Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [74]
“How would you have destroyed me?”
“I didn’t come here to destroy you. I came here to destroy the station. I have a way to cause this control room to send a pulse through the station and wreck it.”
“Killing everybody aboard.”
“No, it sends an emergency evacuation code first and waits ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes?” The droid sounded offended. “You think everyone on a station this large could get to escape pods in ten minutes?”
Guiltily, Ben shrugged. “I didn’t come up with the plan.”
“Give me the data.”
Ben reached into his pouch and grabbed the spike-topped data card. As an afterthought, he also grabbed the other data cards, those that would have initiated self-destruct or shutdown sequences from other control rooms in the station. He held them up and felt the droid’s magnetics yank them out of his hand. A moment later they went into the droid’s mouth-slot.
“Analyzing,” the droid said in its heartbroken tones. Then, “Oh, I know where that interface is. But I’ve been interpreting it as a candy dispenser.”
“That’s…wrong,” Ben said.
“I have to reinterpet myself in light of what it really is. These commands…no. I won’t take life unnecessarily.”
“Unnecessarily? Think about what’s going to happen if you don’t!”
“It’s true. Somebody is going to die. Them or me. Me or them.”
“Except you wouldn’t be dying,” Ben said. “You’re a droid. You’re not really alive.”
The droid leaned toward him, its posture suddenly menacing. “If I do this, I’ll end. Everything I am will just stop and never happen again. Tell me that’s not dying. Go ahead, tell me again.”
Ben leaned away from the droid, ashamed. “I’m sorry.”
The droid resumed its earlier posture. “Analyzing programming,” it said, its voice distracted, almost droid-like. “Security bypasses. Passcodes. Hey, there’s some brilliant stuff here.”
“Our best spies have been working on it,” Ben said absently. The clanking and voices from the hall were becoming louder. He heard a whining noise, and the door lifted enough that a centimeter of corridor light shone through.
“I’m going places I didn’t know about. Seeing through security holocams I couldn’t access before.” The droid looked up and waved toward the ceiling. “Look, there I am.” Its voice became dreamy. “There are places, intersections into the old systems. So old. Beautiful engineering. I can…almost…get in.” It sighed, a sound of exasperation. “They won’t let me in.”
“Time’s kind of running out,” Ben said. “What are you going to do, Anakin?”
“I’m not really Anakin, am I?”
“You’re…an Anakin. Not Anakin Solo.”
“Anakin Sal-Solo.” The droid laughed, but it was a humorless noise. “Thrackan’s offspring. That’s what I am.”
Ben suddenly found himself falling. He landed in a crouch on the floor. He looked cautiously up at the droid.
“I’m not going to destroy this station,” the droid said. “If you could feel it the way I do…feel its life…and there’s so much knowledge here. But I’ll keep my father and his friends from using it. I guess that means I have to die.”
“I’m sorry,” Ben said. And he truly was. He couldn’t quite accept the droid as his cousin, but he abruptly realized he was thinking of it as a him, a living thing…a noble one.
“There it is, right at the human-builder interface,” the droid said. “The code representing the station’s imprinting on Anakin Solo. I’m installing a procedure to scramble what the station thinks Anakin Solo is. And another one to purge my memory—in me, in all my backups. Without those…files…I doubt they’ll ever be able to deconstruct what I’ve done.”
The door suddenly shot upward a meter. Without looking, the droid gestured toward it. It slammed shut again, so hard that the frame buckled. Ben heard cries of alarm and outrage from outside.
“There’s my own code, my programming,” the droid