Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [37]
Why did you lie, Ben?
Looking back, he knew exactly why Ben had lied. At eighteen, the knowledge that his father still lived, still existed in some form, no matter how changed, would have drawn him to that father as only an orphan could have been drawn … would have drawn him to the dark side. At eighteen, he would not have had the experience, the technical strength, to resist. Ben had known that.
The Force flickered in him, like a single flame on a windy night.
“Luke?”
Revenge on the Jedi, on their harlots and their brats. Burn and kill as they burned and killed your parents …
The image in his mind was of seared skeletons in the sand outside the demolished wreck of the only home he’d ever known. The stink of burning plastic, the desert heat hammering his head less terrible than the oily heat of the flames. The emptiness in his heart was a dry well plunging lightless to the center of the world.
That farm in the desert hadn’t been much of a belonging-place, but it had been all he’d ever had.
When he’d gone back to Tatooine to rescue Han from Jabba the Hutt, he had returned to that ruined farmstead on the edge of the Dune Sea. Nobody had taken up the land. Jawas had looted what was left of the house, probably as soon as the ashes cooled. The rooms around the sunken courtyard had collapsed. The whole place was only a crumbling subsidence, half filled with sand.
The markers he’d put on the graves of the people who’d been parents to him had been stolen, too.
Uncle Owen had given his whole life to the farm. It was as if he had never existed at all.
“Luke?”
He blinked. It wasn’t a good idea.
“Luke, are you all right?”
“Oh, please, Master Luke, try to remember who you are! The situation is quite desperate!”
He opened his eyes. The whole room performed one slow, deliberate loop-the-loop and Luke tightened his grip on the sides of the bunk in which he lay to keep from falling out, but at least Nichos and See-Threepio, standing over him, didn’t try to clone duplicates of themselves, and the pain in his chest was far less than it had been. He felt deeply, profoundly tired.
Beyond Nichos and Threepio he could see the shut door of the small cell in which he lay: brightly illuminated, comfortable, with three other bunks and a couple of lockers and drawers. Clean, cold, and with an air of being barely lived in, except for his own black flight suit hanging in one locker, his lightsaber on a dresser top, and the black cloak of a Jedi spread like a blanket across one of the other bunks.
Luke raised his arm and saw that he was wearing the olive-gray undress uniform of an Imperial stormtrooper.
The Jedi killed …
The Jedi killed …
He took a deep breath, summoned all of the Force away from the healing of his body—Nichos and Threepio immediately split into two again—and directed it inward on those memories like a cleansing light.
The voices in his mind yattered on for a bit, then scoured away.
He woke up again, weak and shaken. He couldn’t have been unconscious for more than a few moments because Threepio was still explaining …
“… said that there was nothing wrong with you and you’d only malinger if you went to sick bay! We didn’t know what to do …”
“We’re going to shell Plawal,” said Luke.
Both his companions looked at him in alarm. “We know that, Master Luke!”
Luke sat up, catching at Threepio’s arm as a wave of nausea swept over him; Nichos said, “We’ve been hyper-jumping to half a dozen planets along the Outer Rim where the Empire hid its shock troops for this mission thirty years ago. The lander went down on Tatooine, Bradden, I don’t know where-all. Everything’s automated: landers, pickup, indoctrination …”
“Indoctrination?” said Luke. Another image came, distant and blurred through the ache in his head: a semicircular chamber heaped with unconscious Gamorreans, weapons still in their hands and the tiny, gray, parasitic morrts that clung to them even into battle beginning to recover from the stunrays and skitter nervously over the bodies. Two huge silvery droids of the old G-40 single-function