Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [86]
She felt rather than saw Han reach for the holster that hung beside the bed, and at the same moment, the white glare of Artoo’s cutting beam illuminated, like a tableau, the droid and the corner of the room by the cupboard as he neatly fused the lock.
“What the …?”
She hit the light switch by the bed. Nothing happened. In a panic of confusion her mind reached out, groped for the candles that had illuminated the room earlier with such soft, romantic light. Luke had taught her …
Fire sprang to life again on the floating wicks.
“You crazy little …” Han strode across the room to where Artoo had definitely posted himself in front of the cupboard door. Muffled and shrill, the fast pulse beat of the alarms was rising; Leia reached for the hideout blaster where Han usually kept it under the pillow and found nothing. In the same instant, it seemed, Artoo swung around and pointed his cutting torch in Han’s direction. The white bolt of electricity leaped out; Han sprang backward, barely avoiding it. In the dim saffron glow his eyes were suddenly wide.
Han and Leia both looked toward the windows. The shuttering mechanism was a fused blob of metal.
“Artoo!” cried Leia, confused and suddenly scared.
Outside the bedroom doors Chewbacca roared, and the door rattled in its sliders. With startling speed Artoo darted for the door, the electric cutter extended; Han yelled, “Let go of the handle, Chewie!” a split second before the droid put several thousand volts into the metal handle, then swung back, cutter still zapping hot, short jolts of blue-white lightning. Han, who in addition to shouting his warning had made a plunge for the cupboard, backed hastily, the droid following him for half a meter or so.
“Dammit, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”
A substitution? thought Leia crazily, catching the pillows from the bed and circling in the other direction. When he’d run away from her on the way to the MuniCenter …? That was insane. She knew it was Artoo.
Artoo backed against the cupboard again, his welding arm held out, the live end of it gleaming dangerously in the candlelight. Almost inaudible in the cupboard the blasters’ double whine scaled upward, an insectlike warning of an explosion that would certainly destroy most of the house.
“Leia, put your boots on,” said Han, pulling his own free of the corner and hauling them swiftly onto his feet.
She dropped her load of pillows and obeyed without question. There couldn’t be more than a minute or so left. They were sealed in the room.… Chewie was hammering on the outer door with something but it was clearly going to take more time than they had.
Looking a little ridiculous—he wasn’t wearing much besides the boots—Han crossed the bed in two strides to her side. He turned his body, for a moment blocking the droid’s view of his hand as he pointed to her the thing he wanted her to use; she understood his plan by the thing’s very nature. She wanted to say, Not Artoo … but didn’t.
There was something appallingly, hideously wrong, but there was no time to figure out what or how or why.
Not Artoo …
Han was already moving in on the little droid. He had a blanket in one hand, as if he planned to use it to smother the electric charge of the welder. The droid stood still, guarding the locked cupboard where the blasters were screaming into the final stages of overload, but fairly vibrated with deadly readiness.
Leia thought, He hasn’t made a sound …
Han struck. Artoo lunged at him, lightning leaping forth, and in that instant Leia scooped the water basin, candles and all, from the table and hurled it with all the strength she could summon at the droid. Han was already leaping back with the hair-trigger reflexes of a man who has lived all his life on his nerve ends, and the vast drench of water doused and grounded the electrical discharge of Artoo’s cutting tool in a sizzling, horrible spatter of blue light and spraying sparks. Smoke and lightning poured from the droid’s open hatch, small threads of blue electricity leaping and twitching as Artoo gave one