Star Wars: Children of the Jedi

by Barbara Hambly

  They nearly trampled him barreling out the door.

  “What is it?” growled Ugbuz. At Luke’s signal the two stormtroopers who’d been carrying him for the sake of speed stopped and set him on his feet. “This ain’t Lift Twenty-one.” The Gamorrean’s piggy yellow eyes gleamed suspiciously in the dim flare of the emergency lights. The whole deck was dark now, and the air felt cold, stuffy, and strange. Curious scramblings and scufflings seemed to whisper all around them in the dark and Luke realized it had been quite some time since he’d seen a working SP or MSE. Only their gutted corpses, like roadkills along the walls.

  Threepio stood silhouetted in the dark door of the quartermaster’s office, gleaming in the feeble reflection of the lights of Luke’s staff.

  “Intelligence report.” Luke hobbled to the droid’s side and put a hand on the golden metal shoulder to draw him through to the storeroom beyond the office.

  The antigrav sled was there. Additional power had been jacked into it from the cells of the G-40 and the two snake-droids Luke had killed to raise it three meters above the floor.

  “You okay in here?” he asked softly.

  “Quite all right, Master Luke. As long as I remain within the perimeters programmed into the trackers the Jawas cannot molest me. But I suggest that you pay off the Jawas quickly, before the power ebbs to the point where the sled settles any further.”

  It had already settled a good half meter—even with the two trackers Threepio had reprogrammed to stun Jawas, once the sled with its load of dead robots got within two Jawa-heights of the floor—the point at which they could stand on each other’s shoulders—one way or another, they’d find a means of helping themselves. Luke could already see the little knot of brown-robed figures grouped in the door making their calculations, muttering among themselves in their shrill, childlike voices.

  “Any problems?”

  The smallest of the Jawas scurried forward, lay down, and kissed Luke’s boots. “Master, we did our best, did our best.” It got up again. It was the one he’d rescued, whom he’d nicknamed Shorty in his mind. Yellow eyes gleamed like firebugs in the black pit of its hood. “Went to the places you said, tried to cut the wires you said.”

  It held out its hand. Luke winced. The clawlike fingers were blistered and black with burns. Others stepped forward, stretching out their arms, and the evidence of injury was appalling.

  “It’s true, Luke.” Callista’s voice spoke soft at his side. “The cables feeding power to the Punishment Chamber aren’t only shielded, they’re booby-trapped. One of the Jawas was killed trying to get in and two others are badly stunned. We can’t cut power to the grid.”

  “Something else?” queried Shorty. “Trade you six hundred meters silver wire, fourteen size A Telgorn power cells, thirty size D Loronar cells for drive housings, and optical circuitry of two Cybot Galactica Gyrowheel Multifunctions.”

  Luke barely heard him. He felt cold, panic whispering under the bones of his chest. Cray was due to be taken to execution in under an hour and the grid in the Punishment Chamber was still live. His mind raced, trying to fit new plans, new conditions …

  “Twenty size A Telgorns,” Shorty urged. “This is all we have. Without them we will grope in the dark like blind grubs in the rock, but for you, master, we make a special deal …”

  “Thirty As,” said Luke, recovering, knowing what he’d have to do. If the Jawas claimed they had twenty size As it meant a stockpile of at least forty-five. “And thirty Ds, and thirty meters of reversing shielded cable, in trade for the Gyrowheel Multis. For the rest, you do another job for me.”

  “All the rest?” Half a dozen hooded heads turned—one Jawa moved a step toward the black, floating shadow of the sled, and both trackers swiveled in a flashing of baleful lenses. The Jawa stepped back the precise eight centimeters required to put it beyond the tracker’s range. Luke realized he’d have to conclude his deal quickly or his currency would end up being purloined before he even got back with Cray and Nichos. If he got back with Cray and Nichos.

  “All the rest,” said Luke. “Easy job. Easy.”

  “At your service, master, master,” whined the Jawas in chorus. They crowded around him, waving their burned hands and arms. Some had been bandaged with rags and strips of insulation and uniforms—Luke wondered if it would be safe to detail Threepio to get them disinfectants from sick bay and decided it was too risky until Cray was safe. “Do anything,” promised Shorty. “Kill all the big guards. Steal the engines. Anything.”

  “Okay,” said Luke. “I want you to go all over the ship, everywhere, and bring me back all the tripods and put them all in one room. All in the mess hall, and keep them there. Don’t hurt them, don’t kill them, don’t tie them up—just get them there gently, and put out water for them to drink. Okay?”

  The Jawa saluted. Its robes smelled like a gondar pit. “Okay, master. All okay. Pay now?”

  “Bring power cells to Lift Twenty-one and I pay half.” Luke tried not to think how little time remained between the present moment and 1600 hours. Cray was going to be executed and he had to play junk broker to the Jawas … “And hurry.”

  “There already, master.” The Jawas flurried away into the darkness. “There yesterday!” High above the floor, the trackers clicked and whirred and dangled their grippers in blind-brained automated disapproval.

  Luke leaned on his staff. He was trembling with fatigue. “You okay here by yourself for a little longer?”

  “Quite all right, sir. A stroke of brilliance, if you will permit me to say so, sir …”

  Luke produced the sled controls from his pocket, lowered the sled itself to the floor. He was aware of the smell of Jawas strengthening in the room as he opened the tailgate, awkwardly balancing against the side of the sled as he dragged out the gutted Tredwell and the two Gyrowheel snake-droids. “Okay,” he said, slamming the gate again. “It’ll be tougher to guard, but I need the sled. You think the trackers can handle it?”

  “For a time, sir.” The droid sounded worried, peering into the impenetrable shadows, which were not quite impenetrable to those heat-sensitive optic receptors. “Though I must say, those Jawas are diabolically clever.”

  Callista’s voice spoke from the shadows, where Luke had had, all through the conversation, the sense that she stood, just—and only just—out of sight. “Sure is lucky for our side that Luke’s diabolically clever, too.”

  He felt her pride in him, palpable as the touch of her hand.

  The Jawas were at Lift 21 with the power cells by the time Luke and his sweatily odoriferous forces arrived. Luke was steering the antigrav sled, thankful to be off his feet—he could feel the creep of exhaustion and pain beginning and thought, Drat, I only put that perigen in a few hours ago!

  He glanced at the chronometer above the doors of the lift. 1520. Down the lift shaft from some floor above, a soft contralto voice floated, “All personnel are to report to observation screens in the section lounges. All personnel are to report to observation screens in the section lounges. Failure to do so will be construed as …”

  Ugbuz and his stalwarts turned automatically around. Luke sprang from the sled, wincing as he stumbled, and caught the captain’s arm. “That doesn’t mean you, Captain Ugbuz. Or your men.”

  The boar frowned laboriously. “But failure to report will be construed as sympathy with the intent of the saboteurs.”

  Luke focused the Force into the small, cramped dark of that disturbed and divided mind. “You’re on special assignment,” he reminded him. “Your assignment is to fulfill your destiny as a boar of the Gakfedd tribe. Only thus can you truly serve the intent of the Will.”

  How easy, he thought bitterly as he saw relief flood the boar’s eyes, it must have been for Palpatine to maneuver men using just those words, just those thoughts.

  And how easy for anyone who did it to become addicted to that smiling rush of satisfied power, when the stormtrooper captain signaled his followers back to the open doors of the sha
ft.

  It was the work of only minutes to link the power cells in series and hook them to the sled’s lifters with the long green-and-yellow snakes of the reversing cables. From above, Luke could hear, if he stretched out his perceptions, the breaths and heartbeats of the guards at the upper levels of the shaft. The dim glow of his staff showed him the fused patches of ricochets on the shaft walls, the black scars all around the lift doors where the Klaggs had practiced their aim. In the slow rise of the antigrav sled, the Gakfedds would be sitting targets.

  1525.

  Luke took the foo-twitter’s trackball from his pocket. As he pressed the activation toggle he reached out still farther with his senses, listened to the hollow of the shaft, praying that the enclision grid hadn’t shorted the voder circuits …

  “Nichos!”

  Distant, echoing, reduced to a half-heard wailing breath, the cry still came to him, a hideous echo of terror, despair, and fury. Luke’s breath caught painfully as he heard—half heard, maybe only felt—the scuffle and clang of boots, the hiss of a door. “Nichos, damn you, act like a man if you remember how!”

  And closer, the sudden drift of a guard’s voice, “Wot’s that?”

  Luke heard nothing. But after a moment someone else said, “Stinkin’ pond-scum Gakfedds are up here!”

  There was a rush of retreating feet.

  “Now!” Luke hit the activators on the sled’s motors as two Gakfedds slid it out over the edge into the lift shaft. It balanced, bobbed, like a rowboat in a well. Luke graded the power up on a slow curve as the ersatz stormtroopers piled into the sled. He was horribly aware of the dark drop of eighty meters or more beneath him. The sled sank a little under their weight, then held steady; the shaft carried few echoes, but far off, if he shut his eyes, stretched out his awareness, he could hear the Klaggs cursing as they followed the drifting foo-twitter through silent halls and storerooms lit only by the feeble penny dips of emergency lighting. Could almost hear—a breath within his mind—the reverberation of Callista’s silent laughter as she maneuvered the tracker ahead of them, like a child pushing a balloon.

  Then Cray’s voice again, bitterly cursing the man who could not help her as they dragged her through the halls toward her death.

  No, thought Luke despairingly, as he upped the slow feed of power into the repulsorlifts. No, no, no …

  The engines whined a moment, desperately fighting weight twice their design capacity on a gravity column already dozens of times higher than they were intended to rise …

  Luke shut his eyes, and drew on the strength of the Force.

  It was hard to concentrate, hard to focus and funnel the glowing strength of the universe through a body crumbling with fatigue and a mind clouded with growing pain. Hard to call into jewel-clear power the lambent energies of stars and space and solar winds, of life—even the sweaty, smelly, angry, and desperately confused creatures around him. For the Force was part of them, too. Part of the tripods, the Jawas, the Sand People, Kitonaks … All of them had the Force, the glowing strength of Life.

  Concentrating was like trying to focus light through warped and dirty glass. Luke fought to clear his mind, to put aside Cray, and Nichos, and Callista … to put aside himself as well.

  Slowly, the sled and its burden began to rise.

  Only the lift, only the rising, thought Luke. They are the only things that exist. No before or after. Like a glittering leaf ascending in darkness …

  The yells of the Klaggs grew louder.

  As if looking at a gauge that had nothing to do with the body or the soul of Anakin Skywalker’s son, Luke observed the orange torchlit doorway sinking toward them and readied his hand on the repulsorlift controls. The idiots are going to jump on each other’s shoulders to get to the doors first …

  It would capsize the sled and spill them all down nearly 100 meters of shaft, but he couldn’t break his concentration enough to say so. Instead he slowed his mind, sped his perceptions, trimming the sled’s four lifters separately to compensate as—right on schedule—the Gamorreans leaped and grabbed and piled on each other’s shoulders to be the first ones through the doorway, squealing, cursing, waving axes and shoulder cannons, heedless of Luke’s execution of maneuvers that would have made a transport tech blench. The sled rocked and heaved but nobody fell. The Gakfedds, accepting the navigational near miracle as a commonplace, were all out of the sled and gone before a true commander would have let any of them stand.

  Panting, shaking, sweat burning in the cuts on his face, and cold in every extremity, Luke timed the power dim precisely with their departure so that the sled wouldn’t shoot up through the end of the shaft, and then steadied the much-lightened vessel into the torchlit guard lobby of Deck 19. He collected his staff and rolled over the side, too weary to open the tailgate; lay on the floor, fighting the wave of reaction, the weakness of calling on the Force far beyond his current strength.

  On the wall, the chronometer read 1550.

  Cray, he thought, breathing deep of the stuffy, smoke-filthy air. Cray. And Cray will help me save Callista.

  I’ll pay for this later.

  He climbed to his feet.

  Now.

  In a way it was harder to focus the Force in his own body, to call strength from outside himself, channeling it through muscles burning with the toxins of fatigue and infection and a mind hurting for rest. But that, too, he put aside, moved forward with a warrior’s light strength, barely aware of the lurch and drag of his injured leg, the awkwardness of the staff.

  The corridor around him rang with the sudden cacophony of battle.

  He flattened to the wall as Gamorreans fell out of the hall before him, hacking, yelling, firing almost point-blank with blasters whose shots ricocheted crazily or ripped long burns in the walls; gouging at one another with tusks and raking with stumpy claws, then screams like the rip of metal and canvas and stray gouts of blood stinking like hot copper in the air. Luke dodged, swung around the corner and into the heat of the fray, but saw no glimpse of the green uniform Cray had been wearing, no cornsilk flash of hair. A nightmare vision of Cray lying bleeding in some corridor flashed through his mind—then from the door of a through-passage Callista yelled, “Luke!” and he ran, holding himself up against the wall, barely feeling the sawing pain. “This way!”

  “All personnel are to report to the section lounges,” said the tannoy, clear now, and Luke thought, This part of the ship is still alive. The Will is here.…

  “All personnel are to report …”

  “Luke!”

  He skidded to a stop around a corner, facing the shut black double door of what was labeled PUNISHMENT 2, over whose lintel a single small light burned amber. Nichos stood against the wall, a statue of brushed silver, the only thing alive in his face the desperate agony of his eyes.

  In front of the door stood a human stormtrooper in full armor, blaster carbine ready and pointed in his hands.

  “Just stay where you are, Luke,” said Triv Pothman’s voice. The helmet altered it, rendered it tinnily inhuman, but Luke recognized it all the same. “I know you feel loyal to her but she’s a Rebel and a saboteur. If you back off now I can testify in your favor.”

  “Triv, she isn’t a Rebel.” Luke scanned the hall with his eyes and mind and detected not a fragment of loose metal, not even a gutted MSE or a mess-room plate … “There are no Rebels anymore. The Empire is gone, Triv. The Emperor is dead.” He literally didn’t think he had the strength to rip the carbine out of Pothman’s grip by the Force alone.

  Over the door the digital readout changed to 1556, and the amber light began to blink red. Triv hesitated, then repeated in precisely the same tones, “I know you feel loyal to her but …”

  “That was a long time ago.” Luke reached out with his mind, feeling his way to the older man’s thoughts as if physically trying to penetrate the white plastic of the dog-faced helmet, the guarding darkness that armored his thoughts. Six meters separated them. Exhausted, blank, vision tunnel
ing to grayness, he fumbled to collect the Force and couldn’t, and knew he’d be shot before he covered half the distance. And he wasn’t sure he had the strength for even that.

  “The Empire left you alone,” he said softly. “Alone to be yourself. Alone to do what you wanted, to grow a garden, to embroider flowers on your shirts.” He could almost hear, in the dark of the old man’s mind, the shrill voice of the Will: The Jedi killed your family. They descended on your village in the night, they slew the men in the space among the houses, rounded up the women under the trees. … You fled in the darkness, stumbling in the mud and streams …

  “Remember your captain and the other men killing each other?” said Luke, conjuring the green shadows of the shelter, the gleam of those forty-five white helmets on a plank. The crunch of leaves underfoot and the smoky smell they produced. “Remember the camp you made, and the meadow by the stream? You lived there a long time, Triv. And the Empire disappeared.”

  “I know you feel loyal to her but she’s a …”

  Vines. The earth. A tiny reptile with jewel-colored feathers picking up a thrown breadcrumb in the doorway. The smell of the stream.

  The reality of what had been. The years of peace.

  “She’s a Rebel and a saboteur …”

  His voice trailed off.

  What had really been, thought Luke. He held it out to Pothman, shining memories of place and time; memories of those things that he himself had actually seen and knew, like a slice of sunlight piercing the digitalized tape loop in Pothman’s mind.

  The light above the door blinked faster. 1559.

  “Festering Skybolts!”

  Pothman wheeled and dragged on the locking rings of the doors. Luke sprang, scrambled to help him, the rings gripping fast, refusing to budge, as if held from the other side—or from within the walls themselves, by the Will. Nichos seized them, twisted with the sudden, inexorable, mechanical strength of a droid. Air hissed as the seals broke. “It’s fighting me!” yelled Nichos, dragging the door open, and indeed, the heavy steel leaf was pulling visibly at his grip. “It’s trying to close …”