Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [26]
“We’re doomed.” See-Threepio turned from the gauges of the slowly filling oxygen tanks to where Nichos, knee-deep in the meadow’s dark grass, was carefully daubing sealant on the Spatch-Cote repairs. The outer hull had been holed in a dozen places. Though the space between outer and inner hulls had been automatically filled with emergency foam and Nichos had done a quick patch job on the inner hull during the long flight to Pzob, if they were going to stand any chance of a hyperspace jump the outer had to be tight.
“Master Luke and Dr. Mingla have almost certainly walked into a trap!” The golden robot gestured with the hand not holding the round, bulky Spatch-Cote extruder. “A stormtrooper like that has to be ground support for whatever base is out in the asteroid field! I warned them. Standard Imperial bases house at least three companies. More, in isolated locales such as this! What can they do against five hundred and forty shock troops, with Master Luke injured as badly as he is? Plus tracker droids, interrogators, surveillance equipment, automated traps!”
“Power readings weren’t high enough for anything like that,” pointed out Nichos, switching off the intake valve on the tank.
“Of course a hidden base would alter its power readings!” surmised Threepio despairingly. “We’ll be disassembled, cannibalized for scrap, sent to the sandmines of Neelgaimon or the orbital factories around Ryloon! If they’re short of parts here we’ll be—”
“I will be.” Nichos took the extruder from Threepio and walked along the battered white side of the Huntbird, probing at other dents. “It would not be logical for them to destroy you. I, however …”
When with Luke or Cray, or his other friends at the Academy on Yavin, he had made an attempt to use the facial expressions programmed into the hair-fine complexities of his memory, but Threepio had noticed that when around droids, Nichos no longer bothered. There was no sadness, either in his blue eyes or in his voice.
“You—and Artoo-Detoo—are programmed, designed, for specific purposes, he to repair and understand machinery, you to understand and interpret language and culture. I am only programmed to be myself, to reproduce exactly all the knowledge, all the instincts, all the memories of a single, specific human brain, the experiences of a single human life. When you come right down to it, this is of no use to anyone.”
Threepio was silent. He understood that Nichos expected no reply, for conversation among droids tends to be largely informational with few social amenities. Yet, as when speaking with a human, he felt it incumbent on him to disagree if nothing else. But he also knew that Nichos was absolutely correct.
“So you see,” the not-quite-man went on, “if, as you say, Luke and Cray have walked into a trap and you and I are destined for capture as well, of the two of us I am probably the only one actually doomed. I think the metal here looks a little thin in the dent.” He returned the spatch gun to the protocol droid’s intricately mechanized hand.
Artoo-Detoo—or any other droid of Threepio’s wide acquaintance—would not have been able to make such a pronouncement without reference to an interechoic micrometer. Threepio had observed, however, that humans were not only willing to “eyeball” such measurements, but frequently did so quite accurately, something that logically they should not have been able to do.
He was still trying to align probabilities about what that made Nichos when a voice called, “Threepio!” from across the meadow, and he turned, thankfully, to see Dr. Mingla, Master Luke—mercifully on his feet again and not floating on the damaged antigrav sled on which they’d taken him from the ship—and the strange, solitary stormtrooper who had stolen onto the ship while he and Nichos were in the storage hold. The man had dispensed with his armor and blaster, and carried instead a