Star Wars_ Darksaber - Kevin J. Anderson [77]
Luke set the space yacht down, keeping his fingers tense on the controls in case the ship should begin to cant or settle awkwardly. But the ground seemed stable beneath them. He switched off the engines. “Shall we go for a stroll in the swamp?” he said, offering Callista his hand.
They both wore slick, stain-impermeable jumpsuits, and they pulled on hard boots for sloshing through the brackish water. When he cracked open the hatch, the sudden buzz of millions of life forms—croaks, grunts, whistles, and death screams—assaulted his ears, a chaos of natural sounds that made the jungles of Yavin 4 seem peaceful by comparison. Minuscule gnats and biting flies thickened the air.
Luke stood stunned and a little intimidated on the boarding ramp. A mist had already begun to unfold. The snowy shower of white spores settled to the ground from the sensitive spherical fungi. He smelled the damp odor of decay and fresh life. “Yoda,” he whispered, as memories fell heavy around him.
“This place is so alive,” Callista said beside him, startling Luke from his thoughts. He still couldn’t get used to the fact that he was unable to sense her with the Force, as he did everything else.
A thread of disappointment laced through her voice. “I can see it and hear it, but I can’t feel the web of living creatures as I should.”
“You will,” he said, clasping her hand. “You will. Come on.”
They trudged away from the ship and into the brooding swamps. Enormous gnarltrees stretched to the sky, their twisted roots like multilegged creatures balanced with bent knees. The roots were sweeping and arched, forming dark warrens for innumerable creatures. The day was gray and fog-shrouded, growing darker with each moment as sunset approached.
Luke knew that Yoda’s home had long since been reclaimed by the swamp, torn to a shambles and left in far worse wreckage than Ben Kenobi’s hut had been. He didn’t want to return to the place where he had sat beside the alien Jedi Master’s deathbed, learning the truth about his father and his sister, watching the wrinkle-faced creature fade into nothingness as his spirit left his body after nine hundred years.
He and Callista slogged through puddles, climbing over fallen trees, and scaring creatures that fled into darker hollows, splashing into the swamp. Much larger growling things moved in the distance, crashing between trees.
Luke spoke of Yoda and of his time training here: jogging through the swamp, levitating rocks and Artoo-Detoo, learning nuggets of Jedi philosophy that Yoda spouted in his convoluted language.
The ground fog thickened into white tentacles that wrapped around their lower legs. Callista’s face carried an openness and a tentative wonder that Luke hadn’t seen in some time. Occasionally, she gritted her teeth and seemed to be straining, trying to accomplish something. Apparently failing, she said nothing to Luke; he squeezed her hand tighter.
A knobby white spider as tall as a human heaved itself up from a pile of underbrush, its legs like twisted forerunners of the thick gnarl-tree roots. But the knobby hunter meant them no harm, and stalked off in search of smaller prey.
“We should head back to the ship,” Luke said. “It’s getting dark. We can start some exercises tomorrow.”
They circled toward the clearing where they had landed the space yacht, then sat outside in the darkness. Callista brought out a portable glowlamp, and Luke removed a case of rations from the ship’s stores. They sat on boulders surrounded by an envelope of light, and tore into their food bars. “What a place for a picnic,” Callista said.
She chewed intently while Luke stared down at his tasteless rations. “Yoda didn’t like this food,” he said. “Couldn’t understand how I managed to grow so tall if I ate food like this. He fixed me some kind of stew, and I don’t think I wanted to know what was in it.”
Bugs swarmed around them, attracted by the light as the night thickened. “Should we go inside the ship?” he asked.