Star Wars: Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  All the cabinets had been frozen shut when the Jawas had pulled the main wall hatch in search of wire and components. Though none of the diagnostics worked, Luke was fairly certain—by the way his left foot moved, and by the excruciating pain that shot up the back of his thigh whenever he put the slightest weight on it—that one or more tendons had been severed, which meant that even discounting the near certainty of infection, until he could get to a genuine medical facility he would be seriously lame. Simply keeping traumatic shock at bay took all the healing power of the Force that he could muster, and even that, he knew, couldn’t last long.

  In addition to ripping free coverplates and hatches to get at the machinery within, the Jawas had carried off portions of the autodocs, taken the power cores out of the X-ray and E-scan machines, and tried to remove the temperature regulator from the bacta tank, with the result that the tank itself had leaked half its contents onto the floor in a gigantic sticky pool.

  So much for the possibility of standard regenerative therapy.

  Luke caught one of the horde of MSE droids that were faithfully attempting the herculean task of cleaning up the mess, pulled its power core, and used its wiring to short the locks on the cupboards. The dispensary was stocked with huge quantities of gylocal, a horrifically powerful pain-blocker/stimulant that would allow a warrior to go on fighting long after shock would have felled and killed him—Luke turned the black boxes of ampoules over in his hand and remarked, “They sure expected a fight, didn’t they?” He put them back. Gylocal decomposed after about ten years in storage, separating into its original—and highly toxic—components. Even if the stuff had been fresh Luke wasn’t sure what the effect of the drug would be on his ability to wield the Force.

  Less heroic measures were available in the form of nyex, which made many people—and Luke knew from past experience he was among them—drowsy, and the nonnarcotic painkiller perigen. He planted a perigen patch on his thigh just above the knee and immediately felt the pain lessen. It wouldn’t heal the damage and he’d still be lame, and perigen lacked the mild stimulant included in gylocal, but at least the debilitating stress of fighting the agony would be eased. In the absence of bacta-tank therapy to accelerate the healing of his concussion—and Luke knew he was already over the worst of its effects—the simple reorientive comaren would deal with the last of the symptoms.

  At least there was plenty of that.

  More worrying was the fact that most of the antibiotics and all the synthflesh on the ship had completely decomposed with age.

  In a locker in one of the labs next door he found a regular trooper’s gray coverall whose baggy shape would fit over the taped and splinted dressing on his leg. Changing into it, Luke filled the pockets with all the comaren and perigen he could locate, and wired half a dozen glowrods to the end of his staff.

  “Okay, Threepio,” he said, as he belted his lightsaber once more around his waist and carefully used his staff to lever himself up from the self-conforming chair where he’d sat to change. “Let’s see about finding Cray in this place.”

  In the dark corridors around sick bay, Talz—as Threepio identified them—fled from them like enormous white powder puffs; from the pitch-black maws of holds and wards, little quadrangles of eyes glittered out at him in the bobbing reflection of the glowrods. Luke halted two or three times, and had Threepio translate for him, “I am your friend. I will not harm you, nor lead anyone here to harm you.” But none of the great, soft aliens returned a sound.

  “The Empire used them for work in the mines on Alzoc Three,” said Luke, as he and Threepio headed toward the lighted areas visible far down the corridor. “Alzoc wasn’t even entered in the galactic registry. The Senate found a mention of it a couple of years ago in secret corporate files. Nobody knew what was going on there. They were lied to, betrayed … no wonder they learned to distrust anything humanoid. I wonder what happened to the stormtroopers who waited on their planet to be picked up?”

  Beside the lift he surprised a group of Talz in the process of feeding a band of ten or twelve tripods, setting down big mess-hall basins on the floor, one of water, one of a horrible mixture of porridge, milk, and fish stew, which the tripods knelt to devour eagerly. The Talz themselves took one look at Luke and Threepio and fled. Within minutes a dozen MSEs and two SP-80s appeared, determined to clean up what they obviously considered mess. The tripods moved back in confusion, watching helplessly as the MSEs slurped up what was left of both water and food—cutting in to do so behind Luke’s back when he tried to shoo them away—and the SP-80s made valiant but futile attempts to bend down far enough to pick up the basins themselves.

  “I have nothing but respect for the entire Single-Purpose series, Master Luke,” said Threepio, reaching down to hand the basin to the older and blockier droid. “Truly the core of droid operations. But they are so limited.”

  Threepio could provide no identification or linguistic information on the tripods, and even his translational analog function couldn’t arrive at a complete understanding of their speech. Luke could only gather that they were People and they came from the World and they were looking for a way to go back there.

  “You and me both, pal,” sighed Luke, as the spindly forms wove away down the corridor, still hunting for the right door to go through that would open onto home.

  At least the lift still worked, though with the Jawas at large it was anybody’s guess how long that would last. The dirty little creatures were born scroungers and thieves, especially of metal, wire, and technology. Only four lighted buttons glowed beside the lift door: 10, 11, 12, 13. Up on Deck 12 again the lights were still on, the air clean and circulating. An occasional plate or coffee cup littered the corridors, and cast-off pieces of stormtrooper armor amply indicated a Gamorrean presence, but as Threepio had said, the SP-80 cleaners and the little black boxlike MSEs had meticulously wiped out any evidence of whatever trail the invading Klaggs had left.

  They came around a corner and Luke stopped, startled, to find the corridor in front of them dotted with what looked, at first glance, like blubbery, putty-colored mushrooms; a meter to a meter and a half tall, lumpy, and smelling strongly like vanilla. A second glance showed him that they had arms and legs, though he could see no sensory organs whatsoever. Threepio said, “Good Heavens! Kitonaks! They weren’t here yesterday.”

  He walked forward among them.

  Luke followed. There were thirty at least in the corridor, more, he saw, in the rec room that opened to the right. He touched one and found it room temperature, though with a suspicion of greater heat deep within. Under huge folds of fat many of them showed round, open holes in what were probably their heads, and, peering within, Luke identified two tongues and three rows of small, cone-shaped teeth.

  “What are they doing?” Several bore abrasions and what looked like knife wounds that had bled, clotted, and were on their way to healing, apparently unnoticed.

  “Waiting for Chooba slugs to crawl up into their mouths,” replied the droid. “It’s how they feed.”

  “Nice work if you can get it.” Luke reflected that at some point an expedition to the mess hall sounded in order, though it would call for a certain amount of caution. “They look pretty safe for now.”

  “Oh, they are, Master Luke.” Threepio clanked briskly among the weird forest of still shapes. “They’re among the toughest species in the galaxy. Kitonaks have been known to go without food for weeks, sometimes months, with no ill effects.”

  “Well, unless those landers picked up Chooba slugs in mistake for stormtroopers,” commented Luke, glancing back over his shoulder at them, “they’re going to have to.”

  Where the lights failed and the corridors became dim-lit caverns illuminated only by the reflected glow of glowpanels in the lighted areas or an occasional bleary yellow worklamp, they found the corpse of an Affytechan, the gaudy vegetable people of Dom-Bradden. MSEs crawled over it like greedy insects, trying vainly to clean a mess beyond their small capacities;
ichor congealed on the floor for meters in all directions and the smell of its rotting sugars lay thick and nauseating in the air. Luke was silent, aware again of the dangers of this not quite empty ship.

  A scream echoed down the darkened corridor from the direction of the Gakfedd village in the cargo hold. Luke swung around, listening; then started toward the sound at a limping, staggering run. Its queer and almost metallic timbre told him it was a Jawa, terrified and in agony. He knew long before he reached the hold what he’d find, and in spite of what he knew about Jawas, the hair on his head prickled with fury.

  The Gamorrean stormtroopers had gotten a shredder from someplace, and were holding a Jawa by the wrists above it, lowering it feet first into the whirling blades. There were four or five of them, including Ugbuz, all howling with laughter as they dipped their wretched little captive up and down.

  From the threshold of the giant chamber, Luke reached out with the Force and swatted the shredder away with such violence that it spattered to pieces on the wall ten meters away. Krok—who was holding the Jawa—hurled the miserable little clump of rags and filth aside and whirled, roaring a curse; Ugbuz brought his blaster carbine to bear. Luke, hobbling toward them between the huts, impatiently ripped the carbine from the Gamorrean’s hands while he was still meters away, sending it spinning, and did the same a moment later to another trooper’s ax. Torture of anything fired in him a white and scalding rage. Krok launched himself at him with his huge hands outstretched, and Luke levitated him as if he’d been a hundred and seventy-five kilos of bagged rocks, and held him for a moment two meters above the floor, staring at him with cold blue eyes.

  Then, carelessly almost, he threw him aside, and turned to face Ugbuz.

  “What’s the meaning of this, trooper?” demanded the Gamorrean furiously. “That was a Rebel saboteur, out to thwart our mission! We caught him with that …” He gestured furiously to the bundle of wires and computer chips, torn ends trailing, that lay near where the shredder had been.

  Luke met the Gamorrean’s eyes with a chilled and icy stare before which, after a moment, the piggy gaze dropped. Sullenly, almost, Ugbuz demanded, “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “It isn’t who I think I am,” said Luke softly, stepping close. “It’s who I am.” He lowered his voice to exclude the others, and spoke for Ugbuz’s ears alone. “Major Calrissian, special services. 229811-B.” He gave the serial number of the Millennium Falcon’s engine block. “Intelligence.”

  Had it been possible for Ugbuz’s eyes to widen they would have; as it was his hairy ears shifted forward in awe and respect. He threw a quick glance over his shoulder to where the Jawa had been thrown. Though Krok had slung the Jawa with sufficient force to have surely broken all its bones, it was no longer there—Jawas being endowed with the ratlike ability to take almost any amount of physical punishment and still slither away through the first unwatched crack the moment they were no longer actually restrained.

  Luke laid a hand on the stormtrooper captain’s arm. Both his fury and the exertion of using the Force had left him trembling, almost nauseated, sweat icy on his face, but he kept his voice soft, projecting into it all his Jedi power. “It’s all right,” he said. “You did as you thought best and it was clever work capturing it. But it was acting under my orders, infiltrating the Rebels. There was no actual damage done. You did right to protect the mission, and I’ll see your name shows up in commendations to the Ubiqtorate, but after this … let me interrogate prisoners.”

  “Yes, sir.” For a moment a thoroughly Gamorrean expression of disappointment crossed Ugbuz’s tusked face. Then he was Captain Ugbuz of the Imperial Service again. He saluted.

  “You did well, Captain,” said Luke, and used the Force to subtly project into Ugbuz’s mind the pleased warmth that surety of approval brings.

  “Thank you, sir.” The pseudostormtrooper saluted again and lumbered over to pick up his blaster carbine, stopping once or twice to look over his shoulder at Luke, who limped away in the direction of the door, leaning heavily on his light-clustered staff.

  “Very good, Master Luke,” said Threepio softly when Luke, weak with exhaustion, reached the door once more. “Though I must say, you really ought to find some way to discourage those Jawas from further depredations on the fabric of this vessel if we are not to all perish of cold and suffocation. They seem to have no idea of the damage they’re causing to their own environment.”

  “Well, they wouldn’t be the first,” Luke remarked, leaning against the wall. He felt drained and beaten, his head aching in spite of the comaren. If in immediate danger of death by freezing, he doubted he could have summoned enough of the Force to light so much as a candle.

  “If you’ll come this way, sir,” said the droid, “I believe I have found a partial schematic of the ship.”

  The schematic of Decks 10 through 13 was etched onto four crystalplex panels in what was probably the office of the physical plant manager, showing the locations of lifts and gangways, power lines marked in red and water trunks—shower facilities, coolant lines, fire-control sprinklers—in blue. The asymmetry of the ship’s form made it difficult to remember. From the outside, Luke recalled, the asteroid was more bean-shaped than round, so the higher decks would be smaller, and grouped aft. From the location of coolant trunks, Luke deduced that the main power cores that fed the reactors, the computer core, and the guns were located aft as well.

  His request for a full schematic from the office computer was greeted with a demand for an authorization code, and tinkering with all the various standard Imperial codes he knew or had been told by Cray only got him Current status of all departments consonant with the timetable and objectives of the Will.

  The Will, he thought. The core program. The central, coordinating plan. The thing that regulated everything in the ship, from the temperature of the mess-hall coffee to the nearly human targeting of the defensive guns …

  Nearly human? Luke wasn’t sure anymore about that.

  The thing that knew when the jump to hyperspace would be, that would take them to Belsavis. That knew what the battle plan was for destroying that undefended town.

  Without human knowledge, he thought. Therefore, there was no one who could have been forced, or coerced, or coaxed, to talk, had they been captured. Only the Will.

  He went back to studying the schematics it would show.

  “They’ve got to keep the lines to the fuel tanks and the power chargers short,” he explained, limping along the corridor again a few minutes later with Threepio clanking softly at his side. “That means all the main hangars are going to be in one area, or at most two—port and starboard. Now sick bay is portside on Deck Ten, and next to that a series of decontamination chambers, so I’m betting that big rectangular chamber that’s unmarked on the Deck Ten schematic is the hangar where the lander came in.”

  So it proved. The lander’s engines were dead and nothing Luke could do could revive them—“Well, why not? They fulfilled their purpose”—and in any case, there was no way of manual steering or controls. The G-40 droids stood silent and dead, one already half dismantled by Jawas who couldn’t carry it off. The silvery, bubble-shaped trackers were nowhere to be seen.

  By judicious manipulation of the controls on a service lift—using, again, the power core and wiring of a somewhat indignant MSE—Luke managed to freeze the lift car between Decks 10 and 9 and to get the doors open at least somewhat. While Threepio fretted and predicted doom in the Deck 10 hangar, Luke attached a hundred feet of emergency cable from a locker around one of the lander’s legs and scrambled, with considerable difficulty, down through the lift car and into the hangar immediately below on Deck 9.

  The lights were out there, the bay a vast, silent cavern illumined only by the blanched glow of the starlight beyond the magnetic field that protected the atmosphere of the hold. Through the huge bay doors, rimmed around with the rock of the concealing asteroid in which the Eye had been built, Luke could stare into the endle
ss black vistas of the void. A handful of asteroids had been brought along with the Eye when it made its hyperspace jumps to pick up its long-vanished personnel—probably for cover, Luke thought—and a few of these drifted aimlessly in the middle distance, like bleached hunks of bone.

  The shadowy bay itself was designed to accommodate a single medium-size launch, by the look of it. Cables from the power cell dangled from the ceiling and directional markings indicated where the vessel would stand, in the center of the bay, nose pointing toward the starry darkness that lay beyond the magnetic shield. But there was no launch there.

  Instead, to one side of the hangar, a charred and battered Y-wing craft stood. The empty vastness of the hangar picked up the echoes of Luke’s staff as he crossed the floor to it, and shadows twitched restlessly as he held up his staff with its glowrods to look at the open cockpit above his head.

  A two-seater. Luke couldn’t see well from where he stood, but he thought that the pressure hookups from both stations had been used.

  “It explains what happened.” Luke sank gratefully into one of the white plastic mess-hall chairs and accepted the plate Threepio handed him: reconstituted and radiation-packed, maybe, and bearing only nominal resemblance to actual dewback steak and creamed topatoes, but close enough. In spite of the perigen Luke’s leg felt as if it were about to fall off at the hip—which, Luke reflected, in its current state didn’t sound like such a bad idea—and he was so tired he ached, but he had a sense of matters being at least partially in hand.

  “What happened when?” inquired Threepio.

  “What happened thirty years ago. As Triv told us, the Eye of Palpatine—the whole Belsavis mission—was set up to be a secret, a secret even from the Jedi Knights. That’s why they automated everything. So there would be no leaks.

  “But there was a leak, Threepio. Somebody found out.”

  A sound from the doorway made him turn his head. Four or five tripods wandered through the mess-hall door, beautiful with their shadings of turquoises and pinks, their long yellow fur around the hips and tentacles. Luke got to his feet, leaning painfully on his staff, and limped to the water spigot near the food slots. The pile of discarded plates along that wall was nearly a meter high; Luke selected the deepest bowl he could find, filled it with water, and carried it over to the tripods, having learned that even setting it on a table wouldn’t work. Threepio, at Luke’s orders, followed with a couple of dishes of porridge, which the poor befuddled creatures accepted gratefully, dipping long snouts in and slurping deeply.