Star Wars: Planet of Twilight Page 8

  The silence was huge, like the desert silences of Tatooine. Like the desert silence, it breathed.

  Then behind him he heard a soft, deadly crackling, and felt the lance of electricity stab the air. Turning, he saw flickering snakes of lightning racing down the face of the cliffs, like skeletal hands, or the wide-flung root systems of a thorn plant, a zone of fast-moving coruscation close to half a mile broad and heading his way.

  For an instant he watched it, fascinated. It poured down the face of the cliffs, raced over the jagged rocks at the bottom, sparking and leaping brighter as it raced over the slabs and projections of giant crystals that seemed to grow out of the darker rock. As it came closer he put forth his mind into the Force and raised the speeder in which he sat a few feet above the ground. The ground lightning poured past under it, flowing at the same time along the canyon walls to both sides; he felt the bolts of it that leapt up and struck the bottom of the speeder, jarring him even through its insulation with mild jolts of pain. At the same time he could feel the Force, like a roaring in his mind or hot wind blowing across his face, could almost see it as a sort of ghostly light reflecting back from the clusters and facets of crystals that glowed all around him in the shadows.

  The storm, whatever it was, flowed by under him for perhaps five minutes. When it had gone past him he let the speeder ease to the ground and stood up on it, watching the sparkling flood race down the rocks to the open plain, pale in the wan sun. It washed through the edge of the prison colony ruins, flowed along the jeweled ground beyond, vanishing at last in the direction of the line of spiky crystal rock chimneys that stretched away into the wastelands.

  Even in the stillness it left, the Force was everywhere. Luke could feel it, like a radiation penetrating his skin.

  The planet is dead, he thought. Completely without life, except for the tiny enclaves of human habitation.

  But the Force was here.

  It comes from Life, Yoda had said. Binding you, me, all life together …

  And Callista had come here seeking it. Seeking the key to the frustration, the fear, the terrible forces that had driven her from him.

  There is life here, thought Luke, suddenly aware of it, sure of it. Life somewhere. He wondered if the ruins he’d seen contained some clue as to why no mention had ever been made, in any survey of the planet ever taken.

  Luke could have raised the speeder with his mind and floated it down to the ruins at the canyon’s foot. By the same token, he understood, Yoda himself could have flown wherever he wanted to travel or could have built himself a palatial dwelling of rock instead of the mud hovel in Dagobah’s swamps. Ben Kenobi could have ruled a small planet.

  Wars do not make one great, the little Master had said.

  And neither did the ability to tote a mass of metal where one could just as easily walk.

  Luke dug his canteen from the speeder, checked the lightsaber at his belt and the blaster he’d found with the macrobinoculars under the seat, and started down the canyon on foot.

  Little remained of the Grissmath prison colony after some seven centuries. It had been situated above a ground water seam but evidently the hidden moisture had proved insufficient when terraforming had gone beyond crom and the simple gomex mosses that broke down the minerals of unyielding rock into soil that such plants as balcrabbian and brachniel could use. Without careful cultivation, most of the intermediate growths of the artificial ecosystems had died before they’d reached the stage of being self-sufficient. Lichens and podhoy still grew everywhere around the walls, as if the entire place had been dunked in a vat of crimson mud that had left a rough scum; close to the broken pump housing, a little soil remained, where hardy balcrabbian plants spread their leaves.

  Luke sensed a human presence there moments before his danger-trained eye picked out the dull metal of another speeder concealed in the shadows of a broken foundation. He drew around himself the aura of advanced inconspicuousness that Yoda had spoken about and that later Callista, recalling her own training, had taught him: Beyond a doubt the same means by which old Ben had wandered around the Death Star utterly unnoticed by the most highly trained troops of the Empire.

  The owner of the speeder sat in the dappled shade of the balcrabbian, protected from the wind, where the long-ruptured pump dribbled a series of tiny pools among the broken pavement. A young man, six or seven years junior to Luke, Corellian or maybe Alderaan stock, to judge by the brown hair, the medium build. He reminded Luke of any of the dozens of young farmers he’d known on Tatooine, trying to wrest a living from an inhospitable world. The duranex of his jumpsuit, though one of the toughest fabrics known, was patched and frayed, and the leather of the utility belt and satchel he wore much mended. He looked up quickly when Luke deliberately scraped the side of his boot on a lump of old-style permacrete. The young man’s hand flashed to the long, primitive pellet gun at his side, but something about Luke seemed to convince him that this wasn’t the danger he’d been fearing. He put the weapon down again and raised his hand with a grin.

  “Where’d you drop out of, brother? Don’t tell me you were on that B-wing they brought down.”

  Luke grinned back ingenuously. “I just want the name of the guy who said B-wings were too small to draw their fire, that’s all. Owen Lars,” he introduced himself, holding out his hand.

  The young man rose. “Arvid Scraf. Were you modified for cargo? Trying to make Hweg Shul? Something the size of a B-wing usually can get through the automatics. Smugglers use them sometimes, but I’ve heard they’re tricky. The Therans must have been in the base itself when the sensors picked you up. They can take them off auto and fire themselves, if they want.”

  Luke knelt by the water, dipped his half-empty canteen. The harsh dryness of the air, chilly as it was, filled him with a curious sense of having come home.

  “That’s my luck. I once picked up half a crate of glitterstim for twenty-five hundred credits, only the guy who sold it to me forgot to tell me he’d stolen it and it had sensor relays in it. I hadn’t even cleared the atmosphere when I had fourteen revenue cruisers around me like buzz flies on a ripe fruit.” It hadn’t happened to him, but it had to Han, and it gave him credentials of a sort, and a persona. More than that, it let him size up Arvid Scraf for a few moments more.

  “I heard the Therans were savages—the ones who tried to put holes in me sure looked like them. My cargo must have upped the ship’s mass reading. They can run a gun station?”

  “Don’t sell them short.” Scraf picked up his own canteen. Water splotched his sand-beaten orange sleeves, and down the front of his suit. “Where’d you come down? The Therans will have finished by now. I’ll help you haul whatever’s left into Ruby Gulch. You can get cash for it there.”

  A childhood on Tatooine had made Luke familiar with the economics of salvage. They’d been severe enough on the desert world, which had an open trade of sorts through Mos Eisley. On a planet with virtually no natural resources and little access to imported goods, that much metal and microchips would make him a wealthy man.

  “Who are they, anyway?” he asked, settling himself on the rough wooden bench that served Arvid Scraf’s landspeeder as a seat. The speeder was a crumbling Aratech 74-Z Jawas wouldn’t have touched. The starboard buoyancy tanks were so low that the deck canted sharply, and Arvid had built up a second deck on planks, with posts to level it up. He’d rigged a retractable limb underneath as well, with a wheel to keep the whole thing steady if too heavily laden. It gave the speeder the appearance of a badly misshapen mushroom, balanced on a single stem that did not quite touch the ground.

  “She don’t look like much, but she covers ground,” the young man said, half-proud and half-defensive, when Luke did a double-take. With Luke on the bench, Arvid had had to shift the gravel sack ballast to compensate for his weight.

  But she did, in fact, cover ground. Like the Millennium Falcon, there was marginally more to her than met the eye.

  Now Arvid said, “Who, the Therans?
There’s little villages of ’em up the canyons, or in caves, anyplace they can find a spring or an old pump still working. But most of ’em just come out of the farms. Half the Oldtimers were Therans at some time in their lives. Kids go out of the settlements and ride with the bands for a couple-three seasons. They sniff the smoke, they hear the voices, they dream the dreams, and they meet people they wouldn’t have met if they’d stayed around home, I guess. Then they come back and get married and have kids of their own. Sometimes they ride out again later, but mostly once seems to be enough.”

  He shrugged, clinging like a bantha-buster to the struggling levers, his eyes moving constantly between the sand-scored gauges and the eroded jags and zigs of the rising ground as the Aratech labored through the narrowing steepness of those light-laden crystal rocks, to where Luke had left his appropriated XP-38A.

  “That’s why we can’t make headway against ’em,” Arvid Scraf went on. “Their Listeners tell ’em anything coming in or going out is bad, tell ’em in their sleep, in their dreams. Then it’s part of their dreams for all time. It gets stuck in their heads so bad you can’t make ’em see different. They can’t see what this world could be, if we could get any kind of trade going. ‘We don’t want that,’ they’ll say, and you can talk to the edge of anoxia, and they just look at you with those eyes and say, ‘We don’t want that.’ We Like they know what all the other Oldtimers think. Weird.”

  He shook his head. His big hands on the levers were callused and stained with grease, as Luke’s own had been, he remembered, back in his days of trying to wring a living from a world not intended to support human life.

  The two of them wrestled the XP-38A up wholesale and lashed it to the -74’s bed. Luke knew the reasoning well. In a world without native metal, without timber, without imports, a rusty bucket was treasure.

  The anemic sun was sinking fast, and harsh wind pounded them out of the west, making the repulsorlift vehicle jerk and wobble. As they were wrassling the ropes, Luke caught the leg of his flightsuit on one of the -74’s makeshift struts, scratching the flesh underneath. Reaching down to feel the scrape, his fingers encountered what felt like a droplet of plastic, hard and smooth, on his flesh, and when he pulled up the fabric and stripped the placket, he saw on his calf a very small swelling, like a minute hill in the flesh. In its center bulged a tiny dome of hard, purple-brown chiten, unmistakably the shell of some sort of pinhead-size insect, which vanished into the flesh even as he watched.

  With an exclamation of disgusted alarm, Luke pinched the flesh around the swelling, forcing the thing back and out again. The swelling bubble of blood-dark shell elongated into a repellent abdomen perhaps a centimeter long, that ended in a hard little head and a ring of tiny, wriggling, thorn-tipped legs. It immediately turned between his thumb and forefinger and tried to dig into the ball of his thumb. Luke flicked it away hard, and heard it strike the flat facet of a nearby rock. It bounced down to the slippery canyon floor and scuttered fast for the shadows of the nearest stone.

  Luke said, “Yuck!” and pulled his pant leg up farther. His calf was dotted with tiny, reddened swellings, or fading pink patches where the bugs were already burrowing down into the flesh.

  “Don’t waste your time on ’em,” advised Arvid, from the other side of the speeder. He tied down a final knot and clambered over the tailfins to Luke’s side. “You probably picked ’em up in the shade around the water.” He pulled up his own sleeve to show at least four swellings on his forearm, one of them with the hard little insect tail just vanishing into the flesh. Casually he pinched the thing free and flicked it away against the deck, grinding it to a little purple blotch with the heel of his boot when it began to crawl toward his foot again.

  “They’re kind of gross but they just die and get absorbed. There’s stories of crystal hunters who run out of food in the barrens and stick their hands into holes so they can absorb enough drochs to get energy to make it to a settlement. Not something I’d care to do myself.”

  He made a face.

  “Drochs?”

  Arvid nodded. “They’re everywhere on this planet, and I mean everywhere. Their reproductive rate makes sand bunnies look like Elamposnian monks. Everybody has bites. Sunlight kills ’em. You just keep as clean as you can and don’t worry about it.”

  Reflecting on some of the more loathsome—but quite harmless—denizens of Dagobah who’d scavenged crumbs in the corners of Yoda’s dwelling, Luke supposed Arvid had a point.

  Fifteen or twenty minutes later, as the piggyback speeders turned from the eye-aching crystal mazes to the plain where the burn marks of Luke’s crash landing could be seen, Luke pulled up his sleeve again. Only a few pinkish splotches remained. He pinched the flesh around one carefully, feeling for the hardness of a foreign body, and found nothing. With his mind—with the techniques of the Force—he probed at the molecules, water, life energy of the muscle tissue itself, and found only the few vanishing traces of an alien energy field, which dissolved even as he observed them, becoming first identical with his own body, then a part of it.

  Virtually nothing remained of the B-wing. Scuffmarks, charring, a huge slick of fused gravel where the reactor core had ruptured—even the massive cylinder of the reactor itself was gone. What Luke thought of as the “soft parts” of the ship were scattered broadcast over the harsh ground: the upholstery of the seats, some fragmented plastic from broken couplers, insulation that had been cooked brittle by the crash itself. Everything else had been taken.

  “Didn’t think we’d find much.” Arvid scuffed with his toe at the cracked corner of what had been a console housing, and held it up. Even the screws were gone. “They use everything. Why not? Everybody does.” A dry twist of wind flipped his brown hair across his eyes. “I’m really sorry, Owen.”

  The sun was sinking. Everywhere the orange and rose and cinnabar of its changing lights glanced and glared off the gravel, rocks, the towering crystal chimneys, so that Luke felt as if he were trapped in the midst of a limitless, heatless lava flow that stretched to the ends of the world. The wind had swelled to a torrent, and the temperature was plunging fast.

  “At least you got one of their speeders. That’s something.” Arvid lowered his voice. “Uh—you didn’t owe anything on that cargo, did you?” He worked his fingers into clumsy hand-knitted gloves, and tossed Luke a disreputable coat he’d pulled from beneath the speeder’s seat. His breath was already a cloud of mist. “That was on your craft? I mean, to people who’d make trouble for you?”

  Luke was about to disclaim further interest in his fictitious cargo, but another thought crossed his mind. He lowered his voice also, although it was patently obvious there was no one and nothing to hear them for hundreds of kilometers, and said, “Well, I’d sure rather a couple of individuals thought I bought it in the crash until I can come up with a little working capital again, if you know what I mean.”

  Arvid nodded, with a prompt understanding that made Luke wonder how often smugglers made landfall on this planet. With Pedducis Chorios so close it made sense.

  “You can put up with me at my aunt’s in Ruby Gulch tonight,” Arvid said. “You’ll freeze, out of doors. Aunt Gin’ll give you top price for the speeder, too, if you want to sell, and that should be enough to get you a launch offplanet when you get to Hweg Shul.”

  “Thank you,” said Luke, and pulled closer about him the ragged, too-big jacket. “I appreciate it.”

  “Well, we don’t get a lot of strangers.” Arvid looked a little shy as they clambered back into the Aratech. “The Oldtimers are all each others’ cousins, but those of us who’ve come here in the last ten years or so, we sort of like to hear how things are going, back toward the Core. You know?”

  Luke knew. For the next hour and a half, while Arvid fought the evening wind across the sea floor plains by the light of a couple of wavery chemical lamps, he entertained the young man with smuggler stories gleaned secondhand from Mara and Han and Lando, with tales of the Rebellion edited togeth
er from his own adventures and those of Leia and Winter and Wedge. To these he added news and gossip and hints enough to imply that he was a minor-league planet-hopper making his living as best he could in the chaos without giving allegiance to either side, much as Han had been, once upon a time.

  And, as he himself would have been, ten or twelve years and several lifetimes ago, Arvid was enchanted.

  The young man had gone many hours out of his way to help Luke. Though Luke was tired and would rather have dozed, or asked questions about this eerie world of light and ungiving glass, he knew that such entertainment as he could provide was payment for Arvid’s trouble. There would be time later, he thought, to learn what he had come here to learn.

  Against the darkness, far-off light speared the sky.

  “What the …?”

  “That’ll be the gun station!” Arvid braced his feet against a ballast bag and threw his weight on the steering lever. “Big one—over by Bleak Point …”

  The speeder sagged heavily, the hot flares of its lamplight sparkling on the facets below them. The wind had fallen with full darkness, and in the stillness the cold deepened until Luke’s ears and teeth ached. “There’s a couple blaster rifles under the seat, Owen, if you’d be so kind.”

  Luke fished out a Seinar proton blaster and a venerable Merr-Sonn Standard Four.

  “You take the proton,” offered Arvid generously, as he tromped the accelerator and the scattered boulders and chimneys flashed and whirled past them with horrifying speed. “The Four’s got her ways—I better handle her.”

  “Uh—you probably better.” Luke checked out the Seinar. The geriatric weapon had been refitted repeatedly, like every other piece of equipment he’d seen on the planet, but it was spotlessly clean and the charges were topped. “What’s going on?” The fitful blasts of light ahead were coming from ground level, not pointed at the sky. Luke balanced himself on a stanchion and stood up, wind slapping his gray flightsuit, focusing his mind through the darkness, reaching toward the source of the intermittent glare.