Luke thought about it. “That’s how you did it?” he asked at last. “Caused the grid to misfire?”
A long hesitation. The schematic faded from the screen. At some slight sound in the corridor, Threepio clanked his way out to check, and the whitish glow of the screen edged his golden form in threads of light as he stood listening in the utter black of the doorway square.
>It’s like causing a blaster to misfire. You can’t keep them all from firing—there are too many, and some of them always get through—and you can’t keep all the bolts from hitting you<
Another long pause. She would, Luke thought, have avoided his eyes, as Leia sometimes did when she spoke of Bail Organa, not letting him see her grief.
>The more that hit you, the more that will. But if you case the voder in a gutted tracker droid, you can shoot it up the shaft fast enough to survive a few hits. And a mechanical can absorb a lot more hits than human flesh<
The more that hit you, thought Luke with a chill, the more that will.
She’d climbed the shaft from the gun room, knowing she’d be hit … knowing the first hit would break her concentration on the Force, damage her ability to keep the grid from firing, lessen her chances to avoid the second … and the second hit would lessen her chances to avoid the third.
He remembered how the Klagg’s blood had trickled down the steps, and the smell of burned flesh. His heart contracted within him, aching, as the silence lengthened. Very softly, he said, “I wish it hadn’t happened.”
Wise, powerful, comforting, he approved with bitter sarcasm. The wisdom of a true Jedi Master.
>It’s all right<
They were silent for a time, as if they stood on either side of fathomless night, reaching across to fingers that could not touch.
“Were you from Chad?”
The screen was dark for a long time. He almost feared he’d offended her by asking, or that the batteries had failed. Then words came up, white flowers in the sunken meadow of the void.
>We had a deep-water ranch. We moved with the herds along the Algic Current, from the equator almost to the Arctic Circle. The first time I used the Force was to move pack ice one winter when I got trapped with a band of cows. Papa never understood why I couldn’t stay, if I was happy<
“Were you happy?” He looked down at the lightsaber she’d made for herself, on Dagobah, perhaps, or on whatever planet she’d taken her training. She’d put a line of tsaelke around its handgrip, in memory of the tides of her home.
>I think more happy than I’ve ever been since<
Luke didn’t ask, Then why did you leave? He knew why she’d left.
“It’s funny,” he said softly. “I always hated Tatooine, always hated the farm. Now in a way I think I was lucky. It cost me nothing to leave. Even if my family hadn’t been killed, it would have cost me nothing to get out of there.”
>The Force was like the pull of the tide. Like the deep-ocean currents that carry the herds on their backs. From the time I was a child I knew there was something there; when I learned what it was, I couldn’t not seek the Jedi<
“But you also couldn’t explain.” Any more than he could explain to Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru the inner tide pulling at him, almost before he knew how to speak.
“They’re dead, you know,” he said softly. “The Jedi.”
Another long darkness, like a hollow in her heart. Then, >I know. I felt … the emptiness in the Force. I knew what it meant, without knowing<
He took a deep breath. “Obi-Wan Kenobi hid out for years on Tatooine; he was my first teacher. After he—was killed—I went to Dagobah, to study with Yoda. Yoda died … about seven years ago.”
After I left him. The old grief, the old bitterness, rose in him like a faded ghost. His last pupil … And I left him, only to return too late.
He thought about Kyp Durron, his own finest student; about Streen and Clighal and the rest of the tiny group in the jungles of Yavin. About Teneniel of Dathomir, and Cray and Nichos, and Jacen and Jaina and Anakin and all he’d gone through; the hellish forge of the dark side, the Emperor’s secret fortress on Wayland and all that had happened there … Exar Kun, and the melted Holocron, Gantoris’s ashes smoking on the stones of Yavin and the destruction of worlds.
His heart was the diamond heart of a Jedi, forged and hard and powerful, but the pain he felt inside him was no less for that. Almost to himself, he whispered something he hadn’t even said to Leia, who was like the other half of his soul. “Sometimes it seems like there’s just such a long way to go.”
“Master Luke …” Threepio appeared once more in the doorway. “Master Luke, it appears that the Jawas wish to speak with you.” He sounded as if he disapproved in advance of whatever it was they might have to say. “They’re asking what you have to trade for wire, power cells, and blasters.”
———
“You know,” said Luke, angling a palm-sized diagnostic mirror to see the delicate fastenings of the voder box as he hooked it to the tracker droid’s gutted casing, “if somebody had offered me odds on which group of my fellow guests on this little tour had taken the rooms next to the transport shuttles, I’d have bet my boots and lightsaber on it being the Sand People. It had to be them, didn’t it?”
>It’s something even the Masters don’t reveal about the inner nature of the secret heart of the universe<
The words appeared, minuscule, in the voder’s monitor screen. Luke hadn’t been aware he’d glanced there automatically for a reply.
>The deepest and darkest secret of all that the Force lets you see<
“What?”
She made a whisper by reducing the letters to the tiniest readable specks.
>The universe has a sense of humor<
Luke shuddered. “I’ll have to be a lot higher-level Jedi than I am before I even want to think about that.”
And he felt her rare laughter like a shimmering of the dark air.
Working on the tracker he’d gotten from the Jawas—it was the one Cray had disabled on Pzob, and at the cost of considerable pain he had used the strength of the Force to heal one of their number of the headache and nausea left over from a bad stunblast, and another of electrical burns on its hands—he’d talked: about Tatooine, and Obi-Wan, and Yoda; about the fall of the Empire and the struggles of the New Republic; about Bakura, and Gaeriel Capiston; about Leia and Han and Chewie and Artoo. About the Academy on Yavin, and the dangers to the unfledged, untried, untaught adepts whose power was growing without any sure knowledge of what to do with it or how to guide it. About Exar Kun.
About his father.
And hesitantly, a sentence or two at a time, on the tiny monitor screen or the larger diagnostic—whichever he’d been nearer at the time—Callista had been slowly drawn out: about growing up on the ranch on Chad; about the father who’d never understood and the stepmother who’d been too baffled and unhappy herself to comprehend either of them. About the moons and tides, ice and phosphorus, and the singing of the cy’een far out in the deeps. About Djinn Altis, the Jedi Master who had come to Chad, and the Jedi enclave on Bespin, floating unknown among the clouds.
>It was like riding a cy’een<
The diagnostic screen flashed a thick, long-necked fish-lizard, huge and matchlessly beautiful and shining with wild power, and Luke felt in the darkness, just for an instant, the touch of salt wind and leashed strength and heard the songs the creatures sang running free in their herds.
>Huge and fast and scary, shining like bronze in the sunlight … but I could do it. Barely<
“Yes,” said Luke, remembering the power of the Force flowing into him as he’d battled Exar Kun for the final time, and that first moment when the lightsaber he’d called to his hand on Hoth tore itself free from the snowbank and flew into his grip. “Yes.”
He told her about Cray and Nichos, and why they’d gone to Ithor to seek the help of the Healers there; about Drub McKumb’s attack, and Han and Leia’s mission to Belsavis. “It hasn’t been that long,
” said Luke, sitting back and keying the foo-twitter’s makeshift remote. Nothing happened. Resignedly, he undid the fasteners, angled the mirror again, and tried the second of several possible hookups to the A-size power cell. He’d stripped out all the armaments and gripper arms, and most of its memory cores, knowing he’d have to fling it up a long tunnel by effort of his mind alone. “They’re still going to be there. Even if they weren’t, there’s a whole city on the site now, nearly thirty thousand people.”
>It’s hard to imagine<
The words appeared on the monitor, close beside his eyes.
>Plett’s House was just a little place, though the crypts went back into the cliff, and all ways up under the glacier. But the part that was outside was just a big stone house, set in the most beautiful garden I’ve ever seen. I grew up without gardens—you don’t have them, on the sea<
“Nor in the desert.”
>I remember it was quiet, like few places I’d been or seen. Maybe night on the ark, after everyone was inside, and the stars come clear down to the edge of the world. But sweeter, because even when it’s sleeping, you never can trust the sea<
“Master Luke?”
Luke sat up, aware that his back ached and his hands were trembling with fatigue. Threepio came in, yellow eyes twin moons in the almost-dark of the single glowrod’s light. The smell of coffee floated around him like an exquisite sunset cloud.
“I do hope you’ll find this acceptable.” The golden droid set down the plast cafeteria tray and began removing dish covers. The nearest working mess room of which Callista had been aware had been the Deck 7 Officers’ Lounge, and Threepio had volunteered to make the trek while Luke dismantled the tracker the Jawas had traded to him.
“Selection was rather limited, and those items for which you expressed preference were not to be found. I chose alternates with the same proportion of protein to carbohydrate, and more or less the same texture.”
“No—uh—this is great.” Ordinarily Luke wouldn’t have touched gukked egg, but he’d been so long without food that anything sounded good. “Thank you, Threepio. Did you have any trouble?”
“Very little, sir. I did encounter a group of Jawas, but the Talz chased them away. The Talz think very highly of your efforts to feed and care for the tripods, sir.”
“Are they down here, too?” The gukked eggs were absolutely horrible but Luke ate both of them and was a little surprised at how much better he felt.
“Oh, yes, sir. Both Talz and tripods. The Talz wish me to convey their goodwill to you and ask if they can be of service.”
Luke wondered momentarily if a Talz would be any more reliable at selecting edible food for human consumption than a droid, then dismissed the thought. By the time he needed another meal he’d be long out of here.
>Good job there are two transports< remarked Callista, when Luke returned to work.
>You couldn’t take the Klaggs and the Gakfedds off on the same vessel<
“And which one of them gets to ride with the Sand People?”
>Lander<
“They’ll never go in it,” said Luke. “They hate small enclosed spaces.”
>I wondered why they keep knocking holes in walls. You’ll be lucky if they don’t sever the main power trunk to the magnetic field<
“Another reason to hurry,” said Luke grimly. “This whole ship must be driving them crazy. Not that they were ever real good company to begin with.”
>You sound like you’ve studied them<
Luke laughed. “You could say they were my next-door neighbors growing up. Them and the Jawas. Everybody who lives on Tatooine has to learn enough about the Sand People to stay out of their way.”
He leaned back and flicked the remote. A harsh, guttural voice boomed, “Very well, men, fan out and remain quiet. We are going to massacre those smelly Klagg Rebel saboteurs.”
Luke sighed, and shook his head. “Threepio? Little change in the script here …”
>My, what a grammatical stormtrooper< commented Callista, where the protocol droid couldn’t see.
Luke grinned as he hooked up the cable. “Edit that to, ‘Okay, men, fan out and keep quiet. We’re gonna kill them stinkin’ Klagg Rebel saboteurs.’ ”
>You forgot to say “sir”<
Luke started to make the gesture of elbowing her in the arm, as he did when Leia made a smartmouth remark, but stopped. He couldn’t.
Her arms were dust and bone on the gun deck floor.
Yet she had no more question than he did himself that somehow, all the Eye’s captives—Sand People and Gamorreans as well as the Talz, the Jawas, the Affytechans and Kitonaks and the baffled, helpless tripods—had to somehow be taken to safety. It wasn’t their fault, or their wanting, that they were here, he thought, angling the mirror to affix the voder’s fasteners once again. Savage, violent, destructive as they were, like himself they were captives.
He moved the mirror, seeking the fasteners, and for a moment saw in it his own reflection, and a sliver of the room behind him: Threepio like a grimed and dented golden statue in the feeble glare of the worklight, compulsively tidying up the abandoned tray.
And close beside him, visible clearly over his shoulder, the pale oval face within its dark cloud of hair, the gray eyes from which sorrow had faded a little, replaced by caring, by interest, by renewed life.
Luke’s heart turned over within his ribs, and knowledge fell on him—knowledge, horror, and grief like inevitable night.
Chapter 15
“She might have had other reasons for lying.”
“Like what?” Leia folded her legs up tailor fashion on the bed and sipped the glass of podon cider she’d picked up on her way through the kitchen. The craftsmen Jevax had promised had made their appearance while Leia was out. The metal shutters, armed with a formidable new lock, were nearly out of sight in their wall sockets on either side of the tall windows, and a new bedroom door was folded into its proper slot. Even the cupboard had been fixed. Sitting on the other end of the bed, Han was checking both blasters.
“Like she might be working at Madame Lota’s House of Flowers down on Spaceport Row.”
Leia wondered why it hadn’t crossed her mind before. “Dressed like that?”
He gave her his crooked grin. “I suppose you’re dressed for your job?”
She brushed a dismissive hand over the plain dark linen of her shirt, the knockabout cotton fatigue pants, and high-laced boots. “She wouldn’t have been on the path by the MuniCenter last night if she were working the bars.” The pile of hardcopy Artoo had made for them that first day strewed the bed between them. Nowhere was Roganda Ismaren listed on any employer record of any packing plant in Plawal.
“And if she’d followed me there from the marketplace, for instance, she wouldn’t have been dressed like that at that hour.”
While she was speaking, Han rose and walked out to the balcony, took aim at a small clump of ferns a few meters away in the orchard, and fired. The ferns sizzled into oblivion. He flipped the safety back on and tossed the weapon to Leia. “Good as new. So what did you find in the town records?”
It seemed like a thousand years ago. Returning last night to find a soaked and exhausted Han patching Chewie’s cuts had driven from her mind the web of speculation fed by the records themselves, and after Mara’s subspace call, her mind had been on other things.
“Not … what I was looking for,” said Leia slowly. “No mention of the Jedi, or of Plett himself, though it’s obvious they were behind the different kinds of plants growing here and that they set up the archiving programs—the Municipal Records time-shares off the Brathflen/Galactic/Imperial Fruits computer, but all the archiving programs look like they were originally designed for some kind of four-sixty model, which puts it back to the date the Jedi were here. Naturally, nobody knows where that original computer went to but my guess is it got sold for chips and wire to Nubblyk when the new one was put in.”
“Good guess,” muttered Han. “Not what I want
to hear, but a good guess. Any record of what happened to Nubblyk?”
She shook her head. “He just disappeared one night about seven years ago. His nightclub was taken over by his ‘associate’ Bran Kemple, who also took over his import and export business on Pandowirtin Lane. Slyte’s on the record as having bailed out Drub McKumb twice from charges of running stuff in through the Corridor. Kemple never bailed out McKumb at all. After Kemple took over, McKumb is listed as having been bailed out once by Mubbin the Whiphid—this was right after Slyte disappeared—though at no time is McKumb ever listed as having legally landed a ship at the port. Now the interesting thing is …”
Chewbacca appeared in the doorway with an interrogatory growl, and gestured out into the front room, where a signal was coming in on the subspace.
The code was for Leia, and the image was scrambled.
Leia punched in the unscrambler sequence, and the dazzling buzz of green, brown, and white pixels resolved itself suddenly into the image of Admiral Ackbar.
“This may not mean anything, Princess,” said the Calamarian in his soft, rather sibilant voice. “Still, I thought you ought to know about it. I’ve received reports from operatives in the Senex Sector and the adjoining portions of the Juvex Sector. They say that the heads of six or seven of the old Houses—the ones who’ve been lying low, staying out of the border fighting and not committing to the warlords of the Empire—have all gone ‘on vacation’ … without taking their families or their mistresses.”
“Oh, yeah?” Han raised his brows. “Now, that’s serious.”
The admiral folded his squamous hands, a ghostly image in the subspace holo, like a statue wrought of mist in the receiver cubicle. “This is curious enough, but it coincides almost exactly with the ‘vacations’ taken by the uncommitted ex-governors of Veron and Mussubir Three, and with representatives of the Seinar Corporation and a high-up member of the Mekuun family. Drost Elegin—the head of House Elegin—evidently took his family but left them on Eriadu.”
Star Wars: Children of the Jedi Page 23