Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [117]
The skull of a Gamorrean grinned up at Luke from the bin.
Luke stepped quickly back. Though he knew that full recycling from enzymatic breakdown products didn’t kick in until the second or third week of deepspace missions, still he found himself queasy at the memory of that gukked egg.
The foo-twitter waited for him in the corridor. Luke led the way through another door, past backup enzyme tanks locked up cold and closed, to the far wall. At the touch of the lights on his staff the three SP-80s ranked in a corner swiveled their cubical upper bodies, the wide-range sensor squares casting dim blue glare. A small MMF rolled out of the darkness and rattled its three arms at him like a bare mechanical tree. It halted beside Luke as he knelt to pop the panel hatches, reached to take the hatch cover from him with the surprising, irresistible strength of droids. Luke leaned around the back and hit the pause button. The MMF froze, panel still raised in its grippers.
Within the shaft, the enclision grid’s lattices grinned at him like broken, icy teeth, fading out of sight into the dark chimney above.
Very carefully, Luke leaned into the shaft. It ascended two levels at a steep slant, climbable at a pinch, but not by a man with a useless leg. The square, cold patchwork of the walls seemed to whisper, Try it. Go ahead.
It’s like causing a blaster to misfire, Callista had said.
And, The more that hit you, the more that will.
He thumbed the trackball in his pocket, and the silvery tracker drifted close.
He’d examined the latches that dogged panels shut from behind, so it was an easy matter to reach through with his mind—as he had reached behind the panel leading into the shaft—and twist the latches aside at the top. More difficult was blowing the panel clear, for it was hard to concentrate through fatigue and pain. He felt the hatch cover give, two levels up, and dimly heard the clang of it striking the floor.
Air flowed gently down the shaft against his face.
Two levels. Eight meters at a slant, though the darkness was too dense for his eyes to penetrate.
“Okay, pal,” he whispered to the foo-twitter. “Do your stuff.”
He thumbed the trackball to edge the tracker to within centimeters of the enclision field. Focused his mind, gathered his thoughts, put aside pain, weariness, and growing anxiety. Each square of the grid came to his mind, flawed, delayed, molecules not quite meeting, synapses not quite touching—momentary shifts in atmospheric pressure, conductivity, reaction time … And beside that, kinetic force building up like lightning, dense and waiting, aiming like a sited cannon upward into the dark.
It was like shouting a word, but there was no word. Only the silent explosion of the foo-twitter’s speed, rocketing upward, ripping air as if fired from a slugthrower, and the spattering hiss of lightning. Few, spidery, too late, the blue bolts zapped and fizzled from the opal squares around the metal casing, sparking where one hit, two …
Then he felt it in air, and the grid fell silent again.
Luke checked the monitor on the trackball.
The foo-twitter was still transmitting.
Shakily, he leaned his forehead on the jamb of the panel, thanked the Force and all the Powers of the universe …
And turned, to see what, for that first moment, he thought was another foo-twitter hanging in the dark behind him.
The next second his reflexes took over and he flung himself sideways, barely in time to avoid the scorching zap of blaster fire. Tracker flashed through his mind as he rolled behind the disused tank, jerking his bad leg out of the way of a bolt that burned a chunk out of the heel of his boot. He remembered the charred hole in the Jawa’s side. Evidently the floating, silver trackers were equipped to do more than just stun and fetch.
He grabbed for his staff where it lay in the open and whipped his hand to safety—empty—only just in time. Another bolt hissed