Star Wars: Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  Leia ducked through the momentary screen of the fog to the next catwalk, raced and scrambled along it headfirst, though it was pointing slightly downward to a silk bed a few meters below and nearly ten meters away …

  This time Irek did cut the catwalk. Leia dropped the blaster and grabbed hard and tight as the chain ladder plunged sickeningly down. The lurch, the jerk of it reaching the bottom of its arc was terrifying, jolting her belly and freezing her heart. The ladder jerked and swung and it took all her courage to release her deathgrip enough to begin climbing, but she knew she was a sitting target. A bolt burned the ends of the vines to her left.

  “I’ve got her!” she heard Keldor yell again. Leia dragged herself over the edge of the steel cage and fell into the fusty-smelling masses of the vines. She tore up one of the heavy vine-stakes, knowing it would be almost useless against either lightsaber or blaster, but it was the only weapon to hand. At the same moment the bed lurched and began to move, rumbling along its track on the ceiling, swaying with the momentum of its speed. Leia flattened, digging her hands hard into the vines as the bed lurched and jerked against the other catwalks that connected it to the beds around it, then swayed sickeningly as the thin steel ladders broke off.

  Don’t look down, she told herself grimly, but, looking up, saw where the tracks crossed …

  Another bed swept down the crossing track out of nowhere, vines trailing, whizzing along like an out-of-control freighter. Leia crushed herself flat again, and the gondola slashed by half a meter over her head, cables whining as the whole bed dipped toward her in an attempt to sweep her off. Then the bed she was on was moving faster and faster, swaying wildly as it swooped around corners, raising and lowering—

  Another searing whine of the blaster, as a whipping turn brought her clear of the pouring fog and into what Keldor considered his range.

  “Here! Over here!”

  The moving bed lurched, stopped, and reversed its direction.

  She could see Irek standing up on another bed, slightly above her, backlit in the swirling fog, lightsaber burning like amber flame in his hands.

  Fog was everywhere, spewing streams of it mixed with snow as the cold air poured down through the crack in the dome. Another silk bed swept toward her on a collision course; Leia gauged the possibility of a jump to that one but lost her nerve, ducked flat, and clung as it slammed heavily into the side of her bed, nearly hurling her out, then swept away as it had come. One instant she was swaying over a sickening view of trees and clouds and tiny lights below, the next lost in dark swirls of mist through which the lights on her bed glowed like jewels.

  Something huge and dark loomed out of the mist above her and she felt the jolt of someone landing on the bed. A heavy rustle of feet in the vines, then: “Don’t move, Princess. I’m not very good with this but at this range I’m not going to miss again.”

  The silk bed lurched out of the fog. Ohran Keldor, blaster in hand, stood at the other end.

  The bed slowed, but continued a constant, even course back to the bed where Irek stood like a slender black god.

  In a sudden squeal of cables another garden rose from below them, missing them by less than a meter, and from its rim Han Solo launched himself into the vines at Keldor’s side. At the same moment both that bed and the one Han had ridden over to them swung in another direction, heading along the track toward the vine-festooned supply station on the rift wall, where Leia could see Jevax and Chewbacca, standing at the controls.

  Irek yelled, “No!” and Han, who had twisted the blaster out of the astonished Keldor’s fist, shouted, “Run for it, Leia!”—instead she strode over through the vines and delivered a smashing blow with the vine-stake to the back of Keldor’s head as he struggled with Han on the edge of the bed.

  Keldor staggered, reeling. Han jerked him back from the edge and thrust him toward the leading end of the bed, which was now closing in on the supply station. Jevax waded through the deep vines, reaching out with a long pole to steady the incoming bed. Irek shouted something else, Leia didn’t hear exactly what …

  And the pulleys that held the bed to the trolley overhead let go with a snap.

  Leia flung herself at the hanging jungle of the supply station’s vines, Han leaping after … she thought he wouldn’t make it, reached out with the Force, but didn’t afterward know whether it was his own agility or some added energy of hers that let him grab the bottom ends of that trailing green beard.

  But in any case Ohran Keldor, architect of the Death Star and sole surviving technician of the Eye of Palpatine, had neither the Force nor the trained muscle of a rough-and-tumble smuggler to help him.

  And if Irek was capable of levitating him out of the falling ruin of the silk bed, he didn’t react quickly enough or didn’t try. The scientist’s scream of terror echoed in the ghostly broil of fog still streaming down through the cracked dome, and when Leia and Han gained the safety of the platform, all trace of Irek was gone.

  Chapter 24

  With the closing of the shuttlecraft door behind the last contingent of the Gakfedds, the hangar seemed profoundly silent. Beyond the magnetic seal, the blue-white curve of Belsavis flung back a cold glory of light, a bony radiance that bleached Cray’s features to a haggard shadow and turned Nichos’s to silvery marble.

  “There it is,” said Callista softly. “There, where the clouds rise up in columns over the heat of the thermal vent.”

  Even from here, Luke could see the star-silvered night side chaos where the Plawal Rift lay.

  Leaning like a tired old man on his staff, he remembered the young Jedi who’d come to him a year ago, bringing the tall, elegant blond woman—the most brilliant AI programmer at the Magrody Institute—and strong in the Force as well.

  She’d stepped forward, he remembered, to shake his hand, taking charge of the situation so that it wouldn’t take charge of her.

  I’m sorry, he wanted to say to them, not knowing quite why.

  For life.

  For this.

  For everything.

  “The lander’s going to be launched first, on automatic,” he said, forcing his mind back to the matter at hand. Time was, he knew, now very short. “Once it gets clear of the magnetic field, Blue Shuttle will go …” He gestured to the massive pale block of the Telgorn; it rocked, very slightly, and a muffled thumping could be heard within. He felt a momentary rush of gratitude that the control cabin was completely separate from the passenger hull.

  “Triv …”

  The elderly stormtrooper stepped forward from the shadows where he’d been standing with Threepio. He’d shed his white armor, and wore again the faded, flower-embroidered makeshifts he’d had on when he’d come on board. His dark face was calm, but there was an infinity of sorrow in his eyes.

  “I’m putting you in charge of Blue Shuttle in case there are any problems, but the controls are slaved to Red Shuttle’s console—Nichos will pilot both crafts from there.”

  Luke drew a deep, shaky breath. “Cray …”

  She raised her eyes. Silence had been growing around her, like a sea creature manufacturing a shell of its armor; a double shell, this time, enfolding them both.

  It was the first time he’d seen Cray and Nichos so comfortable together, so close, since the days on Yavin before Nichos’s hands had started to go numb, his vision to blur. With the various small camouflages gone—the steel mesh and the ornamental housings covering wrist joints and neck—he was more than ever a droid, but something in the way they stood, something in their silence, was as if the past eight nightmare months had not taken place.

  “There’s an escape pod at the end of the corridor outside the gunnery deck,” he said quietly. “Once I make it to the top of the shaft, I’ll yell down to you and you get to that pod and get the hell out of here. I think there’ll be time.”

  “I thought I was the one,” said Cray softly, “who was going up the shaft.”

  He shook his head. “I could never make it to the pod. I’ve
rested …” It wasn’t much of a lie, he reflected. “I can use the Force to help misfire the grid, and I think I have the strength to levitate to the top. Once I’m in the central core …”

  He took another deep breath. “Once I’m in the central core I’m going to try to cripple the guns, rather than blow up the ship. According to the readouts you got from the central computer that should be possible from there …”

  “And what if it’s not?” demanded Callista’s voice.

  “Then …” He almost couldn’t say the words. “Then I’ll start the reactor overload. But if it hasn’t blown in ten minutes, Cray—and you’ll be out of there and in the pod by then—start thinking about how we’re going to get enough memory in a unit to get Callista off the ship. After that’s done we’ll blow it.”

  “No,” said Callista.

  “Callista, I can’t—”

  “No.”

  He could see her, almost, standing in front of him, her features set and white and her smoke-colored eyes grim, as they had been in the other hangar, thirty years ago …

  “Luke, we can’t risk it. You can’t risk it. Say you’re right, you find a way to cripple the guns—really cripple them, not have the Eye lie to you and say they’re crippled. That leaves the Eye in orbit until you can scrape up enough units of memory, enough circuits and synapses … You’re never going to find that kind of thing on Belsavis. From what you’ve told me they’re just an agricultural station, and a small one at that. So you send for them. So they take a day, two days to arrive … And meanwhile whoever sent for the Eye of Palpatine comes along … and every Imperial admiral who picks up word of it … You think the Republic’s going to be able to fight off the pack of them? With a station like this one for the prize?”

  Luke was silent, unable to argue. Unable to tell himself that the dark flower of knowledge, the cold dread of his dream, had been illusions.

  Something had sent for the Eye. Something was waiting for it.

  And it had it almost within its grasp.

  “Blow the reactors, Luke.” Her voice was low, barely to be heard in the deep silence of the shuttle deck. None of the others spoke, but Luke was conscious of Cray’s eyes on his face, knowing in a way that none of the others did what he was going through.

  Knowing that his decision to be the one in the shaft was based partly on the knowledge that if he destroyed the ship—if he destroyed Callista—he would be in her heart when the end came.

  “Don’t let the Will deceive you,” Callista continued softly. “Because believe me, it knows how badly you want to deceive yourself.”

  “I know.” He doubted any of the others heard his words, but knew that Callista heard. “I know. I love you, Callista …”

  She whispered, “And I love you. Thank you for bringing me back this far.”

  He straightened up, as if some terrible burden had fallen from him.

  “Nichos, Threepio, Triv … get ready for launch. Cray, I still want you to be the one who stays below, the one who gets out of here …”

  He turned, in time to see her take a stungun from the holster at her side.

  He had, he realized, thought of everything but that. The Will is going to do anything … use anything … He threw himself sideways and rolled as best he could …

  But the killing grind of exhaustion and pain had slowed his reactions and blunted any chance he had of using the Force, and the stunblast smote him like the blow of a club, hurling him into darkness.

  “Who the hell was that?”

  Leia dragged Han up the final half meter or so onto the platform, Jevax and Chewie reaching down beside her to pull him to safety. Cold wind whipped and tangled her hair, fog swirled around them one moment, ice crystals stinging her cheeks, then whipped away to reveal the tossing soft lake of the rift below.

  Dimly, from the open window beneath the vines away along the cliff, she could hear the clamor of alarms.

  “Jevax, can you get us back there? There, under that ledge … And sound the alarms in the valley! All over the planet, whatever other settlements you can reach! The whole planet’s going to be shelled, bombed from space, I don’t know how soon, minutes maybe …”

  “Who was that?” demanded Han. “And who killed that guy in the passageway? Artoo led us back through to the crypts, then up an elevator … What happened to the guardians in the tunnels?”

  “Bombed?” demanded Jevax, horrified.

  “Now! Go! Get everyone under shelter, into the old smuggler tunnels—use the spaceport silos for safety, it won’t have been a target, it wasn’t built thirty years ago …”

  Chewie ducked back into the supply shack, emerged with a controller in his paws. A moment later a vine-coffee bed approached them like a slow, splendid, flower-caparisoned barge along its ceiling tracks.

  “That supership Mara told us about, the other half of the assault on Belsavis … it’s on its way! Irek summoned it—Roganda’s son, Irek—”

  “That kid?”

  “He’s trained in the Force, he can influence mechanicals … He’ll make hash out of our fleet …” She sprang down from the platform into the thick vines of the bed. After the sickening whiplash drop on the slashed catwalk, and springing from the falling bed to the thin tangle of vines, the short jump down to something securely anchored bothered her not in the slightest.

  Han swore and jumped, catching the cables for support; Chewie dropped down after.

  “Warn them!” yelled Leia back, as the Wookiee swiveled the joystick on his controller; the coffee bed swung ponderously along the track, breasting through a banner of fog toward the distant overhang of the cliff, and the gaping window beneath. “Get everyone under cover!”

  Jevax was already swarming onto the little service elevator that would take him down the cliffside.

  Drost Elegin, Lady Theala Vandron, and a motley and vociferating gang of private guards, secretaries, and corporate representatives were assembled in the room from which Leia had jumped to the first of the vine-beds. They rushed to the window at the sight of the approaching bed, but though several were armed, Leia heard Lady Vandron snap, “Don’t fire, you idiots, they could have escaped!” as the bed drew near.

  Chewie flung out a coil of ladder; half a dozen hands caught it, anchored it for Han, Leia, and the Wookiee to cross.

  Artoo-Detoo was between Lady Vandron and one of Roganda’s thugs, rocking back and forth and tweeping excitedly. As Leia swung through the window—Drost Elegin, a gentleman to his bones, held out a hand to help her descend—Leia said, “You’ve been betrayed, all of you! When Irek discovered he couldn’t control the Eye of Palpatine he ran for it, he and his mother. They’re the ones who killed Lord Garonnin …”

  They looked at one another.

  “Look at his body,” said Leia furiously. “Irek’s the only person in this place who has a lightsaber! And if you look at the place you’ll probably find a trail of jewels and negotiable bonds all the way to the elevator.”

  She saw the glances that were exchanged among the guards. Nobody had produced a weapon yet.

  “It should be a simple matter to pursue them,” said Lord Picutorion. “We have some of the fastest—”

  “Not with all the silo gates of the port jammed shut, you don’t,” retorted Leia. She turned to Lady Vandron. “It’s your ship they’re taking, Your Highness … The Eye of Palpatine is going to start bombing the planet any minute, so I suggest everyone go as deep as they can and as far into the tunnels as they can.”

  “The creatures in the crypt—” began the athletic-looking Lady Carbinol.

  “Have no direction without Irek’s will,” said Elegin. He glanced over at Han and Chewbacca, still standing in the embrasure of the window. “As I daresay you found out on your way in.” He whipped his blaster from his side. “After you, Your Highness. We may still be able to catch them before they take off.”

  They encountered, in fact, two or three of the wretched ex-smugglers and ex-hustlers wandering the passageways f
arther from the inhabited areas, where the thermal vent ran out under the ice, but as Elegin had said, without Irek’s will the things ran shrieking from the lights borne by Han, Leia, and the various infuriated aristocrats who strode in their wake. Without Irek to interfere with sensor tracking, thought Leia as she ran, they should be able to round up those miserable guardians and get them whatever kind of help could best be devised.

  She wondered what the old Jedi records Luke had scraped together had to say about such abuses of the power of the Force, what might be done by those with talents as healers.

  “Typical,” Leia heard Lady Carbinol snap to someone at the rear of the group—a group, she noticed, made up largely of the members of the Ancient Houses, the corporate types being mostly in prudent search of the deepest defenses they could find. “I never trusted the woman … I don’t wish to sound the snob, but breeding will tell and in this case it certainly has …”

  Every now and then they found, on the tunnel floor, a piece of jewelry, or a credit paper, to indicate the direction of Roganda’s flight.

  The elevator up to the surface was jammed. “Servo’s blown at the top,” said Han, flipping back the coverplate on the summons button to check the monitor.

  “He did that on the central servo that controls the landing silos,” said Leia. “I don’t know at what distance his power can operate, but it’s not something I’d want to have happen if I were in an X-wing going into combat. Is there a stair?” she asked Drost Elegin, who nodded.

  It was, in fact, a circular ramp, since the old smugglers had to get cargo down it. Artoo-Detoo, who had followed them stolidly along the passageways and ramps from the main mazes behind the cliff, caught up with them and trundled on ahead, his small spotlight shining on the smooth stone of the floor, the battered rock walls. The place smelled of kretch and grew colder as they ascended, Leia’s breath smoking in the light of the lamps. Lady Carbinol lent Han her parka when they reached the pillbox at the top, and Han, Leia in her t-suit, and Drost Elegin—the only other member of the little group to have a parka with him—struggled, with Chewbacca and the droid, over the uneven path that wound through the sheltering backbone of the rock to the ice landing pad and its low white hangar.