“Do you see anything, Threepio?”
“No, Princess. Nothing larger than a few small arthropods, and I’m scanning with infrared also. That doesn’t mean something large and inimical couldn’t be out there.”
“But you don’t see anything?”
“No.”
She was furious at herself. A simple noise had panicked her. Probably only the forlorn cry of some harmless herbivore, and she’d panicked like an infant. It would not happen again.
She was angry because whatever had caused them to crash would certainly cause her to miss her scheduled arrival demonstration on Circarpous, possibly aggravating the government officials assigned to greet her. She was twice over angry at Luke. Angry for not performing a navigational miracle and following her safely down without instruments or control, and angry most of all because he’d been right in insisting they ought not land here.
So she sat and fumed silently to herself, alternately conjuring up the curses she’d employ when he finally did arrive and worrying about what she’d do if he didn’t.
Aahhh-wooop!
Again the trumpeting sound. Whatever had produced it had not left after all. If anything, the sharp hooting sounded closer. This time her hand tightened around the pistol. Once more she examined the surrounding jungle, saw nothing.
As she stared she theorized. Suppose she had misinterpreted that landing beacon somehow? Suppose it was only the barest of automatic installations and this world was devoid not only of mechanics but of facilities for organic travelers as well?
If Luke was dead she’d be marooned here alone, without any idea of … There was a loud crashing, off to her right this time. Swinging around in the seat she instinctively fired off a burst through the cracked port and was rewarded with the odor of burnt, wet vegetable matter. The muzzle of the pistol remained focused on the carbonized spot. Hopefully, she’d hit the thing. Fortunately, she hadn’t.
“It’s me!” a voice shouted, sounding more than a little shaky. She’d barely missed him.
“It’s me and Artoo.”
“Artoo Detoo!” Threepio clambered out of the cockpit, moved to greet his squat counterpart.
“Artoo, it’s good to …” Threepio paused, then continued in a different tone. “What do you think you’re doing, making me wait like this? When I think of the anguish you’ve caused me …”
“Luke, are you all right?”
He began climbing up the damaged side of the fighter, sat down next to the open cockpit. “Yes. I touched down behind you. I was afraid Artoo and I might miss you.”
“I was afraid you …” She stopped, looked down, unable to meet his gaze. “I apologize, Luke. I made a mistake in trying to land here.”
Luke also looked away, embarrassed. “Nobody could have foreseen the atmospheric disturbance that forced us down, Leia.”
She looked into the jungle. “I managed to plot the location of that homing beacon before my instruments went out completely.” She pointed slightly behind them and to her left. “It’s back that way. Once we reach the station we can locate whoever’s in charge and arrange for passage off this world.”
“If there’s a station,” Luke pointed out mildly, “or anyone in charge of it.”
“It occurred to me that it might be a fully automated station,” she confessed, “but I don’t know what else we can do.”
“Agreed,” said Luke with a slow sigh. “We’ve got nothing to gain by sitting here. I used to believe in miracles. I don’t, anymore. We can get eaten just as quickly here as we can on the trail.”
The Princess looked downcast. “You’ve encountered carnivorous life, then?”
“No, hardly any life at all, actually. The only animal of any size I confronted,” he went on with a slight grin, “took one look at me and ran off like a spooked Bantha.” He turned, moved to enter the cockpit. “Let’s get started while it’s still light. I’ll give you a hand making up a pack.”
Carefully he lowered himself in next to her. As he unlatched her seat he became conscious of the confined space they were working in. Awkwardly pressed up against him, the Princess seemed to take no notice of their proximity. In the dampness, though, her body heat was near palpable to Luke and he had to force himself to keep his attention on what he was doing.
Raising herself from the cockpit, the Princess stood on the nose of the fighter and reached down to him. “Hand it up, Luke.”
He lifted the burgeoning pack. “Too heavy?” he asked as he handed it to her. She slid it onto her back, slipped both arms through the straps and adjusted the weight before tightening them.
“The burden of public office was a lot heavier,” she shot back. “Let’s get moving.”
Briskly scrambling over the side, she let herself drop to the ground, planted her feet, took two steps in the direction of the distant beacon … and began to sink.
“Luke … Threepio …”
“Take it easy, Princess.” Edging carefully over the same side, he walked out on the intact wing facing her.
“Luke!” Already she was up to her knees in gray muck. If anything, she was beginning to sink faster.
Trying to anchor himself with his left hand, Luke reached out with his right from the wing edge. “Lean toward me. Artoo, you lock onto the ship. Threepio, give me your hand.”
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 unus
ually 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 a while 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 card-player. 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 l
ittle 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?”