Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  She drew breath again and he put a hand on her shoulder, a finger on her lips; a lover's gesture of intimacy, but still meant to silence her.

  "You don't have to be such a hero, baby. There's always ways of doing things without getting killed."

  Luke thought, He doesn't want to climb up that shaft. He's told himself there's another way--and he probably even believes it--but at bottom, he doesn't want to be the one who climbs through the grid while she's using the Force to make it misfire.

  And he saw this understanding, too, in Callista's gray eyes.

  "Geith," she said softly, and in her hesitation Luke heard the echo of his previous rages. ”Sometimes there's not."

  He threw up his hands. "Now you're starting to sound like old Djinn!"

  "That doesn't make what I'm saying less true."

  "The old boy's too damn ready to tell other people how they should die for a guy who hasn't been off that festering gasball of his for a hundred years! Callie, I've been around. I know what I'm talking about."

  "And I know that we have no idea how long we've got until this thing goes into hyperspace." She still didn't raise her voice, but something in its level softness stopped him from cutting in again. "None. If we destroy it, it's gone. Dead. If we leave it, run for it--”

  "There's nothing wrong with jumping clear and getting help!"

  "Except that it'll lose us our one sure chance."

  "It'll lose us our chance of getting the hell blown up along with this thing, you mean!"

  "Yes," said Callista. "That's what I mean. Will you help me or not?"

  He put his hands on his hips, looked down at her, for he was a tall man. "You stubborn fish rider." Affection glinted in his smile.

  Her voice flawed, just slightly, as she looked up into his face. "Don't leave me, Geith. I can't do it alone."

  And Luke saw something change, just slightly, in Geith's blue eyes.

  Pain came back to him, shredding away the scene in the hangar. He opened his eyes, felt under him the slight, smooth jostle of movement. Thin dark lines passed like scanner wires above his head, traveling from head to feet... ceiling joins.

  Moving his head, he saw that he lay on a small antigrav sled, beyond whose rim See-Threepio's grimed and dented metal head and shoulders were visible as the droid guided the sled along a hall. There was a sound somewhere ahead and Threepio froze into the perfect immobility of a mechanical. The yellow reflection of a tracker droid's dim lights passed over the metal mask of Threepio's face, glinted very faintly on the perfect, intricate shape of his hand where it rested on the sled's rim.

  The yellow light passed on. Threepio moved forward again, footfalls hollow in the empty corridor. Luke slid back toward darkness.

  The foo-twitter, he thought. He'd misfired the enclision grid and thrust the silvery globe up ten meters of shaft, but it had been hit anyway--four, maybe five times. He'd heard the shrill zing of ricochets against the metal. Threepio had cut the comm trunk, Cray was in danger, he couldn't lie here...

  The more that hit you, the more that will.

  He saw her in the gun room.

  The lights were on there, too.

  She was alone. All the monitors were dead, blank black idiot faces, holes into the Will's malignancy--she was sitting very still on the corner of a console, but he knew she listened. Head bowed, long hands folded loose over her thigh, he could see the tension in the way she breathed, in the slight angle of movement. Listening.

  Once she looked at the chronometer above the door.

  "Don't do this to me, Geith." Her voice was barely audible. "Don't do this."

  After long, long, grinding silence like years of cold illness, though absolutely nothing changed in the room, Luke saw when she understood at last. She got to her feet, crossed to a console, and tapped in commands: a tall girl whose gray flight suit hung baggy over the long-limbed fighter's frame, whose lightsaber with its line of dancing sea clowns gleamed against her flank. She called a screen to life, and Luke saw past her shoulder the hangar, with the ruined ally-wing and the empty meters of concrete floor where the Blastboat used to be.

  She toggled in a line of readings, then, as if they weren't enough to convince her, tapped VISUAL REPLAY.

  Luke's eyes were the eyes of the pickup camera concealed among the craters of the dreadnaught's irregular hull. There was no question that Geith was one hellskinner of a pilot. Blastboats were landing craft, not fighters; clumsy to handle, though in a crisis they had the speed to outrun, if not outmaneuver, most pursuit. And Geith had been right--half by observation, half by instinct, Luke saw/felt the pattern of the shots the Will laid down, a complex double ellipse with a couple of random twitches.

  A couple, not the one that Geith had said.

  Dodging, dropping, veering among the sheets of light-filled dust, the half-hidden chunks of tumbling rock, Geith handled the Blastboat as if it were a TIE, flipping through the white streaks of death with breathtaking speed. He was almost out of range when a random bolt that shouldn't have been there holed his stabilizer.

  The more that hit you, the more that will.

  He must have got the craft in hand somehow, spinning crazily but keeping his trajectory. An asteroid swam out of the dust and took off one of his power units, dragged him around..

  And it was over.

  Luke saw the white blast of the final explosion as a reflection from the replay screen cast up on Callista's face.

  She closed her eyes. Tears traced a line in the grime. She had the look of a woman who hadn't slept or eaten in days, exhausted, skating the edge. Maybe the Will had tricks for dealing with those who entered by other means than the landers with their indoctrination bays. Maybe if Geith had been 100 percent alert, 100 percent sharp, he'd have done as he'd meant, and gotten out to fetch help.

  She turned her head, and looked up at the dark shaft, like an upside-down well into the night above the ceiling. The enclision grid had the look of pale, dementedly regular stars. She drew her breath without change of expression, and let it go.

  He woke again, or thought he woke, to utter blackness, and she was there, lying against his back. Her body curved around his, her hip spooned behind his, her thigh touching the back of his leg--his leg didn't hurt, he realized, nothing hurt--her arm lying over his side and her cheek resting against his shoulder blade, like an animal that has crept stealthily to a human's side, seeking reassurance and warmth. The tension of her muscles frightened him, the pent-up bitter grief.

  Grief at dreaming the dream that he'd seen. At remembering the one who'd betrayed her. At having to do it alone.

  Gently, fearing that if he moved at all she'd flee, he turned and gathered her into his arms.

  As she had in the gun room, she breathed once, hanging on to something for as long as she could, then let it go.

  For a long time she wept, silently and without fuss or apology, the hot damp of her tears soaking into his ragged jumpsuit, her body shaking with the draw and release of her breath.

  "It's all right," said Luke quietly. Her hair, thick and rough-textured as it appeared, was startlingly fine to his touch, springy where gathered into his hands, filling them and overflowing. "It's all right."

  After a long time she said, "He thought I'd never try it myself. He meant to save my life. I know that. He knew I'd know."

  "But he still made it his decision, not yours."

  Against his chest he felt her small, wry smile. "Well, it was his decision, so it had to be right, didn't it? I'm sorry. That sounds bitter--a lot of his decisions were right. He was a demon of a fighter. But this... I felt it. I knew there would be no getting back in, once we were away. I was angry for a long time."

  "I'm angry at him."

  He remembered the faint, attenuated sense of her, less than a ghost even, in the gun room. Hidden, eroded, worn by exhaustion almost to nothing.

  "I'm surprised you helped me at all."

  "I wasn't going to," she said. He felt her move her arm, push the hai
r from her face. ”Not out of hate, really, but... It all seemed so distant. So unreal. Like watching morrts scurry around the bones of the ship."

  "Yet you stayed," said Luke, even as he spoke understanding that he was dreaming; understanding that the warmth of her body, the long bones and soft fine hair and the cheek resting on his shoulder were her memories of her body, her recollection of what it had been like, long buried and nearly forgotten. "You used the last of your strength, the last of the Force, to put yourself into the gunnery computer, to keep anyone else from taking the ship. For all you knew, forever."

  Against his shoulder, he felt her sigh. "I couldn't... let anyone come aboard."

  "All those years..."

  "It wasn't... so bad, after a time. Djinn had taught us, had theoretically walked us through, the techniques of projecting the mind into something else, something that would be receptive, to hold the intelligence as well as the consciousness, but he seemed to regard it as cowardly. As being afraid or unwilling to go on to the next step, to cross over to the other side. Once I was in the computer..."

  She shook her head, and he felt the gesture of her hand, trying to speak of some experience beyond his ken. "After a time it began to seem that it had been my entire life. That what came before--Chad, and the sea, and Papa; Djinn's teaching, the platform on Bespin, and... and Geith--they turned into a sort of dream. But the tripods... they're a little like the treems back home, sweet and harmless and well-intentioned. I wanted to help them. I was so glad when you did. That was the first time I really... really saw you. And even the Jawas..."

  She sighed again, and tightened her hold on him, her arm around his rib cage sending a shock of awareness through him, as if its shape and strength and the pressure of her hand had somehow a meaning and a truth to which all other things in his life were tied. He understood for the first time how his friend Wedge could write poems about Qwi Xux's pale, feathery hair. The fact that it was Qwi's made all the difference.

  She said, "Luke..." and he brought her face to his, and kissed her lips.

  Chapter 18

  In the throbbing indigo darkness, Framjem Spathen rolled back his head so that the long electric ropes of his glowing hair brushed the floor, raised arms glistening with cutaneous diamonds to flash in the bloody light, and screamed. The scream seemed to lift him onto his toes, rippling through that hard-muscled body in wave after wave of sound and pain and ecstasy as he rolled his head, heaved his hips, stretched his fingers to the utmost...

  "Were those muscles all really his?" wondered Bran Kemple, drawing on a hookah that smelled like old laundry steeped in alcohol and regarding the holo--an extremely old one, Han had seen it in dozens of cheap clubs from here to Stars' End--with half-shut eyes.

  "Sure they were," said Han. "He paid about two hundred credits per ounce for 'em, plus installation, but after that they were his, all right."

  The dancers on either side of Framjen's holo were real; a boneless Twi'lek boy and a massively breasted Gamorrean female, undulating under the red glare of lights for the edification of half a dozen seedy customers. It would have been hard to picture anything less conducive to lust, Jungle or otherwise. The day-shift hustlers of various races and sexes were working the floor hard, chatting up the patrons and drinking glass after glass of watered liquor at prices that should have brought 100 percent Breath of Heaven. Even they looked tired.

  Han supposed that having to listen to a fifteen-year-old Framjen Spathen holo for eight hours would tire anyone.

  Bran Kemple sighed heavily. "Nubblyk the Slyte. Now there was a hustler who could run things. Things was all different in his day."

  Han sipped his drink. Even the beer was watered. "Pretty lively, hunh?"

  "Lively? Pheew!" Kemple made a kiss-your-hand motion toward the ceiling, presumably a signal to the Slyte's departed spirit. "Wasn't even the word. Half a dozen flights in a week that never made it on the port manifests, people appearin' and disappearin' through the tunnels out under the ice... Decent drinks and decent girls. Hey, Sadie!" he yelled, gesturing to the one-eyed Abyssin barkeep. "Get my friend here a decent drink, fer pity's sakes! Festerin' barkeep can't tell the festerin' difference between a mark and somebody in the trade, fester it."

  He shook his head again, and mopped at his broad, pale-green brow with a square of soiled linen he'd dragged from the depths of his yellow polyfibe suit. His curly brown hair was surrendering to its destiny, and he'd picked up a couple of extra chins in the years since Han had last seen him as a two-bit gunrunner in the Juvex Systems.

  "So what happened?"

  "What happened?" Kemple blinked at him through the gloom. "Place got cleaned out. He'd been strippin' old machinery, droids and computers and lab stuff, down under the ruins. Some kind of old laboratories, they musta been, and there were rooms full of 'em, Nubblyk said. I will say for Nubblyk..."

  The Abyssin brought Han a drink that would have flattened a rancor, and Kemple, evidently forgetting for whom he'd ordered it, polished it off, his long, prehensile tongue questing around the bottom of the glass for stray drops.

  "I will say for Nubblyk, he kept a strong hand on the loot, played it out and kept anybody else from hornin' in. It was his show, nobody else's, and he didn't trust a soul. And why should he, hey? Business is business. He never even told me how he was gettin' into the tunnels."

  "D'ja look for the way in, after he left?"

  "'Course I did!" Kemple's vertical pupils flexed open and shut indignantly. ”Think I'm stupid or somethin'?" Two new dancers climbed up to an even older--and scratchier--holo of Pekkie Blu and the Starboys. Han winced. "We checked the cellar of this joint, and that house he had in Painted Door Street, and finally ran a deep-rock sensor scan of the ruins themselves." He shrugged. ”Double zeros. Not enough gold or xylen under there to register. We couldn't even pay the rental on the scanner. He musta cleaned the place out before--”

  He stopped himself.

  Solo raised his eyebrows. "Cleaned the place out before he went where?"

  "We don't know." He lowered his voice and glanced nervously over at the Abyssin barkeep, who was pouring out a drink for a tall black girl and listening to a long tale of the last mark's perfidy. "That woman who rents the house in Painted Door Street says the credit house where she sends the money every month changes a couple times a year, so it sounds like he's on the run. But before he left he said..."

  He leaned forward to whisper. "He said something about the Emperor's Hand."

  Mara Jade. Solo's eyebrows quirked up. She'd neglected to mention this in last night's discussion. "Oh, yeah?"

  Kemple nodded. Solo recalled that the man never could keep that enormous mouth of his shut. ”He said the Emperor's Hand was on the planet; that his life was in danger." He leaned close enough for Solo to be able to tell the composition of his last three drinks by the smell of his breath and sweat. "I'm thinkin' he cleared out and ran."

  "Could he have cleared out that much loot?"

  "How much?" Kemple straightened up and reached for his hookah again. "It must have been playin' out, anyway, for him to take it all with him. Believe me, we ran sensor scans up, down, backwards, and sideways of the ruins and this place and his house, and you don't get that many sensor malfunctions."

  Oh, don't you? thought Solo, remembering Leia's questions about unexplained flutters in the behaviors of droids.

  "Mubbin didn't buy it."

  Han looked sharply around at the new voice. It was one of the hustlers, a childlike Omwat like a little blue fairy, with eyes a thousand years old.

  "Mubbin the Whiphid," he explained. ”Another of the Slyte's runners. He always said there were shipfuls of stuff still down there--”

  "Mubbin didn't know what he was talkin' about," said the city boss quickly, a gleam of guilty nervousness in his eyes. He looked back at Han. "Yeah, I heard Mubbin go on about how much stuff there still was..."

  "He was Drub McKumb's pal, wasn't he?" Solo addressed the question to the hustler, not Kemp
le. He remembered the Whiphid Chewie had killed, thin and starved and screaming in the dark.

  The boy nodded. "One of my pals was with Drub when he went down that well in the ruins and ran a scan, looking for Mubbin. Drub was convinced he'd gone down looking for the stuff and never came out." He glanced at Kemple. "Some people around here refused to give him a hand when he said he'd go looking himself."

  "Those scans found absolutely zip," pointed out Kemple hastily. "Zero. A lot of zero. If that wasn't good enough for Drub, then--”

  "Wait a minute," said Han. "They ran a life scan down there?"

  "From the room at the wellhead," said the Omwat. Like most of his race he had a high, sweetly flutelike voice. "My pal was a treasure hunter. She had a Speizoc g-2000 she'd got off an Imperial Carillion ship and that thing could pick up a Gamorrean morrt in a square kilometer of permacrete."

  "And there was nothing down there but kretch and pit-molds." Kemple blew a thin cloud of steam. "Drub ran two or three scans--one for the Whiphid and one for xylen and gold. Did the same from the house on Painted Door Street, lookin' for a tunnel entrance there."

  "What'd he tell the woman renting the place?"

  "Miss Roganda?" The boy grinned. "That they'd had reports of "malignant insect infestation" and were inspecting every old Mluki foundation in town. She got all helpful and offered 'em tea."

  "Roganda?" Han felt the hair lift on the back of his neck. "You mean she's the one who's renting Nubblyk's old house?"

  "Sure," said Kemple, turning his attention back to the dancers. "Nice lady--darned pretty woman, too. She could work at this place like a shot, not that this place, or anyplace in town, has that kind of class anymore. Got somebody keepin' her in high style, anyway. Showed up a month or two after the Slyte disappeared and said she'd made arrangements to rent the place. She seemed to know him." He gave Han a wink that was supposed to be slyly sophisticated and succeeded only in looking puerile. "Roganda Ismaren."

  The room where they put Leia was a large one, hewn out of rock and equipped--startlingly--with a window of three wide casements, through which wan daylight filtered even before Lord Garonnin slapped the wall switch to activate the glowpanels of the ceiling. "By all means try to break it if it will amuse you, Your Highness," he said, observing the immediate direction of Leia's interest. "It was put in long before the dome, and the locks are made to withstand almost anything."