Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [262]
Reigniting his lightsaber and moving cautiously back out into the cavern, Obi-Wan came upon a nest of what must have been infant Huge Slimy Cave-Monsters; picking his way around it as they lunged and snapped and squalled at him, he reflected absently that people who thought all babies were cute should really get out more.
Obi-Wan walked, and occasionally climbed or slid or had to leap, and walked some more.
Soon the darkness in the cavern gave way to the pale glow of Utapaun traffic lighting, and Obi-Wan found himself standing in a smallish side tunnel off a major thoroughfare. This was clearly little traveled, though; the sandy dust on its floor was so thick it was practically a beach. In fact, he could clearly see the tracks of the last vehicle to pass this way.
Broad parallel tracks pocked with divots: a blade-wheeler.
And beside them stretched long splay-clawed prints of a running dragon.
Obi-Wan blinked in mild astonishment. He had never entirely grown accustomed to the way the Force always came through for him—but neither was he reluctant to accept its gifts. Frowning thoughtfully, he followed the tracks a short distance around a curve, until the tunnel gave way to the small landing platform.
Grievous’s starfighter was still there. As were the remains of Grievous.
Apparently not even the local rock-vultures could stomach him.
Tantive IV swept through the Kashyyyk system on silent running; this was still a combat zone. Captain Antilles wouldn’t even risk standard scans, because they could so easily be detected and backtraced by Separatist forces.
And the Separatists weren’t the only ones Antilles was worried about.
“There’s the signal again, sir. Whoops. Wait, I’ll get it back.” Antilles fiddled some more with the controls on the beacon. “Blasted thing,” he muttered. “What, you can’t calibrate it without using the Force?”
Bail stared through the forward view wall. Kashyyyk was only a tiny green disk two hundred thousand kilometers away. “Do you have a vector?”
“Roughly, sir. It seems to be on an orbital tangent, headed outsystem.”
“I think we can risk a scan. Tight beam.”
“Very well, sir.”
Antilles gave the necessary orders, and moments later the scan tech reported that the object they’d picked up seemed to be some sort of escape pod. “It’s not a Republic model, sir—wait, here comes the database—”
The scan tech frowned at his screen. “It’s … Wookiee, sir. That doesn’t make any sense. Why would a Wookiee escape pod be outbound from Kashyyyk?”
“Interesting.” Bail didn’t yet allow himself to hope. “Lifesigns?”
“Yes—well, maybe … this reading doesn’t make any …” The scan tech could only shrug. “I’m not sure, sir. Whatever it is, it’s no Wookiee, that’s for sure …”
For the first time all day, Bail Organa allowed himself to smile. “Captain Antilles?”
The captain saluted crisply. “On our way, sir.”
Obi-Wan took General Grievous’s starfighter screaming out of the atmosphere so fast he popped the gravity well and made jump before the Vigilance could even scramble its fighters. He reverted to realspace well beyond the system, kicked the starfighter to a new vector, and jumped again. A few more jumps of random direction and duration left him deep in interstellar space.
“You know,” he said to himself, “integral hyperspace capability is rather useful in a starfighter; why don’t we have it yet?”
While the starfighter’s nav system whirred and chunked its way through recalculating his position, he punched codes to gang his Jedi comlink into the starfighter’s system.
Instead of a holoscan, the comlink generated an audio signal—an accelerating series of beeps.
Obi-Wan knew that signal. Every Jedi did. It was the recall code.
It was being broadcast on every channel by every HoloNet repeater. It was supposed