Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [98]
He wanted her company.
“Any of the bigger game systems in the lounges will have voders,” he said at length. “Threepio, you know the stats on Gamorrean vocal range, don’t you?”
“I can reproduce exactly the language and tonalities of over two hundred thousand sentient civilizations,” replied the droid, with perhaps pardonable pride. “Gamorrean verbal tones begin at fifty herz and run up to thirteen thousand; squeals begin at—”
“So you could help me program the voder?”
“With the greatest of ease, Master Luke.”
“Then what we need is a way to get the voder up to Deck Nineteen in time to pull the Klagg guards away from the shaft.”
A schematic appeared on the screen. Not the precise, every-wire-and-conduit blueprint a ship’s computer would display, but a more or less to scale sketch of a section of the vessel, labeled in one corner DECK 17. A bright circle flashed around a gangway. Then a window appeared in the screen.
>The gangway’s wired. It leads from Recycling—the area of the ship where only the droids go—to Deck 19. If you make your foo-twitter light enough, you should be able to propel it up fast while you keep the enclision grid misfiring enough to let it through without too many hits<
Luke thought about it. “That’s how you did it?” he asked at last. “Caused the grid to misfire?”
A long hesitation. The schematic faded from the screen. At some slight sound in the corridor, Threepio clanked his way out to check, and the whitish glow of the screen edged his golden form in threads of light as he stood listening in the utter black of the doorway square.
>It’s like causing a blaster to misfire. You can’t keep them all from firing—there are too many, and some of them always get through—and you can’t keep all the bolts from hitting you<
Another long pause. She would, Luke thought, have avoided his eyes, as Leia sometimes did when she spoke of Bail Organa, not letting him see her grief.
>The more that hit you, the more that will. But if you case the voder in a gutted tracker droid, you can shoot it up the shaft fast enough to survive a few hits. And a mechanical can absorb a lot more hits than human flesh<
The more that hit you, thought Luke with a chill, the more that will.
She’d climbed the shaft from the gun room, knowing she’d be hit … knowing the first hit would break her concentration on the Force, damage her ability to keep the grid from firing, lessen her chances to avoid the second … and the second hit would lessen her chances to avoid the third.
He remembered how the Klagg’s blood had trickled down the steps, and the smell of burned flesh. His heart contracted within him, aching, as the silence lengthened. Very softly, he said, “I wish it hadn’t happened.”
Wise, powerful, comforting, he approved with bitter sarcasm. The wisdom of a true Jedi Master.
>It’s all right<
They were silent for a time, as if they stood on either side of fathomless night, reaching across to fingers that could not touch.
“Were you from Chad?”
The screen was dark for a long time. He almost feared he’d offended her by asking, or that the batteries had failed. Then words came up, white flowers in the sunken meadow of the void.
>We had a deep-water ranch. We moved with the herds along the Algic Current, from the equator almost to the Arctic Circle. The first time I used the Force was to move pack ice one winter when I got trapped with a band of cows. Papa never understood why I couldn’t stay, if I was happy<
“Were you happy?” He looked down at the lightsaber she’d made for herself, on Dagobah, perhaps, or on whatever planet she’d taken her training. She’d put a line of tsaelke around its handgrip, in memory of the tides of her home.
>I think more happy than I’ve ever been since<
Luke