Cray withdrew her head from the innards of the navicomp. "I'll need couplers and some twelve-mil flat cable... you okay, Luke?" For he'd tried to stand, only to sink back, gray-faced and sweating, against the soot-stained bulkhead.
Luke concentrated the Force in his body, on his brain chemistry and the pinched capillaries of his lungs: relaxing, accelerating repair and regrowth. He felt very tired. "I'll be fine." Please don't let there be hostile smugglers at that base, he thought, trying desperately to gather the strength he'd need. Or some kind of secret base of one of the warlords. Or a hidden mine worked by slaves. Or the concealed research station of some nefarious power we've never even heard of...
If there was any trouble--even the smallest fight--he didn't think he could cope with it. Cray had never seen real action, real trouble. Threepio wasn't designed for it, and Nichos... Whatever happened, he had to get back with word that there was definitely something hiding in the Moonflower Nebula. Something dangerous.
"Luke?"
He realized he'd almost blacked out again. Cray was kneeling in front of him--two Crays, dark eyes filled with concern. The accumulated heat of the engines still lingered in this compartment, but even that couldn't account for the suffocating sensation he felt, hot and stifled, though his hands and feet were cold.
Capillaries. Recovery. Healing.
"Why don't you let Nichos and me go investigate that signal?"
He took a deep breath and wished he hadn't. "I think you may need help there."
Of course, harmless people--good, helpful people--did inhabit unknown bases on remote planets. Please let it be that...
The bad feeling he'd sensed, the knowledge of darkness advancing, didn't leave him.
"The sooner we can get a message out, the better," the young woman pointed out. "Whatever's out in the nebula, we can't risk letting the Imperial warlords find it, and that risk grows every hour. I can scope out the settlement or camp or whatever it is, ask for the parts we need, and send out a distress signal while you rest a little, then start the patching part of the job as soon as you feel up to it. All right?"
Luke's head was swimming. He rested it against the bulkhead behind him, fighting for breath. Not all right, he thought. Not if there's any kind of danger in that camp or in the woods around it.
The spark-charred units, the ruptured hoses dangling like dead limbs, the opened hatches of the compression accelerator and gyro-grav systems, all seemed to be swaying gently, as if the ship were floating on deep water, and the hardrock miners in his skull had resumed their thermal blasting operations again. The thought of getting to his feet, of walking the two or three kilometers to the site of the signal, gave him a sinking feeling inside. I can do it, he told himself grimly. With the help of the Force...
"I think you'll need me there."
He held out his hand, shut his teeth hard against nausea as Cray helped him to his feet. She eased him through the hatch, helped him down the steep, ladder-like steps. "What makes you so sure there'll be trouble?"
"I don't know," said Luke softly. "But I can feel trouble of some kind. There's something..."
They stepped through the hatchway onto the bridge, turned, and found themselves staring down the muzzle of a blaster rifle held by a white-armored Imperial stormtrooper.
Luke's hand shut around Cray's wrist as she went for her blaster. "Cray, no!" The trooper tensed--Luke raised his hands, showing them empty. After a moment Cray did likewise. If he went for his lightsaber, Luke thought, the man might still catch them both in the rifle blast, and there was no way of knowing how many others were in the rest of the ship.
From the faceless white helmet a buzzing voice demanded, "State your name and business."
Cray and Luke stepped back a pace, backs pressed to the wall. Dizziness hit Luke again--he tried to control it, tried to summon enough of the Force to pull the man's rifle from him if he needed to do it, but suspected it was more than he could manage.
"We're traders," he said. "We're lost, our ship was damaged..."
Blackness closed on his vision and he felt his knees buckle. Cray tried to steady him--the stormtrooper sprang forward, dropped his rifle, and caught his arm.
"You're hurt," said the stormtrooper, helping him to sit and kneeling beside him. Nichos and Threepio, hands full of patching materials, appeared from the storeroom hatchway and stared in surprise as the stormtrooper pulled off his helmet, revealing a kindly, much-lined black face surrounded by a grizzled popcorn halo of hair and beard.
"Oh, you poor folks, you look like you've had an awful time," said the man. "You come on over to my camp, I'll get you something to eat and a cup of tea."
Bereft of his gleaming armor, Triv Pothman proved to be a trim, strongly built man in his mid-fifties--"Though I admit the damp's getting to me and I'm not so quick as I used to be." He gestured to the racks of armor along the curved inner wall of his shelter, a low, white, self-erecting dome patched all over outside with black and salmon-colored lichens, rain-streaked and covered with the dirt of years. Second-growth trees, suckers, and vines surrounded what had been a clearing of Imperial military regulation size all around, though most of the sheds and shelters, and the long-dead posts of the security fence, lay buried now under tangles of vines.
"Forty-five of us, there were." There was something akin to pride in his voice. "Forty-five of us, and I'm the only one left. The Gamorreans got the rest, mostly, except for that giant fight between the Commander and Killium Neb and his friends over... Well, that was a long time ago, and it cost some good men their lives." He shook his head regretfully, and poured water from a bearing housing hung over the fire into a spouted pot of painted terra-cotta. The smell of healing herbs filled the vine-hung dome.
"And there they all are." He gestured to the helmets. "For all the good it ever did them."
The old unit medkit was far more complete than what had been on board the Huntbird even before the impact had scattered and smashed half the vessels in the explorer craft's sick bay. Pothman had dosed Luke with another two ampoules of anti-shock--in addition to what Cray had given him right after the final blast--and had hooked him for half an hour to a therapeutic respirator that still, for a miracle, worked. Looking around over the edge of the breath mask that covered his lower face, Luke was deeply grateful. From his days as a pilot in the Rebel fleet he knew too well that once you got injured, unless you got medical help soon you were going to keep on getting injured as you became less and less able to protect yourself.
Though he never, he reflected with a certain wry amusement, thought he'd be so glad that the Empire took good care to equip its stormtroopers with the best.
A feathered lizard, turquoise as palomella blossoms, appeared between the looped-back curtains of the dome's doorway, chittered and spread its mane, and Pothman tweaked a chunk of crust from one of the brown rolls he'd taken from his oven in honor of his guests, and tossed it. The lizard minced forward on delicate little feet, picked up the bread, and nibbled, watching the gray-haired hermit all the while with black jewels of eyes.
"Sure is good to see human beings again." Pothman offered the plate of rolls and honey to Cray, who sat beside Luke on the edge of Pothman's bunk. He winked at her. "Sure is good to see a nice-looking young lady."
Cray drew herself up and started to retort that she wasn't a nice-looking young lady, she held a full professorship at the Magrody Institute, but Luke moved his hand just enough to touch her arm.
The stormtrooper had already turned back to survey the helmets along the wall. They were of an older style than Luke had known, longer in the face to allow for the earlier configuration of respirators, with a dark band of sensors above the eyes.
"They would go on fighting the Gamorreans," Pothman sighed. "That was like sending them out invitations to tea, of course. They'll miss their dinners to have a fight." His grin was very white in his beard. "'Course in those days I was quite a fighter myself."
"You've held the Gamorreans off by yourself
all this time?" Luke carefully removed the respirator mask from his face, breathed deep, tasting the sweetness of the air. It still made him dizzy, but no longer hurt so much. It should hold him, he thought--he hoped--until they reached civilization again. He turned his head to survey the wide room, the simple clay dishes on the shelf, the traps wrought of reptile sinew and engine strapping, the monofilament fishing lines that had patently started life as part of standard Imperial equipment. A loom reared up near the door, constructed of various grades of engine pipe, with several yards of homespun woven on it.
"Oh, gracious, no." Pothman handed him a cup of tea: herbal, spicy, warm, and, Luke sensed, healing. Luke had seen no kiln and wondered where he'd gotten the dishes, and the thread on the loom. Out of his white armor, Pothman wore soft-dyed green and brown clothing, embroidered on breast and sleeves and hem with meticulously accurate renderings of the local flowers and reptiles.
"I got caught early on. They took all the rifles and blasters, you see, and they needed somebody to fix them. But after the power cells died they didn't bother keeping an eye on me. I figure the Emperor forgot the mission a long time ago. You ever hear what happened to it?"
"Mission?" Luke sat up a little and sipped the tea, and did his best to look innocent, something he'd always been good at.
"The Eye of Palpatine." Pothman opened an equipment locker, brought out a utility pack, and started loading it with wire, cables, couplers, backup data wafers, tools. "That was the name of the mission. Scuttlebutt said there were about two companies of troopers in it, but scattered, so nobody would know, nobody would guess. They put us on the most out-of-the-way planets they could find, to be picked up in the biggest, most dangerous, most secret vessel of them all, a supership, a dreadnaught, a battlemoon... One the enemy wouldn't see coming until it was too late."
"What enemy?" asked Luke softly.
There was stillness again, save for the rustling of the trees outside, and the faint clunketing of Pothman's much-mended machinery, a sound that brought back to Luke his childhood on Tatooine.
Pothman was silent, his back to them, looking down at the utility pack on the chest lid before him. "We didn't know," he said at last. "We weren't told. At the time I thought it was... Well, it was my duty. Now..." He turned back, his face troubled.
"I suppose something went wrong. Somebody found out after all, though everyone said that was impossible, since the Emperor was the only one that knew. After we'd been here nearly a year I got to wondering if maybe the Emperor himself had forgotten. When I saw your ship come over I sort of hoped he'd finally remembered--that he'd sent scouts to see what was left." His big hands toyed wistfully with the straps.
"But if it wasn't the Emperor who sent you out, you see, I know enough to know that whoever screwed up and scrapped the mission, nobody's going to want to be reminded it ever existed. Which means I might be sort of an embarrassment."
He slung the pack over his shoulder, and came to stand next to the tidy bunk where Luke lay on the silvery survival blankets and feather quilts. "My signal isn't strong enough to reach anybody, not way out here. But if we can get your engines fixed, you think maybe you might just drop me in some out-of-the-way place where they might not find me? It's nice to see human faces again. I was the company armorer; I know everything's changed in all this time, but I can still work pretty good with my hands, and I've learned to be a fair cook. I can find work. It's been a long time."
No bargaining, thought Luke wonderingly. No. Take me off this rock or you won't get so much as a screwdriver out of me. Everything freely offered, expecting nothing in return.
"It's been a long time," he said gently. ”The Emperor's dead, Triv. The Empire's in pieces. We can take you back to your home, or wherever you want; in the New Republic, or to some port where you can get a flight into the Core Systems, or any other place you want to go."
"We're doomed." See-Threepio turned from the gauges of the slowly filling oxygen tanks to where Nichos, knee-deep in the meadow's dark grass, was carefully daubing sealant on the Spatch-Cote repairs. The outer hull had been holed in a dozen places. Though the space between outer and inner hulls had been automatically filled with emergency foam and Nichos had done a quick patch job on the inner hull during the long flight to Pzob, if they were going to stand any chance of a hyperspace jump the outer had to be tight.
"Master Luke and Dr. Mingla have almost certainly walked into a trap!" The golden robot gestured with the hand not holding the round, bulky Spatch-Cote extruder. "A stormtrooper like that has to be ground support for whatever base is out in the asteroid field! I warned them. Standard Imperial bases house at least three companies. More, in isolated locales such as this! What can they do against five hundred and forty shock troops, with Master Luke injured as badly as he is? Plus tracker droids, interrogators, surveillance equipment, automated traps!"
"Power readings weren't high enough for anything like that," pointed out Nichos, switching off the intake valve on the tank.
"Of course a hidden base would alter its power readings!" surmised Threepio despairingly. ”We'll be disassembled, cannibalized for scrap, sent to the sandmines of Neelgaimon or the orbital factories around Ryloon! If they're short of parts here we'll be--”
"I will be." Nichos took the extruder from Threepio and walked along the battered white side of the Huntbird, probing at other dents. ”It would not be logical for them to destroy you. I, however..."
When with Luke or Cray, or his other friends at the Academy on Yavin, he had made an attempt to use the facial expressions programmed into the hair-fine complexities of his memory, but Threepio had noticed that when around droids, Nichos no longer bothered. There was no sadness, either in his blue eyes or in his voice.
"You--and Artoo-Detoo--are programmed, designed, for specific purposes, he to repair and understand machinery, you to understand and interpret language and culture. I am only programmed to be myself, to reproduce exactly all the knowledge, all the instincts, all the memories of a single, specific human brain, the experiences of a single human life. When you come right down to it, this is of no use to anyone."
Threepio was silent. He understood that Nichos expected no reply, for conversation among droids tends to be largely informational with few social amenities. Yet, as when speaking with a human, he felt it incumbent on him to disagree if nothing else. But he also knew that Nichos was absolutely correct.
"So you see," the not-quite-man went on, "if, as you say, Luke and Cray have walked into a trap and you and I are destined for capture as well, of the two of us I am probably the only one actually doomed. I think the metal here looks a little thin in the dent." He returned the spatch gun to the protocol droid's intricately mechanized hand.
Artoo-Detoo--or any other droid of Threepio's wide acquaintance--would not have been able to make such a pronouncement without reference to an inter-echoic micrometer. Threepio had observed, however, that humans were not only willing to "eyeball" such measurements, but frequently did so quite accurately, something that logically they should not have been able to do.
He was still trying to align probabilities about what that made Nichos when a voice called, "Threepio!" from across the meadow, and he turned, thankfully, to see Dr. Mingla, Master Luke-mercifully on his feet again and not floating on the damaged antigrav sled on which they'd taken him from the ship--and the strange, solitary stormtrooper who had stolen onto the ship while he and Nichos were in the storage hold. The man had dispensed with his armor and blaster, and carried instead a bow and arrows, his clothing of the coarse vegetable-fiber weave typical of primitive cultures.
Which meant there were local tribes, probably Gamorreans, all of them hostile, who would delight in tearing apart both droids and the ship itself for scrap metal.
They were doomed.
The Gamorreans made their appearance long before the engines were even halfway to liftoff capability. Luke was dimly aware of them, through the exhausted pounding in his head, mostly as a sense of time
running out, a sense of someone trying to tell him something. But between channeling the Force to his own healing and the dizziness that still remained whenever he moved too quickly, it was hard to understand. He was lying on his back under one of the bridge consoles, pin-checking wires to see which were still capable of taking power. He laid the pin down, closed his eyes, and relaxed, letting the images come to his mind of clumsy, weirdly stealthy forms moving through the slate-dark shadows of monster trees.
"Company coming." He slid--carefully--out from under, and made his way as quickly as he could to where Cray and Nichos were repairing the stabilizer through the portside emergency hatch.
He could see Cray had already sensed something, too.
"Batten it," said Luke. "Get in the ship."
An arrow shattered against the hull inches from his face. He wheeled, the whole world seeming to jerk under him, sent a lance of blaster fire into the woods to make them keep their heads down, and scrambled back through the hatch as the first band broke cover.
Gamorreans on the whole, seen against a backdrop of more civilized worlds, generally appear clumsy and slow. This is at least partially a function of their stupidity: They don't understand much of what goes on around them, and tend to knock things over when they're not calculating how to use them as weapons in the happy event of a fight breaking out. In the woods of a primitive world with which they were familiar, the huge, muscle-bound bodies moved with terrifying speed, and in the drooling porcine faces showed neither intelligence nor the need for it.
They saw what they wanted, and they attacked.
Axes and stones splintered on the hatch as it slammed shut. Luke stumbled, dizzy, and Cray and Nichos seized his arms, half dragged him up the emergency gangway and onto the bridge, where Triv Pothman was leaning forward across the main console to peer through the glassine viewport at the attackers hammering the ship's sides.
Children of the Jedi Page 6
