Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [39]
Especially, now that he thought of it, because the ground had stopped shuddering and the thunder of the storm outside had changed to the thunder of multiple sonic booms. He got up and walked outside.
The sky was full of TIE fighters whipping through a trans-sonic search grid.
Luke unclipped his lightsaber and thumbed the activator. The blade of brilliant green snarled and spat as its plasma consumed airborne grit. When a TIE fighter swung down through a barrel roll for a closer look, Luke smiled and beckoned with his blade like a ground crewman directing them in for a landing.
Then he put away the lightsaber, lowered himself into a cross-legged meditation posture on the warm rock, and folded his arms to wait.
He waited while the TIE fighters circled his position. He waited while the atmospheric gunships arrived and landed a few hundred meters away. He waited while hundreds of black-armored stormtroopers poured out of the gunships, assembled in ranks, and advanced on him in a broad arc, blasters leveled. He waited while a trooper with a group captain’s flash on his chest stepped cautiously forward and called, “General Skywalker!”
Luke rose.
The assembled stormtroopers tensed. Several hundred blaster carbines snapped to shoulder-ready.
The group captain called again. “General Skywalker! Are you Luke Skywalker?”
“If it’s not too much of a cliché, take me to your leader.” Luke held out his lightsaber, inert, on his open palm, and smiled. “If it is too much of a cliché, take me anyway.”
R2-D2 HAD PASSED THE ROCK STORM IN A SNUG LITTLE lava cave near the rim of the crater, unconcernedly repairing his rollerped’s damaged arm. When the meteorite strikes got powerful enough to interfere with the repairs—a few of the ground shocks bounced the little droid around his lava cave like a Touranian jumping-stone in a bumble-dice cup—R2 just drilled four of his auxiliary manipulators into the sides of the cave to anchor himself in place and went on. With his enormous array of onboard tools, a good-enough repair was simple, though R2 did file a memo in his maintenance archive to have the arm replaced the next time he could find his way into a fully outfitted service center.
Soon the rock storm’s thunder had faded, and R2’s auditory sensors registered the characteristic shriek of air whistling through the accumulator panels of TIE fighters—always heard when TIEs were used in-atmosphere. R2’s onboard threat-assessment algorithm estimated the shrieks to be coming from several kilometers overhead, which meant that a quick peek outside carried an acceptably low level of risk. First came an extensible minidish, with which R2 made a quick scan of sensor channels; discovering no droid-sensitive scans in progress, the little astromech extended his now-functional locomotor arms, deanchored his manipulators, and whirred up to the surface.
“There you are, my little beauty!” The shout registered in R2’s auditory sensors as a series of sonic impulses whose wave characteristics corresponded to the natural vocal production of a human male speaking Basic with a distinctively Inner Rim accent; R2 instantly filed a copy in his medium-term audio log, because he knew from long experience that C-3PO derived a great deal of pleasure-analogue from analyzing distinctive vowel/consonant interactions to deduce the planet of origin—and region of that planet—not only of the speaker in question, but also of the speaker’s parents, childhood companions, teachers, and, if applicable, mate or mates. R2 himself was confident—over seventy-three percent probability—that this accent would turn out to be native to Mindor, but he was content to leave such final determinations to the expert. After all, every droid has to be good at something … and C-3PO had a long history of unpleasantly human-like insistence on his innate superiority in such matters, so R2 also filed a memo to pretend complete ignorance, which he estimated might prevent as much as thirty-seven minutes of pointless bickering.
R2’s threat-assessment algorithm also registered