Star Wars: Journey to The Force Awakens: All Creatures Great and Small (3 page)

BOOK: Star Wars: Journey to The Force Awakens: All Creatures Great and Small
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U
NFORTUNATELY,
an escaping freighter of some kind had placed the entire Death Star on high alert, and even with the tractor beam disabled it appeared to be an inopportune time to dodge the Imperial fleet.

Bobbajo pushed and poked at some controls he had found. The lights moved around quickly, and the panel made rude sounds, but eventually the Nu-Cosian was able to make a service door open.

The Death Star was like any place with lots and lots of people in it: there were janitor stations in every corridor. So the elderly Bobbajo stretched his shoulders, cracked his neck, yawned lazily, and sat down heavily on the single chair within the janitor’s closet.

Pushing back the sleepiness he felt after such a long day of escaping an Imperial prison, Bobbajo reached down and searched
for one of his cages. It was a little one, painted green and orange with a letter
M
engraved on its tiny door.

“Ahhh…” said Bobbajo. “There you are….”

With a practiced twist of his wrist, Bobbajo opened the tiny cage, and Mideyean—a bright orange, thirty-centimeter-long limbless reptile called a slitherette—emerged. The tiny reptilian creature snaked around Bobbajo’s arm, climbing all
the way up to his face. The Nu-Cosian stroked the top of his tiny friend’s head and with a little smile whispered a set of instructions….

It was not long before Mideyean was alone, speeding through the narrow spaces underneath the Death Star’s floor paneling. The panels were mostly solid, but every now and again there was a section fashioned as a form of grate, and the slitherette was hesitant
to be seen by the Imperials.

And the Empire was certainly on high alert. Since she had left the confines of the janitor’s closet and the company of Bobbajo, Mideyean had overheard many things—most of which revolved around a man in a brown robe having a sword fight with a man in a black cape, and a computer failure that had led to some kind of mass shutdown of all the garbage smashers on the
station’s detention level. The fight sounded bad, but more people seemed upset over the garbage smashers and the problems it had caused the sanitation systems. Explosions from garbage chutes had evidently been occurring on multiple levels, and the plumbing in the officers’ quarters was overflowing from every drain.

The Death Star was a mess. But soon enough, the Empire’s evil and oppressive
forces would restore order to the chaotic battle station and return it to its sinister purpose—unless Mideyean fulfilled her mission.

The slitherette squeezed through a narrow crack, pressing herself almost flat in the process. There was little room for error down in that section of the Death Star, as the service pathways to the internal temperature systems were constructed in such a way that
they would recede without notice. If Mideyean wasn’t careful, she could find herself falling straight down through the service shafts to the core of the space station.

It had taken the snakelike creature over an hour to wriggle through the gaps in the wall of the storage closet where Bobbajo and his menagerie were hiding, and several more to reach the systems that would affect the local climate
controls. The idea had been to keep the technicians and security forces working constantly so when the time came, no one would be monitoring the status of the ionic disruptor systems.

Mideyean was an independent creature though, and as she slithered through the station she learned a great many things, all of them quite fascinating to a small limbless reptile from a distant Outer Rim world.

And then she overheard something terrifying.

The Death Star was moving in on a moon of the planet Yavin and was going to blow up that moon and everyone on it.

Mideyean was hurrying to return to her hiding place; a new plan was clearly needed. Unfortunately, there was a small issue: Mideyean had been seen and was being pursued by a hostile and very deadly Arakyd internal systems probe
droid.

The probe may have been only seven centimeters tall, but it still packed quite a punch; it fired a blaster bolt from one of its defensive ports, narrowly missing the slitherette. More surprising was that the blaster shot ricocheted within the enclosed space, back and forth off the floor paneling, and finally sizzled through a section of open grating. The interior of the space station’s
flooring was coated with a deflective surface, probably to protect against system malfunctions, but bouncing blaster fire from a security probe in an enclosed space while in a serious hurry? Things were about as bad as they could be, Mideyean thought.

“Hey…you see that?”

Mideyean shook her head. An Imperial stormtrooper had noticed the probe’s blaster fire. Go figure…things had just gotten
worse.

Suddenly, the compartment flooded with light as the floor panel above Mideyean slid open; the slitherette was exposed. A rough white-and-black armored hand reached down and grabbed her before she could escape.

“A snake?” the stormtrooper said to a nearby officer. “How…?”

The black-uniformed officer sneered with disgust. “That’s a slitherette. I heard reports of vermin from
Maintenance earlier. Probably one of the labs. Best dispose of it quickly.”

Mideyean tried to strike her captor, but his armor repelled her tiny fangs. Before she knew it, the trooper had dropped her down a disposal chute toward the trash compactors.

B
UT THAT’S TERRIBLE!”
The voice did not come from one of the children. Instead it was the Chevin, Jol Bengim, who seemed most outraged over the treatment of the slitherette. “What kind of story is that? And what about the attack the Death Star was planning?”

The children all nodded their heads, equally engaged.

A series of thunderous explosions shook the entire building.

“What
are they doing?”
yelled Thaddeeus, terrified.

“They’re going to bring the building down on us!” shouted Arek, his shiny bald head glistening from fear.

“We will know…soon enough…” said Bobbajo, with a dismissive wave. “For now…let us finish the tale.”

B
OBBAJO CONSIDERED
the time. Mideyean was overdue. With a long sigh, the elderly Nu-Cosian pulled Smeep and Qyp from their resting places and sent them out to search for the missing slitherette.

Tracing Mideyean’s planned path hadn’t been too difficult for Smeep, who knew the scent of Mideyean quite well, and soon the pair reached the open grate from which the stormtrooper had plucked
the bright orange slitherette. Lucky for both Smeep and Qyp, the security droid was busy elsewhere, as were the Imperial agents who had captured Mideyean. Even more fortuitous, the nearby disposal hatch to the garbage chute was still in active mode, giving a pretty strong indication of what had happened to their friend.

Unfortunately, that was the end of the good news. The hatch was active
but locked. And to make matters worse, the two animals could see their friend trapped at the bottom of the chute. Even more awful, the compactors were online, and the poor slitherette was in immediate danger of being squashed flat.

It appeared, to the great frustration of the two distressed creatures, that there was nothing they could do.

B
OBBAJO PAUSED
for only the briefest of moments as a series of shouts and screams echoed from beyond the walls of the makeshift prison. The clamor outside had shifted from concerning to confusing: something was happening and it made the citizens nervous. But before anyone could rise to try to find out what, Bobbajo raised a hand and continued his story.

“Mideyean knew she was…in trouble…”
the Storyteller began.

M
IDEYEAN KNEW
she was in trouble, and it wasn’t just that the walls were beginning to shudder and move in to squash her. No, it was something else, too. Something was in the compactor with her.

Something alive.

A
NOTHER INTERRUPTION
and one of the children shivered with fear. Bobbajo offered the child a warm smile, ignoring the fact that there was even more commotion outside: running, shouting, explosions. The sounds of a battle. Once again, Bobbajo nodded comfortingly to the children and continued his story.

“The entire Death Star…seemed to shake….”

BOOK: Star Wars: Journey to The Force Awakens: All Creatures Great and Small
7.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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