The Gamorrean raced up five or ten steps before the lightning started, thin, vicious fingers of it stabbing out from the walls, playing over the creature's body like a delicate, skeletal spider torturing its prey. The Gamorrean screamed, fell, his big body spasming, flopping on the black metal of the stairs. The pursuing Gakfedds skidded to a halt at the door, staring up in momentary shock.
Then they began to laugh. Ugbuz let out a bellow of mirth, pointing as the Klagg's flesh blistered and blood poured from a thousand pinholes drilled by the lightning. The others whooped, doubled over, slapping their thighs and one another's shoulders in genuine amusement. Luke shrank back into the cross-corridor where he and Threepio stood, sickened. The Klagg, impossibly, was still trying to get to his feet, still trying to ascend the stairs, slipping in blood now, charring to death as he moved. Gamorreans were tough. And the Klagg, quite clearly, considered the sizzling nightmare of the gangway a preferable fate to what the Gakfedds would do. Luke turned away, almost ill, and headed back toward the mess hall. He could hear the Gakfedds' laughter a long way down the hall.
Armories, naval (regular)--search
-- Purpose of this information?
Inventory control
-- All inventory consonant with the parameters and intentions of the Will
"Master Luke?"
Schematic search--water piping
-- Purpose of this information?
"Master Luke, it's getting quite late."
Emergency maintenance
-- All maintenance proceeding in accordance with the intent and timetable of the Will
"You lying wad of synapses, you've got lighting blacked out over half your crew decks and computers down everywhere you look."
"Master Luke, the longer you remain this far from the Gakfedd village, the greater your danger from a retaliatory Klagg raid. There haven't even been Talz, or tripods, in this sector for..."
Luke raised his head. He was sitting at a terminal in the quartermaster's office, the entrance to a small complex of workshops and storage rooms. The long corridor leading to the mess hall's starboard entrance was visible through the open door. Visible past Threepio's shoulder, that is. The protocol droid was standing nervously in the doorway, glancing out with the frequency of a Coruscant stockbroker on the scout for a hovercar after a lunchtime meeting. If Threepio hadn't had an internal chronometer, thought Luke, he'd be looking at a watch every ten seconds. He said, "They have Cray."
Torturing the Jawa had been petty viciousness, like children tormenting an injured animal. The Klagg had been an enemy. And the Klagg would see Cray as an enemy of theirs. Especially, he thought, after the death of their mate in the gangway wired with that evil opalescent grid. Wearily, he typed:
Sysshell
-- Purpose of this information?
Sysview
-- Purpose of this information?
Revsys
-- Purpose of this...
"The purpose of this information is to make you cough up something besides the fact that the Will is in charge of everything and everything is perfect," muttered Luke through his teeth. His head ached again--his whole body felt as if he'd fallen down a flight of stairs, and in spite of the perigen patch on his leg there was a suspicious, grinding inflammation deep inside that made him wonder how long he could summon the Force to battle infection in the torn flesh. "And if I have to go through every Imperial code and slicer Cray and Han and Ghent ever taught me I'll do it."
"I do wish Artoo were here, sir," said Threepio, clanking diffidently to his side. ”He's much better at talking to these supercomputers than I. Why, back when we were with Captain Antilles, we... Oh! Shoo, you nasty little thing!"
Luke knew it was a Jawa even before he turned. Anyone who'd had even the smallest experience with Jawas knew when one had entered an enclosed space. "No, it's okay, Threepio." After seeing the Klagg's death, Luke had considerably more sympathy for the Jawas. He frowned, puzzled, as he swiveled his chair, for Jawas generally avoided contact with other races, particularly on this ship. "What do you want, little guy?"
It was the Jawa he'd saved that morning. How he knew this he couldn't say, because with their all-envelopingly ragged brown robes, grubby gloves, and faces invisible in the shadows of their hoods, it was almost impossible to tell one from another. But somehow he was sure of it.
"Master." The slangy, squeaky patois of the desert was almost unintelligible. One filthy little hand reached out to touch the lightsaber at Luke's belt.
He put his own hand guardingly over it, but sensed no real desire to steal. "'Fraid that's mine, pal."
The Jawa stepped back, silent. Then it reached into it’s robes. "For you."
It held out another lightsaber.
Chapter 8
There was a technique to trolling the bars along Spaceport Row for information. Leia recognized it at once as a variation of what she herself did at diplomatic receptions: more an attitude than any specific set of questions, a kind of easy friendliness compounded of genuine interest in other people's lives, an almost limitless tolerance for meaningless trivia, a finely honed mental garbage filter, and the acceptance--artificial, if necessary--that there wasn't anything else one had to do that afternoon.
She enjoyed watching Han work. Clothed in a dress that he'd picked out for her, of the "not-to-diplomatic-events" variety, she lounged on barstools consuming drinks with paper spaceships in them and listened to him trade trivialities with various barkeeps, watching game transmissions in the seemingly depthless black boxes in the corners--in eight years of close association with Han Solo she had acquired a vivid working knowledge of the rules and strategies of smashball--listening to extremely bad music and getting into marginal conversations with packers, stokers, small-time traders, and smaller-time hustlers and bums. Even in the Core Worlds most people didn't recognize Leia or Han if they didn't know them or know who they were. To ninety percent of the species in the galaxy, all members of other races looked alike anyway, and most humans wouldn't have recognized the Senators from their own planets. There was something to be said, Leia reflected, for the planets still ruled by the Ancient Houses. On Alderaan, everyone had known her: grocery clerks and subspace mechanics had studied the home lives of the House Organa on a day-to-day basis over the tabvids, watched them marry and divorce and squabble over property settlements and put their children through private academies, tsk'ed over the unsuitable attachments of Cousin Nial and recalled that long-ago scandal that had broken off Aunt Tia's engagement to... What had his name been?... from House Vandron. Her onetime suitor Isolder had told her it was the same in the Hapes Consortium, whose ruling House had been in power for centuries.
Here they were just a lanky man with a scar on his chin and a smuggler's habit of watching the doors, and a cinnabar-haired woman in a dress that Aunt Rouge would have locked her in her room before permitting her to wear in public.
Leia listened, with increasing respect, to Han discussing puttie, which had to be the most boring sport in the entire Universe, for thirty minutes with a wizened Durosian before bringing up the subject of the local action. She didn't quite know how he'd come to the conclusion that this was the bar where such a question might be asked.
The reward was that the Durosian--whose name was Oso Nim--remembered Drub McKumb, and recalled his disappearance six years ago. "You sure he didn't just skin out ahead of trouble?" asked Han, and the aged one shook her head.
"Fester it, no. Skin out how, without his ship? Thing musta sat in the impound for ten months, with every tramp skipper and planet hopper that came through trying to bribe the yard captain to let 'em strip parts. Finally sold the whole shebang to a bunch of Rodians for gate fees." She chuckled, displaying several rows of tiny, sharp, brown teeth. "First-timers, they were. Took off with a load of cut-rate silk trying to run the tariff barriers into the Core Worlds and got themselves blistered out of existence first revenue cutter they met. Waste of a good ship, not to speak of all that silk."
&
nbsp; She shook her head regretfully. The Smoking Jets, like every other bar on the Row, consisted of three prefab white plastene room units fixed together and opened into a single long chamber, mounted on a broken foundation of some older rock structure and cantilevered awkwardly to fit. The factories on Sullust turned out interlocking room units by the millions and there wasn't a commercial colony from Elrood to the Outer Rim that didn't have at least some buildings-towns, even--that consisted entirely of three-by-three white cubes.
Down in this part of town, near the segment of the cliff where the Port Offices formed a kind of gateway into the tunnels that led to the docking silos themselves, most of the room units had been fixed--with varying accuracy--to the heavy walls and keyhole arches of the older structures, where steam from the hot springs in the foundations still drifted forth through broken pillars and colonnades. Most of the dwelling-houses so built, Leia had noticed-including the one in which she and Han were staying--had been decorated and added to with native hangings of woven grass, bright cloth, trained trellisworks of vines, to minimize their undeniable resemblance to packing crates. No such care had been lavished on the Smoking Jets.
"And nobody tried to figure out what happened to Drub?" Leia signaled the barkeep to refill Oso Nim's glass.
"Bzzz." The Durosian made a dismissive noise and a gesture reminiscent of scaring flies. "A million things can happen to a man on the game, sweetie. Even in a backwater hole like this one. It's sometimes six months before his friends figure out he hasn't disappeared on purpose, ship or no ship."
"And was it six months before his friends went looking?" asked Han.
Oso Nim cackled and gave him a sidelong glance from iridescent orange eyes. "In six months, you know where your friends are going to be? Drub's mate and crew said he'd been on about crypts under the old ruin at the top of the town and went pokin' themselves, but fester it, there's no crypts! People been looking for them crypts for years, and all they found was solid rock. Smuggler tunnels, sure, there's smuggler tunnels all over this damn town, but crypts? Solid rock is all Drub's mate and crew found, same as others before 'em."
"And what," asked Han, taking the bottle from the barkeep and repairing the old Durosian's depredations on her glass, "were others before 'em looking for?"
He spoke low, under the tinny audio of the holo box above the bar where the final game of the series between Lafra and Gathus was in process; she laughed heartily. "Oh, you're a friend of his, after all these years, sweetie? His long-lost brother?" Durosians generally don't laugh, and in the face of the wholesale horror of lines, teeth, halitosis, and flashing eyes, Leia could understand why other races might discourage them from doing so.
"Hey, Chatty!" she called to a human in a purple-splotched coverall with a packer's stained and bandaged fingers. "Here's old Drub McKumb's long-lost brother, come searching for his bones at last!"
"What, you think there's secret crypts down under Plett's House, too?" Chatty was if anything more wrinkled and decrepit than Oso Nim, though, looking at him, Leia realized he wasn't much older than Han. ”Secret tunnels filled with jewels?" Han made an I-didn't-say-it gesture, and Chatty winked. One of his eyes was a replacement, the cheap kind manufactured on Sullust with a yellowing plastic cornea.
"If there's jewels in them crypts, why ain't Bran Kemple richer, hunh? Why's he playin' penny-ante stakes smuggling coffee and running card games over at the Jungle Lust?"
"Bran Kemple's the town boss?" Han raised his eyebrows in genuine surprise. "I thought it was Nubblyk the Slyte."
"What hole you been hidin' in for the past eight years, Sugar-drawers?" laughed the Durosian, and Chatty took the bottle from Han's hand and poured himself a glass, courteously offering Leia a refill as well. Leia, thoroughly amused, refrained from remarking that people who'd been living at the bottom of a volcanic vent for decades had no business accusing others of hiding in holes. "The Slyte pulled his stakes out eight, nine years ago. Whole scene's gone to pieces since then."
"Gone to pieces," Chatty agreed, nursing Han's bottle mournfully. "Hot rockets, boy!" he yelled furiously, his attention suddenly riveted by the activities of twenty-five skaters on the planet Lafra, "you call that festering shooting? For a million credits a year I'll festering join your festering team and lose your games for you, you stupid sons of slime devils!"
"You sure the Slyte actually pulled his own stakes?" Leia leaned her elbows on the bar and looked innocent and fascinated.
The Durosian grinned and pinched her cheek with fingers like mummified knotgrass. "Your girlfriend catches on quick, Angelpants. The Slyte was a clever old bug. If he was goin' snoopin' around where he had no business, he wouldn't come in here half drunk like Mubbin the Whiphid did, carryin' on about how he'd found a big secret about Plett's House, or like old Drub with his "calculations." Oh, I don't doubt there's somethin' up at those ruins the high-ups around here don't want people snoopin' with. Maybe enough to load dim-cells like Mubbin or Drub or what's-his-name, that Wookiee who worked as a mechanic for Galactic... enough to load them into an outbound ship."
She shook her head, polished off another glass, took the bottle from Chatty, and tilted it, regarding with profound sadness the few remaining drops that trickled into her glass. "Well, whatever it is, it ain't worth it, so why put yourself in trouble, I say." She shrugged. ”Maybe Drub just fell down a repair shaft in some orchard someplace and the kretch ate him."
"Kretch?" said Leia sharply.
The orange eyes glittered in unholy amusement. "How long you been in town, Pretty-Eyes? You'll see the kretch mighty quick. As for old Drub, what was it to him what the high-ups are hidin', long as there was no money in it? And you can be sure there wasn't, else the big corporations'd be sellin'." She smiled beatifically as Leia signaled and another bottle materialized on the stain-repellant lexoplast of the bar. "Why, thank you, darling..." She nodded toward Han and leaned forward to whisper confidentially, "You're way too good for the likes of him."
"I know," whispered Leia, and Oso Nim cackled with delight.
She saddened again, and tossed off another drink. "Well, the whole scene's turned to garbage now anyway. Pity, 'cause eight, ten years ago this place was really movin'. You'd get twelve, fourteen ships a week in on the sly, goods slippin' in under the ice, and this place was as jammed at noon as it was at midnight, maybe more. The Slyte was one who knew how to run things. Since he left it's all turned into nerf-feed."
Odd, thought Leia, as she sought out the Smoking Jets' plumbing facilities a little while later. As far as she could ascertain from Oso Nim's increasingly foggy conversation (Han had ordered still another blue glass bottle, and Chatty was absorbed in the second half of the doubleheader), Nubblyk the Slyte had departed, the "game"--i.e., smuggling--had drastically declined, and Mubbin the Whiphid, a friend of Drub McKumb's, had vanished, all in the same year... the year after Palpatine's death and the breakup of the Empire. A year later--when Drub McKumb had returned to Belsavis--he'd vanished, too. Her aunt Rouge's housekeeper had frequently observed, Just because you keep soap in the pantry doesn't make it food. The temporal proximity of the events could have been coincidence. And yet...
With every possible inch of arable ground in the volcanic rift given over to cash crops, lots in town were small and buildings like the cantina--and the older stone house upon which it was built--were squinched right to the property lines, leaving no room for sanitary accommodations aboveground. An old-fashioned manual hinged door at one end of the bar bore the universal symbols, and behind it a thoroughly insalubrious stair plunged by the light of a minimum-strength glowpanel into the grotty obscurity of the foundations. Though most of the warm springs over which the old houses had been built had been diverted long ago, the heat below ground was even worse than above, the air held a lingering whiff of some sour gas and the dense black-red stone of the walls was patched with a crop of molds and fungus that made Leia glad she hadn't ordered a salad off the cantina's small food menu. At the far end of the narro
w passageway something moved, and Leia, nervously activating the small glowrod that hung at her belt, got her first look at what had to be a kretch.
It was half again as long as her hand, possibly the width of three fingers together, and the color of a scab. Two sets of jaws--one above the other--were large enough that even at a distance of five meters she could see the serrated teeth, and the barbed grabbers on the tail. It lunged at her with a motion something between a hop and a dash, and Leia, who knew better than to fire a blaster in the closed space, scooped up the chunk of stone used as a doorstop at the top of the steps and hurled it at the thing in a reflex of panic and horror.
The stone cracked squarely on the thing's jointed back, rolled off as the kretch spasmed, quivered, and then hauled itself swiftly to vanish between the pipes that ran along the wall. As Leia edged nervously down to retrieve the stone she could see the brown stain it left, and smell a kind of sweet nastiness, like fruit in the final stages of decomposition.
She checked out the repellent little cubicle at the end of the passageway very carefully with the light before entering and afterward hurried her steps along the passage to return to the bar above. The kretch would eat us...
If those were the kretch, she thought, she was not looking forward to encountering them in the crypts where the Jedi children had once dared each other to hunt for Plett's Well... provided they could find the crypts at all.
"Just because you keep soap in the pantry doesn't make it food," agreed Han thoughtfully, as they walked through the drifting glitters of mist on their way back to the house Jevax had arranged for them. "But it's no accident you keep it close to where you wash the dishes."
She nodded, accepting that train of logic, then grinned. "And what do you know about washing dishes... Angelpants?"
"When you spend three quarters of your life bumming around the galaxy, Your Highness-ness, believe me, you end up loading a lot of dishwashers and even washing dishes by hand." He hooked his hands in his belt, but Leia knew he was watching everything around them to the limits of his senses. The eternal vapors of Plawal were unnerving. Thickest down at the far end of the valley where the true hot springs bubbled forth, even here, where the land lay low around the warm springs, visibility was down to a few meters. Even up on the raised streets that skirted the orchards, scenes had a tendency to appear and disappear like isolated tableaux: fruit trees jeweled with orchids, up which sweetberry and bowvine had been trained so that every branch hung heavy with two or three different varieties of fruit; thousands of tiny bridges spanning the faintly steaming pools and streams whose fern-choked verges swarmed with salamanders and frogs; yellow, green, or sea-blue pittins dozing on the thrusting knees of shalaman and aphor trees or hunting insects in the grass; automated watch-critters crouched at the bases of the more expensive trees, beady eyes of green or amber gleaming eerily through the mists. Lava-block walls loomed unexpectedly out of the shifting vapors, topped by the sleek white plastic of the prefabs; ramps of wood or plastic ascending to the doors from street level, lined with pots of imported red plastic or local terra-cotta, lush with berries, slochans, lipanas. Beautiful... But Leia was extremely conscious of the fact that visibility was down to two meters or less.
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