"Major Calrissian, Special Services. 22911-B. Where are they holding the Rebel saboteur they caught?"
"In the detention area of Deck Six, of course!" cried the captain, out of at least six mouths in exquisite harmony. "I have no time for questions like that! My men are being slaughtered!"
Its vast, flinging gesture took in the doorway behind it. Luke touched the opener and saw, to his shock and horror, in the small lounge that lay behind, the dismembered bodies of four or five Affytechans scattered over tables, chairs, desks. Someone had activated the fire-prevention sprinkler in the ceiling, turning the nozzles so that a spray of fine, rather metallic-smelling mist rained down over everything on the room, pattering wetly on the puddled floor. Amid the pools the torn-off limbs and ripped-out nervous systems were sprouting, thin yellow pendules already bending under the swollen weight of a rainbow of fleshy bulbs.
"Captain, the hyperdrive can't take much more of this!" exclaimed someone who was obviously standing in for the ship's engineer, and a gunnery officer added, "More Rebel fighters coming in, sir! A-formation, starboard ten o'clock!" Everyone leaped to the dead consoles and began making important-sounding beeps and twitters.
Luke limped thoughtfully out into the corridor again. Deck 6. Far below them--and the Klagg had definitely been trying to go up. Still...Would the Klaggs have done that kind of damage to the Affytechans?
It was a possibility, thought Luke, trying a door, then doubling through a storage area (still no open ceiling beams) and down a viewing gallery above an empty hangar deck. The pieces hadn't looked charred so much as cut and torn. How did blaster fire react on the soft, silk-like vegetable flesh?
He paused at a juncture, trying to get his bearings. Another door refused to open--one that he had the vague sensation had been open before--sending him back down a cross-corridor, through a laundry drop, along a passage that ended in another shut blast door.
I've been this way, thought Luke. He knew he had. And that door had been...He stopped, his scalp prickling. He smelled Sand People. Idiot, he thought, as his whole body turned cold. If the landers picked up Jawas from Tatooine you should have known there was a chance they'd pick up Sand People--Tusken Raiders--there as well.
They'd been in this corridor not more than a few minutes ago. The air circulators hadn't yet cleared their smell. It meant they could be behind him, tall rag-wrapped shapes like brutally vicious scarecrows mummified in sand, crouched in one of the dark cabins, listening for his dragging footfalls behind one of those many doors the Gamorreans, or the Affytechans, or the Jawas had forced open...
Tusken rifles were mostly basement specials, tinkered by illegal manufacturers in Mos Eisley and sold to the Raiders by unscrupulous middlemen. Inaccurate, dirty-firing, but even a near miss in corridors like these could be fatal.
He could still smell them. The circulators should have cleared away the whiff of their dirt-colored wrappings had they been just passing through. He moved back the way he'd come, stretching his senses for the smallest trace. Around the corner he'd last turned, he thought he heard the faint scratch of metal on metal. At the same moment, movement in the corridor crossing ahead of him caught his eye. A Mouse-droid zooming up the hallway stopped, as if its registers identified something ahead of it out of Luke's sight around the corner. Abruptly it reversed itself, backing full speed in panic.
Luke flung himself toward the nearest room as a searing blast of rifle fire scorched paneling all around him. The Sand People knew their ambush was blown; he heard their almost silent footfalls in the hall as he slammed over the manual on the doors, dashed across the room--it was a communal lounge of some kind, with a visi-reader and a coffee spigot--and through the door on the other side. A cabin, two bunks, like the one he'd come back to consciousness in. Two bunks and one door. Gaffe sticks and makeshift rams pounded on the door of the lounge and he tried another door, a laundry drop like the one from which the Jawa had led him into the repair shaft. The panel that led to the repair shaft wouldn't budge. Luke heard the crashing of the lounge door being broken in, the wild, blistering rake of saturation fire into the lounge, the visi-reader exploding and the hiss of bursting fire-system pipes... He'd never get a chance to bring his lightsaber into play. The blast of the Force that he directed against the wall hatch dented it, but the dog-bolts on the other side held. He remembered seeing, on other hatches in the shafts, the black boxes of magnetic locks.
The door heaved, shook. There was a splintering crash, another harsh clatter as the lock was subjected to rifle fire, and the door opened a slot. Blaster fire roared through, raking the small area of the room accessible through the slit, but it was only the smallest of rooms. Ricochets bounced and sizzled wildly against the walls, and Luke flattened into a corner, trying to summon enough of the Force to keep from getting fried by strays. To an extent he could keep the spattering randomness of them off him, but once the Sand People got the doors open enough to crisp the room wholesale...
The Force. If he could use the Force to blow the doors off outward, to hurl himself through in a flying levitation, it might buy him a few seconds...
He knew that was absurd but was summoning his strength, his energy, to try it anyway when a faint clanging noise by his right foot drew his attention.
The repair shaft coverplate had fallen neatly inward.
Luke ducked through, pushed the panel back into place behind him--it had been dogged, and there was a lock mechanism on it, too--and latched it again with the bolts alone, which even without the lock should hold against Sand People. The worklights still burned dimly here, a grudging ocher glow that faded around him as he climbed down, leaving only the faint light of the glowrods on his staff.
At the next level down he paused, resting his forehead against the panel and stretching out his senses through the metal and into the room beyond. He heard no sound, so dogged back the latches and, holding on to the handgrips within the shaft, swung himself back and away from the hatch and summoned the Force, like a violent kick of kinetic energy, from the outside of the panel, smashing it in despite the magnetic lock.
The metal buckled, twisting against the outer latches, sufficiently for Luke to work it free. He slipped through into a dim-lit storage area on Deck 14. Threepio was waiting for him in the laundry drop. "I was able to find nothing, Master Luke, nothing," moaned the droid. "Dr. Mingla is doomed, I know she is." In the corridor outside, the lights were out. Those in the laundry room dropped to the grimy yellow glow of the emergency batteries in which Threepio's eyes shone like headlamps. "And at the rate the Jawas are stealing wire and solenoids from this vessel," added Threepio tartly, "we're all doomed."
"Well, nobody's doomed yet." Luke eased himself down against the wall and stretched out his splinted leg, which had begun to throb in spite of all the concentration, all the Jedi healing techniques he could summon. He pulled open the engine-taped flap in the leg of his coverall and affixed another perigen patch to his thigh. The analgesic compound lowered the pain but did nothing for his utter weariness. He wondered if he could force his own alertness to sustain a search of the Deck 6 Detention Block, or whether he would miss some subtle clue from sheer exhaustion. We're talking about Gamorreans here, he reflected. How subtle can they be?
Though his every instinct told him to look on the upper decks for Cray, he knew he couldn't neglect even the possibility of a lead. It did make a kind of sense. He took a deep breath. "You willing to search the next deck up, Threepio? I can levitate you as far as the opening on Deck...I think it's Seventeen." He leaned through the open hatch and looked. The next opening looked at least two levels above the Deck 15 hatch.
"Very well, sir. But I do suggest, Master Luke, that you get some rest. And permit me to re-dress that wound on your leg. According to my perception of your vital signs--”
"I'll get some rest when I get back from Deck Six. Really," he added into Threepio's pregnant silence. "We just... I get the feeling we don't have a lot of time." His bones hurt at the thought of
climbing down all those levels--one foot down with his whole weight supported on his arms, then move his arms to the next rung to take his whole weight again...
But his escape from the Sand People had convinced him that he was right in not expending his concentration and possibly dissipating his ability to focus the Force in self-levitation. He had no idea when he'd need everything he could summon. Or how long he'd have to last on what little strength he had. It was difficult enough, he found, raising Threepio all those levels--some ten or twelve meters--and pushing back the hatchway panel so that the droid could scramble through. "Do be careful, Master Luke," called Threepio's voice down the shaft.
Luke grinned. Aunt Beru used to call after him to take his poncho when he'd take the landspeeder out into the Dune Sea, never guessing that he was going hunting womp rats and that if anything went wrong, getting chilled without his poncho was going to be the least of his worries.
His grin faded as he looked down the blackness of the shaft. Most of the lighting was gone, only small, faded squares of brightness showing where hatches had been removed by Jawas using this route between decks. He slung his staff around his shoulder again. Eight levels. One aching rung at a time.
Another thought made him stop and turn back to look around the dim chamber behind him. Everywhere he had traversed in this vessel, he had known--felt--the malignant intelligence of the Will: keeping track of him, monitoring his footfalls, his heartbeats, the temperature of his body. His vital signs, as Threepio monitored them, though without the protocol droid's fussy protectiveness. He was almost certain it was the Will that had closed some of those doors on the deck above, guiding him toward the Sand People's ambush. For the first time, he had the oddest feeling that it wasn't the Will alone observing him.
It certainly hadn't been the Will that had undone the inner lock on that repair-tube hatch. Or had it been? Had that only served the intent of the Will? He didn't know. Nevertheless, before he swung himself back into the shaft for the long crawl down, he said quietly, "Thank you. Thank you for helping me." And I'll feel like the President of the Galactic Society of Village Idiots if it was just a ruse to put me off my guard.
He eased himself off the floor and into the hatch and thence down into darkness.
Chapter 10
"C'mon, Chewie, didn't you hear the man say this afternoon there was nothing up here?" Han Solo flashed the beam of his light around the silent darkness of Plett's House. It was a much stronger beam than Leia's glowrod, a smuggler's actinic luminator. Something scuttled in a corner, invisible in the Stygian mist that curtained the ruined house, and Solo smelled a dirty sweetness, like rotting fruit. Chewbacca produced a hoarse, disapproving groan.
"What, you gonna let a little bug scare you?" The luminator beam found the dull circle of the metal well cover. "Probably lots of 'em down there." Han knelt beside the cover and unslung his utility kit from his shoulder. Overhead, the lights of the hanging gardens sparkled distantly through the mists.
Han had put two calls through to Mara Jade on the Holonet transceiver, but neither had been picked up. His attempt to reach Leia at the municipal archives had failed as well. They said she had not yet arrived, which struck him as not like Leia, though between fog and darkness it was possible she'd taken a wrong turning and gotten lost in an orchard somewhere. Whatever might lurk in the reputedly nonexistent tunnels beneath Plett's House, it was difficult to imagine any genuine danger befalling anyone aboveground in this sleepy, mist-bound Garden of Delight. He'd contacted Winter on subspace, said hello to Anakin and talked briefly to Jacen and Jaina, who'd kept trying to put their hands through the holo field, clearly unaware that their father wasn't in the room with them. But when the call was over and silence returned to the borrowed house, he knew what the trouble was.
He wanted to go back to Plett's House and look around. He thought he knew how to get into the crypts. Like Drub McKumb, he reflected wryly, he, too, had his "calculations." Chewbacca handed him the bundle he'd brought up from the Millennium Falcon's locker--a Scale-3 antigrav generator, and a couple of backpack power cells. Solo set the generator on the well cover and flipped the magnetic catches, only to discover that the cover wasn't durasteel as he'd thought, but some kind of nonferrous metal. Interesting, considering the price differential between ferrous and nonferrous. There were no handles, either. "Well, I guess we do this the hard way." He took a small drill from the utility kit, and hooked it into the power cell. It occurred to him to wonder who exactly had put the cover in place, and how long it had been there. By the dirt in the cracks, at least a couple of years, but Leia had mentioned that in her vision of former years the well had been guarded by open grillework, not a solid slab. Probably for reasons of warmth.
By the light of Chewbacca's torch he fastened bolts to the cover, affixed the antigrav. He couldn't guess how deep the air column of the well was--at least a hundred meters, he calculated from the combined height of the benches that rose above the valley floor. A Scale-3 was good for most jobs of this size, and in the event it lifted the cover easily. The metal slab was beveled inward, and thicker than one would expect, sitting easily in the shaped lip of the well.
Warm steam murky with sulfur sighed up around the cover as it lifted, and wisps of it trailed around the feet of the intruders as they guided the cover out of the way, but whatever lay at the bottom of Plett's Well was a warm spring, not a hot one. By the glow of the luminator, when Han held it down the shaft, thick pillows of moss and lichen could be seen on the glistening dark stone. Mingled with the sulfur and the acrid whiff of chlorine came the smell of rotting fruit. Chewie growled.
"So it stinks," said Han. "So does the Falcon's engine room when we blow a duct."
As he'd thought, there were handholds cut into the rock. The irregularities of the shaft itself, and the dense blocks and pits of shadow they created, hid everything beyond the first few meters, and ghostly drifts of steam threw back the light. Solo fixed a loop of safety line around the stone upright between two of the keyhole windows and clipped the other end to his belt. Chewie ran a double loop of the line around his waist.
"Right," muttered Solo and clipped the luminator to the front of his vest. "So let's see what all the fuss is about."
They hid the children down the well.
Solo almost missed the door that led into the passageway, set in the wall of the shaft where the shadows seemed to cross no matter where the light was coming from. The heat grew thicker as they descended, and with it the dirty, sweetish smell. He was aware of wet, crawly movement among the lichen and mineral deposits on the rock. But below the level of the passageway's entrance, the handholds were choked shut with moss. The difference was noticeable enough to send him searching up the shaft again, probing at each shadow around and behind him with his light.
"There." He shone the light on the walls of the tunnel as he and Chewbacca ducked through the low, oval mouth. The Wookiee shook himself uncomfortably, his coarse, tobacco-colored fur black-wet and pointy with moisture. The luminator beam played across old scarring in the walls, places where the moss on the floor had been gouged and regrown.
"Somebody was here, all right, and a lot less than thirty years ago." Han bent, and picked something out of the moss. In the beam of his flash it glinted dirty yellowish, the size of his thumbnail, with a quality to it at once matte and glittery. Dark lines intricately stitched its surface. "Xylen," he said. "A memory chip--if old Plett was the hot-stuff botanist everybody says he was the place would have been stuffed with sequencers and tanks and what-all else. No wonder people came around to strip it." He unhooked the safety line from his belt, letting it dangle back in front of the tunnel's mouth. "What's the price of xylen on the open market these days, Chewie?"
The Wookiee disclaimed specialized expertise in commodities, but Han knew at least that the xylen backing of that single old-fashioned chip would at least have paid for the dress Leia had worn that afternoon several times over. He slipped it into his pocket.
&nbs
p; "No wonder Nubblyk kept it a secret." The luminator's beam picked out the uneven contours of the dripping walls, the low arch of the moss-grown ceiling. Something black and shiny and the size of Han's foot slithered and fled through the moss to vanish down the throat of the passageway. Han flinched involuntarily and Chewie, bent to keep his head from brushing the ceiling, ran a nervous paw over the back of his mane, as if he suspected that something had detached itself from the moss above him and was crawling in his fur. He growled a question.
"Dunno," said Han. "The only thing that could have killed off the trade in chips--and whatever else they could pull out of the old machinery--is if they'd cleared the place out. That would have been the year after the Battle of Endor, by what they were saying in the bars." Rags of mist flickered around his bootheels as he led the way down a short incline into the tunnel that stretched away into the dark.
Another interrogative rumble.
"Yeah, Drub worked for him as a runner. But the Slyte kept a tight rein on things. My guess is nobody but him knew where the entrance to this place was. And there might have been more than one. Damn," he added, as they came to the top of a steeply zigzagging ramp. "Talk about a place that's bigger on the inside than on the outside."
The tunnel climbed, following the network of old volcanic passages and underground riverbeds that eventually opened into the great chasm of the Plawal Rift itself. At the top of the ramp a short tunnel pierced the rock, only to be blocked at the far end: "That's where the door Leia saw went into the House, I bet." They backtracked, followed the main tunnel, Chewie grumbling as he shifted his bowcaster and blaster rifle to a more comfortable position on his shoulders. "Yeah, here we are. This vent probably runs straight out under the ice."
They followed the scratched marks on the floor to a wide cavern, crossed a narrow wooden bridge above a cleft from which steam and the acrid breath of subterranean gases rose in a suffocating wall. The rocks beyond, where the tunnel widened into a vast, uneven space of darkness, were coated with wrinkled, labyrinthine mazes of paste-white sinter formations, the floor pitted with long-dead fumaroles and slashed by steaming streams nearly choked in strangely tinted mineral deposits. Flat wormlike white tentacles groped from one of the fumaroles, clutching toward their feet, but when Han and Chewbacca drew away in alarm subsided again with a bubbly slurp.
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