Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy Trilogy 01_ Jedi Search - Kevin J. Anderson [17]
Wedge ducked inside the breached metal walls of the shielded room. Luke could hear people shuffling and banging inside. He saw Leia wrinkle her nose at the strange smells wafting out.
Luke’s eyes took a moment to adjust to the glowing yellow illumination of the floating lights posted around the chamber. Something powerful had gone berserk in here. At first he saw broken equipment scattered on the floor, wires torn out, smashed computer terminals. Long claw marks gashed the walls. A black spherical Imperial interrogation droid lay split open in one corner. He saw Leia’s eyes fix on it, and he sensed a wave of revulsion pass through her.
Several people from Wedge’s team had wrestled a heavy metal grate back into place against one wall and were now laser-welding it into its channel. The grate had been horribly bent.
“More excitement last night,” Wedge said. The welders looked up from their work, waved to Wedge, then bent back to their beams. “The mate of that rat-creature came back up through the tunnels, found its companion killed, and smashed everything it could.” He frowned. “Ruined most of the old equipment here, but we still might be able to salvage something. The Emperor kept the place under tight security. Seems to be some kind of deep interrogation facility.”
“Yes, indeed,” Ackbar said, striding through the wreckage. Broken circuit boards crunched under his wide feet. “We wouldn’t want any of this to fall into the wrong hands.”
Luke’s attention drifted over to a tangle of wires and flat sheet-crystal readers on the floor. His forehead furrowed with concentration as he went to look more closely. “Is that what I think it is?” he mumbled.
“What did you say, Luke?” Leia asked, following him.
He didn’t answer her as he bent over the equipment, pulling wires and cables and trying to sort through the mess. “It looks like there were three separate units here. They’re probably all destroyed.” But he felt a growing excitement within him. Maybe they would be able to piece the components together.
“What is it?” Leia asked again.
Luke uncoiled one of the cables and found an intact sheet-crystal reader at the end. It looked like a glassy silver paddle longer than his hand. “I’ve read about this in my research on the old Jedi Knights. The Emperor’s hunter teams used it to seek out Jedi who were hiding during his great purge.”
He found a second intact sheet-crystal paddle, then picked the control pack that looked the least damaged. With his cyborg hand, Luke brushed aside some of the dust, then jacked the cables into either side of the pack, holding the paddles, one in each hand. He flipped the power switch on the control pack and was gratified to see a warm flurry of lights as the unit went through its initialization diagnostics.
“The Emperor’s teams used equipment like this as sort of a Force detector, for his henchmen to read the auras of people they suspected of having Jedi talent. According to the records, the remnants of the Jedi Knights held this thing in great fear—but maybe we can use it to restore the Jedi.”
He grinned, and for a moment he felt like the fresh, excited farm boy he had been back on Tatooine. “Hold still, Leia. Let me test this on you.”
She stood back, alarmed. “But what does it do?” Both Wedge and Ackbar had stepped over to watch.
“Trust me,” Luke said. He held the sheet-crystal paddles at arm’s length, bracketing Leia. When he tripped the scan switch, a thin slice of coppery light traced down Leia’s body from head to toe. Suspended in air above the control pack, a smaller echo of the copper scan-line reappeared in reverse motion, assimilating the data and constructing a tiny hologram of Leia.
It looked different from the small holo of Leia that Artoo Detoo