Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy Trilogy 01_ Jedi Search - Kevin J. Anderson [28]
The two men stopped their work shoring up a collapsed entranceway, but they didn’t seem to know how to react to the presence of a stranger. Luke was probably the first new person they had seen since the sociologist had visited them two years earlier.
“I have come to speak with Gantoris,” Luke said. They looked at him with bleak expressions. Their clothes appeared worn and patched, sewn together from pieces of other garments. Luke’s gaze held one of the two men. The other shied back into the shadows. “Are you Gantoris?” Luke asked softly.
“No. My name is Warton.” He fumbled for words; then they came out in a rush. “Everyone is gone. There’s been a rock slide in one of the crevasses. It buried two of our youngest, who went out to spear bugdillos. Gantoris and the others are there, trying to dig them out.”
Luke felt a stab of urgency and grasped Warton’s arm. “Take me there. Maybe I can help.”
Warton allowed himself to be nudged into motion, and he took Luke along a winding path through jagged rocks. The second man remained behind among the collapsing shelters. Luke and Warton descended through switchbacks down the steep wall of a crack in the ground, a split wrenched apart by tidal forces. Down here the air seemed thicker, smellier, more claustrophobic.
Warton knew exactly where to find the other survivors in the maze of side channels and partial landslides. Luke saw them shoulder to shoulder in an elbow of the crevasse, scrambling over newly fallen rock, working to haul boulders aside. Every one of the thirty people there wore the same implacable expression, as if their optimism had burned away but they could not allow themselves to give up their duties. Two of the women bent over the rubble, calling into the cracks.
One man worked with twice the effort of the others. His long black hair hung in a braid on the left side of his face. His eyebrows and eyelashes had been plucked away, leaving his broad face smooth and angular and flushed with his exertion. He shoved rocks aside, which the other people hauled away. They had already managed to clear some of the debris, but they had not yet uncovered the two victims. The dark-haired man paused to glance at Luke, failed to recognize him or understand his presence, then returned to his efforts. By the way Warton and the others looked to him, Luke guessed the man must be Gantoris himself.
Before Warton had taken him to the base of the rockfall, Luke stopped and, with a quick glance, took in the positioning of the boulders. He let his arms fall to his sides, rolled his eyes back in concentration, and reached out through the Force, using the strength he found there to feel the boulders, to move them, and to keep other rocks from doing further damage. When Yoda had trained him to lift large stones, it had been merely a game, a training exercise; now two lives depended on it.
He paid no attention to the astonished sounds as the colonists stepped back, ducking out of the way as Luke mentally hurled boulder after boulder from the top of the rock pile, tossing them into other parts of the crevasse. He could feel life down in the shadowy depths, somewhere.
When the rocks began to show splashes of blood, and he exposed a pale arm, part of a shoulder hunched in the secret shadows of the avalanche, several people rushed forward. Luke made an extra effort to keep the unstable pile of rocks steady enough for the rescue operations. He continued to remove fallen boulders.
“She’s alive!” someone shouted, and several helpers rushed into the debris, brushing away stones and hauling free a young girl. Her face and legs were battered and bloody, one arm was obviously broken; she began weeping with pain and relief as the rescuers pulled her out. Luke