Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  At the far end of the cave a room had been cut in the rock, littered with plastic boxes and the small, flat packets smugglers used to store goods in when they shoved them behind hull panels or under floor sections. Most of them were chewed and mauled; a small kretch, no longer than Han's thumb, skittered away from the track of his light.

  "Gold wire." Han nudged the plastic litter with his boot toe, then knelt to retrieve something metallic that twinkled dirty-bright in the light. It was kinked and twisted, having been straightened out from its original configuration and bundled for storage. Mineral deposits clung thickly to it, pinkish gold in the beam of the light. "Utility grade."

  He flashed the beam over the room's two other doorways, which led, one to a stair, one to a tunnel beyond. The low ceilings were toothy with stalactites and furred with hair-like deposits of sodium and silica. Lichen glimmered in threads of blue, green, and crimson on the walls, and serpents of mist coiled across the floor. "Let's see what else we got."

  Hot, acrid breezes stirred Solo's sweat-drenched hair and the Wookiee's fur as they moved on into the vent system. Streams of water dripped through the formations on the walls, and the darkness was choking with sulfur and kretch smell. In another room cut from the tunnel wall Han's light glinted on a jumble of metal casings and circuit boards, flashed in the empty glass eyes of an old APD-40 droid's cylindrical head. "When'd they quit making APD'S, Chewie?" Han hunkered to turn the boards over in his hand. All the chips had been pried out, the power cells removed.

  The Wookiee guessed the Clone Wars, but didn't come into the room. He remained in the low-beamed rectangle of the doorway, listening back along the blackness of the tunnel, to the echo chamber of the last cave. Han could hear only the distant rushing of water somewhere, but knew his friend's ears were far sharper than his own.

  "Yeah, I thought that myself. They switched to the C Three series because the APD'S used gold wire and xylen points. This's an old model, too." He flashed the light around the litter of split casings and looted boards. "Must be six, eight droids' worth of junk here. This was what they were after, all right."

  In the next room along the corridor they found the jewels. "What the...?"

  Han's light threw rainbows from the three boxes ranged along the wall, bright colors springing back to salt the low ceiling in fire. He stooped, brought up dirty, crusted earrings, chains, pectorals, pendants...

  Chewie growled a remark, held up a plastic packing crate, half filled with xylen chips. Their eyes met, baffled.

  "That doesn't make any sense." Han ran his fingers through the chips. They were jumbled together with electronic salvage, gold wire, power cells, selenium... "There must be three quarters of a million credits in this room." He shone his light through the inner doorway, and the gleam passed over the hard angles of machinery, dark screens, the smooth curved arms of processors and pumps. "This stuff hasn't been touched. I can't see Nubblyk just walking away and--”

  Chewie held up his paw, head turning toward the outer door, and made a sign to kill the light.

  Silence and utter darkness. The far-off hursh of water echoed in the low groinings of the ceiling. A horrible scratching, and the dirty-sweet kretch smell, made Han fight to thrust from his mind the awful fantasy of a dozen of the things climbing his boots the minute the light was out.

  He picked his cautious way to where he knew Chewie stood still in the entrance. His outstretched hand met fur. Had his companion been human he would have whispered his name to avoid a knife between his ribs, but the Wookiee would know his smell. Chewie did not growl, but under his fingers Han felt the fur of his friend's arm lift and prickle. There was definitely something in the corridor. Stray, hot wind down the tunnels brought a feral stink that almost made Han gag. Whatever it was, for that amount of smell it was big. Then a scream, the scratch of claws; Han yelled "Light!" to warn Chewbacca and threw the full-force beam directly at the source of the sound. It flared diamond hard in yellow beast-eyes, slashing brown teeth. Chewie's blaster bolt went wild and spattered, ricocheting crazily in the narrow space while the creature threw itself on the Wookiee, howling and ripping in a mass of filthy, mold-covered hair.

  There was no question of a second shot, and Han plunged in with his knife, stabbing at the creature's back as it bore Chewbacca to the floor. It screamed, writhed in Chewie's grip, slashed at Han, and the dropped luminator caught movement in the dark. Other things were running, eyes blazing, the uneven ceiling suddenly echoing with screams.

  Han twisted loose from the first attacker as it slumped, grabbed the luminator and Chewbacca's dropped rifle, and the Wookiee rolled to his feet, leaped over the corpse, and pelted away into the dark. Han dashed behind him, firing back, the bolt hissing from wall to wall and showing like lightning the shambling, filthy things on their heels.

  "Back that way!"

  Chewie only roared, long legs taking him far ahead down the twisting rock of the tunnel. The luminator beam leaped crazily over mold-covered walls, bounced across doorways yawning into the dark of dead-end rooms, transformed stalagmites in the great cavern into attackers and old vent holes and lava formations into bottomless pits. They scrambled, slipping in the thin mud of the floor, toward the dark cleft of the entry to the tunnel back toward the well...

  The beam caught the glint of something in the tunnel, rounded and shiny, like black jewelry or the scales of some monstrous thing. Something like wet cobblestones that suddenly seemed to carpet the tunnel--walls, ceiling, and floor. Something that hadn't been there before.

  Kretch. The tunnel leading back toward the well was choked with them.

  For one moment Han and Chewie stood aghast, staring at the nightmare seethe of insectile bodies that filled the passageway nearly twenty centimeters thick. Then, as if a plug had been pulled, the river of kretch flowed out. Han screamed something entirely inadequate to the occasion and plunged away to his left into the lumpy ruin of old lava formations and sullenly steaming craterlets, Chewie at his heels and all the legions of darkness shrieking behind.

  "Got to find a way back," panted Han desperately, as frail sinter and twisted crystal crunched underfoot and the patches of glowing lichen throbbed and stirred like rainbow embers at their passage. The air down here burned with volatile gases and the stench of sulfur, chewing at the lungs, and the baking heat made Han gasp. "Back to the vaults... maybe this way..." More screams, and two black forms sprang suddenly into the glare of the luminator where it fell on the sloped side of an old debris cone rising up before them.

  "On second thought, let's go this way--”

  Chewie caught his arm, stopping him, and roared a challenge into the darkness ahead of them. A challenge was screamed in return.

  Han said, "Great." He raised the light, flashing the beam across the round, smooth terraces of what had been superheated mud pits, now cooled to dance floors of garishly colored hardpan still ringed with the traces of final bubbles--and there they were.

  Three of them, maybe four... one running, a couple crawling on all fours.

  He swung the flash, the white light splashing over finger-thin columns of rising smoke from a vent to their left, a wilderness of steaming caldera below them where the ground fell farther, picked up the eyes of the things scuffling, shambling, running toward them from behind: eyes and hands and the crude weapons they carried.

  Chewbacca fired a bowcaster bolt that went through the chest of something that looked as if it had once been a flat-headed Carosite--it kept on coming, crawling, leaving a broad, bloody smear in its wake. Han opened fire with his blaster at the second group and missed, a huge scar ripping in the mud of the old pits, and from somewhere close by there was a rumble, the ground jarring slightly underfoot and loosened rock showering them from the dark above.

  "This way!" he yelled, and swept the light again, picking up, far off in the darkness, what looked like human artifacts: a raised path among the dead caldera, a barely seen trace of stairs, and, at the top of a low black rise, outlined in the jew
eled glow of colored lichen, a circle of stone pillars. "We can pick 'em off the path!"

  The second group of attackers was already halfway to the head of the path. Han leaned into his dash, the Wookiee loping ahead of him on his longer legs, their original attackers a feral pack not four meters behind. The first of the new group reached the path at the same moment as Chewbacca, slashing at the Wookiee with a metal bar stolen from some ancient workshop. Chewbacca fired his bowcaster and the impact knocked the attacker backward into an old mud pit, filled with what Han had at first taken for a pale, delicate formation of curled and cranial-looking sinter or limestone.

  As the attacker--a Mluki, he looked as if he had been, before madness and neglect had turned him into a screaming beast--went sprawling into the pit, the limestone formation came alive, a sudden heaving of rippling membranes, thrashing layers of fleshy, carnivorous mold. The Mluki, bleeding already from Chewbacca's energy bolt, rolled over and tried to get up, tried to run, but the thing in the pit gripped it with tentacles like elastic white snakes, dragging it down...

  The whitish membranes, like a heaving flower or a mass of writhing tripe, slowly turned red, a color that spread among the membranes to the edges of the pit. Han and Chewie fled past, the path narrowing among crater after crater filled with the carnivorous pit-mold, which rippled furiously and reached for their feet with snakelike tentacles. Behind in the darkness more shrieks resounded, but Han dared not look back to see what other creatures were emerging from the darkness in pursuit.

  At the top of the path, in the circle of pillars, was a well. A low curb surrounded the ten-foot hole. Below, Han could hear the rushing of water, feel the relative coolness of the rising air damp on his burned face. By the white glow of the luminator he could see the things shambling up the path behind them, mouths open and shrieking from hairy, scarred, madness-twisted faces. Some still wore the rags of what had been clothing, and waved makeshift knives and clubs. Some had been human. Their eyes were crazed blanks. Drub McKumb's eyes.

  They were coming fast. What had been a Gotal got too close to the edge of the path and was seized by a tentacle from the pit-mold alongside; the others didn't even look back as it was dragged screaming into a mountain of shuddering membranes. Chewbacca's first shot with the blaster rifle took out a hirsute skeleton that had been a Whiphid; his second missed and blew half-cooled mud from a minor crater like an explosion of steaming goo over everything in sight. The ground shook again, like a sullen warning. Flame sprang up from the mud pits and hot liquid began to creep out in glowing trickles. None of the attackers even noticed.

  Even with both of them shooting, Han knew, they'd never hit them all before they were overwhelmed. There was no path down from the mound. "Down the well!" Chewie roared in protest. "Down the well! There's a way out, that water's flowing, I can hear it..." Whether the way out included space to breathe was problematical, of course. A horrible Devaronian fell on Chewbacca, its arm already torn off by blaster fire, rending at him with a chunk of broken steel. Chewbacca flung it back into the others, fired another blast to cover them while Han sprang up on the well curb and flashed the light down at the water. Five meters or so. As he'd thought, it wasn't a well so much as a shaft into an underground stream. He stepped off the edge and dropped.

  The water was hot, just below scalding--only contrast with air super-heated by the surrounding rock had made the updraft feel cool--and the current vicious. Han clung to the worn stone of the low arch in the well's side until he heard Chewbacca's heavy splash and reassuring growl. Then the water tore his grip free, swirled him along in utter blackness, pounding him against rock, pelting like a millrace to smash him breathless on some unseen obstacle.

  Bars. There were bars across the stream's course. Water slammed into his face, and he felt/heard the splash of something else striking the bars. He groped and felt the reassuring touch of soaked fur. Chewbacca congratulated him on the excellence of his escape arrangements.

  "Don't get smart on me, Chewie, I got us out of the cave, didn't I?" As he spoke he felt for a foothold, a handhold, anything he could find in the bars, stretched and felt his way up along the corroded metal. The bars ended in a slit in the rock ceiling a half meter above the surface of the water, a slit into which he could barely fit his hand. As he worked his fingers in, they brushed something leggy and chitinous that moved sharply, and he jerked his hand back with a cry of disgust. "Let's try down the other way."

  Taking a deep breath, he turned over, climbed down the bars. They went deep, deep, the current crushing his body against them, always more blackness, always more water... What was he going to do if they went deeper than he could climb on a single breath? The thought made him panic, drag himself down and farther down.

  Rock. And a space of about thirty centimeters, gouged in the bottom of the streambed by the vicious race of water over the years. He snaked his body through, climbed desperately, wondering what he'd do if he became disoriented, climbed sideways, climbed down again, got swept away by the current that was dragging him, clutching him, sweeping him on into blackness. He thought, I may not survive this one.

  His head broke water just as he thought he couldn't hold his breath another second. He felt weak, sickened, but at least he could hook his arms through the spaces between the bars and not rely on the dwindling strength of his hands. "Down at the bottom," he gasped. "Way down." The water ripped him away.

  Han and Chewbacca lay for a long time on the grass beside the warm spring, gasping for air like half-drowned vermin belched from some Coruscant sewer. Far off, a dim gold low-power light marked where a path lay. Phosphor bugs played like truant diamonds among the trees. The smell of bowvine fruit and damp grass almost drowned the faint, putrid whiff of sulfur from the stream. Skreekers and peepers made a tiny bass line under the warbling of a nightbird in the orchard. Han rolled over, threw up a considerable quantity of water, and said, "I'm getting too old for this." Chewbacca concurred.

  At least they wouldn't catch cold, Han reflected. The river that ran from Plett's Well was hotter than bathwater and the air around it not much cooler. Vapor wraiths surrounded them from the hotter springs that came to the surface lower in the orchard, piped from the cellars of the ancient houses. He wondered if they'd get into much trouble just falling asleep where they were. But he recalled something about what had happened in the crypts, and decided that might not be such a good idea. With considerable effort, and some misgivings, he propped himself up on his elbows. "You notice something about our pals back in the crypts, Chewie?"

  The Wookiee's sardonic reply made Han wonder why some people said the species had no sense of humor. "When the second and third and fourth batches showed up," said Han quietly, "they knew where to find us." Chewie was silent. For certain species of cave apes--perhaps even for Wookiees--this would have been no oddity. Smell, and echolocation, were highly developed in races and species used to the dark. But these, Han had seen, were not members of those races and species, unless you counted the Gotal, who had been one of the first batch of attackers. They were, he suspected, exactly what Drub McKumb had been: smugglers, or friends of smugglers, who had heard the rumors about the crypts that weren't supposed to exist, who had their "calculations." Who had gone seeking the source of the xylen chips and gold wire that had formed the basis of Nubblyk the Slyte's brief wealth, and had found... what? "C'mon, Chewie," he said tiredly. "Let's get home."

  Chapter 11

  Watching Cray's face, Luke tried to ascertain whether she had remembered who she was, whether she was still under the influence of the Will's programming.

  From the small image in the section lounge vidscreen, it wasn't easy to tell. Bruises marked her cheeks and chin and her shoulder, visible through a tear in her tunic; her pale hair was stiff with sweat and grime. But her eyes, as two Klagg boars pulled her the length of the displayed chamber to the small black podium of the Justice Station, were desperate, hard with fury and frustration.

  "Soap-lovin' Klagg!" howled Ugbuz
, standing by the table at Luke's side. ”Prissy-butt!" "Flower-nose!" ”Cabbage-eater!" yelled the other Gakfedds, clustered close around the vidscreen in the dim confines of the lounge.

  Though disheveled and exhausted, aside from her bruises Cray looked unhurt. In his utterly fruitless search of the Detention Block on Deck 6, Luke had been haunted by the dread that the Will had implanted in the Klaggs the notion that as a Rebel saboteur, Cray had to be interrogated, and this nightmare had kept him combing the corridors around the Main Block for several additional hours until he'd made certain that Cray had never been there, the Klaggs had never been there, and all the interrogator droids remained in their original places, still hooked to their chargers on the walls.

  He'd disconnected them and pulled whatever wiring he could reach.

  Though ultimately reassuring, the search had been far from pleasant, and, knowing the Gamorreans, Luke was aware that it was perfectly possible they'd preferred to dispense with the interrogator droids and do it themselves.

  It didn't look as if they had, though.

  Ugbuz poked Luke in the ribs with an elbow like a battering ram and pointed to the fat white Klagg boar standing next to the Justice Station's cold black viewscreen. "Kinfarg," he explained in an undertone. "Captain of the stinkin' Klagg sons of sows." He added commentary on Captain Kinfarg's personal habits, which Luke suspected were purely speculative. The Gakfedds jeered and catcalled as Kinfarg swaggered up the aisle to take his position next to the podium, but when he began to speak they fell silent, as if by magic.