Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [50]
As he had half suspected, half deduced, the Klagg was heading aft.
“They found some way to get above the crew decks,” he murmured to Threepio as they crossed through chamber after chamber of armories, looted weapons holds, stores whose bins and crates had been broken to disgorge uniforms, boots, belts, and blast armor on the floors and down the halls. “Listen. He’s doubling back on his steps. He knows he has to get a level up.”
He halted, looking cautiously around a corner. The Gamorrean stood in an open lift car, prodding angrily at the buttons there, obviously wanting one that read higher than 13 and not finding it. A moment later the pseudotrooper stepped out of the car again, looking around him, hairy ears swiveling as he listened, breathing clearly audible in the silence. There was an expression sweating like a Gamorrean, and Luke understood it now. The creature’s body glistened and he could smell it from where he stood.
The Gamorrean lumbered on.
“Is he lost, Master Luke?” Threepio could gear his voder down to the faintest hum of almost-inaudibility.
“Looks like. Or the Gakfedds are cutting off the way he came down.”
There was a rumble of shouts, coming closer. The Klagg increased his speed to a clumsy trot. He was still easy to keep up with, through corridors bright with the hard cold light of glowpanels, or dark where the Jawas had looted the wiring. His ears kept swinging backward—Luke wondered how acute they were, and if he could pick up the faint scrape and click of the staff, and the soft creak of Threepio’s joints.
There was a black door, double-blast-sealed and surmounted with a crimson light. The Gamorrean jabbed at the switch, with no result, then pulled out a blaster and shot the whole mechanism. The door jarred a little in its socket, and a voice said, “Entry to upper levels in this area is unauthorized. Security measures are in force.”
The Gamorrean ripped loose the coverplate on the manual hatch by main force, and worked the dogged wheel within. Far down the corridor Luke heard renewed clamor, and knew the Gakfedds had heard the computer’s voice:
“Entry to upper levels in this area is unauthorized. Security measures are in force. Maximum measures will be taken.”
The red light began to blink.
The door opened to reveal a gangway. Black metal steps, gray walls, a checkering of pale squares of opalescent light set in a curious, asymmetrical almost-pattern that seemed at once impersonal and queerly sinister.
“Maximum measures will be taken. Maximum measures will be taken. Maximum …”
“There’s the stinking mutineer swine!”
As Ugbuz and his troopers appeared from a cross-corridor twenty meters away, the Klagg plunged up the gangway.
Watching it, Luke reflected—in the part of his mind not stunned with horror—that it was very like the Empire to design a “security measure” that wouldn’t take effect until the violator was too far into the gangway to turn back.
The Gamorrean raced up five or ten steps before the lightning started, thin, vicious fingers of it stabbing out from the walls, playing over the creature’s body like a delicate, skeletal spider torturing its prey. The Gamorrean screamed, fell, his big body spasming, flopping on the black metal of the stairs. The pursuing Gakfedds skidded to a halt at the door, staring up in momentary shock.
Then they began to laugh.
Ugbuz let out a bellow of mirth, pointing as the Klagg’s flesh blistered and blood poured from a thousand pinholes drilled by the lightning. The others whooped, doubled over, slapping their thighs and one another’s shoulders in genuine amusement. Luke shrank back into the cross-corridor where he and Threepio stood, sickened. The Klagg, impossibly, was still trying to get to his feet, still trying to ascend the stairs, slipping in blood now, charring