Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [79]
A little to Luke’s surprise, they passed a small group of the stumpy, putty-colored aliens, shambling along the corridor at the top of the communicating gangway to Deck 16 with excruciating slowness, conversing in their soft, rambling burble of rumbles and whistles. Luke couldn’t imagine coaxing the torpid creatures into the shuttlecraft or making them stay there once they’d arrived. And as for rounding up the tripods, or the Jawas …
“I don’t know.” He wondered how he’d managed to get himself elected savior to this ship of fools. “But if I’m going to destroy the ship before it attacks Belsavis, Threepio, I’ve got to get them off it somehow. I can’t leave them. Not even the Jawas. Not even the—”
They turned a corner and Luke halted, shocked. The corridor before them, low-ceilinged and slung with the heavy barrels of one of the ship’s main water-circ trunks, was strewn with the hacked and dismembered bodies of Affytechans. Ichor and sap smeared the walls and floor with pungent, sticky streams of green and yellow, speckled with spilled pollen and floating seed. Hacked limbs and trunks were scattered in a ghastly rainbow, as if someone had overturned a clothes basket of gaudy silks. Mouse-droids swarmed, and the whole corridor reeked of the Affytechans’ sour, pungent musk.
The blue-and-white captain and his followers kept walking through the carnage as if there were nothing there. “You were right about making sure of the location of the transport, Major,” the captain was saying. It stepped over most of the torso of what had been the magenta captain in the laundry room. “I’ve always liked the Beta-class Telgorn transport. Two or three of those, plus an escort of Blastboats, should take care of any minor trouble no matter what—”
Luke spun, ducked, and had his lightsaber in hand and bladed as the weighted end of a gaffe stick nearly took his head off. The four Sand People who’d sprung from the pump station behind him fell on him, howling. Luke slashed the first one clean through the body, shoulder to hip, and took the hands off a second as it was bringing its rifle to bear. Threepio bleated, “Master Luke! Master Luke!” as he was knocked over in the fray and lay against the wall where he’d been kicked. “Switch off!” Luke yelled and dropped the blade a split second before a third Tusken fired its blaster at him, the bolt whining off the concentrated core of laser light.
He lunged through a doorway, hitting the closer, which refused to work. The Sand People, joined by two more with others audible in full cry in the corridors beyond, sprang after. Luke levitated a worktable and hurled it at them, scrambled across the room to the opposite door and hit the opener—that, too, refused to work.
Luke cursed, ducked a roaring blaze of blaster fire and levitated the worktable to throw at them again. Someone else fired a blaster and the bolt whined sharply as it ricocheted around the room—it was a long shot and frequently didn’t work, but Luke reached out with his mind and flicked the ricochet into the door mechanism, exploding it in a sizzle of sparks. The door jerked up about half a meter and Luke rolled under it, dragging his staff through after him and scrambling to his feet, limping and staggering away.
He seemed to be in the heart of the Sand People’s hunting territory. Two more sprang at him, from opposite sides, pressing him back into a corner. He sliced and parried, flattened against the walls for support, then fled again, falling, rising, dragging himself painfully down the dark length of a corridor, while on either side ahead of him doors hissed shut and the hoarse, baying yowl of the Sand People echoed against the