Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [21]
Luke breathed deep—at the cost of a certain amount of nausea—and worked on channeling the Force to the center of the worst pain and dizziness in his head. He couldn’t remember how good a pilot Nichos was, but he knew Cray had no experience in it at all. If they were going to make Pzob alive he’d better be in shape to take the ship down.
“I thought there was nothing out here. From Pzob?”
“K Seven Forty-nine Three, yes.”
Luke had completely stopped cussing at petty misfortunes round about the time he’d lost his right hand—after he’d realized he’d aborted and imperiled his own training as a Jedi, betrayed his Master, and put himself in deadly danger of succumbing to the dark side for no purpose whatsoever, his perspective on minor annoyances had changed. He only sighed now, letting his worry run off, and asked, “Imperial?” If the base in the asteroid field was an Imperial one it stood to reason.
“The data section of the computer’s out,” said Cray. “I’ve got the navicomp back on line from the backups but that took every coupling that wasn’t burned out by that last power surge. Can you recognize Imperial signals by internal code?”
“Some of them.” He reached over—carefully—to strip free the straps that held a silvery thermal blanket around him, while Cray unfastened the restraining straps that held him in place. He was, he saw, in the aft crew room as he’d thought. The lighting came from a single emergency glowpanel in the ceiling, but it was sufficient to enable him to see his breath.
“Here you are, Master Luke.” Threepio floated across to him from the lockers on the opposite wall, holding out a t-suit and an oxygen filter mask. “I’m so gratified to see you conscious and well.”
“That’s a matter of opinion.” Even the small movement necessary to get himself into the t-suit made him queasy, and despite all the channeling of healing he could do, his head still throbbed agonizingly. He took the filter mask and glanced inquiringly at Cray.
“The coolant lines ruptured. We got a mask on you as fast as we could but there was a while there we thought you were a goner.”
He touched the back of his head, and was immediately sorry. Whatever he’d struck—or whatever flying debris had struck him—had raised a lump approximately the size of the smaller of Coruscant’s moons.
“I salvaged as much of the battle readouts as I could.” Cray slipped on her own filter mask and followed him across the crew room to the door. “There are some stills, a little footage that I can’t get to run, and a half dozen computer extrapolations of what I think are the site of the attack, but the system’s too damaged for me to get any kind of clear picture of which asteroid it is. When we make port and I can salvage the data I’ll be able to tell you more.” She pushed aside a drifting logpad and a couple of spare filter masks as they entered the short hallway. Though spacegoing vessels as a rule kept to a minimum objects that weren’t strapped or magnetized down, there were always some: comlinks, stylos, coffee mugs, logpads, empty drink bubbles, and data wafers.
The bridge was even colder than the crew room, and murky with pinkish coolant gas. Nichos had lashed himself to the safety bolts on the edge of the main console itself; the chair Luke had been sitting in was tied to a handhold on the far wall, having been ripped loose from its moorings by the impact that had torn Luke out of its harness. The lights had gone completely in here, and only the chalky starlight from the main viewport illuminated the room. Feral red or blinking amber power lights glinted like strange jewels in reflection from the silvery droid’s arms and back.
“The signal we’re picking up from Pzob isn’t strong enough to reach into the Moonflower Nebula,” reported Nichos, as Luke pulled himself close with a floating remnant of the safety-harness strap. “Look familiar?”
Luke checked the readout on the single screen