Part 7 (1/2)

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 vanis.h.i.+ng 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 ma.s.sive cylinder of the reactor itself was gone. What Luke thought of as the ”soft parts” of the s.h.i.+p 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 fict.i.tious 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 off planet 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 together 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 gla.s.s, 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.

Anger. Violence. A great, swirling turmoil in the Force.

”It isn't that-that ground lightning I saw earlier, is it.”

Braced against the seat, Arvid shook his head. ”Looks like an attack on the station.”

The gun station was a squat, dark complex of permacrete shapes seemingly fused into the black shoulder bones of the hills. By the flare and smolder of laser light, Luke made out the ma.s.sive cylinder of the outer wall, featureless and sculled by time and sand storms: No gate, no postern, no door, no windows. The upperworks of the station, where the cannon's gleaming black snout pointed at the sky, were crowned with a ragged, th.o.r.n.y palisade of projecting b.u.t.tonwood poles, planks, and what looked like the whole twisted trunks of scrub-loaks, pointing like spears in all directions and strung with catwalks, bridges, and crow's nests from which the defenders could fire on those below. Tiny lights were entangled in the overhanging ma.s.ses-lanterns, sodium flares, and here and there an occasional string of jerry-built worklights against whose sulfurous glare Luke saw moving figures darting among the jackstraw shadows. Arvid brought the speeder to a halt on the crest of a ridge above the little box canyon in which the gun station stood, per haps a hundred meters from the walls. From this vantage point Luke watched the little band of attackers run back and forth along the curving bastion, firing up into the superstructure with hard, clear bursts of proton light.

”Yep, that's Gerney Caslo.” Arvid had the macrobinoculars indispensable to any frontier dweller to his eyes, adjusting them as he foLlowed this figure or that. ”Gerney's one of the biggest water sellers between here and Hweg Shul. Without him we'd never have gotten those old pump stations going again. The Oldtimers just let 'em rot, except for the ones in their villages. See that gal there with the white hair? That's [lmolly Darm.

She s.h.i.+ps out Spook crystals, the long green-and-violet kind you find in cl.u.s.ters up in the deep hills.

They make some kind of cross-eyed optical equipment that's supposed to make flowers grow better on worlds with K-cla.s.s suns or something. She works for an outfit in Hweg Shul-three suborbitals and they can pretty much ask their own price on whatever they can slip past the gun stations.”

He lowered the macrobinoculars, clearly in no particular hurry to join the attack, though Luke noticed he kept the Merr-Sonn Four propped where he could lay hands on it at seconds' notice. ”She'll be the one to ask about getting yourself on a s.h.i.+p.” His breath plumed in a diamond cloud.

”Her or Seti Ashgad, in Hweg Shul itself. She can wire through for information to the head office in town, if you'd like.”

Below them a faint cheer went up. A small group of what looked like armed farmers and townspeople scrambled onto a speeder that had been backed up to the wall itself. Even without macrobinoculars, Luke could see the extra buoyancy tanks strapped underneath the speeder's hull.

The attackers must have waited until the evening winds died to use antigrav transport at such a distance from the ground.

There must have been some kind of primitive deflector s.h.i.+eld on it as well, for the rocks and lances hurled down from above missed it with a suspicious persistency. One of the crouching figures did something to a stripped-down control console, and the speeder began to rise straight up along the wall.

Luke wondered if the defenders were sufficiently wise in the ways of deflector s.h.i.+elds to lower a man on a rope below the rising speeder's level. ”You think Mistress Darm might be able to trace an incoming pa.s.senger for me?”

”Don't see why she wouldn't. Just about everybody who comes in, comes through Hweg Shul.”