Children of the Jedi Read online

It was like trying to hold down a frenzied rancor. There was something hideously animal in the way the man bucked and heaved, throwing the combined strength of Han and Luke nearly off him, screaming like a mad thing as Chewbacca and the Ithorians closed in.

  "Kill you! Kill you!" The man's broken, filthy hands flailed, grabbing at Han as the Wookiee and Ithorians dragged him from the ground. "Going to kill you all! Solo! Solo!"

  His voice scaled up into a hideous scream as one of the herd's physicians, loping from the Meeting Hall in a billow of purple robes, slapped the man on the side of the neck with an infuser. The man gasped, mouth gaping, sucking air, eyes staring in lunatic pain. Then he sagged back unconscious into a dozen restraining arms.

  Leia's first reaction was to reach Han-the intervening two meters of platform were suddenly a virtual stockade of towering, gesticulating Ithorians, chattering like some impossibly beautiful orchestra whose players have all suddenly been dosed with brain-jagger or yarrock. Umwaw Moolis was in her way. "Your Excellency, never in the history of this herd, of this world, have we been subjected to such an attack..."

  It was all she could do not to push her aside.

  Luke, she was interested to note, had gone straight for the arcade from which the man had come, springing from platform to balcony and scanning the colonnade and the square beyond.

  The children!

  Leia forced her way through the crowd to the doorway.

  Winter was gone. See-Threepio toddled forth from the shadows with his slightly awkward mechanical walk and caught her arm.

  "Winter has taken Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin back to their nursery, Your Excellency," he reported. "She stayed only long enough to point out to them that General Solo was completely unhurt. Perhaps it would be advisable for you and General Solo to go there and reassure them at the first convenient opportunity."

  "Are they guarded?" Han could look after himself... for one awful moment the hairy, convulsed face of the madman returned to her, reaching for the children...

  "Chewbacca has gone with them."

  "Thank you, Threepio."

  "Can't see any further danger." Luke appeared at her side in a swirl of black cloak, light-brown hair ruffled where he'd pushed back the hood, his face--scarred from a long-ago encounter with an ice creature on Hoth-unreadable as usual, but his blue eyes seeming to see everything. "Kids all right?"

  "They're in the nursery. Chewbacca's with them." She looked around. Han was still standing where he had been, in the midst of a hooting, waving crowd of Ithorians, staring at the shadowed door through which the attacker had been taken. He was nodding and even making some kind of reply to the herd leaders, who were assuring him that such things never happened, but Leia could tell he wasn't really hearing them.

  She and Luke edged their way to him.

  "You all right?"

  Han nodded, but gave them only a glance. Leia had seen him less upset by full-scale artillery ambushes with Imperial starfighter support.

  "That can't have been anything like a planned attempt." Luke followed his gaze to the door. ”When he starts to come out of the tranquilizer I'll see if I can go into his mind a little, pick up who he is--“

  "I know who he is," said Han.

  Brother and sister regarded him in surprise.

  "If that wasn't a ghost," said Han, "and it might have been... I'd say it was about fifty percent of my old buddy Drub McKumb."

  Chapter 2

  "Children." The man lashed to the diagnostic bed mumbled the word as if lips, tongue, and palate were swollen and numb. Blue eyes stared blankly up from an eroded moonscape of wrinkled flesh. Above the padded table, small monitor screens traced jewel-bright patterns of color. The central one, Leia could see, indicated that the smuggler was in no physical pain--with that much gylocal in him he couldn't possibly be--but the right-hand monitor showed a jangled horror of reds and yellows, as if all the nightmares in the galaxy held shrieking revel in his frontal lobe.

  "Children," he muttered again. "They hid the children in the well."

  Leia glanced across at her husband. In his hazel eyes she saw the reflection, not of the emaciated creature who lay before them in the ripped green plastene coverall of a long-distance cargo hauler, but the fat, blustering planet-hopper captain he'd known years ago.

  The Healing House of the Cloud-Mother was a dim place, rank with plants like all the herd and bathed in soft blue-green light. Tomla El, chief healer of the herd, was small for an Ithorian and like the lights of the place also a soft blue-green, so that in his purple robe he seemed only a shadow and a voice as he considered the monitors and spoke to Luke at his side.

  "I am unsure that going into his mind would profit you, Master Skywalker." He blinked his round golden eyes at the frenzied right-hand screen. "He's under as much gylocal and hypnocane as we dare administer. The brain has been severely damaged, and his whole system is full of repeated massive doses of yarrock."

  "Yarrock?" said Luke, startled.

  "Sure explains him being off his rocker," commented Han. "I haven't seen Drub in seven or eight years, but back when I knew him he wouldn't even sniff dontworry, much less go in for that caliber of hallucinogen."

  "Oddly enough," said the Healer, "I don't think his condition is attributable to the drug. Judging by his autonomic responses, I believe the yarrock acted as a depressant to the mental activity, permitting brief periods of lucidity. These were found in his pockets."

  He produced a half dozen scraps of flimsiplast, stained and filthy and creased. Han and Leia stepped close to look over Luke's shoulders as he unfolded them.

  HAN SOLO ITHOR THE TIME OF MEETING BELIA'S BOSOM -- SULLUST -- BAY 58 SMELLY SAINT -- YETOOM NA UUN -- BAY 12

  FARGEDNIM P'TAAN

  "P'taan's a medium-big drug dealer on Yetoom." Solo rubbed unconsciously at the scar on his chin, as if contact with it reminded him of his own rough-and-tumble contraband days. "If Drub was on yarrock he could have got it from him, provided he'd found some way to make himself a millionaire in the past seven years. And you'd have to be a millionaire to take enough of that stuff to give yourself that kind of damage."

  He shook his head, and looked again at the starved body on the table, the filthy, claw-like nails.

  "I take it the Smelly Saint and Belia's Bosom are ships?" Leia's eyes were still on the nightmare readouts above the bed.

  "The Saint runs rip-off copy agri-droids out of the Kimm systems, sometimes slaves from the Senex Sector. Makes sense. Yetoom's on the edge of the Senex."

  He shook his head again, staring down at what was left of the man he had known. "He used to be bigger than the three of us put together; I kidded him about being Jabba the Hutt's younger, cuter brother."

  "Children," whispered McKumb again, and tears leaked from his staring eyes. "They hid the children down the well. Plett's Well." His head jerked, spastic, face contorting with pain. "Han... Kill you. Kill you all. Got to tell Han. They're there..."

  "Got to tell Han," repeated Luke softly. "That doesn't sound like a threat."

  "Plett's Well...." Leia wondered why the name tugged on her mind, what it reminded her of... What voice had said it, and who had hushed the speaker at the sound of those words?

  "He's definitely suffering from severe and prolonged malnutrition," said Tomla El, surveying the line of numbers on the bottommost readout screen. "How long since you saw him last, General Solo?"

  "Eight years, nine years," said Han. "Before the fighting on Hoth. I ran across him on Ord Mantell--he was the one who told me Jabba the Hutt had major money on my head. I never heard of anything called Plett's Well."

  "Plettwell." Drub McKumb spoke in an almost natural tone, turning his head toward Leia, who stood nearest, though his eyes, momentarily calm, seemed to see something or someone other than her. "Get to Solo, honey. Tell him. I can't. All the children were down the well. They're gathering..." He flinched, and the right-hand screen scorched to blood; his body spasmed, twisting up into a heaving arc.

&nbs
p; "Kill them!" he screamed. "Stop them!"

  Tomla El moved forward swiftly, slapping another patch of gylocal to the row already on the man's neck. McKumb's eyes slipped closed as the raw color of the monitor faded and darkened.

  "Children," he whispered again. "The children of the Jedi."

  The brain-wave patterns of the left-hand monitor dipped and eased as he sank into sleep, but those on the right continued to flare as he slid into dreams from which he could not be waked.

  "Plettwell." Dr. Cray Mingla spoke the word as if tasting it, turning it over like a circuit board of unfamiliar make to look at all sides. At the same time her long, exquisitely manicured fingers stirred through the little heap of debris retrieved from Drub McKumb's pockets--credit papers, broken ampoules, and tiny packets of black plastene coated with fusty-smelling yarrock residue, and half a dozen pieces of old-fashioned jewelry: a pendant of three opals, a bracelet, and four earrings which did not match, their intricate lacings of bronze wire and dancing pearls crusted thick with pinkish gold mineral salts. Her straight brows, darker than the winter-sun silk of her upswept hair, tweaked down over the bridge of her nose, and Leia, on the opposite side of the Guest House's dining table, heard again the name in her mind.

  Plett's Well, someone--her father?--had said... When?

  "My mother," said Cray after a time. "I think my mother talked about it." She looked hesitantly over at Luke, standing in silence near the door. "She and my great-aunt fought about it, I think. I was very little, but I remember my great-aunt slapping her, telling her never to speak of it.... But she had jewelry like that."

  As she spoke of her childhood, her uncertainty broke through the careful perfection of her beauty, and Luke remembered she was only twenty-six, a few years younger than himself. She scraped at the mineral deposits on an earring with a lacquered pink thumbnail. Oxidized sulfur and antimony, Tomla El had identified it, mixed with trace minerals and mud.

  "My aunts had some, too," said Leia thoughtfully. "Aunt Rouge, Aunt Celly, and Aunt Tia... Father's sisters." Her mouth flickered into a wry quirk at the memory of those three redoubtable dowagers. "They never stopped trying to turn me into what they called a Proper Princess--and marry me off to some brainless twerp from one of the other ancient ruling Houses...."

  "Like Isolder?" Han named the hereditary Prince of the Hapes Consortium--and Leia's erstwhile suitor--and Leia made a face at him where he stood next to Luke in the dining room doorway.

  "But they had jewelry like this," Leia went on after a moment. "It's Old Republic bronze, the strapwork and the iridescent wash."

  "He must have started out with pockets full of the stuff," remarked Han, "if he's been buying yarrock with it along the way."

  Leia reached across the table to touch her own earrings, which she'd discarded the moment she was out of public view: sleekly modern disks of silver, polished and chaste. "Maybe forty, fifty years old? They don't make anything like that now."

  Cray nodded, being well up on every nuance of fashion. Even in the laboratories and lecture rooms of the Magrody Institute she was impeccably turned out, a tall, slim young woman--the blonde with the legs, Leia remembered Han's description, slightly envious of her elegant height, which made it possible for her to carry off fashions that Leia, a good eighteen centimeters shorter, knew were out of the question for herself. Only when actually engaged in the rigors of Jedi training on Yavin had Leia ever actually seen Cray without makeup and jewelry, and even then the young scientist managed--Leia reflected enviously--to look gorgeous.

  "What did your mother say about it?" asked Luke in his quiet voice. "Why didn't your aunt want her to talk about it?"

  Cray shook her head, and Luke turned to the golden protocol droid who had joined them in the dining room, his stubby astromech counterpart at his side.

  "Ring any bells with you, Threepio?"

  "I'm sorry to say it does not, sir," replied the droid. "It was a fortress."

  They all turned, startled, to look at the man--or the thing that had once been a man--standing beside Cray's chair.

  The ambassadorial receptions were over. The ceremonial tours of the various herds, the luncheons, teas, flower viewings, and the descent to tour the jungle floor had all been accomplished, albeit with larger and more heavily armed parties than had been previously planned. Cray and her fiancé, Nichos Marr--two of Luke's most recent students at the Jedi Academy on Yavin who had accompanied Luke to Ithor to consult with Tomla El--had been asked to do service as bodyguards, extending their Jedi-trained senses through the brightly dressed, friendly crowds. With night's gentle cloaking of the floating megalopolis, they had returned with the Presidential party to the privacy of the Guest Houses, the first chance Leia had had all day to speak to Cray Mingla in private about the assassination of Stinna Draesinge Sha... the inconspicuous theoretician who had studied with the people who had helped design the Death Star.

  Though Leia's news of the assassination had shocked her, Cray had had little to tell about her former teacher. Draesinge, like Nasdra Magrody himself, had been almost completely apolitical, seeking knowledge for the sake of knowledge... like the physicist Qwi Xux, thought Leia bitterly, to whom Magrody had taught the principles of artificial intelligence in Moff Tarkin's orbital accelerated learning center above the hostage planet of Omwat.

  Only afterward had Cray asked about Drub McKumb.

  Beyond the suite's lacy translucent groves of arches and windows, the warm night was alive with colored lights and snatches of music as, all over the joined flotilla of the herds, clans and families entertained and rejoiced. Above their heads in the pendant networks of the ceiling, baskets of solar globes shed their warm light on the little group: Leia still in her formal gown of green-and-gold-worked vine-silk and her white tabard, Han in his sharply tailored military trousers, though the first thing he'd done upon returning to the Guest House had been to get rid of the jacket; Luke a shadow in his black Jedi cloak.

  "Artoo ran a cross-check of Plett's Well and Plettwell through the master computer bank on the herd ship Tree of Tarintha, the largest on the planet," Threepio diffidently informed the room at large. "No referent was found."

  "As a child..." Nichos paused, collecting his thoughts, a mannerism Luke noticed now because it was something his student almost never did anymore. He caught the way Cray glanced back at the man--or former man--to whom she was still officially betrothed; saw the way she watched him. Searching, Luke knew, for those other mannerisms, the way he used to put his hand to his forehead when he was thinking... hunting vainly for the small human gestures of knotting his brows, shutting his eyes...

  The face was still that of the young man who had come to Yavin over a year ago, asking to be tested for adeptness in the Force. The technicians of the biomedical institute on Coruscant had saved that much. They'd duplicated his hands as well. Luke recognized the scar on the little finger of the right one, which Nichos had gotten the first time he'd tried maneuvering an edged weapon with the Force. They fitted perfectly into the droid body Cray had designed when Nichos had been diagnosed with the first signs of Quannot's Syndrome, as if Nichos--the Nichos Luke had known, the Nichos Cray had loved--were simply wearing smooth, form-fitted armor of brushed pewter-gray steel, exquisitely articulated, every joint and stress point filled in with metal-meshed plastoid as fine as vine-silk, so that not a strut, not a wire, not a cable showed to remind anyone that this was a droid.

  But the face was perfectly smooth, without expression. All the musculature was mimicked there, with an accuracy never before achieved in prosthetics. Nichos--though he tried to remember, knowing that his expressionlessness disturbed Cray--usually forgot to use them. He was expressionless now, his mind delving back through every fragment of digitalized memory, searching for some forgotten thread.

  "I was there," he said at length. "I remember running up and down corridors, hallways cut in the rocks. Someone had...had raised a mental barrier, an illusion of dread, to keep us out of some of them--had u
sed the Force to do it. The kretch would eat us, someone said, the kretch would eat us.... But we'd dare each other. The older kids--Lagan Ismaren and Hoddas... Hoddag?... Umgil, I think their names were--said we were looking for Plett's Well."

  "What was the kretch?" asked Cray, into the silence that followed.

  "I don't know," said Nichos. Once he would have shrugged. "Something that ate kids, I guess."

  "Someone raised a mental barrier with the Force to keep you out of tunnels where you weren't supposed to go?" Leia leaned forward, the earring still in her hand.

  "I think so, yes," said Nichos slowly. ”Or used the Force to... to instill an aversion in us. I didn't think anything of it at the time but looking back... it was the power of the Force."

  "You have to try that with Jace and Jainy," remarked Han, and Chewbacca, sitting heretofore silent on his other side, groaned in assent.

  "How old were you?" asked Luke. "Do you remember any other names?" Beside him, Artoo whirred softly as he recorded data.

  Nichos's blue eyes--artificials, but they duplicated the originals exactly--stared blankly in front of him for a few moments. A living man would probably have closed them. Cray looked aside.

  "Brigantes," he said after a moment. ”Ustu. She was a Ho'Din, almost two meters tall and the loveliest pale green.... A woman--girl--named Margolis looked after us. I was extremely young."

  "Margolis was my mother's name," said Cray softly.

  There was another silence.

  "The children of the Jedi," Luke whispered.

  "A--a colony of them? A group?" Leia shivered, wondering why that sounded so familiar.

  "My mother..." Cray hesitated, smoothed back a tendril of ivory-pale hair with one long-fingered hand. "My great-aunt was always watching my mother, criticizing her. Later I put together that my mother's mother had been a Knight and Aunt Sophra was afraid Mother--or I--would show signs of sensitivity to the Force as well. Mother never did. I told you about that when Nichos first brought me to Yavin, Luke."

  Luke nodded, remembering. Remembering Nichos's shining grin, The most brilliant AI programmer at the Magrody Institute--and strong in the Force as well.