Children of the Jedi Read online

  "Now, I'll have no malingering in my unit, mister," grunted Ugbuz, when Bullyak turned away. "We've had some losses, and we've had some injured, but those mutineers aren't going to interfere with our mission." He thrust a metal flask at Luke. The fumes alone would have dropped a bantha in its tracks. Luke shook his head. "Drink it! I don't trust a man who won't drink."

  Luke put it to his lips but didn't let the alcohol go any farther than that. Even that movement throbbed hideously in his leg. It took all the disciplines he had learned, all his control of the Force within his own body, to put the pain aside.

  The ax, he thought. The Klaggs who'd attacked him had both carried axes. Had one struck him in the final melee? He didn't recall, but remembered not being able to get up.

  His head hurt, too. For the first time the desperate importance of getting injuries seen to immediately was brought home to him--he'd be even less able, now, to protect himself, and it was quite obvious that he'd have more need to do so.

  Why was the great hold around them dark?

  "What about Trooper Mingla, sir? Skinny blond kid?"

  Ugbuz's tiny eyes squinted harder at him in the gloom of the hut. "Friend of yours?"

  Luke nodded.

  "Missing. Festering mutineers. Two men killed, three missing. Sons of sows. We'll get 'em."

  Bullyak squealed something angrily at him, her long, gray-green braids swinging heavily over the gelid, bitten flesh of her six enormous breasts. Morrts were blood parasites, gray, finger-size, and furry; one of them was even now, Luke could see, fixed on Ugbuz's neck, and another was crawling up Bullyak's braid. The pinny glitter of their eyes flickered all around the hut, in the corners, in the rafters. The blankets stank of them.

  Slowly, agonizingly, he tried to get to his feet.

  Bullyak snarled something at him, and thrust a stick into his hand. It had clearly started life as a pole arm of some weapon brought from Pzob, six feet of knobbed and hand-smoothed wood. His trouser leg had been slit from halfway down his thigh, to let her dress the wound. Even if he'd been able to stand the thought of putting weight on that leg he knew it wouldn't bear him. She'd wrapped his left foot in rags, having cut off the blood-soaked boot. Rather to his surprise, his lightsaber was hooked to his belt.

  The sow shoved him in the direction of the door, with a violence that nearly had him on the floor again.

  "She says get yourself some coffee," said Ugbuz, with an officer's hearty cheer. "You'll heal up fine."

  "Master Luke!"

  Luke looked around. Two dozen huts had been erected, ranged around the walls of what looked like a cargo hold. Doors, pieces of metal paneling, plastic and corrugated crate sides had gone into their construction, as well as blankets, bits of armor, mess hall plates, wire, cable, pipe, and the ubiquitous engine tape. More plates and coffee cups littered the metal decking, and the place had a faint, garbagy smell in spite of the best efforts of the MSE'S buzzing and puttering around the open square in the center. There were few Gamorreans in sight.

  In the dark, open doorway of the vast chamber, Threepio stood waiting. Had he been programmed to do so he'd have wrung his hands.

  Slowly, every step an acid jolt of suppressed agony, Luke limped the fifteen meters that separated them. Threepio made a move as if he would have come through the door to help him, but seemed to think better of it.

  "I'm terribly sorry, Master Luke," apologized the droid. "But the Gamorreans don't permit droids in their village. The SP Eighties have tried repeatedly to dismantle the huts and put the pieces away in their proper places and... well..."

  Luke leaned against the wall and laughed in spite of himself. "Thanks, Threepio," he said. "Thanks for following this far."

  "Of course, Master Luke!" The protocol droid sounded shocked that there would have been any question of it. "After that dreadful fracas in the mess hall..."

  "Did you see what happened to Cray? Ugbuz says she's missing..."

  "She was carried away by the Klagg tribe. They seem to regard the Gakfedds as mutineers, and vice versa. Nichos went after them. She was putting up a good fight, but I'm afraid she was no match for them, sir." He clanked softly along at Luke's side as Luke started to walk again, limping down the corridor and grimly blocking his mind against the pain in his leg. Simply keeping the agony at bay took enormous amounts of his concentration, far more than he'd channeled against the effects of his concussion. He had to find sick bay, and fast. At least with so obvious an injury Ugbuz couldn't argue that he was merely malingering.

  "Any idea where they're headquartered?"

  "I'm afraid not, sir. Captain Ugbuz has sent out scouts to locate their stronghold, so it's quite clear he has no idea either."

  "They shouldn't be too hard to find." Luke was checking every door they passed, mostly cargo holds in this part of the ship. Owing to the Eye's configuration as an asteroid the ship possessed long stretches of hallway unbroken by doorways; the lights were on here, gleaming coldly off the gray metal walls. Here and there a plastic plate or coffee cup from the mess hall made a bright spot in the monochrome, and once they passed a tripod, wandering vaguely through the hall gazing around with its three thick-lashed green eyes.

  "I'm not so sure of that, sir. The SP Eighty cleaner droids were very diligent about scrubbing all trace of their trail from the walls and floors."

  Luke stopped, and leaned back against the wall, his head swimming. Did other Jedi Masters have to go through this? "What happened here?" He opened his eyes again. The stretch of hallway before them was dark, as the Gakfedds' village hold and the area around it had been, the glowpanels of the ceiling dead for easily a hundred meters in front of them. A hatch cover had been ripped loose halfway down and wires and cables trailed out into the hall like the entrails of a gutted beast. As he limped nearer Luke smelled a familiar odor, faint and distant now, but distinctive... "Jawas?"

  If Threepio had possessed lungs he would have heaved a long-suffering sigh. "I'm afraid so, sir. It appears that on such planets where the Empire posted troops to be picked up for this mission thirty years ago, the automated landers collected whatever sentient beings they could find."

  "Oh, great," sighed Luke, bending carefully to study the frame of the gutted hatch. It was grubby with small handprints. He wondered how many of the meter-tall, brown-robed scavengers the lander had picked up on Tatooine.

  "Those were Talz we saw in the mess hall, from Alzoc Three. I have not been very far afield, Master Luke, but I know there are also Affytechans from Dom-Bradden aboard, and the Maker only knows what else besides!"

  "Great," said Luke again, limping on. "So in order to blow up the ship before it reaches Plawal I'm going to have to find the troop transports and somehow get everybody on board. I suppose I could always tell the Gamorreans it's orders, but..." He hesitated, remembering the vicious skill of the ship's gunner, the one Threepio insisted did not exist. Whatever else might be automated on the Eye of Palpatine, there might very well be one member of the original mission crew still on board.

  "Here. This looks like what we're after."

  They had traversed the blacked-out section of corridor to the lighted area beyond. A small office on the right had clearly belonged to a supercargo or quartermaster; a black wall-mounted desk bore a large, curved keyboard, and the staring onyx darkness of a monitor screen gazed gravely down above. Luke sank gratefully into the leather padding of the chair--definitely a quartermaster, he thought--propped his staff against the desk, and flipped the on toggle.

  "Let's see if we can talk this thing into giving us some idea of how much time we have, before we do anything else."

  He typed in Mission status request. It was a common enough command, involving no classified information, but even knowing when the Eye was expected to reach Plawal would tell him how urgently he had to move.

  -- Mission time consonant with the objectives of the Will

  "Hunh?" Luke typed in Menu.

  -- The Will requests objective of this information


  Orientation, typed Luke.

  -- Current status aligned with timetable of the Will. No further information necessary

  "They really didn't want to risk anyone outside finding out about their mission, did they?" murmured Luke. The screen grayed and swam before his eyes, and he drew the Force to him, wearily clearing, strengthening the slowly healing tissues of the brain.

  Sick bay, he thought tiredly. Right after this, sick bay...

  "When did the last lander come aboard, Threepio?"

  "Yesterday, I believe. Those were the Talz."

  Luke considered. "If they're trying to avoid suspicion, it makes sense that they'd lie low for a day or two, maybe longer, before making another hyperspace jump. Maybe a lot longer, depending on who they think was watching them thirty years ago."

  Ben Kenobi, almost certainly. Bail Organa. Mon Mothma. Those who'd watched the rise of Palpatine to supreme power, the birth of the New Order, first with suspicion, then with growing alarm.

  "The ship's certainly big enough to keep a couple of companies comfortable for a while."

  Schematic.

  A deck plan appeared; Luke identified the big cargo hold without trouble, and the quartermaster's office where he now sat. A readout in the corner flagged this as Deck 12. He keyed the command for the deck above, and the one above that, noting the irregular shapes of the decks. Sick bay was two decks below. The decks were huge, but presumably after two or three days Ugbuz wouldn't be sending scouts for rival tribes on his own deck. The computer refused to display the schematic for Deck 9. Keying down, Luke could only get displays for Decks 10 through 13.

  Total schematic.

  -- The Will requests the objective of this information

  Location of alien life forms.

  -- All things are within parameters defined by the Will. There are no unauthorized life forms aboard

  "Oh, there aren't, hunh?" Again Luke keyed in Total schematic.

  -- The Will requests the objective of this information

  Damage control.

  -- The Will is in control. The Will ascertains no damage in any area

  All the lights browned out and the pale-blue letters of the monitor shrank into a tiny dot and blinked away. From the blackness of the corridor outside came the shrill chitter of Jawa voices, the scrabble of fleeing feet. Luke sighed. "I've got a bad feeling about this."

  Chapter 7

  Sick bay was dark, silent, and cold.

  "Drat those Jawas, sir!" cried Threepio.

  Luke Skywalker had dealt successfully with battling a clone of himself, with being enslaved by the Emperor and the dark side, with wholesale slaughter and the destruction of worlds. A good deal of Han Solo's vocabulary did come to mind. "Come on," he sighed. "Let's see what we can manage."

  "These were quite decent early Too-One-Bees, sir," remarked Threepio, holding aloft one of the few emergency glowrods left in the rifled emergency locker on the wall. "But of course the reason they are independently powered in modern ships, instead of hardwired into place, is painfully obvious here."

  "Painfully," thought Luke, leaning against the self-conforming plastene of the diagnostic bed, was certainly the appropriate word for this occasion. All the cabinets had been frozen shut when the Jawas had pulled the main wall hatch in search of wire and components. Though none of the diagnostics worked, Luke was fairly certain--by the way his left foot moved, and by the excruciating pain that shot up the back of his thigh whenever he put the slightest weight on it--that one or more tendons had been severed, which meant that even discounting the near certainty of infection, until he could get to a genuine medical facility he would be seriously lame. Simply keeping traumatic shock at bay took all the healing power of the Force that he could muster, and even that, he knew, couldn't last long.

  In addition to ripping free coverplates and hatches to get at the machinery within, the Jawas had carried off portions of the autodocs, taken the power cores out of the X-ray and E-scan machines, and tried to remove the temperature regulator from the bacta tank, with the result that the tank itself had leaked half its contents onto the floor in a gigantic sticky pool. So much for the possibility of standard regenerative therapy.

  Luke caught one of the horde of MSE droids that were faithfully attempting the herculean task of cleaning up the mess, pulled its power core, and used its wiring to short the locks on the cupboards. The dispensary was stocked with huge quantities of gylocal, a horrifically powerful pain-blocker/stimulant that would allow a warrior to go on fighting long after shock would have felled and killed him--Luke turned the black boxes of ampoules over in his hand and remarked, "They sure expected a fight, didn't they?" He put them back. Gylocal decomposed after about ten years in storage, separating into its original--and highly toxic--components. Even if the stuff had been fresh Luke wasn't sure what the effect of the drug would be on his ability to wield the Force.

  Less heroic measures were available in the form of nyex, which made many people--and Luke knew from past experience he was among them--drowsy, and the non-narcotic painkiller perigen. He planted a perigen patch on his thigh just above the knee and immediately felt the pain lessen. It wouldn't heal the damage and he'd still be lame, and perigen lacked the mild stimulant included in gylocal, but at least the debilitating stress of fighting the agony would be eased. In the absence of bacta-tank therapy to accelerate the healing of his concussion--and Luke knew he was already over the worst of its effects--the simple reorientive comaren would deal with the last of the symptoms. At least there was plenty of that. More worrying was the fact that most of the antibiotics and all the synthflesh on the ship had completely decomposed with age.

  In a locker in one of the labs next door he found a regular trooper's gray coverall whose baggy shape would fit over the taped and splinted dressing on his leg. Changing into it, Luke filled the pockets with all the comaren and perigen he could locate, and wired half a dozen glowrods to the end of his staff.

  "Okay, Threepio," he said, as he belted his lightsaber once more around his waist and carefully used his staff to lever himself up from the self-conforming chair where he'd sat to change. "Let's see about finding Cray in this place."

  In the dark corridors around sick bay, Talz--as Threepio identified them--fled from them like enormous white powder puffs; from the pitch-black maws of holds and wards, little quadrangles of eyes glittered out at him in the bobbing reflection of the glowrods. Luke halted two or three times, and had Threepio translate for him, "I am your friend. I will not harm you, nor lead anyone here to harm you." But none of the great, soft aliens returned a sound.

  "The Empire used them for work in the mines on Alzoc Three," said Luke, as he and Threepio headed toward the lighted areas visible far down the corridor. "Alzoc wasn't even entered in the galactic registry. The Senate found a mention of it a couple of years ago in secret corporate files. Nobody knew what was going on there. They were lied to, betrayed... no wonder they learned to distrust anything humanoid. I wonder what happened to the stormtroopers who waited on their planet to be picked up?"

  Beside the lift he surprised a group of Talz in the process of feeding a band of ten or twelve tripods, setting down big mess-hall basins on the floor, one of water, one of a horrible mixture of porridge, milk, and fish stew, which the tripods knelt to devour eagerly. The Talz themselves took one look at Luke and Threepio and fled. Within minutes a dozen MSE'S and two SP-80'S appeared, determined to clean up what they obviously considered mess. The tripods moved back in confusion, watching helplessly as the MSE'S slurped up what was left of both water and food-cutting in to do so behind Luke's back when he tried to shoo them away--and the SP-80'S made valiant but futile attempts to bend down far enough to pick up the basins themselves.

  "I have nothing but respect for the entire Single-Purpose series, Master Luke," said Threepio, reaching down to hand the basin to the older and blockier droid. "Truly the core of droid operations. But they are so limited."

  Threepio could prov
ide no identification or linguistic information on the tripods, and even his translational analog function couldn't arrive at a complete understanding of their speech. Luke could only gather that they were People and they came from the World and they were looking for a way to go back there.

  "You and me both, pal," sighed Luke, as the spindly forms wove away down the corridor, still hunting for the right door to go through that would open onto home.

  At least the lift still worked, though with the Jawas at large it was anybody's guess how long that would last. The dirty little creatures were born scroungers and thieves, especially of metal, wire, and technology. Only four lighted buttons glowed beside the lift door:

  10, 11, 12, 13.

  Up on Deck 12 again the lights were still on, the air clean and circulating. An occasional plate or coffee cup littered the corridors, and cast-off pieces of stormtrooper armor amply indicated a Gamorrean presence, but as Threepio had said, the SP-80 cleaners and the little black boxlike MSE'S had meticulously wiped out any evidence of whatever trail the invading Klaggs had left.

  They came around a corner and Luke stopped, startled, to find the corridor in front of them dotted with what looked, at first glance, like blubbery, putty-colored mushrooms; a meter to a meter and a half tall, lumpy, and smelling strongly like vanilla. A second glance showed him that they had arms and legs, though he could see no sensory organs whatsoever. Threepio said, "Good Heavens! Kitonaks! They weren't here yesterday." He walked forward among them. Luke followed. There were thirty at least in the corridor, more, he saw, in the rec room that opened to the right. He touched one and found it room temperature, though with a suspicion of greater heat deep within. Under huge folds of fat many of them showed round, open holes in what were probably their heads, and, peering within, Luke identified two tongues and three rows of small, cone-shaped teeth.