Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [27]
Which meant there were local tribes, probably Gamorreans, all of them hostile, who would delight in tearing apart both droids and the ship itself for scrap metal.
They were doomed.
The Gamorreans made their appearance long before the engines were even halfway to liftoff capability. Luke was dimly aware of them, through the exhausted pounding in his head, mostly as a sense of time running out, a sense of someone trying to tell him something. But between channeling the Force to his own healing and the dizziness that still remained whenever he moved too quickly, it was hard to understand. He was lying on his back under one of the bridge consoles, pin-checking wires to see which were still capable of taking power. He laid the pin down, closed his eyes, and relaxed, letting the images come to his mind of clumsy, weirdly stealthy forms moving through the slate-dark shadows of monster trees.
“Company coming.” He slid—carefully—out from under, and made his way as quickly as he could to where Cray and Nichos were repairing the stabilizer through the portside emergency hatch.
He could see Cray had already sensed something, too.
“Batten it,” said Luke. “Get in the ship.”
An arrow shattered against the hull inches from his face. He wheeled, the whole world seeming to jerk under him, sent a lance of blaster fire into the woods to make them keep their heads down, and scrambled back through the hatch as the first band broke cover.
Gamorreans on the whole, seen against a backdrop of more civilized worlds, generally appear clumsy and slow. This is at least partially a function of their stupidity: They don’t understand much of what goes on around them, and tend to knock things over when they’re not calculating how to use them as weapons in the happy event of a fight breaking out. In the woods of a primitive world with which they were familiar, the huge, muscle-bound bodies moved with terrifying speed, and in the drooling porcine faces showed neither intelligence nor the need for it.
They saw what they wanted, and they attacked.
Axes and stones splintered on the hatch as it slammed shut. Luke stumbled, dizzy, and Cray and Nichos seized his arms, half dragged him up the emergency gangway and onto the bridge, where Triv Pothman was leaning forward across the main console to peer through the glassine viewport at the attackers hammering the ship’s sides.
“That’s the Gakfedd tribe,” reported the local expert equably. “See the big guy there? That’s Ugbuz. Alpha male.”
A huge boar Gamorrean was pounding the hatch cover with an ax made of a hunk of stained blast shielding strapped to a hardwood shaft the size of Luke’s leg. His helmet was covered with plumes and bits of dried leather, which Luke realized a moment later were the ears of other Gamorreans.
“That one there with the necklace of microchips is Krok, junior husband to Ugbuz’s wife, Bullyak. If I know Bullyak, she’s watching from the woods …”
“You know them?” said Cray, startled.
Pothman smiled. “Of course, lovely lady.” He still held the gauge and snip-welder he’d been using when Luke had gone down to warn the others. “I was a slave in their village for the better part of two years. In a minute we’ll see … Yep, there they are.”
A second band had emerged from the trees on the opposite edge of the great clearing, equally dirty, drooling, shaggy, clothed in spiked armor wrought half of bright-colored reptile leather, half of scrap metal clearly scavenged or stolen from the Imperial base that for thirty years now had rotted in the woods.
“The Klaggs,” said Pothman. “Look, back in the trees … That’s Mugshub, their matriarch. Like Bullyak, making sure they don’t damage anything of value in their enthusiasm. And besides …” He made a close-fisted mime of a manly muscle-flex. “Fighting just wouldn’t be fighting unless the girls were along to watch.”
The new band of Gamorreans fell upon those already pounding on the side of the ship. Ugbuz and the other boars of the Gakfedd tribe turned