Star Wars: Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  It was like trying to grasp one-handed a wet stone twice the diameter of his grip. He could see it in Ugbuz’s eyes. He wasn’t trying to influence the Gamorrean, but the strength of the Will.

  “Sure, sure it’s vital, Klagg sons of sows, but we have orders to find the Rebel saboteurs before they wreck the ship.”

  It was a programmed loop. Luke knew he wouldn’t be able to get past it. Not with his body shaky from exhaustion, his mind aching from the effort to keep trauma and infection at bay. The big boar’s brow furrowed suspiciously. “Now you tell me again why you had us let that saboteur go?”

  Before Luke could answer there was a clamor of voices from the edge of the village. Ugbuz spun, jaw coming forward and drool stringing from his heavy tusks. “Got some!” he bellowed, yanked his blaster from the holster at his hip, and dashed for the dark rectangle of doorway into the corridor. From the huts all around the cavernous hold other Gakfedds came running, pulling on helmets and picking up axes, laser carbines, vibro-weapons, and blasters—two of them had gotten ion cannons from somewhere and one had a portable missile launcher.

  “I do see their point, Master Luke.” Threepio creaked briskly after him as he followed, much more slowly, in Ugbuz’s wake. “We’ve already lost the lighting in almost all of Deck Eleven and it’s getting more and more difficult to locate a computer terminal in working order. If the Jawas are not stopped they will eventually jeopardize the life support of the vessel itself.”

  As they passed the largest hut the matriarch Bullyak emerged, huge arms folded between her first and second sets of breasts, grimy braids framing a face replete with warts, morrt bites, suspicion, and disgust. She squealed something irritably, and spat voluminously on the floor. Threepio inclined his body in a little half bow and replied, “I quite agree, Madame. I agree absolutely. Jawas are no fit combat for a true boar. She’s quite annoyed,” he explained to Luke.

  “I guessed.”

  When they reached the shaft in the laundry drop, Luke said, “I’ll levitate you as far as the first hatchway onto Deck Fourteen. I’ll take Deck Fifteen. We know the Klagg was trying to go up the gangway when he was killed, so we know their village is above us. Look for any sign of the Klaggs—footprints, blood, torn clothing …” By this time Luke knew the Gamorreans were as likely to fight within the tribe as outside it.

  “I shall certainly try, sir,” replied the droid humbly. “But with the SP-80s doing their duty in cleaning the floors and walls, tracking won’t be easy.”

  “Do the best you can.” Luke reflected that this would have been easier if Cray had been in her right senses—her true identity—when she’d been carried off. “Look also for the kind of walls we saw in the background of the video announcement. The tarp and the crate in that hut have to have come from Mission Stores. Make a note if you see anything similar. Also storerooms for regular navy trooper equipment, as opposed to stormtroopers. I’ll be back to get you down the shaft again at twenty-two hundred.”

  When he reached Deck 15, Luke found that Threepio was only too right about the SP-80s and their unflagging mission to keep the Eye of Palpatine spotless. He found half a dozen plates and cups from the mess hall—polished clean by the MSEs but lying where they had been dropped—but no further evidence of where the Klaggs might have trodden. It was going to be a task, he realized, of laboriously quartering the decks one by one, looking for physical signs of the Klaggs and trying to pick up some trace, some whisper, of recognizable mental resonance from Cray.

  And Threepio wouldn’t even be able to do that.

  A crippled man and a protocol droid. Luke leaned momentarily against the wall, trying not to think about the bruises on Cray’s face, the way her body had snapped against the guards’ brutal grip. Trying not to think about the look in Nichos’s eyes.

  Thirteen hundred hours tomorrow.

  He limped on. The Klagg had been trying to go up. The walls on this deck—or in this section of this deck, which seemed to house the repair installations for the TIE fighters—were darker than those of the crew quarters below, the ceilings lower, but without the metal beams he’d seen in the vid transmission.

  A hangar? he wondered. Storage hold? A corridor stretched to his left, pitch dark. Far down it he heard the scrabble of feet, saw the yellow rat-gleam of Jawa eyes. They were eating the ship to pieces. No wonder the Will had ordered Ugbuz to exterminate them. But he had the suspicion that whatever the result of the Jawa depredations, it would only kill the living crew. Nothing the Jawas could do—no damage or death of those aboard—would prevent the battlemoon’s jump to hyperspace, when it thought nobody was looking. It would have no effect on its capacity to blow the city of Plawal—and probably the other settlements on Belsavis for good measure—to powder and mud.

  He’d seen what the Empire had left of Coruscant, of Mon Calamari, of the Atravis Systems. He’d felt the screaming outcry of the Force, like the ripping apart of organs within his own body, when Carida had gone up.

  To prevent that, he thought, he would go up the enclision grid himself, to make his own attempt at destroying this monster’s mechanical heart.

  Luke tried a door, and when it refused to open limped down the corridor, testing another, and another, until he found one that responded to his command. There was light in that area of the ship, and the air, though chemical, had the slightly ozoneous smell of new, clean oxygen that hadn’t been passed around a hundred sets of lungs. He found another messroom coffee cup on the floor, but no sign of the Klaggs. No trace of Cray’s consciousness.

  It was difficult to keep his bearings, difficult to quarter the ship accurately, because of the closed blast doors on some passageways. He was forced repeatedly to circle through offices, laundry drops, lounges, counting turnings and open doors as he went. As a desert boy he’d learned early to orient himself with the most ephemeral of landmarks, and his training as a Jedi had sharpened and heightened this ability to an almost preternatural degree, but there were miles of corridor, hundreds of identical doors. SP-80s patiently made their rounds along the wall panels, removing already invisible smudges and stains, so there was no sense in marking his way physically with chalk or engine oil. MSEs scurried on their automated errands, as undistinguished from one another as the carefully cloned bepps grown in Bith hydroponics tanks: Luke had heard the expression “as alike as bepps” all his life without ever meeting anyone who actually enjoyed eating the precise, six-centimeter-square, pale-pink, nutritionally balanced and absolutely flavorless cubes.

  Down a darkened hall a square of white light lay against a wall. Shadows passed across it, and Luke’s quick hearing picked up the mutter of voices. Dragging himself along on a crutch, silence was out of the question, but he moved slowly, keeping his distance, extending his senses to listen, to pick out the words …

  Then he relaxed. Though they were saying things like “All gunnery ports cleared, Commander,” and “Incoming reports on status of scouts, sir,” the lisping musicality of the voices—several octaves higher than those of human children—let him know that he’d just stumbled on an enclave of Affytechans.

  The room was some kind of operations systems node, more likely connected to the ship’s recycling and water-pumping lines than to its weaponry. Not that it mattered to the Affytechans. The gorgeous inhabitants of Dom-Bradden—petaled, tasseled, tufted, and fluttering with hundreds of tendrils and shoots—were bent over the circuit tracers and inventory processors, tapping the responseless keyboards and gazing into the blank screens with the intensity of Imperial guards on a mission from Palpatine himself.

  And perhaps they thought they were. Luke had never been quite able to tell about the Affytechans.

  Did they know, he wondered, leaning in the doorway, that the levers weren’t moving, the knobs weren’t turning? That the screens before them were dead as wet slate? “Prepare to launch TIE fighters, Lieutenant,” sang out the obvious commander, a frilled purple thing with haloes of white fur outlining the yellow exuberance of its stam
ens, and the lieutenant—sixteen shades of oranges, yellows, and reds and big around as a barrel—gripped levers in its talons and produced an amazing oratorio of sound effects, none of which had the slightest relation to any mechanical noise Luke had ever heard.

  As far as Luke had been able to ascertain, the Affytechans, unlike the Gamorreans, sought to harm no one. Their consciousness, if they had any, was wholly sunk into the dreams of the Imperial Space Service, not divided between dream and reality.

  “They’re firing on us, Captain!” cried a beautiful thing of yellow and blue. “Plasma torpedoes coming in on port deflector shields!”

  Three or four others made what they clearly fancied were explosion noises—rumblings like thunder and shrill cries—and everyone in the room staggered wildly from one side of the chamber to the other as if the ship had taken a massive hit, waving their flaps and petals and shedding white and gold pollen like clouds of luminous dust.

  “Return fire! Return fire! Yes?” The captain’s lacy sensors turned like a breeze-tossed meadow in Luke’s direction as Luke hobbled over to it and saluted.

  “Major Calrissian, Special Services. 22911-B. Where are they holding the Rebel saboteur they caught?”

  “In the detention area of Deck Six, of course!” cried the captain, out of at least six mouths in exquisite harmony. “I have no time for questions like that! My men are being slaughtered!”

  Its vast, flinging gesture took in the doorway behind it. Luke touched the opener and saw, to his shock and horror, in the small lounge that lay behind, the dismembered bodies of four or five Affytechans scattered over tables, chairs, desks. Someone had activated the fire-prevention sprinkler in the ceiling, turning the nozzles so that a spray of fine, rather metallic-smelling mist rained down over everything on the room, pattering wetly on the puddled floor. Amid the pools the torn-off limbs and ripped-out nervous systems were sprouting, thin yellow pendules already bending under the swollen weight of a rainbow of fleshy bulbs.

  “Captain, the hyperdrive can’t take much more of this!” exclaimed someone who was obviously standing in for the ship’s engineer, and a gunnery officer added, “More Rebel fighters coming in, sir! A-formation, starboard ten o’clock!” Everyone leaped to the dead consoles and began making important-sounding beeps and twitters.

  Luke limped thoughtfully out into the corridor again.

  Deck 6. Far below them—and the Klagg had definitely been trying to go up. Still …

  Would the Klaggs have done that kind of damage to the Affytechans?

  It was a possibility, thought Luke, trying a door, then doubling through a storage area (still no open ceiling beams) and down a viewing gallery above an empty hangar deck. The pieces hadn’t looked charred so much as cut and torn. How did blaster fire react on the soft, silklike vegetable flesh?

  He paused at a juncture, trying to get his bearings. Another door refused to open—one that he had the vague sensation had been open before—sending him back down a cross-corridor, through a laundry drop, along a passage that ended in another shut blast door.

  I’ve been this way, thought Luke. He knew he had. And that door had been …

  He stopped, his scalp prickling.

  He smelled Sand People.

  Idiot, he thought, as his whole body turned cold. If the landers picked up Jawas from Tatooine you should have known there was a chance they’d pick up Sand People—Tusken Raiders—there as well.

  They’d been in this corridor not more than a few minutes ago. The air circulators hadn’t yet cleared their smell. It meant they could be behind him, tall rag-wrapped shapes like brutally vicious scarecrows mummified in sand, crouched in one of the dark cabins, listening for his dragging footfalls behind one of those many doors the Gamorreans, or the Affytechans, or the Jawas had forced open …

  Tusken rifles were mostly basement specials, tinkered by illegal manufacturers in Mos Eisley and sold to the Raiders by unscrupulous middlemen. Inaccurate, dirty-firing, but even a near miss in corridors like these could be fatal.

  He could still smell them. The circulators should have cleared away the whiff of their dirt-colored wrappings had they been just passing through.

  He moved back the way he’d come, stretching his senses for the smallest trace. Around the corner he’d last turned, he thought he heard the faint scratch of metal on metal. At the same moment, movement in the corridor crossing ahead of him caught his eye. A Mouse-droid zooming up the hallway stopped, as if its registers identified something ahead of it out of Luke’s sight around the corner. Abruptly it reversed itself, backing full speed in panic.

  Luke flung himself toward the nearest room as a searing blast of rifle fire scorched paneling all around him. The Sand People knew their ambush was blown; he heard their almost silent footfalls in the hall as he slammed over the manual on the doors, dashed across the room—it was a communal lounge of some kind, with a visi-reader and a coffee spigot—and through the door on the other side. A cabin, two bunks, like the one he’d come back to consciousness in. Two bunks and one door. Gaffe sticks and makeshift rams pounded on the door of the lounge and he tried another door, a laundry drop like the one from which the Jawa had led him into the repair shaft.

  The panel that led to the repair shaft wouldn’t budge. Luke heard the crashing of the lounge door being broken in, the wild, blistering rake of saturation fire into the lounge, the visi-reader exploding and the hiss of bursting fire-system pipes … He’d never get a chance to bring his lightsaber into play. The blast of the Force that he directed against the wall hatch dented it, but the dog-bolts on the other side held. He remembered seeing, on other hatches in the shafts, the black boxes of magnetic locks.

  The door heaved, shook. There was a splintering crash, another harsh zatter as the lock was subjected to rifle fire, and the door opened a slot. Blaster fire roared through, raking the small area of the room accessible through the slit, but it was only the smallest of rooms. Ricochets bounced and sizzled wildly against the walls, and Luke flattened into a corner, trying to summon enough of the Force to keep from getting fried by strays. To an extent he could keep the spattering randomness of them off him, but once the Sand People got the doors open enough to crisp the room wholesale …

  The Force. If he could use the Force to blow the doors off outward, to hurl himself through in a flying levitation, it might buy him a few seconds …

  He knew that was absurd but was summoning his strength, his energy, to try it anyway when a faint clanging noise by his right foot drew his attention.

  The repair shaft coverplate had fallen neatly inward.

  Luke ducked through, pushed the panel back into place behind him—it had been dogged, and there was a lock mechanism on it, top—and latched it again with the bolts alone, which even without the lock should hold against Sand People. The worklights still burned dimly here, a grudging ocher glow that faded around him as he climbed down, leaving only the faint light of the glowrods on his staff.

  At the next level down he paused, resting his forehead against the panel and stretching out his senses through the metal and into the room beyond. He heard no sound, so dogged back the latches and, holding on to the handgrips within the shaft, swung himself back and away from the hatch and summoned the Force, like a violent kick of kinetic energy, from the outside of the panel, smashing it in despite the magnetic lock.

  The metal buckled, twisting against the outer latches, sufficiently for Luke to work it free. He slipped through into a dim-lit storage area on Deck 14.

  Threepio was waiting for him in the laundry drop. “I was able to find nothing, Master Luke, nothing,” moaned the droid. “Dr. Mingla is doomed, I know she is.”

  In the corridor outside, the lights were out. Those in the laundry room dropped to the grimy yellow glow of the emergency batteries in which Threepio’s eyes shone like headlamps.

  “And at the rate the Jawas are stealing wire and solenoids from this vessel,” added Threepio tartly, “we’re all doomed.”

&n
bsp; “Well, nobody’s doomed yet.” Luke eased himself down against the wall and stretched out his splinted leg, which had begun to throb in spite of all the concentration, all the Jedi healing techniques he could summon. He pulled open the engine-taped flap in the leg of his coverall and affixed another perigen patch to his thigh. The analgesic compound lowered the pain but did nothing for his utter weariness. He wondered if he could force his own alertness to sustain a search of the Deck 6 Detention Block, or whether he would miss some subtle clue from sheer exhaustion.

  We’re talking about Gamorreans here, he reflected. How subtle can they be?

  Though his every instinct told him to look on the upper decks for Cray, he knew he couldn’t neglect even the possibility of a lead. It did make a kind of sense.

  He took a deep breath. “You willing to search the next deck up, Threepio? I can levitate you as far as the opening on Deck … I think it’s Seventeen.” He leaned through the open hatch and looked. The next opening looked at least two levels above the Deck 15 hatch.

  “Very well, sir. But I do suggest, Master Luke, that you get some rest. And permit me to re-dress that wound on your leg. According to my perception of your vital signs—”

  “I’ll get some rest when I get back from Deck Six. Really,” he added into Threepio’s pregnant silence. “We just … I get the feeling we don’t have a lot of time.” His bones hurt at the thought of climbing down all those levels—one foot down with his whole weight supported on his arms, then move his arms to the next rung to take his whole weight again …

  But his escape from the Sand People had convinced him that he was right in not expending his concentration and possibly dissipating his ability to focus the Force in self-levitation.

  He had no idea when he’d need everything he could summon. Or how long he’d have to last on what little strength he had.

  It was difficult enough, he found, raising Threepio all those levels—some ten or twelve meters—and pushing back the hatchway panel so that the droid could scramble through. “Do be careful, Master Luke,” called Threepio’s voice down the shaft.