“And find something we missed the last six times?” Mara shook her head and smiled. “Go back to your droid, Skywalker. You’re just trying to get me into our cabin again.”
“I’m predictable that way,” Luke said. “But pay attention to this feeling. Whatever’s causing it, you seem to have a special connection to it.”
“Lucky me.” Mara opened the hatch, then looked over her shoulder before stepping through. “And about that cabin.”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe later.”
R2-D2 trilled a worried objection.
“Don’t worry,” Luke said, chuckling. “I’m a Jedi Master. I can still concentrate.”
He picked up his tools and carefully repaired the break in R2-D2’s deep-reserve chip. Once the solder was cool, he flipped his magnispecs up again and turned to the diagnostic display above the workbench.
“All right, Artoo. Let’s see what your deep-reserve memory shows now.”
A list of headings and numbers began to scroll down the screen, but suddenly stopped as it approached the location of the repaired sector.
“Don’t stop,” Luke said. “I need to see if you can access that sector. “
R2-D2 whirred a moment, then the scrolling resumed. The missing sector number appeared, but the descriptive heading looked like nothing but random characters.
“Stop,” Luke said.
The scrolling continued until the heading vanished off the top of the screen, then stopped.
“Now your response time is slow,” Luke complained. “Bring it back.”
R2-D2 piped a question.
“The sector I’ve been trying to repair. Two twenty-two.”
The list scrolled down until the lower half of the entry appeared at the top the screen.
“And you’re having roll problems.” Luke sighed. “It looks like you’ve got a bug in your system. I may need to get out the blast degausser.”
The entry dropped toward the middle of the screen, one letter in the heading changing with each line it sank.
“Stop! Why are you randomizing the heading?”
The droid whistled a denial.
“You are, too,” Luke said. “I saw the letters change.”
R2-D2 whirred a moment, then displayed a message on diagnostic screen.
It must be encoded.
“Encoded?” Luke began to wonder if perhaps the sector had been sequestered on purpose. R2-D2 had seen a lot of action even before the Rebellion, and Luke was always curious about what secrets the little droid might have locked away. “Then slice it.”
R2-D2 grated an objection.
“Artoo, you’re an astromech droid,” Luke said. “You have enough computing power to slice a triple-key, double-blind randomizer. I think you can solve a simple substitution code.”
The droid buzzed in resignation, then began to whir and hum. A few moments later, the heading vanished altogether. Luke waited for it to return in legible form, then finally gave up and groaned.
“Don’t tell me you lost the heading.”
R2-D2 trilled an apology.
“No problem,” Luke said, losing his patience with the little droid’s excuses. He lowered his magnispecs. “I’ll just fuse it to a sector that is in the directory.”
R2-D2 withdrew his interface arm from the data socket and whistled in protest.
“Then plug back in and stop making this difficult,” Luke said. “Let me see what’s in that sector.”
The droid warbled a question.
“This one.”
Luke touched the tip of his soldering filament to sector 222 and was astonished to hear a tinny female voice erupt from the droid’s speaker.
“Anakin…”
Luke caught a glimmer of moving light on the workbench. He flipped up his magnispecs, expecting to find the images of Tahiri and his dead nephew, Anakin, sharing a personal moment R2-D2 had caught with his holorecorder.
Instead, Luke found himself watching a beautiful, hand-sized, brown-eyed woman whom he did not recognize. She walked across the workbench, then stopped beside a sinewy young man dressed, as she was, in nightclothes.
“What’s bothering you?” she asked.
The young man continued to look away from her. “Nothing.”
“Anakin, how long is it going to take for us to be honest with each other?”
Luke’s heart rocketed into his throat. He had not immediately recognized his father. He wanted to call out to Mara, to share with Leia what he was feeling… but he was too stunned. He simply continued watching.
The young man-Anakin-turned to face the woman. “It was a dream.”
“Bad?”
Anakin looked over her head. “Like the ones I used to have about my mother… just before she died.”