[Galaxy Of Fear] - 03(2)

GREAT. I WANT TO ASK YOU ABOUT

But Tash was unable to continue. She nearly fell off her chair as the Shroud lurched crazily in space.





CHAPTER 2


For a split second the power was cut off and the lights went out, plunging Tash into darkness. A moment later the lights came back on, but her delicate HoloNet connection had been lost.

“Oh, laser burn,” she muttered under her breath. “Zak, you’re going to get it for this.”

Zak had no interest in piloting, but he was a born tinkerer. Tash would have bet a year’s worth of Octavian fruit pudding that he was up in the cockpit right now, taking the console apart.

The ship shook again, and Tash jumped up from her desk, slipping out the automatic door as soon as it opened and hurrying toward the cockpit.

“What’s going on up here?” she demanded as she entered the control room. She half-expected to see the navicomputer spread out in pieces on the floor.

Instead she saw Zak slumped over the controls. His head was buried in his folded arms, his face hidden behind his uncontrollable mop of brown hair.

“Zak!” she yelled.

At the sound of her voice, Zak slowly lifted his head and blinked. “Hey, Tash,” he said drowsily. “I must have dozed off.”

“By the look of things, I would say you fainted,” said a low voice behind Tash.

Uncle Hoole had come up behind her without making a sound. Hoole was a member of the Shi’ido species. They were tall, gray humanoids, and stealth was the least of their gifts. The Shi’ido were shape-shifters.

The Shi’ido studied Zak with his dark eyes, and his narrow gray face wrinkled into a frown. “Are you feeling all right?”

Zak sat up straight. His eyelids drooped, and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He still managed a smile. “Me? Sure. I’m prime.”

The Shroud’s engines let out a groan of distress. Hoole slipped past Tash and examined the readouts quickly. “You laid your head down on the reverse-power coupling controls,” Hoole said. “You are flooding too much fuel into the hyperdrive system.” Hoole flipped a few switches, and the Shroud settled into a smooth flight pattern.

Zak rubbed his eyes and tried to shake his head clear. “Wow, talk about an afternoon nap.”

“Try midmorning nap,” Tash replied, pointing at the chronometer. Although they were in deep space, the ship’s chronometer kept GST, or Galactic Standard Time.

Zak shrugged. “I haven’t been this tired since we hiked to the top of the Triplehorn mountains back on Alderaan.”

Tash and Uncle Hoole exchanged concerned glances. Zak had been through a lot recently. On their last planetary stop, he had been kidnapped by a wanted criminal named Evazan who was working on some bizarre experiments to bring the dead back to life. Eventually Tash and Hoole had been able to save Zak and to defeat Evazan with the help of the bounty hunter Boba Fett. In fact, they had gotten away in the criminal’s own ship, the Shroud, in which they now flew.

Despite the terror he’d witnessed, Zak seemed to come out of that frightening experience without any serious harm. Now, however, he looked terrible.

“No way,” Zak said, when Tash suggested that what he’d been through might be making him sick. “I’m telling you, I’m as shipshape as an Imperial cruiser. ” He jumped up and spun unsteadily around on one foot, turning back to face his sister. “I just needed a little sleep, that’s all.” As if to prove it, Zak wriggled his way past Tash and Hoole and bounded down the corridor to the Shroud’s main lounge.

Hoole stared after him. “I’m afraid I have not been around humans long enough to understand your physiology,” he said to Tash. “Is this common?”

“I don’t know,” Tash said. “Back on Alderaan, Mom always seemed to know if we were sick or not.”

Tash felt a twinge in her heart when she mentioned her mother. Her parents were dead, thanks to the Empire. They had been on the planet Alderaan when it was blasted into rubble by the Death Star six months ago. Tash tried to swallow a sudden lump in her throat. “I think… I think if she were here she’d say Zak was coming down with the flu or something.”

“Let us hope it is nothing worse than that,” Hoole said. “Zak was in Evazan’s hands for some time before we reached him.”

“Do you think Evazan might have done something to Zak that we don’t know about?”

“I’m not sure,” the Shi’ido said, almost to himself. “Let us go see what DV-9 has found in Evazan’s computer files.”

Evazan was also known as Dr. Death, and his mark was everywhere on the ship he had once owned. The corridors were dark and gloomy. The simple couches in the main lounge were torn and gouged. Beyond the lounge lay a small science laboratory. Hoole and his assistant droid, DV-9, had thrown away specimen jars full’ of strange matter and cleaned up as much of the lab as they could, but the walls and countertops were still stained with things Tash did not want to think about.