Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens the Weapon of a Jedi: A Luke Skywalker Adventure (7 page)

“I have a bad feeling about this,” Threepio said as Sarco jabbed
a prod into the side of the happabore’s head and the huge beasts picked their way down the narrow path that led
past the massive spire looming over Tikaroo and into the jungle.

It took a few minutes for Luke to get used to the jolting gait of the happabores and take a real look at the Devaronian jungle surrounding them. It was cool beneath the towering
trees, with bird cries punctuating
the rising and falling thrum of insects calling to one another. The happabores clambered over tangles of massive tree roots, their tiny eyes peering out at the
trail ahead.

Artoo offered a quiet beep from his place atop the rear happabore.

“Peaceful?” Threepio snapped. “You’re obviously malfunctioning. I expect that any moment we’ll be stomped to bits. Or bitten in two by some monstrous
predator.”

“Or turned to scrap by a swarm of metal-eating bugs,” Luke said with a grin. “Don’t forget that one.”

Sarco turned to regard the protocol droid. The chitinous plates of his head reminded Luke unsettlingly of overgrown toenails.

“Or blown to bits because you won’t shut up,” he said.

“Oh dear,” Threepio said in a small voice.

“He’s just kidding, Threepio,” Luke said,
then sensed something nearby. He peered into the jungle, trying to make sense of the rippling patterns of color and shade.

“Wait,” he said, putting his hand on Sarco’s shoulder. The alien shook it off, but tapped his mount with his prod. The happabore halted, its pinkish snout quivering, and gave a
low moan that sounded like it was in pain.

“What is it, Marcus?” Sarco asked.

“I’m
not sure.…It was a feeling I had.”

Luke exhaled, trying to reach out not just with his senses, but also with his feelings.

“There,” he said, pointing deeper into the jungle.

Through a stand of trees he saw four gray shapes, dappled in shadow. One moved slightly, and the shapes resolved themselves into sturdy legs, broad backs, and stubby heads crowned with curling
horns.

They
weren’t happabores but rather the creatures Luke had seen in his vision. They’d stood nearby while he faced the three remotes with his lightsaber.

“Pikhrons,” Sarco grunted. “You have keen senses for an outlander.”

He handed one of the long-barreled blaster rifles to Luke, then raised his own bulky weapon.

“No,” Luke said, pushing Sarco’s rifle down.

“What? Why not?”

Luke shook
his head. He realized he could feel the pikhrons in the Force—the comfort they took in one another and the pleasure they felt in the shade of their glen. He could also feel
their wariness about the intruders atop the happabores and their urge to flee, which was warring with their instinct to remain still and silent.

“You’re taking away a good payday, outlander,” Sarco objected.

“I’ll
pay you whatever you would have earned from the skins,” Luke said. “But we’re leaving the pikhrons alone.”

Sarco shrugged, returned the rifles to their slings, and jabbed the happabore with the prod. As the beasts resumed their journey through the jungle, Luke looked back to see the pikhrons ambling
away through the trees.

“Did you grow up in these woods?” he asked Sarco.

“In Tikaroo,”
Sarco said. “This is home now. I only go into town when it’s necessary. They don’t like me there. They never have.”

“I’m sorry.”

Sarco just grunted.

“Mr. Sarco?” Threepio piped up. “Why do they call you the Scavenger? It seems a most peculiar name.”

Luke grimaced. Sometimes he suspected whoever programmed Threepio for etiquette had installed something upside down.

“It’s supposed
to be an insult,” Sarco said. “My specialty is finding things of value and figuring out who wants them.”

“If you grew up in Tikaroo, you must remember the days before the hunts,” Luke said. “When the villagers followed the old ways.”

The bristles on Sarco’s arms quivered briefly.

“The old ways were sentimental nonsense. Animals are a resource, like everything else in the galaxy.”

“But the people here lived in harmony with the pikhrons for generations.”

Sarco shrugged.

“Besides, resources can be used up if we’re not careful,” Luke said.

“An entire galaxy’s worth? Impossible. What’s the point of caring about a few pikhrons? Or Devaron? Or any of it?”

Luke looked sadly at the stately trees, wondering what had happened to Sarco that he cared so little for
his surroundings. He couldn’t have been born that way—no one was. Something
had warped and twisted him, turned him bitter and withdrawn.

“Besides,” the alien muttered, “it’s a better life traveling the jungle taking what you need than scratching at dirt with a plow.”

“Now
that
I agree with,” Luke said. “I grew up farming, myself. It’s hard work.”

Sarco turned his eyeless mask of
chitin toward Luke. His cilia fluttered and he cocked his head to the left, then to the right.

“Thought you were a hyperspace scout,” he said. “Isn’t that your fighter that Kivas is working on?”

“That’s right.”

“You’re a busy young man. Y-wing, eh? If you want to sell, I know people who’ll pay good credits.”

“What kind of people?” Luke asked.

Sarco shrugged.

“I find things,”
he said. “As long as people pay good credits, what they do with those things isn’t my business.”

“Well, my ship isn’t for sale.”

“What about the droid, then?”

“Of all the nerve!” Threepio exclaimed. “I am most certainly
not
for sale. Isn’t that right, Master—”

“I meant the astromech,” Sarco said. “You talk too much—nobody would buy you.”

Artoo chortled and Luke had to smile.

“They’re not for sale, either,” he said. “But I’ve got a way you can make some easy credits. Take me to Eedit.”

“Forbidden.”

Artoo blatted derisively, and Sarco turned in his seat.

“What did it say?”

Threepio inclined his head haughtily.

“He said he thought you didn’t believe in ghosts.”

“You should shut those droids off,” Sarco said.

“I was thinking the same thing
as Artoo,” Luke said. “What are you afraid of?”

“Nothing,” Sarco said. “But there’s a difference between brave and stupid. Ghosts aren’t the danger at Eedit.”

“What is, then?” Luke asked. “Look, I just want to see the place—I won’t go inside. I’m…interested in old sites.”

Sarco turned to regard Luke.

“First you’re a hyperspace scout, now you’re some kind of historian. Is that why
you carry that antique laser sword? Out of historical interest?”

Luke hesitated, wondering when Sarco had detected his lightsaber. He cursed himself for not being more careful.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s it exactly. I’m interested in old sites, and relics.”

“So am I,” Sarco said, then cocked his head left and right. “So you carry a Jedi weapon, but you can’t use it.”

Luke forced himself
to choke back his pride.

“It’s still a useful tool,” he said. “And before you ask, no, it’s not for sale.”

Sarco’s cilia quivered in a way that made Luke uneasy. But then the alien turned away.

“Very well, Marcus,” he said. “I’ll take you to the barrier. For an additional price, of course.”

S
ARCO BROUGHT the happabores to a halt a few meters away from the edge of the jungle. He and Luke dismounted and peered out across a plateau
dotted with copses of towering trees and overgrown with vines as thick around as Luke’s leg. A stone road, cracked and almost entirely reclaimed by vegetation, led across the plateau to the
shattered towers that Luke had seen from the air.

“No
closer,” Sarco warned, pointing ahead of them.

Luke noticed white spines sticking up from the ground. They were sensors, he realized—and they stretched in a perimeter between the edge of the jungle and the temple.

His heart sank. There was no way he could reach the temple without being detected.

Artoo whistled for their attention.

“Artoo says he’s willing to deactivate the sensors,”
Threepio said. “Though that strikes me as reckless even by his standards.”

“I’m afraid you’re right,” Luke said. “It’s too risky—and we can’t afford to get caught.”

Sarco cocked his head at Luke, then turned his head so the chitinous mask faced the droids.

“I can take you somewhere else,” he said, his electronically modulated voice curiously soft. “A place reserved for my best customers.”

“What’s there?”

Sarco cocked his head one way, then the other.

“It’s a secret.”

An image flashed into Luke’s mind—a gloomy depression carpeted with moss, the jagged ends of old bones sticking out of the dirt and leaves.

Luke shook his head and took a step away from Sarco, his fingers creeping toward his lightsaber.

“I’m not interested in your secrets,” he said firmly. “Is
there any spot that gets us closer to the temple?”

Sarco’s cilia fluttered and he waved his hands at the ring of Imperial sensors.

“Are you blind, boy? You can see for yourself that there’s no way in.”

“The lake, then,” Luke said, thinking back to his vision of swimming beneath the Devaronian moons. “The one that’s nearby.”

Sarco stood stock-still for a moment, and Luke thought
the alien seemed puzzled.

“There’s no lake near here. Just the river and the old dam destroyed in the droid war. But there’s nothing there—the valuable equipment was picked over long
ago.”

A dam?
Luke thought, then realized what he’d seen in his dream wasn’t a lake at all, but an artificial reservoir.

“The old dam? Is it outside the sensor barrier?”

“Yes. But I told you, outlander—there’s
nothing there.”

“We’ll see about that,” Luke said.

The river had shrunk to a knee-deep channel meandering down the center of a bowl-shaped valley strewn with rock—Sarco said most of the water had been diverted for
projects upstream. Even Threepio managed to cross with only a moderate amount of complaining.

Luke stared at the cliffs on the far side of the valley, looking for something
he recognized from his vision, while Sarco kicked at the rocks. The old riverbed was littered with rusted droid
parts and broken pieces of armor that had once been white but had turned a sickly yellow from years of exposure to the sun.

“Garbage,” Sarco muttered, stooping to pick up the angular head of a droid. “Nothing worth taking.”

He flung the head through the air to land at Threepio’s
feet. The protocol droid peered down at it, and Artoo whistled.

“Switch heads?” Threepio asked. “What an unpleasant idea. Artoo-Detoo, some of the fantasies rattling around inside your dome border on the bizarre.”

Artoo’s only reply was a smug tootle.

Luke scanned the cliffs above until he could see the remnants of the braces that had once held the dam in place. They were little more
than twisted wreckage now, but they told him where the top
of the dam had been—and indeed, he could see a dark line on the rock that indicated the old waterline.

He looked below that line, telling himself to relax, to use the Force to direct his eyes.

There
.

“Do you have macrobinoculars?” Luke asked hesitantly, thinking it was a ridiculous question to ask an alien who didn’t have
eyes.

A burst of static that Luke decided was laughter emerged from Sarco’s vocoder. The alien opened a pouch on his bandolier and handed over a small but expensive pair of macrobinoculars.

“For customers,” he explained.

Luke nodded, then focused in on the spot he’d seen and grinned.

“There’s a cave up there,” he said. “Maybe a kilometer upriver. It’s about ten meters above the
valley floor.”

Sarco turned to face that way, then cocked his head at Luke.

“Your species can barely see the cave even with amplification. How did you know it was there?”

“I had a feeling it would be,” Luke said, not wanting to explain further.

Sarco cocked his head left, then right.

“Impressive,” he said. “But can you get up to it?”

“I think so,” Luke said, eyes already
tracing a way up the cliff.

Half an hour later he scrambled into the damp, cool cave, having come close to plummeting down the cliff face only once. He activated his lightsaber, the brilliant blue blade emerging from its
hilt with a familiar snap and hiss.

Luke closed his eyes, enjoying the weight of the hilt in his hand. Then he opened them and held up his father’s weapon, illuminating
the walls of the cave. As in his vision, stone steps
led up into the gloom. He followed them, thinking it was strange to find himself familiar with a place he’d never been.

The stairs ended at the spot where the alien Jedi’s comrade had handed him his lightsaber. After a few meters the tunnel curved sharply to the right. Luke feared it would end in a solid
wall, or a tumble of impassable
rock, and thought about how discouraging it would be to have to ride back through the jungle with Sarco.

Don’t center on your anxieties,
he reminded himself, and peered around the corner.