Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [18]
The armored explorer-cruiser Huntbird the Ithorians had lent to Luke came out of hyperspace a healthy distance from the luminous zone of dust and ionized gases listed on the starcharts as the Moonflower Nebula.
“Are you sure that’s what the random coordinates were for?” asked Cray doubtfully, studying the readouts of all information on the area on the three screens immediately beneath the bridge’s main viewport. “It isn’t even listed in the Registry. Might the coordinates have been for System K Seven Forty-nine, for instance? That’s only a few parsecs away, and at least there’s a planet there—Pzob …” She read off the screen. “Human-habitable and temperate … the Empire could have had a base there, though there’s none listed.”
“It’s habitable,” agreed Luke, tapping through instructions on the keypad with one hand and keeping an eye on the changing images on the central screen as he spoke. “But it was colonized way, way back in the days by Gamorreans, goodness only knows how or why. Anybody wanting a permanent base there would have had to spend a fortune in security.”
“A most unpleasant people, Gamorreans,” agreed Threepio primly from the bench seat he shared with Nichos in the passenger area of the bridge. “They were difficult enough to deal with in the entourage of Jabba the Hutt.… Procedures programs for visiting Gamorr consist of a single line: DO NOT VISIT GAMORR. Really!”
“I don’t know …” Luke studied the viewscreen ahead of them. The reflective veils of dust picked up the light of surrounding stars, and glowed from within to indicate that somewhere in that vastness two or three stars were concealed, their rays diffused by the all-encompassing gases so that almost nothing could be seen. “Readings show a lot of rocks in there.”
He touched a switch, and a schematic manifested itself on one of the small screens. On it the zone was thickly speckled with what looked like grains of sand and pebbles held in uneasy random suspension.
“Asteroid field,” he said. “Looks like all sizes. Usual iron-nickel composition. May be a belt going all around one of the stars in there … I wonder if the Empire ever did any mining?”
“It would cost a fortune, wouldn’t it?” asked Nichos, getting up to step close and look down over their shoulders.
Luke flipped through screen after screen, studying mass readings, spectrographic analyses, local gravitational fields, while all the time the glowing, shifting wall of light drew nearer, so bright that its soft colors streamed from the viewscreen over the faces of those grouped around the console. “It would help if I knew what I was looking for. Whoa, looks like we got something in there …”
He accelerated gently into the first outstringers of the veils of light. Colors swirled and drifted, chunks of rock the size of office blocks on Coruscant floating suddenly out of dustbanks and sandbars of brilliance, so that Luke had to maneuver slowly among them. “There we go.” He toggled a switch, and before them they made out the shape of a cold gray worldlet, seemingly embedded in veils of chilly whites and greens, pitted with holes in which old crane arms and landing cradles could be seen.
“A base of some kind,” said Luke. “Probably mining, but it looks like scavengers have been at it for scrap and whatever parts they could float away.”
“I’m surprised anybody bothered.” Cray peered around his arm for a better view. “Can we get a readout on the rocks around us? With all the interference we’re getting from the magnetic and ion fields of the dust cover, this would be a swell place to hide.”
“I’m not picking up anything, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing here.” Luke thumbed the viewer to show a couple of the larger rocks, in the nine-kilometer