Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  He spiraled back into darkness.

  Lying on Han's bunk in the Millennium Falcon with the bandaged stump of his right arm a blaze of agony underneath the painkiller Lando had given him, and worse than that agony the knowledge that Ben had lied to him. Ben had lied: It was Darth Vader who had spoken the truth.

  Yes, revenge, voices whispered. Take your revenge for that. For a moment he was twenty-one again, his soul a bleeding pulp of betrayal.

  Why did you lie, Ben?

  Looking back, he knew exactly why Ben had lied. At eighteen, the knowledge that his father still lived, still existed in some form, no matter how changed, would have drawn him to that father as only an orphan could have been drawn... would have drawn him to the dark side. At eighteen, he would not have had the experience, the technical strength, to resist. Ben had known that.

  The Force flickered in him, like a single flame on a windy night.

  "Luke?"

  Revenge on the Jedi, on their harlots and their brats. Burn and kill as they burned and killed your parents... The image in his mind was of seared skeletons in the sand outside the demolished wreck of the only home he'd ever known. The stink of burning plastic, the desert heat hammering his head less terrible than the oily heat of the flames. The emptiness in his heart was a dry well plunging lightless to the center of the world. That farm in the desert hadn't been much of a belonging-place, but it had been all he'd ever had. When he'd gone back to Tatooine to rescue Han from Jabba the Hutt, he had returned to that ruined farmstead on the edge of the Dune Sea. Nobody had taken up the land. Jawas had looted what was left of the house, probably as soon as the ashes cooled. The rooms around the sunken courtyard had collapsed. The whole place was only a crumbling subsidence, half filled with sand. The markers he'd put on the graves of the people who'd been parents to him had been stolen, too. Uncle Owen had given his whole life to the farm. It was as if he had never existed at all.

  "Luke?"

  He blinked. It wasn't a good idea.

  "Luke, are you all right?"

  "Oh, please, Master Luke, try to remember who you are! The situation is quite desperate!"

  He opened his eyes. The whole room performed one slow, deliberate loop-the-loop and Luke tightened his grip on the sides of the bunk in which he lay to keep from falling out, but at least Nichos and See-Threepio, standing over him, didn't try to clone duplicates of themselves, and the pain in his chest was far less than it had been. He felt deeply, profoundly tired.

  Beyond Nichos and Threepio he could see the shut door of the small cell in which he lay: brightly illuminated, comfortable, with three other bunks and a couple of lockers and drawers. Clean, cold, and with an air of being barely lived in, except for his own black flight suit hanging in one locker, his lightsaber on a dresser top, and the black cloak of a Jedi spread like a blanket across one of the other bunks. Luke raised his arm and saw that he was wearing the olive-gray undress uniform of an Imperial stormtrooper.

  The Jedi lied...

  The Jedi lied...

  He took a deep breath, summoned all of the Force away from the healing of his body--Nichos and Threepio immediately split into two again--and directed it inward on those memories like a cleansing light.

  The voices in his mind yattered on for a bit, then scoured away.

  He woke up again, weak and shaken. He couldn't have been unconscious for more than a few moments because Threepio was still explaining...his... said that there was nothing wrong with you and you'd only malinger if you went to sick bay! We didn't know what to do..."

  "We're going to shell Plawal," said Luke.

  Both his companions looked at him in alarm. ”We know that, Master Luke!"

  Luke sat up, catching at Threepio's arm as a wave of nausea swept over him; Nichos said, "We've been hyperjumping to half a dozen planets along the Outer Rim where the Empire hid its shock troops for this mission thirty years ago. The lander went down on Tatooine, Bradden, I don't know where-all. Everything's automated: landers, pickup, indoctrination..."

  "Indoctrination?" said Luke. Another image came, distant and blurred through the ache in his head: a semicircular chamber heaped with unconscious Gamorreans, weapons still in their hands and the tiny, gray, parasitic morrts that clung to them even into battle beginning to recover from the stunrays and skitter nervously over the bodies. Two huge silvery droids of the old G-40 single-function type were moving among the bodies, pulling the Gamorreans to their feet--which G-40's could do with terrifying ease--and giving each an injection, then shoving them into the white metal coffins of single-man indoctrination booths that ranged along the curved back wall of the room.

  He touched his forehead. A small circle of slightly roughened skin remained where the cerebral feed had been hooked in. The same thing, he realized, must have been done to him.

  "Where are we?" He got up--carefully--and fastened his lightsaber to his belt as they stepped through the door, into a corridor smelling of metal, chemicals, and cleaning solution. The walls were medium gray under smooth, even light; the deck underfoot vibrated with the faint hum of subspace cruising speeds. A boxy MSE-15 droid glided by, cleaning the floor.

  "On the ship," said Threepio. "The... the dreadnaught. The battlemoon Trooper Pothman spoke of. The giant vessel masked as an asteroid that fired on us. The Eye of Palpatine."

  The Eye of Palpatine. The name rang familiar in Luke's mind. The voices had told him all about it in that long, hazy spell of memories that were not his own. Somehow he knew the dimensions of the ship, huge, more vast than even the biggest of the Super Star Destroyers, bigger than a torpedo sphere, with firepower to waste a planet.

  Of course, he thought. It had been built back before the Death Star, when the Imperial Fleet still thought bigger was better.

  "It wasn't a base on that asteroid, Master Luke," explained Threepio. "That asteroid was the ship, firing at us with an automatic gunnery computer..."

  "Are you sure?" Luke could have sworn it had been a living hand on the guns. No computer had that kind of timing.

  "Absolutely," said Nichos. "Nobody can get up into the gun decks. And there's nobody on board who can handle weaponry--not this kind of weaponry, anyway."

  "Nobody...," said Luke. And then, "They're picking up troops..." He stopped himself, remembering the overgrown base in the forest, the forty-five helmets staring emptily from the wall. "Don't tell me there were still troops waiting."

  They stepped into the troop deck's main mess hall. Ten or twelve enormous, white, furry bipeds were clustered nervously around the food slots, pulling out plates and swiftly sucking up everything smaller than bite-size through short, muscular probosci set under their four blinking black eyes. Several of them carried weapons--mostly legs wrenched off tables and chairs, it looked like--so Luke guessed they had to be at least semisentient.

  There was a noise from the doors at the opposite end of the long room. The armed bipeds turned, raising their weapons. Seven tripodal creatures wandered in, baglike body masses swaying weirdly down from the central girdle of bone supported by the long legs, the tentacles between the hip joints dangling loose. Eyestalks rising above the body mass wavered with a motion that even Luke could tell was disoriented.

  Two of the furry bipeds reached into the food slots and gathered as many plates and bowls as they could carry, and, guarded by one of their chair-leg-bearing mates, crossed cautiously to the newcomers. The larger of the two fuzzies raised a paw, hooted something in soft, unintelligible crooning, and, when the tripods made no response whatsoever, held out the plates.

  The tripods extruded feeding tubes from among the eyestalks and ate. Some of them reached confusedly up with the tentacles to take the plates. The white furries remaining by the food slots wheeped and muffed to one another. The taller of the food bearers reached out with a curious gentleness and touched--patted--the nearest tripod in a gesture Luke knew at once was reassurance.

  "That'll be enough of that, trooper!" The room's third set of sliding doors hurs
hed open, and a gang of about fifteen Gamorreans strode in. Some of them had wedged themselves into pieces of the largest stormtrooper fatigues obtainable by cutting out the sleeves, or had fastened chunks of the shiny white armor onto their arms and chests with silver engine tape. Others wore naval trooper helmets, and others still had the short-faced white stormtrooper helmets perched on top of their heads like hats. Ugbuz, in the lead, had donned a scuttle-shaped black gunner's helmet, and under it his warty, snouted face looked surprisingly sinister. All were armed to the tusks with blasters, forcepikes, axes, and bows.

  "The man's malingering! Everyone had a physical before signing up. That's Fleet regulations, and there's no excuse for this kind of thing! Too many damned malingerers on this ship!"

  Ugbuz snapped his fingers. Another Gamorrean--Krok, Luke thought--headed for the food slots and coffee machines with the heavy, rolling stride typical of the race while Ugbuz and the others took seats at a table. Luke saw that Cray and Triv Pothman were among them.

  Dim memories crowded back from the past several days. He remembered eating, sleeping, sometimes trying to convince his commanding officer to let him go to sick bay when the pain and dizziness got too bad... practicing occasionally in the ship's gunnery range, though his head ached too much for him to shoot well... with other stormtroopers.

  In his memory they were all human.

  The white fluffies moved back a little to let the Gamorrean stormtrooper get coffee for himself and his mates, scratched their heads and made cooing noises as they watched the group around the table with puzzled unease. They, too, bore the fading singe marks of a cerebral feed, and Luke deduced that the indoctrination had taken on some species more firmly than on others. One of the tripods stumbled vaguely toward the stormtrooper table; it got too close and Triv Pothman swatted the thing with a vicious backhand, sending it stumbling among the chairs. The aging savant had shaved, and his face wore the hard expression of careless arrogance with which Luke was familiar among the troopers of the Empire: an utter sureness of position, the knowledge that whatever deeds he might commit, they would be sanctioned by those above.

  The same look was on Cray's face. Luke understood. He had felt like that himself for the past several days. He sighed, and picked his way between the tables toward them, wondering if he could channel the healing of the Force sufficiently at this point to lead Cray out of her indoctrination. His head ached and every limb felt weighted, but the pounding nausea of the earlier stages of the concussion was gone. In a pinch, he thought, he could rally enough concentration, enough power of the Force, to touch the Force within her.

  The Gamorreans--or at least the Gakfedd tribe of them--were obviously born to be stormtroopers. They seemed to have made themselves thoroughly at home: The floor of the mess hall was littered with plastic plates, bowls, and coffee cups, rising to a drift almost a meter deep near the food slots themselves. MSE droids moved over and around the mess like foraging vermin, but were mechanically unable to pick up the dishes and return them to the drop slots that would take them back to the automated kitchens. Near one of the several sets of sliding doors, a stolid SP-80 droid was methodically washing a spatter of foodstains off the wall.

  "Captain." Luke saluted Ugbuz--who returned the gesture with military briskness--then took a seat next to Cray.

  "Luke." Her greeting was casual, buddy-to-buddy. She'd cut off her hair--or Ugbuz, in his persona of a stormtrooper officer, had made her cut it. The centimeter-long bristle lay close and fine against her scalp. Without makeup, and in the olive-gray uniform only slightly too large for her tall frame, she looked like a gawky teenage boy.

  "Pull up a chair, pal, rest your bones. You figure the jump this morning was our last pickup? Get us some coffee, you," she added, with barely a glance in the direction of the two droids. "You want any, Triv?"

  "I want some coffee." The elderly man grinned. "But I guess I'll have to settle for that gondar sweat those machines are puttin' out."

  Cray laughed, easy and rough. It was the first time Luke had seen her laugh in months--oddly enough, the first time he'd ever seen her this relaxed. ”You on rotation for the holo tapes, Luke?" she asked. "I dunno who stocked the library on this crate. Nuthin' later than--”

  "I need to talk to you, Cray." Luke nodded toward the open door to the hallway from which he'd come. "In private."

  She frowned, her dark eyes a little concerned, though it was clear to him that she saw him as a fellow trooper. She probably remembered after a fashion that they'd been friends for some time, the same way she remembered her name was Cray Mingla, but probably didn't think much about it. Luke knew that at the height of the Emperor's power the Imperial troopers had been highly motivated and fanatically loyal, but this depth of indoctrination was something he'd never before encountered. An experiment that hadn't been followed up? Something in use for this mission alone because of its intense secrecy?

  He took a deep breath and wondered how much of his present dizziness and disorientation was the lingering effect of the concussion, and how much a side effect of a too massive indoctrinal shock. He would need all the Force he could summon to break Cray out of this...

  Cray got to her feet and trailed after Luke toward the doorway, casually kicking aside plates and an MSE as she went. Even her walk was a man's walk, adopted unconsciously, the way the Gamorreans seemed to have acquired Basic speech. Threepio and Nichos followed unobtrusively, and Luke let his hand slide down to loosen his blaster in its holster, thumbing the setting down to mildest stun.

  He never got the chance to use it.

  He and Cray paused to let the white furries, still clutching their makeshift weapons, amble out of the door ahead of them. "I dunno what the service is comin' to," muttered Cray, shaking her head. "Look at that. Gettin' recruits from all over the damn place. They'll be takin' festerin' aliens next." The tripods continued to wander aimlessly around the mess hall, bumping occasionally into furniture or tripping over the MSE'S. Clearly the indoctrination that had worked so thoroughly on the Gamorreans had left them--whatever they were--totally bewildered. Where would you put the cranial wires on them, anyway? wondered Luke.

  Then the doorway across the room swished violently open and a voice yelled, "Get 'em, men!"

  It was the rival Gamorrean tribe of the Klaggs.

  Ugbuz and his Gakfedds upended tables, dropped behind them as blaster bolts blazed and spattered wildly around the room. The Klaggs, too, wore bits of stormtrooper gear, engine-taped to their homespun and leather, and cried orders and oaths in Basic. Cray swore and hauled up a table into a makeshift barrier, blazing away in return with no regard for the deadly ricochets bouncing and zapping crazily in all directions; her first bolt caught a Klagg on his chest armor, hurling him back among his fellows as the others of his tribe ducked, ran, zigzagged into the room, firing as they went. Some were armed with blaster carbines and semiautos, others with slugthrowers, forcepikes, and axes. Their aim was universally awful.

  The two Gamorrean tribes clashed in thick waves of metal, flesh, and garbage, and began to beat and tear one another as if taking up the battle outside the Huntbird exactly where they'd left off. Cray screamed, "Scum-eating mutineers! Captain!" and plunged into the fray before Luke could stop her.

  "Cray!" Luke ran two steps after her, the deck seeming to lurch beneath his feet, and collided with two frantic tripods that couldn't seem to locate the door three meters in front of them. With a roar one of the Klaggs bore down on him, swinging an ax. Luke ducked and nearly fell, shoved the tripods toward the door, caught up a chair, and deflected the ax; the Klagg struck him aside and plunged after the defenseless tripods. It caught one of them by the leg, the poor thing screaming and flailing with its tentacles. It took all the Force Luke could summon just to get back to his feet, forget about levitating anything--he grabbed the chair again and swung it, slamming the Gamorrean full force in the back, then whipped his lightsaber free and planted himself in the doorway as the tripods fled wailing into the corr
idor.

  The Gamorrean hurled a table at him, which Luke bisected, then struck at him with an ax at the same moment a ricocheting blaster bolt caught Luke glancingly on the shoulder. Either the blaster was turned fairly low or its power cell was nearly exhausted, but the jolt of it knocked him, gasping and confused, to the floor. He rolled, his vision blurring, blacking. Cut at the Gamorrean, who'd been joined by a friend, also wielding an ax--double vision? Luke wondered cloudily, but he took off one assailant's arm and tried to get to his feet and out the door. He couldn't--his head was swimming too badly for him to figure out why--and he could only slash upward at his remaining assailant, cleaving in half the table that slammed down on him before it could crush his bones.

  The cold sick weakness of shock and the sensation of something being wrong with the gravity...

  Then the Klaggs were gone, leaving a shambles of blood and broken furniture. Luke stayed conscious just long enough to switch off his lightsaber. Pain brought him to as if someone had drenched his left leg with acid. He cried out, clutching at the greasy mess of blankets on which he lay, and someone slapped him hard enough to slam him back down, breathless and dizzy and almost nauseated with pain.

  "Shouldn't you get something from sick bay for that?" Ugbuz's voice.

  And in reply a vicious, squealing snuffle, and warm drool spattered down onto Luke's face and bare chest. More pain, as someone jerked tight a bandage around his left leg. Not a bandage, he thought, identifying another sound, the slick, shrill searing noise of engine tape being pulled off a roll. A familiar sound. If it weren't for engine tape the Rebellion would have collapsed in its first year.

  Cold air on his thigh, his knee, his foot. And rough, clawed hands taping a splint onto his leg. The wrench of it made him cry out again and Ugbuz said, "Suck it up, trooper."

  Luke wondered about the incidence of Imperial officers being killed from behind by friendly fire. He opened his eyes. He was in a hut. A HUT? The ceiling, only a meter or two above his head, was made of plastic piping roofed with pieces of stormtrooper armor and mess hall plates held together with wire and engine tape. Glowrods dangled from the piping rafters, their trailing wires plugged into a backpack-size Scale-20 power cell in the corner, providing the only illumination. Beyond the doorway, curtained with a silver t-blanket on which the words Property of Imperial Navy were clearly visible, could be seen the vague gray steel walls of some larger space, a gym or a cargo hold. Ugbuz stood in the doorway, arms folded, looking down at him where he lay on a bed made of dirty blankets, and above him--taping the splints to his leg--knelt the enormous, vicious-looking Gamorrean sow whom Pothman had pointed out to him as Bullyak, head female of the Gakfedd tribe.