by Timothy Zahn
Thrawn shook his head. “Preparing for the Sluis Van attack is the fleet’s top priority at the moment. No, I think we’ll subcontract this one out. I want you to send messages to all the major smuggling chiefs whose groups operate in this area—Brasck, Karrde, Par’tah, any others we have on file. Use their private frequencies and encrypt codes—a little reminder of how much we know about each of them should help ensure their cooperation. Give them Skywalker’s hyperspace vector and offer a bounty of thirty thousand for his capture.”
“Yes, sir.” Pellaeon glanced back down the crew pit, at the activity still going on around the tractor beam station. “Sir, if you knew that Skywalker’s escape was only temporary . . .?”
“The Empire is at war, Captain,” the Grand Admiral said, his voice cold. “We cannot afford the luxury of men whose minds are so limited they cannot adapt to unexpected situations.”
He looked significantly at Rukh, then turned those glowing eyes back on Pellaeon. “Carry out your orders, Captain. Skywalker will be ours. Alive . . . or otherwise.”
CHAPTER
17
In front of Luke, the scopes and displays glowed softly as the diagnostic messages, most of them bordered in red, scrolled past. Beyond the displays, through the canopy, he could see the X-wing’s nose, lit faintly by the sheen of distant starlight. Beyond that were the stars themselves, blazing all around him with cold brilliance.
And that was all. No sun, no planets, no asteroids, no cometary bodies. No warships, transports, satellites, or probes. Nothing. He and Artoo were stranded, very literally, in the middle of nowhere.
The computer’s diagnostic package came to an end. “Artoo?” he called. “What’ve you got?”
From behind him came a distinctly mournful electronic moan, and the droid’s reply appeared on the computer scope. “That bad, huh?”
Artoo moaned again, and the computer’s summary was replaced by the droid’s own assessment of their situation.
It wasn’t good. Luke’s reverse-triggering of the acceleration compensator had caused an unanticipated feedback surge into both hyperdrive motivators—not enough to fry them on the spot, but scorching them badly enough to cause sudden failure ten minutes into their escape. At the Point Four the ship had been doing at the time, that translated into approximately half a light-year of distance. Just for good measure, the same power surge had also completely crystallized the subspace radio antenna.
“In other words,” Luke said, “we can’t leave, we aren’t likely to be found, and we can’t call for help. Does that about sum it up?”
Artoo beeped an addition. “Right,” Luke sighed. “And we can’t stay here. Not for long, anyway.”
Luke rubbed a hand across his chin, forcing back the sense of dread gnawing at him. Giving in to fear would only rob him of the ability to think, and that was the last thing he could afford to lose at this point. “All right,” he said slowly. “Try this. We take the hyperdrive motivators off both engines and see if we can salvage enough components to put together a single functional one. If we can, we remount it somewhere in the middle of the aft fuselage where it can handle both engines. Maybe where the S-Foil servo actuator is now—we don’t need that to get home. Possible?”
Artoo whistled thoughtfully. “I’m not asking if it’ll be easy,” Luke said patiently as the droid’s response came up. “Just if it would be possible.”
Another whistle, another pessimistic message. “Well, let’s give it a try anyway,” Luke told him, unstrapping his restraints and trying to wriggle around in the cramped confines of the cockpit. If he pulled off the back of the ejection seat, he would be able to get into the cargo compartment and the tools stored there.
Artoo warbled something else. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to get stuck,” Luke assured him, changing his mind and reaching for the in-cockpit pouches instead. The gloves and helmet seals for his flight suit were stored there; it’d be just as easy at this point to gear himself for vacuum and then get into the cargo compartment through its underside hatch. “If you want to be helpful, you might pull up the maintenance specs and find out exactly how I go about getting one of those motivators out. And cheer up, will you? You’re starting to sound like Threepio.”
Artoo was still jabbering indignantly over that characterization when the last of Luke’s helmet seals cut off the sound. But he did sound less frightened.
It took nearly two hours for Luke to get past all the other cables and tubing in the way and remove the port engine hyperdrive motivator from its socket.
It took less than a minute more to discover that Artoo’s earlier pessimism had been justified.
“It’s riddled with cracks,” Luke told the droid grimly, turning the bulky box over in his hands. “The whole shield casing. Just hairlines, really—you can barely see some of them. But they run most of the length of the sides.”
Artoo gave a soft gurgle, a comment which required no translation. Luke hadn’t done a lot of X-wing maintenance, but he knew enough to recognize that without an intact superconducting shield, a hyperdrive motivator was little more than a box of interconnected spare parts. “Let’s not give up yet,” he reminded Artoo. “If the other motivator’s casing is all right we may still be in business.”
Collecting his tool kit, feeling inordinately clumsy in zero-gee freefall, he made his way under the X-wing’s fuselage to the starboard engine. It took only a few minutes to remove the proper access cover and tie back some of the interfering cables. Then, trying to get both his faceplate and his glow rod together in the opening without blinding himself, he peered inside.
A careful look at the motivator casing showed that there was no need to continue the operation.
For a long moment he just hung there, one knee bumping gently against the power surge vent, wondering what in the name of the Force they were going to do now. His X-wing, so sturdy and secure in even the thick of combat, seemed now to be little more than a terribly fragile thread by which his life was hanging.
He looked around him—looked at the emptiness and the distant stars—and as he did so, the vague sense of falling that always accompanied zero-gee came flooding back in on him. A memory flashed: hanging from the underside of Cloud City, weak from fear and the shock of losing his right hand, wondering how long he would have the strength to hang on. Leia, he called silently, putting all the power of his new Jedi skill into the effort. Leia, hear me. Answer me.
There was no answer except for the echoing of the call through Luke’s own mind. But then, he hadn’t expected one. Leia was long gone, safe on Kashyyyk by now, under the protection of Chewbacca and a whole planet of Wookiees.
He wondered if she’d ever find out what had happened to him.
For the Jedi, there is no emotion; there is peace. Luke took a deep breath, forcing back the black thoughts. No, he would not give up. And if the hyperdrive couldn’t be fixed . . . well, perhaps there was something else they could try. “I’m coming in, Artoo,” he announced, replacing the access panel and again collecting his tools. “While you’re waiting, I want you to pull everything we’ve got on the subspace radio antenna.”
Artoo had the data assembled by the time Luke got the cockpit canopy sealed over him again. Like the hyperdrive data, it wasn’t especially encouraging. Made of ten kilometers of ultrathin superconducting wire wound tightly around a U-shaped core, a subspace radio antenna wasn’t something that was supposed to be field-repairable.
But then, Luke wasn’t the average X-wing pilot, either.
“All right, here’s what we’re going to do,” he told the droid slowly. “The antenna’s outer wiring is useless, but it doesn’t look like the core itself was damaged. If we can find ten kilometers of superconducting wire somewhere else on the ship, we should be able to make ourselves a new one. Right?”
Artoo thought about that, gurgled an answer. “Oh, come on now,” Luke admonished him. “You mean to tell me you can’t do what some nonintelligent wire-wrapping machine does all day?�
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The droid’s beeping response sounded decidedly indignant. The translation that scrolled across the computer scope was even more so. “Well, then, there’s no problem,” Luke said, suppressing a smile. “I’d guess either the repulsorlift drive or else the sensor jammer will have all the wire we need. Check on that, will you?”
There was a pause, and Artoo quietly whistled something. “Yes, I know what the life support’s limitations are,” Luke agreed. “That’s why you’ll be the one doing all the wiring. I’m going to have to spend most of the time back in hibernation trance.”
Another series of whistles. “Don’t worry about it,” Luke assured him. “As long as I come up every few days for food and water, hibernation is perfectly safe. You’ve seen me do it a dozen times, remember? Now get busy and run those checks.”
Neither of the two components had quite the length of wiring they needed, but after poking around a little in the more esoteric sections of his technical memory, Artoo came to the conclusion that the eight kilometers available in the sensor jammer should be adequate to create at least a low-efficiency antenna. He conceded, however, that there was no way to know for sure until they actually tried it.
It was another hour’s work for Luke to get the jammer and antenna out of the ship, strip the ruined wire off the core of the latter, and move everything to the upper aft fuselage where Artoo’s two graspers could reach it. Jury-rigging a framework to feed the wire and protect it from snagging took another hour, and he took a half hour more to watch the operation from inside to make sure it was going smoothly.
At which point there was nothing left for him to do.
“Now, don’t forget,” he warned the droid as he settled himself as comfortably into the cockpit seat as possible. “If anything goes wrong—or you even think something’s about to go wrong—you go ahead and wake me up. Got that?”
Artoo whistled his assurances. “All right,” Luke said, more to himself than to the droid. “I guess this is it, then.”
He took a deep breath, letting his gaze sweep one last time across the starry sky. If this didn’t work . . . But there was no point in worrying about that now. He’d done all he could for the moment. It was time now for him to draw upon inner peace, and to entrust his fate to Artoo.
To Artoo . . . and to the Force.
He took another deep breath. Leia, he called, uselessly, one last time. Then, turning his mind and thoughts inward, he began to slow his heart.
The last thing he remembered before the darkness took him was the odd sense that someone, somewhere, had in fact heard that final call.. . .
Leia . . .
Leia jerked awake. “Luke?” she called, propping herself up on one elbow and peering into the dimness surrounding her. She could have sworn she’d heard his voice. His voice, or perhaps the touch of his mind.
But there was no one. Nothing but the cramped space of the Lady Luck’s main cabin and the pounding of her own heart and the familiar background sounds of a ship in flight. And, a dozen meters away in the cockpit, the unmistakable sense of Chewbacca’s presence. And as she woke further, she remembered that Luke was hundreds of light-years away.
It must have been a dream.
With a sigh, she lay back down. But even as she did so, she heard the subtle change in sound and vibration pattern as the main sublight drive shut down and the repulsorlift kicked in. Listening closer, she could hear the faint sound of air rushing past the hull.
Slightly ahead of schedule, they were coming in to Kashyyyk.
She got out of bed and found her clothes, feeling her quiet misgivings gnawing with renewed force as she got dressed. Han and Chewbacca could make all the reassuring noises they wanted, but shed read the diplomatic reports, and she knew full well how strong the undercurrent of resentment was that the Wookiees still harbored toward humans. Whether her status as a member of the New Republic hierarchy would make up for that was, in her view, entirely problematical.
Especially given her chronic difficulty in understanding their language.
The thought made her wince, and not for the first time since leaving Nkllon, she wished she’d had Lando use some other droid for his little voice-matching trick. Having Threepio and his seven-million-language translator along would have made this whole thing so much less awkward.
The Lady Luck was already deep into the atmosphere by the time she arrived in the cockpit, skimming low over a surprisingly flat layer of clouds and making smooth curves around the treetops that were occasionally visible poking through them. She remembered when she’d first come across a reference to the size of Kashyyyk’s trees; she’d had a full-blown argument with the Senate librarian at the time about how the government could not afford to have its records data shot through with such clearly absurd errors. Even now, with them right in front of her, she found the things hard to believe. “Is that size typical for wroshyr trees?” she asked Chewbacca as she slipped into the seat beside him.
Chewbacca growled a negative: the ones visible above the clouds were probably half a kilometer taller than the average. “They’re the ones you put nursery rings on, then,” Leia nodded.
He looked at her, and even with her limited ability to read Wookiee faces his surprise was quite evident. “Don’t look so shocked,” she admonished him with a smile. “Some of us humans know a little about Wookiee culture. We aren’t all ignorant savages, you know.”
For a moment he just stared at her. Then, with an urf-urf-urf of laughter, he turned back to the controls.
Ahead and to the right, a tighter group of the extra-tall wroshyr trees had come into view. Chewbacca turned the Lady Luck toward it, and within a few minutes they were close enough for Leia to see the network of cables or thin branches linking them together just above cloud height. Chewbacca circled the ship partway around, bringing it within the perimeter; and then, with just a growl of warning, dropped sharply down into the clouds.
Leia grimaced. She’d never really liked flying blind, especially in an area crowded with obstacles the size of wroshyr trees. But almost before the Lady Luck was completely enveloped by the thick white fog they were clear of it again. Immediately below them was another cloud layer. Chewbacca dropped them into that one, too, and drove through it to clear air again—
Leia inhaled sharply. Filling the entire gap between the group of massive trees, apparently hanging suspended in midair, was a city.
Not just a collection of primitive huts and fires like the Ewok tree villages on Endor. This was a real, genuine city, stretching out over a square kilometer or more of space. Even from this distance she could see that the buildings were large and complex, some of them two or three stories high, and that the avenues between them were straight and carefully laid out. The huge boles of the trees poked up around and, in some places, through the city, giving the illusion of giant brown columns supporting a rooftop of clouds. Surrounding the city on all sides, strangely colored searchlight beams lanced outward.
Beside her, Chewbacca rumbled a question. “No, I’ve never even seen holos of a Wookiee village,” she breathed. “My loss, obviously.” They were getting closer now; close enough for her to see that the Cloud City-type unipod she’d expected was nowhere to be seen.
For that matter, there was no support of any kind visible. Was the whole city being held up by repulsorlifts?
The Lady Luck banked slightly to the left. Directly ahead of them now, at one edge of the city and a little above it, was a circular platform rimmed with landing lights. The platform seemed to be sticking straight out from one of the trees, and it took a few seconds for her to realize that the whole thing was nothing more or less than the remnant of a huge limb that had been horizontally cut off near the trunk.
A not insignificant engineering feat. Dimly, she wondered how they’d disposed of the rest of the limb.
The platform didn’t look nearly big enough to accommodate a ship the size of the Lady Luck, but a quick glance back at the city itself showed that the apparent sm
allness was merely a trick of the tree’s deceptive scale. By the time Chewbacca put them down on the fire-blackened wood, in fact, it was clear that the platform could not only easily handle the Lady Luck, but probably full-sized passenger liners, as well.
Or, for that matter, Imperial Strike Cruisers. Perhaps, Leia decided, she shouldn’t inquire too deeply into the circumstances of the platform’s construction.
She had half expected the Wookiees to send a delegation out to meet her, and she turned out to have been half right. Two of the giant aliens were waiting beside the Lady Luck as Chewbacca lowered the entry ramp, indistinguishable to her untrained eye except for their slightly different heights and the noticeably different designs of the wide baldrics curving from shoulder to waist across their brown fur. The taller of the two, his baldric composed of gold-threaded tan, took a step forward as Leia headed down the ramp. She continued toward him, using all the calming Jedi techniques she knew, praying that this wouldn’t be as awkward as she was very much afraid it would be. Chewbacca was hard enough for her to understand, and he’d been living out among humans for decades. A native Wookiee, speaking a native dialect, was likely to be totally incomprehensible.
The tall Wookiee bowed his head slightly and opened his mouth. Leia braced herself—
[I to you, Leiaorganasolo, bring greetings,] he roared. [I to Rwookrrorro welcome you.]
Leia felt her jaw drop in astonishment. “Ah . . . thank you,” she managed. “I’m—all—honored to be here.”
[As we by yourr presence arre honored,] he growled politely. [I am Ralrracheen. You may find it easierr to call me Ralrra.]
“I’m honored to meet you,” Leia nodded, still feeling a little dazed by it all. Apart from the odd extended growling of his final r sounds, Ralrra’s Wookiee speech was perfectly understandable. Listening to him, in fact, it was as if all the static she’d always had to plow through had suddenly cleared away. She could feel her face warming, and hoped her surprise didn’t show.
