Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [61]
The Jedi who had ascended that shaft had lived long enough to damage the ship’s activation trigger, dying up in the core while the Will itself had been left alive. Because she hadn’t been quite strong enough? Quite experienced enough?
Or was the enclision grid something not even the strength of a Master could outlast?
A dirty little hand closed around his sleeve. “Not good, not good.” The Jawa tried to pull him in the direction of the repair shaft that led downward again. It pointed up at the dark square in the ceiling. “Bad. Die a lot.”
Die a lot. Luke thought about the Jawas, and the filthy, rival, feuding villages of the Klaggs and the Gakfedds, reestablishing here the patterns of their homeworld in terms of what they now thought they were. About the Kitonaks in the rec room, waiting patiently for their Chooba slugs to crawl into their mouths, and the dead Affytechan on the floor, and the Talz guarding each other’s backs—against whom?—as they took water to the tripods.
Destroying the ship, he understood, was going to be the easy part.
———
See-Threepio was sitting in front of the comm screen in the quartermaster’s office, a long flex of cable plugged into the droud at the back of his cranium and a tone of serious annoyance in his voice as he said, “You silly machine, you’ve got enclaves of alien life forms all over you, what do you mean, ‘No life forms alien to the intent of the Will’? What about a trace on Galactic Registry Standard 011-733-800-022?”
Luke leaned one shoulder against the jamb of the doorway, aware that there was no more need for Threepio to address the Will aloud than there was for the droid to use human speech to communicate with Artoo-Detoo. But Threepio was programmed to interface with civilized life forms, to think like a civilized life form. And one of the marks of nearly every civilization Luke had ever encountered had been chattiness.
Threepio was chatty.
“What do you mean there are no life forms of that Registry number on board? You have seventy-six Gamorreans in residence!”
“I already tried that, Threepio.” Luke stepped into the room, his entire body aching from the compensation of walking with the staff, the unaccustomed, agonizingly repeated set of movements involved in dragging himself up the ladder rungs by the strength of his arms.
Threepio turned in his chair—another unnecessary human mannerism, for his audio receptors would have picked up, and identified, Luke’s footsteps and breathing eighteen meters down the hall.
“According to the Will, there are no aliens on this ship,” said Luke, with a kind of wry weariness. “According to the Will, concentrations of bodies with internal temperatures of a hundred and five degrees—Gamorrean normal—don’t exist, either. Or those with temperatures of a hundred and ten, or one-six, or eighty-three, which means there aren’t any Jawas, Kitonaks, or Affytechans around. But I have found a way to get up onto the upper decks without—”
From the speaker on the wall on Luke’s right a triple chime sounded, and green lights flared in the onyx void of a ten-centimeter in-ship comm screen above the desk. “Attention, all personnel,” said a musical contralto voice. “Attention, all personnel. Tomorrow at thirteen hundred hours an Internal Security Hearing will be broadcast on all ship’s channels. Tomorrow at thirteen hundred hours an Internal Security Hearing will be broadcast on all ship’s channels.”
The screen sprang to unexpected life. Within it Luke saw the image of Cray, her hands bound, her mouth sealed shut with silver engine tape, her dark eyes wide and scared and furious, being held between two ludicrously uniformed Gamorrean troopers, Klaggs by their helmets.
“Observation of this hearing is mandatory for all personnel. Refusal or avoidance of observation will be construed as sympathy with the ill intentions of the subject.”
After the first shocked second Luke focused his attention on the background, the texture and color of the walls behind Cray and her guards—darker than those in the crew decks and not as cleanly finished—the relative lowness