Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [170]
“We’d better get under cover,” said Han softly. “If that ship Mara talked about is going to try and finish up its mission, we don’t know how far around the rift it was programmed to bomb. Let’s just hope the caves are deep enough.”
A burning pinpoint of white light flared suddenly in the dim sky, faded, then swelled suddenly to a monstrous glare. Han flinched, covering his eyes with his arm. Leia turned her face aside and saw their shadows—man, woman, Wookiee, droid—momentarily etched black against the blue-white meringue of the drifts among which they stood.
Han said, “What the …?”
“I don’t know,” said Leia. “But that was way too big for a Tikiar. It has to have been the Eye.”
“Luke, forgive me.”
He rolled over, body aching from the effects of the stungun’s blast. There were soft hootings in the semidark, and a white, fluffy enormity came and bent over him, urging him down with padded black paws.
Talz. They clustered around the emergency bunk where he lay, and the whole dark space of the shuttle hold smelled of their fur.
Someone was singing. “Pillaging Villages One by One.”
Luke sat up, and was immediately sorry.
“Forgive me,” said Callista’s voice as he lay down again. Somewhere close by the Jawas chattered, yellow eyes glowing in the dark. Over the heads of the Talz he could see one end of the shuttlecraft jammed with old droid parts and stormtrooper helmets used as buckets to hold scrap metal, wire, and power cells. He remembered Callista had told both groups of Gamorreans, in her pseudomessages from the Will, that it was the Intent of the Will that they leave all their weapons outside their respective shuttlecraft.
The voice was tinny, small. Turning his head, he saw the player set next to him on the thin mattress of the bunk. The holo of her face appeared dimly above it, no more substantial than the audio.
She looked exhausted, as she had in his dream-vision of her in the gun room, her brown hair straggling from the loose braid she’d put it in, her gray eyes at peace.
“It was my idea—mine and Cray’s. I was afraid—we were both afraid—that at the last minute you’d try to settle for less than complete destruction of the Eye of Palpatine … that you’d try to play for time, to take me off the ship. I’m sorry that I … made your decision for you.”
Her image faded out, and Cray’s appeared, weary and stretched-looking, but with that same exhausted peace in her eyes. “With me in the gun room using the Force against the enclision grid, I figure it’s just possible for a droid to make it up the shaft … And a droid could take a few hits and still be able to function. Nichos agreed to this.”
The pale, still features of the Jedi who for a year had been Luke’s pupil appeared beside hers, oddly detached-looking in front of the metal of the cranial cowling. The hand—the precise duplicate of Nichos’s hand—rested on Cray’s shoulder, and she reached to touch the fingers that had been programmed to human warmth.
“Luke, you know I was never more than a substitute; a droid programmed to think, and remember, and act like someone Cray wanted very much to keep. And that might have suited me, if I hadn’t loved her—truly loved her—as well. But I’m not the living Nichos, and I know I never can be. I would always be something less, something that was not.”
“Nichos is on the other side, Luke,” said Cray softly. “I know it, and Nichos …” She half smiled. “And this Nichos knows it. Remember us.”
Their images faded.
No image replaced it, but Callista’s voice said again, “Forgive me, Luke. I love you. And I will love you, always.”
From the starboard portholes came a blazing burst of white.
“No!” Luke flung himself to his feet. He thrust through the Talz, through the Jawas clustering around the ports, the gentle tripods crowding up against the massive piles of the Jawas’ junk; fell against the wall to stare out in time to see the huge white flare on the far side of the drifting asteroid fade …
Tiny, it was, hanging