Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  "Get my mother. And fetch the smallest steel ball from the toy room to the Princess's prison..."

  Leia bolted down the corridors, twisting, weaving through the maze. She felt Irek's mind invading them, searching for her, reaching like vast wings of smoke to fill the ill-lit passageways with shadows she knew could not be real but which terrified her anyway. It was hard to sense in which direction her body lay, hard to hear the distant heartbeat she followed...

  She skidded to a stop in horror as the floating black ball of the interrogator droid drifted out from around a corner, lights flashing, flickering... Not real, not real, but even knowing this she turned aside. Down another corridor the huge, heavy, stinking shape of a Hutt reached for her with a quivering prehensile tongue, copper eyes dilating and contracting with ugly lusts.

  She turned aside from it, sobbing, trying to find some way around, and in her mind she heard Irek's voice whispering, Irek's shrill boy's laugh. I'll trap you. I'll find you and trap you. You'll never get out...

  The drug, she thought. The drug they'd given her must have left a psychic residue he could track....

  She couldn't let him catch her. Couldn't let him overtake her. Blocks and slabs of darkness loomed in front of her, walls of stench overpowering her ability to track where she should go. The smell of kretch, of roses, of filth. Great, howling waves of power jerked and dragged at her, pulling her back, washing her sideways. In the back of her consciousness she was aware of Irek running lightly, skipping and hopping down the corridors with the sheer delight of trying to find her, trying to track her, trying to block her from the room where her body lay.

  Luke, she thought desperately, Luke, help me...

  And like a mocking playground echo, Irek mimicked jeeringly, Oh, Lukie, help me...

  There. That corridor there. She knew it, recognized it, flung herself around the corner...

  And he was standing in front of the door.

  The towering black shape, the glister of pallid light on the black helmet, the evil gleam of lights within the shadows of his great cloak, and the thick, indrawn breath.

  Vader.

  Vader was standing before the door.

  She swung around in terror. Irek stood in the passageway behind her, the dark radiance that surrounded him seeming to pulse with lightning. In his hand he held one of the steel balls that had so puzzled her in the toy room, but now, with her disembodied consciousness, she saw that there were entrances to it, entrances invisible to eyes limited by the electromagnetic spectrum.

  Entrances that did not serve as exits.

  And within the ball itself, maze after maze of concentric, ever tinier labyrinth balls.

  He smiled. "You're here. I can tell you're here."

  Leia turned. Vader still stood before the door. She could not pass him. She could not.

  "Mother can't stop me," said Irek. "She won't even know."

  He held up the ball, and his mind seemed to reach out into the corridor like a vast net, drawing at her. Leia felt herself dissolving like a smoke wraith, an unskilled illusion; drawn as if by a vacuum toward the steel ball; dissipating into the power of the dark side.

  There had to be a way to use the Force to protect herself, she thought... to get past the dark terror that stood before the door. But she didn't know what it was.

  The boy puckered his lips and inhaled, pulling her in with his breath.

  "Irek!"

  Roganda appeared in the corridor behind her son, her white dress gathered up in her hand as if she'd been running.

  "Irek, come at once!"

  He swung around, his concentration broken. The shadow of Vader vanished. Leia flung herself at the door, through the door, hurled herself to the sleeping form on the bed...

  With human perceptions once again she barely heard the voices through the door, but she recognized, nevertheless, Ohran Keldor's voice.

  "Lord Irek, we've picked it up on the scanners! It's here! The Eye of Palpatine."

  Chapter 22

  "Master Luke, are you quite certain this is going to work?"

  "You got me." The logistics of managing a staff and the rope with which Luke was towing the small pump salvaged from a laundry room were not the best in the world, but at this point Luke was simply delighted to have located a pump that still worked. Very little on the Eye of Palpatine still worked.

  Except the guns, he thought. Except the guns.

  "How much time will it give us?" inquired Nichos, striding silently along under his load of two oil drums filled with sugar water. ”Provided it works at all."

  "Maybe an hour clear." The lights on his staff were failing, too, and the service corridor, with its low ceilings and bundles of conduit lines, was beginning to take on the appearance, dampness, and smell of some cavern far below ground level. Here and there water dripped down the walls. Luke examined the places and nodded with satisfaction. They were certainly on the line of the main water trunk for this section of the ship.

  "That isn't much, to check the lander and the two shuttles," remarked Triv Pothman.

  Luke shook his head. Every step was like having pieces of bone ripped out of his thigh. "It'll have to do." The last of the perigen was long gone--the Force alone kept him from going into shock, kept the fever of internal infection at bay.

  Cray, walking behind them with a five-gallon bucket of sugar water in each hand, said nothing; had said nothing while Luke outlined his plans for getting the ship cleared, and very little more during the process of cutting into the main sensors for a reading of their position and an estimate of how much time before the shelling of Belsavis would begin. Only when Callista said, "That's too much time," at the display of twelve hours, thirty minutes, had Cray spoken.

  "It's what the file says."

  "It's what the Will says the file says. Don't you see?" Callista had gone on. "The Will's going to do whatever it can, use whatever it can, to delay us and fulfill its mission. Mission Control would never have left a delay of twelve and a half hours after coming out of hyperspace. Not with Jedi on the planet. Not with the fleet of ally-wings they have... had."

  "She's right," Luke had said, glancing over at Cray. He'd expected an argument, since Cray had never believed that computers could or would lie.

  But since leaving the security of her laboratory, Cray had been through trial by the Will, and her only reaction was a slight, bitter tightening of her lips. She had watched in silence when Luke and the others had mixed the syrup with water to produce a thick, hypersweet mixture, had taken her share of it when the antigrav sled had proven too large to enter the service corridor vent. She moved as if every step, every intake of breath, was a chore she had to get through, and she would not, Luke saw, meet Nichos's eyes.

  "Thank the Maker," exulted Threepio, as they turned a corner and dim worklights gleamed along the ceiling overhead. "I was beginning to fear this quadrant of the ship around the shuttle bays was without power as well."

  "Jawa're probably too scared of the Sand People to get close enough to raid it." Luke turned down a side corridor, following the main conduit.

  "Yet," remarked Callista, her voice coming from beside him, as if she walked close by.

  "I like a cheery girl."

  She sang two lines of an old nursery song, "Let's everybody be happy, let's everybody be happy..." and Luke, in spite of the agony in his leg, laughed.

  "It must be driving them crazy," Callista went on after a moment. "The Sand People. If they're as... as rigidly bound to tradition as you describe, they must hate the fact that everything is different here, with no day and no night, and only walls and corridors to hunt in."

  "As time goes by I'm less and less thrilled about it myself." The door to the main pump room was locked. Threepio convinced the lock program that a key had been inserted and the door whooshed open.

  "Break the mechanism, Nichos," said Luke quietly. "You're right, Callista. I don't trust the Will any farther than I can throw this ship, uphill and against the wind."

>   "Funny," said Pothman, looking around him at the oily black root system of pipes and vents, as Luke hooked the small portable pump into the main mechanism. "I never thought about it while I was a trooper. But now, looking back, I think I never could get used to living in corridors and rooms and ships and installations. I mean, it seemed normal at the time. Only after I was living in the forest on Pzob I realized how much I loved it, how much I'd missed the woods and the trees of Chandrila. You miss the oceans, Miss Callista?"

  "Every day."

  Cray, standing in the doorway, only leaned her forehead against the jamb and said nothing, watching while Luke hooked the makeshift power cables into the main outlets, pressed the switch. The dry, whirring rasp of the motor fired up, small and shrill against the deeper, calmer throb of the main pump that half filled the room before them. Luke breathed a sigh of gratitude and unshipped the small pump's hose.

  "Here goes."

  He plunged the hose into the first of the sugar-water drums, watching the connection between the small pump surge and stiffen with the pressure of the stuff, then, a moment later, the line between the small pump and the large.

  Callista called up, softly, to the oblivious Sand People inhabiting the regions above the pump room, "Here's looking at you, kids."

  They pumped, in all, close to twenty gallons of concentrated sugar water into the Sand People's water supply.

  "Leave it," said Luke, as Nichos turned back from the door to fetch the portable pump or tidy the buckets. "We're not coming back."

  "Ah," said Nichos, remembering that everything was going to be ion vapor this time tomorrow, and shook his head deprecatingly. "Perhaps a touch too much tidiness programmed in." The next moment he glanced sidelong at Cray, realizing that the jest might have been construed as a criticism--or simply as a reminder that he was, in fact, a collection of programs--but she managed a smile, and for the first time met his eyes.

  "I knew I shouldn't have cribbed that part out of one of those SP Eighty wall washers."

  They stood looking at each other for a moment, startled and not quite certain how to deal with her admission of having programmed him, of his being a droid... then she reached out and touched his hand.

  "Think they'll mind if we crash their party?" whispered Callista when they reached the top of the gangway. The noise from the shuttle hangar the Sand People had taken for their headquarters was tremendous: groaning, grunting, howling; whoops and clatters as machinery or weapons--gaffe sticks? rifles?--were hurled here and there. Every now and then they'd all begin to yowl together, hair-raising ululations that rose and fell in volume and pitch and then died away into raucous shrieks and crashes.

  "Let's sit this one out." Luke leaned back against the wall, aware that he was trembling and that sweat rolled down the sides of his face, glittering in the chill of the corridor lights. He wanted to sit down, but knew that if he did he'd probably never get up. He was burningly aware of Callista beside him, close by him, as if she were merely invisible and would become visible again later...

  He pushed the thought away.

  Triv hunkered down, listening but coiled to spring up again, his blaster in his hand. Threepio stood a meter or so away down the corridor to their backs, auditory sensors turned up to highest gain. Awkwardly, Cray and Nichos stood together, as if not certain what to say.

  Cray asked, "Will you be okay, Luke?" and Luke nodded.

  "This shouldn't take too long."

  "A bunch of deep-water cy'een herders'd have these boys under the table before they'd even warmed up their elbows," commented Callista.

  More whoops.

  "Maybe that's why they killed that storekeeper."

  The riot subsided. A few broken grunts and shouts, then silence. Someone yelled his opinion about something to his by now oblivious fellow tribesmen, and then there was a clatter, as if of a dropped metal drinking vessel.

  "Right," said Luke. "Let's go. We don't have much time. Threepio, get the Talz."

  "Certainly, Master Luke." The droid creaked off briskly into the darkness.

  The shuttle hangar was carpeted in somnolent Sand People. Sugar water was spilled everywhere, soaking into the dirt-colored robes and head wrappings, and several bore dark, harsh-smelling stains on their robes, as if of ichor or blood. A small, square service hatch on one wall was scratched and dented as if hacked at by maniacs--gaffe sticks and spears strewn like jackstraws all around it amply indicated that someone had thought it a useful target to demonstrate everyone's skill. The wall around the square hatch bore considerably more damage than the hatch itself.

  "Swell party," commented Luke, and scrambled painfully up the ramp into the first of the shuttlecraft while Triv and Nichos prudently collected every weapon in sight. The gauges looked all right--under Cray's expert cutting the on-board computer woke up without reference to its passwords and expressed itself ready for action.

  "Doesn't seem to be hooked into the Will at all," she commented.

  "About time something went our way."

  "I warn you," said Triv Pothman worriedly from the door, "I was never trained to run one of these things. And those readouts of the surface you're getting aren't making me feel any better about learning."

  "I'll slave this shuttle to the other so Nichos can control them both." Cray settled into the pilot's chair, ran her hands through her hair with the old gesture of tucking aside stray tendrils--and winced a little at the touch of the sawed-off bristle--then called up the core program and began tapping instructions in. The gesture of tidying her hair filled Luke with an odd sense of relief, of gladness. Whatever she'd been through, its darkness in her was lightening. She was returning to herself.

  "Nichos isn't a hotshot jet jockey like Luke," she went on, "but he can take both in even through that mess, if somebody on the ground can talk him down. A lot of the stabilization's preprogrammed for the planet, of course. And believe me, when the main ship blows, there'll be somebody out here to investigate."

  "Cray," said Luke, "I need to talk to you about that."

  She didn't so much as spare him a glance. ”Later," she said. "First let's hear your plan for getting those Kitonaks down here and into a shuttle in something under two weeks."

  Outside there was a groaning clamor, a bellowing war cry. Luke and Cray, stumbling to the door of the lander, were just in time to see a Tusken Raider launch itself at Triv Pothman, swinging its gaffe stick in such a fashion as to present considerably more danger to itself than to the former stormtrooper. Nichos leaped over two intervening slumberers and caught the Tusken's arm, pulling the weapon from its fumbling hand. Triv was saying, "Hey, hey, hey, my friend, just relax, okay? Have another little shot..."

  The Raider accepted the silver cup half full of sugar water from the trooper's hand, downed it in a gulp, and subsided once again to the floor.

  "Master Luke..." Threepio appeared in the doorway of the hangar, followed by a half dozen fluffy white Talz.

  "Great!" Luke scrambled down from the shuttlecraft, stumbling as his leg gave under him with a shocking blast of pain. Cray caught his arm and three of the Talz were immediately at his side, steadying him and crooning worriedly.

  "Thank them," said Luke, struggling to control his breath, to fight off the pain that threatened to blot his consciousness. "Thank you," he added, speaking directly to the tall creatures, as Threepio produced a succession of hoons and hums. "Tell them that without their help I could not possibly hope to save all those here who need to be saved."

  Threepio relayed Luke's message to the Talz, who replied with snufflings, hoots, and heavy, patting hugs. Then without further ado the Talz began to pick up Sand People and carry them out of the hold, heading for the lander on Deck 10.

  "You know that even with my reprogramming that lander won't do anything but head out a couple of kilometers and hang there," Cray said, watching them go. "It can't be steered."

  "That'll do," said Luke. "I'll leave instructions with Triv and Threepio that nobody's supposed
to open the thing till it gets to Tatooine anyway."

  "You really think anybody'll tow it to safety, once they know what's inside?" She put one fist on her hip, turned to look at him sidelong, weary and bitter.

  "I don't know," said Luke quietly. ”If I make it out..." He hesitated. ”Or if you make it out, please see to it that someone does."

  Her face softened with the wisp of a smile. "You never give up," she said, "do you, Luke?"

  He shook his head.

  "Funny," Cray said, as they walked up the ramp into the second shuttle. "You'd think that since we appeared in this sector somebody'd be out from Belsavis to check on who we are anyway. But there's not a thing."

  "I've never seen anything like it." Jevax flicked through another series of screens, the two technicians--another Mluki and a glum-looking Durosian--leaning over his shoulders. None of the three looked up as Han and Chewbacca thrust their way through the door and into the port's central control.

  The Durosian shook his head. "It has to be a malfunction somewhere in the slave relay to the bay gates themselves," he said. "The program tests positive. All the gates couldn't malfunction mechanically at the same time." His earth-colored brow furrowed down over opalescent orange eyes, and he rubbed the hard beak of his mouth.

  "What's going on?"

  Jevax looked up, seeing Solo and the Wookiee for the first time, and got to his feet. ”I hope you're not coming for takeoff clearance," he said in a tone of voice half jocular, half puzzled--nobody in his right mind would take off into the nightly inferno of Belsavis's winds. "Did Her Excellency find what she needed in the MuniCenter records? I'm afraid I wasn't able to--”

  "Leia never got to the MuniCenter at all," said Han.

  The Mluki's eyes widened with shock, then flickered to the chronometer on the wall.

  "There's a woman living on Painted Door Street, in the house Nubblyk the Slyte used to own--Roganda Ismaren. Came here about seven years ago..."

  "Ahh," said Jevax thoughtfully. "Roganda Ismaren. Woman so high..." He gestured to someone about Leia's small height. "Black hair, dark eyes..."