Star Wars_ The Jedi Academy Trilogy 01_ Jedi Search - Kevin J. Anderson [75]
“One down,” Kyp said.
Echoing sounds came from the open tunnel mouth ahead. Through the infrared goggles Han could see other spots of warmth, a caravan. They shot past the side tunnel just as another train of floating mine cars emerged.
“They’ve got reinforcements!” Han said in dismay. But then he saw the cars were all linked together—another mining party on its way back to the muster room at the end of a shift.
Skynxnex and the other guard plowed right into them. Their accelerating cars rode up and over, knocking three hapless workers out of their seats and leaving them blind and lost in the tunnel. The driver of the work train slewed out of the way, ramming into the rocky wall of the tunnel.
Skynxnex spun in the air but somehow kept his seat. The second guard fared even better, pulling up beside Skynxnex as they zoomed away from the site of the wreck and the shouting work crew.
Han had no idea where they were going, but they were getting farther and farther away from anyplace good. With Skynxnex and his double-blaster behind them, they had no choice but to keep fleeing deeper into the tunnels.
Ahead in the inky blackness a sudden clump of pearlescent glitters sprang out of a bare rock wall, wavering in the air. Then the luminescence started traveling down the tunnel away from them, as if trying to outrun the approaching cars.
“Another bogey!” Kyp cried.
Their floating car followed the bogey, closing the gap. But as they neared, the swirling glowing thing accelerated, as if taunting them by flying ahead, whipping around curves just in front of them. By the faint glow Han could actually see the winding curves of rock.
Skynxnex and the other pursuer zoomed along in their wake.
“Uh-oh,” Kyp said. “I think I just figured out what course we’re on. All this feels very familiar.”
“What?” Han said. “How can you tell?”
“The most recent set of destination coordinates in this navigation computer was programmed by Boss Roke. We’re going back down to where that monster was!”
The glowing bogey roiled ahead of them, dipping up and down but refusing to pop back into the spice-covered walls. As it rushed along, the bogey’s bodily illumination activated threadlike veins of glitterstim, leaving a patchwork of blue sparks in their wake.
In a long, straight stretch of tunnel Skynxnex fired his double-blaster again.
As if he could sense the blast coming, Kyp rocked the car to one side as the intense pulsed bolt shot down the tube, passed through the bogey without harming it, and struck a distant wall. The impact blew open a huge aperture into another grotto.
Seeing an escape, the bogey ducked through the new opening.
“Put it on manual,” Kyp said. “Let me fly it.” By now their eyes had grown accustomed to the bogey’s glow, and they could actually see where they were going.
“I don’t want a free return trip to where that monster is waiting.” Han relinquished the controls. Without a moment’s pause Kyp launched the car into the wide-open section of wall that led to an unknown maze.
“This is the same series of tunnels,” Kyp said.
As they plunged into the new grotto, something long and fibrous stung Han’s face like a sharp wire whipping past him.
The bogey shot into the vast chamber, flying across the darkness to the far wall. Upon striking the rock face, though, it did not melt through and vanish as the first bogey had done days earlier. Instead, the glowing ball stuck on the rough rock surface. It glittered and spangled and pulsed, as if struggling.
Another whiplike strand struck Han’s face as they flew through the air.
Around the bogey in the glow, wide veins of spice fizzled blue as the illumination activated them. The light crackled and spread outward in a network, geometrical crisscrossings along the wall. All of the spice in the chamber began to race around in