Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [59]
He knew Threepio didn’t believe him, of course.
He ducked his head through the hatch, reached over the narrow shaft to seize the rungs, and hopped across. Even that small movement caught his leg with a flash of pain that left him breathless, despite all the healing, all the strength of the Force he could summon. He glanced down at the seemingly bottomless plunge of the shaft, and thought, I’ll need to save my strength.
“Be careful, Master Luke …” The droid’s voice floated up after him in the dark.
In the crazy, bobbing dimness of the glowrods slung to his back, the Jawa was barely visible, a dark, scrambling figure like a robed insect skittering up the ladder now far over his head. Bundled trunk lines of cable and wire brushed Luke’s shoulders as he hitched himself laboriously in the Jawa’s wake, hoses like glistening black esophagi and thinner lines of rubbery insulated fiber-optic coax crowding close, as if he were indeed ascending the alimentary canal of some monstrous beast. The Jawa paused every now and then to finger the cabling in a way that made Luke extremely nervous. Who could tell what systems depended on that particular hunk of wire?
Here and there orange worklights burned dim above closed hatchways—dogged shut on the inside, he observed, and equipped with the dark boxes of magnetic seals. Elsewhere he climbed in darkness, lit only by the glowrods on his staff. The tube smelled fusty, of lubricants and insulation and now, overwhelmingly, of Jawa, but it lacked the characteristic, slightly greasy smell of air recycled countless times through the noses and lungs of a living crew. Even with the vessel’s current bizarre populations, it would be long before it acquired that smell.
Longer than they’d be aboard.
Longer than this weird mission would last.
What started it up again?
Threepio had put his intricately jointed metal finger on the crux of the problem, the galling root of Luke’s anxious dreams.
The Eye of Palpatine had been wrought in secret for a secret purpose, a mission that had been thwarted. It had lain sleeping in its remote screen of spinning asteroids in the heart of the Moonflower Nebula for thirty years, while the New Order that had planned that mission, armed the ship’s guns, programmed the Will’s single-minded control, had risen to power and then cracked apart under the weight of its own callousness, monomania, and greed.
The stormtroopers stationed on half a dozen remote worlds of the Rim had grown old and died.
Palpatine himself had died, at his own dark pupil’s hand.
So why had the Will awakened?
Luke shivered, wondering whether it was simply his own apprehension for the safety of those on Belsavis—for Han and Leia and Chewie—that cast a shadow on his heart, or whether the shadow was of something else, some separate entity whose power he had sensed moving like a dianoga underwater through the darker regions of the Force.
The tube topped out in a thick-barred metal grille painted garish, warning yellow and black. Affixed to it—in case anyone should miss the point—was a sign: ENCLISION GRID. NO FURTHER ASCENT. DANGER.
Beyond the bars, Luke could just distinguish a lateral repair conduit, through which the cables of the ascending shaft continued like runners of some thick-fleshed, ugly vine. The walls of the conduit gleamed with the asymmetrical pattern of opaline squares, each square a deadly laser port, waiting in the dark.
Just beneath the metal safety bars, a ring of dirty fingerprints around an open hatchway showed clearly which course the Jawa had taken.
Luke dragged himself through, into light only marginally brighter than that of the worklamps in the shaft.
It was the gun room. Rank after rank of consoles picked up the moving firebug of his glowrods from the shadows of soot-colored