Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [11]
Mirax is gone, and I am losing details of her life.
I got up and ran to the living room. The red light still blinked on the holopad. I punched it with the urgency of a pilot ejecting from a stricken fighter. Her image appeared once again and I smiled, but as she spoke, my smile died. The countless nuances I’d read into how she looked at me, and what she said, how she inflected her voice and shifted her balance, were gone. I could have been looking at some commercial broadcast of a beautiful woman selling anything from lum to a trip to the Alakatha resorts.
I hit another button and switched the holopad over into communications mode. I keyed in a call to Squadron Headquarters. The head and shoulders of a black droid materialized, all but lost in the darkness except for the glow of golden eyes in his clamshell head. “You have reached Rogue Squadron Headquarters. This is Emtrey. It is good to see you, Captain Horn.”
“You, too, Emtrey.” I raked fingers back through my short brown hair. “I’m going to ask you a question and I want a straight answer—and the question is going to sound strange.”
“I understand the parameters of your request.”
“Good.” I hesitated for a moment. “It is approximately 1:30 in the morning, Coordinated Galactic Time, right?”
“1:31:27, to be exact, sir.”
I nodded. Normally I found Emtrey’s slavish adherence to reality annoying, but right now it was a lifeline to sanity. “And I’m Corran Horn, right?”
The droid’s head jerked back. “Yes, sir. A moment please.…Your voiceprint checks to within 99.4953 percent of accuracy, the variation being accounted for by travel stress and degree of rest.”
“Okay, good, Emtrey, very good.” I licked my lips. “Here’s the big one.”
The droid’s image leaned forward toward me. “I am ready, sir.”
“I’m married to Mirax Terrik, right?”
Emtrey’s eyes flared. “Oh, yes, sir. You will recall that I attended the ceremony Commander Antilles conducted on the Lusankya, and again attended the ceremony you had here on Coruscant. I believe Whistler made a holographic record of the first ceremony, and I know there were multiple holographs of the second one.”
My jaw dropped. I knew there were holographs of the ceremonies, but I had forgotten them. Our original copies had been destroyed when our home had been leveled, but Mirax had obtained new copies from her father. I wanted to turn to the cabinet where we stored them and play one immediately, but I hesitated. I couldn’t risk finding them as emotionally empty as I had the replay of Mirax’s message.
“Are you all right, Captain Horn?”
I frowned, then nodded slowly. “I don’t know, Emtrey. Is the colonel available?”
Emtrey’s eyes flickered for a moment. “The colonel is in his office. He has a meeting scheduled thirty standard minutes from now.”
“Ask him to cancel it or postpone it, please. I have to talk to him.” I stared intently at Emtrey as if I could reach into his robotic brain and communicate my urgency. “Mirax is gone, I mean really gone, and I have to find her. I’ll be there in a half hour. Horn out.”
I arrived at headquarters a little later than expected because of gross indecision on my part concerning clothes. I went to toss almost anything on, but I saw too many shirts and pants and jackets that Mirax had bought for me and, rather often, transported from all over the galaxy. Try as I might, I couldn’t remember what she had said about any of them. I couldn’t remember her smiles or laughter as she dressed me up, or what she’d said as she later worked me back out of the clothes. Each shirt hung there like a ghost of a memory, all two dimensional and lifeless.
I’d finally shrugged something on—a hideous matching of patterns and colors, as it turned out,