Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [8]
“Artoo ran a cross-check of Plett’s Well and Plettwell through the master computer bank on the herd ship Tree of Tarintha, the largest on the planet,” Threepio diffidently informed the room at large. “No referent was found.”
“As a child …” Nichos paused, collecting his thoughts, a mannerism Luke noticed now because it was something his student almost never did anymore. He caught the way Cray glanced back at the man—or former man—to whom she was still officially betrothed; saw the way she watched him. Searching, Luke knew, for those other mannerisms, the way he used to put his hand to his forehead when he was thinking … hunting vainly for the small human gestures of knotting his brows, shutting his eyes …
The face was still that of the young man who had come to Yavin over a year ago, asking to be tested for adeptness in the Force. The technicians of the biomedical institute on Coruscant had saved that much. They’d duplicated his hands as well. Luke recognized the scar on the little finger of the right one, which Nichos had gotten the first time he’d tried maneuvering an edged weapon with the Force. They fitted perfectly into the droid body Cray had designed when Nichos had been diagnosed with the first signs of Quannot’s Syndrome, as if Nichos—the Nichos Luke had known, the Nichos Cray had loved—were simply wearing smooth, form-fitted armor of brushed pewter-gray steel, exquisitely articulated, every joint and stress point filled in with metal-meshed plastoid as fine as vine-silk, so that not a strut, not a wire, not a cable showed to remind anyone that this was a droid.
But the face was perfectly smooth, without expression. All the musculature was mimicked there, with an accuracy never before achieved in prosthetics. Nichos—though he tried to remember, knowing that his expressionlessness disturbed Cray—usually forgot to use them. He was expressionless now, his mind delving back through every fragment of digitalized memory, searching for some forgotten thread.
“I was there,” he said at length. “I remember running up and down corridors, hallways cut in the rocks. Someone had … had raised a mental barrier, an illusion of dread, to keep us out of some of them—had used the Force to do it. The kretch would eat us, someone said, the kretch would eat us.… But we’d dare each other. The older kids—Lagan Ismaren and Hoddas … Hoddag? … Umgil, I think their names were—said we were looking for Plett’s Well.”
“What was the kretch?” asked Cray, into the silence that followed.
“I don’t know,” said Nichos. Once he would have shrugged. “Something that ate kids, I guess.”
“Someone raised a mental barrier with the Force to keep you out of tunnels where you weren’t supposed to go?” Leia leaned forward, the earring still in her hand.
“I think so, yes,” said Nichos slowly. “Or used the Force to … to instill an aversion in us. I didn’t think anything of it at the time but looking back … it was the power of the Force.”
“You have to try that with Jace and Jainy,” remarked Han, and Chewbacca, sitting heretofore silent on his other side, groaned in assent.
“How old were you?” asked Luke. “Do you remember any other names?” Beside him, Artoo whirred softly as he recorded data.
Nichos’s blue eyes—artificials, but they duplicated the originals exactly—stared blankly in front of him for a few moments. A living man would probably have closed them. Cray looked aside.
“Brigantes,” he said after a moment. “Ustu. She was a Ho’Din, almost two meters tall and the loveliest pale green.… A