Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [10]
Leia grinned, but the smile was a wan one and disappeared almost at once as she shook her head. “There’s just—I don’t know. Maybe it’s because he looks so much like the holos I’ve seen of his father. I sympathize with his cause—him and the Newcomers on that planet. But it’s out of our jurisdiction.” She looked over at the brig and did a double take. “He came in that?”
“He’s not kidding about those gun stations.” Luke gestured to the long char on the brig’s side. “A B-wing should be just small enough to get past the screens.”
There was a moment’s silence, awkward, neither knowing quite what to say. To break it, Luke fished in his pocket for Callista’s message. “You need this for anything? Analysis?”
“Keep it.” She put her hands on his shoulders, drew him down to kiss his cheek. “We’ve got all we can out of it. It may tell you something about where to find her, once you get down there.”
There was silence. Then, “She’s got to come back,” said Luke softly. “She’ll stand a better chance of regaining the ability to use the Force at the Jedi academy than she will on her own. We have all the records that are still in existence, all the training aids you found on Belsavis. The Jedi power has to be still within her somewhere. Cray had it. It isn’t as if Callista’s mind went into the body of a non-Jedi. And the Academy needs her.”
Leia was silent.
“I need her.”
“You’ll find her.” Still she held his hands, willing him to feel a reassurance she did not share. She had never seen her brother happier than during the time he’d spent with that quirky, silent, gentle lady: A Jedi Knight reincarnated without her powers. A woman who had been a ghost and lived again.
But she’d been with Callista on Belsavis, when she’d realized that her ability to use and touch the Force had not carried over into the body that Dr. Cray Mingla had bequeathed to her. She’d watched the woman’s grief, frustration, and slow-growing despair; had talked to her about things that could not be said by either one to Luke.
Luke would find her, Leia thought sadly. Somehow she knew that much. But to what end?
“You’d better go,” she said. “Luke—When you’re down there, look around, will you? According to Ashgad, the Theran cultists who control the gun stations use coercion and superstition to rule the Oldtimer population.”
As Leia spoke, she followed Luke to the corner, where he’d stacked the supplies he’d take with him: a water bottle, a small medkit, food tablets. They’d chosen a B-wing over the smaller X-wing fighter partly because of the nearness of the pirate-nests on Pedducis Chorios, but partly because of Callista’s warning. The three systems had been scanned repeatedly, and reported clear. But Leia still felt uneasy. A B-wing could take on a much larger ship in a fight, but it was perilously close to the estimated automatic target mass of the gun stations.
“Now, if it’s just superstition, there’s nothing we can do about that,” she went on. “It’s their free choice, and they voted overwhelmingly to keep the original trade restrictions in force. But if there’s coercion involved, that may change the Rationalists’ case. We may be able to negotiate. Moff Getelles still rules the Antemeridian sector ‘in the name of the Emperor,’ and it isn’t that far away.”
That had been yet another reason for choosing a B-wing.
“If fighting breaks out between the Newcomers and the Therans, he may try to interfere. We’ve got a pretty strong force at the Durren orbital base, but I’d rather not have to use it.”
Luke nodded. She stood below, looking up as Luke climbed the long, fragile ladder up the side of the airfoil and began working the bottles and packets into every spare cranny of the cockpit. In the days of the Rebellion, and during the long mopping up of sporadic warfare with the various