Part 30 (1/2)

Like a huge serpent he struck, and she raised her blade to defend, her mind open with the Force, feeling before he did so that he was going to switch to lateral again.

He did, and she was in under the blow and slas.h.i.+ng a long, streaming, sidelong cut that went through the soft green body like burning wire. She flung herself past him, away from him, fast, for the huge bulk of him burst open, severed clean through, mammoth gouts of fluid and flesh and organs exploding soddenly forth.

She heard him bellow with rage, once-saw the hot smoke-colored blade of his lightsaber go whirling, end over end.

Then he was collapsing like a punctured balloon, like an empty sack, and Leia stood panting, covered in slime, her own blade burning in her hand, as Luke flung himself out from under the Headhunter and into its c.o.c.kpit.

Dripping with filth, she saluted him with the blade, and Luke saluted back, their eyes meeting for an instant before he slammed the c.o.c.kpit shut. Luke knew what it was that he saw.

Her first victory. The victory over the shadow of Vader. The victory of acceptance of herself.

And, he knew who had taught her that long characteristic side cut.

He hit the lifters, and the Headhunter slammed into life and rocketed like a falcon into the sky.

It rose faster than the Reliant, faster than most interceptors, for it had been designed to outmaneuver the gun stations, and had done so before. Course controls were adapted to the positions of each gun station, Liegeus's calculations, beautifully precise. He punched in the program, to hold the segment of sky guarded only by Bleak Point, knowing that had to be the way the Reliant was going as well. The flashes of light returned to his mind. Fighting, he thought. Fighting high above the surface of the planet, orbital battle. Someone must have come in to stop them.

Would they know to open fire on a s.h.i.+p rising from the planet's surface?.

Blue sky darkened around him. The pale stars brightened to burning jewels.

He saw the gray s.h.i.+p, rising far ahead, making for the flurry of explosions and lights. There was a Republic corsair, hanging in s.p.a.ce, far away to his left, being torn to pieces by tiny, darting CCIR Needles of black and bronze. The things the Empire wanted. The things Loronar was going to give them.

Beyond, at the farthest range of his vision, he saw the fleet.

Imperials. Two, three Republic vessels-Was that the Falcon?.

Dodging, twisting, like durkii maddened by parasitic kleex, trying to fire at the Imperial s.h.i.+ps that were surrounding them. A thousand tiny flashes of fire as the Needles tore and swirled around them. He was out of signal range still, but coming into firing range on the square, awkward gray s.h.i.+p that contained Dzym and Ashgad, the monstrous life drinker and his pitiful p.a.w.n and the dark boxes of death that would consume the lives of all the galaxy, and relay that life back to him.

Only for that. Destruction, death, ruin stretching over planet after planet, only so that Dzym could drink of the lives of everything he touched, without fear.

Luke's thumb hit the firing b.u.t.ton. White light lanced forth.

The next second a terrible concussion ripped his s.h.i.+p, tossed it spinning. He glimpsed the Reliant still going its way untouched, glimpsed something small and fast and black pa.s.s over him.... Another shot, and his whole console went red. He scratched and twisted at the joystick, trying to drag the Headhunter to stability, but he was spinning out of control, falling into Nam Chorios's gravitational pull.

As the Z-95 rolled, he pulled her straight and got off a wing laser shot at the Reliant, saw yellow fire explode from her aft engines.

But she didn't go up. Only drifted, swinging off course, and his long-range pickups brought in the faint crackle of Seti Ashgad's voice, calling for an intercept.

As the Headhunter began its long fall, Luke saw a small carrack detach from the Imperial fleet, begin to make its way toward the drifting craft.

And before the Imperials knew what they had loosed, the Death Seed would grow across the stars.

Then he was falling.

Cabin gray was out. Against the sickening sensation of freefall, Luke worked to reroute switches, to shuttle power from the now-unneeded s.h.i.+elds, trying to summon enough pickup to at least take him in alive.

The heat in the c.o.c.kpit was unbearable, suffocating, the ground a vast lake of molten reflection, rus.h.i.+ng to smash him to powder. Hot spiky mountains, black shadow. The crystalline needles of the tsils. He felt the jolt and pull as one of the engines caught, dragged on the joystick, trying to even out into a long, sweeping curve. The retros fired, cutting his speed. He seemed to be descending in a column of fire, falling he knew' not where. A laser bolt hissed near him and he thought, Oh, thanks .. Presumably he had pa.s.sed into the range of some other gun station.

Or they'd got Bleak Point fixed.

Flatten the curve. Hold the retros. Cut in the antigravs.

Callista... he thought, wanting more than he had ever wanted anything that he had been able to speak to her again. Callista...

He was above a plain. An enormous sea bed, blinding with the fire of diamonds to the horizon. Snaking lines of tsils, marching away into the distance. The Ten Cousins. Other circles, other lines, pointing toward the great glittering outcrops of Spooks in the hills.

There was a pattern to them, visible only when coming in from above like this. A pattern that tugged at his consciousness, reminded him of half-forgotten dreams.

He pulled back on the joystick as hard as he could, threw his mind open to the Force because the ground was flas.h.i.+ng by so fast he couldn't see anything of the terrain below-and brought her in.

Afterward he didn't remember getting out of the Headhunter before it exploded. He knew he'd probably used the Force to damp the physical reactions involved until he'd crawled to more-or-less safety. He had no idea where he was or how close might be his chances of rescue, and somehow that didn't matter.

If the Imperial Fleet picked up Dzym-Dzym with his enslaved front man Seti Ashgad, with his little dark boxes of crawling life, with his promises of controllable, invisible plague and limitless access to the crystals they needed for those tiny death dealers-there was going to be nothing left of the Republic, of the fragments of the Empire, of any s.p.a.ce-going civilization whatever.

Only Dzym, fat and sated and looking around for more.

Luke lay on the spines of the crystal, eyes shut, the smoke of the burning Headhunter in his nostrils, knowing he should get up and knowing that he could not.

Feeling them standing around him again.

Silent, unseen.

If-you're going to attack me, attack me, he thought, his mind slipping into a darkness and dreams of stormtroopers and Jawas again. If you're going to have me, go ahead.

And then, on the borderlands of consciousness, he remembered the pattern of the tsils, coming in from high above: remembered his dreams when they'd loomed in the background. remembered the voices that spoke to him in those dreams, like the Listeners said the rocks spoke to them.

You're alive, he said, enormously surprised-more surprised than he'd been about anything in his life.

a.s.sent flowed out over him, colors in his mind, as blue as the crystalline core of the tsils, the green of the Spook cl.u.s.ters high on the rocks. Alive alive alive alive... like an echo.

And his dream of the Jawas came back.

They'd only used, after all, the images they could find in his mind: the indigenous inhabitant, brain gutted and forced to work for the stormtroopers.

You've been alive all this time.

All this time, they agreed, a gentle vibration like music, rising from the crystals beneath him, from the tsils, from the mountains; rising up into his bones. From all time For all time. Thinking and dreaming] and speaking and singing. The sea formed us, and the sea went away.

The planet fed us, from the fires of her heart. Little people here and there but not important. Not until they took us. Took our .. and the word was impossible to translate in his mind, ”brother/self” he thought-a part of their minds.

The deep tide of their anger flowed over him, anger for their kidnapped kin.

Taken and enslaved, zapped with the horrible electronic realignment, as the Jawas had been zapped in his dream, so that they became slaves.

Through the minds of the tsils Luke saw those enslaved ones, imprisoned both in the Needles and in the synthdroids; slaves but still kindred, still tsils in their hearts. He sensed the incomprehension of those slow timeless beings about what it was that they saw, but he himself understood.

The cabin of the Reliant. Two synthdroids lying dazed, eyes staring, on the floor, their flesh a rotting ma.s.s but their minds receiving impres sions, still and calm, without pain. Seti Ashgad sat at the controls, his face a welted, bleeding ma.s.s, gasping, fighting for breath. His hair, his clothing, his body crawled with drochs, freed of their fear of the crystal-imbued light of Nam Chorios; while Luke, through the eyes of the synthdroids, watched, he saw a thumb-size brown insect crawl into Ashgad's mouth.

And Dzym stood behind him. Dzym with his robe open to the waist, every pulsing orifice and squirming pendule moving, while Dzym himself stared at the Imperial carrack's approach in the main screen with hungry delight in his eyes.