by Brian Daley
Han felt himself being lifted, but distantly, as if he had been packed in a crate of dunnage beads. Incidental views showed him that the same was happening to all the others except Bollux, who seemed to have disappeared altogether.
Then came a ride of uncertain duration. The lay of the land and the vagaries of the portage showed Han the rocky ground, Dellalt’s blue-white sun, his companions being carried along by other captors, and then the ground again, with no predictability.
At last he saw a gaping hole in the terrain, an entrance to a subsurface area three times the size of the Falcon’s main hatch. The boulder that had hidden it was raised on six thick support jacks. Lowered, it would seal and camouflage the hole perfectly, Han knew, because he himself had prowled past it earlier in investigating the area.
Wide pleated hoses had been brought up from beneath the surface. Their pulsations indicated that a gas was being pumped through them, but Han could detect nothing by sight or smell. This was how they had been paralyzed, then; he concluded dizzily that the fantastic headgear he had seen contained breathing filters or respirators.
His bearers moved toward the opening. Suddenly darkness swirled all around him. Either he drifted into and out of consciousness or the lighting in the underground area was only intermittent; it was impossible to tell which. He knew that once or twice he caught sight of the sources of illumination: primitive glow-rods arcing over the tunnels, like tracer trails of rockets, in soft colors of blue and green and red.
Han was carried past many rooms that seemed to serve a wide variety of functions. Once he heard sounds of adults chanting, then of children doing the same. There were the rhythms of heavy machinery, whirring turbines and banging switching panels, racing gears and the spitting, crackling openings and closings of massive power bars. He smelled foods that were strange to him, and people, with all their various odors.
He tried to concentrate, either to find a way out of his predicament or to experience his last moments fully, but instead kept drifting into passivity.
His first indication that the paralysis was wearing off was when he was unceremoniously dumped onto a cold stone floor; he didn’t quite let out a yelp but came close. He hurt where he had hit: his shoulder, back, and rump.
He heard someone—Badure, he thought—groan. Han tried to sit up. A bad mistake; a flare ignited in his forehead. He lay back down, knowing now what had elicited Badure’s groan. He clasped his forehead, a major victory of movement, and ran his tongue over his teeth, checking to see if fungus were really growing there.
Suddenly an enormous shaggy face was hovering over him. Chewbacca hauled him up by great fistsful of his flight jacket and sat him up against a large stone. Han’s faltering hand went automatically to his holster and found it vacant. That frightened him, but galvanized him as well.
He clamped both hands to his head, whispering so that it wouldn’t come apart. “Best time to escape’s the soonest,” he told his first mate. “Kick the door over and let’s leg it.”
His friend urrffed with a disgusted gesture to the door. Han made a major effort and looked up, setting off little shooting stars on the periphery of his vision.
The door was barely discernible, an oblong of stone fitted into the wall so tightly that barely a hairline crack showed. There was a glow-rod on either side of it, but the rest of the room was unlit. Han frisked himself—no tools, no weapons, not even a toothpick.
Badure and Hasti had been dumped together. Skynx was still rolled in a tight ball, but of Bollux there was no sign. The Wookiee plucked Han to his feet, and the pilot moved to one of the glow-rods and pulled it from its socket. The filament retained enough power to run independently for some time. Han moved farther into the chamber, waving the light as he explored; his partner trailed behind, huge fists ready.
“Check the size of this place!” Han found the breath to whisper. The Wookiee grunted. The stone ceiling arced away into the gloom beyond the light. Han came upon row after long row of low stone monoliths, about the height of his sternum, twice as wide as they were high. He couldn’t see an end to them.
A voice behind them made both partners jump. “Where are we?” It was Hasti, who had just recovered enough to rise and follow. “And what are those things? Shelves? Work tables?”
“Runways?” Han added, wincing at the throbbing in his head. “Paperweights? Who knows? Let’s look the rest of this granite gymnasium over.” At least, he thought, moving about would help counteract the paralysis. Best to let the others rest for now.
But a search of the gargantuan room, which was about the size and shape of a medium spacecraft hangar, yielded no other doors, no other features at all, simply a vast space filled with the stone slabs.
“The whole mountain’s probably hollow,” Han conjectured, keeping his voice low. “But I don’t see how those hopping half-wits we saw could’ve done it.” They started back toward the door.
Chewbacca uttered a low sound.
Han translated. “He’s saying how dry it is in here. You’d expect it to be damp, from condensation if nothing else.” Their footsteps clacked and echoed.
By that time Badure was sitting up and Skynx had uncurled. Interrupting one another with several simultaneous conversations and frequent crossovers, they established the bare facts of what had happened.
“What will they do with us?” Skynx asked, not concealing his trembling.
“Who knows?” Han responded. “But they took Bollux and Max. I hope those two lads don’t end up as drill bits and belt buckles.” He regretted now his own and Chewbacca’s abuse of the aircraft mockups on the landing field, and wondered if this was the standard treatment of vandals, recalling the Swimmer Shazeen’s comment that few travelers made it through the mountains. “Anyway, they haven’t killed us out of hand; that’s one thing in our favor, right?” Skynx did not seem comforted.
“I’m thirsty,” Hasti announced, “and hungry as a Wookiee.”
“I’ll summon room service,” offered Han. “Marinated range-squab for four, and a few magnums of chilled T’iil-T’iil? We’ll get the place redecorated while we’re at it.”
She snorted. “You should get the auto-valet, Solo, and feed yourself into it; you look like a jet-juicer just off an eight-day twister.”
Amused, Han glanced at her, giving her a long-suffering smile. Then he sighed and sat down with his back against one of the stone slabs. Chewbacca lowered himself next to Han. “Hey, partner; forward guard to your center’s flanking slot, six win-lose units.”
Chewbacca fell into deep concentration, chin on fist, envisioning the gameboard match they would be playing on the Falcon. Without computer assistance, playing was much more difficult and involved, but it might help pass the time.
Hasti went to stand before the chamber’s single door. Han looked up and saw that her shoulders were shaking, as was the glow-rod she held in her hand. He got up and went to comfort her, assuming she was weeping, but she pushed his hand away, and it dawned on him that she was trembling in anger.
Without warning, the girl flung herself at the door, swinging the glow-rod. It burst into splinters and a shower of sparks and blazing shards. She pounded the stone with the stump of the glow-rod, kicking it and beating it with her free hand, ranting maledictions she had learned in a life among the mining camps and factory worlds of the Tion Hegemony.
Han and Badure approached her when the worst of her rage seemed spent. “Nobody’s locking me under some old mountain to rot!” she yelled. She swung randomly at the men with the battered stump of the glow-rod, and they found it more politic to duck than to grapple. “Part of that treasure’s mine, and nobody better try to cut me out of it!”
Puffing, drained, she shuffled over to where the Wookiee sat. Chewbacca had watched the proceedings curiously. Hasti dropped the glow-rod stump and sat down next to the Millennium Falcon’s first mate.
Han was about to say something, if only to comment on the intensity of her avarice, when a glissando from Skynx’s
flute sounded through the room.
The Ruurian still wore his instruments. They had been cradled to his middle, concealed by his woolly coat, when he had curled up. He was tuning them in an absorbed way, shutting out his current distress, having perched on the slab against which Chewbacca and Hasti sat.
Han went to listen while Badure stayed at the door to study it with the remaining glow-rod. In the halflight Skynx played a haunting tune full of longing and loneliness. Han dropped down next to Hasti and together they listened. The music made strange play with the acoustics of the vast space.
Skynx paused. “This is a song of my home colony, you see. It’s called ‘By the Banks of the Warm, Pink Z’gag.’ It’s played at cocoon-weaving time, when the cycle’s crop of larvae gather to go chrysalis. At the same time the previous cycle’s cocoons open and the chroma-wings come forth to exude their pheromones, which draw them to one another. The air is sweet and light then; gaiety is there.”
A large globule of emotion-secretion gathered at the corner of each faceted red eye. “This adventuring has been educational, but most of it is nothing more than danger and hardship a very long way from home. If I were ever to come to the banks of the Z’gag again, I would never leave!” He resumed playing the sad melody.
Hasti, gazing vacantly into the darkness, was disheveled, but looked attractive nonetheless, nearly as pretty as when she had been gowned and primped onboard the Falcon. Han slipped an arm around her and she leaned against him, scarcely noticing him.
“Don’t fold until the hand’s over,” he encouraged her quietly.
She turned to him with a labored smile, brushing her dirty fingers against his stubble of beard, tracing the raw scar across his chin. “You know, this is an improvement, Solo. You’re not Slick now, not so smooth and careless.”
He leaned toward her and she didn’t turn away. And then he kissed her. There was some question as to who was more surprised. Without parting, they settled into a more comfortable embrace, and gave the kiss serious attention. Skynx’s music carried them along.
She shoved herself free at last. “Han, oh, I—stop it; please, stop!” He retreated, confused. “The last thing I need is to get involved with you.”
Sounding wounded, he asked, “What’s wrong with me?”
“You run all over people and you never take anything seriously, for starters. You joke through life with that silly smirk on your face, so sure of yourself I want to bounce a rock off your skull!”
She kept him at arm’s length. “Solo, my sister Lanni inherited Dad’s Guild book, so she had pilot’s status here in the Tion. But I had to work any job I could get. Mess-hand, housegirl, sanit-crew, I’ve done them all in the camps, the mines, the factories. I’ve seen your type all my life. Everything’s a big laugh, and you can charm the daylights out of people when you feel like it, but you’re gone the next day and you never look back. Han, there are no people in your life!”
He protested, “Chewie—”
“—is your friend,” she cut him off, “but he’s a Wookiee. And you’ve got that pair of mechanical cohorts, Max and Bollux, and that hotshot starship of yours, but the rest of us are temporary cargo. Where are the people, Han?”
He started to defend himself, but she overrode him. Chewbacca, intrigued, forgot about his next gameboard move.
“I’m sure you drive the portside girls wild, Solo; you look like you just stepped out of a holo-thriller. But I’m not one of them; never was, never will be.”
She softened a bit. “I’m no different from Skynx. On my birthworld there’s a stretch of land my parents used to own. I’m going to get my cut of the treasure, I swear on my blisters, and buy it back if I have to purchase the whole planet. I’ll build a home and take care of Badure, because he took care of Lanni and me. I’ll have things of my own and a life of my own. I’ll share it if I meet the right man, but I’ll live without him if I don’t. Solo, light housekeeping in a starship isn’t my idea of a dream come true!” She drew away from him and went to join Badure, pushing her fingers through the tangles of red hair.
Skynx finished his sad song, then lowered his flute. “I wish I could see the home colony one more time, the air filled with the chroma-wings and their pheromones and the sounds of their wooing. What would you wish for, Captain Solo?”
Staring absently after Hasti, Han shrugged. “Stronger pheromones.”
Skynx started. Then, sides rippling, began chortling in the Ruurian version of convulsive laughter, issuing chittering, high-pitched giggles. Chewbacca loosed a sustained howl of amusement, slapping his thigh with a huge paw, his mane shaking. That started Han chuckling ruefully. He reached up and gave Skynx a push; the Ruurian rolled over onto his back, tittering and kicking his short limbs in the air. A guffaw exploded from Badure and even Hasti, shaking her head in exasperation, shared the joke. Chewbacca, blue eyes tearing, slapped Han’s shoulder, whereupon the pilot fell sideways, barely able to breathe for laughing.
In the midst of it all, the door swept open.
Bollux was ushered in and the door closed before any of them could do more than gape. In another moment they had congregated around the ’droid, elbowing one another, their demands for information and their questions interrupting one another’s.
After a few seconds Badure shouted everyone down. They quieted, realizing he would ask the same questions as they anyway. “What’s happened? Who are those people? What do they want from us?”
Bollux made the strangely human self-effacing sounds he employed in approaching a delicate subject. “There’s rather a surprising story here. It’s somewhat complicated. You see, long ago, there was—”
“Come on, Bollux!” Han shouted, cutting through the cybernetic rhetoric, “What are they going to do with us?”
The ’droid sounded dismayed. “I know it sounds absurd in this day and age, sir, but unless we can do something, you’re all about to become, er, a human sacrifice.”
XII
“BY which,” Skynx said with a forlorn hope, “we may assume you mean only humans?”
“Not quite,” Bollux admitted. “They’re not really sure what you and First Mate Chewbacca are, but they’ve concluded they have nothing to lose by sacrificing you. They’re discussing procedures now.”
The Wookiee growled and Skynx’s red eyes glazed.
“Bollux, who are these people?” Han demanded.
“They call themselves the Survivors, sir. The signal we picked up was a distress call. They’re waiting to be picked up. When I asked them why they didn’t simply go to the city, they became very vexed and excited; they harbor a great deal of hatred for the other Dellaltians. I gathered that that animosity is tied up with their religion somehow. They are extreme isolationists.”
“How did you find all this out?” Badure wanted to know. “Do they speak any Standard?”
“No, sir,” the ’droid replied. “They speak a dialect that was prevalent in this section of space prior to the rise of the Old Republic. It was recorded on a language tape in Skynx’s material, and Blue Max had stored it along with other information. Of course, I didn’t reveal that Max exists; he translated for me in burst-signals and I conducted the conversation.”
“A culture of pre-Republic origins,” pondered Skynx, forgetting to be scared.
“Will you forget the homework?” snapped Hasti, then turned again to Bollux. “What’s all this about sacrifices? Why us?”
“Because they’re waiting to be picked up,” said the ’droid. “They’re convinced that life-form termination enhances the effect of their broadcast.”
“So we stumbled in, a major power boost,” mused Han, thinking of all those people who had disappeared in these mountains. “When’s the big sendoff?”
“Late tonight, sir; it has something to do with the stars and is accompanied by considerable ritual.”
We’ve got just one trump card left, Han thought, then said, “I think that’ll work out just fine.”
Their captors wasted no
food or drink on them, which Han loudly proclaimed an indication that they had fallen into the hands of a low-class outfit. But they still had plenty of time to question Bollux.
The mountain warren was indeed a large complex, though it apparently housed what Bollux estimated to be no more than one hundred people living in a complicated family-clan group. Asked why he had been separated from them all, the ’droid could only say that the Survivors appeared to understand what automata were and held them in some awe. They had been adamant about the need to go forward with the sacrifice, but had bowed to his demands that he be permitted to see his companions.
On the details of the sacrifice Bollux was less clear. Ceremonial objects and equipment were being moved to the surface even as they spoke; the sacrifice was to take place on the mock-up landing field. Although the ’droid had been unable to locate the confiscated weapons, the captives decided that any attempt at escape would have a better chance of success if made on the surface. Han revealed his plan to the others, vague as it was.
“There are a lot of things that could go wrong,” Hasti protested.
Han agreed. “The worst of which is getting sacrificed, which will happen anyway. How long until nightfall?”
She consulted her wrist chrono; there were many hours yet. They decided to rest. Chewbacca barked his gameboard move to Han, then settled down for a nap. Badure followed suit.
Han scowled at the Wookiee, whose gameboard move was extremely unconventional. “Just because we’re going to be sacrificed, you’re playing a reckless game now?” The Wookiee flashed his teeth in a self-satisfied grin.
Skynx appeared to be in deep conversation with Bollux, using the obscure dialect the Survivors spoke. Hasti had gone off to commune with her thoughts, and Han decided not to bother her. He wished urgently that the group could take some immediate course of action to dispel any brooding. None was available, so he settled into that—for him—most difficult of all tasks, waiting.
