Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 07_ Conviction - Aaron Allston [20]
The port authority representative, a youthful redheaded human wearing a gold jumpsuit with piping in burgundy, offered advice—rote advice that he’d obviously memorized years earlier. “Nam Chorios is at its farthest point from its sun, and that, plus axial tilt, means it’s winter. Harsh winter. If you’re away from shelter at night, you freeze and die. If you don’t have heavy clothes, you can pick them up in Hweg Shul, the shuttle’s destination.” He set three small spray canisters on the desktop between himself and Vestara. “Droch repellent. Courtesy of the port authority, which means it’s paid for by your decontam prepay. You can buy more planetside.” He set three small glow rods with oversized battery packs beside them. “Very bright—don’t look right into them or you’ll damage your retinas, but they send drochs scurrying away. Or paralyze ’em so you can step on ’em. These you return when you lift, or incur an additional charge to your decontam account. Good luck finding your cousins.” He sounded as though he had not the least interest in learning how the quest for fictitious cousins came out, but his tone was polite enough.
A few minutes later, loaded with their new anti-droch gear and duffels from Jade Shadow packed with winter garments, the three boarded an aged but meticulously maintained Lambda-class shuttle. A few minutes later, the passenger compartment also occupied by a Duros female in medical whites and a middle-aged human male in the shiny business wear affected by Meridian sector middle managers, they launched from Koval Station and began atmospheric entry.
Staring out the port-side viewport beside his seat, Luke reflected on the changes brought by the thirty years since his first visit to this world.
As they descended into the atmosphere, the colors, the textures of the world below were just as he remembered. There were vast plains of slate-gray stone and dust. There were patches of terrain that glittered, reflecting and refracting the sunlight in all the colors of the rainbow and more besides—plains of crystalline gravel, ravines filled with towering columns of crystal, some of them the sapient tsils, or spook-crystals, native to this world. There were dark ridges of basaltic mountain, many of them decorated with crystalline patches. And here and there, more numerous than on his first visit, there were small patches of green—communities clinging precariously to the small areas of arable land above subterranean water seams.
Not that farming sustained the planet’s economy these days. Most of the remaining farmers were Oldtimers, descendants of the first wave of colonists, tough, hardy men and women content with the hard-scrabble existence of agricultural production on an unforgiving world.
But for the Newcomers, the second wave of settlers, the aftermath of the events that had brought Luke Skywalker here three standard decades before had changed everything. Release of the Death Seed, discovery of the intelligent tsils, had forced the hand of the New Republic, which previously had had no interest in the self-governing world. Suddenly there were space platforms taking away from the Oldtimers and their ground-based weapons stations the responsibility of making sure no drochs ever made it offworld … and that no tsils were removed from the planet against their will. Suddenly medical facilities, both government and private, were establishing a new economy based on medical research and the production of medicines unique to this world because of the violet sunlight, the manipulation of that light by the tsils, and the healing techniques of the Theran Listeners, the Oldtimers who communed with the tsils through the Force.
Everybody had gotten what they wanted. The Oldtimers, though their secrets were revealed, had help in keeping the menace of the drochs in check. The Newcomers had a booming economy. The tsils no longer had to fear being ripped from their world by technology-producing corporations that did not understand, and in many cases would