Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy Trilogy 01_ Jedi Search - Kevin J. Anderson [40]
As they huddled in the tunnel, picking at broken rock, Han could think only of his aching knees, his burning fingers. Of how nice it would be to be back with Leia again. No one had told him how long a shift was—not that he had any way of telling time in the darkness. He grew hungry. He grew thirsty. He kept working.
During a lull Han felt a tingle go up his spine. He looked, knowing he could see nothing in the dark. But his ears, now attuned as his primary sense, picked up a distant rustling, a thousand whispering voices growing louder, picking up speed like a hydrolocomotive bulleting down a tube. A pearly glow seemed to seep out of the air.
“What—?”
“Shhh!” Kyp answered. The prisoners had stopped working. A faint glittering dazzle like a dense cloud of faint fire-flies shot through the tunnel, humming and chittering.
Han ducked. Around him he heard the others also falling flat on the debris-covered floor.
The glowing thing shot down the hollow tube, rolling and roiling. Once it passed them and went beyond the point where they had mined spice from the walls, the glowing thing suddenly curved right and plunged straight into the solid rock, vanishing like a fish falling back into a dark pool.
Behind them, along the curving lengths of the tunnel, tiny blue sparks flickered from the exposed spice that had been activated by the light source whizzing past. The blue sparks sputtered and flickered, and quickly faded.
Han’s eyes ached from the sudden barrage of light—a light that was probably too dim for him to have seen under normal circumstances, but his eyes had been yearning in blackness for hours now. “What was that?” he shouted.
He heard Kyp panting beside him. “Nobody knows. It’s about the fifteenth one I’ve seen over the years. We call them bogeys. They’ve never hurt anybody, or so we think, but nobody knows what’s grabbing those people down in the deep mines.”
The guard himself seemed shaken, and Han could hear a quaver in his voice. “That’s enough. End of shift. Let’s make our way back to the cars.”
That sounded like a good idea to Han.
When the string of mine cars returned to the long holding grotto and the metal door closed behind them, Han heard the sound of weapons being drawn. All workers were ordered to strip out of their thermal suits. Han could understand the precautions—with a brief mental boost from stolen glitterstim, a prisoner might be able to stage an escape … although Han had been to the barren surface of Kessel and wondered where an escapee might go.
When the standard lights finally came back on, the blinding glare was enough to make Han crouch over, as if someone had punched him in the gut. He shielded his eyes.
He felt a hand take him and lead him into the muster room. “It’s okay, Han. Just follow me. Let your eyes get used to it. There’s no hurry.”
But Han was in a hurry to see what Kyp Durron looked like. He kept blinking away tears and forcing his pupils to contract enough that he could make sense out of the brilliant images showering around him. But when he finally discerned Kyp’s form, he blinked again—this time in surprise.
“You’re just a kid!” Han saw a dark, tousle-headed teen who looked as if he cropped his own hair with a blunt object. He had wide eyes surrounded by dark rims, and his skin was pale from years of living in the darkness of the spice mines. Kyp was wiry and tough looking. He stared at Han with hope and a little intimidation.
“Don’t worry,” Kyp said. “I do the best I can.”
Kyp reminded him of the brash and wide-eyed young Luke Skywalker Han had first met in the Mos Eisley cantina. But Kyp seemed tougher than Luke had been, not quite so naive. With the rough life Kyp had had, growing up on Kessel and locked in the spice mines without anyone to watch over him, it was no wonder the kid had a hard streak in him.
At the moment Han couldn’t decide which he hated more—the Empire, for inflicting such hardships on Kyp