Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [41]
The Gamorrean hurled a table at him, which Luke bisected, then struck at him with an ax at the same moment a ricocheting blaster bolt caught Luke glancingly on the shoulder. Either the blaster was turned fairly low or its power cell was nearly exhausted, but the jolt of it knocked him, gasping and confused, to the floor. He rolled, his vision blurring, blacking. Cut at the Gamorrean, who’d been joined by a friend, also wielding an ax—double vision? Luke wondered cloudily, but he took off one assailant’s arm and tried to get to his feet and out the door. He couldn’t—his head was swimming too badly for him to figure out why—and he could only slash upward at his remaining assailant, cleaving in half the table that slammed down on him before it could crush his bones.
The cold sick weakness of shock and the sensation of something being wrong with the gravity …
Then the Klaggs were gone, leaving a shambles of blood and broken furniture. Luke stayed conscious just long enough to switch off his lightsaber.
Pain brought him to as if someone had drenched his left leg with acid. He cried out, clutching at the greasy mess of blankets on which he lay, and someone slapped him hard enough to slam him back down, breathless and dizzy and almost nauseated with pain.
“Shouldn’t you get something from sick bay for that?”
Ugbuz’s voice.
And in reply a vicious, squealing snuffle, and warm drool spattered down onto Luke’s face and bare chest. More pain, as someone jerked tight a bandage around his left leg.
Not a bandage, he thought, identifying another sound, the slick, shrill searing noise of engine tape being pulled off a roll. A familiar sound. If it weren’t for engine tape the Rebellion would have collapsed in its first year.
Cold air on his thigh, his knee, his foot. And rough, clawed hands taping a splint onto his leg.
The wrench of it made him cry out again and Ugbuz said, “Suck it up, trooper.”
Luke wondered about the incidence of Imperial officers being killed from behind by friendly fire. He opened his eyes.
He was in a hut. A HUT? The ceiling, only a meter or two above his head, was made of plastic piping roofed with pieces of stormtrooper armor and mess hall plates held together with wire and engine tape. Glowrods dangled from the piping rafters, their trailing wires plugged into a backpack-size Scale-20 power cell in the corner, providing the only illumination. Beyond the doorway, curtained with a silver t-blanket on which the words PROPERTY OF IMPERIAL NAVY were clearly visible, could be seen the vague gray steel walls of some larger space, a gym or a cargo hold. Ugbuz stood in the doorway, arms folded, looking down at him where he lay on a bed made of dirty blankets, and above him—taping the splints to his leg—knelt the enormous, vicious-looking Gamorrean sow whom Pothman had pointed out to him as Bullyak, head female of the Gakfedd tribe.
“Now, I’ll have no malingering in my unit, mister,” grunted Ugbuz, when Bullyak turned away. “We’ve had some losses, and we’ve had some injured, but those mutineers aren’t going to interfere with our mission.” He thrust a metal flask at Luke. The fumes alone would have dropped a bantha in its tracks. Luke shook his head. “Drink it! I don’t trust a man who won’t drink.”
Luke put it to his lips but didn’t let the alcohol go any farther than that. Even that movement throbbed hideously in his leg. It took all the disciplines he had learned, all his control of the Force within his own body, to put the pain aside.
The ax, he thought. The Klaggs who’d attacked him had both carried axes. Had one struck him in the final melee? He didn’t recall, but remembered not being able to get up.
His head hurt, too. For the first time the desperate importance of getting injuries seen to immediately was brought home to him—he’d be even less able, now, to protect himself, and it was quite obvious that he’d have more need to do so.
Why was the great hold around them dark?
“What about Trooper Mingla, sir? Skinny blond kid?”
Ugbuz