Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [171]
“NO!”
Then the explosion, like the shattering destruction of the world.
Chapter 25
Mara Jade picked them up in the Hunter’s Luck very shortly after that.
“I came out of hyperspace almost on top of that Tikiar,” she said as she and Leia helped Luke along the short, prehensile temp-lock from the Red Shuttle’s lock to the Luck’s. Behind them in the shuttle, Chewbacca was snarling furiously at the assorted Gamorreans and Jawas seeking to follow, so loudly that he could be heard in the thin almost-vacuum. See-Threepio, who’d more or less piloted both shuttles away from the spreading cloud of ruin that had been the Eye of Palpatine, had remained with the Wookiee to translate, explaining in a number of languages that everything was under control and they’d all be taken care of.
“It was heading up the Corridor like it had a pack of Void Demons on its tail. If I’d known who it was I’d have taken a shot at them, but they were going so fast I probably wouldn’t have got a hit. You be all right, Skywalker?” She keyed the entry to the Luck’s main lock, and regarded Luke worriedly as the air cycled in.
Luke nodded. There seemed no point in saying anything. He’d heal, he supposed, inwardly as well as physically. He knew that people did.
The black gulf of nothingness inside him wouldn’t always be the only thing he could see.
Now he just wanted to sleep.
Leia put her arm around his waist, and he felt the touch of her mind on his. Tell me later, she said.
Leia, he thought, would have liked Callista.
Mara would have, too, in her cold, cautious way.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, knowing it was a lie.
“There’s a pretty good company medcenter in Plawal,” Mara was saying as she eased Luke down the short corridor to one of the small cabins. The Hunter’s Luck was a rich kid’s yacht that had fallen to pirates years before, but some of the old amenities still remained, including a self-conforming bed in a niche with a small monitor screen onto the bridge. After sleeping on heaps of blankets on the decking in corners of offices, the gentle comfort was strange.
“Who’s the old duffer you got riding herd on the Blue Shuttle, kid?” Han, on the bridge, glanced up at what was clearly his own screen.
Luke smiled a little at his friend’s nickname for him. “Triv Pothman. He used to be a stormtrooper, a long time ago.” He leaned his head back into the pillow, barely feeling it when Leia stripped open the leg of his suit and slapped two heavy-duty gylocal patches and a massive dose of antibiotics onto the bruised, inflamed flesh.
He heard Mara swear and ask, “How long has it been like that?”
It was hard to estimate time. “Five days, six days.”
She sliced off the splint Bullyak had braced it with; he barely felt her stripping away the pipe and engine tape. “The Force healed that? By the look of those cuts you should have gangrene from your quads to your toenails.”
“Artoo-Detoo!” He heard Threepio’s voice in the hall. Turning his head, through the door he saw the protocol droid hold out his dented arms to his stubby astromech counterpart, himself battered and smoke-stained and crusted with mud and slime. “How extremely gratifying to find you functional!”
I’ll never be anything but a droid, he heard Nichos’s voice in his mind. If I didn’t love her …
He tried to close his mind to the hurt of memory. Five days, six days, he had said …
“And Your Highness,” Threepio’s voice continued. “I trust your mission to Belsavis went as you had hoped?”
“You could say that, Threepio,” said Leia.
“If you were being kind of free with the truth,” put in Han from the bridge. “Whoa, what have we got here? We got a signal in the debris field. Escape pod, it looks like.”
Luke opened his eyes. “Cray.” So she decided to live after all. Something inside him wondered why.
While Mara went off to the bridge to work the tractor beam, Luke insisted that Leia strap another splint to his leg so that he could go down to the hold when they brought the pod in. “She’ll need … to be taken care of,” he said, easing himself to a sitting position as his sister