Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [53]
“I’m sure you could, sir,” said Threepio diffidently. “But according to the chronometer on the wall immediately to your left, the ship will reach the hyperspace target zone in less than four minutes, and though I am myself not a pilot, I believe that if you miss the zone you will condemn us all to drifting forever in hyperspace—a fate that would be fatal to you long before either one of us would even suffer boredom. And your last remark,” he added, finally stung, “is not only untrue but physiologically impossible for any nonorganic life form.”
As if for emphasis, Artoo-Detoo did something that caused the lights to dim and the faint thrum of the central core readjusting itself to penetrate even to the secondary airlock, and a small puff of pink gas swirled out of the ventilator on the bridge. Captain Bortrek swung around, terror in his eyes at the sight of it. Then he veered back, screamed curses at both droids in the safety of their airlock for a few moments more, and threw himself into the pilot’s seat to begin the procedures to take the ship out of hyperspace on target.
He did not cease to blaspheme, however, and though he repeated himself frequently and never emerged from the realm of purely mundane and unimaginative scatology, he continued to relieve his emotions at the top of his lungs throughout the journey to Nim Drovis, during planetfall at a small smugglers’ pad in the bayous south of the Bagsho spaceport, and was still cursing when Artoo-Detoo jammed the airlock open on a timer, See-Threepio quickly disattached the temporary wiring, and the two droids hastened down the ramp. Extrapolating from statistical probability, Threepio assumed that Captain Bortrek was still cursing when the Pure Sabacc lifted off.
With the fading of the Sabacc’s launch engines in the gluey warmth of the night, darkness settled around the two errant droids. In every direction around the wide, smoke-stained permacrete rectangle of the pad, hillocks of brush-furred mud alternated with forests of reeds whose thin heads rose no more than a few centimeters above the ambient water, a desolation of marsh-gunnies, gulpers, and the blinking green eyes of wadie-platts like ghost lights among the sedge. Against the dark hem of the sky, a sprinkling of lights marked Bagsho, largest of the planet’s free ports, settled largely by Alderaan colonists but transformed in the past five years into a major crossroad between the New Republic and the neutral systems of the Meridian sector.
Had he been capable of doing so, See-Threepio would have heaved a sigh. As it was he turned from the glimmer of the lights to regard his comrade and said, “Well, I hope you know what you’ve gotten us into.”
Artoo whistled a sorry little whistle, dropped himself forward onto his roller-leg, and snapped on his headlamp. A trifle unsteadily—because of the switching box still space-taped to one side and the clusters of wires looped up from a jack on his back that hadn’t been there before—he led the way across the permacrete pad to the narrow ribbon of trail that led toward the city, Threepio clanking resignedly in his wake.
“There,” said Umolly Darm, sitting back in her chair and pecking through a save command on the ramshackle keyboard. “Eight and a half months ago, on Buwon Neb’s run in from Durren. One human passenger, female, hundred and seventy-five centimeters tall—she’s the only human female that height all year. Cleared port authority under the name Cray Mingla.”
“That’s her,” Luke said in a breath. His whole body felt strange, tingling with pain and grief and joy. He was almost afraid to speak, in case the grimy orange lettering should be swallowed into the monitor’s dark again. “Thank you.”
“No occupation listed,” went on Darm. Her violet eyes flicked kindly to his face, then away; she kept her voice matter-of-fact. “Though in Hweg Shul … drat!” The screen fuzzed out. Luke felt as if he’d been knifed through the heart; a moment later, he was aware of the prickling lift of the hair at his nape and turning quickly toward the window,