb with a bad leg. If we’re going to blow off all three of our lives we can’t risk you losing strength halfway.”
Luke nodded. With the little rest he’d been able to get he felt stronger, but it took everything he could summon of the Force to keep the pain in his leg from utterly swamping his mind. He would probably, he thought, be able to misfire the grid, but in spite of what Yoda had taught him, levitation took a lot of energy.
“We can program the lander to take off with the Sand People in it,” she went on, “if you insist on getting them off the ship.”
“If it’s at all possible,” said Luke. “I think it will be, once Threepio and … and Nichos”—he hesitated to speak her lover’s name to her, but though her eyes moved from his she didn’t flinch—“get back here with the syrup. It can be picked up and towed back to Tatooine.”
“Triv and Nichos can each pilot a shuttle. Once they’re out of the ship’s jamming field they can transmit distress signals, though somebody’s going to have their work cut out for them deprogramming the Gamorreans … not to mention convincing the Affytechans they aren’t stormtroopers. They’re multiplying, too, you know …”
“I know.” Luke sighed.
“How you’re going to get the Kitonaks on the shuttles …”
“I think I’ve got that figured out, too,” he said. It was in his mind that even as he couldn’t drag his staff up the shaft with him—even as he wouldn’t be able to move quickly enough among the stations at the computer core—he probably wouldn’t be able to make it down the long corridor to the jettison pod before the engines blew.
But that, he understood, was a technicality.
“Callista …”
He didn’t know what he would have said. Tried to talk her, one more time, into letting Cray try to make some kind of computerized vessel for her mind and memories, her thought and heart … tried to talk her into escaping …
But the bench on which he was sitting gave a sudden, jarring lurch, almost throwing him to the floor, and the cold sickness of gravity flux drew at his belly, dizzying …
Another lurch, and he caught at one of the lamp-bowls as Cray grabbed the other halfway to the floor. Far off they felt the humming vibration rising within the ship’s bones, the drag of power shifting …
Callista said