Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [381]
“No. I would know.”
Chewbacca directed a yodeling bray at her.
“He believes you,” Cudgel translated.
Starstone leaned toward Chewbacca. “You think you can set us down?”
Chewbacca lowed dubiously, then nodded. Feathering the repulsorlift lever, he began to cheat the transport closer to the wroshyr. The craft was meters from landing when, without warning, what remained of the wooden tier sheared away from the massive trunk, taking several lower tiers with it as it disintegrated and fell.
Starstone sucked in her breath as Chewbacca pulled the ship sharply away from the bole. Half out of her chair, she focused her gaze on the cave-like opening to the tree’s dimly lighted interior and stretched out with the Force.
“They’re inside! I can feel them.”
Filli pulled her back into her chair. “There’s nothing we can do.”
Archyr’s voiced barked through the enunciator. “Gunships approaching.”
Cudgel forced her to look at him. “What would Shryne want you to do?”
She didn’t have to think about it. Blowing out her breath, she said: “Chewbacca, get us out of this.”
Relieved sighs came from Filli and Cudgel, a melancholy rumble from the Wookiee, who lifted the transport’s nose and accelerated.
“Steer clear of the lake,” Archyr warned. Again the drop ship came alongside, warding off strikes from inrushing Imperial gunships. “We’ve only got a narrow escape vector, north-northwest.”
Dodging fire, the two ships raced into a burnt-orange sunset and climbed for the stars, mingling with scores of escaping ferries and cargo haulers. Turbolaser bolts rained down from ships in orbit, and across the darkening curve of the planet, fires raged.
Lowing in anguish and pounding one giant fist on the instrument panel, Chewbacca pointed to a bright burning in the canopy.
“Rwookrrorro,” Cudgel said. “Chewbacca’s tree-village.”
The stars were just losing their shimmer when the communications suite toned. Filli routed the transmission through the cockpit speakers.
“Glad to see you’ve come to your senses,” Jula said. “Is Roan with either of you?”
“Negative, Jula,” Filli said sadly.
Save for bursts of static, the enunciator remained silent for a long moment; then Jula’s voice returned. “After Alderaan, there was nothing I could say …” Her words trailed off, but she wasn’t finished. “None of us is out of this yet, anyway. Vader or whoever’s in charge has Interdictor cruisers parked in orbit. No ships have been able to jump to hyperspace.”
“Does the Drunk Dancer have enough firepower to take on the cruiser?” Cudgel asked.
“Filli,” Jula said, “inform whoever asked that question that I’m not about to go to guns with a Detainer CC-twenty-two-hundred.”
As the transport reached the edge of Kashyyyk’s envelope, magnified views of local space showed hundreds of ships trapped in the artificial gravity well generated by the Interdictor’s powerful projectors. Interspersed among the ensnared vessels drifted the blackened husks of Separatist warships that had been there since the end of the war.
“Too bad we can’t start up one of those Sep destroyers,” Cudgel lamented. “They have guns enough to deal with that cruiser.”
Starstone and Filli looked at each other.
“We might know a way,” he said.
On Kashyyyk, rapacious fires held night at bay. The shadows of running figures crisscrossed the ground. Spilled blood shone glossy black, as black as the charred bark of the wroshyr trees.
Safe inside their plastoid shells an occupying force of stormtroopers rappelled into the burning forests, flushing fleeing Wookiees back into the open, out onto the debris-strewn landing platform, the shore of the lake, the public spaces between the tree clusters that made up Kachirho.
Imperial war machines closed in from all sides; speeders and swift boats roaring up onto the sandy banks, gunships coiling down from the treetops, Victory-class Destroyers descending from the stars, their wedge-shaped armored hulls outlined by bright running lights.
Driven from tree-city and forest, the Wookiees found themselves surrounded by companies of troopers.