6. Truth and pain
Luke sat at the table, staring at the table-top while he drew thin lines on it with his finger, obviously not taking in anything that happened around him. Leia was the one to step behind him with a blanket, laying it over his shoulders in order to give him some comfort. "You could not have done anything else" she murmured softly, "it all happened too fast."
Luke drew some more lines, his eyes seemed to watch something in a far, far distance. "I just can't believe that he is dead", his voice creaked toneless, and Nyé had trouble understanding him properly as he repeated, "I just can't."
As the pilot approached their silent group, Nyé figured that he must have handed the steering to the wookie. "Come on, Luke. It's not over yet." The addressed showed no reaction, but Leia shot a loathing gaze at the pilot. "Leave him alone! Can't you see how much the old man meant to him?"
Nyé had watched them with slight interest up till now, she had even found the strength in her legs to lift herself up on her own feet, as an intense blow on the ship swept her off her feet again.
The pilot struggled as well, but he managed to hold himself steady. "So what? The old man gave up his life so that we could get away. Do you want to pass that on, Luke? Do you want Kenobi to have given his life in vain?"
Nyé's heart stopped for a beat there, only to restart at a much faster pace. This last name could of course only be a coincidence, but all of this was about a Jedi. Ben Kenobi. Maybe a relative of Obi-Wan's? She could not remember ever hearing of such a person. This grew more and more mysterious.
Luke, to her and Leia's surprise, stood up and had himself shown towards a slim tube, crawling into it without hesitation. Maybe there were even some larger blasters on board this ship?
Nyé concentrated and remembered making out at least one cannon from the outside. The pilot disappeared into one very similar tube, leaving the girls on their own. Leia and Nyé did not need to talk this through, both of them at once hurried back to the cockpit to assist the wookie in his efforts of flying the ship. Leia did a good job as co-pilot, so Nyé just stood behind her and let her do the work. She felt useless and displaced, but that could change, as soon as…
"There they are!" Leia shouted, pointing at the console, where two small lights had lit up, just two points, closing in on them with deadly speed. Two more joined them almost immidiately.
"Fighters." Nyé managed to say the word calmly, more a diagnosis than a warning. "Four fighters. Careful there, Luke, one's closing in on you… also at the other one's."
Luke's friend snarled into his speaker phone. "The name's Han Solo." – "Pleased to meet you. Nyé Murano."
The firefight between the four ships wore on, with Nyé losing the overview to the growing pain in her left arm, where the blaster had hit her, that took her concentration off the monitors too much. She sucked it up, turning around and rushing to help the two droids, who tried to extinguish some flames that had been lit by an aggressive hit.
Finally, the last adversary fighter vanished in a colourful explosion and Leia hugged the wookie rejoicing, who snarled at her – only very – silently.
As Han and Luke joined them in the cockpit to calculate the coordinates for the jump to lightspeed, Nyé managed to slip out on them without anyone noticing. Although some triumph over that last victory, she did not feel like celebrating. Back in the cockpit she could still listen to Leia and Han, having an acid-tongued crosstalk, while Luke and the wookie Chewiebacca, who was shortly called Chewie, played a game at the table, only a few feet next to her.
Most of her interest was now in the droids, especially the R2-unit, that looked a bit wrecked, but still as familiar as she had hoped it to. "What are you called?" she asked in a friendly tone, as she remembered full well that some droids were able to differentiate between human sounds. "I'm just asking because some time past I used to know a pair of droids, very similar to the two of you. Strange coincidence, isn't it? The combination of an android and a astromech droid is rather uncommon after all."
The golden android bowed stiffly, and said the few words she had praid for secretly. "My name is C-3PO", he told her with his tinny voice, "human-cyborg relations, at your service, mam, and this is…"
"3PO? Why didn't you say anything? I bet you did not find a new partner all this sudden, eh?" Grinning, Nyé bended the knee to study the small droid who had for such a long time been Padmé's and later, during the war, Anakin's property – and her responsibility to repair after many a fight. "R2D2, I must say, you seem to lack maintenance for some time! And you're not half as happy to meet me again as I'd have imagined…" The small, bolt-shaped droid wheezed with confusion.
"Mam, I am truly sorry, but R2 says that…" Nyé frowned. "Stop calling me that, 3PO. I understood him fully, as you know perfectly well." – "Excuse me, mam, but – no, I don't." Nyé's frown grew deep enough to make her realize that her skin had started to prickle all over as if it were dying off.
But this was not the time to worry about cosmetic irregularities. "What do you mean, you don't? 3PO, after all the three of as have been through together…" – "… been through together?" C-3PO actually started to stutter, a delicate little modification she had once implanted into his circuits herself in order to make him seem more human. R2D2, on the other hand, started to whistle and wheeze in maddening fast pace.
But all she could do to answer him was shake her head. "They must have erased your memories, am I right? That's why you don't recognize me anymore." She could herself hear the bitterness in her voice. "I guess I have to be thankful they did not disassemble you, as they were at it, too."
3PO got over the confusion that had stricken his so carefully programmed "brain". "My memory files have not been erased for the last twenty years, mam, and according to my modification on human age determination, that must have been before you were even born. With all due respect, you have to be confusing us with someone else, mam." The shock of that statement hit her as if he had fired a broadside at her. Numbly, she investigated further on. "But… I mean, you must remember the Senator Amidala! Padmé Amidala!" R2 gleamed blue, 3PO on the other hand started a real answer. "I have never heard this name befo…" – "Anakin Skywalker?" 3PO shook his head in a fainthearted effort to stop her now feverish questions, giving him an almost human appearance in his helplessness. "Or… Obi-Wan Kenobi?" Nyé's voice was not much more than a whisper, as if she did not expect any positive answer anyway.
R2 meanwhile started to wheeze again, with 3PO chatting at the same time. "But of course we remember Master Kenobi, he was R2's occupant and we were supposed to fly to Alderaan with hi…" Nyé reached out defensively, to shut up 3PO's far slower response. Now she was fully able to concentrate on R2's shrill whistles. "What do you mean, he is dead?"
Luke had stopped talking to the wookie quite a while ago, yet she had not noticed that in her feverish attempts to find out the truth about her two long-lost droid friends.
"Ben is dead, yes." Luke summoned it up quietly. "But why does that confuse you? You were there, you saw… You saw him…" He did not speak it out fully, so she narrowed her eyes at him. "I do not care for Ben Kenobi, no offence, I am talking about Obi-Wan Kenobi here, the Jedi-Master Obi-Wan Kenobi. Do you know if he was somehow related to your Ben Kenobi?"
Luke stared at her, suspiciously. "Are you saying you did not recognize him earlier? Ben or Obi-Wan, it is really just a name. I knew him as Ben, but he told me he was called Obi-Wan. Only that that was twenty years ago."
Nyé touched her temple, reaching out for the wall in order to steady her sudden tremble. To hear it from him, a human, made it far realer than out of the metal circuits of a droid. "That… is… not possible." She whispered, afraid that she might faint of that new shock. "How might he have aged that far? You must have met a deceiver. Kenobi would never have lied about such a thing…" – "He did not lie, I am sure of it."
"Twenty years, that is just ridiculous!"
Luke shrugged, not getting anything. "Enough of Ben… who are you? You say you know Ben and don't recognize him, you say you know the droids, but they don't recognize you… Who ARE you?"
Nyé had to slide over in order to sit up straight against the wall, as all her surroundings started to spin around her. Faintly, more for herself than for him, she recited what she thought to remember, as if to ensure herself she had not gone mad, she as still herself, and all this was just a bit misunderstanding.
"My name is Nyé Murano. I was born on Naboo one year before the Great ReSynchronisation, and have worked for the Senator Padmé Amidala since the first year of the Clone Wars, namely the year 13 after the Great ReSynchronization. I…" Luke had snapped his eyes open and cut her off. "The Clone Wars have been over for almost two decades." Nyé finally realized what had happened, she realized the cruel reality and all it meant for her life, her friends from the past. It meant that her former life was nothing more than exactly that, the past, a time long gone, never to return.
"Two decades." Monotonic, she repeated his words. "That is just… too long."
"Too long for what?" Luke did not give in so easily, and she understood she had to give him, give all of them, and explanation, and soon.
"Darth Vader… he… imprisoned me. He did it after the fall of the republic. I was part of the resistance against the new empire. I thought that it had only been a few months, but I was wrong. In the name of the force, I had no idea…" Involuntarily she led out a sob, suppressing it at once, but of course the boy had heard it alright. Hastily she stood up, and although she staggered because of the sudden movement and the on-going shock, she managed to get out of the chamber, murmuring "I… I have to tend to that arm of mine" as a lame excuse.
Luke stared after her for a long moment. "Maybe the princess should be asked to talk to her. She seems to be pretty – messed up in her mind. I wonder what kind of torture they did to her to break her like that…"