Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [87]
A ridiculous consideration, she thought—the explosion would kill both of them and Chewie as well …
Han ripped the power cores out of both blasters and hurled the stripped weapons across the room onto the bed, where Leia buried them under pillows. The triggering blast—without the power that would have vaporized everything in the room—was like a violent hiccup, the kick of some huge, fierce, sullen thing under the bedding.
An instant later, with a rending crash, Chewbacca smashed his way through the bedroom door.
For a moment there was stillness, Han standing beside the cupboard, staring down at the two blaster power cores that lay hissing in the puddled water around his feet.
The room was filled with the stench of burning feathers and scorched insulation.
Chewie looked at Artoo, bowed forward, blackened by the electrical discharge, motionless and dead. Then he moaned, a long animal howl, grieving his friend.
Chapter 13
In addition to cutting all the power in the house, Artoo had fused the comlinks. Chewbacca had to venture forth into the steamy fog of the night to bring Jevax a report of what had taken place. The Chief Person returned to the house with him, concerned and shaken—he had been awake, he said, at the MuniCenter, trying to raise communication with the nearby valley of Bot-Un, whose comm center had gone out for the fifth time in six months.
“I don’t understand it,” the old Mluki said, looking from the ruin of fried bedding to the charred, motionless droid, upon whom Han was grimly affixing a restraining bolt. “The pump stations and the mechanical feeders, yes—we’re still very much a shoestring operation in some ways, whatever the corporate brass likes to say. Most of our equipment is secondhand, and quite frankly pretty old. But your Artoo unit—”
“Wait a minute.” Leia had removed her boots by this time and wrapped herself in a darkly patterned crimson-and-black local kimono, her hair hanging in a burnished mass down her back. She’d spent the past fifteen minutes locating every glowrod and emergency power-celled panel in the house, even retrieving the candles from the watery mess on the floor. “Are you telling me programming failures like this are common?”
“Not common.” The Mluki’s eyes met hers frankly under the heavy ridge of brow. “But every now and then a tree feeder will go mildly amok and wander through the streets squirting nutrient at passersby. Or one of the ice walkers will start hiking away across the glaciers, forcing its passengers to bail out and walk back to the valley. Most people who have business out on the glaciers—who’re traveling to Bot-Un or Mithipsin, for instance—pack thermal suits and distress signals as a matter of course.”
He spread his white-furred hands, and the silver in his ears glinted as he tilted his head. “Personally—though I’m not a mechanic—I suspect it’s the result of doming the valley. It was always pretty damp here, but enclosing the valley has made it more so, and the pumping stations can’t eliminate or neutralize all the corrosive gases that rise out of the vents at the bottom end of the rift. They’ve never reported mechanical problems like this in Bot-Un.”
“But it’s not a mechanical problem,” argued Leia. “It’s a programming fault …”
“Well, that’s what the mechanics here say.” Jevax scratched his head. “But the programmers swear it’s mechanical.”
They would, thought Leia late the following morning, as she watched Chewbacca poke around in Artoo-Detoo’s mechanical innards in a hissing sizzle of sparks. She had yet to meet a programmer who’d admit that untoward results weren’t universally attributable to either hardware failure or operator error. Even Qwi Xux honestly and sincerely believed to this day that the Death Star would have made a wonderful mining