Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [164]
The vine jerked and gave half a meter under her weight, but somehow the huge steel basket of the bed was safely, easily under her. She grabbed a support cable and clung, releasing the vine, gasping and trembling all over. Lights glowed above her, below her, and all around, illuminating the other beds in the dark. Leia looked up to the dark mazes of tracks, the rags of fog drifting among the cable-and-pulley arrangements that held up the gondolas of the beds and above it all the cold white fragments of wind-thrashed ice skating across the plex of the dome itself. She knew she shouldn’t look down but did … a swirling sea of fog, broken by dark trees and the fragile lamps of a sunken city.
A tremendously long way down.
Lightly, she ran along the duckboard that stretched the length of the bed.
The supply station affixed to the cliff wall itself, with its own thick beds festooned in vines, seemed impossibly far away.
The steel gondolas that supported the hanging beds were ten or twelve meters by six, filled with earth and overflowing with the heavy, thick-leaved coffee- or silk-vines. This was a coffee bed, tight clusters of dark beans half hidden among the striped leaves, the bittersweet smell of the foliage thick in her lungs. Narrow catwalks ran between the beds, little more than chain ladders wound on reels that extended or contracted as the beds were raised and lowered, or could be unhooked and drawn in completely if a bed was brought laterally around to one of the supply stations on the rift wall. The thought of crossing one turned Leia absolutely cold, but it was the only means of making her way from bed to bed until she reached the station …
The bed jarred, shook, swayed. Turning, she saw that Irek had swung from the window as she had, and was running lightly down the duckboards to her, lightsaber shining redly in his hand.
Leia fired her blaster and missed, the boy ducking nimbly and vanishing among the vines. Rather than face him—not knowing exactly what she’d have to face—she fled, ducking and scrambling across the first of the spider-strand catwalks, clinging to the safety line that formed a spindly railing for the bridge. She half expected Irek to cut the bridge behind her and try to spill her off, but he didn’t, probably knowing she could hang on to the ladder and climb. She felt his weight on the catwalk behind her but didn’t dare stop and turn until she had the next bed swinging and rocking beneath her feet; then she turned, in time to see him spring off the catwalk and into the vines.
She fired again but the blaster jerked in her hand, almost loosening her grip, and she ducked the whining slash of the blade close enough that she could feel its cold. The coffee vines tangled her feet but she moved lightly, ducking his cuts, weaving and springing away. She dodged again, as behind her two of the heavy stakes that held the vines uprooted themselves and slashed at her head like thrown clubs—he was attempting to drive her over the edge. Her second shot missed, and she could feel the pressure of his mind on hers; her lungs laboring, her throat tightening. Consciously she relaxed them, opened them, thrust aside what he was trying to do to her …
A blaster bolt whined, took a piece out of the steel rim of the basket, and left a mass of acridly smoking vines between them. Irek startled back and looked around; Leia fired from a distance of less than two meters and only at the last second did his mind try to rip the blaster again from her hand. The bolt seared a smoking rent in the shoulder of his coat, and at the same moment Keldor’s voice yelled, “I’ve got her! I’ve—”
Irek lunged at Leia in response, driving her toward the edge, and then there was a shattering crack from the plex overhead and the pane cracked, frigid air pouring down through the hole the blaster had made and turning instantly to a swirling column of fog in which snow fragments sparkled viciously in the starry lights.
Leia