Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [22]
“The Gamorrean colonists?” suggested Cray. “Or smugglers, maybe?”
“The Gamorreans haven’t stopped fighting each other long enough to set up a technological base of any kind on any planet where they’ve settled,” said Luke doubtfully. “It might be smugglers—which doesn’t mean they won’t be allied with Harrsk or Teradoc or some other Imperial wannabe, or with one of the big smuggler gangs for that matter. But at this point,” he added, toggling the readout back to the navicomputer and marveling a little that Cray had gotten the thing workable at all, “we don’t have any choice.”
———
Massive, porcine, primitive, and belligerent, Gamorreans will live and thrive wherever there is soil fertile enough to farm, sufficient game to hunt, and rocks to throw at one another, but given their preference they will take forested country, if possible where mushrooms grow. The woods surrounding the four- or five-acre fire scar in which Luke put the Huntbird down were monumental, dense, thick, old, and hugely tall, like the rain forests of Ithor but heavier, and the shadowed, brooding silence beneath their leathery leaves made Luke profoundly uneasy.
“The base should be in that direction,” he said, sitting down rather quickly on the steps of the explorer’s emergency exit—the boarding ramp was inoperational—and pointing off in the direction of the lately risen orange sun. Despite all the energy of the Force that he could summon he felt giddy and ill, and though his lungs were healing rapidly he was still short of breath. “It’s not very far; the energy readings don’t look big enough for power fences or heavy weaponry.”
“Wouldn’t they need power fences at least if there are Gamorreans in the area?” Like Luke, Cray had stripped out of her t-suit; her deft fingers were rapidly rebraiding her hair even as she spoke. Quite a trick without a mirror, thought Luke, a little amused. But Cray could manage it if anyone could.
“The Gamorreans may not have colonized this continent,” he pointed out. Wind stirred at the long grass, dark blue-green, like all the vegetation in this amber-lit world, but far from being unsettling the slight goldenness of the light gave everything a deep sense of sunset peace. A flock of tiny bipeds—red and yellow, and no higher than Luke’s knee—fled, startled from behind a fallen tree trunk, and went whistling and chirping away toward the eaves of the woods.
“For that matter, we may find a colony from some other race altogether. The reports on this world haven’t been updated in fifty years.”
“We have the engine hatches open, Master Luke.” Threepio and Nichos appeared at the top of the steps, the gold and silver metals of their bodies dented and streaked with oil. They, too, had taken a beating in the battle with the asteroid. “Most of the coolant gas has now dissipated into the atmosphere.”
The impact of the last plasma bolt and the shattered asteroid had jammed the hatches into the engine compartment; in addition to the intermittent waves of dizziness that still plagued him, Luke had thought it wiser to let the droids, who needed no breath masks, use their greater strength to force the doors while the humans made a quick reconnaissance of the outside.
The engine itself was a complete mess.
“We’ll need about thirty meters of number eight cabling, and a dozen data couplers,” said Luke half an hour later, sliding gingerly out of an access hatch in the darkened engine room. Even the glowpanels had gone out here, the claustrophobic chamber illuminated by a string of emergency worklights wired to a Scale-10 battery from the emergency kit. “The rest of it I think I can patch.”
I’d better be able to patch, he reflected grimly. Leia’s words about how easy it was to get lost between inhabited worlds reverberated unnervingly