“Well, let’s not stand around here in the dark.” Something about the way the vine-hung boughs with their ghostly orchids seemed to bend close unnerved her, even in this safe and well-patrolled paradise. A sharp rustle in the darkness made her nearly jump out of her skin, but it was only a tree feeder, pausing to lower its hoselike proboscis to the roots of a shalaman tree and pump forth a measured dose of rank-smelling organic goo before picking its careful way back among the trees.
“Let’s see if we can get back to the path.”
It wasn’t easy, between the dark and the mushy unevenness of the ground. Artoo’s base was weighted to give him maximum stability, but though he was better than he looked on rough terrain he wasn’t perfect, and the base weight would make it, if not impossible, at least backbreaking, for Leia to right him should he unbalance. It took a half hour of muddy searching, stumbling over tree roots and getting yikked at by watch-critters in the dark, along the bed of a steaming volcanic stream before they found a sufficiently gentle incline and a clearing among the ferns that let her see the path again.
Just for a moment, Leia looked up and saw someone standing at the top of the slope, under the yellow blur of the light.
She thought, What’s she doing here?
And then wondered why, as the woman turned from the light and walked quickly away down the path …
Why had she thought that? It wasn’t anyone she knew.
Was it?
Schoolfriend? Her age looked about right, so far as Leia could tell at that distance and behind the blurring of intervening fog. But somehow she couldn’t picture that slim, childlike body in the white-and-blue uniform of the Alderaan Select Academy for Young Ladies. She was sure she’d never seen that chained ocean of rain-straight, coal-black hair plaited in a schoolgirl’s braids. That let out the possibility of her being the daughter of an Alderaan noble altogether, since they’d all gone to the same school …
Someone from the Senate? It rang a bell, but she’d been the youngest Senator herself at the age of eighteen, and there had been no one near her age there, certainly no girls. A Senator’s daughter? Wife? Someone she had met at one of those endless diplomatic receptions on Coruscant? Someone seen across the room at the Emperor’s levee?
HERE?
She regained the path as quickly as she could, but steadying Artoo over the bumpy roots took her whole effort and attention. When she reached the top of the slope and looked quickly down the path, the woman was gone.
Chapter 9
See-Threepio didn’t like the idea. “You can’t trust those Jawas, Master Luke! There has to be a gangway somewhere …”
Luke contemplated the hatch cover the Jawa had removed from the wall in one of the laundry drop rooms, the dark shaft full of wiring and cables that lay beyond. A ladder of durasteel staples emerged from the silent well of blackness below, vanished up into the lightless chimney above. He thought about the physical effort involved in hitching himself up those rungs, without use of his left leg, one rung at a time, compared with what the mental effort would cost him to use the Force to levitate. The choice wasn’t pleasant.
Neither were the memories of the Klagg stormtrooper’s death.
“I’ll be all right,” he said quietly.
“But all the gangways can’t be wired!” protested the droid. “I don’t like the idea of you going alone. Can’t you wait a little, sleep on this? If you’ll forgive my saying so, sir, you look as if you would greatly benefit from some sleep. Though I never use it myself, I’m told that humans …”
Luke grinned, touched by Threepio’s concern. “I’ll get some sleep when I get back,” he promised. In the dark of the shaft above he heard the rat-rustle of the Jawa’s robes halt, an interrogatory piping squeal, “Master?”
“If I don’t track this down now I may not get another chance.” He made a quick check of the power cell of the glowrods taped to his staff, then slung the wire loop he’d taped on the staff’s upper end over his shoulder, balancing carefully on his good leg with his hands against the hatchway’s narrow sides. “I’ll be all right,” he said again.
He knew Threepio didn’t believe him, of course.
He ducked his head through the hatch, reached over the narrow shaft to seize the rungs, and hopped across. Even that small movement caught his leg with a flash of pain that left him breathless, despite all the healing, all the strength of the Force he could summon. He glanced down at the seemingly bottomless plunge of the shaft, and thought, I’ll need to save my strength.
“Be careful, Master Luke …” The droid’s voice floated up after him in the dark.
In the crazy, bobbing dimness of the glowrods slung to his back, the Jawa was barely visible, a dark, scrambling figure like a robed insect skittering up the ladder now far over his head. Bundled trunk lines of cable and wire brushed Luke’s shoulders as he hitched himself laboriously in the Jawa’s wake, hoses like glistening black esophagi and thinner lines of rubbery insulated fiber-optic coax crowding close, as if he were indeed ascending the alimentary canal of some monstrous beast. The Jawa paused every now and then to finger the cabling in a way that made Luke extremely nervous. Who could tell what systems depended on that particular hunk of wire?
Here and there orange worklights burned dim above closed hatchways—dogged shut on the inside, he observed, and equipped with the dark boxes of magnetic seals. Elsewhere he climbed in darkness, lit only by the glowrods on his staff. The tube smelled fusty, of lubricants and insulation and now, overwhelmingly, of Jawa, but it lacked the characteristic, slightly greasy smell of air recycled countless times through the noses and lungs of a living crew. Even with the vessel’s current bizarre populations, it would be long before it acquired that smell.
Longer than they’d be aboard.
Longer than this weird mission would last.
What started it up again?
Threepio had put his intricately jointed metal finger on the crux of the problem, the galling root of Luke’s anxious dreams.
The Eye of Palpatine had been wrought in secret for a secret purpose, a mission that had been thwarted. It had lain sleeping in its remote screen of spinning asteroids in the heart of the Moonflower Nebula for thirty years, while the New Order that had planned that mission, armed the ship’s guns, programmed the Will’s single-minded control, had risen to power and then cracked apart under the weight of its own callousness, monomania, and greed.
The stormtroopers stationed on half a dozen remote worlds of the Rim had grown old and died.
Palpatine himself had died, at his own dark pupil’s hand.
So why had the Will awakened?
Luke shivered, wondering whether it was simply his own apprehension for the safety of those on Belsavis—for Han and Leia and Chewie—that cast a shadow on his heart, or whether the shadow was of something else, some separate entity whose power he had sensed moving like a dianoga underwater through the darker regions of the Force.
The tube topped out in a thick-barred metal grille painted garish, warning yellow and black. Affixed to it—in case anyone should miss the point—was a sign: ENCLISION GRID. NO FURTHER ASCENT. DANGER.
Beyond the bars, Luke could just distinguish a lateral repair conduit, through which the cables of the ascending shaft continued like runners of some thick-fleshed, ugly vine. The walls of the conduit gleamed with the asymmetrical pattern of opaline squares, each square a deadly laser port, waiting in the dark.
Just beneath the metal safety bars, a ring of dirty fingerprints around an open hatchway showed clearly which course the Jawa had taken.
Luke dragged himself through, into light only marginally brighter than that of the worklamps in the shaft.
It was the gun room. Rank after rank of consoles picked up the moving firebug of his glowrods from the shadows of soot-colored metal walls. Screen after screen, large and small, regarded him with dead obsidian eyes.
In the center of the chamber a ceiling panel had been removed, and a barred grille lik
e the one that had blocked further ascent in the repair shaft lay propped in a corner. Holding the staff with its glowing end aloft, Luke could see that the shaft rose upward, where the bundled pipes and hoses, finger-fat power lines and the wide ribbon-cables of computer couplers, flowed aloft in a static river from half a dozen lateral conduits to some central locus above. Yellow and black banded the lower half meter or so of the shaft, but there was no sign, no written warning. Only the small, baleful glare of red power lights, and above them, the opal glister of the enclision grid, spiraling eerily into darkness.
A tug on his belt caught his attention. Luke put down his hand protectively as the Jawa pawed at the lightsaber that hung at his belt—the second lightsaber, the one it had brought him. After a moment’s hesitation Luke yielded it, and the Jawa ran to a spot directly under the open shaft. It set the weapon on the floor, considered it for a moment, then moved it a few centimeters and changed the angle, clearly re-creating the exact position in which it had been found.
Luke hobbled to stand over it, and looked up. The shaft gaped above him, a narrow chimney breathing death.
It led to the heart of the ship. There were too many power lines, too many bundles of fiber-optic cables, too many heavy-duty coolant pipes for it to lead anywhere but to the computer core.
Luke stooped, carefully balancing on his staff, and picked up the lightsaber, then straightened and gazed up into that darkness again.
He understood.
Someone had ascended that shaft, thirty years ago.
There had been two of them who’d made it onto the ship in the battered Y-wing he’d found. One had taken the launch and left, probably arguing that reinforcements should be sought.
The other had known, or guessed, that there might not be time before the ship jumped to hyperspace to start its mission: that the risk was too great, the stakes too high, to permit the luxury of getting out of there alive. And that other had remained, to attempt to disarm the Will.
The deadly enclision grid seemed to grin, like pale, waiting teeth.
“I’m sorry,” said Luke, very softly, to that waiting column of shadow. “I wish I could have been here to help you.”
She would have needed help.
He turned the weapon in his hand, knowing instinctively that it had been a woman who made it, who wielded it. A woman with large hands and a long reach, to judge by the weapon’s proportions.… Yoda had told him that the old Jedi Masters could learn quite startling things about a Knight just by examining the lightsaber whose making was a Jedi’s final test.
Around the rim of the handgrip someone had taken the time to inlay a thin line of bronze tsaelke, the long-necked, graceful cetaceans of Chad Ill’s deep oceans.
Still more quietly, he said, “I wish I could have known you.”
He clipped the lightsaber to his belt, and began to hunt for the way this woman—his colleague and fellow Jedi—had gotten into the gun room.
There was only one entrance, straight into a turbolift, which refused to respond to Luke’s touch on the summoning button, but at a guess it was the way she had used. With a little effort he could short the doors into opening, he knew. From there he’d have access to the decks below, either via rope—which could be liberated from a storeroom—or via levitation, if he wanted to risk that great a drain on his limited strength. He wondered if the Force could be used—as it sometimes could—to hold off the blue lightning-threads of the enclision grid long enough for him to get up the shaft to the ship’s computer core.
The thought of trying it turned him cold.
Once in the core, it should be fairly simple to trigger an overload, to destroy the Eye of Palpatine as it should have been destroyed thirty years ago …
And hadn’t been.
He remembered the Klagg’s screams as it bled and charred to agonizing death in the gangway.
The Jedi who had ascended that shaft had lived long enough to damage the ship’s activation trigger, dying up in the core while the Will itself had been left alive. Because she hadn’t been quite strong enough? Quite experienced enough?
Or was the enclision grid something not even the strength of a Master could outlast?
A dirty little hand closed around his sleeve. “Not good, not good.” The Jawa tried to pull him in the direction of the repair shaft that led downward again. It pointed up at the dark square in the ceiling. “Bad. Die a lot.”
Die a lot. Luke thought about the Jawas, and the filthy, rival, feuding villages of the Klaggs and the Gakfedds, reestablishing here the patterns of their homeworld in terms of what they now thought they were. About the Kitonaks in the rec room, waiting patiently for their Chooba slugs to crawl into their mouths, and the dead Affytechan on the floor, and the Talz guarding each other’s backs—against whom?—as they took water to the tripods.
Destroying the ship, he understood, was going to be the easy part.
———
See-Threepio was sitting in front of the comm screen in the quartermaster’s office, a long flex of cable plugged into the droud at the back of his cranium and a tone of serious annoyance in his voice as he said, “You silly machine, you’ve got enclaves of alien life forms all over you, what do you mean, ‘No life forms alien to the intent of the Will’? What about a trace on Galactic Registry Standard 011-733-800-022?”
Luke leaned one shoulder against the jamb of the doorway, aware that there was no more need for Threepio to address the Will aloud than there was for the droid to use human speech to communicate with Artoo-Detoo. But Threepio was programmed to interface with civilized life forms, to think like a civilized life form. And one of the marks of nearly every civilization Luke had ever encountered had been chattiness.
Threepio was chatty.
“What do you mean there are no life forms of that Registry number on board? You have seventy-six Gamorreans in residence!”
“I already tried that, Threepio.” Luke stepped into the room, his entire body aching from the compensation of walking with the staff, the unaccustomed, agonizingly repeated set of movements involved in dragging himself up the ladder rungs by the strength of his arms.
Threepio turned in his chair—another unnecessary human mannerism, for his audio receptors would have picked up, and identified, Luke’s footsteps and breathing eighteen meters down the hall.
“According to the Will, there are no aliens on this ship,” said Luke, with a kind of wry weariness. “According to the Will, concentrations of bodies with internal temperatures of a hundred and five degrees—Gamorrean normal—don’t exist, either. Or those with temperatures of a hundred and ten, or one-six, or eighty-three, which means there aren’t any Jawas, Kitonaks, or Affytechans around. But I have found a way to get up onto the upper decks without—”
From the speaker on the wall on Luke’s right a triple chime sounded, and green lights flared in the onyx void of a ten-centimeter in-ship comm screen above the desk. “Attention, all personnel,” said a musical contralto voice. “Attention, all personnel. Tomorrow at thirteen hundred hours an Internal Security Hearing will be broadcast on all ship’s channels. Tomorrow at thirteen hundred hours an Internal Security Hearing will be broadcast on all ship’s channels.”
The screen sprang to unexpected life. Within it Luke saw the image of Cray, her hands bound, her mouth sealed shut with silver engine tape, her dark eyes wide and scared and furious, being held between two ludicrously uniformed Gamorrean troopers, Klaggs by their helmets.
“Observation of this hearing is mandatory for all personnel. Refusal or avoidance of observation will be construed as sympathy with the ill intentions of the subject.”
After the first shocked second Luke focused his attention on the background, the texture and color of the walls behind Cray and her guards—darker than those in the crew decks and not as cleanly finished—the relative lowness of the ceilings, the visible beams, bolts, and conduits. A corner of a makeshift hut intruded on the scene, part of a packing box with SOROSUB IMPORTS DIVISION stenci
led on it and a roof made of what looked like a survival tarp. Klagg village, he thought.
Nichos stood by the hut, a restraining bolt riveted to his chest and wretched, haunted horror in his eyes.
“All personnel with evidence to lay against the subject are requested to speak to their division Surveillance Representative as soon as possible. Neglect in this matter, when discovered, will be construed as sympathy with the ill intentions of the subject.”
Cray jerked her arm against the Gamorrean’s grasp, kicked hard at his shin. The Klagg half turned and struck her hard enough to have knocked her down had he and the other guard not kept hold of her arms; her face and the shoulder visible through her torn uniform tunic bore other bruises already. Luke saw the look of agony Nichos cast in her direction, but the droid-man made no move, no effort, of either help or comfort.
He couldn’t, Luke knew, because of the restraining bolt.
The guards were half carrying the nearly unconscious Cray out of vid range when the vid itself went dark. Nichos remained where he was, his eyes the only living part of his motionless face.
“Sorry, son, but we’ve had orders.” Ugbuz folded his heavy arms and regarded Luke with a gaze that was hard as flint and not a bit sorry. The Gakfedd chief nodded to himself, as if savoring the orders, or the feeling of having had them, an eerily human gesture that made the hair on Luke’s neck prickle.
“Yeah, I know we have to get them Klagg sons of sows …” The phrase came out all as one word, a leftover fragment from the part of Ugbuz that was still a Gakfedd, “… but we have orders to find the Rebel saboteurs before they wreck the ship.”
His eyes narrowed, hard and yellow and vicious, studying Luke, as if he remembered it was Luke who had stopped them from torturing the Jawa.
Luke extended the power of the Force, focused it with the small gesture of his hand. “Yet it’s vital that we find the Klagg stronghold immediately.”
Star Wars: Children of the Jedi Page 14
