Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [58]
Luke was better at understanding the little droid than she was, though she could interpret some of his odd beeps and warbles. But the reply he made was a quick, almost perfunctory double gleep, telling her nothing.
“Well, let’s not stand around here in the dark.” Something about the way the vine-hung boughs with their ghostly orchids seemed to bend close unnerved her, even in this safe and well-patrolled paradise. A sharp rustle in the darkness made her nearly jump out of her skin, but it was only a tree feeder, pausing to lower its hoselike proboscis to the roots of a shalaman tree and pump forth a measured dose of rank-smelling organic goo before picking its careful way back among the trees.
“Let’s see if we can get back to the path.”
It wasn’t easy, between the dark and the mushy unevenness of the ground. Artoo’s base was weighted to give him maximum stability, but though he was better than he looked on rough terrain he wasn’t perfect, and the base weight would make it, if not impossible, at least backbreaking, for Leia to right him should he unbalance. It took a half hour of muddy searching, stumbling over tree roots and getting yikked at by watch-critters in the dark, along the bed of a steaming volcanic stream before they found a sufficiently gentle incline and a clearing among the ferns that let her see the path again.
Just for a moment, Leia looked up and saw someone standing at the top of the slope, under the yellow blur of the light.
She thought, What’s she doing here?
And then wondered why, as the woman turned from the light and walked quickly away down the path …
Why had she thought that? It wasn’t anyone she knew.
Was it?
Schoolfriend? Her age looked about right, so far as Leia could tell at that distance and behind the blurring of intervening fog. But somehow she couldn’t picture that slim, childlike body in the white-and-blue uniform of the Alderaan Select Academy for Young Ladies. She was sure she’d never seen that chained ocean of rain-straight, coal-black hair plaited in a schoolgirl’s braids. That let out the possibility of her being the daughter of an Alderaan noble altogether, since they’d all gone to the same school …
Someone from the Senate? It rang a bell, but she’d been the youngest Senator herself at the age of eighteen, and there had been no one near her age there, certainly no girls. A Senator’s daughter? Wife? Someone she had met at one of those endless diplomatic receptions on Coruscant? Someone seen across the room at the Emperor’s levee?
HERE?
She regained the path as quickly as she could, but steadying Artoo over the bumpy roots took her whole effort and attention. When she reached the top of the slope and looked quickly down the path, the woman was gone.
Chapter 9
See-Threepio didn’t like the idea. “You can’t trust those Jawas, Master Luke! There has to be a gangway somewhere …”
Luke contemplated the hatch cover the Jawa had removed from the wall in one of the laundry drop rooms, the dark shaft full of wiring and cables that lay beyond. A ladder of durasteel staples emerged from the silent well of blackness below, vanished up into the lightless chimney above. He thought about the physical effort involved in hitching himself up those rungs, without use of his left leg, one rung at a time, compared with what the mental effort would cost him to use the Force to levitate. The choice wasn’t pleasant.
Neither were the memories of the Klagg stormtrooper’s death.
“I’ll be all right,” he said quietly.
“But all the gangways can’t be wired!” protested the droid. “I don’t like the idea of you going alone. Can’t you wait a little, sleep on this? If you’ll forgive my saying so, sir, you look as if you would greatly benefit from some sleep. Though I never use it myself, I’m told that humans …”
Luke grinned, touched by Threepio’s concern. “I’ll get some sleep when I get back,” he promised. In the dark of the shaft above he heard the rat-rustle of the Jawa’s robes halt, an interrogatory piping squeal, “Master?”
“If I don’t track this down now I may not