Star Wars Journal - The Fight for Justice by Luke Skywalker by John Peel Page B

garbage chute; we’d fallen into a trash compactor. And we were going to get compacted along with the garbage!
    I don’t know if the Imperials did this deliberately, or whether the compactor was simply running on a regular schedule. Either way, our luck had run bad. The walls were closing in, and we were destined to become a lot thinner.
    We all panicked and tried to jam the walls apart. We didn’t have any luck, naturally. Things were starting to look really bad for us again, and Han and Leia were trading insults as the walls got closer.
    Then the comlink sounded, and Threepio was on the other end. He and Artoo had run into some trouble, but I didn’t have time for any long-winded stories. I ordered him to have Artoo shut down the trash compactors and then open the door for us—fast!
    It was an incredible relief to get out of there. We smelled repulsive, of course, and the body gloves Han and I still wore under the white stormtrooper armor were wet.
    Somehow—even after falling into the trash—Leia managed to look lovely. Apparently, Han was too busy arguing with her to notice.
    I was hoping we’d have an easy, uneventful trip back to the Falcon . But the stormtroopers had other ideas. They were after us again. We had no choice but to run for it and try to get to the ship from another direction. Somehow Leia and I got separated from Han and Chewie in the fighting and running. But at least we were armed with guns—which made us feel a bit better.
    The troopers’ armor is supposed to reflect blaster bolts. That’s why they wear it in the first place. Only there are several weak spots you can hit if you’re a good-enough shot. The joints, for example, or the neck. And if you aim just right, the eyepieces. Most of the Imperials weren’t very good shots. Maybe because they’re used to just rounding people up and murdering them, which doesn’t take much skill. They had a hard time shooting at us, because we ducked and weaved and shot back a lot. I was a pretty decent shot back home—when you’ve got little else to do, you tend to practice shooting a lot. So most of the troopers I hit stayed down. What surprised me was that Leia was good, too. She’d obviously practiced a lot as well.
    Our luck couldn’t hold, of course. Sooner or later we’d run into someone who actually could shoot straight. Leia and I ducked through a door and shot out the lock behind us, only to discover we’d sealed ourselves into trouble, not out of it.
    We were at the top of a drop shaft, leading into the depths of the station. I don’t know how far down it went, but it had to be kilometers . This was a big station. There was a door on the other side of the drop, and absolutely no way to get over to it. There was a ramp that could be extended across the drop—providing we hadn’t already shot out the controls, of course.
    So we were stuck, and the troopers knew it. All they had to do was blast through the door and push us off.
    I wasn’t about to panic, though, and make the princess think I was a jerk. Instead, I considered our options. There was nothing to make a bridge out of, but my eye caught a length of piping about ten feet above where we stood.
    We might be able to swing across.
    In my belt I had several items that were handy around the farm, one of which was a spool of cable. It’s very high-tensile, because you never knew when you might need to pull a stuck droid out of a moisture sump or something. And there was a small hook on the end, enabling it to snap into place and hold on. So I took it out and flung it over the bar above us. It clicked and caught hold.
    “Hang on!” I told Leia.
    She understood what I was doing and grabbed me tightly. I wished I had longer to appreciate that hold, then she abruptly kissed me.
    “For luck!” she explained.
    Well, we certainly needed all the luck we could get. The touch of her lips burned on my cheek, and I took a deep breath and swung.
    We made it, even if my landing was a bit