Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  "So what's this about smuggler tunnels?"

  "Back when I was in the game," said Han, "I never made it out here--too close to the Senex Sector--but I knew there were at least a dozen landing pads out on the ice. Judging by the number of people in the bars who're still in the game, I'd be surprised if there's more than one or maybe two still operational. Now, according to Lando, what's left of the Empire hasn't changed its tariffs and the export duties here haven't changed any... gone up, if anything. Which means that nine years ago, something dried up."

  "Right about a year after the Battle of Endor."

  Han nodded. "Something you might want to keep in mind when you go through the town records--now that old Jevax has had time to pick out the parts that might tell you anything."

  "You know, Han..." Leia paused at the top of the wooden ramp that climbed the high, broken stone of their house's foundations to the wide front door. "That's the first thing that drew me to you. The childlike innocence of your heart."

  He caught her arm, grinning; she tried to duck away to open the door but he pinned her, a hand on either side of her shoulders, their eyes laughing into one another's, his body warm against hers. "You want to see how innocent I can be?"

  She reached to touch the scar on his chin. "I know how innocent you are," she said, meaning it, and their lips met, isolated in the still cloak of the mist. Only the padding footfalls on the ramp broke them apart, and the soft whirring of servos. They stepped back from each other in time to see Chewbacca's tall form materialize out of the pearlescent shimmer of the air, trailed a moment later by Artoo. The glittering colors of the mist were darkening as the dome-magnified sunlight waned. Between the gray trees of the orchards that stretched downhill from the back of the house, the twilight was growing thick.

  "Find anything?"

  As they passed through the front door Chewbacca shrugged eloquently and groaned. He'd pursued his own investigation of the local scene in places that left the smell of strange smokes in his fur, and had learned, he said, very little. Very little was going on. One of the smuggler pads out on the glacier was still in operation sometimes, though there were fewer and fewer pilots looking to make the difficult run in through the Corridor. A couple of ships were buying vine-silk on the cheap-mostly grade-two skimmings from the factories. A couple of dealers running in yarrock, ryll, and various sorts of frontal-lobe candy for the old buzz-brains living in the grubby shacks and lean-tos behind Spaceport Row. Bran Kemple was evidently the only person selling it on a regular basis. Everybody said Not like the old days. You could make more money packing brandifert if you didn't mind purple fingers.

  "I'm going to take Artoo with me to the MuniCenter, if you don't mind." Inside the house Leia hunted out a dark green-and-violet tunic slightly more respectable than the garment she'd worn to go touring the bars of the Row--she owned underwear more respectable than that particular outfit, for that matter--and more comfortable shoes. "You find anything from public access while we were up at Plett's House, Artoo?"

  The astromech trundled obediently over to the small monitor-printer setup in the corner and extruded a comm plug, and the printer began to chatter. Han crossed the room to see. "Export figures for all seven main packing plants for the past week," he reported with a grave nod. "Mmmm... oh, now we've got employee health figures... fuel intake of all vessels for the past week... Better and better. Wow, here's a hot item! Repair costs for malfunctions of mechanical fruit pickers amortized over the past ten years. Leia, I don't know if my heart can take this..."

  She rapped him on the arm with the back of her knuckles. "Don't tease Artoo... That's very thorough of you, Artoo, you did a good job. You always do." The droid beeped. Past the bedroom's line of floor-length windows and the narrow stone terrace beyond, darkness had settled, the lights that dotted the orchards below the house making raveled blurs of brightness in the mist. The house was one of the few in Plawal to consist mostly of the original stone--only the kitchen and half the living room were prefab--but had been remodeled in the past few years, the old keyhole windows replaced by modern crystalplex with sliding metal shutters to cut out the orchard lights. It was environment-controlled, too, after a fashion--better than the Smoking Jets, anyway. An ironic refinement, thought Leia, for a planet whose surface temperature averaged in the minus fifties.

  Like most houses in the old town it was built over a small warm-spring site, and though the spring had been diverted to warm the orchard, the basement floor still produced errant wisps of steam. Leia wondered with a sudden qualm of disgust if kretch lurked there. “You'll be okay here?" She paused on her way to the door.

  "I'll have a go at calling Mara Jade. She may know where those landing pads were, and something about why Nubblyk the Slyte left." He made a show of checking his pockets. "And I know I picked up a card in the bar for order-in dancing girls."

  "Just make them sweep up the confetti when they're done."

  They kissed again, and Leia strode down the ramp to street level, Artoo trundling in her wake. It had grown dark. Silver-winged moths fluttered crazily around the lamps; pittins and mooklas hunted frogs beneath the bridges. The world smelled of sweet growing things, of grass and fruit--fruit bred specially, calculatedly, to make the inhabitants of this rift, this world, wealthy and competitive in the galactic markets. In the darkness among the trees, luminous insects flickered like fairy candles.

  A paradise, thought Leia. If you didn't know about the kretch underneath it. If you didn't know about Drub McKumb's voice screaming, Kill you all... going to kill you all...They're gathering... If you didn't know that occasionally someone who followed up unsubstantiated rumors about the tunnels beneath Plett's House would vanish without a trace.

  In a market square among the sleek white prefabs, the dark huddle of old stone walls, barrow men and vendors were striking their awnings, folding up their wares amid the final desultory shoppers of the day. Above the market the MuniCenter reared on the first of the low benches above the town, only its lights visible as a blurred galaxy in the dark fog. The sloping path toward it wound among the orchards, and because of the multitude of hot springs that came out of the valley's point there the fog was thick, the sodium arc lights with their unreal white glare edged a few leaves with light and left all else swallowed by the night. Now and then a mechanical tree feeder would stalk momentarily into view, unnervingly like a huge metal spider with its half dozen long, jointed arms, its blind turrets and proboscis-like squirters, rows and rings of yellow lights outlining it like shining crowns and bracelets of jewels. Unlighted, silent, not quite ruined enough, Plett's House rose invisible in the dark behind. Leia remembered the vision she'd seen there, the deep sense of silent peace. Remembered the voices of the children, and old Ho'Din, beautiful with his pale-green skin against the black Jedi cloak; remembered his haunted eyes. She remembered also the urgency in Luke's voice when he'd told her not to bring the children to this paradise of a place. Had she brought them, she wondered, what would they have seen?

  Abruptly, Artoo-Detoo, who had been following her along the path, made a right-angle turn and trundled off into the foggy darkness to her right. Leia turned, startled: "Artoo?" She could hear the crash of his heavy cylindrical body in the foliage, the furious yik-yik-yik of the guard-critters around the trees, the startled whoops of night birds. "Artoo!"

  His treads left deep marks in the soft grass. Leia followed, pushing at the leaves, wet fern slapping at her boots, pulling out her glowrod and holding it before her where the darkness grew dense away from the lights.

  "Artoo, what is it?"

  The ground dipped sharply beneath her feet. She heard Artoo's startled tweet, the crash of something falling. Branches caught at her hair, slithered damply across her face as she hurried forward. The little astromech droid had come to a stop at the base of a wall, pressed against it and still trying vainly to go forward. Leia could hear the whirr of his servos, the grind of his treads in the soft ground. She flashed the light swiftly to the r
ight and left but saw nothing, only the dark of the enclosing foliage, barely visible through the dense mists, the bob of firebugs among the sweet-scented trees. "Artoo, stop!" she ordered. "Stop!"

  The whirring of the gears halted. "Back up." He was mired. "Hold it," said Leia, and after another careful scout around with her light, she took from her boot the small knife she carried and cut branches--making sure they bore no fruit--to lay in the deep tread marks on the muddy ground. "Back up."

  The droid obeyed. "Artoo, what is it? What happened?" Luke was better at understanding the little droid than she was, though she could interpret some of his odd beeps and warbles. But the reply he made was a quick, almost perfunctory double gleep, telling her nothing.

  "Well, let's not stand around here in the dark." Something about the way the vine-hung boughs with their ghostly orchids seemed to bend close unnerved her, even in this safe and well-patrolled paradise. A sharp rustle in the darkness made her nearly jump out of her skin, but it was only a tree feeder, pausing to lower its hose-like proboscis to the roots of a shalaman tree and pump forth a measured dose of rank-smelling organic goo before picking its careful way back among the trees.

  "Let's see if we can get back to the path."

  It wasn't easy, between the dark and the mushy unevenness of the ground. Artoo's base was weighted to give him maximum stability, but though he was better than he looked on rough terrain he wasn't perfect, and the base weight would make it, if not impossible, at least backbreaking, for Leia to right him should he unbalance. It took a half hour of muddy searching, stumbling over tree roots and getting yikked at by watch-critters in the dark, along the bed of a steaming volcanic stream before they found a sufficiently gentle incline and a clearing among the ferns that let her see the path again.

  Just for a moment, Leia looked up and saw someone standing at the top of the slope, under the yellow blur of the light. She thought, What's she doing here? And then wondered why, as the woman turned from the light and walked quickly away down the path...Why had she thought that? It wasn't anyone she knew. Was it?

  Schoolfriend? Her age looked about right, so far as Leia could tell at that distance and behind the blurring of intervening fog. But somehow she couldn't picture that slim, childlike body in the white-and-blue uniform of the Alderaan Select Academy for Young Ladies. She was sure she'd never seen that chained ocean of rain-straight, coal-black hair plaited in a schoolgirl's braids. That let out the possibility of her being the daughter of an Alderaan noble alt, since they'd all gone to the same school...

  Someone from the Senate? It rang a bell, but she'd been the youngest Senator herself at the age of eighteen, and there had been no one near her age there, certainly no girls. A Senator's daughter? Wife? Someone she had met at one of those endless diplomatic receptions on Coruscant? Someone seen across the room at the Emperor's levee?

  Here?

  She regained the path as quickly as she could, but steadying Artoo over the bumpy roots took her whole effort and attention. When she reached the top of the slope and looked quickly down the path, the woman was gone.

  Chapter 9

  See-Threepio didn't like the idea. "You can't trust those Jawas, Master Luke! There has to be a gangway somewhere..."

  Luke contemplated the hatch cover the Jawa had removed from the wall in one of the laundry drop rooms, the dark shaft full of wiring and cables that lay beyond. A ladder of durasteel staples emerged from the silent well of blackness below, vanished up into the lightless chimney above. He thought about the physical effort involved in hitching himself up those rungs, without use of his left leg, one rung at a time, compared with what the mental effort would cost him to use the Force to levitate. The choice wasn't pleasant. Neither were the memories of the Klagg stormtrooper's death. "I'll be all right," he said quietly.

  "But all the gangways can't be wired!" protested the droid. "I don't like the idea of you going alone. Can't you wait a little, sleep on this? If you'll forgive my saying so, sir, you look as if you would greatly benefit from some sleep. Though I never use it myself, I'm told that humans..."

  Luke grinned, touched by Threepio's concern. "I'll get some sleep when I get back," he promised. In the dark of the shaft above he heard the rat-rustle of the Jawa's robes halt, an interrogatory piping squeal, "Master?"

  "If I don't track this down now I may not get another chance." He made a quick check of the power cell of the glowrods taped to his staff, then slung the wire loop he'd taped on the staff's upper end over his shoulder, balancing carefully on his good leg with his hands against the hatchway's narrow sides. "I'll be all right," he said again.

  He knew Threepio didn't believe him, of course. He ducked his head through the hatch, reached over the narrow shaft to seize the rungs, and hopped across. Even that small movement caught his leg with a flash of pain that left him breathless, despite all the healing, all the strength of the Force he could summon. He glanced down at the seemingly bottomless plunge of the shaft, and thought, I'll need to save my strength.

  "Be careful, Master Luke..." The droid's voice floated up after him in the dark. In the crazy, bobbing dimness of the glowrods slung to his back, the Jawa was barely visible, a dark, scrambling figure like a robed insect skittering up the ladder now far over his head. Bundled trunk lines of cable and wire brushed Luke's shoulders as he hitched himself laboriously in the Jawa's wake, hoses like glistening black esophagi and thinner lines of rubbery insulated fiber-optic coax crowding close, as if he were indeed ascending the alimentary canal of some monstrous beast. The Jawa paused every now and then to finger the cabling in a way that made Luke extremely nervous. Who could tell what systems depended on that particular hunk of wire?

  Here and there orange worklights burned dim above closed hatchways--dogged shut on the inside, he observed, and equipped with the dark boxes of magnetic seals. Elsewhere he climbed in darkness, lit only by the glowrods on his staff. The tube smelled fusty, of lubricants and insulation and now, overwhelmingly, of Jawa, but it lacked the characteristic, slightly greasy smell of air recycled countless times through the noses and lungs of a living crew. Even with the vessel's current bizarre populations, it would be long before it acquired that smell. Longer than they'd be aboard. Longer than this weird mission would last.

  What started it up again? Threepio had put his intricately jointed metal finger on the crux of the problem, the galling root of Luke's anxious dreams. The Eye of Palpatine had been wrought in secret for a secret purpose, a mission that had been thwarted. It had lain sleeping in its remote screen of spinning asteroids in the heart of the Moonflower Nebula for thirty years, while the New Order that had planned that mission, armed the ship's guns, programmed the Will's single-minded control, had risen to power and then cracked apart under the weight of its own callousness, monomania, and greed.

  The stormtroopers stationed on half a dozen remote worlds of the Rim had grown old and died. Palpatine himself had died, at his own dark pupil's hand. So why had the Will awakened?

  Luke shivered, wondering whether it was simply his own apprehension for the safety of those on Belsavis--for Han and Leia and Chewie--that cast a shadow on his heart, or whether the shadow was of something else, some separate entity whose power he had sensed moving like a dianoga underwater through the darker regions of the Force.

  The tube topped out in a thick-barred metal grille painted garish, warning yellow and black. Affixed to it--in case anyone should miss the point--”

  a sign: Enclision grid. No further ascent. Danger. Beyond the bars, Luke could just distinguish a lateral repair conduit, through which the cables of the ascending shaft continued like runners of some thick-fleshed, ugly vine. The walls of the conduit gleamed with the asymmetrical pattern of opaline squares, each square a deadly laser port, waiting in the dark. Just beneath the metal safety bars, a ring of dirty fingerprints around an open hatchway showed clearly which course the Jawa had taken. Luke dragged himself through, into light only marginally brighter than that of the worklamps i
n the shaft.

  It was the gun room. Rank after rank of consoles picked up the moving firebug of his glowrods from the shadows of soot-colored metal walls. Screen after screen, large and small, regarded him with dead obsidian eyes. In the center of the chamber a ceiling panel had been removed, and a barred grille like the one that had blocked further ascent in the repair shaft lay propped in a corner. Holding the staff with its glowing end aloft, Luke could see that the shaft rose upward, where the bundled pipes and hoses, finger-fat power lines and the wide ribbon-cables of computer couplers, flowed aloft in a static river from half a dozen lateral conduits to some central locus above. Yellow and black banded the lower half meter or so of the shaft, but there was no sign, no written warning. Only the small, baleful glare of red power lights, and above them, the opal glister of the enclision grid, spiraling eerily into darkness.