Another series of whistles. “Don’t worry about it,” Luke assured him. “As long as I come up every few days for food and water, hibernation is perfectly safe. You’ve seen me do it a dozen times, remember? Now get busy and run those checks.”
Neither of the two components had quite the length of wiring they needed, but after poking around a little in the more esoteric sections of his technical memory, Artoo came to the conclusion that the eight kilometers available in the sensor jammer should be adequate to create at least a low-efficiency antenna. He conceded, however, that there was no way to know for sure until they actually tried it.
It was another hour’s work for Luke to get the jammer and antenna out of the ship, strip the ruined wire off the core of the latter, and move everything to the upper aft fuselage where Artoo’s two graspers could reach it. Jury-rigging a framework to feed the wire and protect it from snagging took another hour, and he took a half hour more to watch the operation from inside to make sure it was going smoothly.
At which point there was nothing left for him to do.
“Now, don’t forget,” he warned the droid as he settled himself as comfortably into the cockpit seat as possible. “If anything goes wrong—or you even think something’s about to go wrong—you go ahead and wake me up. Got that?”
Artoo whistled his assurances. “All right,” Luke said, more to himself than to the droid. “I guess this is it, then.”2
He took a deep breath, letting his gaze sweep one last time across the starry sky. If this didn’t work … But there was no point in worrying about that now. He’d done all he could for the moment. It was time now for him to draw upon inner peace, and to entrust his fate to Artoo.
To Artoo … and to the Force.
He took another deep breath. Leia, he called, uselessly, one last time. Then, turning his mind and thoughts inward, he began to slow his heart.
The last thing he remembered before the darkness took him was the odd sense that someone, somewhere, had in fact heard that final call.…
Leia …
Leia jerked awake. “Luke?” she called, propping herself up on one elbow and peering into the dimness surrounding her. She could have sworn she’d heard his voice. His voice, or perhaps the touch of his mind.
But there was no one. Nothing but the cramped space of the Lady Luck’s main cabin and the pounding of her own heart and the familiar background sounds of a ship in flight. And, a dozen meters away in the cockpit, the unmistakable sense of Chewbacca’s presence. And as she woke further, she remembered that Luke was hundreds of light-years away.
It must have been a dream.
With a sigh, she lay back down. But even as she did so, she heard the subtle change in sound and vibration pattern as the main sublight drive shut down and the repulsorlift kicked in. Listening closer, she could hear the faint sound of air rushing past the hull.
Slightly ahead of schedule, they were coming in to Kashyyyk.
She got out of bed and found her clothes, feeling her quiet misgivings gnawing with renewed force as she got dressed. Han and Chewbacca could make all the reassuring noises they wanted, but she’d read the diplomatic reports, and she knew full well how strong the undercurrent of resentment was that the Wookiees still harbored toward humans. Whether her status as a member of the New Republic hierarchy would make up for that was, in her view, entirely problematical.
Especially given her chronic difficulty in understanding their language.
The thought made her wince, and not for the first time since leaving Nkllon, she wished she’d had Lando use some other droid for his little voice-matching trick. Having Threepio and his seven-million-language translator along would have made this whole thing so much less awkward.
The Lady Luck was already deep into the atmosphere by the time she arrived in the cockpit, skimming low over a surprisingly flat layer of clouds and making smooth curves around the treetops that were occasionally visible poking through them. She remembered when she’d first come across a reference to the size of Kashyyyk’s trees; she’d had a full-blown argument with the Senate librarian at the time about how the government could not afford to have its records data shot through with such clearly absurd errors. Even now, with them right in front of her, she found the things hard to believe. “Is that size typical for wroshyr trees?” she asked Chewbacca as she slipped into the seat beside him.
Chewbacca growled a negative: the ones visible above the clouds were probably half a kilometer taller than the average. “They’re the ones you put nursery rings on, then.” Leia nodded.
He looked at her, and even with her limited ability to read Wookiee faces his surprise was quite evident. “Don’t look so shocked,” she admonished him with a smile. “Some of us humans know a little about Wookiee culture. We aren’t all ignorant savages, you know.”
For a moment he just stared at her. Then, with an urf-urf-urf of laughter, he turned back to the controls.
Ahead and to the right, a tighter group of the extra-tall wroshyr trees had come into view. Chewbacca turned the Lady Luck toward it, and within a few minutes they were close enough for Leia to see the network of cables or thin branches linking them together just above cloud height. Chewbacca circled the ship partway around, bringing it within the perimeter; and then, with just a growl of warning, dropped sharply down into the clouds.
Leia grimaced. She’d never really liked flying blind, especially in an area crowded with obstacles the size of wroshyr trees. But almost before the Lady Luck was completely enveloped by the thick white fog they were clear of it again. Immediately below them was another cloud layer. Chewbacca dropped them into that one, too, and drove through it to clear air again—
Leia inhaled sharply. Filling the entire gap between the group of massive trees, apparently hanging suspended in midair, was a city.
Not just a collection of primitive huts and fires like the Ewok tree villages on Endor. This was a real, genuine city, stretching out over a square kilometer or more of space. Even from this distance she could see that the buildings were large and complex, some of them two or three stories high, and that the avenues between them were straight and carefully laid out. The huge boles of the trees poked up around and, in some places, through the city, giving the illusion of giant brown columns supporting a rooftop of clouds. Surrounding the city on all sides, strangely colored searchlight beams lanced outward.3
Beside her, Chewbacca rumbled a question. “No, I’ve never even seen holos of a Wookiee village,” she breathed. “My loss, obviously.” They were getting closer now; close enough for her to see that the Cloud City–type unipod she’d expected was nowhere to be seen.
For that matter, there was no support of any kind visible. Was the whole city being held up by repulsorlifts?
The Lady Luck banked slightly to the left. Directly ahead of them now, at one edge of the city and a little above it, was a circular platform rimmed with landing lights. The platform seemed to be sticking straight out from one of the trees, and it took a few seconds for her to realize that the whole thing was nothing more or less than the remnant of a huge limb that had been horizontally cut off near the trunk.
A not insignificant engineering feat. Dimly, she wondered how they’d disposed of the rest of the limb.
The platform didn’t look nearly big enough to accommodate a ship the size of the Lady Luck, but a quick glance back at the city itself showed that the apparent smallness was merely a trick of the tree’s deceptive scale.4 By the time Chewbacca put them down on the fire-blackened wood, in fact, it was clear that the platform could not only easily handle the Lady Luck, but probably full-sized passenger liners, as well.