Star Wars the Truce at Bakura - Kathy Tyers [4]
Artoo beeped a query.
Guessing at a translation, Luke said, “All right, Artoo. You stand watch. I’ll take another nap.” He rolled over. Slowly, his weight pushed a new furrow into the bed’s flexible contour. This was the down side of being called a hero. It’d been worse when he lost his right hand.
Come to think of it, the bionic hand didn’t ache.
One bright spot.
It was time to re-create the ancient Jedi art of self-healing. Yoda’s sketchy lessons left much to be imagined.
“I’ll leave you, sir.” Too-Onebee swiveled away. “Please attempt to sleep. Call if you require assistance.”
One last question brought Luke’s head up. “How’s Wedge?”
“Healing well, sir. He should be ready for release within a day.”
Luke shut his eyes and tried to remember Yoda’s lessons. Booted feet pounded rapidly past the open hatchway. Already focused deep into the Force, he felt an alarmed presence hurry up the hall. As carefully as he listened, he couldn’t recognize the individual. Yoda had said fine discernment—even of strangers—would come in time, as he learned the deep silence of self that let a Jedi distinguish others’ ripples in the Force.
Luke rolled over, wanting to sleep. He was ordered to sleep.
And he was still Luke Skywalker, and he had to know what had alarmed that trooper. Cautiously he sat up and gingerly slipped down onto his feet. With the ache localized at one end of his body, he could diminish it by willing his feet not to exist … or something like that. The Force wasn’t something you explained. It was something you used … when it let you. Not even Yoda had seen everything.
Artoo whistled an alarm. Too-Onebee rolled toward him, limb-pipes flailing. “Sir, lie back down, please.”
“In a minute.” He poked his head out into the long corridor and shouted, “Stop!”
The Rebel trooper spun to a halt.
“Did they decode that drone ship’s message yet?”
“Still working on it, sir.”
Then the war room was the place to be. Luke backed into Artoo and steadied himself with a hand on the little droid’s blue dome. “Sir,” insisted the medical droid, “please lie down. The condition will rapidly become chronic unless you rest.”
Imagining himself pain-racked for the rest of his life, and the alternative—another spell in the sticky tank—Luke sat down on the squishy edge of the flotation bed and fidgeted.
Then a thought struck him. “Too-Onebee, I bet you’ve got—”
Large enough to hold a hundred, the flagship’s war room was almost empty. A service droid slid along the curve of an inner bench, passing between a light tube and glimmering while bulkheads. Down near the circular projection table that dominated the war room’s center, near a single tech on duty, Mon Mothma—the woman who’d founded and who now led the Rebel Alliance—stood with General Crix Madine. Mon Mothma’s presence gleamed visibly in her long white robes and invisibly through the Force, and the bearded Madine’s confidence had grown since the Battle of Endor.
They both looked in Luke’s direction and frowned. Luke smiled halfheartedly and gripped the handrests of the repulsor chair he’d commandeered out of the medical suite, steering it down over the steps toward them.
“You’ll never learn, will you?” General Madine’s frown got flatter. “You belong in sick bay. This time we’ll have Too-Onebee knock you out.”
Luke’s cheek twitched. “What about that message? Some Imperial commander burned a quarter million credits on that antique drone.”
Mon Mothma nodded, reprimanding Luke with her placid stare. A side console lit, this one a smaller light projection table. Above it appeared a miniature hologram of Admiral Ackbar, with huge eyes bulging at the sides of his high-domed, ruddy head. Although the Calamarian had commanded the Battle of Endor from a chair under the broad starry viewport on Luke’s left, Ackbar felt more comfortable on his own cruiser. Life support there was fine-tuned to Calamarian standards. “Commander Skywalker,” he wheezed. Whiskery tendrils wobbled under his jaw. “You need to consider