Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [29]
Still, there was water down there somewhere. The harsh projections of faceted stone cut his hands as he picked his way back down to the speeder, and he shivered a little in the chill as he put the craft into gear and headed down the canyons toward the ruin.
With clumsy dignity, See-Threepio arranged the body of Yeoman Marcopius in the scout boat’s small specimen-freeze chamber. The craft contained only emergency medical kits, not even a class-3 med droid, much less a stasis box, and though Threepio hooked the boy immediately into life supports and diagnostics, nothing had been able to save him. The diagnostics faithfully reported no anomalous conditions, no poison, no disease, no bacteria, and no virus on one screen, while the other cataloged the absence of oxygen absorption or brain function.
There was nothing wrong with him. He’d just died.
The protocol droid coaxed the young man’s limbs into the most dignified position possible in a chamber slightly more than a meter square, then straightened himself up, made a few little human warm-up noises, and proceeded to produce the standard Service for the Departed, complete with music.
Artoo tweeped a worried inquiry. Threepio paused in mid-fugue and said, “Well, of course I’m playing the Service for the Departed on full-speed fast-forward! We’ll be coming out of hyperspace soon—if poor Yeoman Marcopius’s computations were correct. And I don’t scruple to tell you, Artoo, that I’m very worried that he might already have been feeling ill when he input the calculations to the computer. It takes so little to disarrange an organic brain. Really, only a temperature variation of half a dozen degrees. Who knows where we might emerge from hyperspace? Or if anyone will be within hailing distance to pilot the ship into port?”
The astromech wibbled another comment.
“Oh, you’ve checked? We are on the proper course to emerge within hailing distance of the Durren orbital base? Why didn’t you say so before? Now don’t keep interrupting me. It isn’t respectful.”
He turned back to the young man in the white uniform—the young man who had been their primary hope of a swift and successful planetfall at Durren—assumed a pose of reverent mourning, and whipped through the two-hour service in one seven-second lightspeed burst.
“There.” He slid the freeze chamber lid shut and turned the locking ring. “The unit is certified to contain any form of communicable disease in the Registry. Once we’ve alerted Fleet authorities as to Master Ashgad’s appalling treachery, poor Yeoman Marcopius’s family can be notified.… Good heavens!” His gold head snapped a quick thirty degrees as a light went up over the infirmary door. “That’s the warning signal. We’d better immobilize to come out of hyperspace.”
The amber light blinked faster as the two droids ascended the lift to the bridge. Though the scout boat was set for an automatic deceleration and would have emerged from hyperspace whether or not anyone was at the controls, Threepio felt vaguely safer as he stepped into one of the several immobilization niches near the lift door of the bridge. Beyond the vacant chairs of captain and co-pilot, the line of readouts appeared normal. No warning lights shone beneath the great viewports with their swirling lights and darks of mutated starlight and bent gravitational fields. Artoo settled himself in the niche nearest the consoles and extruded an input jack to the dataport at the near end of the board. He tweeped reassuringly as the lockdown lights flowed from their flutter of blinking into steady, burning gold.
“I know we’re coming out at the far edge of Durren planetary space,” retorted Threepio crossly. “Durren is a major port. Only an idiot would set an automatic deceleration sequence for anywhere that there would be the slightest possibility of encountering another ship.”
The lights on the bridge shifted and brightened. The gravity field surged as regular power cut in. The weird, mottled-silk patterns of stretched starlight flexed, lined, and gave way suddenly to the