Star Wars_ Splinter of the Mind's Eye - Alan Dean Foster [7]
Using the nose of the ship as a crude guide, he set his tracomp and they started off, angling a few degrees to starboard.
It might have been a movement of bush branches in the forest, it might have been the Force, or it might have been an old-fashioned hunch, but even Ben Kenobi would have admitted that Luke had only one chance of finding the Princess’ ship. If it didn’t lie close along the path he was taking, if he missed it and passed on, he could continue trodding the surface of Mimban for a thousand years without ever seeing her again.
If his original plotting tape had been accurate and if she hadn’t altered her course of descent at the last moment for some strange reason, he ought to find her within a week. Of course, he considered, she might not have been able to prevent her fighter from changing its angle of fall. He shunted that possibility aside. The situation was grim enough without such speculations.
The fog-mist-rain altered its consistency but never dried up completely. So it wasn’t long before the exposed portions of his body were thoroughly soaked. At present, he thought, it was more of a belligerent fog than a real rain.
His suit kept his body moisture-free, but face, hands and scalp soon had rivulets of their own as water accumulated. There were rare, almost clear-dry moments, but he still spent a lot of energy regularly wiping the accumulated water beads from his forehead and cheeks.
Once he saw something that looked like a four-meter-long pale snake slither off into the underbrush at his approach. As he strode cautiously over the path it had taken, he saw that it had left a grooved track lined with luminous mucus in the soft earth. But Luke wasn’t impressed. He had spent little time in zoological study. Even on Tatooine, which harbored its own protoplasmic freaks, such things hadn’t interested him much. If a critter didn’t try to eat you, claw you or otherwise ingest you, there were other things to absorb one’s interest.
Nonetheless, he now had to direct all his attention to keeping to his predetermined path. Despite the tracom built into his suit sleeve he knew he could easily lose his way. A deviation of a tenth of a degree could be critical.
He mounted a slight rise during one of the rare, almost clear periods. Through the fog and mist he glimpsed monolithic gray battlements off in the distance. It seemed likely to him that those walls had not been raised by human hands.
Their uniform steel-gray color made them look as if they’d been constructed of a child’s toy blocks. Luke couldn’t be sure, this far away, whether their color was true or distorted by the shifting fog. Soaring gray towers were inlaid with black stone or metal and boasted misshapen domes.
He paused, tempted for the first time to change direction and explore. There were discoveries to be made here. However, the Princess waited not in that eldritch city but somewhere further on, in an environment which at any moment might prove hostile.
As if in response to his thought, he noticed a stirring in a clump of rust-green bushes ahead. Straining every sense, he dropped to one knee and removed the lightsaber from its place at his waist. The vegetation began to rustle violently. His thumb slid over the activation stud. Artoo beeped nervously alongside.
Whatever was in there was moving toward him. He thought about testing the wind, remembered sheepishly that there wasn’t any. That, however, might not prove an inhibition to the creature approaching him.
Quite abruptly the greenery ahead parted. Out walked the Mimbanite. It was a large dark brown furry ball, with patches and stripes of green covering its body, roughly a meter in diameter. Four short furry legs supported it, ending in thick, double digits. Four arms poked clear of the upper surface. The modest tail was naked like a rat’s.
Two wide eyes