To Drub McKumb.
They hid the children down the well …
The voices of the children floated up to her. They were playing in the big, square room below; she saw them darting among the heavy tables of shalaman wood set along the inner wall, a whole pack of them: mostly human, but including an Ithorian, Wookiees, a Twi’lek, Bith … A woman repairing a half-dissected sterilizer at one of the tables called out an indulgent warning to one toddler who’d ventured too near the bronze, flower-shaped grille that screened the well in the floor’s center, though the grille’s openings were too small to admit anything except the smallest of the toys with which they played. Steam floated up through the openings, warming the room, as did the dim sunlight magnified by the angled crystalplex set in each keyhole window. A dark-haired man played a red-lacquered mandolin. Pittins of every color that pittins came in dozed on the windowsills or tracked the occasional myrmin across the floor.
The door in the rear wall opened, and an old Ho’Din came in, two and a half meters tall and graceful in his black cloak of Jedi mastership, his flowerlike headstalks faded with age. Calm seemed to flow from him, and a deep sense—such as she sometimes felt from Luke—of vast strength bought at a terrible price.
She opened her eyes.
The roofless chamber below her at the base of the tower was empty, full of shadows as the feeble daylight waned.
There was no door in the rear wall.
“They sealed it somehow.” Han passed his palms along the smooth dark stone where the rear wall of Plett’s House had been cut into the rock of the cliff. “Even the best patch jobs will leave a join, but this is watertight.”
“It was about here, though.” Leia half closed her eyes again, recapturing the scene. There was a kind of pain in the memory, a sense of having lost or mislaid something treasured, a long time ago.
The happiness she had felt rising from that room? The peace of being loved unconditionally, which had dissolved in searing laser violence when someone on the Death Star had thrown a final switch?
Looking at the man beside her, she wondered if Han had ever known that kind of peace, that sense of belonging, in his childhood.
Chewie growled a query; Han gave it some thought. “Yeah, I think we’ve still got the echolocator—if Lando didn’t borrow it the last time he flew the Falcon for some cockamamie treasure-hunting scheme.”
“I wouldn’t bet on even an echolocator finding the tunnel that Master came out of,” said Leia. She turned to survey the empty chamber once again. “The Jedi …” She hesitated, thinking about the things Luke had taught her, the things the old Jedi Vima-Da-Boda had said. “If the Jedi could cover their tracks to the extent of having everybody in the valley just forget they’d ever been there in the face of some pretty severe bomb damage, I don’t think an echolocator’s going to do us a lot of good.”
“I think you’re right.” Han caressed the stone again, as if he half believed it was illusion rather than technology that concealed it. And perhaps, thought Leia, it was. “But at least now we know two things.”
“Two things?”
“That there was an entrance here,” said Han grimly, “… and that it wasn’t the entrance Drub used.”
Chapter 6
The Jedi Knights had murdered his family.
A band of them had descended on the town where he’d grown up, summoning fog by the power of the Force in the dead of night and moving through it in cold and shadow, wraiths of power and silence with eyes glowing green as marshfire in the dark. He’d fled, gasping, the icy pressure of their minds clutching at his, trying to cripple him and bring him back. He’d lain in the trees outside of town …
(trees?)
… and seen them line up the women, laughing at their screams as they pulled their babies from their arms and sliced them to pieces with their lightsabers. He’d seen cauterized stumps lying on the ground, heard the shrieks that had echoed in the bitter night air. The Jedi had sought him, hunting him in speeders, whooping derisively while he fled over rocks and mud and streams …
(mud and streams? I was raised in the desert.)
… and then turned back, to slaughter the children. He’d seen his younger brother and sister …
(What brother?)
… cut down while they pleaded for their lives …
Who made this up?
It was true. Every word of it was true.
Or something very like it was true, anyway.
Luke shut his mind, breathed deep through the pain that remained in his chest and lungs. He gathered the Force to him, let the knowledge run off him like water from oiled armor. The memories were like those in Nichos’s mind, he realized. Words, sometimes powerful words, but absolutely without images. Words that said they were the truth, that felt like the truth …
His head ached. His body ached. His concentration wavered, darkened, and the feeling of betrayal, the bruised and savaged ache in his heart, returned. The Jedi had betrayed him.
He spiraled back into darkness.
Lying on Han’s bunk in the Millennium Falcon with the bandaged stump of his right arm a blaze of agony underneath the painkiller Lando had given him, and worse than that agony the knowledge that Ben had lied to him. Ben had lied: It was Darth Vader who had spoken the truth.
Yes, revenge, voices whispered. Take your revenge for that.
For a moment he was twenty-one again, his soul a bleeding pulp of betrayal.
Why did you lie, Ben?
Looking back, he knew exactly why Ben had lied. At eighteen, the knowledge that his father still lived, still existed in some form, no matter how changed, would have drawn him to that father as only an orphan could have been drawn … would have drawn him to the dark side. At eighteen, he would not have had the experience, the technical strength, to resist. Ben had known that.
The Force flickered in him, like a single flame on a windy night.
“Luke?”
Revenge on the Jedi, on their harlots and their brats. Burn and kill as they burned and killed your parents …
The image in his mind was of seared skeletons in the sand outside the demolished wreck of the only home he’d ever known. The stink of burning plastic, the desert heat hammering his head less terrible than the oily heat of the flames. The emptiness in his heart was a dry well plunging lightless to the center of the world.
That farm in the desert hadn’t been much of a belonging-place, but it had been all he’d ever had.
When he’d gone back to Tatooine to rescue Han from Jabba the Hutt, he had returned to that ruined farmstead on the edge of the Dune Sea. Nobody had taken up the land. Jawas had looted what was left of the house, probably as soon as the ashes cooled. The rooms around the sunken courtyard had collapsed. The whole place was only a crumbling subsidence, half filled with sand.
The markers he’d put on the graves of the people who’d been parents to him had been stolen, too.
Uncle Owen had given his whole life to the farm. It was as if he had never existed at all.
“Luke?”
He blinked. It wasn’t a good idea.
“Luke, are you all right?”
“Oh, please, Master Luke, try to remember who you are! The situation is quite desperate!”
He opened his eyes. The whole room performed one slow, deliberate loop-the-loop and Luke tightened his grip on the sides of the bunk in which he lay to keep from falling out, but at least Nichos and See-Threepio, standing over him, didn’t try to clone duplicates of themselves, and the pain in his chest was far less than it had been. He felt deeply, profoundly tired.
Beyond Nichos and Threepio he could see the shut door of the small cell in which he lay: brightly illuminated, comfortable, with three other bunks and a couple of lockers and drawers. Clean, cold, and with an air of being barely lived in, except for his own black flight suit hanging in one locker, his lightsaber on a dresser top, and the black cloak of a Jedi spread like a blanket across one of the other bunks.
Luke
raised his arm and saw that he was wearing the olive-gray undress uniform of an Imperial stormtrooper.
The Jedi killed …
The Jedi killed …
He took a deep breath, summoned all of the Force away from the healing of his body—Nichos and Threepio immediately split into two again—and directed it inward on those memories like a cleansing light.
The voices in his mind yattered on for a bit, then scoured away.
He woke up again, weak and shaken. He couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few moments because Threepio was still explaining …
“… said that there was nothing wrong with you and you’d only malinger if you went to sick bay! We didn’t know what to do …”
“We’re going to shell Plawal,” said Luke.
Both his companions looked at him in alarm. “We know that, Master Luke!”
Luke sat up, catching at Threepio’s arm as a wave of nausea swept over him; Nichos said, “We’ve been hyper-jumping to half a dozen planets along the Outer Rim where the Empire hid its shock troops for this mission thirty years ago. The lander went down on Tatooine, Bradden, I don’t know where-all. Everything’s automated: landers, pickup, indoctrination …”
“Indoctrination?” said Luke. Another image came, distant and blurred through the ache in his head: a semicircular chamber heaped with unconscious Gamorreans, weapons still in their hands and the tiny, gray, parasitic morrts that clung to them even into battle beginning to recover from the stunrays and skitter nervously over the bodies. Two huge silvery droids of the old G-40 single-function type were moving among the bodies, pulling the Gamorreans to their feet—which G-40s could do with terrifying ease—and giving each an injection, then shoving them into the white metal coffins of single-man indoctrination booths that ranged along the curved back wall of the room.
He touched his forehead. A small circle of slightly roughened skin remained where the cerebral feed had been hooked in. The same thing, he realized, must have been done to him.
“Where are we?” He got up—carefully—and fastened his lightsaber to his belt as they stepped through the door, into a corridor smelling of metal, chemicals, and cleaning solution. The walls were medium gray under smooth, even light; the deck underfoot vibrated with the faint hum of subspace cruising speeds. A boxy MSE-15 droid glided by, cleaning the floor.
“On the ship,” said Threepio. “The … the dreadnaught. The battlemoon Trooper Pothman spoke of. The giant vessel masked as an asteroid that fired on us. The Eye of Palpatine.”
The Eye of Palpatine. The name rang familiar in Luke’s mind. The voices had told him all about it in that long, hazy spell of memories that were not his own. Somehow he knew the dimensions of the ship, huge, more vast than even the biggest of the Super Star Destroyers, bigger than a torpedo sphere, with firepower to waste a planet.
Of course, he thought. It had been built back before the Death Star, when the Imperial Fleet still thought bigger was better.
“It wasn’t a base on that asteroid, Master Luke,” explained Threepio. “That asteroid was the ship, firing at us with an automatic gunnery computer …”
“Are you sure?” Luke could have sworn it had been a living hand on the guns. No computer had that kind of timing.
“Absolutely,” said Nichos. “Nobody can get up into the gun decks. And there’s nobody on board who can handle weaponry—not this kind of weaponry, anyway.”
“Nobody …,” said Luke. And then, “They’re picking up troops …” He stopped himself, remembering the overgrown base in the forest, the forty-five helmets staring emptily from the wall. “Don’t tell me there were still troops waiting.”
They stepped into the troop deck’s main mess hall. Ten or twelve enormous, white, furry bipeds were clustered nervously around the food slots, pulling out plates and swiftly sucking up everything smaller than bite-size through short, muscular probosci set under their four blinking black eyes. Several of them carried weapons—mostly legs wrenched off tables and chairs, it looked like—so Luke guessed they had to be at least semisentient.
There was a noise from the doors at the opposite end of the long room. The armed bipeds turned, raising their weapons. Seven tripodal creatures wandered in, baglike body masses swaying weirdly down from the central girdle of bone supported by the long legs, the tentacles between the hip joints dangling loose. Eyestalks rising above the body mass wavered with a motion that even Luke could tell was disoriented.
Two of the furry bipeds reached into the food slots and gathered as many plates and bowls as they could carry, and, guarded by one of their chair-leg-bearing mates, crossed cautiously to the newcomers. The larger of the two fuzzies raised a paw, hooted something in soft, unintelligible crooning, and, when the tripods made no response whatsoever, held out the plates.
The tripods extruded feeding tubes from among the eyestalks and ate. Some of them reached confusedly up with the tentacles to take the plates. The white furries remaining by the food slots wheeped and muffed to one another. The taller of the food bearers reached out with a curious gentleness and touched—patted—the nearest tripod in a gesture Luke knew at once was reassurance.
“That’ll be enough of that, trooper!” The room’s third set of sliding doors hurshed open, and a gang of about fifteen Gamorreans strode in. Some of them had wedged themselves into pieces of the largest stormtrooper fatigues obtainable by cutting out the sleeves, or had fastened chunks of the shiny white armor onto their arms and chests with silver engine tape. Others wore naval trooper helmets, and others still had the short-faced white stormtrooper helmets perched on top of their heads like hats. Ugbuz, in the lead, had donned a scuttle-shaped black gunner’s helmet, and under it his warty, snouted face looked surprisingly sinister. All were armed to the tusks with blasters, forcepikes, axes, and bows.
“The man’s malingering! Everyone had a physical before signing up. That’s Fleet regulations, and there’s no excuse for this kind of thing! Too many damned malingerers on this ship!”
Ugbuz snapped his fingers. Another Gamorrean—Krok, Luke thought—headed for the food slots and coffee machines with the heavy, rolling stride typical of the race while Ugbuz and the others took seats at a table. Luke saw that Cray and Triv Pothman were among them.
Dim memories crowded back from the past several days. He remembered eating, sleeping, sometimes trying to convince his commanding officer to let him go to sick bay when the pain and dizziness got too bad … practicing occasionally in the ship’s gunnery range, though his head ached too much for him to shoot well … with other stormtroopers.
In his memory they were all human.
The white fluffies moved back a little to let the Gamorrean stormtrooper get coffee for himself and his mates, scratched their heads and made cooing noises as they watched the group around the table with puzzled unease. They, too, bore the fading singe marks of a cerebral feed, and Luke deduced that the indoctrination had taken on some species more firmly than on others. One of the tripods stumbled vaguely toward the stormtrooper table; it got too close and Triv Pothman swatted the thing with a vicious backhand, sending it stumbling among the chairs. The aging savant had shaved, and his face wore the hard expression of careless arrogance with which Luke was familiar among the troopers of the Empire: an utter sureness of position, the knowledge that whatever deeds he might commit, they would be sanctioned by those above.
The same look was on Cray’s face.
Luke understood. He had felt like that himself for the past several days.
He sighed, and picked his way between the tables toward them, wondering if he could channel the healing of the Force sufficiently at this point to lead Cray out of her indoctrination. His head ached and every limb felt weighted, but the pounding nausea of the earlier stages of the concussion was gone. In a pinch, he thought, he could rally enough concentration, enough power of the Force, to touch the Force within her.
The Gamorreans—or at least the Gakfedd tribe of them—were obviously born t
o be stormtroopers. They seemed to have made themselves thoroughly at home: The floor of the mess hall was littered with plastic plates, bowls, and coffee cups, rising to a drift almost a meter deep near the food slots themselves. MSE droids moved over and around the mess like foraging vermin, but were mechanically unable to pick up the dishes and return them to the drop slots that would take them back to the automated kitchens. Near one of the several sets of sliding doors, a stolid SP-80 droid was methodically washing a spatter of foodstains off the wall.
“Captain.” Luke saluted Ugbuz—who returned the gesture with military briskness—then took a seat next to Cray.
“Luke.” Her greeting was casual, buddy-to-buddy. She’d cut off her hair—or Ugbuz, in his persona of a stormtrooper officer, had made her cut it. The centimeter-long bristle lay close and fine against her scalp. Without makeup, and in the olive-gray uniform only slightly too large for her tall frame, she looked like a gawky teenage boy.
“Pull up a chair, pal, rest your bones. You figure the jump this morning was our last pickup? Get us some coffee, you,” she added, with barely a glance in the direction of the two droids. “You want any, Triv?”
“I want some coffee.” The elderly man grinned. “But I guess I’ll have to settle for that gondar sweat those machines are puttin’ out.”
Cray laughed, easy and rough. It was the first time Luke had seen her laugh in months—oddly enough, the first time he’d ever seen her this relaxed. “You on rotation for the holo tapes, Luke?” she asked. “I dunno who stocked the library on this crate. Nuthin’ later than—”
“I need to talk to you, Cray.” Luke nodded toward the open door to the hallway from which he’d come. “In private.”
She frowned, her dark eyes a little concerned, though it was clear to him that she saw him as a fellow trooper. She probably remembered after a fashion that they’d been friends for some time, the same way she remembered her name was Cray Mingla, but probably didn’t think much about it. Luke knew that at the height of the Emperor’s power the Imperial troopers had been highly motivated and fanatically loyal, but this depth of indoctrination was something he’d never before encountered. An experiment that hadn’t been followed up? Something in use for this mission alone because of its intense secrecy?
Star Wars: Children of the Jedi Page 9
