Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [63]
“I guessed.”
When they reached the shaft in the laundry drop, Luke said, “I’ll levitate you as far as the first hatchway onto Deck Fourteen. I’ll take Deck Fifteen. We know the Klagg was trying to go up the gangway when he was killed, so we know their village is above us. Look for any sign of the Klaggs—footprints, blood, torn clothing …” By this time Luke knew the Gamorreans were as likely to fight within the tribe as outside it.
“I shall certainly try, sir,” replied the droid humbly. “But with the SP-80s doing their duty in cleaning the floors and walls, tracking won’t be easy.”
“Do the best you can.” Luke reflected that this would have been easier if Cray had been in her right senses—her true identity—when she’d been carried off. “Look also for the kind of walls we saw in the background of the video announcement. The tarp and the crate in that hut have to have come from Mission Stores. Make a note if you see anything similar. Also storerooms for regular navy trooper equipment, as opposed to stormtroopers. I’ll be back to get you down the shaft again at twenty-two hundred.”
When he reached Deck 15, Luke found that Threepio was only too right about the SP-80s and their unflagging mission to keep the Eye of Palpatine spotless. He found half a dozen plates and cups from the mess hall—polished clean by the MSEs but lying where they had been dropped—but no further evidence of where the Klaggs might have trodden. It was going to be a task, he realized, of laboriously quartering the decks one by one, looking for physical signs of the Klaggs and trying to pick up some trace, some whisper, of recognizable mental resonance from Cray.
And Threepio wouldn’t even be able to do that.
A crippled man and a protocol droid. Luke leaned momentarily against the wall, trying not to think about the bruises on Cray’s face, the way her body had snapped against the guards’ brutal grip. Trying not to think about the look in Nichos’s eyes.
Thirteen hundred hours tomorrow.
He limped on. The Klagg had been trying to go up. The walls on this deck—or in this section of this deck, which seemed to house the repair installations for the TIE fighters—were darker than those of the crew quarters below, the ceilings lower, but without the metal beams he’d seen in the vid transmission.
A hangar? he wondered. Storage hold? A corridor stretched to his left, pitch dark. Far down it he heard the scrabble of feet, saw the yellow rat-gleam of Jawa eyes. They were eating the ship to pieces. No wonder the Will had ordered Ugbuz to exterminate them. But he had the suspicion that whatever the result of the Jawa depredations, it would only kill the living crew. Nothing the Jawas could do—no damage or death of those aboard—would prevent the battlemoon’s jump to hyperspace, when it thought nobody was looking. It would have no effect on its capacity to blow the city of Plawal—and probably the other settlements on Belsavis for good measure—to powder and mud.
He’d seen what the Empire had left of Coruscant, of Mon Calamari, of the Atravis Systems. He’d felt the screaming outcry of the Force, like the ripping apart of organs within his own body, when Carida had gone up.
To prevent that, he thought, he would go up the enclision grid himself, to make his own attempt at destroying this monster’s mechanical heart.
Luke tried a door, and when it refused to open limped down the corridor, testing another, and another, until he found one that responded to his command. There was light in that area of the ship, and the air, though chemical, had the slightly ozoneous smell of new, clean oxygen that hadn’t been passed around a hundred sets of lungs. He found another messroom coffee cup on the floor, but no sign of the Klaggs. No trace of Cray’s consciousness.
It was difficult to keep his bearings, difficult to quarter the ship accurately, because of the closed blast doors on some passageways. He was forced repeatedly to circle through offices, laundry drops, lounges, counting turnings and open doors as he went. As a desert boy he’d learned early to