Star Wars_ The Black Fleet Crisis 02_ Shield of Lies - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [22]
Artoo’s response was an electronic bleat. “Very well, then,” Threepio said haughtily. “See if I care. I don’t need your help.” With that, the golden droid released his grip on Artoo’s right tread support and folded his arms across his chestplate.
“But I need your help, Threepio,” said Lando. “So stop squabbling with your brother and call out the numbers.”
“Why do you keep making that error, Master Lando? That egotistical little tyrant is no kin of mine,” Threepio sniffed.
“I can help you, Lando,” Lobot said quietly, without explanation. “Field, zero-point-eight-two gauss. Flux density, one-point-seven-four. Alpha rate—”
Lando looked at Lobot with annoyance, a sight that gave Lobot surprising satisfaction. Neither of them saw Threepio reach out and clutch one of the projections on the panel to steady himself. But both heard a loud burst of static on the contact suit comm unit and saw a blue glow in the passage.
“Gracious me!” Threepio exclaimed.
Quickly looking that way, Lobot saw that the end of the panel was crawling with blue-white snakes of energy. They were crackling between the tips of the projections, dancing up Threepio’s arm nearly to the elbow joint, and rapidly growing more intense.
“Threepio—don’t let go—” Lobot began.
The warning came too late. The moment his surprise abated, Threepio pulled back his hand in a reflex of squeamishness.
An instant later a massive, squirming bolt of energy leaped from the panel to Threepio’s hand, flashed up his arm and one side of his head, and sprang from there to the face of the passage. Before anyone could react, it had raced away down the passage and disappeared, spreading as it went until it was dancing over the entire surface like a halo of blue fire. One finger of the bolt ran along the hand lines, leaving them crumbling into black dust in its wake.
The bolt left Threepio convulsing and spinning in midair. His right arm was burned black and smoking from the servos and energizer controls, his head was frozen at an odd angle and quivering as though an actuator were caught in a feedback loop.
Lobot loosed a string of curses he had forgotten he knew and started toward the injured droid. Lando stared dumbly for a moment, then did the same. But Artoo beat both of them to Threepio, latching on and dragging him away down the passage in the opposite direction from the one the bolt had taken. As Artoo passed Lando, the droid made a hostile noise.
“I’m sorry,” Lando said, throwing his arms up in a gesture of surrender. “It’s not my fault. Lobot—tell him it’s not my fault.”
Hastening up the passage after Artoo and Threepio, Lobot jetted past Lando in purposeful silence.
Artoo would not allow Lando to approach Threepio. He had to content himself with watching from several meters away while Lobot and Artoo hovered over the protocol droid and tried to assess the damage.
From several meters away, the damage looked to be considerable.
An R6 or R7 could have survived the jolt handily. The latest combat-rated droids were armored against power surges and induced currents up to and including a near-direct hit from a class one ion cannon.
But Threepio had been designed for wars of words. His buffers and breakers were minimal, and the bolt of energy from the panel had overwhelmed them. If the charge had passed across his body, through the primary processors, instead of up one side, Threepio would be dead.
As it was, Lando could see that Threepio’s right arm was rigid and useless at his side, the servo controllers burned and the linkages fused. Even worse, his speech synthesizer or vocal processor had been crippled. When he spoke, his voice phased and changed timbre, as though he were a million klicks away on a pocket comlink. Twice already he had halted in midsentence, as though stuck searching for the most ordinary of words—something Lando had never heard him do before.
After a