Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [67]
He had no idea when he’d need everything he could summon. Or how long he’d have to last on what little strength he had.
It was difficult enough, he found, raising Threepio all those levels—some ten or twelve meters—and pushing back the hatchway panel so that the droid could scramble through. “Do be careful, Master Luke,” called Threepio’s voice down the shaft.
Luke grinned. Aunt Beru used to call after him to take his poncho when he’d take the landspeeder out into the Dune Sea, never guessing that he was going hunting womp rats and that if anything went wrong, getting chilled without his poncho was going to be the least of his worries.
His grin faded as he looked down the blackness of the shaft. Most of the lighting was gone, only small, faded squares of brightness showing where hatches had been removed by Jawas using this route between decks. He slung his staff around his shoulder again.
Eight levels. One aching rung at a time.
Another thought made him stop and turn back to look around the dim chamber behind him.
Everywhere he had traversed in this vessel, he had known—felt—the malignant intelligence of the Will: keeping track of him, monitoring his footfalls, his heartbeats, the temperature of his body. His vital signs, as Threepio monitored them, though without the protocol droid’s fussy protectiveness. He was almost certain it was the Will that had closed some of those doors on the deck above, guiding him toward the Sand People’s ambush. For the first time, he had the oddest feeling that it wasn’t the Will alone observing him.
It certainly hadn’t been the Will that had undone the inner lock on that repair-tube hatch.
Or had it been? Had that only served the intent of the Will?
He didn’t know. Nevertheless, before he swung himself back into the shaft for the long crawl down, he said quietly, “Thank you. Thank you for helping me.”
And I’ll feel like the President of the Galactic Society of Village Idiots if it was just a ruse to put me off my guard.
He eased himself off the floor and into the hatch and thence down into darkness.
Chapter 10
“C’mon, Chewie, didn’t you hear the man say this afternoon there was nothing up here?” Han Solo flashed the beam of his light around the silent darkness of Plett’s House. It was a much stronger beam than Leia’s glowrod, a smuggler’s actinic luminator. Something scuttled in a corner, invisible in the Stygian mist that curtained the ruined house, and Solo smelled a dirty sweetness, like rotting fruit.
Chewbacca produced a hoarse, disapproving groan.
“What, you gonna let a little bug scare you?” The luminator beam found the dull circle of the metal well cover. “Probably lots of ’em down there.” Han knelt beside the cover and unslung his utility kit from his shoulder. Overhead, the lights of the hanging gardens sparkled distantly through the mists.
Han had put two calls through to Mara Jade on the Holonet transceiver, but neither had been picked up. His attempt to reach Leia at the municipal archives had failed as well. They said she had not yet arrived, which struck him as not like Leia, though between fog and darkness it was possible she’d taken a wrong turning and gotten lost in an orchard somewhere. Whatever might lurk in the reputedly nonexistent tunnels beneath Plett’s House, it was difficult to imagine any genuine danger befalling anyone aboveground in this sleepy, mist-bound Garden of Delight. He’d contacted Winter on subspace, said hello to Anakin and talked briefly to Jacen and Jaina, who’d kept trying to put their hands through the holo field, clearly unaware that their father wasn’t in the room with them. But when the call was over and silence returned to the borrowed house, he knew what the trouble was.
He wanted to go back to Plett’s House and look around.
He thought he knew how to get into the crypts.
Like Drub McKumb, he reflected wryly, he, too, had his “calculations.”
Chewbacca handed him the bundle he’d brought up from the Millennium Falcon’s locker—a Scale-3 antigrav