Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight (39 page)

“I don't know what it would mean,” she said slowly, groping for words, “if I accepted it. If I made him a part of me, the way Luke has.”

“You mean for others'.” Callista wrapped her long arms about her knees, sitting perched on a smooth hunk of crystal like fused glass, her dark hair frayed by straying winds across the crimson leather of her jacket. “Those who would ask what his daughter was doing ruling the Council?”

“Maybe,” said Leia. “Mostly for myself. And for the children. It will take time.” The thought of it revolted her, furious anger succeeded by the heat of tears in her throat.

“No one is asking you to do it tomorrow. But if you know what parts of him are inside you, you can know what to build a wall around and what to take into yourself. Because you cannot afford not to be strong, Leia,” she said. “You cannot afford to let this kind of thing happen to you, ever again.”

“No,” she said softly. “I know that.”

Callista stood and unhooked the lightsaber from her belt. The sun-yellow blade slid forth like a lance of summer into winter's dark.

“Then let's begin.”

Sparring with Callista was in some ways easier than sparring with Luke, though the lost Jedi was of a height with her brother and no less exacting a teacher. Still, Callista understood the differences in technique required of Leia's lesser height and lighter weight, knew the finer points with the instincts of one who has been rigorously coached for many years, and was far more conscious of distance and timing than any man Leia had ever worked with. As when she worked with Luke, Leia had no sense of danger whatever, no fear of the softly humming laser blades that could slide through flesh like a hot silver wire through cheese; only a strange exhilaration, a sense of freedom that she mistrusted instinctively because it felt so utterly right.

“Footwork,” said Callista dispassionately, searing a tiny curl of smoke from the rock a centimeter from Leia's much-taped golden boot.

“Footwork. Don't be afraid of your spirit. Don't always be watching yourself.”

Leia stepped back, the blade whispering, shedding pale azure light over her sweating face, the long tendrils of her cinnamon hair hanging down in her eyes. “If I don't watch myself I'm afraid I'll do something wrong.”

“I know,” said Callista. “You've watched yourself like that all your life. What are you afraid you'll do?”

“Hurt someone,” said Leia, and knew it for the truth from the bottom of her soul. They weren't talking about combat now. They both knew that.

“You'll know when the time is to strike,” said Callista. “And when to step away. The only way to learn it is to do more of this, not less.”

“I don't want to be another . . .” The words froze in her throat.

“Another Palpatine?” asked Callista. "Another Vader? You aren't.

You're not even another Bail Organa. You're Leia."

Leia was silent, regarding the soft-shining blue light of the blade, the paler glow of Callista's just beyond. Those two heatless beacons illuminated the darkness around them, isolated the two women in the heart of an ember fire, statesman and warrior, thinker and feeling heart.

“Haven't you seen that yet?” asked Callista, her voice more quiet still. “Luke has.”

Leia's panting breath steadied. The weapon felt more stable in her hands, more a part of herself. For the first time ever when she had held the lightsaber, she smiled. And smiling, signed to the younger woman and stepped into the fray again.

It was Callista who gestured to stop. Leia lowered her weapon.

Callista turned her head, listening, her dark, level brows drawn together.

A moment later B came into the circle of torchlight, his scarred, thin face intent in the braided frame of his long hair.

“They're moving on the gun station,” he said. “From Ruby Gulch, dozens of them. On other gun stations as well.”

“How did he know that?” Leia asked, as she and Callista followed the others to the caves where the cu-pas and speeders were hidden She climbed onto the back of a repulsor-lift sled with three other cultists; Callista swung into the saddle of a pale golden cu-pa, wrapped the gray veiling close around her face, and settled her rifle and grenades over her shoulder “Voices tell them, they say. Voices that speak in their minds if they sleep in certain places, far back in the hills, or drink preparations of certain herbs--as far as I can tell, that suppress left-brain linear activity. Be is a Healer, strong in the Force. Many of the other Listeners are, tOO.”

She tossed Leia a rifle and a bow. There were arrows in the back of the sled, being passed among those who clustered there, men and women alike, as the vehicles and animals began their swift trek through the icy darkness of predawn, flowing like water down the silent canyons.

“The Force is so strong here,” she said softly, her gloved hand steady, easy on the cu-pa's rein “I'd heard the rumor of it from Djinn, my Master. There was a story about two young Jedi who came here centuries ago seeking gifts and strength in the Force that they themselves lacked Nothing further was known of them, but one of them supposedly was a Hutt. I know Hutts live a long time” She shook her head, wonderingly, as if regarding that desperate young woman of nearly a year ago, fleeing the ruin of Admiral Daala's demolished fleet and seeking a place to go, a clue to lead her through the labyrinth of her quest for her own lost gifts.

“What I found, you know. Pettiness, old feuds, slavery to the base. . . And I thought, never again. Never again am I going to be anyone's pawn, because of the powers I was born with, the powers I don't even possess anymore But while I was a prisoner I saw the Reliant. I had seen Dzym and guessed what he was planning. I take it you didn't get my message?”

“I got it.” Leia grimly shifted the rifle on her shoulder, clung to the struts of one of the sled's makeshift gun turrets. “It's just that by that time things had progressed too far to be called off. It reached me the day I left.”

“You should have said you were sick.”

"It took Q-Varx and the Rationalists months to set up the meeting.

They were operating in good faith--pawns, not spies. I read their correspondence.

I wasn't willing to risk the political repercussions of refusal."

Callista shook her head, and Leia said, “You have to make these decisions.” She hesitated, and then, because she herself despised surprises, added, "Luke came, too. He was on Hesperidium to see me off.

He took a fighter to the planet's surface, to look for you."

Callista's head turned sharply.

“I don't know where he is.”

She looked away. What could be seen of her face was still as ivory, but above the edge of the veil, the wide gray eyes filled with tears.

They rode for a time in silence, winding down the trails that were barely familiar, scattered with broken rock and shards of crystal, with dunes of gravel hurled up wholesale from the flats below. Dawn winds had started as the wan sun 'warmed the endless dead sea bottom.

Squinting against it in the silky gray light, Leia could make out the taller masses of the cliffs around the gun station, the fretwork of the shattered upper works, black against the peadescent air.

“I found nothing here that would help me,” said Callista quietly.

"The Force is here, but not in a form that I can touch or understand.

Whatever is alive here--if anything--is invisible, intangible. Believe me, I've tried to reach it, to touch it. The Listeners say it's the ghosts of the old holy men and women that speak to them, but I think they're wrong. The voices only use the shapes that the Listeners have already in their minds."

She shook her head, her eyes narrowing against the shadowless twilight of distances and wind. “There's a woman in Hweg Shul who has interests in shipping. When this is over I'm going to contact her, see if I can get myself off-planet in one of the little cargo lifters and work my passage elsewhere. Are you going to tell Luke you've seen me?”

“Whatever you wish,” said Leia. “I'd like to, yes, but I won't if you'd rather I didn't.”

Callista started to say something, then thought about it and asked, “What do you think would be best?”

“I think it would be best if I did.”

“Then do so,” said Callista. “Make him understand, if you can. Tell him that I will love him to the ending of my life, but that mine is a life of which he cannot be a part.”

Across the crystal ridges, sudden snakes of white lightning flickered, cold and pale in the dawning light. Leia grabbed the railing of the speeder as it rocked and swayed, jolted by what felt like a groundquake, though the ground beneath the antigrav lifters was steady.

An obsidian boulder several tons in mass wrenched and twisted in the rock side of the mountain before them, and the glittering talus of crystals at the foot of the cliffk around them leapt upward into funnels, like toothed whirlwinds.

The Therans in the speeders cried out, looking around them with weapons at the ready, and Callista and Be fought their cu-pas to a standstill moments before the beasts could bolt in panic.

“Another,” said Callista softly. “Worse than before, I think.”

“There's one with them who moves this storm.” B6's lizard-black eyes were shut, listening deeply. “He brings this storm at his will, summons and directs it.”

“That will be Beldorion.”

“What do we do?” asked a man on Leia's repulsor sled, looking nervously around at the cold cliffs sparkling in the new light, the world paused, it seemed, on the brink of chaos.

B shook back his tangled braids. “We can do no other than we are instructed,” said the Listener. “We meet them, and die.”

If the horrors of watching the dying corpses of Cybloc XII being looted had been bad--the squabbles between looters, the remote-operated droids patrolling like whirring insects, the sight of those few expiring survivors being relieved of jewelry and credit cylinders by thieves--the darkness that followed was infinitely worse. The dome lights were gone. The dim auxiliary circuits were going. In the medical offices where, with a droid's infinite patience, See-Threepio was broad casting his distress call in alternating bands of Basic and various of his six million language repertoire, the light had gone utterly, and only a few' buildings were lit in the next square, leaking stray glims to show him the street below the windows, where nothing at all now moved.

The body of the dead looter lay where it had been left, naked of its e-suit, which others had taken along with the computer equipment that he'd been dragging. It was little more than a black shape to Threepio's visual receptors, though it registered on his infrared for some time. The smells of alien bacteria and decay organisms choked the air.

“It isn't any use,” he said in time. Artoo-Detoo, sitting inert as a heating unit in the corner, illuminated a single red light, inquiring.

“The entire base computer core has been gutted. Even should someone attempt a landing, we wouldn't know it.”

Artoo wibbled a reply.

“Oh, very well. But it will do us no good. I expect we'll sit here until our power cells run down, and chaos and destruction will encompass the Republic.” At another time Threepio would have spoken out of a personal conviction of impending doom. Now he realized he was saying no more than the truth.

“We did our best.”

The astromech tweeped and settled back to his resting position. It was inconceivable that either of them would do other than his best.

Threepio returned to the jury-rigged microphone. "Distress on Cybloc XII. Distress on Cybloc XII. Please send an evacuation team.

Please send an evacuation team.

"Ee-tsuti Cybloc XIt. Ee-tsuti Cybloc XII. N'geesw'a eltipic'uti ava'acuationma-teem5 negpo, insky.

“Dzgor groom Cybloc XII. Dzgor groom Cybloc Xli. Hch'ca shmim'ch vr/Srkshkipfuth gna gna kabro n'grabiaschkth moah.” He dug down into the bottommost registers of his voder circuits. The Yeb language had few technical terms, and it was necessary to patch together a linguistic equivalent from “Several conglomerates are urged strongly but respectfully to coordinate activities to prevent the drowning of another conglomerate that is not a threat to any of them, nor will be in the immediate or distant future to them or to their children.” He did the best he could.

Bith was easier. “Six-five. Twelve-seven-eight. Two-nine-seven.” In many ways, Threepio was very fond of the Bith.

“Distress on Cybloc XII. Dis--Artoo, look! It's an incoming vessel!”

He pointed to the dark transparisteel, through which the transpariflex panels of the dome could be seen. Against the livid gloom of the sky the red track of descending retros had appeared. “Can you get any sort of reading on the computer?”

Artoo, who had tried already a dozen times, simply twitted a negative.

Threepio was already toddling toward the turbolift. “They'll be coming into the port bays. By the time we reach there they should be just about landed. Oh, thank goodness.”

Artoo simply lowered himself down onto his third wheel, and rolled after his golden counterpart, without comment. If he had reservations about the nature of the rescuers, as deduced from the make and serial numbers of their vessels, he kept them to himself.

It wasn't that Threepio hadn't considered the possibility of smugglers, looters, or space pirates. But the events that had transpired since the two droids and the unfortunate Yeoman Marcopius's escape from the doomed Borealis had given the protocol droid a little more confidence in his ability to negotiate possible transport. in any case his power core was dangerously close to reserve, and even another pas de deux with space pirates seemed preferable to going cold on the dead world, leaving Her Excellency to her own devices with no one who knew where she was. All the way through the dark, utterly silent streets of the plague-stricken dome, he composed scenarios and arguments to talk his way into passage to Coruscant without informing potentially hostile--or simply verbally incontinent hosts what his message and mission might be.

And they all fell silent within him as he and Artoo stepped through the doorway of the largest of the docking bays, and he saw before him in the actinic glare of its landing lights the black ship that stood there, an Imperial Fleet Seinar IPV System Patrol Craft, like a sleek-shelled crab, lowering its boarding ramp.