Star Wars: Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  Abyssal darkness and faint, ghostly clankings lay at the bottom of the gangway beyond the open doorway labeled 17. This was one of the ship’s recycling centers, cut off from the crew decks or any realm of human activity. The droids who occupied themselves with the reconstitution of food, water, and oxygen needed no lights to work. The glow of Luke’s staff picked out moving angles, blocky SP-80s going about their monotonous business in company with apparatus not intended to interface with humans at all, MMDs of all sizes, scooting RIs and MSEs, and a midsize Magnobore that bumped Luke’s calves like a mammoth turtle. He’d disconnected the gauge lights on the altered tracker to delay as long as possible the moment when the Klaggs realized they’d been duped, and it drifted forlornly behind him, like a rather dirty balloon attached by an invisible line to the trackball in his pocket.

  Right turn, then second left, Luke repeated to himself. A wall panel in one of the recycling chambers, a narrow shaft at a forty-five-degree angle … He settled his mind, collecting about himself, in spite of the pain and the slow numbing of the overdoses of perigen, the mental focus, the inner quiet, that was the strength of the Force. For the dozenth—or hundredth—time since that particular side effect had begun to make itself felt, he wondered if he’d be able to work better with an infection-induced fever and the constant stress of pain.

  It had to work, he thought. It had to.

  He turned a corner, and stopped.

  A dead Jawa lay in the corridor.

  It had a handful of cables wound around one shoulder, a satchel open beside its hand. Luke limped to the body, eased himself down to kneel beside it, and touched the skinny black claw of wrist. A charred pit of blaster fire gaped in its side.

  Batteries and power cells lay strewn around the open satchel. Luke scooped them back into the leather pouch, slung the strap over his shoulder. Faint whirring made him look up, to face two small droids of a kind he’d never seen before. Gyroscopically balanced on single wheels, they reminded him of some of the older models of interrogation droids, but instead of pincer arms they had long, silvery tentacles, jointed like snakes. Small round sensors, like cold eyes, triangulated on him at the end of prehensile stalks.

  The two droids were barely taller than Artoo-Detoo but there was a curiously insectile menace to them that made Luke back slowly away.

  The tentacles extruded with a whippy hiss, encircled and lifted the Jawa’s tattered little carcass. The droids swiveled and shot away. Luke followed to the door of a cavern lit only by the sickish glow of gauge lights and readouts. The smell of the place was like walking into a wall of muck: ammoniac, organic, and vile. Steam frothed thinly from beneath the covers of the three round, well-like vats whose metal curbs rose scarcely half a meter above the bare durasteel of the deck. As the snake-eyed droids approached the nearest tank, its cover dilated open. The stench redoubled as steam poured forth, knee-high ground fog that swirled to the farthest corners of the room.

  The droids raised the Jawa corpse high and dropped it into the vat with a viscous ploop. The cover dilated shut.

  A sharp rattle at Luke’s side made him jump. A slotted hatchway popped open in the wall, and a tumble of belt buckles, boot latches, a stormtrooper helmet, and some half-dissolved bones clattered into the catchbin under the hatch, everything dripping brownish enzymatic acid.

  The skull of a Gamorrean grinned up at Luke from the bin.

  Luke stepped quickly back. Though he knew that full recycling from enzymatic breakdown products didn’t kick in until the second or third week of deepspace missions, still he found himself queasy at the memory of that gukked egg.

  The foo-twitter waited for him in the corridor. Luke led the way through another door, past backup enzyme tanks locked up cold and closed, to the far wall. At the touch of the lights on his staff the three SP-80s ranked in a corner swiveled their cubical upper bodies, the wide-range sensor squares casting dim blue glare. A small MMF rolled out of the darkness and rattled its three arms at him like a bare mechanical tree. It halted beside Luke as he knelt to pop the panel hatches, reached to take the hatch cover from him with the surprising, irresistible strength of droids. Luke leaned around the back and hit the pause button. The MMF froze, panel still raised in its grippers.

  Within the shaft, the enclision grid’s lattices grinned at him like broken, icy teeth, fading out of sight into the dark chimney above.

  Very carefully, Luke leaned into the shaft. It ascended two levels at a steep slant, climbable at a pinch, but not by a man with a useless leg. The square, cold patchwork of the walls seemed to whisper, Try it. Go ahead.

  It’s like causing a blaster to misfire, Callista had said.

  And, The more that hit you, the more that will.

  He thumbed the trackball in his pocket, and the silvery tracker drifted close.

  He’d examined the latches that dogged panels shut from behind, so it was an easy matter to reach through with his mind—as he had reached behind the panel leading into the shaft—and twist the latches aside at the top. More difficult was blowing the panel clear, for it was hard to concentrate through fatigue and pain. He felt the hatch cover give, two levels up, and dimly heard the clang of it striking the floor.

  Air flowed gently down the shaft against his face.

  Two levels. Eight meters at a slant, though the darkness was too dense for his eyes to penetrate.

  “Okay, pal,” he whispered to the foo-twitter. “Do your stuff.”

  He thumbed the trackball to edge the tracker to within centimeters of the enclision field. Focused his mind, gathered his thoughts, put aside pain, weariness, and growing anxiety. Each square of the grid came to his mind, flawed, delayed, molecules not quite meeting, synapses not quite touching—momentary shifts in atmospheric pressure, conductivity, reaction time … And beside that, kinetic force building up like lightning, dense and waiting, aiming like a sited cannon upward into the dark.

  It was like shouting a word, but there was no word. Only the silent explosion of the foo-twitter’s speed, rocketing upward, ripping air as if fired from a slugthrower, and the spattering hiss of lightning. Few, spidery, too late, the blue bolts zapped and fizzled from the opal squares around the metal casing, sparking where one hit, two …

  Then he felt it in air, and the grid fell silent again.

  Luke checked the monitor on the trackball.

  The foo-twitter was still transmitting.

  Shakily, he leaned his forehead on the jamb of the panel, thanked the Force and all the Powers of the universe …

  And turned, to see what, for that first moment, he thought was another foo-twitter hanging in the dark behind him.

  The next second his reflexes took over and he flung himself sideways, barely in time to avoid the scorching zap of blaster fire. Tracker flashed through his mind as he rolled behind the disused tank, jerking his bad leg out of the way of a bolt that burned a chunk out of the heel of his boot. He remembered the charred hole in the Jawa’s side. Evidently the floating, silver trackers were equipped to do more than just stun and fetch.

  He grabbed for his staff where it lay in the open and whipped his hand to safety—empty—only just in time. Another bolt hissed wildly off the decking and he dodged a second tracker that swam up out of the darkness.

  In the meadow on Pzob he’d watched these silvery, gleaming spheres in action, and knew the few instants’ whirring shift and refocus of the antennalike nest of sensors—rolled, ducked, changing direction. The central vision ports shifted and the second droid splatted fire, not at him, but in a line of quick bursts on the floor in a raking pattern, driving him toward the open panel of the shaft and the enclision grid within.

  “Oh, clever,” muttered Luke, crawling back, gauging his timing for a leap. More by instinct than anything else he flung himself through an opening in the pattern of bolts, rolled up to his knees, and whipped the diagnostic mirror from his pocket as the trackers swiveled in his direction again. He caught the bolt of the first one on the angled glass, cl
ean and vicious and perfectly aimed. It struck the second tracker in the instant before it fired. The tracker burst in a shattering rain of shrapnel that clawed Luke’s face like thorns, but it gave him the second or so he needed to reangle the mirror as the first tracker tried again—and zapped itself into noisy oblivion with its own reflected bolt.

  Luke lay on the floor, gasping, the warmth of the blood trickling down his face contrasting sharply with the cold of drying sweat. One dead tracker lay like a squashed spider on the floor a meter from his side. The second still hung fifty or so centimeters above the floor, broken grippers trailing, turning disjointedly here and there. Luke got his hands under him preparatory to crawling for his staff.

  With a faint whirring, the three SP-80s in the corner came to life.

  Luke dove for the door as they whipped toward him, moving faster than he’d have given those tractor treads credit for. He held out his hand, calling his staff to it, as the MMF came to life again and shot out a gripper. Luke rolled out the doorway, wondering if he could get as far as the gangway in time, and skidded to a halt as two more SPs and the biggest Tredwell he’d ever seen—a 500 or 600 at least, a massively armored furnace stoker—loomed out of the hall’s darkness, reaching for him with inexorable arms.

  The lightsaber whined to life in his hand as snaky silver tentacles caught his wrist from behind. He struck at one of the snake-eye droids, the other jabbing at him with a long, jointed rod, and the jolt of the electrical shock knocked him breathless. He flipped the lightsaber to his left hand, as he could when he had to, cut at the snake-droid’s sensors. Something struck him from behind, wrenching strength grabbing his arms, lifting him bodily from the floor. He cut again, sparks exploding as the glowing blade severed a G-40’s servocable, but, unlike human opponents, the droids didn’t know enough to back off, and were incapable of going into shock. They surrounded him, gripping with an impossible strength, and when he slashed through sensor wires, joints, servotransmitters, there were always more.

  The Tredwell’s case-hardened arms resisted even the cut of the laser. It was made to work in the heart of an antimatter furnace, and though the lightsaber hissed and slashed, the searing violence of the blows reverberated up Luke’s arms as if it would shatter the bones. Arms dangling, eyestalks dangling, such droids as were still operable followed the stoker as it bore Luke through the doorway, and the mephitic stink of the enzyme chamber’s darkness engulfed them. Luke hammered, twisted, slashed at the pinchers that held his arms and ankles, but couldn’t so much as make them flinch. The stink redoubled as the enzyme vat irised wide. Steam boiled up around him like thin foam, the smell as much as the heat of the dark red-brown liquid that bubbled beneath him making him dizzy.

  Luke went limp. The lightsaber’s blade retracted. A leaf on the wind, he thought. A leaf on the wind.

  The Tredwell let him drop. Relaxed, almost as if he could sleep, Luke summoned the Force as he fell, light and true as if he drifted above the steam. From some abstract distance he was aware of his own body rolling lightly sideways above the seething filth in the vat, away from the droids, levitating effortlessly to the far rim.

  Just beyond the rim he fell, and hit the floor hard. His crippled leg gave beneath him as he tried to stand, stumbled and plunged for the door, crawling desperately as the droids clanked and ground in pursuit. They weren’t as fast as the trackers had been—he had the coverplate off the manual door release when they were still a meter behind him, and ran his lightsaber into the works to fuse them once the door was down between him and the droids.

  He managed to crawl a considerable distance before he passed out.

  “Callista, we can do it.” The man’s voice held a thin veneer of patience and confidence over a core of rough irritation. He put his big, callused hands through the back of his belt and looked from her to the blackness framed by the faintly glowing rectangle of the magnetic field.

  Luke recognized the hangar, though it seemed less cavernous in the clear cold lighting of the glowpanels than it had been when he’d stood there by the shorn, chalky light of the stars. The Moonflower Nebula’s drifting banks of light could be seen outside, speckled with the darker chunks of asteroids, an eerie field of glow and lancing shadow. The Y-wing stood where he’d seen it, scars and holes glaring in the brightness. On the marks that had been empty stood a Skipray Blastboat, crowding the smaller craft.

  “The station lays its defensive fire in a double ellipse pattern, that’s all. We got in, didn’t we?” The man’s eyes were bright blue in a hatchet-jawed, amiable face grubby with three days’ rust-colored beard. He had a gold ring in one ear.

  “The Force was with us or we’d never have made it.” It was the first time Luke had seen her clearly, but it was as if he’d always known that she was tall, slim, long-boned without the smallest trace of lankiness. The lightsaber with its rim of bronze cetaceans hung at her belt. Like her companion she was filthy, a universe of heavy brown hair unwashed and trailing from a knot the size of his two fists at her nape, gray eyes light against the soot and oil that stained her face. Shrapnel or shattering glass had opened a three-inch cut on her forehead; the way it was scabbed, it would leave a hell of a scar. Her voice was like smoke and silver.

  She was beautiful. Luke had never seen a woman so beautiful.

  “I’d like to think I had something to do with that.” The man’s long mouth twisted.

  “You did.” Callista looked taken aback that he’d feel offended. “Of course you did, Geith. The Force—”

  “I know.” He made a gesture, a slight pushing of the air, as if against something heard before for which he had no time. “The point is, there’s other ways of doing this than getting ourselves killed.”

  There was silence between them, and Luke saw, in the way she stood, in her diffidence, her concern that he would be angry at her. She started to say something, visibly checked, and after a moment changed it to, “Geith, if there was any way for me to go up that shaft, you know I—”

  By the flare in his eyes Luke saw he’d read her words as an accusation of cowardice. “And I’m telling you neither of us has to do it, Callie.” Anger in his voice; Luke saw that no lightsaber hung beside the blaster at his waist. Was that between them, too?

  “It’s not going to take us that long to get clear of the Nebula’s interference and back to where we can signal for help. Help in dealing with this hunk of junk”—his expansive wave took in the chill gray-walled labyrinths of the silent Eye—“and at least let Plett know what’s coming at him. As it is, if we try to be heroes and fail, they won’t know zip until they catch a lapful of smoking plasma.”

  “They won’t know if we make a run for it and get nailed, either.”

  Her voice was low. His rose. “It’s a double ellipse with one randomized turn. I’ve got it scoped, Callie. It’ll be tougher in that tub than in the Y-wing but it can be done.”

  She drew breath again and he put a hand on her shoulder, a finger on her lips; a lover’s gesture of intimacy, but still meant to silence her.

  “You don’t have to be such a hero, baby. There’s always ways of doing things without getting killed.”

  Luke thought, He doesn’t want to climb up that shaft. He’s told himself there’s another way—and he probably even believes it—but at bottom, he doesn’t want to be the one who climbs through the grid while she’s using the Force to make it misfire.

  And he saw this understanding, too, in Callista’s gray eyes.

  “Geith,” she said softly, and in her hesitation Luke heard the echo of his previous rages. “Sometimes there’s not.”

  He threw up his hands. “Now you’re starting to sound like old Djinn!”

  “That doesn’t make what I’m saying less true.”

  “The old boy’s too damn ready to tell other people how they should die for a guy who hasn’t been off that festering gasball of his for a hundred years! Callie, I’ve been around. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “And I know
that we have no idea how long we’ve got until this thing goes into hyperspace.” She still didn’t raise her voice, but something in its level softness stopped him from cutting in again. “None. If we destroy it, it’s gone. Dead. If we leave it, run for it—”

  “There’s nothing wrong with jumping clear and getting help!”

  “Except that it’ll lose us our one sure chance.”

  “It’ll lose us our chance of getting the hell blown up along with this thing, you mean!”

  “Yes,” said Callista. “That’s what I mean. Will you help me or not?”

  He put his hands on his hips, looked down at her, for he was a tall man. “You stubborn fish rider.” Affection glinted in his smile.

  Her voice flawed, just slightly, as she looked up into his face. “Don’t leave me, Geith. I can’t do it alone.”

  And Luke saw something change, just slightly, in Geith’s blue eyes.

  Pain came back to him, shredding away the scene in the hangar. He opened his eyes, felt under him the slight, smooth jostle of movement. Thin dark lines passed like scanner wires above his head, traveling from head to feet … ceiling joins.

  Moving his head, he saw that he lay on a small antigrav sled, beyond whose rim See-Threepio’s grimed and dented metal head and shoulders were visible as the droid guided the sled along a hall. There was a sound somewhere ahead and Threepio froze into the perfect immobility of a mechanical. The yellow reflection of a tracker droid’s dim lights passed over the metal mask of Threepio’s face, glinted very faintly on the perfect, intricate shape of his hand where it rested on the sled’s rim.

  The yellow light passed on. Threepio moved forward again, footfalls hollow in the empty corridor. Luke slid back toward darkness.

  The foo-twitter, he thought. He’d misfired the enclision grid and thrust the silvery globe up ten meters of shaft, but it had been hit anyway—four, maybe five times. He’d heard the shrill zing of ricochets against the metal. Threepio had cut the comm trunk, Cray was in danger, he couldn’t lie here …