Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [80]
He flung himself around a corner and jerked back just in time to avoid being cut in half by a blast door smashing down; fled back, half recognizing the lights of what looked like a laundry drop, which would have a repair shaft behind it, only to have the room’s door slam shut when he was a few meters away. He decapitated another Tusken that leaped on him from the open black doorway of what looked like a lounge, scrambled over the body and fled through, throwing himself, rolling, just in time to avoid being shut into that room by its suddenly activated door.
The corridor in which he found himself was very dark. Tiny orange worklights made a thin trail along one side of the ceiling. Gasping for breath, Luke dragged himself to his feet, leaned trembling on his staff, his leg hurting as if the ax that had smashed it were slamming again with each beat of his heart.
The Will, he thought. The lightsaber weighed heavy in his hand, unbladed but ready at a second’s notice. It was only a matter of time before it steered him into another wired gangway, or back to the arms of the Sand People.
Their yowling broke out again, close by; a lot of them, by the sound. Luke scanned the corridor. Shut doors. No vents. No cover.
Then, halfway down, a door opened.
It didn’t hiss and spring, as doors did. The laborious creaking was more characteristic of someone turning the manual crank. It cracked a jagged line of grimy orange emergency light perhaps thirty centimeters wide, and stopped.
Luke glanced at the blast wall that sealed one end of the corridor, the darkness at the other end, shrieking with the cries of the approaching Sand People. Between them himself, breathless, lamed, a sitting target …
And that uneven line of orange light.
And the sense of waiting that seemed to press on him from the darkness like the dense watchfulness of some unseen mind.
Yet strangely he felt no sense of dread.
He stepped closer. Through the opening he could see the blank-eyed dark consoles of one of the lower-level gunnery chambers, the semicircles of consoles, the glistening dark levers and somber shadow.
Silence now, but he knew, could feel, the Sand People coming near.
In that silence, very faintly, he thought he heard the almost-whispered thread of melody:
“The Queen had a hunt-bird and the Queen had a lark,
The Queen had a songbird that sang in the
dark.…”
Luke glanced back over his shoulder at the darkness, then stepped, very quickly, through the door.
It slid shut.
For some moments the only sound that came to his ears was his own breathing, steadying as he caught his wind. Shadow clustered thick around him, hid the far end of the long room like an obscuring curtain. Then, dimly, on the other side of the door, the scratch of metal on metal, the swift-moving whisper of feet.
Luke braced his body against the nearest console and held his lightsaber ready, still unilluminated, in his hand.
Dim with the muffling of the walls, he heard the harsh gronch of their voices, the crash of gaffe sticks against the other doors along the hall. Six of them at least. If the door before him were to open again he could probably kill two or three, but shooting through the door at him they’d have him. He looked around at the dark chamber. Even the chairs were bolted down.
The door in front of him rattled under blows, but held.
If the Will wanted it to open, something else prevented it from doing anything about it.
It occurred to Luke that the Will had effectively imprisoned him here. All it needed to do was not open the gun room door again—ever.
The silence returned, lengthened. The pain in Luke’s leg increased, the deep internal burning of infection unmistakable now. Keeping his senses stretched, his mind forced to attention on the corridor, he opened the patch in the leg of his coverall and affixed a new dose of perigen, though his supply was running perilously low. Anything to keep the pain at bay, to free his concentration for the use of the Force. Exhaustion and perigen-suppressed fever made him dizzy. He realized it had been some