And then there was that little stretch between first and second sun, when the cold night wind would kick its last and the planet itself would sigh. Good water prospectors lived for those moments, when the precious drops that had birthed in the night suddenly realized you were on to them, and fled. A smart farmer like Orrin could smell them, and follow them. And it was possible to follow them—because in daylight, nothing could stop you. Not in this region. Not anymore.
Those were the rules. The new rules, maybe—but his rules, made possible by his hard work and guidance.
Guess I forgot to tell this batch of Tuskens, he thought, climbing down the ladder. The raiders had ruined more than the morning for these poor people. Orrin winced. The guts of half a dozen maintenance and sentry droids marked the Tuskens’ path into the camp. Two vaporators sparked, maintenance doors at their bases bashed open. And then there were the strike points, scattered randomly around the yard. A couple smoked still, where blasterfire had flash-fused the sand into lightning glass. His posse had left those, not the Tuskens. Orrin had never known Plug-eye to use blasters on the way in.
Plug-eye. This raid could have been the work of no other. No other Tusken in this part of the Jundland Wastes would dare attack at dawn. No one had ever caught more than half a glance at Plug-eye and lived to describe it. If they’d lived, Orrin always said, then they didn’t meet Plug-eye, but some other Tusken, with a more amiable disposition. Descriptions of the notorious raider varied. Skinny or fat? Male or female? Short and stubby, or a Wookiee in a robe?
The tales had only two things in common. Plug-eye was as fierce as fire—and where other Sand People had metal turrets for their eyeholes, something must have happened to one of the warrior’s eyes. Rather than simply removing the eyepiece, Plug-eye had jammed a crimson stone into the opening.
Or something. The stories didn’t even agree on which eye it was. This time, though, things might be different. They’d arrived quickly enough to save some witnesses.
Orrin had already been dressed and in the fields for an hour when the call—or more correctly, the Call—came. That fact, and his work team’s proximity, had saved the Bezzard family from a horrific end. But what had come before was tragic enough. Two of Orrin’s neighbors—cousins, on his ex-wife’s side of the family—exited the back door of the house, carrying the body of the Bith farmhand. Orrin looked down as they passed. The posse would handle the burial—just as, over the dune to the east, more volunteers were burning the dead Tuskens. They had to make this as easy for the Bezzards as possible.
He’d lived through it before. When his youngest had died, just as senselessly.
Orrin heard motion in the house. “Mullen, you in there?” he asked.
“Yep.”
Orrin’s older son—he couldn’t bring himself to think of him as the only son, yet—sauntered from the building, holding two halves of a blaster rifle. “Looks like Plug-eye was here,” Mullen said.
“Figured.”
Inscrutable behind his black goggles, Mullen Gault could have been a clone of his father at twenty-five—if the younger man weren’t trying so hard to look like someone else. Both were tall and powerfully built, with the ruddy skin of farmers born and raised. There the similarities ended. Blue-eyed Orrin’s hair was dark and elegantly graying. He tried to look nice even on the range; you never knew who might happen by. Mullen, meanwhile, had woken in his clothes from the previous night’s carousing. That was typical. He’d sacrificed several teeth years earlier to a tangle with a gambler in Anchorhead—and he’d lost another in the same town just recently.
People said that was why Mullen frowned as often as his father smiled, but Orrin knew that wasn’t so. The boy had been scowling in the crib.
Orrin took the rifle pieces. Most Tuskens wouldn’t leave anything that might be useful. Plug-eye seemed pickier. “How many were there?”
Mullen picked at his beard and stood against the doorway, scratching his back against the jamb. “Three Tuskens dead in the yard. Then those that took off into the hills. Veeka just called—she lost ’em up at the Roiya Rift.” Mullen looked keenly at his father. “I figured you’d want me to call off the hunt. They’re on their way back.”
Orrin snorted. “Well, don’t miss ol’ Pluggy too much. Next time breakfast rolls around—”
He stopped. A woman’s anguished sobs echoed through the house. “The owner. Is she all right?”
“She’s out front with the old man,” Mullen said. “She’s pretty shook up.”
“Imagine so.” Orrin looked up. “Who’s with her now?”
“I said. The old man.”
Orrin gawked. “The dead old man?” He threw the fragments to the ground. “I told you to make sure someone was with her, Mullen. And you thought I meant her dead father?”
Mullen simply stared.
“Mullen, I swear!” Orrin grimaced and jabbed two fingers at the bridge of his son’s goggles, clonking his son’s head against the door. “Really.”
The young man said nothing as his father marched back to the landspeeder. Finding his twill half-cape behind the passenger seat, Orrin draped it over his shoulders and turned to face the house. This isn’t going to be easy.
The sight of dark-haired Tyla Bezzard cradling the old man on the stoop took his breath away. It was grisly, what the raiders had done—it had to be Plug-eye. But what chilled him more was how the young woman seemed not to care about the state of her father’s body.
Without looking up, she sensed Orrin’s approach. “Someone’s come, Daddy.”
Orrin took off his hat and instinctively knelt beside her. He’d known the woman when she was a child. Her father, Lotho Pelhane, had been a hand on Orrin’s family ranch for twenty years. Before Lotho struck out on his own, Tyla and Orrin’s kids used to play together. Orrin placed his cloak over Tyla’s shoulders. As he did, she buried her head in his chest and bawled.
“I know, Tyla, I know,” he said, embracing her. “It’s a blasted thing, all right.” He looked down at the corpse, still awkwardly slumped against her lap. Lotho Pelhane still had a weeks-old bandage around his head, a surreal sight given the mess that was made of the rest of him. Orrin looked away.
Tyla whimpered. “I—I tried to remember, Master Gault—”
“Orrin.”
“I tried to remember. You sold us the alarm and the activator,” she said, showing him the remote control device in her hand. She was clutching it almost hard enough to crush it. “I was so scared,” she gasped. “I couldn’t remember how to turn on the local alarm at first—”
“It’s all right,” he said. “The Settlers’ Call worked just fine. We got your signal. And we came right here.” Gently, Orrin pulled her away from the stoop, allowing Lotho’s body to almost imperceptibly slip away from her. “You did just fine. Your husband and your boy are safe. We got the Tuskens.”
“I don’t care!” She looked down at her dead father. “I don’t want to stay here! Not anymore!”
Orrin pulled back from Tyla and brought her upright, squeezing her shoulders in his firm hands. “Now, listen. I knew your father. You know Lotho wouldn’t want to hear this. He wasn’t any more scared of Tuskens than he was of his own shadows.”
She looked down at the bandage on her father’s head and sniffled. “They nearly got him last month, you know—knocked him down one night at his place. It’s why he came to stay with us. But he was getting better. He said he’d gotten away once, so he thought he was safe—”
“That’s right. And you made this place safe with the Call. You did the right thing—”
She wept again. Orrin just waited. He’d been here too many times before—though less often, lately. “This was bad, no accounting for it. But we got a bunch of them, and we’ll get the rest of them. And it’ll get better. You understand?”
She pulled away, suddenly angry. “What do they want? They’re monsters—”
“Tatooine’s got sand and it’s got monsters,” Orrin said. He looked over
to see Mullen standing with the burial detail. “Now, I’m going to check on that husband and son of yours. These folks will take care of your dad, until we get you back to the oasis. Annileen Calwell will put you up there tonight.”
Tyla nodded weakly and began walking, still oblivious to the bloody mess her tunic had become.
Orrin looked skeptically at his son as she went out of earshot. “Can I trust you to take care of this woman for five minutes without sending her into another conniption?”
Mullen spoke in a low voice. “Sure, sure. But weren’t you gonna ask her about Plug-eye? You said you—”
“Where’s my hat?” Orrin looked around on the ground. “I need something to hit you with. Now go!”
Orrin found Tellico Bezzard, the young owner of the homestead, at the machine shed, surrounded by a buzz of activity. The rest of the posse had returned. The grown-ups in the group—a distinction defined more by good sense than age—had tackled without delay the list of things that always had to be addressed in these cases. Though the posse was officially leaderless, Orrin had always been the one to take charge in the past; he was glad now to see that so much of his advice had stuck. Some folks were in the house cleaning up. Others were fixing the vaporators. Still others were gathering the goods the Bezzards would want for their stay at the Pika Oasis. They were working, even knowing they were missing out on important hours in their own fields.
And then there was his daughter, Veeka, and her junior satellite Jabe Calwell, sitting on crates with a flask out, drinking under the morning suns. Orrin knew it wasn’t water; after all, Veeka was drinking it. Since her twin brother’s death, the twenty-one-year-old had decided to do all the living he’d missed out on. And Jabe, at sixteen Orrin’s newest farmhand, was doing his best to keep up with her. They were in the middle of describing how they’d killed one of the Sand People to Tellico, who sat numbly as he bobbled his unknowing baby on his knee. The farmer’s blaster sat on the sand, nearby, unfired.
When Veeka noticed her father’s approach and grim expression, she grinned awkwardly. “Whoops. Sorry,” she said, quickly passing the flask to Tellico. “Here, buddy. Drink up.” The frazzled young farmer looked blankly at the container.
Orrin rolled his eyes and barged in. “Sorry is right.” He snatched the flask and threw it behind the shed. He glared at Veeka. “Get these people some water. Now.”
Smirking, Veeka ambled off, Jabe in tow. Orrin sighed. His daughter had the amiable attitude that Mullen lacked, but her interest in others was a centimeter deep. Both his children had missed the empathy ship.
It fell to him, as usual. Orrin knelt before the young farmer and his infant. “You all right?”
Tellico spoke quickly and excitedly. “Yeah. I’m amazed you got here so fast.”
“There was some luck. My hands and I were working the towers on the west range when you activated the Settlers’ Call. We were halfway here before the folks at the oasis even got to their speeders.”
Orrin knew there was luck, true—but also good design. This was how it was supposed to work. When a homestead activated the Call, everyone in this part of the desert moved. If settlers were armed and had a ride, they followed the sirens to trouble. If not, they mustered at the Pika Oasis, where guns and vehicles were garaged behind Dannar’s Claim, the area’s general store. The alarm at the activating location had a different sound from the others, but all started with something calculated to spook any Tusken: the recorded howl of a krayt dragon. That had been Orrin’s favorite touch.
“Well, it’s a wonderful thing, sir. Worth every credit.”
Orrin smiled humbly. “Tell your friends. It’s for all of us, really.”
“Her dad—Lotho—never wanted us to buy into it. But—” The young man broke off, and looked away. He clutched the baby tighter.
“You forget about all that,” Orrin said. “But I want you to remember something for me, if you can. The Tuskens. What can you tell me?”
Tellico looked to him urgently. “Oh, it was Plug-eye, all right. No mistaking it. Where the right eye was—”
“Right from where you’re lookin’?”
Tellico pointed to his right eye. “No, this eye. It shines.”
Orrin started. “What, like a cybernetic?” That sounded absolutely crazy.
“No, sir. More like a crystal. It caught the light when I looked—and I couldn’t take my eyes off it.” He shivered in the suns. “Scared the life out of me.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Orrin scratched his chin. “Anything else?”
The young farmer paused. “The robes were different, I guess. No bandolier. But really, I was so focused on the eye—”
Orrin stood and patted Tellico on the back. “Forget it, son. Now let’s get you and Tyla taken care of. Annileen will put you up at the Claim as long as you need.”
Orrin watched as the farmer and child departed. Mullen stepped to his father’s side. “Any help?”
“Nope.”
Mullen sneered. “And he had a shot at Plug-eye and didn’t take it.”
“I don’t think that boy would know his blaster from his spanner.” Orrin looked behind him and chuckled. “Now where’s that flask?”
Veeka and Jabe walked up from the house. “I thought you didn’t want me to drink this early,” Veeka said.
“You make me drink,” Orrin said. He turned to look at Jabe, fresh-faced and thrilled to be here. The boy was the age his Varan—Veeka’s twin—had been five years earlier, when tragedy struck. It was one reason Orrin had taken him onto his maintenance crew: Jabe was a sunny presence.
But Orrin knew what awaited the kid at home. “Boy, when your mother finds out I let you go out with the posse, they’ll need to make room for me on the pyre beside the Tuskens.”
Veeka opened the maintenance hatch of her sporty landspeeder. “You want to hide back here, runt? You’ll just fit.”
Jabe blushed at the teasing. “It won’t be that bad,” he said.
“Oh, yes it will.” Orrin stared at the kid. “You’ll be begging the Jawas to adopt you.”
He stepped forward and clapped his hands twice loudly. “That’s it, people. Good job, here. Back to the oasis. Drinks at Dannar’s Claim!”
CHAPTER THREE
THE OLD NIKTO WOMAN plopped a bolt of cloth on the counter. “Do you work here?”
Standing behind the counter, Annileen Calwell didn’t look up from her datapad. “No, I come in here and do inventory in my spare time.”
A moment passed before Annileen suddenly froze. “Wait,” she said, eyes widening as she took in her surroundings. “Counter. Cashbox. Title deed.” With a look of alarm, Annileen turned abruptly to the alabaster-skinned customer. “I’m sorry, I guess I do work here.”
It was a game they’d played every day since Erbaly Nap’tee’s first visit to the store. Except that for the Nikto woman, it wasn’t a game: Erbaly had never once remembered who Annileen was. For a while, Annileen had thought the alien simply couldn’t distinguish among humans. Eventually, she figured out that Erbaly just didn’t care—and so their game began.
That had been eleven standard years ago.
The shrivel-faced alien clicked her tongue with impatience. “Now, see this?” Her withered white finger jabbed at the fabric. “Do you know why this costs so much?”
“No,” Annileen said, smiling primly. “Why?”
The Nikto’s cracked lips pursed. She started to say something more, but Annileen stopped her.
“Just a second. They need me in the cantina.” Her apron whirled as Annileen spun and walked the meter and a half to where her sundries counter turned into a bar. She picked up a glass that a sleeping prospector had knocked over and then returned to Erbaly. “I’m back,” she said.
The Nikto woman tapped her foot. “Is there someone else here I can talk to?”
“Now there, I can help you,” Annileen said. After setting the glass in a basin, she stepped out through a gap in the long counter and walked to one of t
he back tables, where a green-snouted Rodian huddled silently over his morning caf. Annileen clapped her hand on his shoulder—an act that he seemed not to notice in the least. “This is Bohmer,” she said.
Erbaly studied him. “Does he work here?”
“We don’t know,” Annileen said. “But he’s here an awful lot.”
“Thank you just the same.” The elderly Nikto sniffed disdainfully and headed for the front door.
Annileen picked up the bolt of cloth from the counter and called after her. “I’ll set this aside for when you’re here tomorrow, Erbaly. Have a nice day!”
Erbaly said nothing as she stormed past Leelee Pace, Annileen’s best friend, who was preparing a parcel for mailing—another of the store’s many services. The crimson-skinned Zeltron laughed heartily as the Nikto slammed the door behind her. “That’s our Annie,” Leelee said. “Retailer of the year. Customers can’t stay away!”
“Sure they can, Leelee.” Annileen orbited one of the luncheonette tables, cleaning it off without looking at it. “See, Dannar had it figured. Anyone can stay away for a while. Until they remember that it’s thirty kilometers to the nearest working keg. Then they never want to leave.”
“I’ve noticed,” Leelee said, stacking packages. “That was shorter than your usual go-around with Erbaly. Something biting you?”
“No.”
Carting the breakfast dishes behind the counter, Annileen knew that wasn’t true. But what she’d told her friend about Dannar’s Claim certainly was. The place was the largest facility of any kind in the Pika Oasis. Two of the domes had been there since before anyone could remember, part of some ancient farm. Annileen’s late husband Dannar had added on, connecting one of the domes with a new oblong sales area beneath a rounded roof. The dome behind now constituted her family’s living quarters and guesthouse.
Kenobi Page 3
