And as the spears pushed him again onto the plank he heard, clearly through the dream mists, her mocking laughter …
“No!” Luke shouted; and as suddenly as it had appeared, the vision vanished. He was back in the cave on Dagobah, his forehead and tunic soaked with sweat, a frantic electronic beeping coming from the comlink in his hand.
He took a shuddering breath, squeezing his lightsaber hard to reassure himself that he did indeed still have it. “It’s—” He worked moisture into a dry throat and tried again. “It’s okay, Artoo,” he reassured the droid. “I’m all right. Uh …” He paused, fighting through the disorientation to try to remember what he was doing here. “Are you still picking up that electronic signal?”
Artoo beeped affirmatively. “Is it still ahead of me?”
Another affirmative beep. “Okay,” Luke said. Shifting the lightsaber in his hand, he wiped more of the sweat from his forehead and started cautiously forward, trying to watch all directions at once.
But the cave had apparently done its worst. No more visions rose to challenge his way as he continued deeper in … and at last, Artoo signaled that he was there.
The device, once he’d finally pried it out of the mud and moss, was a distinct disappointment: a small, somewhat flattened cylinder a little longer than his hand, with five triangular, rust-encrusted keys on one side and some flowing alien script engraved on the other. “This is it?” Luke asked, not sure he liked the idea of having come all the way in here just for something so totally nondescript. “There’s nothing else?”
Artoo beeped affirmatively, and gave a whistle that could only be a question. “I don’t know what it is,” Luke told the droid. “Maybe you’ll recognize it. Hang on; I’m coming out.”
The return trip was unpleasant but also uneventful, and a short time later he emerged from under the tree roots with a sigh of relief into the relatively fresh air of the swamp.
It had grown dark while he’d been inside, he noted to his mild surprise; that twisted vision of the past must have lasted longer than it had seemed. Artoo had the X-wing’s landing lights on; the beams were visible as hazy cones in the air. Wading his way through the ground vegetation, Luke headed toward the X-wing.
Artoo was waiting for him, beeping quietly to himself. The beeping became a relieved whistle as Luke came into the light, the little droid rocking back and forth like a nervous child. “Relax, Artoo, I’m all right,” Luke assured him, squatting down and pulling the flattened cylinder out of his side pocket. “What do you think?”
The droid chirped4 thoughtfully, his dome swiveling around to examine the object from a couple of different directions. Then, abruptly, the chirping exploded into an excited electronic jabbering. “What?” Luke asked, trying to read the flurry of sounds and wondering wryly why Threepio was never around when you needed him. “Slow down, Artoo. I can’t—never mind,” he interrupted himself, getting to his feet and glancing around in the gathering darkness. “I don’t think there’s any point in hanging around here anymore, anyway.”
He looked back at the cave, now almost swallowed up by the deepening gloom, and shivered. No, there was no reason to stay … and at least one very good reason to leave. So much, he thought glumly, for finding any kind of enlightenment here. He should have known better. “Come on,” he told the droid. “Let’s get you back in your socket. You can tell me all about it on the way home.”
Artoo’s report on the cylinder was, it turned out, fairly short and decidedly negative. The little droid did not recognize the design, could not decipher its function from what his general-purpose scanners could pick up, and didn’t even know what language the script on the side was written in, let alone what it said. Luke was beginning to wonder what all the droid’s earlier excitement had been about … until the last sentence scrolled across his computer scope.
“Lando?” Luke frowned, reading the sentence again. “I don’t remember ever seeing Lando with anything like this.”
More words scrolled across the scope. “Yes, I realize I was busy at the time,” Luke agreed, unconsciously flexing the fingers of his artificial right hand.5 “Getting fitted with a new hand will do that. So did he give it to General Madine, or was he just showing it to him?”
Another sentence appeared. “That’s okay,” Luke assured the droid. “I imagine you were busy, too.”
He looked into his rear display, at the crescent of Dagobah growing ever smaller behind him. He had intended to go straight back to Coruscant and wait for Leia and Han to return from Bpfassh. But from what he’d heard, their mission there could run a couple of weeks or even more. And Lando had invited him more than once to visit his new rare-ore mining operation on the superhot planet of Nkllon.6
“Change in plans, Artoo,” he announced, keying in a new course. “We’re going to swing over to the Athega system and see Lando. Maybe he can tell us what this thing is.”
And on the way, he’d have time to think about that disturbing dream or vision or whatever it was he’d had in the cave. And to decide whether it had been, in fact, nothing more than a dream.
C H A P T E R 12
“No, I don’t have a transit permit for Nkllon,” Han said patiently into the Falcon’s transmitter, glaring across at the modified B-wing running beside them. “I also don’t have any accounts here. I’m trying to reach Lando Calrissian.”
From the seat behind him came a sound that might have been a stifled laugh. “You say something?” he asked over his shoulder.
“No,” Leia said innocently. “Just remembering the past.”
“Right,” Han growled. He remembered, too; and Bespin wasn’t on his list of fond memories. “Look, just give Lando a call, will you?” he suggested to the B-wing. “Tell him that an old friend is here, and thought we might play a hand of sabacc for my choice of his stock. Lando will understand.”
“We want to what?” Leia asked, leaning forward around his chair to give him a startled look.
Han muted the transmitter. “The Imperials might have spies here, too,” he reminded her. “If they do, announcing our names to the whole Athega system wouldn’t be very smart.”
“Point,” Leia conceded reluctantly. “That’s a pretty strange message, though.”
“Not to Lando,” Han assured her. “He’ll know it’s me—provided that middle-level button pusher1 out there loosens up and sends it in.”
Beside him, Chewbacca growled a warning: something big was approaching from aft-starboard. “Any make on it?” Han asked, craning his neck to try to get a look.
The transmitter crackled back to life before the Wookiee could answer. “Unidentified ship, General Calrissian has authorized a special transit waiver for you,” the B-wing said, his tone sounding a little disappointed. He’d probably been looking forward to personally kicking the troublemakers out of his system. “Your escort is moving to intercept; hold your current position until he arrives.”
“Acknowledged,” Han said, not quite able to bring himself to thank the man.
“Escort?” Leia asked cautiously. “Why an escort?”
“That’s what you get for going off and doing politics stuff when Lando drops by the Palace for a visit,” Han admonished her, still craning his neck. There it was … “Nkllon’s a superhot planet—way too close to its sun for any normal ship to get to without getting part of its hull peeled off. Hence”—he waved Leia’s attention to the right—“the escort.”
There was a sharp intake of air from behind him, and even Han, who’d seen Lando’s holos of these things, had to admit it was an impressive sight. More than anything else the shieldship resembled a monstrous flying umbrella, a curved dish fully half as big across as an Imperial Star Destroyer. The underside of the dish was ridged with tubes and fins—pumping and storage equipment for the coolant that helped keep the dish from burning up during the trip inward. Where the umbrella’s handle would have been was a thick cylindrical pylon, reaching half as far back as the umbrella dish was wide, its far end bristling with huge radiator fins. In the center of the pylon, looking almost like an afterthought, was the tug ship that drove the thing.