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By Root 441 0

very extensive library of recordings of his adventures with the only droid in his long, long existence who he could truthfully label my friend: C-3PO. He did not anticipate that he would miss C-3PO; he did not anticipate that he would be capable of missing anyone or anything. He did, however, experience a peculiar sensation in his social-interaction subroutines every time he accessed these particular directories. It was a sensation both positive and negative, and it was largely impossible, to R2’s considerable puzzlement, to quantify.

He supposed, after much computation, that he must be regretting that he would never see his friend again, while at the same time he was taking considerable comfort from the knowledge that his friend was, and would be for the foreseeable future, quite safe.

Somehow that seemed to make him more able to focus on the task at hand.

When the Falcon had departed without Luke on board, R2 had known exactly what to do, and he had done it. Once free of the trash ejector, he had tuned his sensor suite to register Master Luke’s personal chemical signature—his scent—and tracked Luke’s progress through the Shadow Base, right up until the trail had ended abruptly at a stone wall. Having no instructions or programming that appeared to offer him any useful alternative courses of action, he had settled in to wait.

R2 had waited while the gravity stations depowered, and while the fleet departed. He had waited through the breakup of the Shadow Base, and through the explosion of the planet. And he was waiting still.

He was entirely—one hundred percent—certain that Luke had been on the opposite side of that stone wall, which was now part of the surface of this tiny asteroid.

Luke was inside this ball of rock, and though Luke’s own chance of personal survival was only fractionally greater than R2’s—which was to say, for all practical purposes, nonexistent—the astromech would continue to clamber along the asteroid’s dark side and keep himself functional until he could do so no longer, because there remained a very slight, but measurable, chance that he might still be able to somehow help.

A peculiar motion among the starfield attracted his attention. One particular asteroid—one point of very bright radiation reflected from Taspan—moved somewhat more across the system’s plane of the ecliptic than along it. Further: This bright point’s motion was clearly retrograde; its heading was against the general direction of the asteroid field. Finally: This point of light did not travel with the consistent velocity that would be expected from a body whose motion was subject only to the laws of orbital mechanics; on the contrary, it accelerated, then slowed, then sped up again.

There was only one probable explanation.

Activating the telescopic zoom feature of his optical sensor, he was able to confirm his calculation: This object was indeed a ship.

Specifically, a Lambda T-4a shuttle.

R2-D2 opened the comm hatch in his dome and extended his parabolic antenna. He aimed it precisely—after calculating the lightspeed delay—at where the shuttle would be when his transmission would arrive, and began to broadcast a distress beacon code with all his considerable energy. Once he had established contact with the shuttle’s brain, he was able to explain the details of the situation and trust that the ship’s brain would be able to communicate the pertinent facts to its pilot.

The shuttle’s vector shifted to an intercept course with gratifying alacrity. The shuttle swung around to the asteroid’s light side, extended a docking claw, and seized the asteroid, drawing them close enough together to enclose the asteroid in its hyperdrive envelope. Then it made the jump to lightspeed.

R2-D2 spent the hyperspace transition reviewing his calculations, but they were impeccable.

The designs of an evil but brilliant man had been thwarted. Luke would survive, Princess Leia and Han Solo had escaped, C-3PO was assuredly safe, and R2-D2—to the best of his self-diagnostic subroutine’s ability to determine—had not, in fact, undergone a quantum