Splinter in the Mind's Eye, Page 3

  She did as she was told, the motion generating squelching sounds from the bog. Her hand flailed for him, smacking the soft ground many centimeters from his.

  Rising, he scrambled back to the cockpit and retrieved his walking stick, then returned hurriedly to his prone position on the wing and extended it. "Lean toward me," he urged her again. "Threepio, you and Artoo hold tight or I'll go in with her."

  "Don't worry sir," Threepio assured him. Artoo added a whistle.

  She was up to her waist now. On the first try she missed the pole. The second time her fingers locked around it, were joined by her other hand.

  Luke wrapped both hands around his end of the stick and sat up on the wing, leaning back. His feet slid and scraped on the smooth metal. "Artoo, Threepio... pull!"

  Having secured a firm grip on her, the earth was reluctant to yield its prize. Every muscle in his body taut, Luke struggled to heave and to conjure the Force simultaneously. He tried to put all of his weight behind his arms, behind his desperate pull.

  A tired sucking noise sounded, and the Princess lurched forward. Luke allowed his exhausted arms a brief respite and hyperventilated while he had the chance.

  "You can play toy engine later," the Princess admonished him. "Pull now."

  Momentary anger gave him enough energy to pull her the rest of the way clear. Reaching down, he gave her a hand up and then they were both sitting on the edge of the wing.

  Covered from the ribs down in a packing of green-gray mud and pieces of what looked like dried straw, the Princess appeared decidedly unregal. She pushed futilely at the mud, which was drying rapidly to the consistency of thin concrete. She said nothing, and Luke knew anything he might venture would not be terribly well received.

  "Come on," he suggested simply. Taking up his walking stick, he moved to the back side of the wing. Leaning over, he probed at the ground, which displayed no inclination to eat his stick. But still he kept one hand on the wing edge when he stepped off. His feet sank, but only half a centimeter into the spongy loam. Yet the earth here looked no different from the quickclay that had almost taken the Princess.

  She dropped down easily beside him and soon they were traveling through intermittent patches of half-familiar vegetation. Branches and bushes blocked tired legs and occasional thorns tore hopefully at them, but Luke's assumption that the ground beneath the taller growths was the firmest held true with gratifying consistency. Even the weighty 'droids didn't sink into the muck.

  From time to time as they hiked along, the Princess would dab or push disgustedly at her lower body, which was now solidly caked with the gook she'd slid into. She remained unusually quiet. Luke couldn't tell whether her silence was due to a desire to conserve her strength or embarrassment at her present situation. He tended to think the former. To his knowledge, being embarrassed was not something she was subject to.

  Frequently they would pause, turn circles, and then match up pointer alignment on their tracoms to insure they were still marching toward the beacon site.

  "Even if it is an automatic station," he remarked several days later, in an effort to cheer her, "somebody put it down here and so they have to maintain it. However infrequently. I saw some pretty big ruins near the place we set down. Perhaps natives are still living in them or they might be empty, but the beacon could be for the use of a xenoarcheological research post."

  "That's possible," she admitted brightly. "Yes... that would also explain why the beacon's not listed. A small scientific outpost could be temporary!"

  "And recent," Luke added, excited by the plausibility of his own supposition. Just talking about such a possibility made him, made them both feel better. "If that's the case, then even an automated station that's only used on occasion ought to contain an emergency shelter and survival provisions. Heck, there might even be a subspace planetary relay for contacting Circarpous IV when the scientific team is operating here."

  "A cry for help would be a poor way for me to announce my presence," the Princess observed, brushing at her dark hair. "Not," she added quickly, "that I'm going to be particular. I'll settle for arriving in a medical cocoon."

  They walked on in silence for awhile before another question entered Luke's mind. "I still wonder, Princess, what caused our instruments to go crazy. That enormous volume of rising free energy we passed through... bolts jumping from sky to ship and ship back to sky again... I've never seen anything like that before."

  "Nor have I, sir," commented Threepio. "I thought I might go mad."

  "Neither have I," admitted the Princess thoughtfully. "And I've never read of a natural phenomenon like it. Several colonized gas giants have bigger storms, but never with so much color. And big thunderheads are always involved. We were above the thick cloud layer when it happened. Still," she hesitated, "the whole thing seemed almost familiar, somehow." Artoo beeped his agreement.

  "You'd think whoever established that homing beacon in this area would also have put a message in the transmission warning ships away from the danger."

  "Yes," the Princess agreed. "Hard to imagine a scientific expedition, or any other kind, being that negligent. The omission, it's almost criminal." She shook her head slowly. "That effect... I can almost remember something like it." A diffident smile, then, "My head's still full of the conference."

  It should be, Luke thought, full of one thing only-making it to that homing beacon and hoping there was more there than just a pile of machinery. What he said was, "I understand, Princess."

  Not the Force, but a more ancient, more highly developed sense in man half convinced him they were being watched. He found himself turning rapidly to scan the trees and mist behind them and at each side. Nothing looked back at him, but the feeling refused to go away.

  Once she spotted him peering hard at a dank copse. "Nervous?" It was part question, part challenge.

  "You bet I'm nervous," he shot back. "I'm nervous and frightened and I wish to hell we were on Circarpous right now. Anywhere on Circarpous, instead of trudging through this swamp on foot."

  Turning serious, the Princess told him, "One learns to accept whatever events life has in store with the best possible spirits." She stared straight ahead.

  "That's just what I'm doing," Luke confessed, "accepting them in the best possible spirits-nervousness and fear."

  "Well, you needn't look at me as if this is all my fault."

  "Did I imply that? Did I say that?" Luke countered, a touch more tightly than he intended. She glanced sharply at him and he cursed his inability to conceal his feelings. He would have been, he decided, a rotten cardplayer. Or politician.

  "No, but you as much as..." she began hotly.

  "Princess," he interrupted softly, "we still have a long way to go, according to your plotted location. Just because something full of teeth and claws hasn't pounced on us from every tree doesn't mean such creatures don't thrive here. One thing we haven't got is time to fight between ourselves. Besides, responsibility is a dead issue now. It's been superseded by survival. Survive we will, if the Force is with us."

  There was no reply. That in itself was encouraging. They trudged on, Luke stealing admiring glances at her when she wasn't looking. Disheveled and caked with mud from the waist down, she was still beautiful. He knew she was upset, not at him, but at the possibility they might miss the scheduled conference with the Circarpousian underground.

  There's no night so dark as a night filled with fog, and every night on Mimban was like that. They made a bed for themselves between the parted roots of a great tree. While the Princess started a fire, Luke and the 'droids constructed a rain shelter by stretching the two survival capes between both massive roots. They huddled together for warmth and watched the night try to slip around the edges of the fire. It crackled reassuringly despite the mist as the night sounds chorused around them. They were no different from day sounds, but anything that wears the cloak of night, especially on an alien world, partakes of the night's mystery and terror.

  "Don't
worry, sir," said Threepio. "Artoo and I will keep watch. We don't require sleep, and there's nothing out there that can ingest us." Something sounding like a broken pipe gurgled stentorianly in the darkness and Threepio started. Artoo gave a derisive beep, and the two 'droids moved out into the darkness.

  "Very funny," Threepio admonished his companion. "I hope one of the local carnivores chokes on you and breaks every one of your external sensors." Artoo whistled back, sounding unimpressed. The Princess pressed close against Luke. He tried to comfort her without appearing anxious, but as the darkness closed to a stygian blackness around them and the night sounds turned to sepulchral moans and hootings, his arm instinctively went around her shoulders. She didn't object. It made him feel good to sit there like that, leaning against her and trying to ignore the damp ground beneath.

  Something called out with an abyssal shrillness, startling Luke from his sleep. Nothing moved beyond the dying fire. With his free hand he tossed several shards of wood onto the embers, watched the fire blaze again.

  Then he happened to glance down at his companion's face. It was not the face of a Princess and a Senator or of a leader of the Rebel Alliance, but instead that of a chilled child. Moistly parted in sleep, her lips seemed to beckon to him. He leaned closer, seeking refuge from the damp green and brown of the swamp in that hypnotic redness.

  He hesitated, pulled back. She was an aristocrat and Rebel leader. For all he'd accomplished above Yavin, he was still only a pilot and, before that, a farmer's nephew. Peasant and Princess, he mused disgustedly.

  His assignment was to protect her. He wouldn't abuse that trust, no matter his own hopeless hopes. He would defend her against anything that leapt out of the darkness, crawled from the slime, dropped from the gnarled branches they walked under. He would do it out of respect and admiration and possibly out of the most powerful of emotions, unrequited love.

  He would even defend her from himself, he determined tiredly. In five minutes he was fast asleep....

  Any awkwardness was spared by the fact that he awakened first. Removing his arm from her shoulders, he nudged her gently once, twice. With the third nudge she sat straight up, eyes wide and staring with sudden wakefulness. She turned sharply to stare at him. Then the events of the past several days came flooding back to her and she relaxed a little.

  "Sorry. I thought I was someplace else. I was a little frightened." She started to rummage through her survival pack, and Luke did the same with his. Threepio offered a cheery "Good morning."

  While the cloud-masked sun rose somewhere behind them, warming the mists slightly, they shared a meager breakfast of emergency cube concentrates.

  "Whoever created these," she grimaced in distaste, biting off a small piece of a pink square, "must have been part machine. They didn't program anything like taste or flavor into them."

  Luke tried not to let the awful taste he was experiencing show. "Oh, I don't know. They're designed to keep you alive, not to taste good."

  "Want another one?" She extended a blue square with the consistency of dead sponge. Luke eyed it, half-smiled queasily.

  "Not... right away. I'm kind of full." She nodded knowingly, then smiled. He grinned back at her.

  The long day never grew truly comfortable, but their suits and the thermal capes kept them warm enough. By late morning it had grown sufficiently hot for them to unhook the capes, fold the thin material into small rectangles, and put them up in suit pockets.

  The rare breaks in the mist were never large enough to give them a view of the rising sun, though Threepio and Artoo assured them it was there. It attacked the mist persistently, raising the light level from mere dimness to a kind of enthusiastic twilight.

  "We should be getting close to the beacon," she told them all around midday. Luke wondered how many hours they'd slept. Nights and days would be long on Circarpous/Mimban.

  "We have to be prepared to find nothing, Princess. There might not be a beacon station,"

  "I know," she admitted quietly. "We'll have to search, though. We can walk in an expanding spiral from the place I plotted, and hope."

  A long wall of trees and lesser growth lay ahead. They plunged into it without hesitating, trading ease of passage for secure footing.

  "Pardon me, sir."

  Luke looked slightly ahead and to his right. Both robots had paused and See Threepio was leaning against something. "What is it, Threepio?"

  "Your pardon, sir, but this isn't a tree I'm pressing against," the 'droid said, "it's metal. I thought the matter worthy enough to bring to your notice. There is a possibility..." A loud beep cut him off and he glared down at Artoo. "Talk too much? What do you mean I talk too much, you factory second!"

  "Metal... it is metal!" The Princess was standing alongside the robots, waiting for Luke to make his way through the brush.

  "Artoo, see if you can clear some of this undergrowth away." The little 'droid activated a small cutting flame, used it to burn a path through the jungle. "It's a wall... it's got to be," Luke muttered as they walked parallel to the forest-scarred metal surface.

  Sure enough, the metal finally ended, and they emerged from the trees onto a modestly cleared roadway. It led into a street paved with packed clay-earth. Buildings lined both sides of the glorified alley, marching resolutely into the swirling fogs. Warm yellow glows shone from lights hidden behind tightly sealed windows, illuminating and outlining raised metal sidewalks canopied against the mist and rain.

  "Thank the Force," the Princess murmured.

  "First," Luke began, "we find a place to get cleaned up. Then..." He took a step forward. A hand caught his shoulder, held him back. He eyed Leia curiously. "What's the matter?"

  "Think a minute, Luke," she urged him softly. "This is more than just a simple homing beacon site. Much more." Cautiously, she leaned around the corner of the metal wall, peered down the street. Figures were strolling along the metal walkways now. Others crossed the mist-slicked street. "It's too substantial for a scientific post, too."

  Luke turned his own attention to the shrouded streets, took in the figures, the crude shape of the structures. "You're right. It's a big installation. Maybe some company from Circarpous..."

  "No." She gestured sharply. "Look there."

  Two figures were swaying down the center of the street. They wore armor instead of loose clothing, formed armor of white and black. Armor that was all too familiar.

  Both men carried their helmets casually. One dropped his, bent to retrieve it, kicked it accidentally up the street. His companion chided him. Cursing, the clumsy Imperial picked up his helmet, and the two continued on their meandering path.

  Luke's eyes had grown as wide as Leia's. "Imperial stormtroopers, here. Without the Circarpousians' knowledge, or we'd have heard of it from the underground there."

  She was nodding excitedly. "If the Circarpousians find out, they'll quit the Empire faster than a bureaucrat can quote forms!"

  "And who's going to inform them about the violation?" Luke wanted to know.

  "Why, we..." The Princess stopped, looked somber. "We have two reasons to need help now, Luke."

  "Shsssh," he whispered. They drew back further into the darkness. A large cluster of men and women appeared around the near corner. They were chatting softly among themselves, but it wasn't their inaudible conversation that intrigued Luke and Leia. They wore unusual clothing, coveralls of some black, reflective material which tucked into matching high boots.

  The coveralls rose to end in a cap that fit over the wearer's head. Some members of the group had their hoods up and fastenformed, others wore them folded flat against their upper back. Various types of equipment Luke didn't recognize hung and swayed from wide belts.

  Evidently the Princess knew what they were. "Miners," she informed him, watching as the group moved off down one metal walkway. "They're wearing mining suits. The Empire's digging something valuable out of this planet, and the Circarpousians don't know a thing about it."

  "How can you be
so sure?" Luke inquired.

  The Princess sounded positive. "They'd have their own installation here, and no troops. The Empire obviously doesn't want anyone to know about this." Artoo whistled soft agreement.

  Further conversation was made impossible when the air was suddenly filled with a distant, violent howling. It sounded like a parade of demons tramping along just beneath the surface.

  The sound continued for several minutes, then ceased. Realization transformed the Princess' expression.

  "Energy mining!" she explained breathlessly to Luke. "They're using some big generators here." A thoughtful pause, then, "That might account for the atmospheric disturbance which forced us down. I knew I'd read about that effect somewhere. A ship has to be specially insulated to drop down through an area where an energy drill is working. By-products, including excess charges, are shunted away skyward.

  "But the fallout materials-if this world supports a native race, it's illegal, that kind of mining."

  "Since when," observed Luke bitterly, "did legalities ever matter to the Empire?"

  "You're right, of course."

  "We can't stand here forever," he went on. "First thing we have to do is obtain some substantial food. Those concentrates can keep you alive for only so long without some protein to work with. And," he added, glancing at her muddy exterior, "we've got to get cleaned up. We can't attract any attention. Since Yavin and the Death Star we're both well known to Imperial enforcement officials, we'd be taken on sight."

  He studied her pilot's suit, then his own. "We can't go strolling around town in these. I think we'd better work on stealing a change of clothing."

  "Steal?" the Princess objected, drawing herself up. "From a possibly honest shopkeeper? If you think for a minute that a former Princess of the royal house of Alderaan, a Senator, is going to resort to-"

  "I'll steal them," Luke said curtly. He leaned around the metal corner. The mist-shrouded street was momentarily deserted and he beckoned for her to follow.