Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight (21 page)

“Drones?”

“You can't send a drone through hyperspace! And that's no drone shooting!”

The methane storms of Damonite fell away behind them, a glowing acid yellow disk against the blackness that whirled past the glassine ports as Lando dropped and cut and dodged. Han wasted another couple of shots and had a quick look at something as the Falcon swept through a little gaggle of the attacking ships.

Were they ships at all? thought Han; Did they have live pilots? He wasn't sure. They were maybe two and a half meters long and less than a meter through, fulgin cylinders bristling with the knobs of what looked like miniaturized laser cannon. What did they have in there, little guys the size of his thumb?

“Get us outa here!” he yelled, though he knew for a fact that was exactly what Lando was trying to do.

The tiny ships surrounded them like a cloud of piranha-beetles, whipping and following every move and quite effectively impeding any chance of breaking into hyperspace. Another red light went on, meaning another shield had gone. There was a perceptible jar, and from the gun turret Han saw the white flicker of lightning spread across the whole surface of the Falcon below and around him as the shields tried to compensate. At the same moment Lando yelled in his earjack, “They're not going for the decoy transmissions, so they can't be drones!”

“I'm gonna clear us a path!” Han yelled back, as a blast of white at the corner of his eye told him the miniature ships had taken out some part of the Falcon's upper structures. "Straight through seven by six bearing zero, punch it on three?

“Han, old buddy, what . . . ?”

“Do it!” At the same moment he hit every fore cannon he had, straight columns of white destruction flowing out in an almost continuous burst at seven by six. Like a pittin chasing its shadow, the Falcon followed the path of the light, faster and faster, Han watching the slow-growing flare of destruction ahead of them and calculating by feel rather than by instrumentation when the last possible moment would be to jump without hurling themselves into their own fire. The little bronze toothpick ships came pouring back in the wake of the blast, firing at the now-steady target following the heels of the light.

He counted, “One . . . two . . .” ('This had better work . . .) The last of the shields went in a flare of white, and red glare bathed Han's face from the sides, white from the front as the Falcon dove toward the laser ruin ahead . . .

“Three!”

Lando hit it--he had reflexes like a tingball set--and the stars stretched into lines of white.

“I never thanked you.” Leia stepped through the tall arch that led from her small terrace into the shadowy chamber. Liegeus, who had come in with a synthdroid bearing food and another pitcher of water, paused in the act of setting them down, shook his head.

“Don't,” he said, and the pain in his voice, the shame, told her a thousand things that he hadn't meant. Their eyes met for a time. Then he said to the synthdroid, “You may go.”

The door swished shut behind it. Leia could see the dark patch of necrosis on the back of its neck, and smell the faint stink of rot in its wake. She didn't know how to ask what she wanted to know without raising suspicions, so she only said, “Why are you here? How did you come here? Beldorion called you a philosopher.”

“And I am,” sighed Liegeus. He made a move as if he would fuss with the water pitcher, the covered dish of aromatic and exquisitely cooked insect life, but let his hand fall to his side again. He faced her.

“A wanderer. A blot on the familial escutcheon. They don't speak my name. Alas, it has also been my misfortune to be a competent designer of artificial intelligence systems for spacecraft, and a very, very good holo faker.”

“A holo faker?”

“Of course, my dear. it was my art, my hobby--the source of my joy and the material for a thousand silly pranks in my youth. The bane of my existence, now Beldorion has drafted me into editing and retap-ing his formidable library of Huttese pornography. Even my stint on Gamorr, ghost-writing love poems for the boars to pass off as their own when they go courting in the wintertime, wasn't so fearful.”

Leia laughed, like sudden summer breaking the ice lock of her fears, and Liegeus laughed, too. For a moment she thought he might have reached out and taken her hand, but he drew back at the last moment, saying instead, “Is there something you'd like me to make for you? I have digitalized holo scrap of every imaginable background, face, animal, and bit of furniture that's ever been recorded motions, sounds, the slightest variations of movement. You would not know that you weren't there. I can give you the hatching of the glimmerfish by starlight, in the lake of Aidera below the palace where you were raised, or the Starboys in their heyday . . . or your husband,” he added diffidently. “I have scrap of him, you know. And your children.”

It gave Leia a queer pang to hear him say so, but she knew that Han was a public figure, the children were public figures and had been holo-taped tens of thousands of times. Liegeus's dark eyes were like those of a dog who fears to be kicked--he was afraid, she realized, that he'd offended her, and she reached out reassuringly and touched his hand.

“No,” she said. “Thank you, no. It would hurt too much, I think.”

He opened his mouth to give her a reassuring lie, as he had before when he'd brought her water, but closed it instead, the lie unsaid. Their eyes met again, she in the light and he in shadow. He began to say something else and lost his nerve, and before he could find it again the door opened and the synthdroid returned.

“Master Vorn, Master Ashgad wishes to speak with you on the terrace.”

Leia followed him inside the chamber, and to the door, and was careful, when he took his departure, not to let herself be seen as she crept back to the railing of the balcony, where she could hear every word said on the terrace below.

"I trust everything is proceeding on schedule? came Ashgad's voice.

“It is, sir. I can begin bringing the core up the day after tomorrow; I'm feeding in escape trajectories to establish an exit program now.”

“Try to set the work forward as much as you can, Liegeus,” said Ashgad.

“The longer we delay, the more possibilities exist for something going wrong. We're bringing in boxes tonight, both kinds. See they're properly stored.”

Liegeus's voice was almost inaudible. “Yes, sir.”

“It will be up to you for the next three days,” Ashgad went on. "I'm leaving in the morning for Hweg Shul, to start things in motion there.

I should be gone . . ."

“Leaving`.,” Liegeus sounded aghast.

“Oh, things will be all right.” Ashgad spoke rather quickly, like a man who hopes things will be all right. In the five days Leia had been under his roof she had neither seen nor spoken to the man; he evidently did not like being brought face-to-face with the victims of his crimes.

“Beldorion will be in charge, but you're not to permit him to come near Her Excellency. I heard about that little incident yesterday, and I've had words with him. He knows it's not to be repeated.”

“But will he honor his word?” asked Liegeus, clearly alarmed. “If he tried yesterday to gain control over her, he may . . .”

“He'll do what he's told,” snapped Ashgad. “As will Dzym.”

“No,” said Liegeus softly. “He won't. And Dzym won't.”

“You worry too much,” said Ashgad, too loudly and too swiftly.

“I'll be back in three days.”

“But--”

“I said, don't worry about it!”

Leia heard his footfalls retreat and felt through her knees on the terrace's tiles the heavy whoosh of a closing door. She sat back against the railing, feeling curiously sick with dread.

Ashgad was leaving. She would be alone in this house with Beldorion.

And with Dzym.

“You find your friend`.,” Luke raised his head quickly from the valves he was cleaning--in a dust-heavy atmosphere like Nam Chorios's, engines needed almost constant regrinding and refitting--as the doorway of Croig's Fix-It Barn darkened, and he grinned a greeting at Umolly Darm.

The prospector had the grimy look of one just into town from the wastelands, her baggy trousers and thick, padded jacket pregnant with dust. Beyond her, in the street, Luke saw her heavy X-3 Skid piled high with a load of boxes, crystals glimmering like great heaps of broken blue-and-violet glass in the thin sun.

“Not yet,” he said. He wasn't terribly surprised to see Darm. Arvid had told him when he'd recommended him for the job as mechanic at Croig's that it was the biggest repair shop in Hweg Shul, which meant on the planet. And it was big, for Hweg Shul, meaning it housed about thirty repair bays that refitted anything from pumps to speeders to small household appliances for little more than the cost of a cheap lunch for his workers. Like every other Newcomer building it sat on stilts--the T-47 being worked on in the next bay had shorted all its coils from being too close to the ground during the recent storm.

Croig was a Durosian, and Luke was positive he had connections to half the smugglers in the sector.

“What can I do for you?” He set aside the valves and crossed the dirty, oil-streaked floor. Unshaven and clad in the local mix of homespun and blerd-leather, after three days in Hweg Shul, Luke had so completely blended with the scenery that even Taselda's tame fanatics would not have noticed him in the street.

Darm handed him a banthine sonic drill. “Ruptured core sheath,” she said. "I don't know whether you can do anything with it or not.

And I wanted to ask your boss if I could bring in the skid after I unload it--again. We're sending a shipment up tonight, or trying to.

Loronar's got a pick-up cruiser in high orbit."

“Loronar?” asked Luke, suddenly curious. “You sell the crystals to Loronar Corporation?” The way Arvid had spoken, he'd gotten the impression of a small-time operation--Darm digging around in the desert for crystals to make some kind of obscure optical or medical equipment, useful only to high-level boffins at the university research labs. Loronar was anything but small time.

“Sure.” Darm dug in the pocket of her sand-scored red vest and fished forth a hunk of crystal the length and width of two of Luke's fingers, and perhaps twice the depth. "Smokies we call them, or Spooks.

This one's a little small for what they want, and they look for better color than this--see how pale it is?--but they'll buy as many as we can ship. Watch this. Hold it up to the light?"

Luke nodded.

“See the shadows in it? Those gray lines? Now watch.” She carried it across the bay floor to where the heavy coils of the recharger--smuggled in piecemeal and Croig's pride and joy--crouched like a greasy metal monster in the corner, the center of an organic-looking nest of cable and tube. Gingerly--the recharger had been set up in a corner of the room to protect it from sand, and because it was in the dark, it was always crawling with drochs--Darm pulled out a recharger block, set the terminals against the crystal, and thumbed the switch.

Luke flinched, appalled and disoriented, though Darm didn't appear to feel anything The disturbance in the Force axed his brain like a scream. The woman regarded him in surprise as he fell back a step, trembling. “What is it”

“You didn't feel that?” His mind was still ringing with it, though it had ended in a split second, even before she turned off the switch. Sweat stood out on his face and he felt vaguely sick.

She shook her head, clearly puzzled. “You okay, Owen? What happened?”

Luke hesitated. It was impossible to explain matters of the Force to those unaware of its existence and, given Taselda's attempt to control him--and Officer Snaplaunce's account of her attempt to kidnap Cal-lista--in the town he was very careful to whom he spoke. “It's nothing.”

He took the crystal from Darm's hand, and held it to the nearest window once more. The threadlike gray striations in the Spook's heart had changed their orientation, forming two starlike blotches where the terminals had touched.

“if that Spook had had the proper cc lot, said the prospector with rueful amusement, ”I'd just have done myself out of a hundred credits.

They can program them, realign the structure to act as a receiver."

She flipped the pale arrowhead of quartz in her hand, then tossed it to Luke.

His hand jerked back, and the crystal fell to the floor and shattered into glittering slivers. "Sorry, he said. sorry She kicked the fragments casually out of sight under the recharger.

“Not to worry. Like I said, it wasn't anything they'd take, but even the tiny ones can be reoriented like that with an ion zap.” She frowned at him again, studying his face, which still, Luke feared, showed too much of the sickened shakiness he felt inside. “You sure you're okay?” She probably meant, thought Luke, that it wasn't like him to drop things and after years of a Jedi's hair-trigger physical training it certainly wasn't.

Whatever their other properties, the Spook crystals somehow seemed to be loci or triggers for the Force.

“Yeah,” said Luke, and rubbed his temples, trying to gather his wits.

“Yeah, I'm fine.” No wonder the planet reverberated with the Force.

Could they be used to . . .

“There's a meeting tonight,” went on Darm, her voice breaking into the half-formed train of thought. “Seti Ashgad's back. Turns out he met with some bigwig in the Republic, how do you like that We're all going to his place tonight. You know it. That big old joint that used to belong to some Hutt who ran things around here way long ago. Pretty fancy, but it must get fairly exciting during ground lightning. if you wanted to go I could get you in, introduce you around. People will be there from as far away as Outer Distance. If your friend's still in settled territory at all, someone will have seen her.”

“Thanks,” said Luke, his sense of confusion, of despair, returning at the mention of her presence on this world. He'd walked past Taselda's house two or three times in the past twenty-four hours, carefully, had walked past Ashgad's, too. At least this would be a way in without rousing the suspicions of the too-intelligent Officer Grupp. “I'd like that.”