Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [116]
By the chronometer on his wrist it was just after 1000 hours. Threepio should already have located the main communications trunk and isolated the line that controlled the Deck 19 intercoms. It was information classified to the Will, but the Will couldn’t prevent Callista from whistling a trace note from one side of the deck to the other, loud enough for the protocol droid’s sensitive receptors to detect. Failure of the line would be attributed to the Jawas, in their guise as Rebel saboteurs, or just possibly—when the guards on Lift Shaft 21 heard the Gakfedd voices—to some plot by the Gakfedds themselves. With luck, Luke could get up the shaft and get Cray out of her cell before they were even aware they’d been tricked.
Abyssal darkness and faint, ghostly clankings lay at the bottom of the gangway beyond the open doorway labeled 17. This was one of the ship’s recycling centers, cut off from the crew decks or any realm of human activity. The droids who occupied themselves with the reconstitution of food, water, and oxygen needed no lights to work. The glow of Luke’s staff picked out moving angles, blocky SP-80s going about their monotonous business in company with apparatus not intended to interface with humans at all, MMDs of all sizes, scooting RIs and MSEs, and a midsize Magnobore that bumped Luke’s calves like a mammoth turtle. He’d disconnected the gauge lights on the altered tracker to delay as long as possible the moment when the Klaggs realized they’d been duped, and it drifted forlornly behind him, like a rather dirty balloon attached by an invisible line to the trackball in his pocket.
Right turn, then second left, Luke repeated to himself. A wall panel in one of the recycling chambers, a narrow shaft at a forty-five-degree angle … He settled his mind, collecting about himself, in spite of the pain and the slow numbing of the overdoses of perigen, the mental focus, the inner quiet, that was the strength of the Force. For the dozenth—or hundredth—time since that particular side effect had begun to make itself felt, he wondered if he’d be able to work better with an infection-induced fever and the constant stress of pain.
It had to work, he thought. It had to.
He turned a corner, and stopped.
A dead Jawa lay in the corridor.
It had a handful of cables wound around one shoulder, a satchel open beside its hand. Luke limped to the body, eased himself down to kneel beside it, and touched the skinny black claw of wrist. A charred pit of blaster fire gaped in its side.
Batteries and power cells lay strewn around the open satchel. Luke scooped them back into the leather pouch, slung the strap over his shoulder. Faint whirring made him look up, to face two small droids of a kind he’d never seen before. Gyroscopically balanced on single wheels, they reminded him of some of the older models of interrogation droids, but instead of pincer arms they had long, silvery tentacles, jointed like snakes. Small round sensors, like cold eyes, triangulated on him at the end of prehensile stalks.
The two droids were barely taller than Artoo-Detoo but there was a curiously insectile menace to them that made Luke back slowly away.
The tentacles extruded with a whippy hiss, encircled and lifted the Jawa’s tattered little carcass. The droids swiveled and shot away. Luke followed to the door of a cavern lit only by the sickish glow of gauge lights and readouts. The smell of the place was like walking into a wall of muck: ammoniac, organic, and vile. Steam frothed thinly from beneath the covers of the three round, well-like vats whose metal curbs rose scarcely half a meter above the bare durasteel of the deck. As the snake-eyed droids approached the nearest tank, its cover dilated open. The stench redoubled as steam poured forth, knee-high ground fog that swirled to the farthest corners of the room.
The droids raised the Jawa corpse high and dropped it into the vat with a viscous ploop. The cover dilated shut.
A sharp rattle at Luke’s side made him jump. A slotted hatchway popped open in the wall, and a tumble