Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [38]
He touched his forehead. A small circle of slightly roughened skin remained where the cerebral feed had been hooked in. The same thing, he realized, must have been done to him.
“Where are we?” He got up—carefully—and fastened his lightsaber to his belt as they stepped through the door, into a corridor smelling of metal, chemicals, and cleaning solution. The walls were medium gray under smooth, even light; the deck underfoot vibrated with the faint hum of subspace cruising speeds. A boxy MSE-15 droid glided by, cleaning the floor.
“On the ship,” said Threepio. “The … the dreadnaught. The battlemoon Trooper Pothman spoke of. The giant vessel masked as an asteroid that fired on us. The Eye of Palpatine.”
The Eye of Palpatine. The name rang familiar in Luke’s mind. The voices had told him all about it in that long, hazy spell of memories that were not his own. Somehow he knew the dimensions of the ship, huge, more vast than even the biggest of the Super Star Destroyers, bigger than a torpedo sphere, with firepower to waste a planet.
Of course, he thought. It had been built back before the Death Star, when the Imperial Fleet still thought bigger was better.
“It wasn’t a base on that asteroid, Master Luke,” explained Threepio. “That asteroid was the ship, firing at us with an automatic gunnery computer …”
“Are you sure?” Luke could have sworn it had been a living hand on the guns. No computer had that kind of timing.
“Absolutely,” said Nichos. “Nobody can get up into the gun decks. And there’s nobody on board who can handle weaponry—not this kind of weaponry, anyway.”
“Nobody …,” said Luke. And then, “They’re picking up troops …” He stopped himself, remembering the overgrown base in the forest, the forty-five helmets staring emptily from the wall. “Don’t tell me there were still troops waiting.”
They stepped into the troop deck’s main mess hall. Ten or twelve enormous, white, furry bipeds were clustered nervously around the food slots, pulling out plates and swiftly sucking up everything smaller than bite-size through short, muscular probosci set under their four blinking black eyes. Several of them carried weapons—mostly legs wrenched off tables and chairs, it looked like—so Luke guessed they had to be at least semisentient.
There was a noise from the doors at the opposite end of the long room. The armed bipeds turned, raising their weapons. Seven tripodal creatures wandered in, baglike body masses swaying weirdly down from the central girdle of bone supported by the long legs, the tentacles between the hip joints dangling loose. Eyestalks rising above the body mass wavered with a motion that even Luke could tell was disoriented.
Two of the furry bipeds reached into the food slots and gathered as many plates and bowls as they could carry, and, guarded by one of their chair-leg-bearing mates, crossed cautiously to the newcomers. The larger of the two fuzzies raised a paw, hooted something in soft, unintelligible crooning, and, when the tripods made no response whatsoever, held out the plates.
The tripods extruded feeding tubes from among the eyestalks and ate. Some of them reached confusedly up with the tentacles to take the plates. The white furries remaining by the food slots wheeped and muffed to one another. The taller of the food bearers reached out with a curious gentleness and touched—patted—the nearest tripod in a gesture Luke knew at once was reassurance.
“That’ll be enough of that, trooper!” The room’s third set of sliding doors hurshed open, and a gang of about fifteen Gamorreans strode in. Some of them had wedged themselves into pieces of the largest stormtrooper fatigues obtainable by cutting out the sleeves, or had fastened chunks of the shiny white armor onto their arms and chests with silver engine tape. Others wore naval trooper