Star Wars: Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  He took a deep breath and wondered how much of his present dizziness and disorientation was the lingering effect of the concussion, and how much a side effect of a too massive indoctrinal shock. He would need all the Force he could summon to break Cray out of this …

  Cray got to her feet and trailed after Luke toward the doorway, casually kicking aside plates and an MSE as she went. Even her walk was a man’s walk, adopted unconsciously, the way the Gamorreans seemed to have acquired Basic speech. Threepio and Nichos followed unobtrusively, and Luke let his hand slide down to loosen his blaster in its holster, thumbing the setting down to mildest stun.

  He never got the chance to use it.

  He and Cray paused to let the white furries, still clutching their makeshift weapons, amble out of the door ahead of them. “I dunno what the service is comin’ to,” muttered Cray, shaking her head. “Look at that. Gettin’ recruits from all over the damn place. They’ll be takin’ festerin’ aliens next.” The tripods continued to wander aimlessly around the mess hall, bumping occasionally into furniture or tripping over the MSEs. Clearly the indoctrination that had worked so thoroughly on the Gamorreans had left them—whatever they were—totally bewildered. Where would you put the cranial wires on them, anyway? wondered Luke.

  Then the doorway across the room swished violently open and a voice yelled, “Get ’em, men!”

  It was the rival Gamorrean tribe of the Klaggs.

  Ugbuz and his Gakfedds upended tables, dropped behind them as blaster bolts blazed and spattered wildly around the room. The Klaggs, too, wore bits of stormtrooper gear, engine-taped to their homespun and leather, and cried orders and oaths in Basic. Cray swore and hauled up a table into a makeshift barrier, blazing away in return with no regard for the deadly ricochets bouncing and zapping crazily in all directions; her first bolt caught a Klagg on his chest armor, hurling him back among his fellows as the others of his tribe ducked, ran, zigzagged into the room, firing as they went. Some were armed with blaster carbines and semiautos, others with slugthrowers, forcepikes, and axes. Their aim was universally awful.

  The two Gamorrean tribes clashed in thick waves of metal, flesh, and garbage, and began to beat and tear one another as if taking up the battle outside the Huntbird exactly where they’d left off. Cray screamed, “Scum-eating mutineers! Captain!” and plunged into the fray before Luke could stop her.

  “Cray!” Luke ran two steps after her, the deck seeming to lurch beneath his feet, and collided with two frantic tripods that couldn’t seem to locate the door three meters in front of them. With a roar one of the Klaggs bore down on him, swinging an ax. Luke ducked and nearly fell, shoved the tripods toward the door, caught up a chair, and deflected the ax; the Klagg struck him aside and plunged after the defenseless tripods. It caught one of them by the leg, the poor thing screaming and flailing with its tentacles. It took all the Force Luke could summon just to get back to his feet, forget about levitating anything—he grabbed the chair again and swung it, slamming the Gamorrean full force in the back, then whipped his lightsaber free and planted himself in the doorway as the tripods fled wailing into the corridor.

  The Gamorrean hurled a table at him, which Luke bisected, then struck at him with an ax at the same moment a ricocheting blaster bolt caught Luke glancingly on the shoulder. Either the blaster was turned fairly low or its power cell was nearly exhausted, but the jolt of it knocked him, gasping and confused, to the floor. He rolled, his vision blurring, blacking. Cut at the Gamorrean, who’d been joined by a friend, also wielding an ax—double vision? Luke wondered cloudily, but he took off one assailant’s arm and tried to get to his feet and out the door. He couldn’t—his head was swimming too badly for him to figure out why—and he could only slash upward at his remaining assailant, cleaving in half the table that slammed down on him before it could crush his bones.

  The cold sick weakness of shock and the sensation of something being wrong with the gravity …

  Then the Klaggs were gone, leaving a shambles of blood and broken furniture. Luke stayed conscious just long enough to switch off his lightsaber.

  Pain brought him to as if someone had drenched his left leg with acid. He cried out, clutching at the greasy mess of blankets on which he lay, and someone slapped him hard enough to slam him back down, breathless and dizzy and almost nauseated with pain.

  “Shouldn’t you get something from sick bay for that?”

  Ugbuz’s voice.

  And in reply a vicious, squealing snuffle, and warm drool spattered down onto Luke’s face and bare chest. More pain, as someone jerked tight a bandage around his left leg.

  Not a bandage, he thought, identifying another sound, the slick, shrill searing noise of engine tape being pulled off a roll. A familiar sound. If it weren’t for engine tape the Rebellion would have collapsed in its first year.

  Cold air on his thigh, his knee, his foot. And rough, clawed hands taping a splint onto his leg.

  The wrench of it made him cry out again and Ugbuz said, “Suck it up, trooper.”

  Luke wondered about the incidence of Imperial officers being killed from behind by friendly fire. He opened his eyes.

  He was in a hut. A HUT? The ceiling, only a meter or two above his head, was made of plastic piping roofed with pieces of stormtrooper armor and mess hall plates held together with wire and engine tape. Glowrods dangled from the piping rafters, their trailing wires plugged into a backpack-size Scale-20 power cell in the corner, providing the only illumination. Beyond the doorway, curtained with a silver t-blanket on which the words PROPERTY OF IMPERIAL NAVY were clearly visible, could be seen the vague gray steel walls of some larger space, a gym or a cargo hold. Ugbuz stood in the doorway, arms folded, looking down at him where he lay on a bed made of dirty blankets, and above him—taping the splints to his leg—knelt the enormous, vicious-looking Gamorrean sow whom Pothman had pointed out to him as Bullyak, head female of the Gakfedd tribe.

  “Now, I’ll have no malingering in my unit, mister,” grunted Ugbuz, when Bullyak turned away. “We’ve had some losses, and we’ve had some injured, but those mutineers aren’t going to interfere with our mission.” He thrust a metal flask at Luke. The fumes alone would have dropped a bantha in its tracks. Luke shook his head. “Drink it! I don’t trust a man who won’t drink.”

  Luke put it to his lips but didn’t let the alcohol go any farther than that. Even that movement throbbed hideously in his leg. It took all the disciplines he had learned, all his control of the Force within his own body, to put the pain aside.

  The ax, he thought. The Klaggs who’d attacked him had both carried axes. Had one struck him in the final melee? He didn’t recall, but remembered not being able to get up.

  His head hurt, too. For the first time the desperate importance of getting injuries seen to immediately was brought home to him—he’d be even less able, now, to protect himself, and it was quite obvious that he’d have more need to do so.

  Why was the great hold around them dark?

  “What about Trooper Mingla, sir? Skinny blond kid?”

  Ugbuz’s tiny eyes squinted harder at him in the gloom of the hut. “Friend of yours?”

  Luke nodded.

  “Missing. Festering mutineers. Two men killed, three missing. Sons of sows. We’ll get ’em.”

  Bullyak squealed something angrily at him, her long, gray-green braids swinging heavily over the gelid, bitten flesh of her six enormous breasts. Morrts were blood parasites, gray, finger-size, and furry; one of them was even now, Luke could see, fixed on Ugbuz’s neck, and another was crawling up Bullyak’s braid. The pinny glitter of their eyes flickered all around the hut, in the corners, in the rafters. The blankets stank of them.

  Slowly, agonizingly, he tried to get to his feet.

  Bullyak snarled something at him, and thrust a stick into his hand. It had clearly started life as a pole arm of some weapon brought from Pzob, six feet of knobbed and hand-smoothed wood. His trouser leg had been slit from halfway down his thi
gh, to let her dress the wound. Even if he’d been able to stand the thought of putting weight on that leg he knew it wouldn’t bear him. She’d wrapped his left foot in rags, having cut off the blood-soaked boot. Rather to his surprise, his lightsaber was hooked to his belt.

  The sow shoved him in the direction of the door, with a violence that nearly had him on the floor again.

  “She says get yourself some coffee,” said Ugbuz, with an officer’s hearty cheer. “You’ll heal up fine.”

  “Master Luke!”

  Luke looked around. Two dozen huts had been erected, ranged around the walls of what looked like a cargo hold. Doors, pieces of metal paneling, plastic and corrugated crate sides had gone into their construction, as well as blankets, bits of armor, mess hall plates, wire, cable, pipe, and the ubiquitous engine tape. More plates and coffee cups littered the metal decking, and the place had a faint, garbagy smell in spite of the best efforts of the MSEs buzzing and puttering around the open square in the center. There were few Gamorreans in sight.

  In the dark, open doorway of the vast chamber, Threepio stood waiting. Had he been programmed to do so he’d have wrung his hands.

  Slowly, every step an acid jolt of suppressed agony, Luke limped the fifteen meters that separated them. Threepio made a move as if he would have come through the door to help him, but seemed to think better of it.

  “I’m terribly sorry, Master Luke,” apologized the droid. “But the Gamorreans don’t permit droids in their village. The SP Eighties have tried repeatedly to dismantle the huts and put the pieces away in their proper places and … well …”

  Luke leaned against the wall and laughed in spite of himself. “Thanks, Threepio,” he said. “Thanks for following this far.”

  “Of course, Master Luke!” The protocol droid sounded shocked that there would have been any question of it. “After that dreadful fracas in the mess hall …”

  “Did you see what happened to Cray? Ugbuz says she’s missing …”

  “She was carried away by the Klagg tribe. They seem to regard the Gakfedds as mutineers, and vice versa. Nichos went after them. She was putting up a good fight, but I’m afraid she was no match for them, sir.” He clanked softly along at Luke’s side as Luke started to walk again, limping down the corridor and grimly blocking his mind against the pain in his leg. Simply keeping the agony at bay took enormous amounts of his concentration, far more than he’d channeled against the effects of his concussion. He had to find sick bay, and fast. At least with so obvious an injury Ugbuz couldn’t argue that he was merely malingering.

  “Any idea where they’re headquartered?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir. Captain Ugbuz has sent out scouts to locate their stronghold, so it’s quite clear he has no idea either.”

  “They shouldn’t be too hard to find.” Luke was checking every door they passed, mostly cargo holds in this part of the ship. Owing to the Eye’s configuration as an asteroid the ship possessed long stretches of hallway unbroken by doorways; the lights were on here, gleaming coldly off the gray metal walls. Here and there a plastic plate or coffee cup from the mess hall made a bright spot in the monochrome, and once they passed a tripod, wandering vaguely through the hall gazing around with its three thick-lashed green eyes.

  “I’m not so sure of that, sir. The SP Eighty cleaner droids were very diligent about scrubbing all trace of their trail from the walls and floors.”

  Luke stopped, and leaned back against the wall, his head swimming. Did other Jedi Masters have to go through this?

  “What happened here?” He opened his eyes again. The stretch of hallway before them was dark, as the Gakfedds’ village hold and the area around it had been, the glowpanels of the ceiling dead for easily a hundred meters in front of them. A hatch cover had been ripped loose halfway down and wires and cables trailed out into the hall like the entrails of a gutted beast. As he limped nearer Luke smelled a familiar odor, faint and distant now, but distinctive … “Jawas?”

  If Threepio had possessed lungs he would have heaved a long-suffering sigh. “I’m afraid so, sir. It appears that on such planets where the Empire posted troops to be picked up for this mission thirty years ago, the automated landers collected whatever sentient beings they could find.”

  “Oh, great,” sighed Luke, bending carefully to study the frame of the gutted hatch. It was grubby with small handprints. He wondered how many of the meter-tall, brown-robed scavengers the lander had picked up on Tatooine.

  “Those were Talz we saw in the mess hall, from Alzoc Three. I have not been very far afield, Master Luke, but I know there are also Affytechans from Dom-Bradden aboard, and the Maker only knows what else besides!”

  “Great,” said Luke again, limping on. “So in order to blow up the ship before it reaches Plawal I’m going to have to find the troop transports and somehow get everybody on board. I suppose I could always tell the Gamorreans it’s orders, but …” He hesitated, remembering the vicious skill of the ship’s gunner, the one Threepio insisted did not exist.

  Whatever else might be automated on the Eye of Palpatine, there might very well be one member of the original mission crew still on board.

  “Here. This looks like what we’re after.”

  They had traversed the blacked-out section of corridor to the lighted area beyond. A small office on the right had clearly belonged to a supercargo or quartermaster; a black wall-mounted desk bore a large, curved keyboard, and the staring onyx darkness of a monitor screen gazed gravely down above. Luke sank gratefully into the leather padding of the chair—definitely a quartermaster, he thought—propped his staff against the desk, and flipped the on toggle.

  “Let’s see if we can talk this thing into giving us some idea of how much time we have, before we do anything else.”

  He typed in Mission status request. It was a common enough command, involving no classified information, but even knowing when the Eye was expected to reach Plawal would tell him how urgently he had to move.

  • Mission time consonant with the objectives of the Will

  “Hunh?”

  Luke typed in Menu.

  • The Will requests objective of this information

  Orientation, typed Luke.

  • Current status aligned with timetable of the Will. No further information necessary

  “They really didn’t want to risk anyone outside finding out about their mission, did they?” murmured Luke. The screen grayed and swam before his eyes, and he drew the Force to him, wearily clearing, strengthening the slowly healing tissues of the brain.

  Sick bay, he thought tiredly. Right after this, sick bay …

  “When did the last lander come aboard, Threepio?”

  “Yesterday, I believe. Those were the Talz.”

  Luke considered. “If they’re trying to avoid suspicion, it makes sense that they’d lie low for a day or two, maybe longer, before making another hyperspace jump. Maybe a lot longer, depending on who they think was watching them thirty years ago.”

  Ben Kenobi, almost certainly. Bail Organa. Mon Mothma. Those who’d watched the rise of Palpatine to supreme power, the birth of the New Order, first with suspicion, then with growing alarm.

  “The ship’s certainly big enough to keep a couple of companies comfortable for a while.”

  Schematic.

  A deck plan appeared; Luke identified the big cargo hold without trouble, and the quartermaster’s office where he now sat. A readout in the corner flagged this as Deck 12. He keyed the command for the deck above, and the one above that, noting the irregular shapes of the decks. Sick bay was two decks below. The decks were huge, but presumably after two or three days Ugbuz wouldn’t be sending scouts for rival tribes on his own deck.

  The computer refused to display the schematic for Deck 9.

  Keying down, Luke could only get displays for Decks 10 through 13.

  Total schematic.

  • The Will requests the objective of this information

  Location of alie
n life forms.

  • All things are within parameters defined by the Will. There are no unauthorized life forms aboard

  “Oh, there aren’t, hunh?” Again Luke keyed in Total schematic.

  • The Will requests the objective of this information

  Damage control.

  • The Will is in control. The Will ascertains no damage in any area

  All the lights browned out and the pale-blue letters of the monitor shrank into a tiny dot and blinked away. From the blackness of the corridor outside came the shrill chitter of Jawa voices, the scrabble of fleeing feet.

  Luke sighed. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

  Chapter 7

  Sick bay was dark, silent, and cold.

  “Drat those Jawas, sir!” cried Threepio.

  Luke Skywalker had dealt successfully with battling a clone of himself, with being enslaved by the Emperor and the dark side, with wholesale slaughter and the destruction of worlds.

  A good deal of Han Solo’s vocabulary did come to mind.

  “Come on,” he sighed. “Let’s see what we can manage.”

  “These were quite decent early Too-One-Bees, sir,” remarked Threepio, holding aloft one of the few emergency glowrods left in the rifled emergency locker on the wall. “But of course the reason they are independently powered in modern ships, instead of hardwired into place, is painfully obvious here.”

  “Painfully,” thought Luke, leaning against the self-conforming plastene of the diagnostic bed, was certainly the appropriate word for this occasion.