mask, leaning closer. Beside him Chewbacca bristled in anticipation.
"Are you really from the outside?" the voice said. "I haven't been above
ground for years." It seemed hopeful, soft, and tenor, but muffled behind
the breath mask and the rushing wind. Han couldn't tell if it was the voice
of an aged man, a deep-voiced woman, or a quiet and meek clerk from the
former Imperial prison.
Han's mind pictured a skeletal old man with long scraggly hair, tattered
beard, and ragged clothes. "Yeah, we're from out there. A lot of things have
changed."
"I'm Kyp. Kyp Durron."
After a moment's hesitation Han introduced himself and Chewbacca. Suspecting
some kind of trap, he decided not to give too much information. Kyp Durron
seemed to sense this and talked about himself without asking too many prying
questions.
"You'll get to know everybody here. That's just the way of it. I've lived
most of my life on Kessel. My parents were political prisoners, exiled on
this planet when the Emperor started cracking down on civil unrest. My
brother Zeth was taken off to the Imperial military training center on
Carida, and we never heard another word from him. I got stuck here in the
spice mines. I always thought they'd come back and haul me to Carida too,
but I guess they forgot."
Han tried to imagine Kyp's life going from bad to worse. "How come you're
still down in the mines?"
"During the prison revolt they didn't much care who ended up here. Now most
of the workers are the old Imperial prison guards. Nobody thought to let me
out when they changed everything up top. I've never been important enough."
Kyp made a sound that must have been a bitter laugh. "People say I have good
luck in all sorts of things, but my luck has never been good enough to let
me have a normal life." He paused, as if gathering hope. In that moment Han
wished he could see the stranger's face. "Is it really true the Empire has
fallen?"
"Seven years ago, Kyp," Han said. "The Emperor was blown up with his Death
Star. We've been fighting battles ever since, but the New Republic is trying
to keep everything together. Chewie and I came here as ambassadors to
reestablish contact with Kessel." He paused. "Obviously the people of Kessel
weren't interested."
Han snapped his attention to the front as he heard something happen to the
cars ahead. The front car split off; he could hear it echo with a
diminishing swoosh down one of the side tunnels. A few moments later another
two cars separated themselves and went down another side tunnel as their
sounds diminished in the hollow distance. The rest of the floating mine car
continued down the main tunnel.
"They're separating the mining teams," Kyp said. "I wanted to be with you.
Tell me everything."
"Kyp," Han said with a sigh, "it looks like we'll have plenty of time to
give you the details."
The audio hum of the mine cars' repulsorlifts deepened. Han felt the breeze
on his face dwindle as they slowed. His hands and face were numb; his ears
tingled with the cold, but the rest of his body seemed comfortably warm in
the heated thermal suit.
The guard who had shouted at Kyp spoke when the floating cars stopped.
"Everybody out. Link up. March to the work area."
The remaining cars swayed as the prisoners climbed off and stood in silence
on the crumbled ground. Their equipment grated against each other in the
darkness, and their boots scuffed the dirt. A pandemonium of little sounds
echoed in the claustrophobic tunnel, making the blackness press in even more
heavily.
"Where are we going?" Han said.
Kyp grabbed a loop on Han's belt. "Just hold the person in front of you.
Believe me, you don't want to get lost down here."
"I believe you," Han said. Chewbacca made his own noise of agreement.
When the work detail had lined up, the front guard began to march them
along. Han took small shuffling steps to keep from stumbling over rubble on
the floor, but he still tripped into Chewbacca several times.
They turned to pass through another tunnel entrance. Han heard a faint thump
and a yowl of pain from the Wookiee. "Watch your head there, buddy," he
said. He heard the rustle of fur inside a thermal suit as Chewbacca bent
down to pass through the arch.
"Here's the rail," the guard said. "Stop here, take your time, and go down."
"What's a rail?" Han asked.
"Once you touch it, you'll figure it out," Kyp answered.
The noises he heard made no sense to Han. He couldn't determine what was
actually happening. He discerned sliding sounds of fabric, bitten-back
outcries of surprise or fear. When Chewbacca shuffled up, he voiced a
guttural complaint, shaking his entire body in refusal.
The guard lashed out with something hard that struck Chewbacca. The Wookiee
roared in pain and swung his arm trying to hit the guard, but apparently
smacked only the rock wall instead. Chewbacca grew more upset, flailing
right and left. Han had to duck to keep from being battered.
"Chewie! Calm down! Stop it!" The Wookiee slowly regained control of himself
at the sound of Han's voice.
"Do what I tell you!" the guard shouted.
"It's okay," Kyp added his own encouragement. "We do this every day."
"I'll go first, Chewie," Han said, "whatever it is."
"Down there," the guard snapped.
Han bent over, fumbled with his hands, and felt a big hole in the floor like
a trapdoor to lower tunnels, with piled rubble all around it. His fingers
found a cold metal railing about the size of a typical steel girder,
polished smooth and plunging downward, like a slide or a metal banister.
"You want me to ride that?" Han asked. "Where does it go?"
"Don't worry," Kyp said again. "It's the best way down."
"You've got to be kidding!"
Then he heard Chewbacca laughing, a nasal, chuffing sound. That made up
Han's mind for him. He sat down on the metal rail and wrapped his legs
around it, placing his hands behind his hips and gripping the rail as best
he could. The slippery fabric of the thermal suit immediately started him
sliding. The darkness grabbed at him as he picked up speed. Han imagined
sharp stalactites just centimeters above his head, waiting to take off the
top of his skull if he sat up at the wrong moment. He continued to
accelerate. "I don't like this!" he said.
Suddenly the rail disappeared beneath him, and he tumbled onto a mound of
powdery sand. Another two workers scrambled forward to yank him clear of the
end of the rail. He brushed dust off his thermal suit, though he couldn't
see the dirt anyway.
A few moments later Chewbacca came down with a long, echoing howl, and
shortly after that came Kyp Durron and the guard. "Line up again!" the guard
said.
Chewbacca grunted and huffed a few words. Han snorted. "Don't tell me it was
fun!"
The guard marched them ahead. When the ground dropped out from under them,
they splashed into a shallow lake. The pressure of the water pushed against
the legs of Han's suit. The captive mi
ners sloshed ahead, holding on to each
other in their blindness.
The water had a sour, brackish smell, and Han's stomach clenched,
anticipating a drop-off that would plunge him in over his head. Chewbacca
whined but kept his comments to himself.
Under the water something soft and fingerlike poked against Han's legs.
Other contacts nudged at his feet, prodding and coiling around his calves.
"Hey!" He thrashed about with his feet. The ghostly, touching things swarmed
about him. Han pictured soft blind grubs, hungry in the darkness; their
mouths would be filled with fangs, waiting for something to eat, something
helpless in the dark--as he was. He splashed again to drive them away.
"Don't call attention to yourself," Kyp Durron said in a low voice. "That
will only bring more of them."
Han forced himself not to overreact, to walk with gliding, even strides.
None of the other prisoners cried out; apparently, no one had been eaten
alive yet, though the small probing fingers or suckers or mouths continued
to play around his legs. His throat felt very dry.
He wanted to drop to his knees when they finally reached the tunnel on the
other side of the subterranean lake. Behind them dripping water and tiny
splashing sounds echoed in the grotto.
An unknown time later they arrived at the actual spice-mining area. The
guard withdrew an apparatus from his pack, making shuffling and clinking
noises as he did so. Unseen, he set it up along the walls of the tunnel.
"We have to go deep to get the good spice deposits," Kyp said. "Down here
the glitterstim is fresh and fibrous, instead of old and powdery like in the
higher mines. The spice veins are laid in crisscross patterns along the
walls of the tunnel, never going much below the surface of the rock."
Before Han could say anything else, a high-pitched, teeth-jarring hum
pounded against the tunnel. Chewbacca roared in pain. Then a skin of rock
along the inner tunnel sloughed off. The guard had used an acoustic
disruptor that penetrated only a few inches into the rock, crumbling it
down. "Get to it!" he said.
Kneeling on the rubble-strewn floor, Kyp showed Han and Chewbacca how to
sort through the crushed rock, feeling with cold-numbed fingers through the
broken pebbles and debris to pluck out strands of glitterstim, like tufts of
hair or asbestos fiber.
Han's hands felt raw from the work and the biting cold, but none of the
other prisoners complained. They all seemed beaten. He could hear them
breathing and gasping as they continued to exert themselves. Han stuffed
fragments of glitterstim into the gathering pouch at his hip. He felt a
sinking feeling, like a knife twisting inside him. He could be at this job
for a long, long time.
After the team finished sifting through the rubble, the guard moved them
farther down the tunnel, then activated his acoustic disruptor to bring down
another section of the wall.
As they huddled in the tunnel, picking at broken rock, Han could think only
of his aching knees, his burning fingers. Of how nice it would be to be back
with Leia again. No one had told him how long a shift was--not that he had
any way of telling time in the darkness. He grew hungry. He grew thirsty. He
kept working.
During a lull Han felt a tingle go up his spine. He looked, knowing he could
see nothing in the dark. But his ears, now attuned as his primary sense,
picked up a distant rustling, a thousand whispering voices growing louder,
picking up speed like a hydrolocomotive bulleting down a tube. A pearly glow
seemed to seep out of the air.
"What--his"
"Shhh!" Kyp answered. The prisoners had stopped working. A faint glittering
dazzle like a dense cloud of faint fireflies shot through the tunnel,
humming and chittering.
Han ducked. Around him he heard the others also falling flat on the
debris-covered floor.
The glowing thing shot down the hollow tube, rolling and roiling. Once it
passed them and went beyond the point where they had mined spice from the
walls, the glowing thing suddenly curved right and plunged straight into the
solid rock, vanishing like a fish falling back into a dark pool.
Behind them, along the curving lengths of the tunnel, tiny blue sparks
flickered from the exposed spice that had been activated by the light source
whizzing past. The blue sparks sputtered and flickered, and quickly faded.
Han's eyes ached from the sudden barrage of light--a light that was probably
too dim for him to have seen under normal circumstances, but his eyes had
been yearning in blackness for hours now. "What was that?" he shouted.
He heard Kyp panting beside him. "Nobody knows. It's about the fifteenth one
I've seen over the years. We call them bogeys. They've never hurt anybody,
or so we think, but nobody knows what's grabbing those people down in the
deep mines."
The guard himself seemed shaken, and Han could hear a quaver in his voice.
"That's enough. End of shift. Let's make our way back to the cars."
That sounded like a good idea to Han.
When the string of mine cars returned to the long holding grotto and the
metal door closed behind them, Han heard the sound of weapons being drawn.
All workers were ordered to strip out of their thermal suits. Han could
understand the precautions--with a brief mental boost from stolen
glitterstim, a prisoner might be able to stage an escape...although Han had
been to the barren surface of Kessel and wondered where an escapee might go.
When the standard lights finally came back on, the blinding glare was enough
to make Han crouch over, as if someone had punched him in the gut. He
shielded his eyes.
He felt a hand take him and lead him into the muster room. "It's okay, Han.
Just follow me. Let your eyes get used to it. There's no hurry."
But Han was in a hurry to see what Kyp Durron looked like. He kept blinking
away tears and forcing his pupils to contract enough that he could make
sense out of the brilliant images showering around him. But when he finally
discerned Kyp's form, he blinked again--this time in surprise.
"You're just a kid!" Han saw a dark, tousle-headed teen who looked as if he
cropped his own hair with a blunt object. He had wide eyes surrounded by
dark rims, and his skin was pale from years of living in the darkness of the
spice mines. Kyp was wiry and tough looking. He stared at Han with hope and
a little intimidation.
"Don't worry," Kyp said. "I do the best I can."
Kyp reminded him of the brash and wide-eyed young Luke Skywalker Han had
first met in the Mos Eisley cantina. But Kyp seemed tougher than Luke had
been, not quite so naive. With the rough life Kyp had had, growing up on
Kessel and locked in the spice mines without anyone to watch over him, it
was no wonder the kid had a hard streak in him.
At the moment Han couldn't decide which he hated more--the Empire, for
inflicting such hardships on Kyp and his family, or Moruth Doole for
perpetuating them ... or himself, for getting Chewie and him into this mess
in the first place.
&n
bsp; Night on Eol Sha offered little rest. Falling darkness fought against the
simmering orange glow from the nearby volcano, the pastel blaze of the
Cauldron Nebula, and the looming spotlight of the too-close moon. Hissing
blasts from the geyser field broke the quiet at irregular intervals.
Luke sat alone in the cramped storage module Gantoris had given him for
sleeping accommodations. Never intended as a living area, the module had few
comforts: a basin of filmy water and a cloth-covered mound of dirt for a
bed.
Gantoris took a perverse pleasure in telling Luke that it had been one of
the dead boy's favorite places to play. Either the refugees blamed Luke for
not being able to save both children, or perhaps Gantoris just wanted to
keep him off balance.
Luke had his lightsaber and all the powers he had learned from Jedi
training, should he decide to escape. But that was not the reason he had
come to Eol Sha. Cupping his chin in his hands, he stared out at the hostile
night. He needed to convince Gantoris to listen to him, to see the need for
rebuilding the Jedi Knights--but why would someone from an isolated colony,
with no conception of galactic politics, bother to care?
If Gantoris was indeed a descendant of the long-ago Ta'ania, Luke had to
make him care.
When the other people drifted to their quarters for the evening, Warton
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