Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [69]
“No wonder Nubblyk kept it a secret.” The luminator’s beam picked out the uneven contours of the dripping walls, the low arch of the moss-grown ceiling. Something black and shiny and the size of Han’s foot slithered and fled through the moss to vanish down the throat of the passageway. Han flinched involuntarily and Chewie, bent to keep his head from brushing the ceiling, ran a nervous paw over the back of his mane, as if he suspected that something had detached itself from the moss above him and was crawling in his fur.
He growled a question.
“Dunno,” said Han. “The only thing that could have killed off the trade in chips—and whatever else they could pull out of the old machinery—is if they’d cleared the place out. That would have been the year after the Battle of Endor, by what they were saying in the bars.” Rags of mist flickered around his bootheels as he led the way down a short incline into the tunnel that stretched away into the dark.
Another interrogative rumble.
“Yeah, Drub worked for him as a runner. But the Slyte kept a tight rein on things. My guess is nobody but him knew where the entrance to this place was. And there might have been more than one. Damn,” he added, as they came to the top of a steeply zigzagging ramp. “Talk about a place that’s bigger on the inside than on the outside.”
The tunnel climbed, following the network of old volcanic passages and underground riverbeds that eventually opened into the great chasm of the Plawal Rift itself. At the top of the ramp a short tunnel pierced the rock, only to be blocked at the far end: “That’s where the door Leia saw went into the House, I bet.” They backtracked, followed the main tunnel, Chewie grumbling as he shifted his bowcaster and blaster rifle to a more comfortable position on his shoulders.
“Yeah, here we are. This vent probably runs straight out under the ice.”
They followed the scratched marks on the floor to a wide cavern, crossed a narrow wooden bridge above a cleft from which steam and the acrid breath of subterranean gases rose in a suffocating wall. The rocks beyond, where the tunnel widened into a vast, uneven space of darkness, were coated with wrinkled, labyrinthine mazes of paste-white sinter formations, the floor pitted with long-dead fumaroles and slashed by steaming streams nearly choked in strangely tinted mineral deposits. Flat wormlike white tentacles groped from one of the fumaroles, clutching toward their feet, but when Han and Chewbacca drew away in alarm subsided again with a bubbly slurp.
At the far end of the cave a room had been cut in the rock, littered with plastic boxes and the small, flat packets smugglers used to store goods in when they shoved them behind hull panels or under floor sections. Most of them were chewed and mauled; a small kretch, no longer than Han’s thumb, skittered away from the track of his light.
“Gold wire.” Han nudged the plastic litter with his boot toe, then knelt to retrieve something metallic that twinkled dirty-bright in the light. It was kinked and twisted, having been straightened out from its original configuration and bundled for storage. Mineral deposits clung thickly to it, pinkish gold in the beam of the light. “Utility grade.”
He flashed the beam over the room’s two other doorways, which led, one to a stair, one to a tunnel beyond. The low ceilings were toothy with stalactites and furred with hairlike deposits of sodium and silica. Lichen glimmered in threads of blue, green, and crimson on the walls, and serpents of mist coiled across the floor.
“Let’s see what else we got.”
Hot, acrid breezes stirred Solo’s sweat-drenched hair and the Wookiee’s fur as they moved on into the vent system. Streams of water dripped through the formations on the walls, and the darkness was choking with sulfur and kretch smell. In another room cut from the tunnel wall Han’s light glinted on a jumble of metal casings and circuit boards, flashed in