Star Wars: Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  “Somebody found out,” Luke continued as he worked, “and came to the Moonflower Nebula. Their Y-wing got shot to pieces by the autodefenses—which are the closest thing to human I’ve ever seen—but they made it in. They disabled the Eye’s triggering mechanism—probably disabled whatever slaved signal-relay stations they could find, so no signal could come in to start the mission. Then they took the launch from the hangar, and fled.”

  “One could only wish,” said Threepio, “that they had disabled the autodefenses as well.”

  “Maybe they couldn’t,” said Luke. The tripods began to move off, hooning and muttering vaguely among themselves, and Luke and Threepio started back to the table where Luke had been.

  “According to the power cell readings in the hangar, that bay is just above the fighter berths where the short-range fliers—the ground supports and the escorts, TIEs according to the power consumption graphs—are docked. If the mission involved a ground assault—and it has to have, if they were picking up stormtroopers—there have to be assault shuttles somewhere, probably on the upper decks in this same area, but they wouldn’t have been any good either in deep space. They have to have taken the launch.”

  “I see,” replied the droid. He was silent a moment, holding Luke’s staff and offering his arm to help him down into the chair. “But if the signal relay was destroyed, what started it up again?” he asked. “After thirty years?”

  A horrible cacophony of shouts sounded in the corridor outside. Luke swung to his feet, outdistancing Threepio as he limped to the door. Through the grunting, shrieking, bellowing, he could hear the heavy thunder of feet.

  It was a member of the Klagg tribe. Luke recognized it instantly, for the Klaggs had all been wearing helmets and armor from regular navy troopers rather than stormtroopers, bucket-shaped helmets and gray breastplates instead of the familiar white. Wherever their headquarters was, it was obviously close to different armories than the Gakfedds’. However, Luke scarcely needed this observation, since the Klagg was in full and terrified flight from fifteen Gakfedds, howling, waving axes and forcepikes, brandishing blasters and carbines, and occasionally letting off a shot that ricocheted wild and lethal along the corridors like a red-hot hornet.

  Luke said, “Come on!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “He’ll be heading back to his home territory!”

  Luke crossed the mess hall to the opposite doors, knowing that the corridor down which the Gakfedds chased their prey led nowhere and the Klagg would have to double back. Sure enough, moments later Luke heard behind him in the corridor the thudding crash of a single set of feet, the snuffling, slobbering pant of the fugitive Klagg. He led Threepio into a laundry drop room to let the Klagg hasten by without seeing them, then stepped out again, following, listening. The Gakfedds seemed to have lost their prey, the echoes of their shouting ringing from corridors nearby, but Luke, listening ahead, could trail quite easily the solitary Klagg’s gasping breath and lumbering feet. Gamorreans weren’t runners. With the use of both his legs Luke could have outdistanced any Gamorrean ever littered, and even leaning on a staff he had little trouble keeping up.

  As he had half suspected, half deduced, the Klagg was heading aft.

  “They found some way to get above the crew decks,” he murmured to Threepio as they crossed through chamber after chamber of armories, looted weapons holds, stores whose bins and crates had been broken to disgorge uniforms, boots, belts, and blast armor on the floors and down the halls. “Listen. He’s doubling back on his steps. He knows he has to get a level up.”

  He halted, looking cautiously around a corner. The Gamorrean stood in an open lift car, prodding angrily at the buttons there, obviously wanting one that read higher than 13 and not finding it. A moment later the pseudotrooper stepped out of the car again, looking around him, hairy ears swiveling as he listened, breathing clearly audible in the silence. There was an expression sweating like a Gamorrean, and Luke understood it now. The creature’s body glistened and he could smell it from where he stood.

  The Gamorrean lumbered on.

  “Is he lost, Master Luke?” Threepio could gear his voder down to the faintest hum of almost-inaudibility.

  “Looks like. Or the Gakfedds are cutting off the way he came down.”

  There was a rumble of shouts, coming closer. The Klagg increased his speed to a clumsy trot. He was still easy to keep up with, through corridors bright with the hard cold light of glowpanels, or dark where the Jawas had looted the wiring. His ears kept swinging backward—Luke wondered how acute they were, and if he could pick up the faint scrape and click of the staff, and the soft creak of Threepio’s joints.

  There was a black door, double-blast-sealed and surmounted with a crimson light. The Gamorrean jabbed at the switch, with no result, then pulled out a blaster and shot the whole mechanism. The door jarred a little in its socket, and a voice said, “Entry to upper levels in this area is unauthorized. Security measures are in force.”

  The Gamorrean ripped loose the coverplate on the manual hatch by main force, and worked the dogged wheel within. Far down the corridor Luke heard renewed clamor, and knew the Gakfedds had heard the computer’s voice:

  “Entry to upper levels in this area is unauthorized. Security measures are in force. Maximum measures will be taken.”

  The red light began to blink.

  The door opened to reveal a gangway. Black metal steps, gray walls, a checkering of pale squares of opalescent light set in a curious, asymmetrical almost-pattern that seemed at once impersonal and queerly sinister.

  “Maximum measures will be taken. Maximum measures will be taken. Maximum …”

  “There’s the stinking mutineer swine!”

  As Ugbuz and his troopers appeared from a cross-corridor twenty meters away, the Klagg plunged up the gangway.

  Watching it, Luke reflected—in the part of his mind not stunned with horror—that it was very like the Empire to design a “security measure” that wouldn’t take effect until the violator was too far into the gangway to turn back.

  The Gamorrean raced up five or ten steps before the lightning started, thin, vicious fingers of it stabbing out from the walls, playing over the creature’s body like a delicate, skeletal spider torturing its prey. The Gamorrean screamed, fell, his big body spasming, flopping on the black metal of the stairs. The pursuing Gakfedds skidded to a halt at the door, staring up in momentary shock.

  Then they began to laugh.

  Ugbuz let out a bellow of mirth, pointing as the Klagg’s flesh blistered and blood poured from a thousand pinholes drilled by the lightning. The others whooped, doubled over, slapping their thighs and one another’s shoulders in genuine amusement. Luke shrank back into the cross-corridor where he and Threepio stood, sickened. The Klagg, impossibly, was still trying to get to his feet, still trying to ascend the stairs, slipping in blood now, charring to death as he moved.

  Gamorreans were tough. And the Klagg, quite clearly, considered the sizzling nightmare of the gangway a preferable fate to what the Gakfedds would do.

  Luke turned away, almost ill, and headed back toward the mess hall. He could hear the Gakfedds’ laughter a long way down the hall.

  Armories, naval (regular)—search

  • Purpose of this information?

  Inventory control

  • All inventory consonant with the parameters and intentions of the Will

  “Master Luke?”

  Schematic search—water piping

  • Purpose of this information?

  “Master Luke, it’s getting quite late.”

  Emergency maintenance

  • All maintenance proceeding in accordance with the intent and timetable of the Will

  “You lying wad of synapses, you’ve got lighting blacked out over half your crew decks and computers down everywhere you look.”

  “Master Luke, the longer you remain this far from the Gakfedd village, the greater your danger from a retaliatory Klagg raid.
There haven’t even been Talz, or tripods, in this sector for …”

  Luke raised his head. He was sitting at a terminal in the quartermaster’s office, the entrance to a small complex of workshops and storage rooms. The long corridor leading to the mess hall’s starboard entrance was visible through the open door. Visible past Threepio’s shoulder, that is. The protocol droid was standing nervously in the doorway, glancing out with the frequency of a Coruscant stockbroker on the scout for a hovercar after a lunchtime meeting. If Threepio hadn’t had an internal chronometer, thought Luke, he’d be looking at a watch every ten seconds.

  He said, “They have Cray.”

  Torturing the Jawa had been petty viciousness, like children tormenting an injured animal. The Klagg had been an enemy. And the Klagg would see Cray as an enemy of theirs.

  Especially, he thought, after the death of their mate in the gangway wired with that evil opalescent grid.

  Wearily, he typed:

  Sysshell

  • Purpose of this information?

  Sysview

  • Purpose of this information?

  Revsys

  • Purpose of this …

  “The purpose of this information is to make you cough up something besides the fact that the Will is in charge of everything and everything is perfect,” muttered Luke through his teeth. His head ached again—his whole body felt as if he’d fallen down a flight of stairs, and in spite of the perigen patch on his leg there was a suspicious, grinding inflammation deep inside that made him wonder how long he could summon the Force to battle infection in the torn flesh. “And if I have to go through every Imperial code and slicer Cray and Han and Ghent ever taught me I’ll do it.”

  “I do wish Artoo were here, sir,” said Threepio, clanking diffidently to his side. “He’s much better at talking to these supercomputers than I. Why, back when we were with Captain Antilles, we … Oh! Shoo, you nasty little thing!”

  Luke knew it was a Jawa even before he turned. Anyone who’d had even the smallest experience with Jawas knew when one had entered an enclosed space.

  “No, it’s okay, Threepio.” After seeing the Klagg’s death, Luke had considerably more sympathy for the Jawas. He frowned, puzzled, as he swiveled his chair, for Jawas generally avoided contact with other races, particularly on this ship.

  “What do you want, little guy?”

  It was the Jawa he’d saved that morning. How he knew this he couldn’t say, because with their all-envelopingly ragged brown robes, grubby gloves, and faces invisible in the shadows of their hoods, it was almost impossible to tell one from another. But somehow he was sure of it.

  “Master.” The slangy, squeaky patois of the desert was almost unintelligible. One filthy little hand reached out to touch the lightsaber at Luke’s belt.

  He put his own hand guardingly over it, but sensed no real desire to steal. “ ’Fraid that’s mine, pal.”

  The Jawa stepped back, silent. Then it reached into its robes. “For you.”

  It held out another lightsaber.

  Chapter 8

  There was a technique to trolling the bars along Spaceport Row for information. Leia recognized it at once as a variation of what she herself did at diplomatic receptions: more an attitude than any specific set of questions, a kind of easy friendliness compounded of genuine interest in other people’s lives, an almost limitless tolerance for meaningless trivia, a finely honed mental garbage filter, and the acceptance—artificial, if necessary—that there wasn’t anything else one had to do that afternoon.

  She enjoyed watching Han work. Clothed in a dress that he’d picked out for her, of the “not-to-diplomatic-events” variety, she lounged on barstools consuming drinks with paper spaceships in them and listened to him trade trivialities with various barkeeps, watching game transmissions in the seemingly depthless black boxes in the corners—in eight years of close association with Han Solo she had acquired a vivid working knowledge of the rules and strategies of smashball—listening to extremely bad music and getting into marginal conversations with packers, stokers, small-time traders, and smaller-time hustlers and bums. Even in the Core Worlds most people didn’t recognize Leia or Han if they didn’t know them or know who they were. To ninety percent of the species in the galaxy, all members of other races looked alike anyway, and most humans wouldn’t have recognized the Senators from their own planets.

  There was something to be said, Leia reflected, for the planets still ruled by the Ancient Houses. On Alderaan, everyone had known her: grocery clerks and subspace mechanics had studied the home lives of the House Organa on a day-to-day basis over the tabvids, watched them marry and divorce and squabble over property settlements and put their children through private academies, tsk’ed over the unsuitable attachments of Cousin Nial and recalled that long-ago scandal that had broken off Aunt Tia’s engagement to … What had his name been? … from House Vandron.

  Her onetime suitor Isolder had told her it was the same in the Hapes Consortium, whose ruling House had been in power for centuries.

  Here they were just a lanky man with a scar on his chin and a smuggler’s habit of watching the doors, and a cinnabar-haired woman in a dress that Aunt Rouge would have locked her in her room before permitting her to wear in public.

  Leia listened, with increasing respect, to Han discussing puttie, which had to be the most boring sport in the entire Universe, for thirty minutes with a wizened Durosian before bringing up the subject of the local action. She didn’t quite know how he’d come to the conclusion that this was the bar where such a question might be asked.

  The reward was that the Durosian—whose name was Oso Nim—remembered Drub McKumb, and recalled his disappearance six years ago. “You sure he didn’t just skin out ahead of trouble?” asked Han, and the aged one shook her head.

  “Fester it, no. Skin out how, without his ship? Thing musta sat in the impound for ten months, with every tramp skipper and planet hopper that came through trying to bribe the yard captain to let ’em strip parts. Finally sold the whole shebang to a bunch of Rodians for gate fees.” She chuckled, displaying several rows of tiny, sharp, brown teeth. “First-timers, they were. Took off with a load of cut-rate silk trying to run the tariff barriers into the Core Worlds and got themselves blistered out of existence first revenue cutter they met. Waste of a good ship, not to speak of all that silk.”

  She shook her head regretfully. The Smoking Jets, like every other bar on the Row, consisted of three prefab white plastene room units fixed together and opened into a single long chamber, mounted on a broken foundation of some older rock structure and cantilevered awkwardly to fit. The factories on Sullust turned out interlocking room units by the millions and there wasn’t a commercial colony from Elrood to the Outer Rim that didn’t have at least some buildings—towns, even—that consisted entirely of three-by-three white cubes.

  Down in this part of town, near the segment of the cliff where the Port Offices formed a kind of gateway into the tunnels that led to the docking silos themselves, most of the room units had been fixed—with varying accuracy—to the heavy walls and keyhole arches of the older structures, where steam from the hot springs in the foundations still drifted forth through broken pillars and colonnades. Most of the dwelling-houses so built, Leia had noticed—including the one in which she and Han were staying—had been decorated and added to with native hangings of woven grass, bright cloth, trained trellisworks of vines, to minimize their undeniable resemblance to packing crates.

  No such care had been lavished on the Smoking Jets.

  “And nobody tried to figure out what happened to Drub?” Leia signaled the barkeep to refill Oso Nim’s glass.

  “Bzzz.” The Durosian made a dismissive noise and a gesture reminiscent of scaring flies. “A million things can happen to a man on the game, sweetie. Even in a backwater hole like this one. It’s sometimes six months before his friends figure out he hasn’t disappeared on purpose, ship or no ship.”

  “And was it
six months before his friends went looking?” asked Han.

  Oso Nim cackled and gave him a sidelong glance from iridescent orange eyes. “In six months, you know where your friends are going to be? Drub’s mate and crew said he’d been on about crypts under the old ruin at the top of the town and went pokin’ themselves, but fester it, there’s no crypts! People been looking for them crypts for years, and all they found was solid rock. Smuggler tunnels, sure, there’s smuggler tunnels all over this damn town, but crypts? Solid rock is all Drub’s mate and crew found, same as others before ’em.”

  “And what,” asked Han, taking the bottle from the barkeep and repairing the old Durosian’s depredations on her glass, “were others before ’em looking for?”

  He spoke low, under the tinny audio of the holo box above the bar where the final game of the series between Lafra and Gathus was in process; she laughed heartily. “Oh, you’re a friend of his, after all these years, sweetie? His long-lost brother?” Durosians generally don’t laugh, and in the face of the wholesale horror of lines, teeth, halitosis, and flashing eyes, Leia could understand why other races might discourage them from doing so.