On the rocks below, tossed aside like wadded sheets of used paper, lay the crumbled forms of Boss Roke, Clorr, and the guard, frozen solid and drained of every drop of their bodily energy.
The creature must lay down deposits of spice as its web to capture bogeys, Han thought, or any other warm creature it can find down in these tunnels. That was why light activated the glitterstim spice—to trigger the bogeys’ capture in the trap.
Skynxnex and the pursuing guard roared into the grotto. The scarecrow fired again, paying little attention to where he was going. His blast ricocheted off the wall, activating more spice.
The spider-thing glowed a dull blue with electric arcs crawling up and down its needlelike limbs, as if the creature itself were made out of activated spice. Attracted to the approaching heat source, it reared up.
Skynxnex did not see it until he had driven his floating mine car nearly into the grappling-hook claws. In the last instant Skynxnex pointed his hot double-blaster down and fired at the voracious creature—but the energy spider absorbed the blaster’s power and snatched out with a dozen limbs.
Skynxnex tried to leap out of the doomed car, but the spider thing speared him with a sharp leg, raising his scarecrow body higher. With the last of his strength, Skynxnex flailed his arms as his body grew cold.
The multilegged creature began to feed.
The pursuing guard rebounded sideways as he struck a thick mass of spice fibers dangling from the ceiling. The glitterstim sparked and glowed in the growing illumination. As the guard saw Skynxnex captured, saw the huge energy spider and the collapsing ceiling of the grotto, he whirled his floating mine car around and fled back out the cavern entrance as fast as he could go.
Han, though, saw an open passage in the ceiling and noticed a dim trickle of light coming from it. He wanted only to be out of there before the thing came scrambling after them, clawing its way up glasslike strands of glitterstim.…
“Up there!” Han urged.
Kyp plunged the car upward into the ceiling opening and suddenly came upon another network of tunnels. But these catacombs looked man-made. At last, one of the illicit mining shafts dug by spice smugglers searching to find active veins.
Han let out a whoop of delight. “This is it! We’re out of here now!” Chewbacca clapped him on the back, nearly belting Han out of the pilot’s seat.
They raced upward. The distant daylight pierced through the jagged obstacles of the passage. Han did not want to slow down. Kyp accelerated toward the light.
The floating car burst into the thin open air of Kessel, where watery light blinded them like a supernova. Blinking and struggling to see, Han yanked off his goggles and took back the pilot controls. He evened out their trajectory above the flat, desolate surface of the small planet.
Off to their right he saw the towering stack of an atmosphere factory gushing white steam and air vapor into the sky. “That way,” Kyp said. “We’ll be able to find a ship.”
“Good idea,” Han said.
As they approached the enormous construction, flying low enough to avoid notice, he kept an eye out. Moruth Doole would not know of their escape until the lone surviving guard returned to the muster room and made his report. Han, Kyp, and Chewbacca would have a few moments to get a head start, but not very long.
Adjacent to the atmosphere factory, Han did indeed see a broad landing pad with four craft on it. Two of the ships were local landskimmers and useless to them—but the others were small supply shuttles, spaceworthy enough, though they wouldn’t go fast.
Holding the breath mask against his face, Han pointed with his other hand. “Down there. Get one of those ships and we’re away from Kessel.” He grabbed Kyp’s shoulder. “We can go home.”
14
When Luke returned to Coruscant, he had a joyous reunion with Han and Leia’s two-year-old children, whom he had not seen for some time, not since he and Ackbar had set up the secret, protected planet for them.
He waited in Leia’s living quarters, playing with the twins, tossing them in the air and juggling them using his Jedi powers. Jacen and Jaina squealed in delight, giggling and intuitively trusting that their Uncle Luke would never let them fall.
Children were a wonder to him. Raised with his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru on the parched world of Tatooine, Luke had had little time for playing with children because the life of a moisture farmer was wrapped up in such hard work.
When he left Tatooine with Ben Kenobi, Luke had joined the Rebel Alliance, spending time as a fighter pilot and in Jedi training with Yoda. He never had time or opportunity to see children—and now he felt as much pleasure playing with them, watching their wide-eyed innocence, as they seemed to enjoy having him around.
“Faster! Faster!” Jacen cried.
Instead, just to tease him, Luke stopped the boy cold in the air, letting him hang motionless as Luke orbited Jaina around him. The little girl squealed and stretched out her hand, trying to grab her brother’s ear as she spun.
Tiring of that, Luke let Jaina drift into a cushioned seat while he reached out to catch Jacen as the boy descended, holding him in his arms. Jaina squirmed and reached her pudgy arms up, wanting to be held too.
Luke made faces at the little boy, puckering his lips and wiggling them back and forth. He spoke in a funny head-cold voice that sounded something like Yoda’s. “The Force is strong in this little one, hmmmm? Yes!” But then Luke wrinkled his nose and noticed something he didn’t need Jedi powers to understand. “Or maybe that’s not the Force I sense. Leia, I think you need to perform a motherly duty.” He held Jacen in front of him.
Threepio bustled into the room. “Allow me to take care of that, sir. I have been getting a great deal of practice in the past day or two.”
Luke smiled at the thought of Threepio trying to manage squirming twins. He noticed the droid looked a bit scuffed and battered. “Was that part of your protocol programming?”
“My manual dexterity is sufficient to the task, Master Luke.” Threepio flexed his golden motorized fingers, then took Jacen from Luke’s grasp. “And believe me, I enjoy these duties much more than gallivanting through space, getting shot at by Imperial fighters, or getting lost in asteroid fields.”
Leia came into the room. She forced a smile that Luke could tell was a mask. She looked very tired. It wasn’t just the strain of combining her diplomatic duties with being a mother; something else deeply concerned her, but she hadn’t said anything. Luke did not pry—he could have reached in and taken the secret from her mind, but he would not do that to his sister. And she might even have figured out how to block him by now. He would let her broach the subject in her own way.
“The prep unit will have the meal ready in just a few minutes,” Leia said. “I’m very glad you’re back, and the twins seem to be pleased too.”
Luke realized that he hadn’t seen Han since his return; but because of their busy schedules, seeing Han and Leia in the same place at the same time was a rare occurrence anyway. It was a wonder they had somehow managed to have three children! Could Han’s absence have something to do with Leia’s hidden concern?
Luke picked up Jaina with the Force again, raising her into the air. She giggled and began flailing her arms and legs as if swimming through the open spaces of the room.
“Leia, I need your help in a couple of bureaucratic matters,” Luke said.
“Sure.” She smiled wryly at him. “What can I do?”
“I still need to contact Mara Jade and a handful of other possible Jedi candidates. But now that I have two trainees here and waiting, I’ve got to find a place where we can begin our Jedi studies. And I have to find it soon.
“I’ve spoken with Streen and Gantoris, and it’s clear to me that Coruscant is not appropriate. Streen doesn’t like to be around people, and he’s not going to be very comfortable anywhere in Imperial City. All of Coruscant is covered with metropolis, buildings on top of buildings.
“And—” He hesitated, but this was a privat
e conversation with Leia; he could not hide any of his worries from her. “There is some danger about what we might do. Who am I to be teaching all these Jedi potentials? I have no way of knowing what might trigger a disaster like one of the Emperor’s Force storms. It would be better if we found someplace isolated, a place of solitude where we can conduct our training without interference.”
“And in safety.” Leia’s dark eyes met his, and he knew that both of them were thinking of Darth Vader. “Yes, I agree. I’ll try to find you an appropriate place.”
“And while you’re looking,” Luke continued, “we also need to relocate all of the people on Eol Sha. There’s only about fifty of them left on that outpost, but the planet is doomed. When I took Gantoris, I promised we would find a new home for the survivors. See what you can do.”
“For a group of people that small, it shouldn’t be difficult,” Leia answered. “Anyplace sounds better than the planet they’re leaving.”
Luke laughed. “Or you could always have Han win another planet for them in a card game!”
She looked at him as if stung. Yes indeed, he thought. It was something to do with Han. He bounced Jaina up in the air again, touching her to the ceiling, then letting her fall back down.
Suddenly Lando Calrissian burst into the room unannounced. “Leia! Winter just told me that Han hasn’t come back yet. Why haven’t you talked to me about it?”
Startled, Luke let Jaina fall and barely managed to catch her in the air a handbreadth above the hard floor. Jaina giggled deliriously, confident that the whole thing had been planned.
Lando looked upset and angry as he glared at Leia, planting his hands on his hips, pushing back the cape to hang behind him. Then he noticed Luke standing in the room. “Luke, are you going to do anything about this?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about—but I think Leia was just about to tell me.”
Both men looked at her. She sighed and sat down. “Yes, Han is missing. He went off to Kessel about two weeks ago, but now he’s four days late coming back. He never contacted me, so yesterday I got in touch with Kessel. I spoke to someone who seems to be in charge, a Rybet named Moruth Doole.
“Doole says that Han and Chewie never arrived. Kessel has no record of the Millennium Falcon. Doole suggested they might have gotten lost in the black hole cluster.”
“Not Han!” Lando said. “And not in the Falcon. He knows how to fly that thing almost as well as I do.”
Leia nodded. “All through the conversation I sensed something wrong with the way Doole was acting. His answers were too pat, and he seemed nervous. I had the distinct feeling he was expecting my call and had already made up appropriate excuses.”
“I don’t like that,” Lando said.
“Well, if Han is missing and you knew since yesterday, why didn’t you send out a fleet of New Republic scouts?” Luke said. “A formal search party? What if he is lost in the Maw somewhere?”
Leia sighed. “Think about it, Luke. If I mobilized an official force, I could create a galactic incident just when we’re trying to get Kessel into the New Republic. And besides,” she admitted, “you know Han. There’s a very real chance he’s just goofing around. He forgot his kids were coming back. Maybe he found a good game of sabacc or started talking old times with some of his spice-smuggler buddies—that’s why he wanted to go on the mission in the first place.”
“We’ll go look for him ourselves,” Lando said.
Luke could tell by the way Leia’s face brightened that this was what she intended to ask all along. “We’ll go snoop around,” he said. “There won’t be any official dispatch or record of our mission.”
Lando said, “We’d better take the Lady Luck. She’s just a privately owned yacht with some pretty good punch in her engines.”
Leia stepped forward and plucked Jaina out of Luke’s lap and cradled her. “I’ll watch over Gantoris and Streen while you’re gone.”
Luke nodded and spread his hands wide. “You see, that’s why you’re a diplomat—you think of details like that. Just don’t let the two of them get into any trouble.”
“We should take Artoo with us,” Lando said. “That little droid sure helped me out at the blob races.”
Luke had heard of Lando’s exploits with the scam artist Tymmo. “You can tell me all about it on our way there. Leia’s waited long enough.”
“Let’s go to Kessel,” Lando said.
15
They managed to steal the second shuttle.
Han and Chewbacca wasted precious time in the first cargo ship on the atmosphere factory’s landing pad, trying to cross-circuit the controls as Kyp Durron kept watch in the open hatch. The air was cold on their exposed skin, and they didn’t know how much stray radiation from the Maw actually penetrated the atmospheric shield; the sounds of breathing hissed behind their breath masks. No one had seen them. Yet.
After only a few minutes, Han accidentally triggered the shuttle’s automatic lockout systems. He slammed his hand on the panel. “Should have known I couldn’t beat the high-level security interlocks!”
Chewbacca pulled off an access plate and tossed it into the back compartment with the sound of a crashing landspeeder. Roaring in his Wookiee language, he began yanking wires out of the controls and jamming them into override ports, but the few lights still functioning on the panels continued to burn red.
“Forget it, Chewie. We’ll try the other ship,” Han said. “I think I know what I did wrong last time.”
Kyp kept watch on the tiny doors of the atmosphere factory’s massive stack. “Still no movement from inside. We’re clear.”
They raced across the open spaces of the landing field to the second cargo shuttle, an old Imperial model with scarred armor and long planar wings that made it look like a mechanical flying fish. Han and Chewbacca had flown a similar Lambda-class shuttle on their guerrilla mission to Endor; but this model looked even older. Prison facilities must have low priority for new equipment acquisitions, he thought.
Chewbacca opened the hatch, and Han ducked inside, moving straight to the controls. The Wookiee clambered after him as four guards marched into view around the perimeter of the atmosphere stack. The squad wore cobbled-together uniforms of old stormtrooper armor and thermal suits from the mines.
Kyp plastered himself to the wall just inside the open hatch. Looking across the landing field, he saw that they had forgotten to close the doorway on the first shuttle, and now their tampering was painfully obvious. He swallowed. “Better hurry, Han. We’ve got company, but they haven’t seen us yet.”
“If this doesn’t work, we’re in deep bantha dung,” Han muttered, punching up the command screens and removing the access plate to the security override.
The squad of guards marched on what was probably a routine patrol. Han glanced up to see them through the shuttle’s windowport, but the reflectorized transparisteel would prevent them from observing the pilot’s compartment. He wondered how many times a day the guards walked around the circular perimeter of the atmosphere stack. He hoped they were sleepwalking by now.
He tried to fire up the shuttle’s engines. The control panel gave him an ERROR message. “Bantha dung it is, then,” he said. But he had one more thing to try.
The lead guard suddenly stopped and gestured toward the open hatch in the first shuttle. He tilted his head to speak into his helmet comlink, then went cautiously forward. He took another guard with him, while the remaining two drew their weapons and spread out, looking from side to side.
“Oh boy,” Kyp said.
Han rewired the security circuit, feeding the password-checking mechanisms back into themselves; then he snapped the plate back on. “Let’s try it. Kyp, get ready to close the hatch. If this works, those guards are going to be upset. If it doesn’t work, I’m going to be upset.”
The two guards poked their heads out of the first shuttle, gesturing wildly. They had seen the sabotage. The other two jabbered into their helmet radios, then spr
inted toward the second shuttle, drawing their weapons.
Kyp slapped the button that slammed the hatch shut. All the guards began running, pointing their blasters at the shuttle.
Han punched the start controls. With a merciful whine and hum, the engines ignited. Power surged through the shuttle. Han gave a whoop of triumph, but Chewbacca knocked him back into the pilot’s seat as he furiously worked the controls with his big hairy hands to lift them off the pad.
The guards fired blasters at the shuttle. Han heard the sizzling thumps as the beams struck, but the ship’s armor could withstand attack from minor hand weapons.
At the base of the atmosphere stack, doors opened and an entire squad of guards boiled out like Anoat lizard-ants in mating season. One bright laser bolt splashed across the transparisteel directly in front of Han’s eyes, dazzling him. “Time to leave this party,” he said.
Chewbacca raised them off the ground, maneuvering the shuttle away from the other vehicles on the landing pad.
Two guards wrestled a blaster cannon into place, erecting it on its tripod and cranking up the aim point. Chewbacca growled, and Han took over the controls. “I know. That thing could be real trouble if we don’t get some altitude fast.”
A flurry of hand-blaster bolts pinged against the lower hull. Han flew the ship higher, adjacent to the gigantic stack, spiraling upward and using the curving walls as a shield. The guards managed to fire only one shot from the blaster-cannon, but the beam scattered wide as Han corkscrewed up, keeping the stack between him and the troops. Below, the guards ran around the perimeter to keep within firing range, but Han flew the shuttle beyond the reach of small weapons fire.
“We’re out of here!” Han said. “Punch it, Chewie!”
Then the massive laser turrets mounted on the atmosphere tower began firing at them.
“What!” Han cried. “What are they doing with weapons on an atmosphere stack? It’s a factory, not a garrison!”
Star Wars: The Jedi Academy Trilogy I: Jedi Search Page 18
