Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [127]
With a slight hiss, the emergency lighting of the medical center browned out and gave up its final, feeble ghost. With darkness came a skittering, brown insects with which Threepio was not familiar scrambling along the walls.
“What are we going to do?”
Artoo maneuvered his way into one of the offices, where an Ithorian in the white coat of a physician lay dead over her console, and plugged into the computer jack in the wall. He tweeped worriedly, light from the street outside falling across him in pale orange bars.
“At the same time as the Adamantine?” said Threepio. “That’s absurd. Plague vectors don’t operate that swiftly and the odds against a simultaneous mutation are seven thousand four hundred twenty-one against.”
A couple of tweets and a wibble.
“When were the last reports from anywhere in the facility?”
Artoo reported. Though the street below the med station had been deserted for some time, a small band of e-suited figures hurried along, dragging sheets heaped with what looked like random gleanings—monitors, circuit boards, jewelry, shoes. One of those figures staggered, caught itself against the corner of a wall. The others conferred hastily among themselves, not going anywhere near their afflicted comrade, and ran. The man they had left tried to stagger after them, then sank down, helmeted head resting on his knees. In ten minutes or so, during which Artoo gave Threepio a précis of the progress of the plague in all reported quarters of the Meridian sector, the green light on the looter’s e-suit went to amber, then to red, visible as a tiny dot of brightness across the street.
Through the smoky transparisteel of the facility’s environmental dome, the orange streak of a departing ship could be seen.
A few moments later, the streetlamps went out.
The nights on Cybloc XII are long. The small moon on which it is built has a rotation period almost synchronous with its orbit. The great, glowing mass of the planet Cybloc is only occasionally visible from the port facility there, as a huge gold-and-green disk low in the sky. It did not show that night. Until the harsh light of the primary, Erg Es 992, flooded through the port’s dome, Artoo worked alone, sending Threepio out on scavenging expeditions to various laboratories for what he needed and improvising what the protocol droid could not find. By that time it was safe, the streets were deserted save for the dead.
In time Artoo was ready.
“But it’s useless,” Threepio protested, looking down at the little stack of circuit boards and wiring that the astromech had hooked into the medical center computer. “There isn’t enough amplification in that modulator to get a signal out of the system. Don’t get smart with me,” he added, to Artoo’s tweeted reply. “I found the only thing on your list that was available. You should be glad I was able to retrieve that. There’s absolutely nothing usable left in the Port Authority, or in any one of the shipping companies.”
Artoo hooked another circuit into the loop.
“And I don’t see what good that’s going to do. If there’s known to be plague here, no one’s going to come near enough even to hear a distress signal except more looters.”
Threepio did not even add, We’re doomed. There was, perhaps, enough true doom, enough complete hopelessness, in the silent streets he had spent the night traversing to have stilled that particular observation. Threepio had seen dead humans, but the scale of this devastation awed him. The implications of looters innocent of quarantine regulations scattering even now to every corner of the Republic in all available transport horrified him still more.
So when Artoo gave him his instructions, Threepio obeyed. Thin as a thread, on a beam that wouldn’t get much past the world that had been their goal for so long, the signal went out, in Basic and every one of six million galactic languages, just to be on the safe side:
“Help.”
18
“Whaddaya mean, you can’t get a response from Cybloc Twelve?” Han Solo slapped the comm button on the office viewscreen of the Durren Base Comptroller, much