Luke grinned. Aunt Beru used to call after him to take his poncho when he’d take the landspeeder out into the Dune Sea, never guessing that he was going hunting womp rats and that if anything went wrong, getting chilled without his poncho was going to be the least of his worries.
His grin faded as he looked down the blackness of the shaft. Most of the lighting was gone, only small, faded squares of brightness showing where hatches had been removed by Jawas using this route between decks. He slung his staff around his shoulder again.
Eight levels. One aching rung at a time.
Another thought made him stop and turn back to look around the dim chamber behind him.
Everywhere he had traversed in this vessel, he had known—felt—the malignant intelligence of the Will: keeping track of him, monitoring his footfalls, his heartbeats, the temperature of his body. His vital signs, as Threepio monitored them, though without the protocol droid’s fussy protectiveness. He was almost certain it was the Will that had closed some of those doors on the deck above, guiding him toward the Sand People’s ambush. For the first time, he had the oddest feeling that it wasn’t the Will alone observing him.
It certainly hadn’t been the Will that had undone the inner lock on that repair-tube hatch.
Or had it been? Had that only served the intent of the Will?
He didn’t know. Nevertheless, before he swung himself back into the shaft for the long crawl down, he said quietly, “Thank you. Thank you for helping me.”
And I’ll feel like the President of the Galactic Society of Village Idiots if it was just a ruse to put me off my guard.
He eased himself off the floor and into the hatch and thence down into darkness.
Chapter 10
“C’mon, Chewie, didn’t you hear the man say this afternoon there was nothing up here?” Han Solo flashed the beam of his light around the silent darkness of Plett’s House. It was a much stronger beam than Leia’s glowrod, a smuggler’s actinic luminator. Something scuttled in a corner, invisible in the Stygian mist that curtained the ruined house, and Solo smelled a dirty sweetness, like rotting fruit.
Chewbacca produced a hoarse, disapproving groan.
“What, you gonna let a little bug scare you?” The luminator beam found the dull circle of the metal well cover. “Probably lots of ’em down there.” Han knelt beside the cover and unslung his utility kit from his shoulder. Overhead, the lights of the hanging gardens sparkled distantly through the mists.
Han had put two calls through to Mara Jade on the Holonet transceiver, but neither had been picked up. His attempt to reach Leia at the municipal archives had failed as well. They said she had not yet arrived, which struck him as not like Leia, though between fog and darkness it was possible she’d taken a wrong turning and gotten lost in an orchard somewhere. Whatever might lurk in the reputedly nonexistent tunnels beneath Plett’s House, it was difficult to imagine any genuine danger befalling anyone aboveground in this sleepy, mist-bound Garden of Delight. He’d contacted Winter on subspace, said hello to Anakin and talked briefly to Jacen and Jaina, who’d kept trying to put their hands through the holo field, clearly unaware that their father wasn’t in the room with them. But when the call was over and silence returned to the borrowed house, he knew what the trouble was.
He wanted to go back to Plett’s House and look around.
He thought he knew how to get into the crypts.
Like Drub McKumb, he reflected wryly, he, too, had his “calculations.”
Chewbacca handed him the bundle he’d brought up from the Millennium Falcon’s locker—a Scale-3 antigrav generator, and a couple of backpack power cells. Solo set the generator on the well cover and flipped the magnetic catches, only to discover that the cover wasn’t durasteel as he’d thought, but some kind of nonferrous metal. Interesting, considering the price differential between ferrous and nonferrous. There were no handles, either.
“Well, I guess we do this the hard way.” He took a small drill from the utility kit, and hooked it into the power cell. It occurred to him to wonder who exactly had put the cover in place, and how long it had been there. By the dirt in the cracks, at least a couple of years, but Leia had mentioned that in her vision of former years the well had been guarded by open grillework, not a solid slab. Probably for reasons of warmth.
By the light of Chewbacca’s torch he fastened bolts to the cover, affixed the antigrav. He couldn’t guess how deep the air column of the well was—at least a hundred meters, he calculated from the combined height of the benches that rose above the valley floor. A Scale-3 was good for most jobs of this size, and in the event it lifted the cover easily. The metal slab was beveled inward, and thicker than one would expect, sitting easily in the shaped lip of the well.
Warm steam murky with sulfur sighed up around the cover as it lifted, and wisps of it trailed around the feet of the intruders as they guided the cover out of the way, but whatever lay at the bottom of Plett’s Well was a warm spring, not a hot one. By the glow of the luminator, when Han held it down the shaft, thick pillows of moss and lichen could be seen on the glistening dark stone. Mingled with the sulfur and the acrid whiff of chlorine came the smell of rotting fruit.
Chewie growled.
“So it stinks,” said Han. “So does the Falcon’s engine room when we blow a duct.”
As he’d thought, there were handholds cut into the rock. The irregularities of the shaft itself, and the dense blocks and pits of shadow they created, hid everything beyond the first few meters, and ghostly drifts of steam threw back the light. Solo fixed a loop of safety line around the stone upright between two of the keyhole windows and clipped the other end to his belt. Chewie ran a double loop of the line around his waist.
“Right,” muttered Solo and clipped the luminator to the front of his vest. “So let’s see what all the fuss is about.”
They hid the children down the well.
Solo almost missed the door that led into the passageway, set in the wall of the shaft where the shadows seemed to cross no matter where the light was coming from. The heat grew thicker as they descended, and with it the dirty, sweetish smell. He was aware of wet, crawly movement among the lichen and mineral deposits on the rock. But below the level of the passageway’s entrance, the handholds were choked shut with moss. The difference was noticeable enough to send him searching up the shaft again, probing at each shadow around and behind him with his light.
“There.” He shone the light on the walls of the tunnel as he and Chewbacca ducked through the low, oval mouth. The Wookiee shook himself uncomfortably, his coarse, tobacco-colored fur black-wet and pointy with moisture. The luminator beam played across old scarring in the walls, places where the moss on the floor had been gouged and regrown.
“Somebody was here, all right, and a lot less than thirty years ago.” Han bent, and picked something out of the moss.
In the beam of his flash it glinted dirty yellowish, the size of his thumbnail, with a quality to it at once matte and glittery. Dark lines intricately stitched its surface.
“Xylen,” he said. “A memory chip—if old Plett was the hot-stuff botanist everybody says he was the place would have been stuffed with sequencers and tanks and what-all else. No wonder people came around to strip it.” He unhooked the safety line from his belt, letting it dangle back in front of the tunnel’s mouth. “What’s the price of xylen on the open market these days, Chewie?”
The Wookiee disclaimed specialized expertise in commodities, but Han knew at least that the xylen backing of that single old-fashioned chip would at least have paid for the dress Leia had worn that afternoon several times over. He slipped it into his pocket.
“No wonder Nubblyk kept it a secret.” The luminator’s beam picked out the uneven contours of the dripping walls, the low arch of the moss-grown ceiling. Something black and shiny and the size of Han’s foot slithered and fled through the moss to vanish down the throat of the passageway. Han flinched involuntarily and Chewie, bent to keep hi
s head from brushing the ceiling, ran a nervous paw over the back of his mane, as if he suspected that something had detached itself from the moss above him and was crawling in his fur.
He growled a question.
“Dunno,” said Han. “The only thing that could have killed off the trade in chips—and whatever else they could pull out of the old machinery—is if they’d cleared the place out. That would have been the year after the Battle of Endor, by what they were saying in the bars.” Rags of mist flickered around his bootheels as he led the way down a short incline into the tunnel that stretched away into the dark.
Another interrogative rumble.
“Yeah, Drub worked for him as a runner. But the Slyte kept a tight rein on things. My guess is nobody but him knew where the entrance to this place was. And there might have been more than one. Damn,” he added, as they came to the top of a steeply zigzagging ramp. “Talk about a place that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside.”
The tunnel climbed, following the network of old volcanic passages and underground riverbeds that eventually opened into the great chasm of the Plawal Rift itself. At the top of the ramp a short tunnel pierced the rock, only to be blocked at the far end: “That’s where the door Leia saw went into the House, I bet.” They backtracked, followed the main tunnel, Chewie grumbling as he shifted his bowcaster and blaster rifle to a more comfortable position on his shoulders.
“Yeah, here we are. This vent probably runs straight out under the ice.”
They followed the scratched marks on the floor to a wide cavern, crossed a narrow wooden bridge above a cleft from which steam and the acrid breath of subterranean gases rose in a suffocating wall. The rocks beyond, where the tunnel widened into a vast, uneven space of darkness, were coated with wrinkled, labyrinthine mazes of paste-white sinter formations, the floor pitted with long-dead fumaroles and slashed by steaming streams nearly choked in strangely tinted mineral deposits. Flat wormlike white tentacles groped from one of the fumaroles, clutching toward their feet, but when Han and Chewbacca drew away in alarm subsided again with a bubbly slurp.
At the far end of the cave a room had been cut in the rock, littered with plastic boxes and the small, flat packets smugglers used to store goods in when they shoved them behind hull panels or under floor sections. Most of them were chewed and mauled; a small kretch, no longer than Han’s thumb, skittered away from the track of his light.
“Gold wire.” Han nudged the plastic litter with his boot toe, then knelt to retrieve something metallic that twinkled dirty-bright in the light. It was kinked and twisted, having been straightened out from its original configuration and bundled for storage. Mineral deposits clung thickly to it, pinkish gold in the beam of the light. “Utility grade.”
He flashed the beam over the room’s two other doorways, which led, one to a stair, one to a tunnel beyond. The low ceilings were toothy with stalactites and furred with hairlike deposits of sodium and silica. Lichen glimmered in threads of blue, green, and crimson on the walls, and serpents of mist coiled across the floor.
“Let’s see what else we got.”
Hot, acrid breezes stirred Solo’s sweat-drenched hair and the Wookiee’s fur as they moved on into the vent system. Streams of water dripped through the formations on the walls, and the darkness was choking with sulfur and kretch smell. In another room cut from the tunnel wall Han’s light glinted on a jumble of metal casings and circuit boards, flashed in the empty glass eyes of an old APD-40 droid’s cylindrical head.
“When’d they quit making APDs, Chewie?” Han hunkered to turn the boards over in his hand. All the chips had been pried out, the power cells removed.
The Wookiee guessed the Clone Wars, but didn’t come into the room. He remained in the low-beamed rectangle of the doorway, listening back along the blackness of the tunnel, to the echo chamber of the last cave. Han could hear only the distant rushing of water somewhere, but knew his friend’s ears were far sharper than his own.
“Yeah, I thought that myself. They switched to the C Three series because the APDs used gold wire and xylen points. This’s an old model, too.” He flashed the light around the litter of split casings and looted boards. “Must be six, eight droids’ worth of junk here. This was what they were after, all right.”
In the next room along the corridor they found the jewels.
“What the …?”
Han’s light threw rainbows from the three boxes ranged along the wall, bright colors springing back to salt the low ceiling in fire. He stooped, brought up dirty, crusted earrings, chains, pectorals, pendants …
Chewie growled a remark, held up a plastic packing crate, half filled with xylen chips.
Their eyes met, baffled.
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Han ran his fingers through the chips. They were jumbled together with electronic salvage, gold wire, power cells, selenium … “There must be three quarters of a million credits in this room.” He shone his light through the inner doorway, and the gleam passed over the hard angles of machinery, dark screens, the smooth curved arms of processors and pumps. “This stuff hasn’t been touched. I can’t see Nubblyk just walking away and—”
Chewie held up his paw, head turning toward the outer door, and made a sign to kill the light.
Silence and utter darkness. The far-off hursh of water echoed in the low groinings of the ceiling. A horrible scratching, and the dirty-sweet kretch smell, made Han fight to thrust from his mind the awful fantasy of a dozen of the things climbing his boots the minute the light was out.
He picked his cautious way to where he knew Chewie stood still in the entrance. His outstretched hand met fur. Had his companion been human he would have whispered his name to avoid a knife between his ribs, but the Wookiee would know his smell. Chewie did not growl, but under his fingers Han felt the fur of his friend’s arm lift and prickle.
There was definitely something in the corridor.
Stray, hot wind down the tunnels brought a feral stink that almost made Han gag. Whatever it was, for that amount of smell it was big.
Then a scream, the scratch of claws; Han yelled “Light!” to warn Chewbacca and threw the full-force beam directly at the source of the sound. It flared diamond hard in yellow beast-eyes, slashing brown teeth. Chewie’s blaster bolt went wild and spattered, ricocheting crazily in the narrow space while the creature threw itself on the Wookiee, howling and ripping in a mass of filthy, mold-covered hair.
There was no question of a second shot, and Han plunged in with his knife, stabbing at the creature’s back as it bore Chewbacca to the floor. It screamed, writhed in Chewie’s grip, slashed at Han, and the dropped luminator caught movement in the dark. Other things were running, eyes blazing, the uneven ceiling suddenly echoing with screams.
Han twisted loose from the first attacker as it slumped, grabbed the luminator and Chewbacca’s dropped rifle, and the Wookiee rolled to his feet, leaped over the corpse, and pelted away into the dark. Han dashed behind him, firing back, the bolt hissing from wall to wall and showing like lightning the shambling, filthy things on their heels.
“Back that way!”
Chewie only roared, long legs taking him far ahead down the twisting rock of the tunnel. The luminator beam leaped crazily over mold-covered walls, bounced across doorways yawning into blind dark of dead-end rooms, transformed stalagmites in the great cavern into attackers and old vent holes and lava formations into bottomless pits. They scrambled, slipping in the thin mud of the floor, toward the dark cleft of the entry to the tunnel back toward the well …
The beam caught the glint of something in the tunnel, rounded and shiny, like black jewelry or the scales of some monstrous thing. Something like wet cobblestones that suddenly seemed to carpet the tunnel—walls, ceiling, and floor. Something that hadn’t been there before.
Kretch.
The tunnel leading back toward the well was choked with them.
For one moment Han and Chewie stood aghast, staring at the nightmare see
the of insectile bodies that filled the passageway nearly twenty centimeters thick. Then, as if a plug had been pulled, the river of kretch flowed out.
Han screamed something entirely inadequate to the occasion and plunged away to his left into the lumpy ruin of old lava formations and sullenly steaming craterlets, Chewie at his heels and all the legions of darkness shrieking behind.
“Got to find a way back,” panted Han desperately, as frail sinter and twisted crystal crunched underfoot and the patches of glowing lichen throbbed and stirred like rainbow embers at their passage. The air down here burned with volatile gases and the stench of sulfur, chewing at the lungs, and the baking heat made Han gasp. “Back to the vaults … maybe this way …”
More screams, and two black forms sprang suddenly into the glare of the luminator where it fell on the sloped side of an old debris cone rising up before them.
“On second thought, let’s go this way—”
Chewie caught his arm, stopping him, and roared a challenge into the darkness ahead of them.
A challenge was screamed in return.
Han said, “Great.” He raised the light, flashing the beam across the round, smooth terraces of what had been superheated mud pits, now cooled to dance floors of garishly colored hardpan still ringed with the traces of final bubbles—and there they were.
Three of them, maybe four … one running, a couple crawling on all fours.
He swung the flash, the white light splashing over finger-thin columns of rising smoke from a vent to their left, a wilderness of steaming caldera below them where the ground fell farther, picked up the eyes of the things scuffling, shambling, running toward them from behind: eyes and hands and the crude weapons they carried.
Chewbacca fired a bowcaster bolt that went through the chest of something that looked as if it had once been a flat-headed Carosite—it kept on coming, crawling, leaving a broad, bloody smear in its wake. Han opened fire with his blaster at the second group and missed, a huge scar ripping in the mud of the old pits, and from somewhere close by there was a rumble, the ground jarring slightly underfoot and loosened rock showering them from the dark above.
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