Star Wars the Truce at Bakura - Kathy Tyers [48]
Bewildered, Dev shut his eyes. From the deepest recesses of emotion, he released something controlled and repressed and stinking and hateful and—
The huge lizard loomed nearer. Dev howled and struck its forelimb.
“Harder,” it whistled. “You can do better than that, weakling.”
Gritting his teeth, Dev plunged a fist into its upper arm. “You killed my world. My parents, my people. Every one of them gone, absorbed, murdered, mutilated.…” He trailed off, sobbing.
“Nothing new to be angry for?”
Dev raised his fists in front of his chest. What was the lizard doing, pumping him for information? It wouldn’t get any this time.
It bent closer and blew lizard stench at him. “You’d like to poke at this eye, I’ll guess.”
Dev stared at the eye. It seemed to grow and surround him with blackness. It sucked him in. He fell into its depths, clutching the trailing edges of freedom.
He tumbled.
Horrified, he lay curled up on cold gray deck tiles. He had abused Bluescale. He could only guess his fate.
“Dev,” Bluescale said softly, “you should never say things like that.”
“I know,” he said miserably.
Bluescale trilled, a soft throaty purr, “You owe us so much.”
How could he ever think otherwise?
“Dev,” Bluescale whistled.
He looked up.
“We forgive you.”
He sighed deeply and pushed up to his knees, gripping the enclosure’s lower railing.
“Here, Dev.” Bluescale held out a hypospray. Gratefully, Dev leaned his shoulder into another sting. His shame melted magically away.
“I angered you deliberately, Dev. To show you how close to the surface your temper lies. You must never show anger.”
“I won’t again. Thank you. I’m sorry.”
“What so disturbed you this afternoon, Dev?”
He vaguely remembered that he’d hoped not to tell, but he couldn’t remember why. The Ssi-ruuk protected him and met all his needs. They gave him pleasure, even when he did not deserve it.
“It was remarkable,” he began. “The sense of another Force user, close by.”
“Force user?” Bluescale repeated.
“Someone like me. It’s not that I’m lonely, but like seeks like. I wished I could seek him out, but I guessed he was an enemy of the fleet, since he arrived with the new ones. It made me sad.”
“Him? It was male?”
Dev raised his head with an effort and smiled up at Bluescale. Whatever had been in the hypospray, it was making him so sleepy he could barely move.
“Perhaps I’ll dream about him,” he murmured, and he slid down off the railing.
Gaeriel lay resting in midair above a circular repulsor bed. A knitted fur coverlet wrapped her from shoulders to knees. The bed hovered over a slightly faded carpet. Yeorg and Tiree Captison’s home was one of the finest on Bakura, so she’d heard, but as Imperial taxes increased, even the prime minister had to defer repairs and replacements. Gaeri’s new salary helped with upkeep. She didn’t care about “finest,” but she did care about Uncle Yeorg and Aunt Tiree.
It’d been months since she’d needed a midafternoon rest, and the nap hadn’t helped. She’d awakened in a cold fright that the repulsor bed only chilled. The Jedi Luke Skywalker had appeared in a disquieting dream, hovering over her head in a repulsor field he generated with his Jedi powers. Before she could wake herself up, his skin and hair darkened. He became the Ssi-ruuvi envoy, Dev Sibwarra. Sibwarra floated slowly downward into the repulsor field and through the coverlet, drawing life out of her—
Frustrated, she wriggled out of the coverlet and punched a wall control. The Imperial Symphony Orchestra struck up a soothing melody around and inside her ears. She’d returned from Center thrilled by the latest Imperial sound technology, a hydrodynamic music system. For her graduation gift, Uncle Yeorg had ordered a system built into the walls of this room. Each surface, even the long window, functioned as a huge speaker. Fluid slowly circulated between panels, carrying and amplifying sound. Workers had restructured her long, rectangular room into an oval for better acoustics.
However, Wilek Nereus owned the only hard-copy catalogs on Bakura to go with the system. Data, literary,