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As he bent down, the light of his little glowrod fell on them, and to his surprise he saw that several of the biggest had definite limbs, pincer-clawed or tentacular, sometimes both on the same organism. He stepped quicker, reminding himself that Arvid said they simply died and dissolved in the flesh.…

But the pain in his calf was followed by weariness, a cold lassitude, an ache in his chest, and the sudden, overwhelming desire for sleep.

He stepped around a corner, and onto another landing, and there they were.

The floor was brown with them. Among the glistening mass there were half a dozen nearly the size of Luke’s hand, spider-shaped or arthropod, some with the batrachian, springing legs of a Cabuloid pad-hopper.…

Luke fell back, appalled, and something struck him from behind, fastening to his back between the shoulder blades, and pain like the slice of a chisel jabbed the back of his neck.

He flung himself back against the wall, crushing whatever it was against the permacrete, but as if that had been a signal the drochs on the floor hopped and skittered and flowed toward him. The pain on his neck still reechoed, though a sticky fluid trickling down his back told him that whatever had attacked him was dead. He turned to flee down the stairs and saw that the drochs had gathered in behind him, big and small, some of them huge, legged, toothed, and fast as lizards. Weakness flowed over him with the agony of a hundred bites, as if all his veins had been opened—not blood loss, he knew at once, but life-loss, the draining of the electrochemical field of his nervous system, of the life essence of his flesh and heart.

He fell against the wall, clinging to the permacrete to stay upright, knowing that if he went down among them he was a dead man indeed. They evaded the slashes of his lightsaber, a weapon too big to touch them, too slow for all its speed. On the steps ahead of him Luke saw the biggest droch of all, nearly twice the size of his two fists bunched together, carcinomorphic, staring at him with two bright eyes on short stalks, and he thought, It’s sentient. Or nearly so.

And he knew somehow that it was this thing that had orchestrated the attack on him, letting him come so far up the steps that there was no chance of descent.

He cut at it, staggering with weakness. The thing sprang aside. Luke’s knees gave out and he fell, gasping, dizzy, pain stabbing him as if he were rolled in needles.…

And he summoned the Force.

Like a shining wind he called it, and like a shining wind it came, tearing the drochs from his body as Vader had once torn cabinets and spools and railings from the infrastructure of the carbon-freeze chamber on Bespin to hurl at him. But the drochs he hurled away, crushing them against the walls, staggering to rise as more flowed toward him, from up the stairs and from below.

He thought, I can’t do this. The balance of the Force is broken. This will destroy some other place.…

But when they fastened on him again, stabbing with greedy mouths through the ripped cloth of his suit, panic and horror seized him, and he knew that he must use the Force or die.

Like a whirlwind the psychokinetic energy ripped and chopped at them, plucked them up and flung them against the walls, down the steps, and Luke had glimpses, in the jarring swirl of splintered light, of the bigger drochs seizing and fastening their mouths upon the smaller, then hurling themselves at him. The choking sensation of rotted, fermented life blotted his brain, more and more life, as if each droch were bloated on the lives of those it drank.

In for two creds, so let’s rob the bank, thought Luke. No sense in being inconspicuous now. He directed the Force before him, and staggered up the stairs, climbing on his hands and knees, while above him he had the sense of the big arthropod droch retreating, claws clicking on the floor, eye-stalks watching him like evil stars out of the darkness.

17

“What’s that?” Leia whirled at something that was less a sound than a stabbing in her mind, a tightening in her