Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [152]
She turned aside from it, sobbing, trying to find some way around, and in her mind she heard Irek’s voice whispering, Irek’s shrill boy’s laugh. I’ll trap you. I’ll find you and trap you. You’ll never get out …
The drug, she thought. The drug they’d given her must have left a psychic residue he could track.…
She couldn’t let him catch her. Couldn’t let him overtake her. Blocks and slabs of darkness loomed in front of her, walls of stench overpowering her ability to track where she should go. The smell of kretch, of roses, of filth. Great, howling waves of power jerked and dragged at her, pulling her back, washing her sideways. In the back of her consciousness she was aware of Irek running lightly, skipping and hopping down the corridors with the sheer delight of trying to find her, trying to track her, trying to block her from the room where her body lay.
Luke, she thought desperately, Luke, help me …
And like a mocking playground echo, Irek mimicked jeeringly, Oh, Lukie, help me …
There. That corridor there. She knew it, recognized it, flung herself around the corner …
And he was standing in front of the door.
The towering black shape, the glister of pallid light on the black helmet, the evil gleam of lights within the shadows of his great cloak, and the thick, indrawn breath.
Vader.
Vader was standing before the door.
She swung around in terror. Irek stood in the passageway behind her, the dark radiance that surrounded him seeming to pulse with lightning. In his hand he held one of the steel balls that had so puzzled her in the toy room, but now, with her disembodied consciousness, she saw that there were entrances to it, entrances invisible to eyes limited by the electromagnetic spectrum.
Entrances that did not serve as exits.
And within the ball itself, maze after maze of concentric, ever tinier labyrinth balls.
He smiled. “You’re here. I can tell you’re here.”
Leia turned. Vader still stood before the door. She could not pass him. She could not.
“Mother can’t stop me,” said Irek. “She won’t even know.”
He held up the ball, and his mind seemed to reach out into the corridor like a vast net, drawing at her. Leia felt herself dissolving like a smoke wraith, an unskilled illusion; drawn as if by a vacuum toward the steel ball; dissipating into the power of the dark side.
There had to be a way to use the Force to protect herself, she thought … to get past the dark terror that stood before the door. But she didn’t know what it was.
The boy puckered his lips and inhaled, pulling her in with his breath.
“Irek!”
Roganda appeared in the corridor behind her son, her white dress gathered up in her hand as if she’d been running.
“Irek, come at once!”
He swung around, his concentration broken. The shadow of Vader vanished. Leia flung herself at the door, through the door, hurled herself to the sleeping form on the bed …
With human perceptions once again she barely heard the voices through the door, but she recognized, nevertheless, Ohran Keldor’s voice.
“Lord Irek, we’ve picked it up on the scanners! It’s here! The Eye of Palpatine.”
Chapter 22
“Master Luke, are you quite certain this is going to work?”
“You got me.” The logistics of managing a staff and the rope with which Luke was towing the small pump salvaged from a laundry room were not the best in the world, but at this point Luke was simply delighted to have located a pump that still worked. Very little on the Eye of Palpatine still worked.
Except the guns, he thought. Except the guns.
“How much time will it give us?” inquired Nichos, striding silently along under his load of two oil drums filled with sugar water. “Provided it works at all.”
“Maybe an hour clear.” The lights on his staff were failing, too, and the service corridor, with its low ceilings