Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [17]
“Luke?”
He’d heard the light, soft step in the corridor, and with it the very faint mechanical hum of Threepio’s servos. The two of them—the golden droid and the pewter-gray one with the man’s pale face—stood in the doorway.
“Did the random numbers I generated turn out to mean something?”
Faint water stains marked the silvery arm and shoulder on his left side, as if he’d stood close to the Falls. Luke wondered how the experience of that beauty, shared with the woman he loved, had registered in his memory banks.
“They’re coordinates, all right.” Luke touched the hardcopy that lay on the cubicle’s small desk before him. “They’re the coordinates for the Moonflower Nebula, out on the Outer Rim, past the K Seven Forty-nine System. There’s nothing out there, never has been, but … I’ve made arrangements with Umwaw Moolis to lend me a ship. I just think it needs to be checked out.”
One of Luke’s hardest lessons concerning the use of the Force had been to abandon mechanical, provable realities and trust his hunches. These days people generally didn’t ask questions of the man who had destroyed the Sun Crusher.
“Will I be accompanying you, Master Luke?”
“Of course you’ll be accompanying him, Threepio.” Nichos stepped back a half pace to regard the protocol droid. “As will I. And Cray, too, I hope.” He turned his head, and Luke heard, a moment before he saw her come into the lights of the cubicle doorway, Cray’s quick-tapping footfalls in the hall.
“You hope what?” She put her arm around Nichos’s waist, smiled up at him almost the way she used to, though Luke observed the almost infinitesimal pause before he draped an arm around her shoulders in return. As Luke had known she would be, Cray was beautifully turned out in a gown of black and white, carefully made up, a bright scarf wound in her flaxen hair.
“That you’ll be coming to the Moonflower Nebula with Luke and Threepio to investigate this … whatever it is. This hunch he has.”
“Oh, but I …” She stopped herself from saying something—probably, Luke guessed, from protesting that she had to continue Nichos’s rehabilitation and rehumanization therapies with Tomla El. He saw her visibly rein herself in, and look at him again with concern in her face. “What, Luke? Nichos told me this morning about the random number field.”
“It may be nothing.” Luke rose from the little table, switched off the monitor, and shoved the hardcopy back into the pouch on his belt. “The two of you came here to work—to help you, Nichos. It’s not—”
“You had work of your own to do back on Yavin.” Cray met his eyes gravely, her brown gaze almost on level with his own. “Yet you came here with us.”
“You don’t know what’s out there, Luke.” Nichos put a hand on Luke’s arm. “Between the warlords and Grand Admiral wannabes of the various parts of the Imperial Fleet, and whatever Princes of the Ancient Houses in the Senex Sector who think they can grab a piece of power … they’re coming up with new things all the time. Request Umwaw Moolis to get you a bigger ship.”
The Outer Rim. Many years ago Luke had described his homeworld of Tatooine—one of the worlds in that very sparsely settled and marginally habitable region of the galaxy—as the point that was farthest from the bright center of the universe, with considerable accuracy. He had since visited places beside which Tatooine looked like Coruscant during Carnival Week, but his original definition would still hold up … and the same could be said for most of the rest of the Outer Rim as well.
Swollen crimson suns circled by frozen balls of methane and ammonia. Hot-burning blue stars whose light and heat crisped their planets to cinders. Pulsars whose orbiting worlds alternately froze and melted and clusters so filled with ambient radiation as to cook out any possibility of life on whatever bodies weren’t torn apart by the conflicting gravitational fields.
Everywhere in the galaxy were a lot of empty planets, balls of rock and metals too