The woman hesitated, then finally asked, “And?”
Anakin’s gaze fell. “It was about you.”
The hologram crackled to an abrupt end, and an ominous humming arose deep inside R2-D2’s internal workings. Luke flipped down his magnispecs and peered in to find the recording head bumping against his soldering filament as it attempted to access sector 222.
“Artoo!” Luke reached for the droid’s primary circuit breaker. “Wait!”
The recording head stopped moving, but Luke did not lift the soldering filament.
“What are you doing?”
The droid reinserted his interface arm into the data socket, and Luke had to flip up his magnispecs to read the message on the diagnostics screen. He continued to hold the soldering filament in place.
I need to reformat sector 222. Those data are corrupted.
“Nothing looks corrupted to me.” Luke could not understand why R2-D2 would try so desperately to hide 222’s contents, but he had no doubt that was exactly what the droid was doing. “Who was that woman with my father?”
R2-D2 whistled two notes.
“The woman in the hologram,” Luke said irritably. “Show it to me again.”
R2-D2’s holoprojector obediently came to life,
displaying
the familiar, three-dimensional figure of an Alderaanian Princess in an elegant white gown.
“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi,” the figure said. “You’re my only hope.”
“Not that woman,” Luke said. “I know my sister. The one talking to Anakin. Is that… is she my mother?”
A message appeared on the diagnostics display.
I don’t know what woman you ‘re talking about. That sector is defective. It should be sequestered.
“It was sequestered-probably on purpose.”
Luke studied R2-D2 carefully, touching him through the Force. With most other droids, any hope of sensing the truth would have been lost to the indecipherable Force static generated by its system routines. But R2-D2 had been Luke’s close companion for nearly three decades. The little droid’s static aura was as distinctive to him as was the presence of Mara or Leia or Han.
After a moment, Luke sensed the direction his questions should take. “It didn’t look like they knew you were holorecording. What were you doing? Spying?”
R2-D2 let out a squeal that Luke took to be a protest of denial-until it ended in a sharp crackle and a surge of electricity melted the filament Luke was using to protect sector 222. He jerked the wire free and started to rebuke the droid for his stubbornness, but one whiff of the acrid fumes pouring from the access panel told him this much damage was nothing the droid would do to himself. Luke used the Force to trip R2-D2’s primary circuit breaker, then opened a second access panel to vent the interior of the casing.
When the smoke cleared, he flipped his magnispecs down and saw that every circuit within a millimeter of sector 222 had been melted. Worse, a bead of hot filament had landed on the sector itself. Luke tore his magnispecs off and hurled them against the wall.
“Kriffing slicers!” He could not help feeling that someone had gone to a great effort to prevent him from discovering his mother’s identity, but of course that was just his disappointment. Whoever had booby-trapped R2-D2’s spyware had done it for their own reasons-reasons important fifty years ago, but that hardly mattered now. “Kriffing history!”
“Dad,” Ben’s voice asked, “what’s kriffing?”
Luke turned to find his son standing at his side, mouth agape at his father’s unaccustomed display of anger.
“Nothing-a bad word,” Luke said, calming himself. With a little luck-and the proper equipment-the memory chip could be restored and the booby trap bypassed. Things were never as bad as they seemed. “Your mother won’t be happy I said it in front of you.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t tell.” An innocent smile came to Ben’s small face. “Maybe I can have a tube of nerfspread?”
NINETEEN
With the dance-field glowing in the iridescent light of Qoribu’s reflection and a thousand Taat swirling through the intricate patterns of the Little Dawn Rumble, Leia felt as though she had stepped a thousand centuries into Alderaan’s past, when the Colony still ruled the planet and human expansion remained a dark storm on the galaxy’s horizon. The Killiks were “singing” their part of the Song of the Universe as they danced, chirping melody through their tiny proboscises, tapping time with their mandibles, drumming bass in their chest cavities. Alien and primal though the music was, the performance was as flawless as anything Leia had ever heard in Harmony Hall on Coruscant, a thousand instruments played by a single artist.