“The Gamorrean colonists?” suggested Cray. “Or smugglers, maybe?”
“The Gamorreans haven’t stopped fighting each other long enough to set up a technological base of any kind on any planet where they’ve settled,” said Luke doubtfully. “It might be smugglers—which doesn’t mean they won’t be allied with Harrsk or Teradoc or some other Imperial wannabe, or with one of the big smuggler gangs for that matter. But at this point,” he added, toggling the readout back to the navicomputer and marveling a little that Cray had gotten the thing workable at all, “we don’t have any choice.”
———
Massive, porcine, primitive, and belligerent, Gamorreans will live and thrive wherever there is soil fertile enough to farm, sufficient game to hunt, and rocks to throw at one another, but given their preference they will take forested country, if possible where mushrooms grow. The woods surrounding the four- or five-acre fire scar in which Luke put the Huntbird down were monumental, dense, thick, old, and hugely tall, like the rain forests of Ithor but heavier, and the shadowed, brooding silence beneath their leathery leaves made Luke profoundly uneasy.
“The base should be in that direction,” he said, sitting down rather quickly on the steps of the explorer’s emergency exit—the boarding ramp was inoperational—and pointing off in the direction of the lately risen orange sun. Despite all the energy of the Force that he could summon he felt giddy and ill, and though his lungs were healing rapidly he was still short of breath. “It’s not very far; the energy readings don’t look big enough for power fences or heavy weaponry.”
“Wouldn’t they need power fences at least if there are Gamorreans in the area?” Like Luke, Cray had stripped out of her t-suit; her deft fingers were rapidly rebraiding her hair even as she spoke. Quite a trick without a mirror, thought Luke, a little amused. But Cray could manage it if anyone could.
“The Gamorreans may not have colonized this continent,” he pointed out. Wind stirred at the long grass, dark blue-green, like all the vegetation in this amber-lit world, but far from being unsettling the slight goldenness of the light gave everything a deep sense of sunset peace. A flock of tiny bipeds—red and yellow, and no higher than Luke’s knee—fled, startled from behind a fallen tree trunk, and went whistling and chirping away toward the eaves of the woods.
“For that matter, we may find a colony from some other race altogether. The reports on this world haven’t been updated in fifty years.”
“We have the engine hatches open, Master Luke.” Threepio and Nichos appeared at the top of the steps, the gold and silver metals of their bodies dented and streaked with oil. They, too, had taken a beating in the battle with the asteroid. “Most of the coolant gas has now dissipated into the atmosphere.”
The impact of the last plasma bolt and the shattered asteroid had jammed the hatches into the engine compartment; in addition to the intermittent waves of dizziness that still plagued him, Luke had thought it wiser to let the droids, who needed no breath masks, use their greater strength to force the doors while the humans made a quick reconnaissance of the outside.
The engine itself was a complete mess.
“We’ll need about thirty meters of number eight cabling, and a dozen data couplers,” said Luke half an hour later, sliding gingerly out of an access hatch in the darkened engine room. Even the glowpanels had gone out here, the claustrophobic chamber illuminated by a string of emergency worklights wired to a Scale-10 battery from the emergency kit. “The rest of it I think I can patch.”
I’d better be able to patch, he reflected grimly. Leia’s words about how easy it was to get lost between inhabited worlds reverberated unnervingly in his mind.
Cray withdrew her head from the innards of the navicomp. “I’ll need couplers and some twelve-mil flat cable … you okay, Luke?” For he’d tried to stand, only to sink back, gray-faced and sweating, against the soot-stained bulkhead.
Luke concentrated the Force in his body, on his brain chemistry and the pinched capillaries of his lungs: relaxing, accelerating repair and regrowth. He felt very tired. “I’ll be fine.” Please don’t let there be hostile smugglers at that base, he thought, trying desperately to gather the strength he’d need. Or some kind of secret base of one of the warlords. Or a hidden mine worked by slaves. Or the concealed research station of some nefarious power we’ve never even heard of …
If there was any trouble—even the smallest fight—he didn’t think he could cope with it.
Cray had never seen real action, real trouble. Threepio wasn’t designed for it, and Nichos …
Whatever happened, he had to get back with word that there was definitely something hiding in the Moonflower Nebula. Something dangerous.
“Luke?”
He realized he’d almost blacked out again. Cray was kneeling in front of him—two Crays, dark eyes filled with concern. The accumulated heat of the engines still lingered in this compartment, but even that couldn’t account for the suffocating sensation he felt, hot and stifled, though his hands and feet were cold.
Capillaries. Recovery. Healing.
“Why don’t you let Nichos and me go investigate that signal?”
He took a deep breath and wished he hadn’t. “I think you may need help there.”
Of course, harmless people—good, helpful people—did inhabit unknown bases on remote planets. Please let it be that …
The bad feeling he’d sensed, the knowledge of darkness advancing, didn’t leave him.
“The sooner we can get a message out, the better,” the young woman pointed out. “Whatever’s out in the nebula, we can’t risk letting the Imperial warlords find it, and that risk grows every hour. I can scope out the settlement or camp or whatever it is, ask for the parts we need, and send out a distress signal while you rest a little, then start the patching part of the job as soon as you feel up to it. All right?”
Luke’s head was swimming. He rested it against the bulkhead behind him, fighting for breath. Not all right, he thought. Not if there’s any kind of danger in that camp or in the woods around it.
The spark-charred units, the ruptured hoses dangling like dead limbs, the opened hatches of the compression accelerator and gyro-grav systems, all seemed to be swaying gently, as if the ship were floating on deep water, and the hardrock miners in his skull had resumed their thermal blasting operations again. The thought of getting to his feet, of walking the two or three kilometers to the site of the signal, gave him a sinking feeling inside. I can do it, he told himself grimly. With the help of the Force …
“I think you’ll need me there.”
He held out his hand, shut his teeth hard against nausea as Cray helped him to his feet. She eased him through the hatch, helped him down the steep, ladderlike steps. “What makes you so sure there’ll be trouble?”
“I don’t know,” said Luke softly. “But I can feel trouble of some kind. There’s something …”
They stepped through the hatchway onto the bridge, turned, and found themselves staring down the muzzle of a blaster rifle held by a white-armored Imperial stormtrooper.
Luke’s hand shut around Cray’s wrist as she went for her blaster. “Cray, no!” The trooper tensed—Luke raised his hands, showing them empty. After a moment Cray did likewise. If he went for his lightsaber, Luke thought, the man might still catch them both in the rifle blast, and there was no way of knowing how many others were in the rest of the ship.
From the faceless white helmet a buzzing voice demanded, “State your name and business.”
Cray and Luke stepped back a pace, backs pressed to the wall. Dizziness hit Luke again—he tried to control it, tried to summon enough of the Force to pull the man’s rifle from him if he needed to do it, but suspected it was more than he could manage.
“We’re traders,” he said. “We’re lost, our ship was damaged …”
Blackness closed on his vision and he felt his knees buckle. Cray tried to steady him—the stormtrooper sprang forward, dropped his rifle, and cau
ght his arm.
“You’re hurt,” said the stormtrooper, helping him to sit and kneeling beside him. Nichos and Threepio, hands full of patching materials, appeared from the storeroom hatchway and stared in surprise as the stormtrooper pulled off his helmet, revealing a kindly, much-lined black face surrounded by a grizzled popcorn halo of hair and beard.
“Oh, you poor folks, you look like you’ve had an awful time,” said the man. “You come on over to my camp, I’ll get you something to eat and a cup of tea.”
Bereft of his gleaming armor, Triv Pothman proved to be a trim, strongly built man in his mid-fifties—“Though I admit the damp’s getting to me and I’m not so quick as I used to be.” He gestured to the racks of armor along the curved inner wall of his shelter, a low, white, self-erecting dome patched all over outside with black and salmon-colored lichens, rain-streaked and covered with the dirt of years. Second-growth trees, suckers, and vines surrounded what had been a clearing of Imperial military regulation size all around, though most of the sheds and shelters, and the long-dead posts of the security fence, lay buried now under tangles of vines.
“Forty-five of us, there were.” There was something akin to pride in his voice. “Forty-five of us, and I’m the only one left. The Gamorreans got the rest, mostly, except for that giant fight between the Commander and Killium Neb and his friends over … Well, that was a long time ago, and it cost some good men their lives.” He shook his head regretfully, and poured water from a bearing housing hung over the fire into a spouted pot of painted terra-cotta. The smell of healing herbs filled the vine-hung dome.
“And there they all are.” He gestured to the helmets. “For all the good it ever did them.”
The old unit medkit was far more complete than what had been on board the Huntbird even before the impact had scattered and smashed half the vessels in the explorer craft’s sick bay. Pothman had dosed Luke with another two ampoules of antishock—in addition to what Cray had given him right after the final blast—and had hooked him for half an hour to a therapeutic respirator that still, for a miracle, worked. Looking around over the edge of the breath mask that covered his lower face, Luke was deeply grateful. From his days as a pilot in the Rebel fleet he knew too well that once you got injured, unless you got medical help soon you were going to keep on getting injured as you became less and less able to protect yourself.
Though he never, he reflected with a certain wry amusement, thought he’d be so glad that the Empire took good care to equip its stormtroopers with the best.
A feathered lizard, turquoise as palomella blossoms, appeared between the looped-back curtains of the dome’s doorway, chittered and spread its mane, and Pothman tweaked a chunk of crust from one of the brown rolls he’d taken from his oven in honor of his guests, and tossed it. The lizard minced forward on delicate little feet, picked up the bread, and nibbled, watching the gray-haired hermit all the while with black jewels of eyes.
“Sure is good to see human beings again.” Pothman offered the plate of rolls and honey to Cray, who sat beside Luke on the edge of Pothman’s bunk. He winked at her. “Sure is good to see a nice-looking young lady.”
Cray drew herself up and started to retort that she wasn’t a nice-looking young lady, she held a full professorship at the Magrody Institute, but Luke moved his hand just enough to touch her arm.
The stormtrooper had already turned back to survey the helmets along the wall. They were of an older style than Luke had known, longer in the face to allow for the earlier configuration of respirators, with a dark band of sensors above the eyes.
“They would go on fighting the Gamorreans,” Pothman sighed. “That was like sending them out invitations to tea, of course. They’ll miss their dinners to have a fight.” His grin was very white in his beard. “ ’Course in those days I was quite a fighter myself.”
“You’ve held the Gamorreans off by yourself all this time?” Luke carefully removed the respirator mask from his face, breathed deep, tasting the sweetness of the air. It still made him dizzy, but no longer hurt so much. It should hold him, he thought—he hoped—until they reached civilization again. He turned his head to survey the wide room, the simple clay dishes on the shelf, the traps wrought of reptile sinew and engine strapping, the monofilament fishing lines that had patently started life as part of standard Imperial equipment. A loom reared up near the door, constructed of various grades of engine pipe, with several yards of homespun woven on it.
“Oh, gracious, no.” Pothman handed him a cup of tea: herbal, spicy, warm, and, Luke sensed, healing. Luke had seen no kiln and wondered where he’d gotten the dishes, and the thread on the loom. Out of his white armor, Pothman wore soft-dyed green and brown clothing, embroidered on breast and sleeves and hem with meticulously accurate renderings of the local flowers and reptiles.
“I got caught early on. They took all the rifles and blasters, you see, and they needed somebody to fix them. But after the power cells died they didn’t bother keeping an eye on me. I figure the Emperor forgot the mission a long time ago. You ever hear what happened to it?”
“Mission?” Luke sat up a little and sipped the tea, and did his best to look innocent, something he’d always been good at.
“The Eye of Palpatine.” Pothman opened an equipment locker, brought out a utility pack, and started loading it with wire, cables, couplers, backup data wafers, tools. “That was the name of the mission. Scuttlebutt said there were about two companies of troopers in it, but scattered, so nobody would know, nobody would guess. They put us on the most out-of-the-way planets they could find, to be picked up in the biggest, most dangerous, most secret vessel of them all, a supership, a dreadnaught, a battlemoon … One the enemy wouldn’t see coming until it was too late.”
“What enemy?” asked Luke softly.
There was stillness again, save for the rustling of the trees outside, and the faint clunketing of Pothman’s much-mended machinery, a sound that brought back to Luke his childhood on Tatooine.
Pothman was silent, his back to them, looking down at the utility pack on the chest lid before him. “We didn’t know,” he said at last. “We weren’t told. At the time I thought it was … Well, it was my duty. Now …” He turned back, his face troubled.
“I suppose something went wrong. Somebody found out after all, though everyone said that was impossible, since the Emperor was the only one that knew. After we’d been here nearly a year I got to wondering if maybe the Emperor himself had forgotten. When I saw your ship come over I sort of hoped he’d finally remembered—that he’d sent scouts to see what was left.” His big hands toyed wistfully with the straps.
“But if it wasn’t the Emperor who sent you out, you see, I know enough to know that whoever screwed up and scrapped the mission, nobody’s going to want to be reminded it ever existed. Which means I might be sort of an embarrassment.”
He slung the pack over his shoulder, and came to stand next to the tidy bunk where Luke lay on the silvery survival blankets and feather quilts. “My signal isn’t strong enough to reach anybody, not way out here. But if we can get your engines fixed, you think maybe you might just drop me in some out-of-the-way place where they might not find me? It’s nice to see human faces again. I was the company armorer; I know everything’s changed in all this time, but I can still work pretty good with my hands, and I’ve learned to be a fair cook. I can find work. It’s been a long time.”
No bargaining, thought Luke wonderingly. No Take me off this rock or you won’t get so much as a screwdriver out of me. Everything freely offered, expecting nothing in return.
“It’s been a long time,” he said gently. “The Emperor’s dead, Triv. The Empire’s in pieces. We can take you back to your home, or wherever you want; in the New Republic, or to some port where you can get a flight into the Core Systems, or any other place you want to go.”
“We’re doomed.” See-Threepio turned from the gauges of the slowly filling oxygen tanks to where Nichos, knee-deep in the meadow’s
dark grass, was carefully daubing sealant on the Spatch-Cote repairs. The outer hull had been holed in a dozen places. Though the space between outer and inner hulls had been automatically filled with emergency foam and Nichos had done a quick patch job on the inner hull during the long flight to Pzob, if they were going to stand any chance of a hyperspace jump the outer had to be tight.
“Master Luke and Dr. Mingla have almost certainly walked into a trap!” The golden robot gestured with the hand not holding the round, bulky Spatch-Cote extruder. “A stormtrooper like that has to be ground support for whatever base is out in the asteroid field! I warned them. Standard Imperial bases house at least three companies. More, in isolated locales such as this! What can they do against five hundred and forty shock troops, with Master Luke injured as badly as he is? Plus tracker droids, interrogators, surveillance equipment, automated traps!”
“Power readings weren’t high enough for anything like that,” pointed out Nichos, switching off the intake valve on the tank.
“Of course a hidden base would alter its power readings!” surmised Threepio despairingly. “We’ll be disassembled, cannibalized for scrap, sent to the sandmines of Neelgaimon or the orbital factories around Ryloon! If they’re short of parts here we’ll be—”
“I will be.” Nichos took the extruder from Threepio and walked along the battered white side of the Huntbird, probing at other dents. “It would not be logical for them to destroy you. I, however …”
When with Luke or Cray, or his other friends at the Academy on Yavin, he had made an attempt to use the facial expressions programmed into the hair-fine complexities of his memory, but Threepio had noticed that when around droids, Nichos no longer bothered. There was no sadness, either in his blue eyes or in his voice.
“You—and Artoo-Detoo—are programmed, designed, for specific purposes, he to repair and understand machinery, you to understand and interpret language and culture. I am only programmed to be myself, to reproduce exactly all the knowledge, all the instincts, all the memories of a single, specific human brain, the experiences of a single human life. When you come right down to it, this is of no use to anyone.”
Star Wars: Children of the Jedi Page 6
