Star Wars_ Darksaber - Kevin J. Anderson [114]
Callista’s gray eyes were red-rimmed as she took a poly sponge soaked in warm water and bathed Luke’s face, his forehead, his neck. She whispered to Leia, “I had to watch him as my own supplies dwindled. As he dwindled.” She shuddered. “I held him, but I couldn’t touch him. I told him so many things.…” She reached out with her fingertip, gently caressing Luke’s cheek.
Suddenly his blue eyes snapped open, and he took a deep breath. He blinked, and color flooded back into his cheeks. Drawing several more slow breaths, he revived like a time-lapse exposure of a blossom unfolding. “We’re safe?” he said. His voice was a hoarse croak, but it was alive—he was alive!
Callista hugged him, and Han and Chewie and Leia gathered around, barely restraining themselves from smothering him again with their delight.
“Yes, Luke, you’re safe now,” Leia said, “and we’re on our way. We’ll take you back to the Jedi academy, where you can relax and recover.”
CHAPTER 40
From his personal offices on the nearly completed Dark-saber battle station, Bevel Lemelisk gazed out the array of latticed windows, studying the final steps in the mammoth construction project.
His office was unabashedly austere, with cold metal walls, little furniture, and no decoration whatsoever. He didn’t waste time on frivolities like artwork or comfort. The thing that concerned him most was ensuring that he had the right equipment—and plenty of it. He was only truly happy when surrounded with technological toys.
As Lemelisk watched the continually shifting chaos of the asteroid belt—random patterns of motion from the drifting rocks tugged by their own minimal gravities into complex fifth-order permutations—he noted the distant light reflected off the hull of some other ship in the asteroid belt. He squinted. Yes, it was definitely a vessel, not another asteroid.
“Spies?” he wondered with a thrill of adrenaline; he doubted it. This huge weapon was doing nothing to conceal itself. More likely it was a group of smugglers who thought they were safe in an uncharted area of space.
Most bothersome, though, in Lemelisk’s opinion, was the fact that the Taurill had once again been thrown into a frenzy of distraction by unexpected movement. He couldn’t imagine how the busy little creatures in their tiny, custom-made spacesuits could notice something so faint and far away, but the Taurill Overmind had thousands of eyes—and it took only one to notice.
The tiny Taurill construction workers jockeyed around for better views of the moving reflected lights, leaving their positions so they could stare upward and point with multiple arms.
Lemelisk scowled. Now he would have to go on another plate-by-plate inspection outside the Darksaber just to make sure they didn’t mess up again. He had successfully managed to conceal the first debacle from Durga the Hutt, but he wasn’t confident he could continue to trick the crime lord.
He waddled down the hall, taking a turbolift to the construction access bay, and climbed inside a smelly old inspection scooter, a tiny spherical craft that held one person—and that just barely.
Lemelisk tucked his paunch behind the crude controls and sealed himself in. The laboring air-recirculation systems did little to dampen the odor of decaying upholstery that continued to outgas even so many years after the scooter had been put into operation.
Lemelisk raised the small vehicle off the floor and passed through the magnetic atmosphere field, then puttered along the cylindrical hull of black anodized plates.
He remembered the time he had taken a similar inspection tour of the original Death Star with Grand Moff Tarkin … and he hoped this time it wouldn’t turn out to be such a disaster.
* * *
He and Grand Moff Tarkin had departed from the Governor’s palace on Eriadu, an important trading and governmental hub on the Outer Rim, where Tarkin had established his primary base of operations when he