Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [77]
“Let’s hope not,” said Luke quietly. “Because a droid program—an artificial intelligence—is exactly what we’re up against in this ship.”
They walked in silence for a time toward the laundry drop where the repair shaft rose to take them to Deck 18. While waiting for Cray’s trial Threepio had changed the dressings of the ax wound on Luke’s leg, and though the infection seemed to be contained, Luke thought the pain was getting worse again.
“I have observed, sir,” Threepio said after a time, “that since Nichos’s … transformation”—it was extremely rare for Threepio to hesitate over a word—“he and I have a great deal more in common than we ever did when he was … as he was before. He was always a pleasant and likable human being, but now he is much less humanly unpredictable, if you will pardon me for expressing a purely subjective opinion based on incomplete data. I can only trust and hope that Dr. Mingla finds this a benefit.”
Trust and hope, thought Luke. Grammatical constructs programmed into Threepio’s language to make it more human … but he knew that the pessimistic droid did not, in fact, either trust or hope anything. He wondered if Nichos did, anymore.
“Come on,” he said quietly. “Let’s find an SP and see if you can convince it to become a tracker.”
Luke had been surrounded by droids all his life, had grown up with them on his uncle’s farm. As Threepio said, they were excellent at what they were, but unlike humans what they were not, they were not, one hundred percent. And Cray, wherever she was, was finding this out in the cruelest possible way.
He only hoped he could reach her in time.
The area of Deck 18 immediately surrounding the laundry drop to which the repair shaft led them was high-ceilinged, almost twice the height of other decks. The walls were of the same dark gray Luke had seen in the background of both the Klagg village and the Justice Chamber. A short distance beyond the laundry drop, the corridors were utterly lightless; hatches and wall panels gaped open, spewing cables and wires like the entrails of gutted beasts. Luke didn’t need to see the dirty fingermarks all around them to guess who was responsible.
An SP-80 was doggedly removing the fingermarks. It didn’t pause when Luke flipped open the coverplate in its side and plugged in the comm cable from the droud in the back of Threepio’s cranium. Over the course of the years back on Tatooine Uncle Owen had owned at least five different SPs that Luke could remember, and by the time he was fourteen Luke had been able to break down, clean, repair, refit, and reassemble one in four hours. Reprogramming from a translator droid that already had access to biocodes and serial indexes was candy.
The SP plodded off down the corridor almost before Luke had the cable out of it; he had to pace it to shut the coverplate. It still held its cleaner arm and vacuum absorption pad straight out in front of it, and for some reason Luke was reminded of the Kitonaks, patiently waiting for Chooba slugs to crawl to them across thousands of light-years of hyperspace and into their open mouths.
“Does it scent the Klaggs on this deck, d’you think?” asked Luke softly, limping in the SP’s slow wake with Threepio clicking along at his side. “Or would it pick them up on the downdraft from a gangway?”
“Oh, the sensory mechanism of a cleaner SP is quite capable of detecting grease molecules in a concentration of less than ten thousand per square centimeter, in an area of a quarter of a square centimeter, at a distance of a hundred meters or more.”
“Biggs’s mother could do that,” remarked Luke.
Threepio was silent for a moment. “With all due respect to Mrs. Biggs, sir, I understand that even if a human is born with an exceptional olfactory center in the brain, it requires a Magrody implant and extensive childhood training to develop such a skill, though among the Chadra-Fan and the Ortolans such abilities are quite commonplace.”
“Joke,” said Luke gravely. “That was a joke.”
“Ah,” said Threepio. “Indeed.”
The SP halted before a closed blast shield that blocked the