Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy Trilogy 01_ Jedi Search - Kevin J. Anderson [54]
Before the droid could answer, Lando clamped his hand over Threepio’s mouth to keep him silent. Threepio nodded and turned to stare at the man in the shadows.
With a whirring sound Artoo-Detoo puttered down the walkway between the pens. Tymmo looked up, startled, but Artoo carried a cleaning attachment and scrubbed the floor under the pens. He whirred right by Tymmo, ignoring the man just as a cleaning droid would do. Lando nodded in admiration for the little astromech.
Tymmo turned back to his work, shaken by Artoo’s appearance and apparently wanting to be out of there as soon as possible.
“Sir!” Threepio cried. “He just implanted a small object in the protoplasm of that blob!”
Tymmo whirled and grabbed at one of the pockets of his jumpsuit. Lando didn’t need greater illumination to recognize a blaster being drawn.
“Thanks a lot, Threepio!” he said as he tackled the droid. An instant later a blaster bolt sparked off the wall near where they had been standing a moment before. “Come on!”
He scrambled to his feet and ran over to where Tymmo had been hiding, ducking to take advantage of the cover the blob pens offered. Another blaster shot ricocheted through the dimness, missing them by a wide margin.
“Artoo!” Threepio wailed. “Sound the alarms! Call the guards! Alert the corral owner! Anybody!”
Tymmo shot at them again, and Threepio gasped as sparks erupted close to his head. “Oh, dear!”
Inside the corral the blobs awakened and stirred, rearing up against the bars of their pens.
He heard Tymmo crash into the corner of a cage. They reached the pen where Tymmo had been meddling. Lando kept his head low. “Threepio, see if you can tell what he planted in that blob.”
“Do you really think that’s wise right at the moment, sir?”
“Do it!” Lando had his own blaster drawn, scanning the shadows for Tymmo’s form.
Ratcheting alarms rang out. “Good work, Artoo,” Lando mumbled.
Seeing a hunched, moving form, Lando risked a shot on stun but missed. An indignant series of electronic noises told him he had almost deactivated Artoo. “Sorry about that.”
By firing his blaster Lando had given away his position. Tymmo shot back, but his energy bolt spanged off the wall. Lando fired again, and as the stun beam expanded outward, he saw several blobs in its path curl up and condense sideways.
“A shoot-out at the blob corral,” Lando said to himself. “Just the way I wanted to spend my vacation.”
Threepio stood next to the pen trying to determine exactly what Tymmo had been doing. The blob itself, riled by the disturbance, reared up against the bars, leaning into the cage door. Dim light glinted off Threepio’s polished body, offering a clear target; but this time when Tymmo fired, his blaster bolt incinerated the lock on the pen. With the pressing weight of the blob, the door flung open, and the entire gelatinous mass dumped onto Threepio’s head, oozing down his body. The droid’s muffled cries of panic came through the wet protoplasm.
Seeing Tymmo’s form move through the shadows, Lando sprinted after him. The other man made for the archway exit as fast as he could move in the murkiness. “Tymmo! Hold it right there!”
Tymmo turned to glance in Lando’s direction, then put on a burst of reckless speed. At that moment Artoo scuttled out of the shadows, placing himself directly in the running man’s path. Tymmo crashed into the droid, somersaulted into the air, and landed on his back.
Lando pounced, grabbing Tymmo’s blaster arm and yanking it behind his back until the weapon dropped free. “Good job, Artoo.”
Tymmo thrashed and struggled as the alarms continued to sound. “Get away from me! I won’t let you take me back to her!”
“Help me! Help!” Threepio cried. He waved his arms, frantically trying to wipe blob material from his outer shell.
Guard droids and human security officers scrambled into the grotto. Lights flared on as somebody upped the illumination.