Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [65]
“Captain, the hyperdrive can’t take much more of this!” exclaimed someone who was obviously standing in for the ship’s engineer, and a gunnery officer added, “More Rebel fighters coming in, sir! A-formation, starboard ten o’clock!” Everyone leaped to the dead consoles and began making important-sounding beeps and twitters.
Luke limped thoughtfully out into the corridor again.
Deck 6. Far below them—and the Klagg had definitely been trying to go up. Still …
Would the Klaggs have done that kind of damage to the Affytechans?
It was a possibility, thought Luke, trying a door, then doubling through a storage area (still no open ceiling beams) and down a viewing gallery above an empty hangar deck. The pieces hadn’t looked charred so much as cut and torn. How did blaster fire react on the soft, silklike vegetable flesh?
He paused at a juncture, trying to get his bearings. Another door refused to open—one that he had the vague sensation had been open before—sending him back down a cross-corridor, through a laundry drop, along a passage that ended in another shut blast door.
I’ve been this way, thought Luke. He knew he had. And that door had been …
He stopped, his scalp prickling.
He smelled Sand People.
Idiot, he thought, as his whole body turned cold. If the landers picked up Jawas from Tatooine you should have known there was a chance they’d pick up Sand People—Tusken Raiders—there as well.
They’d been in this corridor not more than a few minutes ago. The air circulators hadn’t yet cleared their smell. It meant they could be behind him, tall rag-wrapped shapes like brutally vicious scarecrows mummified in sand, crouched in one of the dark cabins, listening for his dragging footfalls behind one of those many doors the Gamorreans, or the Affytechans, or the Jawas had forced open …
Tusken rifles were mostly basement specials, tinkered by illegal manufacturers in Mos Eisley and sold to the Raiders by unscrupulous middlemen. Inaccurate, dirty-firing, but even a near miss in corridors like these could be fatal.
He could still smell them. The circulators should have cleared away the whiff of their dirt-colored wrappings had they been just passing through.
He moved back the way he’d come, stretching his senses for the smallest trace. Around the corner he’d last turned, he thought he heard the faint scratch of metal on metal. At the same moment, movement in the corridor crossing ahead of him caught his eye. A Mouse-droid zooming up the hallway stopped, as if its registers identified something ahead of it out of Luke’s sight around the corner. Abruptly it reversed itself, backing full speed in panic.
Luke flung himself toward the nearest room as a searing blast of rifle fire scorched paneling all around him. The Sand People knew their ambush was blown; he heard their almost silent footfalls in the hall as he slammed over the manual on the doors, dashed across the room—it was a communal lounge of some kind, with a visi-reader and a coffee spigot—and through the door on the other side. A cabin, two bunks, like the one he’d come back to consciousness in. Two bunks and one door. Gaffe sticks and makeshift rams pounded on the door of the lounge and he tried another door, a laundry drop like the one from which the Jawa had led him into the repair shaft.
The panel that led to the repair shaft wouldn’t budge. Luke heard the crashing of the lounge door being broken in, the wild, blistering rake of saturation fire into the lounge, the visi-reader exploding and the hiss of bursting fire-system pipes … He’d never get a chance to bring his lightsaber into play. The blast of the Force that he directed against the wall hatch dented it, but the dog-bolts on the other side held. He remembered seeing, on other hatches in the shafts, the black boxes of magnetic