Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [48]
The Will, he thought. The core program. The central, coordinating plan. The thing that regulated everything in the ship, from the temperature of the mess-hall coffee to the nearly human targeting of the defensive guns …
Nearly human? Luke wasn’t sure anymore about that.
The thing that knew when the jump to hyperspace would be, that would take them to Belsavis. That knew what the battle plan was for destroying that undefended town.
Without human knowledge, he thought. Therefore, there was no one who could have been forced, or coerced, or coaxed, to talk, had they been captured. Only the Will.
He went back to studying the schematics it would show.
“They’ve got to keep the lines to the fuel tanks and the power chargers short,” he explained, limping along the corridor again a few minutes later with Threepio clanking softly at his side. “That means all the main hangars are going to be in one area, or at most two—port and starboard. Now sick bay is portside on Deck Ten, and next to that a series of decontamination chambers, so I’m betting that big rectangular chamber that’s unmarked on the Deck Ten schematic is the hangar where the lander came in.”
So it proved. The lander’s engines were dead and nothing Luke could do could revive them—“Well, why not? They fulfilled their purpose”—and in any case, there was no way of manual steering or controls. The G-40 droids stood silent and dead, one already half dismantled by Jawas who couldn’t carry it off. The silvery, bubble-shaped trackers were nowhere to be seen.
By judicious manipulation of the controls on a service lift—using, again, the power core and wiring of a somewhat indignant MSE—Luke managed to freeze the lift car between Decks 10 and 9 and to get the doors open at least somewhat. While Threepio fretted and predicted doom in the Deck 10 hangar, Luke attached a hundred feet of emergency cable from a locker around one of the lander’s legs and scrambled, with considerable difficulty, down through the lift car and into the hangar immediately below on Deck 9.
The lights were out there, the bay a vast, silent cavern illumined only by the blanched glow of the starlight beyond the magnetic field that protected the atmosphere of the hold. Through the huge bay doors, rimmed around with the rock of the concealing asteroid in which the Eye had been built, Luke could stare into the endless black vistas of the void. A handful of asteroids had been brought along with the Eye when it made its hyperspace jumps to pick up its long-vanished personnel—probably for cover, Luke thought—and a few of these drifted aimlessly in the middle distance, like bleached hunks of bone.
The shadowy bay itself was designed to accommodate a single medium-size launch, by the look of it. Cables from the power cell dangled from the ceiling and directional markings indicated where the vessel would stand, in the center of the bay, nose pointing toward the starry darkness that lay beyond the magnetic shield. But there was no launch there.
Instead, to one side of the hangar, a charred and battered Y-wing craft stood. The empty vastness of the hangar picked up the echoes of Luke’s staff as he crossed the floor to it, and shadows twitched restlessly as he held up his staff with its glowrods to look at the open cockpit above his head.
A two-seater. Luke couldn’t see well from where he stood, but he thought that the pressure hookups from both stations had been used.
“It explains what happened.” Luke sank gratefully into one of the white plastic mess-hall chairs and accepted the plate Threepio handed him: reconstituted and radiation-packed, maybe, and bearing only nominal resemblance to actual dewback steak and creamed topatoes, but close enough. In spite of the perigen Luke’s leg felt as if it were about to fall off at the hip—which, Luke reflected, in its current state didn’t sound like such a bad idea—and he was so tired he ached, but