Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [94]
>The droid with her, the droid with the living eyes—What is he? What is this? Is this a new sort of creature Palpatine thinks he can use? What is this, that’s happening between them?<
“Palpatine’s dead.” Laser light showing up the Emperor’s bones within his flesh … The pain in his own bones, his own flesh, destroying him. Darth Vader’s voice …
He pushed the images from his mind. “The Empire has broken into six, maybe ten major fragments, ruled by warlords and Governors. The Senate’s in control of Coruscant and most of the Inner Rim. A New Republic has been established and is growing strong.”
The screen wiped dark for a moment. Then, spreading and flashing across it, a growing design, a dancing spiral geometry of outflung joy. Her joy, Luke realized. The essence, the heart of what he himself had felt in that tree village on Endor’s green moon, when he knew that the first terrible hurdle had been cleared.
Music by someone who no longer had a voice.
The joy-dance of the bodiless.
Triumphal delight and utter thanks.
We won, we won! I died but we won!
If she had been here, he knew, she would have flung herself into his arms.
Like Triv Pothman, she’d been waiting a long time.
What she said was, >You have made this worth it for me<
The designs whirled themselves across every screen in the room and then away, like a ring of dancing waves moving outward.
Luke said softly, “Almost.”
Another long pause. >98%<
He knew it was half jesting, and he laughed.
>You’re Master Luke? Is Calrissian your real name?<
“Skywalker,” he said. “Luke Skywalker.”
He was conscious of the silence implicit in the suddenly black screen.
“Anakin’s son,” he added quietly. “It was Anakin who killed Palpatine.”
There was nothing on the screen still, but as if he looked into another person’s eyes, he sensed the changing tides of her thought, the wondering contemplation of the vagaries of time.
>Tell me<
“Another time,” said Luke. “What happened to this vessel? This mission? What started it again? How long do we have?”
>How long we have I don’t know. I am … side by side with the Will, but there are things of the Will that I do not and cannot touch. Thirty years I have existed so. I managed to cripple the receptors, and before coming here, damaged or destroyed most of the slaved autoactivation relays that would have triggered the computer’s core from a distance. The components of the relay were crashed, shattered, destroyed; no one could have found them to activate this station by that means, but there still remained the danger the station could have been activated manually. That’s why I … stayed<
“Then I was right.” Luke felt his scalp prickle. “I knew it, sensed it … those guns weren’t fired by a mechanical. On a ship this size—”
>No. I was the one firing the guns. That’s where I’ve been all these years. In the gunnery computers. I was sure you were the Empire’s agent. Before you came on board there was no one, nor is there anyone on board save yourself, and the aliens the landers brought in after the Will was activated again<
“I don’t understand,” said Luke. “If no one came on until the Will was activated …”
>It was the Force. I felt it, sensed it … The broken activation relays were set off, all of these years later, by the use of the Force<
Luke was shocked silent, the neat amber letters like a hammer blow hitting him over the heart.
“The Force?” He leaned closer, as if to touch her arm, her hand … “That’s impossible.”
>Yes, I know it is<
“The Force can’t affect droids and mechanicals.”
>No, it can’t<
Luke thought about that for a time, about what it meant or could mean. Ithor came back to him, and the cold flood of dread as he’d sat in semitrance at Nichos’s side, the sense of something terribly wrong. The wave of darkness spreading outward, reaching, searching … The random numbers that had led him here—the dream of some terrible attack creeping stealthily through the desert night.
“But why? Why bomb Belsavis now? There’s nothing there.”
Nothing except