Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [153]
“That isn’t much, to check the lander and the two shuttles,” remarked Triv Pothman.
Luke shook his head. Every step was like having pieces of bone ripped out of his thigh. “It’ll have to do.” The last of the perigen was long gone—the Force alone kept him from going into shock, kept the fever of internal infection at bay.
Cray, walking behind them with a five-gallon bucket of sugar water in each hand, said nothing; had said nothing while Luke outlined his plans for getting the ship cleared, and very little more during the process of cutting into the main sensors for a reading of their position and an estimate of how much time before the shelling of Belsavis would begin. Only when Callista said, “That’s too much time,” at the display of twelve hours, thirty minutes, had Cray spoken.
“It’s what the file says.”
“It’s what the Will says the file says. Don’t you see?” Callista had gone on. “The Will’s going to do whatever it can, use whatever it can, to delay us and fulfill its mission. Mission Control would never have left a delay of twelve and a half hours after coming out of hyperspace. Not with Jedi on the planet. Not with the fleet of Y-wings they have … had.”
“She’s right,” Luke had said, glancing over at Cray. He’d expected an argument, since Cray had never believed that computers could or would lie.
But since leaving the security of her laboratory, Cray had been through trial by the Will, and her only reaction was a slight, bitter tightening of her lips. She had watched in silence when Luke and the others had mixed the syrup with water to produce a thick, hypersweet mixture, had taken her share of it when the antigrav sled had proven too large to enter the service corridor vent. She moved as if every step, every intake of breath, was a chore she had to get through, and she would not, Luke saw, meet Nichos’s eyes.
“Thank the Maker,” exulted Threepio, as they turned a corner and dim worklights gleamed along the ceiling overhead. “I was beginning to fear this quadrant of the ship around the shuttle bays was without power as well.”
“Jawa’re probably too scared of the Sand People to get close enough to raid it.” Luke turned down a side corridor, following the main conduit.
“Yet,” remarked Callista, her voice coming from beside him, as if she walked close by.
“I like a cheery girl.”
She sang two lines of an old nursery song, “Let’s everybody be happy, let’s everybody be happy …” and Luke, in spite of the agony in his leg, laughed.
“It must be driving them crazy,” Callista went on after a moment. “The Sand People. If they’re as … as rigidly bound to tradition as you describe, they must hate the fact that everything is different here, with no day and no night, and only walls and corridors to hunt in.”
“As time goes by I’m less and less thrilled about it myself.” The door to the main pump room was locked. Threepio convinced the lock program that a key had been inserted and the door whooshed open.
“Break the mechanism, Nichos,” said Luke quietly. “You’re right, Callista. I don’t trust the Will any farther than I can throw this ship, uphill and against the wind.”
“Funny,” said Pothman, looking around him at the oily black root system of pipes and vents, as Luke hooked the small portable pump into the main mechanism. “I never thought about it while I was a trooper. But now, looking back, I think I never could get used to living in corridors and rooms and ships and installations. I mean, it seemed normal at the time. Only after I was living in the forest on Pzob I realized how much I loved it, how much I’d missed the woods and the trees of Chandrila. You miss the oceans, Miss Callista?”
“Every day.”
Cray, standing in the doorway, only leaned her forehead against the jamb and said nothing, watching while