Trouble on Cloud City

14

Jacen fell.

And he kept on falling.

As he plunged down from Cloud City, the giant hanging metropolis seemed to shoot up and away from him like a spacecraft rocketing toward orbit.

In the first several seconds he let out a panicked cry for help. But he kept dropping … dropping, with no bottom in sight. A cold wind rushed past his face, roaring in his ears, rippling his clothes, making it hard for him even to draw a breath. He quickly realized that screaming only wasted his precious energy.

Jacen concentrated, trying to use what Jedi powers he possessed to help him stop his endless fall. He had to think of a way. With the Force he could make himself lighter, perhaps slow his descent… for all the good that would do him—it would only prolong the inevitable.

He felt as if he were floating and envisioned the Force as an invisible hand cradling him, lifting him up … but he knew that was only an illusion. No matter how hard he concentrated, how much he tried to use his Jedi skills, he could not push himself back up to the now-distant Cloud City.

Worse, Bespin was a gas giant, a huge ball of atmospheric mixes, with no true surface, only a super-dense liquid core hidden under thousands of kilometers of clouds. Jacen would keep falling into denser and denser gases, but he would be crushed long before he ever reached the central sphere. He would just fall forever into the gas giant, until the pressure squashed him flat.

The clouds swirled below, streaming in spirals like a whirlpool far, far beneath him. With each instant he fell closer and closer to oblivion.

In his mind he tried to call out to his sister Jaina or to Tenel Ka, but he couldn’t seem to make contact. In any case, there was nothing they could do … at least, not in time.

He did use his Jedi training to keep himself calm, remembering the techniques that Master Skywalker had taught him. Great, he thought with a flash of grim humor, at least I’ll die calm.

But he was not ready to give up yet. He lay back and continued to fall and fall and fall, sending out a silent cry for help … though he didn’t know where to direct it.

The wind and gases burned his eyes. He let them drift halfway shut. Even so, the sunlight dazzled him, creating tiny rainbows through the ice crystals high in Bespin’s atmosphere, and the colors of the pink and orange airborne algae seemed painfully bright.

Then, curving out at the edge of his vision, he saw a flicker of dark wings swoop through a mist of clouds and streak away. He blinked and spun around in the air. The gusting winds caught at his clothes.

He saw the shape again. It flitted by, closer this time. Suddenly, with a burst of speed, the flying creature cruised closer still to examine him like some giant curious hawkbat with a smooth bullet-shaped body and fleshy wings.

A thranta! “Help!” Jacen shouted. The colorfully painted rider on the creature’s back gently tweaked the harness, directing the thranta.

Jacen continued to drop, and the flying creature swooped down as well, effortlessly sweeping the air aside with its broad wings. Jacen heard the flapping sounds and a faint squeal that might have been a high-pitched subsonic call. As they streaked downward together the thranta rider met Jacen’s eyes, nodded, and brought the creature under him, matching the speed of the young man’s descent. Then he nudged upward so that Jacen dropped gently onto the creature’s broad back, as if caught in a safety net.

The rider tossed Jacen the loose end of a sturdy rope that he had tied about his own waist. Jacen clutched the rope, trembling as the realization that he had almost died caught up with him. He gasped, but for a long moment could say nothing more than “Thank you.”

Seeing Jacen secured on the back of his mount, the rider gave the harness a light snap and nudged the thranta with his knees. The creature took off with glee, soaring toward a white cloud bank far from the gleaming technological island of Cloud City, which was now only a silvery sparkle in the distant sky.

As he sweated and shuddered, just trying to catch his breath, Jacen pulled himself forward and held on to the skinny thranta rider by the waist. He was a young male, earless, with smooth skin that was painted or tattooed in swirling colors and patterns that made the thranta rider himself look like an optical illusion. The rider glanced over his bony shoulder at his unexpected passenger, smiling and flashing ebony teeth like polished gems.

“That’s not a very good acrobatic routine you have, my friend,” the thranta rider said. “You really shouldn’t jump unless you know your mount will be there to catch you.” The rider’s voice was high-pitched and musical, in contrast with the roaring air around them.

“I… I didn’t mean to jump,” Jacen admitted, then heaved a huge sigh of relief. His entire body shuddered. “We were ambushed by assassins. My two friends managed to catch themselves on an antenna beneath Cloud City, but I couldn’t hang on.”

“Ambushed and fell,” the thranta rider said. He nodded, his face pinched and sorrowful. “Yep. I’ve seen that before.” He flew on without further explanation.

Jacen held on tightly, gradually regaining his composure, and finally he introduced himself. “I suppose I should tell you whose life you saved. I’m Jacen. Jacen Solo.”

The thranta rider said, “My name is M’kim. I practice with the sky rodeo troupe, but I’m not a full-fledged member of the performing team … yet.”

The boy snapped the reins of the thranta, and it dove like a meteor, then pulled up into a sharp loop in the air. Jacen was afraid he’d fall, but the thranta circled, somersaulted, and became level again. At any other time, he might have enjoyed the brief rush of exhilaration, but he’d already had enough thrills for one day.

“So most days I come out with my friend here.” M’kim patted the solid fleshy side of the flying creature, and the thranta ducked and bobbed in the air, showing off. “Just to practice.”

“Hey, I’m certainly impressed,” Jacen said. He held on, and found he was actually enjoying himself as the thranta soared and danced. Life seemed so sweet and exhilarating after his long fall and near brush with death.

Suddenly he realized with a sick jolt that if Lowie and Tenel Ka had managed to rescue themselves under Cloud City, they would believe he had fallen to his death. He couldn’t let his friends live with such grief a moment longer.

“I’ve got to get back,” he said, shouting into M’kim’s ear hole. “I need to let my friends know that I’m alive.”

But the thranta rider set his face in a grim expression and flew on, arrowing deeper into the clouds below, and away from Cloud City.

“If I take you back too soon,” M’kim said, “those who tried to kill you might still be waiting. Better for now to let them think you’re dead.”

“But that means everybody else thinks I’m dead too,” Jacen said. “And my friends may need my help.”

The thranta soared through a layer of mist that slapped Jacen in the face; he spluttered in the cold moisture and smelled a strong chemical tang of gases that drifted up from the deep cloud-deck layers below.

“We’ll go here first.” M’kim released the harness and gestured ahead in the direction of the thranta’s flight.

Behind an obscuring veil of white mist, a heavy green-brown cloud floated like a mat above the other layers of vapor. The dark island in the sky seemed solid enough, and as the thranta brought them closer, Jacen saw that the sludgy raft-cloud was actually a huge cluster of algae nodules. The airborne sacs of gas-filled plant life drifted at an equilibrium level in the clouds and photosynthesized by soaking up sunlight, water vapor, and chemicals from the clouds.

“Amazing!” Jacen said. “It’s like a living island.”

The thranta flapped its sail-like wings and drove them closer to the spinning, bobbling raft in the sky. “This is a place of solitude,” M’kim said. “We can talk here and rest without fear of being discovered. There’s no hurry. You’re not at risk with me.”

Jacen nodded. He was still deeply concerned about his friends, though, and worried about what else might be happening to them while he wasn’t there to help. He didn’t even know for certain that the two Jedi Knights had managed to rescue themselves from their precarious perch beneath Cloud City, but he believed his friends were resourceful enough to get themselves out of a fix like that.

The thranta hovered over the floating algae island. Uncertain, Jacen looked down at the squishy surface. But M’kim deftly danced off the back of his flying creature and landed on the soft clusters of algae sacs, bouncing on the surface of the green-brown nodules as if he were swimming.

The thranta rider lay back, gesturing for Jacen to join him. “Come on. We can watch the clouds go by and talk about what’s really happening over there in Cloud City.” His face turned grave. “I have a feeling you need to know this.”

Still holding the harness, Jacen stood up on wobbly legs and balanced on the back of the thranta. Then he jumped.