Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [44]
Schematic.
A deck plan appeared; Luke identified the big cargo hold without trouble, and the quartermaster’s office where he now sat. A readout in the corner flagged this as Deck 12. He keyed the command for the deck above, and the one above that, noting the irregular shapes of the decks. Sick bay was two decks below. The decks were huge, but presumably after two or three days Ugbuz wouldn’t be sending scouts for rival tribes on his own deck.
The computer refused to display the schematic for Deck 9.
Keying down, Luke could only get displays for Decks 10 through 13.
Total schematic.
• The Will requests the objective of this information
Location of alien life forms.
• All things are within parameters defined by the Will. There are no unauthorized life forms aboard
“Oh, there aren’t, hunh?” Again Luke keyed in Total schematic.
• The Will requests the objective of this information
Damage control.
• The Will is in control. The Will ascertains no damage in any area
All the lights browned out and the pale-blue letters of the monitor shrank into a tiny dot and blinked away. From the blackness of the corridor outside came the shrill chitter of Jawa voices, the scrabble of fleeing feet.
Luke sighed. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
Chapter 7
Sick bay was dark, silent, and cold.
“Drat those Jawas, sir!” cried Threepio.
Luke Skywalker had dealt successfully with battling a clone of himself, with being enslaved by the Emperor and the dark side, with wholesale slaughter and the destruction of worlds.
A good deal of Han Solo’s vocabulary did come to mind.
“Come on,” he sighed. “Let’s see what we can manage.”
“These were quite decent early Too-One-Bees, sir,” remarked Threepio, holding aloft one of the few emergency glowrods left in the rifled emergency locker on the wall. “But of course the reason they are independently powered in modern ships, instead of hardwired into place, is painfully obvious here.”
“Painfully,” thought Luke, leaning against the self-conforming plastene of the diagnostic bed, was certainly the appropriate word for this occasion.
All the cabinets had been frozen shut when the Jawas had pulled the main wall hatch in search of wire and components. Though none of the diagnostics worked, Luke was fairly certain—by the way his left foot moved, and by the excruciating pain that shot up the back of his thigh whenever he put the slightest weight on it—that one or more tendons had been severed, which meant that even discounting the near certainty of infection, until he could get to a genuine medical facility he would be seriously lame. Simply keeping traumatic shock at bay took all the healing power of the Force that he could muster, and even that, he knew, couldn’t last long.
In addition to ripping free coverplates and hatches to get at the machinery within, the Jawas had carried off portions of the autodocs, taken the power cores out of the X-ray and E-scan machines, and tried to remove the temperature regulator from the bacta tank, with the result that the tank itself had leaked half its contents onto the floor in a gigantic sticky pool.
So much for the possibility of standard regenerative therapy.
Luke caught one of the horde of MSE droids that were faithfully attempting the herculean task of cleaning up the mess, pulled its power core, and used its wiring to short the locks on the cupboards. The dispensary was stocked with huge quantities of gylocal, a horrifically powerful pain-blocker/stimulant that would allow a warrior to go on fighting long after shock would have felled and killed him—Luke turned the black boxes of ampoules over in his hand and remarked, “They sure expected a fight, didn’t they?” He put them back. Gylocal decomposed after about ten years in storage, separating into its original—and highly toxic—components. Even if the stuff had been fresh Luke wasn’t sure what the effect of the drug would be on his ability to wield the Force.
Less heroic measures were available in the form of nyex, which made many people—and