“To protect this generation from yourself,” said Callista gently, “you have to embrace the way of the Jedi, Leia. Not flee it. Luke is right.”
She stood, unfolding herself to her lanky height, her crimson clothing almost black in the star glimmer and the pallid glow reflected from the shining stones. Nights on Nam Chorios, without benefit of warming oceans, were unbelievably cold, even in this summer season. Leia huddled her gloved hands in her armpits and wondered how the Therans managed, night after night, under the open stars.
“There’s a woman in Hweg Shul named Taselda, a small-time Jedi adept who came to this planet centuries ago, seeking power. The way I came.”
“Beldorion spoke of her,” said Leia. “Was he her partner?”
“They came here together. After this long, telling lies to themselves, to each other, to everyone, I’m not sure exactly what took place. They were both adepts, but neither had much power. Only one of them had sufficient training to make a lightsaber, but I don’t know which. I don’t think either of them has the capacity for it now. Like me, they came here seeking an easy answer.”
“I didn’t think Hutts could be born strong in the Force.”
“Don’t underestimate the Force, Leia,” said Callista. “Anyone—anything—can be born in its light. There’s a tree on the planet Dagobah that’s strong in it. Sea slugs in the oceans of Calamari use it to draw plankton into their mouths until they grow to be bigger than starfighters. But they haven’t the sentient mind to learn to use it beyond that. And that is for the best.”
She sighed.
Suddenly sure of it, Leia said, “You were the slave Liegeus spoke of, weren’t you? The one Beldorion sold or traded to Dzym.”
Callista stood so silent for so long that Leia feared she’d angered her, but in time she nodded. “Having been Taselda’s slave before,” she said. “I let myself be enslaved, because I was so hungry, so desperate. She used me, as Beldorion would have used me, had I been any good to him. As he’d have used you.”
Leia nodded again. The pain in Callista’s face was frightening to see, and she felt anger stir in her again, this time not anger at Ashgad specifically, but at them all: Beldorion, the Rationalists, Moff Getelles, all those who grabbed for petty goals and broke and ruined lives in the process, not seeing anything beyond their own wants. But it was sour anger, like brittle ice above a still well of endless grief.
“As long as I can be manipulated like that,” Callista went on, “as long as I can be used—as long as I lack my own power in the Force—I am a prime candidate for the dark side. I’m standing in its shadow now. If there is a way for me at all, I have to follow it alone. I will love Luke until the day I die and beyond, but I will not pull him into that shadow with me. Please, Leia. Make him understand.”
“What do we have?” Han Solo strode into the bridge still stripping off the helmet and gloves of his e-suit, registered immediately the blinking red lights over the comm board, the worried note in Chewbacca’s growl that had summoned him and Lando back onto the ship in double-time. Outside, terrible stillness lay over the pitch-black lava plains of Exodo II, the eternal dust that lay around the bore holes of the ghaswars that were the planet’s most plentiful life form stirring uneasily in the glare of the Millennium Falcon’s lights. The wrecked scout cruiser they’d traced there had been in much the same shape as the Corbantis had been, save that the engines had been long cold, the crew dead of radiation poisoning, asphyxiation, cold, and ghaswar bores.
Chewbacca rumbled a reply and put up the readout.
Han stared at it, aghast. “That’s gotta be wrong.”
Lando came striding down the corridor. He’d taken off his e-suit and was combing his crisply curling black hair. He’d been badly shaken by the bodies on the destroyed cruiser and more so by the evidence that it, too, had been destroyed by the tiny, knifelike missiles that had cut up the Corbantis and almost demolished the Falcon. “I’ve had a look at those barometric readings, old partner, and if we want to get off this planet before the next atmostide we’d better …”
His voice trailed off. He stood staring at the screenful of data the Wookiee had transferred to the main viewer.
“What the hell is that?”
“What’s it look like?” demanded Han, shaken. “It’s an invading fleet, coming out of hyperspace and heading right this way.”
“Artoo-Detoo, what in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing?” Threepio toddled after his counterpart as the astromech wheeled into life again the moment the doors of the impound bay were shut, heading over to the access panel by the door. “Honestly, ever since poor Captain Bortrek installed those extra interface circuits you have been behaving in a most extraordinary fashion! You know as well as I do that with these restraining bolts we’re not going to be able to leave the room!”
Artoo merely tweeped a request.
“Why?”
Artoo explained.
“I don’t see that,” protested Threepio. “I don’t see at all how removing that panel, even if I could do it, would save poor Master Yarbolk from being put out the airlock. If we’re discovered, as we surely will be, we could get into terrible trouble!”
Artoo pointed out that as troubles went, being dissected for one’s microprocessors and later paid for at a ninety-five percent discount to one’s owners was as terrible as it got.
“I’m really not programmed for this kind of thing at all! Oh, why will not anyone believe me!” Threepio pressed one forefinger against the center of the access plate above the door panel and thrust, with all the strength of his hydraulic arm joint. Never, in any circumstances, would he have exerted his strength against living flesh of any variety, but metal was metal, and not being up to military standard, this metal buckled along the edge sufficiently for him to get his fingers under the plate and pull it free. Artoo proceeded to deliver a string of instructions.
“Honestly, I think those additional circuits disrupted your logic modifiers! Green wires connected to coaxial links—you don’t possess coaxial links! Oh.” Threepio flipped open one of the silvery gray add-ons screwed to his counterpart’s side. “Well, I’m sure that they aren’t good for you.”
Nevertheless, he hooked the links into the green wires, and listened to the flow of bleeps, twitters, and chirps that Artoo-Detoo poured into the quarantine ship’s internal relay system.
“Artoo-Detoo, that is a patent untruth!” declared Threepio indignantly. “First you disable the opening mechanism on the doors of airlock three, then you cause the system to believe that those doors have been opened … and even should you help Master Yarbolk escape from that airlock, that doesn’t do us any good, you know. We’re still unable to leave this hold while we have the restraining bolts on, and he is still unable to get off this vessel.”
The golden protocol droid turned away, arms folded in the human-form expression of indignation and uninvolvement. “I won’t have anything further to do with this.”
Artoo made a sad little noise, but no request to be unhooked from the access hatch. Indeed, he produced small blips and whirrs every now and then, which indicated to Threepio that the astromech was still monitoring something in the QEC’s main computer. It became clear what it was when he rocked a little on his wheels and tweeted excitedly. The next moment the doors of the impound hold opened, and Yarbolk hustled inside.
“I owe you,” he whispered excitedly, fishing in his pocket and producing a magnetic bolt extractor and a pair of wire snips. “Brothers, I owe you plenty. This whole ship stinks! The Big Green Fish only knows who paid that captain how much to put me out the airlock. Maybe she thought the order was on the up-and-up.”
“It could be,” surmised Threepio, as the Chadra-Fan popped the restraining bolt from his golden chest. “Artoo here claims there is a traitor, or at least a major information leak, on the Galactic Council.”
“And the Rebels have taken Coruscant,” muttered Yarbolk, going to work on Artoo. “Tell me something I don’t know.
You went and blabbed that Ashgad had kidnapped Lady O-S. Is that true?”
Threepio hesitated, belated visions of galaxywide coverage cascading into his deductive logic circuits.
“Because if it is, you better keep damn quiet about it, my tinny friend, if you don’t want her getting what I nearly got. And as for a traitor on the Council—Fish, I figured that one out weeks ago! Loronar buys and sells Senators and governors in the Republic and out of it. All it takes is a few strategic contributions to good causes. Hold that door, would you, Threesie? It’s gonna close again once I get Artie unhooked … ah. Thanks.”
He looped up the wires and coax cables into the interface box on Artoo’s side and replaced the strip of silver space tape that had held its hatch closed. “All those Senators have blind spots. Pet causes. Like ‘order in the galaxy’ or ‘the rights of all sentient species’ or ‘the rights of one obviously superior sentient species to put all other sentient species straight whether they want to be put straight or not.’ And it’s Loronar’s business to know what those blind spots are.”
He was hurrying down the corridor as he spoke, furry feet making no sound, wide nostrils snuffing softly. Once he halted, pushing the two droids back into the niche of a bay door. Two Sullustan guards walked by, weapons slung casually over their shoulders, bodies slumped with fatigue. “Thank your lucky nuts and bolts the whole ship’s understaffed and occupied with those Aqualish smugglers up in the holding area. Which one of these bays is their ship in, Artie?”
Artoo cornered determinedly and made his way down a short passage to a landing bay whose doors, surprisingly, stood open. They passed inside, Yarbolk pausing to crank the doors shut manually from within. The bay was tiny and almost completely filled by the lumpy ovoid of the Aqualish smugglers’ vessel. Beyond the dark, silvery green egg of the ship, the magnetic field glimmered faintly around the oval shape of the entry port. Yarbolk hooked Artoo’s coax links into the access hatch beside the bay door: “Figure five minutes should do us?”
Artoo tweeped.
“You can get that baby started in that short a time?”
Artoo tweeped again, indignantly.
“Okay, okay. Once you get it to turn over those things are candy to fly. I doubt she’s got the juice in her to make it to Cybloc, but I know a fellow on Budpok who’ll buy her, no questions asked, cargo and all. The proceeds should get me back to the Core, and you to Cybloc no problem.”
“Not again,” groaned Threepio, as he, Artoo, and Yarbolk hastened across the decking to the Aqualish ship. “I do hope we can arrive at a more convincing disguise this time. I must say that I am quite frankly becoming very tired of being treated as the potential personal property of every sentient being we meet.”
“Not to worry.” Yarbolk pulled the hatch shut behind them and twirled the locking rings—for a space-going civilization, the Aqualish had some surprisingly primitive features on their ships. He toddled ahead of the two droids to the bridge, where he hooked Artoo into the computer core again and perched on the stool before the console, his furry little feet dangling.
“I have a plan—one that doesn’t depend on you two pretending to be anything you’re not.”
Threepio said nothing, but in the portion of his central processing unit that formed opinions as protocol paradigms for communications facilitation, he reflected that he was heartily sick of plans.
They were undoubtedly doomed.
From the dense shadow at the base of the plateau, Luke looked up the striated cliff-face at the matte black jumble of Seti Ashgad’s compound, and wondered how many of those glowing rectangles of yellow and white denoted occupation. Was one of them Leia’s prison? Or were they holding her somewhere in the heart of the house, within the rock of the plateau itself?
Shivering in the dense cold, he reached out with his mind, seeking to touch hers—Leia …—but did not know if she could hear. In the darkness, the whisper of the Force around him was very strong, pressing on his mind, tugging at all his thoughts, so that he was hard put to keep it at bay. Even as there were ways of using the Force to keep from being seen, so it was possible to keep from making an image on certain types of sensors. Luke hoped that such minor use wasn’t sufficient to trigger a reaction elsewhere on the planet.
What was happening elsewhere in the galaxy as a result of Leia’s kidnapping—what other events that kidnapping would have been coordinated with—he didn’t like to think.
He’d brought a toolkit from Croig’s shop—leaving most of his slender finances to pay for it—and it didn’t take long to rewire the alarm and spring the door-catches. His small glowrod showed him a permacrete parking bay containing a sleek black Mobquet Chariot, and by the stains on the floor there were two other speeders usually in residence, one of them with a faulty rear coil. Turbolift doors gleamed dully in the light. Luke ran the beam along the wall, seeking a stairway door, and drochs the size of his thumb waddled and skittered out of his way.
The stairway, he thought, was going to be bad.
The Force was life, Yoda had said. Connecting all living things. What he felt, standing in the doorway to the stair and reaching up with whatever senses he could muster, Luke had never felt before and never wanted to feel again.
Life, thick and cloying. Life huge and all-encompassing—there couldn’t possibly be that many creatures in the stairwell! Billions, billions.… The sense of life there was overwhelming, and yet there was something hideously wrong with it. Something ugly, evil, rotted. A dirty miasma, a sense of fermentation, swollen like cancerous tissue, rotted and foul. Luke had no idea how to interpret this, no concept of what this meant, or even if his perception were accurate. He couldn’t even tell if it was billions of lives he felt, or only one, huge and vile and waiting.
But Leia had to be up there.
The lightsaber hummed to life in his hand. He maneuvered the little clip-on glowrod from the toolkit onto the front flap-pocket of his coverall, flicked it on.
Permacrete steps ascended to a landing, then turned out of his view. Darkness, and something moving along the walls. With the choking inner sense of evil it was impossible to determine anything else about what might be up there, shape or size or sound or smell.
Cautiously, Luke began to climb.
He passed one landing, two, then three. Each break in the stair was twenty steps up. The plateau looked well over three hundred meters high, but there was no telling how deep the foundations of the house extended. As far as Luke could tell, there were no holocams or viewers in the stairwell: only a close-crowding monotony of permacrete walls, grimy with the brown tracks of drochs. The join of the walls and floor was almost sepia with the noisome exudations of their bodies.
Pain stabbed him in the calf and he looked down to see half a dozen huge drochs—the length of his thumb—wriggling and climbing up his boots. Several had bitten through his pants leg and into the flesh already. Disgusted, he pulled a hypo-driver from his belt and used the shaft of it to dislodge those that hadn’t bitten yet, but more were crawling purposefully toward him across the floor.
As he bent down, the light of his little glowrod fell on them, and to his surprise he saw that several of the biggest had definite limbs, pincer-clawed or tentacular, sometimes both on the same organism. He stepped quicker, reminding himself that Arvid said they simply died and dissolved in the flesh.…
But the pain in his calf was followed by weariness, a cold lassitude, an ache in his chest, and the sudden, overwhelming desire for sleep.
He stepped around a corner, and onto another landing, and there they were.
The floor was brown with them. Among the glistening mass there were half a dozen nearly the size of Luke’s hand, spider-shaped or arthropod, some with the batrachian, springing legs of a Cabuloid pad-hopper.…
Luke fell back, appalled, and something struck him from behind, fastening to his back between the shoulder blades, and pain like the slice of a chisel jabbed the back of his neck.
He flung himself back
against the wall, crushing whatever it was against the permacrete, but as if that had been a signal the drochs on the floor hopped and skittered and flowed toward him. The pain on his neck still reechoed, though a sticky fluid trickling down his back told him that whatever had attacked him was dead. He turned to flee down the stairs and saw that the drochs had gathered in behind him, big and small, some of them huge, legged, toothed, and fast as lizards. Weakness flowed over him with the agony of a hundred bites, as if all his veins had been opened—not blood loss, he knew at once, but life-loss, the draining of the electrochemical field of his nervous system, of the life essence of his flesh and heart.
He fell against the wall, clinging to the permacrete to stay upright, knowing that if he went down among them he was a dead man indeed. They evaded the slashes of his lightsaber, a weapon too big to touch them, too slow for all its speed. On the steps ahead of him Luke saw the biggest droch of all, nearly twice the size of his two fists bunched together, carcinomorphic, staring at him with two bright eyes on short stalks, and he thought, It’s sentient. Or nearly so.
And he knew somehow that it was this thing that had orchestrated the attack on him, letting him come so far up the steps that there was no chance of descent.
He cut at it, staggering with weakness. The thing sprang aside. Luke’s knees gave out and he fell, gasping, dizzy, pain stabbing him as if he were rolled in needles.…
And he summoned the Force.
Like a shining wind he called it, and like a shining wind it came, tearing the drochs from his body as Vader had once torn cabinets and spools and railings from the infrastructure of the carbon-freeze chamber on Bespin to hurl at him. But the drochs he hurled away, crushing them against the walls, staggering to rise as more flowed toward him, from up the stairs and from below.
He thought, I can’t do this. The balance of the Force is broken. This will destroy some other place.…
Star Wars: Planet of Twilight Page 26
