Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  She recalled other things as well.

  "Artoo," she said softly, "I want to see how this tunnel links up with the smuggler tunnels under Plawal itself. But if we get into any trouble, your default command is to head back to the crawler and get Han." While she spoke she broke the seals on three of the crates, helped herself to a flamethrower, a semiauto blaster carbine, and a forcepike, which she assembled swiftly, deftly, as the boys in the Hoth dugout had taught her when it looked as if they weren't going to get out before the Imperials came in.

  "Give him coordinates, information, everything. Don't stay to defend me. All right?"

  The droid beeped and trailed her onto the lift.

  The smuggler tunnel would surface somewhere in Plawal, she knew. But from Han's description of the lava caves and the well in its circle of standing stones--from the fact that Roganda Ismaren had spent a part of her childhood here--she guessed they connected with the crypts under Plett's House as well. What she was concealing there, and how she had managed to thwart sensor probes after people started disappearing, Leia couldn't imagine, but it was clear to her now what had become of Drub McKumb and Nubbyk the Slyte...and who knew how many more besides?

  Vader... and Palpatine, Mara had said.

  And, evidently, Palpatine's concubine...though the woman hadn't struck Leia as particularly strong in the Force. Certainly not imbued with that aura of eerie strength, that silence that even as a cocky teenage Senator she had felt emanating from the Emperor.

  What, then?

  Leia slung her weaponry straps over her shoulders, and stepped out warily into the dark.

  For a long distance the smuggler tunnel was simply raw stone, chewed out of the bedrock of the planet under five thousand years' worth of glacier, which ran occasionally through the widened beds of what had once been underground streams. The floor had been smoothed to permit the passage of cargo droids: ramps built, roofs heightened, crevasses bridged. It was easy to follow; all she had to do was move as silently as she could.

  Later, when the way branched, or cross-tunnels were cut in the rock, or when they passed through caves stifling with fumes and smotheringly hot from sullen craters of steaming mud, she listened, stretching out her senses, feeling in the Force for the touch, the essence of the five people who led her on. Painted Door Street--the narrow lane on which Roganda had said she lived--tacked onto the vine-curtained bench on which Plett's House stood. Before the dome was built, the rift had been periodically subject to storms. Of course the Mluki would tunnel... and of course the smugglers would find at least some of the tunnels in the foundations of those ancient houses.

  Not all the dwellings on Painted Door Street were built over the older dwellings, of course... but Leia was willing to bet Roganda's was.

  She had lived here. She had known this place. And she had come back, when Palpatine died in the seething heart of his second attempt to cow the galaxy by terror.

  Why?

  Leia sensed the swift scramble of claws, the snuffling pant of animal breath, even before Artoo whistled his nearly soundless warning. They were far off but coming close fast, their direction almost impossible to determine in the maze of cross-tunnels, caves, carved-out rooms, ramps and stairways ascending and descending.

  "They're probably tracking us by scent," she said softly. "So let's have some light, Artoo."

  The droid barely had time to brighten all his panel lights when the things were on them.

  Rodian, human, and two Mluki--or what had been those races once. Leia identified them even as she cut with the forcepike--not as clean or as strong as a lightsaber, but in trained hands potentially deadly. It had the advantage of keeping more than one at bay at a time, without danger of ricochets, and as they fell screaming on her, Leia struck at her attackers, cold, scared, and furious. She slashed a Mluki halfway through the neck and swung immediately to the Rodian, whose broken metal club gashed open her sleeve and the flesh of her arm. The weight of them nearly overpowered her. There was nothing in them she could warn to keep back, nothing that realized they were in danger. When one of the humans ripped the forcepike away from her she barely brought the flamethrower up in time, searing at them, blasting them, and they attacked her, still burning, as she caught up the pike again to finish the job.

  They had hardly fallen when the kretch appeared, slithering out of the darkness to feed on the corpses and the blood.

  From the depths of the tunnels--behind her, around her, in a dozen directions--the second Mluki's final cry was echoed by a chorus of screams.

  Kill you all. Kill you all...

  She fled down a tunnel, Artoo's beam flashing ahead of her to the archway of an artificial entrance in the rock. She ducked through, to an area of cut stone, hewn chambers, ramps of desiccated and kretch-gnawed wood covering steps and changes of level. A bridge crossed a fast-running stream whose water steamed thinly in the hot air. A tunnel where she sensed an echo of the Force whispering, Don't come down here...

  Dead glowpanels, small trunk beds in corners...

  Something huge and hair-matted and stinking fell upon her from a doorway, and Leia slashed without thinking, blood splattering her t-suit as the thing collapsed shrieking at her feet. She sprang over it, Artoo nudging past the body, and the air around them seemed to breathe with foul, snuffling, guttural snarls and what might have been stammered, mind-blasted words.

  Refuge. She sensed it, felt a curious lightness, the sudden impulse of safety. A sense of what she'd long been seeking.

  It lay to her left, calling her, it seemed, through a dark triple arch.

  An open hall, wide and dark with soda-straw stalactites and thin curtains of mineral deposits forming through cracks in the roof. A stream divided the wide room in two, planks thrown across it, but no sign of a bridge. Right, left, and center, three open, arched doorways led out of the room on the far side of the water, and as Leia crossed the plank, the center one called.

  Distantly, as Artoo shined his spotlight into the room beyond the center arch, Leia felt as she had felt looking down from the tower, as if she saw and heard things not of her own time.

  Children's voices.

  The bone-deep awareness of the presence of the Force.

  She stepped through the arch, and Artoo brightened his lights again. Chips and threads of metal winked at her all the length of the long, barrel-vaulted room.

  A glass tank a few centimeters thick, empty save for a thin layer of yellow sand.

  A glass cylinder a meter tall, hermetically sealed and containing only the withered skeleton of a leaf. Beside it on the table lay a ball of black volcanic glass, a gold ring, and a crude doll wrought of rag and twigs.

  The whole back wall of the room was taken up by an exquisitely balanced apparatus of suspended spheres, rings, rods, and pulleys, glistening in enigmatic welcome. Two other machines of shafts and buckets and polished steel balls seemed to beckon, tempt, and tease the mind with a monumental silliness of potential chain reactions.

  There was a glass sphere filled with dull pinky-gold liquid that seemed to stir, colors coalescing briefly at the vibration of her stride.

  The children were here, thought Leia.

  The joy and fascination they'd felt seemed to have soaked into the stone of the walls.

  She might not have found their names, Leia thought... but she'd found their toys.

  She reached tentatively, touched the sphere of liquid, and where her fingers contacted the glass, molecules of red separated themselves from the pink suspension, hung like dissipating clouds in the fluid atmosphere of the ball. Uncertainly--because Luke had taught her nothing of this, though it seemed ridiculously easy once she tried--she prodded with her mind, and the liquid separated itself, golden on the top, crimson on the bottom. Something in the color of the crimson made Leia look deeper, summon the Force... In the blood-colored molecules were hidden enough of a third color to form between the existing zones a narrow band of cobalt blue.

  Jacen and Jaina need these, sh
e thought. Anakin, when he grew older.

  There were other things, maddeningly simple things she could not understand.

  Why a circle of empty bowls, straight-sided and of varying size? What went in them? Leia could see nothing on the black tabletop except gray stains like watermarks...Was the composition of the table part of the riddle? Dense and shiny, it looked like lacquer until she touched it, but under her fingertips it clearly said, Wood.

  What were all those weirdly heavy metal spheres, lined up according to size in a rack?

  The bars, ropes, hanging beams of the ceiling were self-explanatory... or were they?

  Luke has to see this.

  None of this was mentioned in the Holocron, or in the records Luke had salvaged from the wreck of the Jedi ship Chu'unthor. Maybe they didn't think it worth recording, as we don't think to mention the alphabet when we write literary criticism. Or stop to explain the human enzyme system at the start of a love story.

  Or the human need for oxygen, for that matter.

  Perhaps it was premonition, some dark tension in the air that keyed and stretched Leia's senses. But amid the shadows of levers and pulleys of that great toy on the wall she caught sight of something half familiar and, stepping forward, pulled it from where it had been tucked almost out of sight. It was a small packet of black plastene, powdered with a dirty residue whose smell brought back to her the dim blue-green grotto of the Cloud-Mother's Healing House; Tomla El's soft voice saying, Yarrock.

  New, she thought. Not anything the Jedi would have left here. But who?

  By the doorway, Artoo whistled a warning.

  Leia froze, not breathing, reaching with her mind into the dark.

  The shrieks and snuffles of the mind-stripped guardians of the tunnels were mute.

  But the air itself seemed to thicken, coalescing, sinking in on itself.

  The Force. An enormous darkness, masquerading as the silence of nothing there.

  Then from the darkness she heard a very faint, chitinous scratching.

  Some shift of pressure, a change of the deep, hot atmosphere of the caves, brought her the smell, like the vast exhalation of rotting sugarcane or the decaying debris of the fruit-packing plants, a chemical dirtiness that lifted the hair on her nape.

  "Let's get out of here, Artoo." She slid the packet back where she had found it, crossed quickly to the door, and Artoo flashed the beam of his spotlight past her, to the ebon silk of the water flowing down the center of the room, and the stretch of floor beyond it.

  The floor moved. Glistening shapes heaved over one another like a lake of black jewels amid a vast, filthy scratching of claws.

  "I wouldn't advise it, Your Highness."

  Roganda Ismaren, small and pale and fragile-looking in her white gown, stood framed in the narrow archway to Leia's right. Beside her stood a dark-clothed boy, like her slim and raven-haired, like her small, with a suggestion about him of wiry grace.

  Ohran Keldor, Drost Elegin, and another man--stocky, hard-faced, fifty, in black--stood grouped behind.

  "Artoo, go!" ordered Leia. "Now--”

  Roganda only gestured. Elegin and the third man strode to cut Artoo off before he reached the bridge and Leia brought up the flamethrower. The dark-haired boy snickered derisively and said, "Oh, please!" and Leia, warned by some instinct, flung the weapon from her as the tank glowed and ruptured in a burst of fire. She shucked her carbine and caught up the forcepike, feeling the yank of the boy's mind on it, forcing her own mind against his like a resistant wall as she sprang between the men and Artoo. Elegin fired his blaster at her but she was already dodging, moving in on him, driving him back. The other man yelled, "Put it away, idiot!" as the bolt hissed and zinged against walls, floor, ceiling in shattering ricochets. Leia couldn't probe with her mind to strike the weapon out of his hand but she could at least keep it from being done to her.

  At Roganda's side, the boy said, "Don't waste your time, Elegin, Garonnin. You..."

  He fixed his wide eyes, like cobalt glass, on Artoo. "Back here. Now."

  Artoo, who had crossed the plank bridge and was a few meters from the arch leading away into the dark maze of passageways, came to a stop. Kretch crawled and squirmed wildly over his slick sides in a way that turned Leia sick, but the little droid took no apparent notice. It was the boy who had stopped him, the boy's voice...

  "Back here," the boy repeated calmly. "You aren't going anywhere."

  "Artoo, go!" Leia shifted sideways, forcepike raised, keeping a wary eye on Elegin and the man called Garonnin--surely not a member of the House Garonnin?

  "Oh, really, Leia," said the boy impertinently. "If I could make him almost blow up the house you were sleeping in, you don't think he's going to disobey me now?" He sniggered again, his face twisting in an unpleasant grin. ”I'll make him run into the water and short himself out."

  He turned those glass-cold eyes on the droid. "Come on. Open all your repair ports and back this way, one point five meters left and parallel to your original course."

  "Artoo!" She couldn't look, keeping an eye on the men.

  The astromech droid rocked on his base and emitted a desperate whistle.

  "Come on," ordered the boy.

  "Irek, just send the kretch away and Garonnin will--”

  "No!" said the boy furiously. The black wings of his brows plunged together over an ivory curve of nose. "I told him to come back and he won't. Back here. One point five meters left and parallel course--”

  "Artoo, get out of here!"

  Artoo ran a pace back, a pace left, kretch twisting like a net of filth over him and crunching stickily under his treads.

  "Come back here!" ordered the boy, all calm suddenly gone from his voice. "One point five meters..."

  Artoo wheeled in a tight circle and headed for the door into the tunnels.

  "Send away the kretch, Lord!" Garonnin made a feint toward the bridge, Leia stepping to block, vibroblade raised. "Once he gets into the tunnels we won't be able to track him!"

  "Obey me!" yelled Irek, pale face twisting, ignoring the older man completely. ”Come back!"

  "Picture the schematic...," began Roganda evenly, and Irek turned upon her like a wildcat.

  "I know what I'm supposed to do! It worked before..."

  Artoo vanished into the tunnels in a brown smear of mashed kretch. Irek stared after him, panting with rage and disbelief, and Leia felt the vicious fury, the concentration of the Force, flung after him...

  And remembered, vividly, Chewbacca amid a tangle of wire and solder on the terrace, patching the droid back together.

  "Send the kretch--”

  "Don't bother me!" screamed Irek, and strode toward the bridge, shoving Garonnin aside.

  Leia stepped in front of him, vibroblade raised in her hand. The boy stopped, staring at her in astonishment that anyone would thwart his will. Leia felt the tug and jerk of the Force against her grip on the pike haft and tightened her grip, bringing all her mind, all her concentration, to bear on keeping him back.

  The blue eyes widened in stark fury and he whipped a black-hilted lightsaber from his side. At the same moment Leia felt her breath choke off, had to fight with all her strength to draw past it... She could see he didn't handle the laser weapon properly, using instead the stance and grip of formal blade-dueling, totally inappropriate for the two-handed weapon's balance. In a duel Luke would make strip steak of him...

  The blade slashed at the forcepike and Leia feinted upward with it, ducked aside, and nearly took off his feet at the ankles. Battling for even a thread of air, she faced him off, and with a yell of fury he came at her...

  "Irek!" shouted Roganda.

  The kretch had begun to swarm across the bridge.

  Leia felt the bitter grip on her windpipe relax, saw the swarming anthropods halt in the middle of the planks and begin to mill, as if an invisible barrier prevented them from coming further. Closer to the door, there was a turmoil among them as they devoured the bodies of those Artoo had
crushed.

  "Mother, she's doing something!" cried Irek angrily. "It isn't working. That droid should come back. That doddering old scumbag said--”

  "Irek, be silent!"

  Leia saw the look Roganda gave her son, and saw, too, the concubine's swift wary glance at Garonnin and Elegin.

  She's keeping something from them...

  "Lord Garonnin, Lord Elegin," said Roganda in her sweet, reasonable voice--that same sweet voice, with just a touch of helpless deference, thought Leia, that she had used to speak to Leia herself in the market. "Step back this way. We seem to be in a rather simple impasse. Irek, remember not to lose your temper and always take the easiest way out. Your Highness..." She stepped a little aside in the doorway, to let the two aristocrats past her. Irek remained where he was, just out of range of Leia's forcepike, sullen blue eyes flickering from Leia to the kretch.

  "Right," said Irek softly. And he grinned. ”You put it down, Princess, or I let the kretch come all the way across the bridge. Maybe I should do it anyway." He tittered, and stepped back a pace; the kretch flooded across, pouring onto the near side of the floor like a seethe of bloody mud.

  "Irek!" commanded Roganda furiously.

  The kretch stopped, milling again; Leia had backed a few paces but knew at the speed they ran she'd never make it to safety even if she knew in which direction it might lie. Particularly not, she thought, if Elegin had his blaster trained on her.

  "Well, why not do it now?" demanded Irek sullenly. "Without her the Republic would crumble."

  "Without her the Republic would simply elect another Chief of State," replied Lord Garonnin quietly, a twinge of disgusted contempt in his voice.

  He stepped around Roganda and walked across the room toward Leia and the kretch. Leia, fighting not to run headlong from the filthy things, wasn't sure she could have done that. The light of the single glowpanel in the doorway behind Roganda made a stiff gold fuzz, like a metal halo, of the elderly man's short-cropped hair.