Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [29]
His vision cleared and he saw Pothman running, zigzagging in the long grass. One shot from the autocannon puffed dirt and shredded stems on the black man’s heels; a second caught him square between the shoulder blades. Luke hit the ground again and rolled to avoid a similar blast. From the tail of his eye he saw Cray do the same.
The Force. Got to use the Force …
Silent and evil, like silvery bubbles, tracker droids drifted from the open door of the lander.
They paused for a moment at the top of the ramp, round and gleaming, the small searchbeams clustered at their apexes moving, shifting, actinic beams stabbing around them, crisscrossing in the rich dim sunlight as they established bearings. Sensors turned like obscene antennae—Luke saw the round lenses on their equators iris open and shut, vile, all-seeing eyes.
Steel pincers and grippers unfurled from beneath them like insect feet, jellyfish tentacles, dangling as they drifted. With medium but inexorable speed, they floated down the ramp.
Concentrate the Force on body temperature, thought Luke. Lower it, slow the heart rate, anything to fox their signals …
Nichos, with far more agility than average for human-form droids, was running for the woods. Threepio, not designed for headlong flight, hastened determinedly after him. The trackers ignored them both.
“Do not attempt escape. Mutineers and evaders …”
Forty meters away, Cray rose to her knees behind a fallen log and got off a perfect shot, burning away the nest of sensors on the tracker homing in on where she lay. Luke shut his teeth on a cry of “Don’t …” knowing that it didn’t matter if she gave away her position. The trackers knew her position.
As the injured machine whirled, lurched, sensor lights stabbing and swiveling wildly to reorient, a second tracker spun in midair and caught Cray hard with a stunbolt, dropping her like a dead thing in the long grass.
Luke flattened, felt for his blaster, fighting to keep his vision single as the image of two of the floating droids divided into four, hovering over Cray’s fallen body, reaching down with glittering, jointed limbs. Halfway to the clearing’s edge, Nichos halted.
“Cray!”
His cry was a living man’s cry of despair.
A shadow fell over Luke. He knew what it was even as he rolled to face it, turned on the ground, summoned all the Force, all his will and concentration, for a single shot.
White light blinded his eyes and he heard the oily soft chitter of steel limbs unfurling toward him as he pressed the trigger.
It was the last thing he recalled.
Chapter 5
“The children of the Jedi.” Jevax, Chief Person of Plawal, slowed his steps on the hairpin switchbacks of the red-black rock stairs, deep-set green eyes taking on a faraway expression as he gazed out into the still rainbow mists that shut them in. The steps were cut straight into the coarse, faintly sparkling rock of the little valley’s cliffs, but whoever had done that cutting had had either limited facilities or a paranoid streak about the original inhabitants of the valley floor. Leia could touch the rock to her right, and the railing of stripped shalaman wood on her left, without extending her arms more than a dozen centimeters from her sides, and by the look of the wood the railing was fairly new. Beyond it lay fog, darkened by blurs that she knew were the tops of trees.
“Yes,” said Jevax softly. “Yes, they were here.”
He returned his concentration to the climb, pushing through overhanging branches bearded with sweetberry vines and holding them politely back for Leia, Han, and finally Chewbacca to follow. In the steam-chamber atmosphere of the Plawal Rift, trees grew from the smallest juts and irregularities in the succession of “benches”—natural rock platforms or ledges that led up to the sheer wall of the cliffs themselves. Dark leaves mixed with trailing gray curtains of moss that hung over the rock face, jeweled with speckled bowvines and