“But you was the kid who stopped us questioning that saboteur?”
“No,” said Luke, drawing the Force about him, projecting it into Ugbuz’s limited—and rather divided—mind. He found that even this small and simple exercise was difficult under the effects of pain and fatigue. “That was someone else also.”
“Oh.” Ugbuz’s frown deepened. “The Will says there’s something going on on this ship.”
“There is,” Luke agreed. “But none of it has anything to do with me.”
“Oh. Okay.” He disappeared back into the lounge, but in the doorway Luke saw him turn and glance back over his shoulder as if puzzling about edges that did not match.
Just what I needed, thought Luke. Something else to worry about.
“Let’s go,” he said softly. “I want to reprogram one of the SPs on Deck Eighteen, and there’s something else I want to try up on Deck Fifteen.”
“Great galaxies, Captain, there’s hundreds of them!” The Affytechan second-in-command swung away from the blank screen—they were in the central lounge of Deck 15 this time, bent intently over the dead consoles of games and visi-readers—and fluttered all its tendrils and ramifications in horror. “They were lying in wait for us behind every asteroid in the field!”
“Gunnery! What’s our status?” It was a different captain, ligulate, delicious pink grading into magenta, and extravagant with stalks and tassels. The former captain was in charge of a glitterball console at the far end of the lounge.
“Down to fifty percent, Captain,” reported a tubulate mass of azure and periwinkle. “But we’ve still got enough juice to make ’em think twice!”
“That’s the spirit, men!” cried the captain. “We’ll have ’em yelling for their mothers before we’re through. Can I help you?” The captain’s lacy florets all turned in Luke’s direction as Luke and Threepio approached the two chairs, piled one atop the other, which constituted the makeshift bridge.
“Major Calrissian, Special Services.” Luke saluted, a gesture the captain returned smartly. Though all the screens and consoles were dead—including, Luke suspected, the main viewer on which the Affytechans had supposedly watched Cray’s trial—at least the lights still worked. Luke couldn’t be sure, but he thought there were more Affytechans than there had been before.
“New assignment, sir, which supersedes all previous orders.” As Luke spoke he collected the Force, projected it into the mind—if there was a mind—within that mass of color and fluff.
“There’s been a minor malfunction of the schematics library. Sabotage, we think. Nothing to worry about, but we need to know the location and status of all transport craft on board. It’s a tough assignment—dangerous.” Luke made his face grave. “I’d hesitate passing it on to inexperienced men, but you … Well, you’re the best we have. Think you can handle it?”
The captain sprang down from his chair, a good meter and a half to the floor, and returned Luke’s salute again. Whatever creatures the Affytechans relied upon for cross-pollination, they clearly found some rather strange enzymes appealing; the Affytechans, especially when they moved quickly, gave off an amazing galaxy of stenches, acrid, ammoniac, or gluily musky. In the damaged air-conditioning of the Deck 15 lounge the effect was overpowering.
“You can count on us, Major. Men …”
The Affytechans abandoned the battle midmaneuver and lined up in the center of the lounge, standing at rigid attention while their captain outlined the assignment and gave them a pep talk worthy of the great general Hyndis Raithal herself.
“It never ceases to amaze me, sir,” said Threepio, as the exuberant crew streamed out of the lounge, “the ingenuity of the human species. Say what she will—and I certainly intend no criticism of either Dr. Mingla or her preceptors—I have never yet encountered a droid program capable of the kind of lateral thinking one sees in human beings.”
“Let’s hope not,” said Luke quietly. “Because a droid program—an artificial intelligence—is exactly what we’re up against in this ship.”
They walked in silence for a time toward the laundry drop where the repair shaft rose to take them to Deck 18. While waiting for Cray’s trial Threepio had changed the dressings of the ax wound on Luke’s leg, and though the infection seemed to be contained, Luke thought the pain was getting worse again.
“I have observed, sir,” Threepio said after a time, “that since Nichos’s … transformation”—it was extremely rare for Threepio to hesitate over a word—“he and I have a great deal more in common than we ever did when he was … as he was before. He was always a pleasant and likable human being, but now he is much less humanly unpredictable, if you will pardon me for expressing a purely subjective opinion based on incomplete data. I can only trust and hope that Dr. Mingla finds this a benefit.”
Trust and hope, thought Luke. Grammatical constructs programmed into Threepio’s language to make it more human … but he knew that the pessimistic droid did not, in fact, either trust or hope anything. He wondered if Nichos did, anymore.
“Come on,” he said quietly. “Let’s find an SP and see if you can convince it to become a tracker.”
Luke had been surrounded by droids all his life, had grown up with them on his uncle’s farm. As Threepio said, they were excellent at what they were, but unlike humans what they were not, they were not, one hundred percent. And Cray, wherever she was, was finding this out in the cruelest possible way.
He only hoped he could reach her in time.
The area of Deck 18 immediately surrounding the laundry drop to which the repair shaft led them was high-ceilinged, almost twice the height of other decks. The walls were of the same dark gray Luke had seen in the background of both the Klagg village and the Justice Chamber. A short distance beyond the laundry drop, the corridors were utterly lightless; hatches and wall panels gaped open, spewing cables and wires like the entrails of gutted beasts. Luke didn’t need to see the dirty fingermarks all around them to guess who was responsible.
An SP-80 was doggedly removing the fingermarks. It didn’t pause when Luke flipped open the coverplate in its side and plugged in the comm cable from the droud in the back of Threepio’s cranium. Over the course of the years back on Tatooine Uncle Owen had owned at least five different SPs that Luke could remember, and by the time he was fourteen Luke had been able to break down, clean, repair, refit, and reassemble one in four hours. Reprogramming from a translator droid that already had access to biocodes and serial indexes was candy.
The SP plodded off down the corridor almost before Luke had the cable out of it; he had to pace it to shut the coverplate. It still held its cleaner arm and vacuum absorption pad straight out in front of it, and for some reason Luke was reminded of the Kitonaks, patiently waiting for Chooba slugs to crawl to them across thousands of light-years of hyperspace and into their open mouths.
“Does it scent the Klaggs on this deck, d’you think?” asked Luke softly, limping in the SP’s slow wake with Threepio clicking along at his side. “Or would it pick them up on the downdraft from a gangway?”
“Oh, the sensory mechanism of a cleaner SP is quite capable of detecting grease molecules in a concentration of less than ten thousand per square centimeter, in an area of a quarter of a square centimeter, at a distance of a hundred meters or more.”
“Biggs’s mother could do that,” remarked Luke.
Threepio was silent for a moment. “With all due respect to Mrs. Biggs, sir, I understand that even if a human is born with an exceptional olfactory center in the brain, it requires a Magrody implant and extensive childhood training to develop such a skill, though among the Chadra-Fan and the Ortolans such abilities are quite commonplace.”
“Joke,” said Luke gravely. “That was a joke.”
“Ah,” said Threepio. “Indeed.”
The SP halted before a closed blast shield that blocked the hall. Luke stepped forward and palmed the opener, without result. “Really, Master Luke, there are times when I almost agree with
Ugbuz’s attitude toward the Jawas,” said Threepio, as the SP’s four small sensor pits curved and shifted this way and that and streams of yellow numbers fidgeted across its readout. Then it turned, with great deliberation, backtracked to a cross-corridor a few meters behind them, turned right, and continued through the maze of shut doors and dark, cavernous storage hulls.
Luke said nothing, but the hair on his nape prickled with the sensation of being watched, observed from the darkness. Jawas? He might not have an SP-80’s olfactory detectors but he’d know if Jawas were around. Ditto for Sand People.
This was something else.
Another blast door. The SP recalibrated, changed course, through a holding area filled with gutted packing containers whose contents—regular navy helmets, coveralls, gray-green half-armor, and blankets—strewed the floor. Pieces of the containers themselves were gone; Luke noted that those that remained were labeled SOROSUB IMPORTS. The walls here were dark in the bobbing light of Luke’s staff, and looked unfinished, with rafters stretching bare overhead and bolt ends glinting in the shadows. The door into a repair bay stood open. Luke glanced back over his shoulder and saw that the corridor entrance, through which they had come moments before, was shut now.
The Will, he thought. It’s herding us. Pushing us the way it wants us to go.
Clanking softly, the SP-80 turned down a long corridor on the starboard side of the ship. Though no damage by Jawas was evident, the lights were gone here, too, and as he and Threepio drew farther from the lighted area and the reflections of its glow got dimmer and dimmer, Luke sensed ever more strongly the presence of an unknown, watching entity. He kept as close to Threepio as he could, matching his halting stride to the droid’s and making sure there was never a space between them when they passed under the periodic blast doors.
The SP-80 turned a corner. A stair led up into pitchy night. Luke heard the hiss-whirr-tap of its short legs negotiating the stairs of a gangway and extended his arm sharply to stop Threepio from following it, feeling only the horrible inner prickling sensation of a trap.
He held out his staff with its dimly shining glowrods toward the square opening of the stairs. The light was flung back by dim strips of opalescent material, thick and thin alternating in a strange not-quite-pattern, vanishing upward into the dark.
Luke looked up. The ceiling of the gangway was dotted with the cold pearly squares of the more usual form of enclision grid.
The SP ascended, unharmed, out of his sight.
“Good heavens.” Threepio stepped closer to the door. “It’s definitely some sort of enclision grid, sir. But obviously deactivated. Possibly the Jawas—”
“No.” Luke leaned against the wall, his leg beginning to throb burningly as the first relief of the perigen wore off. “No, the Will wouldn’t have herded us to a gangway that was disabled. It’s just waiting until we’re too far up to turn back.”
Slowly, the heavy, mechanical stride of the SP droid faded. In the darkness, the weight of the ship seemed to press on them, waiting for them to follow it up the wired stair. Luke hurried his stride as much as he could to get back to the area of the lights.
The Affytechans were waiting for them down in the bright, warm lighting of Deck 15, like an ambulatory garden of enormous and slightly pixilated flowers. “We’ve located the transport craft, sir,” said the captain—the post seemed to have shifted to a stalky tubulate of blue and white. “Two Beta-class Telgorns with a capacity of a hundred and twenty apiece, in the Deck Sixteen portside landing bays.” It saluted him smartly. “Dr. Breen here has been working on getting the schematics program repaired.”
The former orange-and-yellow captain saluted as well. “Simple transposition of numbers, sir. Probably due to operator error. Easily fixed.”
Dr. Breen?
“This way, sir.”
“Even if you are able to pilot one, or both, transport craft, sir,” protested Threepio hesitantly, “however will you prevent the defenses of the Eye of Palpatine itself from destroying them, as they destroyed our scout craft? You said yourself they had an almost human targeting capability. And for that matter, how in the galaxy are you going to get the Klaggs and the Gakfedds into the craft to take them off the ship? Or the Kitonaks?”
A little to Luke’s surprise, they passed a small group of the stumpy, putty-colored aliens, shambling along the corridor at the top of the communicating gangway to Deck 16 with excruciating slowness, conversing in their soft, rambling burble of rumbles and whistles. Luke couldn’t imagine coaxing the torpid creatures into the shuttlecraft or making them stay there once they’d arrived. And as for rounding up the tripods, or the Jawas …
“I don’t know.” He wondered how he’d managed to get himself elected savior to this ship of fools. “But if I’m going to destroy the ship before it attacks Belsavis, Threepio, I’ve got to get them off it somehow. I can’t leave them. Not even the Jawas. Not even the—”
They turned a corner and Luke halted, shocked. The corridor before them, low-ceilinged and slung with the heavy barrels of one of the ship’s main water-circ trunks, was strewn with the hacked and dismembered bodies of Affytechans. Ichor and sap smeared the walls and floor with pungent, sticky streams of green and yellow, speckled with spilled pollen and floating seed. Hacked limbs and trunks were scattered in a ghastly rainbow, as if someone had overturned a clothes basket of gaudy silks. Mouse-droids swarmed, and the whole corridor reeked of the Affytechans’ sour, pungent musk.
The blue-and-white captain and his followers kept walking through the carnage as if there were nothing there. “You were right about making sure of the location of the transport, Major,” the captain was saying. It stepped over most of the torso of what had been the magenta captain in the laundry room. “I’ve always liked the Beta-class Telgorn transport. Two or three of those, plus an escort of Blastboats, should take care of any minor trouble no matter what—”
Luke spun, ducked, and had his lightsaber in hand and bladed as the weighted end of a gaffe stick nearly took his head off. The four Sand People who’d sprung from the pump station behind him fell on him, howling. Luke slashed the first one clean through the body, shoulder to hip, and took the hands off a second as it was bringing its rifle to bear. Threepio bleated, “Master Luke! Master Luke!” as he was knocked over in the fray and lay against the wall where he’d been kicked. “Switch off!” Luke yelled and dropped the blade a split second before a third Tusken fired its blaster at him, the bolt whining off the concentrated core of laser light.
He lunged through a doorway, hitting the closer, which refused to work. The Sand People, joined by two more with others audible in full cry in the corridors beyond, sprang after. Luke levitated a worktable and hurled it at them, scrambled across the room to the opposite door and hit the opener—that, too, refused to work.
Luke cursed, ducked a roaring blaze of blaster fire and levitated the worktable to throw at them again. Someone else fired a blaster and the bolt whined sharply as it ricocheted around the room—it was a long shot and frequently didn’t work, but Luke reached out with his mind and flicked the ricochet into the door mechanism, exploding it in a sizzle of sparks. The door jerked up about half a meter and Luke rolled under it, dragging his staff through after him and scrambling to his feet, limping and staggering away.
He seemed to be in the heart of the Sand People’s hunting territory. Two more sprang at him, from opposite sides, pressing him back into a corner. He sliced and parried, flattened against the walls for support, then fled again, falling, rising, dragging himself painfully down the dark length of a corridor, while on either side ahead of him doors hissed shut and the hoarse, baying yowl of the Sand People echoed against the walls all around.
He flung himself around a corner and jerked back just in time to avoid being cut in half by a blast door smashing down; fled back, half recognizing the lights of what looked like a laundry drop, which would have a repair shaft behind it, only to have the room’s door slam shut when he was a few meter
s away. He decapitated another Tusken that leaped on him from the open black doorway of what looked like a lounge, scrambled over the body and fled through, throwing himself, rolling, just in time to avoid being shut into that room by its suddenly activated door.
The corridor in which he found himself was very dark. Tiny orange worklights made a thin trail along one side of the ceiling. Gasping for breath, Luke dragged himself to his feet, leaned trembling on his staff, his leg hurting as if the ax that had smashed it were slamming again with each beat of his heart.
The Will, he thought. The lightsaber weighed heavy in his hand, unbladed but ready at a second’s notice. It was only a matter of time before it steered him into another wired gangway, or back to the arms of the Sand People.
Their yowling broke out again, close by; a lot of them, by the sound. Luke scanned the corridor. Shut doors. No vents. No cover.
Then, halfway down, a door opened.
It didn’t hiss and spring, as doors did. The laborious creaking was more characteristic of someone turning the manual crank. It cracked a jagged line of grimy orange emergency light perhaps thirty centimeters wide, and stopped.
Luke glanced at the blast wall that sealed one end of the corridor, the darkness at the other end, shrieking with the cries of the approaching Sand People. Between them himself, breathless, lamed, a sitting target …
And that uneven line of orange light.
And the sense of waiting that seemed to press on him from the darkness like the dense watchfulness of some unseen mind.
Yet strangely he felt no sense of dread.
He stepped closer. Through the opening he could see the blank-eyed dark consoles of one of the lower-level gunnery chambers, the semicircles of consoles, the glistening dark levers and somber shadow.
Star Wars: Children of the Jedi Page 18
