Star Wars_ Tales From Jabba's Palace - Kevin J. Anderson [152]
Tilting her head back, she saw the stars streaming by so rapidly it was almost like a jump into hyperspace. At this rate, even in the short-range speeder, they’d reach Mos Eisley within a couple of days, even assuming they had to take shelter during the worst of the day heat.
Yarna hugged her jacket around her and thought of her children, remembering the day they had been born, and Nautag’s pride in such a handsome brood. The babies had been barely a cold season old when the slavers had come … and thus they had not been given names. On Askaj, cublings were not named until after their first birthday.
Yarna mentally calculated the time since their capture, comparing the Askajian year to the year on Tatooine. Her children were late in receiving their names … but she’d rectify that lack as soon as they were reunited. The wind of their passage rushed through her short hair as Yarna, for the first time, considered what to name her cublings.
Nautag, of course, for the boy … the dancer felt a moment’s pang for her other male infant, who’d been snatched out of her arms by one of the slavers and carelessly dropped. His skull had been crushed by the fall. Yarna forced herself to look ahead. What should she name her two daughters?
The names came to her in a flash of inspiration: Leia and Luka. Leia … she hadn’t known the Alderaanian girl well, but if she had indeed killed Jabba, then Yarna owed her a debt she could never repay. And the name of the young Jedi who’d killed the rancor had been Luke Skywalker. Between the two of them, the dancing girl and the young Jedi had avenged Nautag. It was fitting that his children be named for them.
She turned her head to watch Doallyn as he piloted the speeder. The guard was a mystery to her … what did he look like under that mask? Was he human-seeming? His hands, in their black gloves, had the same number of digits as her own …
“Is the speeder running well?” she asked, having to raise her voice to be heard over the wind.
His mechanically enhanced voice reached her ears without difficulty. “The steering balance is out of adjustment. It keeps pulling to the right. I have to keep it on manual.”
“Then this one wasn’t repaired, was it?”
“I doubt it.”
“Will it get us to Mos Eisley?”
“If the problem doesn’t worsen, it will.”
Yarna said a silent invocation to the Moon Lady as they sped along.
They had been traveling for hours when they swooped over the crest of a high dune and Yarna, squinting, saw a faint glow in the east. As she watched, it brightened, outlining distant hills. The desert beneath them was still in shadow, but there was no mistaking those faraway hills. Yarna tapped Doallyn’s arm to gain his attention, and pointed. “The Jundland Wastes?”
He nodded. “The edge of them. We’re only three hundred kilometers from the Stone Needle now.”
Within minutes, Tatooine’s twin suns rose into view, and the rolling sand dunes of the desert around them glowed pink and gold. Yarna had never seen the Dune Sea from a vehicle before—when she’d been brought to Jabba’s palace, she’d been inside a shuttle, and there had been no portholes.
The rays of the suns struck her, and the chill of the night quickly vanished. She was wedged too tightly into the seat to take off her jacket, so she simply waited, sweating, wondering if Doallyn was determined to reach the Jundland Wastes before halting.
But after another hour, as the suns grew hotter and hotter, the pilot throttled back the speeder’s headlong rush. The little vehicle slowed, then came to a halt and hovered above a fairly level stretch of white sand.
“I think we ought to take shelter until late afternoon,” the guard said, unsealing the fastenings of the jacket and tugging it off. “Traveling in midday is dangerous.”
“I agree,” Yarna