Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [159]
The sprinkler system burst into gushing life.
A rainstorm of water poured down over Luke, Threepio, and every squatty, mushroom-shaped, putty-colored Kitonak in the section.
“Deck Sixteen!” cried Threepio in the Kitonak tongue. “Deck Sixteen! The water is in the shuttlecraft!” And he sprang back, dragging his master to safety as the thundering tide of Kitonaks not only slammed through the door, but broke down the walls on either side of the entry-way and went lumbering and slipping up the corridor in the direction of the shuttle decks.
Luke cast his mind ahead, visualizing every carefully memorized foot of the corridors, gangway, elevator shaft between the Portside Section Lounge and the Deck 16 shuttle-hangar, superheating the thin layer of air at the top of the hallways to fire the sprinklers along the way.
Kitonaks mate in water.
Rain, to them, is the trigger for startling and enthusiastic speed.
“You think Cray and Nichos’ll be able to handle getting them in the shuttle?”
“Should be no problem,” said Callista. “I’ll go along, but I don’t think it’s anything a well-bred person should see. I’ll be back with you by the time we need to convince the Klaggs and the Gakfedds to go on board.”
I can’t do it, thought Luke, watching the ghostly flicker in the whirling rain retreat along the corridor in the wake of the lubricated and lust-crazed mob. I can’t … not save her.
He stood with the water coursing down his hair and face, trying not to think about not ever speaking with her again.
“Master Luke?” Threepio’s voice was diffident.
With an almost physical effort he shook himself free of that grief, the sense that there was nothing in him, body or soul, that did not consist entirely of blinding pain. First things first. “Yeah,” he said softly. “Let’s go get the Jawas and move the tripods out.”
Roganda and her son were forging an alliance with the Senex Lords.
Leia struggled, trying desperately to return to consciousness, but her mind felt as if she had been frozen in that gelid green ocean. She was aware of the room around her—still dimly aware of the shadows of others who had occupied that room—but could neither sink back into her original coma nor rise to wakefulness.
And she had to wake up. She had to get out.
They were creating a power base, to give them position with the warlords Harrsk and Teradoc and the other remaining branches of the Imperial Fleet.
And around that power base, the Imperial Fleet might very well coalesce once more.
And that coalition would be armed with the wealth of the Senex Lords, and the massive weaponry of the Eye of Palpatine, drawn from the darkness of the past by a fifteen-year-old boy whose powers could cripple the Republic’s unprepared defenses. To gain the Eye, and Irek, as secret weapons, a man like High Admiral Harrsk might surrender power that he would not have given over to a child’s regent a few years ago.
She had to get out.
Or get a message out, even if it cost her her life.
Han Solo. Ithor. Time of Meeting. Once he’d stumbled onto some cache of Irek’s yarrock hidden in the tunnels, once his mind had been cleared a little by the counterreaction of the drug, Drub had done everything in his power to warn his friend … to help the Republic that he knew was Han’s new allegiance. He, too, knew they had to be warned.
She wondered at what point they’d gotten rid of Nasdra Magrody. Probably as soon as Irek was capable of controlling and directing his ability to influence mechanicals—Magrody knew far too much to be allowed to live.
Like his pupil, she thought. She remembered the report of Stinna Draesinge Sha’s murder: Her room had been gone through, her papers destroyed. Magrody must have worked on the initial phases of the implanted brain chip with her, or talked to her about them.
And hadn’t there been some other physicist, some other student of Magrody’s, who’d died under