Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  "What are they doing?" Several bore abrasions and what looked like knife wounds that had bled, clotted, and were on their way to healing, apparently unnoticed.

  "Waiting for Chooba slugs to crawl up into their mouths," replied the droid. "It's how they feed."

  "Nice work if you can get it." Luke reflected that at some point an expedition to the mess hall sounded in order, though it would call for a certain amount of caution. "They look pretty safe for now."

  "Oh, they are, Master Luke." Threepio clanked briskly among the weird forest of still shapes. "They're among the toughest species in the galaxy. Kitonaks have been known to go without food for weeks, sometimes months, with no ill effects."

  "Well, unless those landers picked up Chooba slugs in mistake for stormtroopers," commented Luke, glancing back over his shoulder at them, "they're going to have to."

  Where the lights failed and the corridors became dim-lit caverns illuminated only by the reflected glow of glowpanels in the lighted areas or an occasional bleary yellow worklamp, they found the corpse of an Affytechan, the gaudy vegetable people of Dom-Bradden. MSE'S crawled over it like greedy insects, trying vainly to clean a mess beyond their small capacities; ichor congealed on the floor for meters in all directions and the smell of its rotting sugars lay thick and nauseating in the air. Luke was silent, aware again of the dangers of this not quite empty ship.

  A scream echoed down the darkened corridor from the direction of the Gakfedd village in the cargo hold. Luke swung around, listening; then started toward the sound at a limping, staggering run. Its queer and almost metallic timbre told him it was a Jawa, terrified and in agony. He knew long before he reached the hold what he'd find, and in spite of what he knew about Jawas, the hair on his head prickled with fury.

  The Gamorrean stormtroopers had gotten a shredder from someplace, and were holding a Jawa by the wrists above it, lowering it feet first into the whirling blades. There were four or five of them, including Ugbuz, all howling with laughter as they dipped their wretched little captive up and down.

  From the threshold of the giant chamber, Luke reached out with the Force and swatted the shredder away with such violence that it spattered to pieces on the wall ten meters away. Krok--who was holding the Jawa--hurled the miserable little clump of rage and filth aside and whirled, roaring a curse; Ugbuz brought his blaster carbine to bear. Luke, hobbling toward them between the huts, impatiently ripped the carbine from the Gamorrean's hands while he was still meters away, sending it spinning, and did the same a moment later to another trooper's ax. Torture of anything fired in him a white and scalding rage. Krok launched himself at him with his huge hands outstretched, and Luke levitated him as if he'd been a hundred and seventy-five kilos of bagged rocks, and held him for a moment two meters above the floor, staring at him with cold blue eyes.

  Then, carelessly almost, he threw him aside, and turned to face Ugbuz.

  "What's the meaning of this, trooper?" demanded the Gamorrean furiously. "That was a Rebel saboteur, out to thwart our mission! We caught him with that..." He gestured furiously to the bundle of wires and computer chips, torn ends trailing, that lay near where the shredder had been.

  Luke met the Gamorrean's eyes with a chilled and icy stare before which, after a moment, the piggy gaze dropped. Sullenly, almost, Ugbuz demanded, "Who the hell do you think you are?"

  "It isn't who I think I am," said Luke softly, stepping close. "It's who I am." He lowered his voice to exclude the others, and spoke for Ugbuz's ears alone. ”Major Calrissian, special services. 229811-B." He gave the serial number of the Millennium Falcon's engine block. "Intelligence."

  Had it been possible for Ugbuz's eyes to widen they would have; as it was his hairy ears shifted forward in awe and respect. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder to where the Jawa had been thrown. Though Krok had slung the Jawa with sufficient force to have surely broken all its bones, it was no longer there--Jawas being endowed with the rat-like ability to take almost any amount of physical punishment and still slither away through the first unwatched crack the moment they were no longer actually restrained.

  Luke laid a hand on the stormtrooper captain's arm. Both his fury and the exertion of using the Force had left him trembling, almost nauseated, sweat icy on his face, but he kept his voice soft, projecting into it all his Jedi power. "It's all right," he said. "You did as you thought best and it was clever work capturing it. But it was acting under my orders, infiltrating the Rebels. There was no actual damage done. You did right to protect the mission, and I'll see your name shows up in commendations to the Ubiqtorate, but after this... let me interrogate prisoners."

  "Yes, sir." For a moment a thoroughly Gamorrean expression of disappointment crossed Ugbuz's tusked face. Then he was Captain Ugbuz of the Imperial Service again. He saluted.

  "You did well, Captain," said Luke, and used the Force to subtly project into Ugbuz's mind the pleased warmth that surety of approval brings.

  "Thank you, sir." The pseudostormtrooper saluted again and lumbered over to pick up his blaster carbine, stopping once or twice to look over his shoulder at Luke, who limped away in the direction of the door, leaning heavily on his light-clustered staff.

  "Very good, Master Luke," said Threepio softly when Luke, weak with exhaustion, reached the door once more. "Though I must say, you really ought to find some way to discourage those Jawas from further depredations on the fabric of this vessel if we are not to all perish of cold and suffocation. They seem to have no idea of the damage they're causing to their own environment."

  "Well, they wouldn't be the first," Luke remarked, leaning against the wall. He felt drained and beaten, his head aching in spite of the comaren. If in immediate danger of death by freezing, he doubted he could have summoned enough of the Force to light so much as a candle.

  "If you'll come this way, sir," said the droid, "I believe I have found a partial schematic of the ship."

  The schematic of Decks 10 through 13 was etched onto four crystal-plex panels in what was probably the office of the physical plant manager, showing the locations of lifts and gangways, power lines marked in red and water trunks--shower facilities, coolant lines, fire-control sprinklers--in blue. The asymmetry of the ship's form made it difficult to remember. From the outside, Luke recalled, the asteroid was more bean-shaped than round, so the higher decks would be smaller, and grouped aft. From the location of coolant trunks, Luke deduced that the main power cores that fed the reactors, the computer core, and the guns were located aft as well.

  His request for a full schematic from the office computer was greeted with a demand for an authorization code, and tinkering with all the various standard Imperial codes he knew or had been told by Cray only got him Current status of all departments consonant with the timetable and objectives of the Will.

  The Will, he thought. The core program. The central, coordinating plan. The thing that regulated everything in the ship, from the temperature of the mess-hall coffee to the nearly human targeting of the defensive guns... Nearly human? Luke wasn't sure anymore about that. The thing that knew when the jump to hyperspace would be, that would take them to Belsavis. That knew what the battle plan was for destroying that undefended town. Without human knowledge, he thought. Therefore, there was no one who could have been forced, or coerced, or coaxed, to talk, had they been captured. Only the Will. He went back to studying the schematics it would show.

  "They've got to keep the lines to the fuel tanks and the power chargers short," he explained, limping along the corridor again a few minutes later with Threepio clanking softly at his side. "That means all the main hangars are going to be in one area, or at most two--port and starboard. Now sick bay is portside on Deck Ten, and next to that a series of decontamination chambers, so I'm betting that big rectangular chamber that's unmarked on the Deck Ten schematic is the hangar where the lander came in."

  So it proved. The lander's engines were dead and nothing Luke could do could revive them--"Well, why not? They ful
filled their purpose"--and in any case, there was no way of manual steering or controls. The G-40 droids stood silent and dead, one already half dismantled by Jawas who couldn't carry it off. The silvery, bubble-shaped trackers were nowhere to be seen.

  By judicious manipulation of the controls on a service lift--using, again, the power core and wiring of a somewhat indignant MSE--Luke managed to freeze the lift car between Decks 10 and 9 and to get the doors open at least somewhat. While Threepio fretted and predicted doom in the Deck 10 hangar, Luke attached a hundred feet of emergency cable from a locker around one of the lander's legs and scrambled, with considerable difficulty, down through the lift car and into the hangar immediately below on Deck 9.

  The lights were out there, the bay a vast, silent cavern illumined only by the blanched glow of the starlight beyond the magnetic field that protected the atmosphere of the hold. Through the huge bay doors, rimmed around with the rock of the concealing asteroid in which the Eye had been built, Luke could stare into the endless black vistas of the void. A handful of asteroids had been brought along with the Eye when it made its hyperspace jumps to pick up its long-vanished personnel--probably for cover, Luke thought--and a few of these drifted aimlessly in the middle distance, like bleached hunks of bone.

  The shadowy bay itself was designed to accommodate a single medium-size launch, by the look of it. Cables from the power cell dangled from the ceiling and directional markings indicated where the vessel would stand, in the center of the bay, nose pointing toward the starry darkness that lay beyond the magnetic shield. But there was no launch there.

  Instead, to one side of the hangar, a charred and battered ally-wing craft stood. The empty vastness of the hangar picked up the echoes of Luke's staff as he crossed the floor to it, and shadows twitched restlessly as he held up his staff with its glowrods to look at the open cockpit above his head. A two-seater. Luke couldn't see well from where he stood, but he thought that the pressure hookups from both stations had been used.

  "It explains what happened." Luke sank gratefully into one of the white plastic mess-hall chairs and accepted the plate Threepio handed him: reconstituted and radiation-packed, maybe, and bearing only nominal resemblance to actual dewback steak and creamed topatoes, but close enough. In spite of the perigen Luke's leg felt as if it were about to fall off at the hip--which, Luke reflected, in its current state didn't sound like such a bad idea--and he was so tired he ached, but he had a sense of matters being at least partially in hand.

  "What happened when?" inquired Threepio.

  "What happened thirty years ago. As Triv told us, the Eye of Palpatine--the whole Belsavis mission--”

  set up to be a secret, a secret even from the Jedi Knights. That's why they automated everything. So there would be no leaks. But there was a leak, Threepio. Somebody found out."

  A sound from the doorway made him turn his head. Four or five tripods wandered through the mess-hall door, beautiful with their shadings of turquoises and pinks, their long yellow fur around the hips and tentacles. Luke got to his feet, leaning painfully on his staff, and limped to the water spigot near the food slots. The pile of discarded plates along that wall was nearly a meter high; Luke selected the deepest bowl he could find, filled it with water, and carried it over to the tripods, having learned that even setting it on a table wouldn't work. Threepio, at Luke's orders, followed with a couple of dishes of porridge, which the poor befuddled creatures accepted gratefully, dipping long snouts in and slurping deeply.

  "Somebody found out," Luke continued as he worked, "and came to the Moonflower Nebula. Their ally-wing got shot to pieces by the autodefenses--which are the closest thing to human I've ever seen-b they made it in. They disa4 the Eye's triggering mechanism--probably disa4 whatever slaved signal-relay stations they could find, so no signal could come in to start the mission. Then they took the launch from the hangar, and fled."

  "One could only wish," said Threepio, "that they had disabled the autodefenses as well."

  "Maybe they couldn't," said Luke. The tripods began to move off, hooning and muttering vaguely among themselves, and Luke and Threepio started back to the table where Luke had been. "According to the power cell readings in the hangar, that bay is just above the fighter berths where the short-range fliers--the ground supports and the escorts, TIE'S according to the power consumption graphs--are docked. If the mission involved a ground assault--and it has to have, if they were picking up stormtroopers--there have to be assault shuttles somewhere, probably on the upper decks in this same area, but they wouldn't have been any good either in deep space. They have to have taken the launch."

  "I see," replied the droid. He was silent a moment, holding Luke's staff and offering his arm to help him down into the chair. "But if the signal relay was destroyed, what started it up again?" he asked. "After thirty years?"

  A horrible cacophony of shouts sounded in the corridor outside. Luke swung to his feet, outdistancing Threepio as he limped to the door. Through the grunting, shrieking, bellowing, he could hear the heavy thunder of feet.

  It was a member of the Klagg tribe. Luke recognized it instantly, for the Klaggs had all been wearing helmets and armor from regular navy troopers rather than stormtroopers, bucket-shaped helmets and gray breastplates instead of the familiar white. Wherever their headquarters was, it was obviously close to different armories than the Gakfedds'. However, Luke scarcely needed this observation, since the Klagg was in full and terrified flight from fifteen Gakfedds, howling, waving axes and forcepikes, brandishing blasters and carbines, and occasionally letting off a shot that ricocheted wild and lethal along the corridors like a red-hot hornet.

  Luke said, "Come on!"

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "He'll be heading back to his home territory!"

  Luke crossed the mess hall to the opposite doors, knowing that the corridor down which the Gakfedds chased their prey led nowhere and the Klagg would have to double back. Sure enough, moments later Luke heard behind him in the corridor the thudding crash of a single set of feet, the snuffling, slobbering pant of the fugitive Klagg. He led Threepio into a laundry drop room to let the Klagg hasten by without seeing them, then stepped out again, following, listening. The Gakfedds seemed to have lost their prey, the echoes of their shouting ringing from corridors nearby, but Luke, listening ahead, could trail quite easily the solitary Klagg's gasping breath and lumbering feet. Gamorreans weren't runners. With the use of both his legs Luke could have outdistanced any Gamorrean ever littered, and even leaning on a staff he had little trouble keeping up. As he had half suspected, half deduced, the Klagg was heading aft.

  "They found some way to get above the crew decks," he murmured to Threepio as they crossed through chamber after chamber of armories, looted weapons holds, stores whose bins and crates had been broken to disgorge uniforms, boots, belts, and blast armor on the floors and down the halls. "Listen. He's doubling back on his steps. He knows he has to get a level up."

  He halted, looking cautiously around a corner. The Gamorrean stood in an open lift car, prodding angrily at the buttons there, obviously wanting one that read higher than 13 and not finding it. A moment later the pseudotrooper stepped out of the car again, looking around him, hairy ears swiveling as he listened, breathing clearly audible in the silence. There was an expression sweating like a Gamorrean, and Luke understood it now. The creature's body glistened and he could smell it from where he stood. The Gamorrean lumbered on.

  "Is he lost, Master Luke?" Threepio could gear his voder down to the faintest hum of almost-inaudibility.

  "Looks like. Or the Gakfedds are cutting off the way he came down."

  There was a rumble of shouts, coming closer. The Klagg increased his speed to a clumsy trot. He was still easy to keep up with, through corridors bright with the hard cold light of glowpanels, or dark where the Jawas had looted the wiring. His ears kept swinging backward--Luke wondered how acute they were, and if he could pick up the faint scrape and click of the staff, and the s
oft creak of Threepio's joints.

  There was a black door, double-blast-sealed and surmounted with a crimson light. The Gamorrean jabbed at the switch, with no result, then pulled out a blaster and shot the whole mechanism. The door jarred a little in its socket, and a voice said, "Entry to upper levels in this area is unauthorized. Security measures are in force."

  The Gamorrean ripped loose the coverplate on the manual hatch by main force, and worked the dogged wheel within. Far down the corridor Luke heard renewed clamor, and knew the Gakfedds had heard the computer's voice:

  "Entry to upper levels in this area is unauthorized. Security measures are in force. Maximum measures will be taken."

  The red light began to blink. The door opened to reveal a gangway. Black metal steps, gray walls, a checkering of pale squares of opalescent light set in a curious, asymmetrical almost-pattern that seemed at once impersonal and queerly sinister.

  "Maximum measures will be taken. Maximum measures will be taken. Maximum..."

  "There's the stinking mutineer swine!"

  As Ugbuz and his troopers appeared from a cross-corridor twenty meters away, the Klagg plunged up the gangway. Watching it, Luke reflected--in the part of his mind not stunned with horror--that it was very like the Empire to design a "security measure" that wouldn't take effect until the violator was too far into the gangway to turn back.