Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [136]
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