Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [5]
“Winter has taken Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin back to their nursery, Your Excellency,” he reported. “She stayed only long enough to point out to them that General Solo was completely unhurt. Perhaps it would be advisable for you and General Solo to go there and reassure them at the first convenient opportunity.”
“Are they guarded?” Han could look after himself … for one awful moment the hairy, convulsed face of the madman returned to her, reaching for the children …
“Chewbacca has gone with them.”
“Thank you, Threepio.”
“Can’t see any further danger.” Luke appeared at her side in a swirl of black cloak, light-brown hair ruffled where he’d pushed back the hood, his face—scarred from a long-ago encounter with an ice creature on Hoth—unreadable as usual, but his blue eyes seeming to see everything. “Kids all right?”
“They’re in the nursery. Chewbacca’s with them.” She looked around. Han was still standing where he had been, in the midst of a hooting, waving crowd of Ithorians, staring at the shadowed door through which the attacker had been taken. He was nodding and even making some kind of reply to the herd leaders, who were assuring him that such things never happened, but Leia could tell he wasn’t really hearing them.
She and Luke edged their way to him.
“You all right?”
Han nodded, but gave them only a glance. Leia had seen him less upset by full-scale artillery ambushes with Imperial starfighter support.
“That can’t have been anything like a planned attempt.” Luke followed his gaze to the door. “When he starts to come out of the tranquilizer I’ll see if I can go into his mind a little, pick up who he is—”
“I know who he is,” said Han.
Brother and sister regarded him in surprise.
“If that wasn’t a ghost,” said Han, “and it might have been … I’d say it was about fifty percent of my old buddy Drub McKumb.”
Chapter 2
“Children.” The man lashed to the diagnostic bed mumbled the word as if lips, tongue, and palate were swollen and numb. Blue eyes stared blankly up from an eroded moonscape of wrinkled flesh. Above the padded table, small monitor screens traced jewel-bright patterns of color. The central one, Leia could see, indicated that the smuggler was in no physical pain—with that much gylocal in him he couldn’t possibly be—but the right-hand monitor showed a jangled horror of reds and yellows, as if all the nightmares in the galaxy held shrieking revel in his frontal lobe.
“Children,” he muttered again. “They hid the children in the well.”
Leia glanced across at her husband. In his hazel eyes she saw the reflection, not of the emaciated creature who lay before them in the ripped green plastene coverall of a longdistance cargo hauler, but the fat, blustering planet-hopper captain he’d known years ago.
The Healing House of the Cloud-Mother was a dim place, rank with plants like all the herd and bathed in soft blue-green light. Tomla El, chief healer of the herd, was small for an Ithorian and like the lights of the place also a soft blue-green, so that in his purple robe he seemed only a shadow and a voice as he considered the monitors and spoke to Luke at his side.
“I am unsure that going into his mind would profit you, Master Skywalker.” He blinked his round golden eyes at the frenzied right-hand screen. “He’s under as much gylocal and hypnocane as we dare administer. The brain has been severely damaged, and his whole system is full of repeated massive doses of yarrock.”
“Yarrock?” said Luke, startled.
“Sure explains him being off his rocker,” commented Han. “I haven’t seen Drub in seven or eight years, but back when I knew him he wouldn’t even sniff dontworry, much less go in for that caliber of hallucinogen.”
“Oddly enough,” said the Healer, “I don’t think his condition is attributable to the drug. Judging by his autonomic responses, I believe the yarrock acted as a depressant to the mental activity, permitting brief periods of lucidity. These were found in his pockets.”
He produced a half dozen scraps of flimsiplast, stained and filthy and creased. Han and Leia stepped close