Star Wars - Episode I Adventures 008 - Trouble on Tatooine Page 3

  Anakin hardly dared to breathe. Overhead he heard clanking, the squeaking of hinges, and the sudden rattle as someone picked up a handful of coins.

  “Looks good to me,” one of the pirates said.

  The pirates put the grate back on. Then they used their booted feet to stomp it snugly into place.

  Anakin rubbed at his eyes. They were full of grit. He wanted to get out of there fast.

  But something held him back: pirate treasure.

  Anakin was honest, but he needed money desperately. Jira had already contacted the smugglers, and they would be here within the hour to take the Ghostling children home. First they would demand money.

  Now Anakin had stumbled upon some.

  He couldn’t leave without it.

  Anakin waited several moments. As stealthily as he could, he wriggled back up the pipe until he reached the drain cover. Sweat poured off of him. Climbing the pipe quietly was hard work.

  He pushed the cover gently. It came off. The Morseerian pirates had actually broken the bolts for him! Anakin felt tempted to leave a thank you note after he took their money.

  He carefully lifted the heavy iron cover, then slid it across the floor.

  In seconds he entered the storage room.

  There was no light. He flipped on his glow rod and looked around. Old crates, most of them covered in dust, filled the room.

  An old air cooler was built into a niche over the door, but it didn’t work. The room felt stiflingly hot.

  Anakin looked on the floor. It, too, was covered dust. No one had cleaned it for decades.

  It wasn’t hard to figure out where the pirates hid the treasure box. Anakin simply followed their footprints in the dust.

  Anakin’s heart pounded. He gripped his beamdrill as if it were a blaster, afraid that the pirates would come back at any moment. He tried not to imagine what they’d do if they caught him.

  He reached some boxes covered with a tarp. He gently lifted it. Beneath the tarp was a locked freight box.

  The treasure!

  He tried to lift the box. It was so heavy he doubted that even a hulking Whiphid could have budged it.

  Anakin didn’t have a key for the lock.

  But he did have a beamdrill.

  He adjusted the drill settings so that it would give off a small, narrow beam of plasma. He flipped it on. The drill hissed like a snake, and emitted a steady blue tongue of flame.

  He set the beam into the lock and began to cut through. The metal turned red and molten, dripping into a puddle on the floor. Anakin was an expert with a beamdrill. He had to cut apart bits of old spaceships all the time.

  But this was the first time he’d ever cut into a freight box.

  In seconds, he flipped open the lid.

  Inside the box was a fortune in coins from a hundred worlds!

  Here on Tatooine, people used hard currency. Anakin knew the worth of many of the pieces. He grabbed the most valuable coins and shoved them into the deep pockets of his Jawa robe.

  They clinked softly, music to his ears.

  Anakin quickly counted a good three thousand wupiupi worth of coins.

  But he hadn’t counted on how keen the ears of the Morseerian pirates might be!

  He heard a scuffling and managed to flip off the power to his glow rod just before the door whisked open. He dodged behind the dusty crates. The Morseerians flashed their beam lights over the room.

  “Look,” a pirate said. “The grate’s off the floor. Someone is in here!”

  Anakin stifled the urge to scream. The pirates had blasters. They wouldn’t hesitate to shoot!

  The pirates stood in the doorway. Anakin hid behind the crates, fumbling once again with the settings on his beamdrill.

  He set it to maximum length, wide beam. He could tell the drill’s power was almost gone. At these settings, the power would run out almost instantly.

  When the light beams were trained on the far side of the room, Anakin rose up in the darkness. He aimed his beamdrill and pulled the trigger.

  The beams flooded the room with light. The Morseerians screamed. They were terrified of the rays. The pirates breathed methane. If the beam hit their breather masks, the whole building would blow up like a bomb!

  Anakin hadn’t counted on the fact that the pirates had four arms. Each pirate had a beam light, but also held two blasters.

  Both pirates opened fire as they retreated out the door. Green blaster bolts sizzled through the air, blowing crates into pieces of flying debris, tearing through the walls, burning past Anakin’s feet.

  Anakin screamed and rushed at the pirates, even as they backed out the door, fleeing in panic.

  He kept the flame shooting at the door as he raced for the sewer drain. The beamdrill suddenly sputtered empty. He hurled the drill through the doorway and dove headfirst down the drain.

  After nearly crushing his head, Anakin reached the bottom of the pipe and jackknifed back along the pipe he’d come through.

  Above he could hear the pirates curse. They rushed to the pipe and began shooting down into it, but they were too late

  “Better get a new lock,” Anakin shouted as he crawled to safety.

  Later, scrambling down the pipe, Anakin wondered how soon the slave hunters might come after him and his friends.

  He only knew that he had to find a way out of the pipes. Then he could go back and get the others.

  He reached a juncture, turned again, and found an old drainpipe. He climbed up and reached the drain cover.

  The pipe opened into a warehouse, where food crates were stacked all around. Lights were on.

  He could only be in one place: the storage room for the Mos Espa Galactic Food Emporium — just down the street from Watto’s junkyard!

  Anakin climbed up to the drain cover and pushed. Its bolts looked old and rusted, but he couldn’t get the leverage he needed.

  He tried banging with the handle of his glow rod, hoping that it wouldn’t break before the bolts did.

  A voice overhead demanded, “What are you doing?”

  A huge man peered through the drain cover.

  “Drain inspector,” Anakin said, coming up with the first lie that sprang to his lips. “Could you give me a hand with this?”

  The big man stared down at him, unbelieving. “Escaped slave is more like it,” he said, “I should call store security.” He glanced toward a nearby door.

  Anakin swallowed back his fear. “Please don’t.”

  He couldn’t see the man well through the drain screen. He was just a rough outline. But slowly Anakin began to see details of his clothes. The man wore a simple tunic made of cheap fabric, as dull as the sands of Tatooine. There was a familiar look to his face. He was weathered, beaten down by life. Anakin had seen that look a thousand times, on the faces of other slaves.

  “Please,” Anakin said. “Help us!”

  The fellow licked his lips and looked again nervously at the door.

  “Go away,” the slave begged. “I have a family to protect.”

  “First pull off the grate.”

  "You’ll get us all killed,” the man objected.

  “Pull off the grate and walk away. Don’t come back for a while,” Anakin said. “No one will ever know.”

  The fellow looked around nervously. Sweat broke on his brow.

  “Please,” Anakin said. “They’re just children I’m trying to save. All of them are kids.”

  The man reached down and yanked the drain cover. Metal twisted as it broke from the floor. Only then did Anakin realize how big the slave was. He was a strong man, with massive arms made hard by long hours of lifting and stacking crates. Anakin could never have removed the drain cover without his help.

  “You’ve got twenty minutes,” the slave said as he walked out of the storage room and turned off the lights.

  Anakin raced back to his friends. He had to get them out of the pipes while the warehouse grate was still open.

  He passed junction after junction
. All the pipes looked exactly the same. At each junction he paused for half a second just to make sure he was still heading the right way.

  Once he passed a turn and thought he was lost. He’d marked it, but not clearly enough. He stopped and gouged out a clearer mark.

  He’d nearly reached the big chamber when he saw a light ahead. Someone was scrambling toward him.

  He saw Arawynne with a glow rod. Behind her he could hear heavy breathing, the grunts and cries of Ghostling children.

  “Anakin, quick!” she cried. “Turn around.”

  “What's wrong?” he asked.

  “Slave hunters!” Arawynne shouted. “They’re in the pipes, following us!”

  Anakin couldn’t turn around. There wasn’t enough room. Instead he scurried backward until he reached a juncture.

  Arawynne’s expression was grim, and Anakin realized that something horrible had happened.

  “What else is wrong?” he asked.

  “Coniel, the boy you pulled from the sand, is unconscious. Dorn has him. Dorn’s trying to catch up, but he can’t move very fast, carrying a child. He said he’ll try to meet us at Bantha Rock.”

  Bantha Rock. That was where the smuggler ship was supposed to land.

  “Anakin, I’m scared,” Arawynne confessed. “I don’t think Dorn’s following us anymore. I think he knows he’ll get caught, so he’s trying to lead the slave catchers away from us.”

  That sounded like something Dorn would do.

  Just then, there was a distant thwing, the sound of blaster fire, followed shortly by another.

  Anakin felt himself get cold all over. He was worried about Dorn, more worried than he’d ever been in his life. But worrying wouldn’t do any good anymore.

  Dorn was gone.

  Anakin raced back until he reached the juncture, then turned and led the children up to the storeroom at the market.

  He opened the back door of the market and looked out.

  He’d been in the drainage system for a long time. Night had begun to fall on Tatooine. The shadows were deep and thick. He hoped that it wasn’t too late to reach the smuggler’s ship.

  At this point, readers who chose to follow the adventure in the Star Wars Adventures Game Book can return to Trouble on Tatooine.

  Anakin raced to the junkyard. Luckily, Watto was away on unexpected, last-minute business — and hadn’t taken his landspeeder. It was a beat-up old thing, but Anakin had made sure that there wasn’t a faster speeder on Tatooine.

  He whipped it through the darkening streets, around to the back of the Mos Espa Galactic Food Emporium.

  Jawas and scurriers were pawing through the garbage behind the market. They hardly paid any attention as Pala, Kitster, Arawynne, and the Ghostling children ran out of the shadows and jumped into the back of the landspeeder.

  Anakin threw dirty old blankets over them, ones that he normally used to keep the sun off of Watto’s junk.

  He hit the thrusters.

  Just as he sped out of the alley, the back door of the market burst open. A pair of slave hunters stood there: fierce Rodians with heavy blasters.

  They let loose a salvo of blaster fire. A bolt ripped through the housing on the rear of the landspeeder as Anakin whipped around the corner.

  Anakin realized dully that Watto would probably never even notice another hole in his speeder. He shot through the streets of Mos Espa, hit the open desert, and tightened down on the throttle.

  The landspeeder hummed, singing over the sand. It bounced with every rise and fall of the dunes. The stars tonight shone fiercely bright.

  He whisked over the desert sands with his light off. The landspeeder screamed past a pair of Tusken Raiders who rode upon a lone bantha.

  Soon he neared Bantha Rock, a huge red stone that thrust out of the ground out in the canyons. In the darkness, the rock looked more like a giant bantha than ever.

  Anakin watched overhead, looking between stars for the lights of ships. Distantly, he saw the blinking landing lights of huge freighters and other ships that dove toward Mos Espa spaceport.

  But he didn’t see any ships nearby. No ships landing, nothing taking off. He supposed that that was a good sign. Maybe the smugglers were waiting for him.

  Or maybe they never came in the first place.

  He powered up the lights on the landspeeder. They cut through the darkness like lightning in a summer dust storm.

  Ahead he spotted an old woman beside a clump of rocks. Jira stood up and waved.

  Pala climbed from under the tarp and looked around. Jira sat all alone on the pile of rocks. Pala couldn’t see any sign of a smuggler’s ship.

  “Are they here yet?” Pala asked.

  Jira shook her head. “They only come when I signal that we’re ready. And we have a problem: I couldn’t get enough money.”

  Pala’s heart fell. She’d gone through all the trouble to get the Ghostling children free. She’d been captured and nearly killed. But for what?

  Dorn was gone, one of her oldest friends, along with a Ghostling child.

  “I have some money!” Anakin shouted. Pala couldn’t imagine Annie having anywhere near enough. But suddenly he reached in his robe and pockets and began pulling out coins from a dozen worlds.

  “Annie,” Jira asked, “where did you get this?”

  “Uh, I sort of found it in the pipes.”

  Jira took a handful of coins and looked at them closely.

  “Will it be okay?” Pala asked.

  “Smugglers aren’t particular,” Jira said. “Yes, it will be okay. There’s more than enough.”

  Words could not express how astonished Pala was at the sight of Anakin’s money, or how relieved she felt. She ran to him and gave him a hug. Now she would be free... if the smugglers showed up.

  The other children all crawled out from beneath the blankets and stood on the warm desert sands. The Ghostlings still glowed with their own special light. Even bedraggled, and dirty, they were beautiful. But Kitster looked miserable. He stood hunched over, worrying about Dorn.

  Jira went to the rock and picked up a little glow rod. She raised it high overhead and powered it on, then swung it in a slow circle. She turned it off, for a second, then repeated the movement twice more.

  When she finished, the thrusters of a spaceship became visible, high atop Bantha Rock. Blue flames erupted from its exhaust ports, and the ship rose up from a jumble of rocks, where it had been hidden from the naked eye.

  For a moment it soared into the air, looking for all the world like a shooting star. Then it veered back toward them, a battered Corellian freighter diving in for a landing.

  Only when the ship had touched down and the hatch had swung open did Pala begin to realize that she was going to make it out of this alive.

  Pala hugged Anakin again and broke into tears of relief and sadness — relief that she was going to live, sadness because she knew that she’d never see Anakin again.

  A huge man rushed from the hatch of the freighter and stood on the gangplank, a man with long dark hair that flowed over his shoulders. The red loading lights in the hatch cast an eerie glow over him. He wore a pair of heavy blasters — one strapped to each leg.

  He looked at Jira and the children. He shook his head in wonder. “Do you have the money?”

  Pala had expected his voice to be hard, for he had the look of a hardened criminal. But instead it was soft, almost kind.

  “Yes,” Jira said. She took a bag of coins, the scrapings from every slave in Mos Espa, and handed it to him. The smuggler didn’t look in the bag. He merely hefted it thoughtfully.

  “It will do,” he said. He counted the children. “I can squeeze them all on board — barely.”

  Kitster and Anakin looked at each other in surprise. Neither one of them had planned to leave Tatooine. It would have been too much to hope, but now the smuggler was offering to take them away.

  “Uh,” Anakin said quickly. “I’m not going.”

  “Not going?” the smuggler
asked.

  “My mother's here,” Anakin said. “I can’t leave her.”

  “Are you sure?” the smuggler asked. “Chances like this don’t come by more than once in a lifetime.”

  Anakin squinted at the smuggler. For a moment he looked as if he was listening to a distant voice. “Yes they do,” he said finally. “I hope.”

  He seemed firm in his choice. He really did believe that someday he’d get free. But Kitster knew that a chance like this might never come again for either of them.

  Kitster went to his best friend and stood looking at him for a moment. “Wow,” he said, still so much in shock that he couldn’t believe his luck. “I guess this is good-bye.”

  “Yeah,” Anakin said. Anakin gave him a hug, and Kitster squeezed him hard. He felt Anakin try to hold all the pain inside.

  It didn’t feel right to Kitster, leaving like this. Dorn was gone, and Kitster would be taking his place. In doing so, he’d leave Anakin more alone than ever. “All your friends will be gone,” Kitster said.

  “I’ll still have Wald and Amee,” Anakin said. That was true, but it wasn’t the same. Anakin played with the younger kids, but he’d practically been raised with Pala, Kitster, and Dorn. They weren’t just friends anymore. They were brothers and sisters.

  “Yeah, you’ll always have friends,” Kitster said. Pala and the Ghostlings were saying good-bye to Jira. The old woman wept with relief to see them go, and Kitster gave her a hug too.

  Jira mussed up Kitster’s hair and said, “I’m glad you’ll be free, even though I’ll miss you.”

  He thought of all the good times he’d had with her, and said, “I’m glad I’ll be free, even though I’ll miss you.”

  Anakin warned the smuggler, “Sir, my friends have transmitters in them, and slave trackers.”

  “Don't worry,” the smuggler said. “I know how to handle that.”

  Kitster turned and staggered toward the spaceship. Pala and the Ghostlings went inside.

  As he drew near, he stared at the big smuggler under the red loading lights. There was something familiar about him, something strange. It was almost as if Kitster had met him in a dream.