Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [24]
Blackness closed on his vision and he felt his knees buckle. Cray tried to steady him—the stormtrooper sprang forward, dropped his rifle, and caught his arm.
“You’re hurt,” said the stormtrooper, helping him to sit and kneeling beside him. Nichos and Threepio, hands full of patching materials, appeared from the storeroom hatchway and stared in surprise as the stormtrooper pulled off his helmet, revealing a kindly, much-lined black face surrounded by a grizzled popcorn halo of hair and beard.
“Oh, you poor folks, you look like you’ve had an awful time,” said the man. “You come on over to my camp, I’ll get you something to eat and a cup of tea.”
Bereft of his gleaming armor, Triv Pothman proved to be a trim, strongly built man in his mid-fifties—“Though I admit the damp’s getting to me and I’m not so quick as I used to be.” He gestured to the racks of armor along the curved inner wall of his shelter, a low, white, self-erecting dome patched all over outside with black and salmon-colored lichens, rain-streaked and covered with the dirt of years. Second-growth trees, suckers, and vines surrounded what had been a clearing of Imperial military regulation size all around, though most of the sheds and shelters, and the long-dead posts of the security fence, lay buried now under tangles of vines.
“Forty-five of us, there were.” There was something akin to pride in his voice. “Forty-five of us, and I’m the only one left. The Gamorreans got the rest, mostly, except for that giant fight between the Commander and Killium Neb and his friends over … Well, that was a long time ago, and it cost some good men their lives.” He shook his head regretfully, and poured water from a bearing housing hung over the fire into a spouted pot of painted terra-cotta. The smell of healing herbs filled the vine-hung dome.
“And there they all are.” He gestured to the helmets. “For all the good it ever did them.”
The old unit medkit was far more complete than what had been on board the Huntbird even before the impact had scattered and smashed half the vessels in the explorer craft’s sick bay. Pothman had dosed Luke with another two ampoules of antishock—in addition to what Cray had given him right after the final blast—and had hooked him for half an hour to a therapeutic respirator that still, for a miracle, worked. Looking around over the edge of the breath mask that covered his lower face, Luke was deeply grateful. From his days as a pilot in the Rebel fleet he knew too well that once you got injured, unless you got medical help soon you were going to keep on getting injured as you became less and less able to protect yourself.
Though he never, he reflected with a certain wry amusement, thought he’d be so glad that the Empire took good care to equip its stormtroopers with the best.
A feathered lizard, turquoise as palomella blossoms, appeared between the looped-back curtains of the dome’s doorway, chittered and spread its mane, and Pothman tweaked a chunk of crust from one of the brown rolls he’d taken from his oven in honor of his guests, and tossed it. The lizard minced forward on delicate little feet, picked up the bread, and nibbled, watching the gray-haired hermit all the while with black jewels of eyes.
“Sure is good to see human beings again.” Pothman offered the plate of rolls and honey to Cray, who sat beside Luke on the edge of Pothman’s bunk. He winked at her. “Sure is good to see a nice-looking young lady.”
Cray drew herself up and started to retort that she wasn’t a nice-looking young lady, she held a full professorship at the Magrody Institute, but Luke moved his hand just enough to touch her arm.
The stormtrooper had already turned back to survey the helmets along the wall. They were of an older style than Luke had known, longer in the face to allow for the earlier configuration of respirators, with a dark band of sensors above the eyes.
“They would go on fighting the Gamorreans,” Pothman sighed. “That was like sending them out invitations to tea, of course. They’ll miss