Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [102]
The storeroom containing the antigrav units was exactly where the schematic said it was.
But only one unit was active. The rest—nearly a dozen—lay in boxes of styrene and goatgrass along the wall, dead, useless as so many rocks would have been.
Leia felt as if she’d had a bucket of cold water hurled in her face.
Her hands shook uncontrollably as she pulled the single unit whose lights were green from its shelf. It was a 100-GU unit—a speeder usually took four—and about half charged. She clicked it to neutral buoyancy and pulled it after her like a balloon on a string to the lab outside, where a synthdroid lay on the floor, eyes staring, near the half-assembled parts of a new buoyancy charger. The old one, on a table nearby, was an outmoded model held together by Y-bands and silver space tape. A scattering of antiquated, blown-out, and depleted tanks lay around it.
Next time they vote to have trade come in, I’m all for it, thought Leia grimly, as she dug through drawers. There was a belt reel of cable and a hook there, standard in mountainous terrain; also a small glowrod, and two rolls of silver space tape, which she threaded onto the makeshift bedroll strap. This business of never having the right equipment is ridiculous! She pocketed a couple of emergency mini-heaters, crossed the room at a run to the big double doors that the schematic had told her would lead to the docking bay.
As the schematic promised, the great permacrete pad that formed the southeastern quarter of Ashgad’s compound overlooked open space on two sides. The Reliant sat on five short legs close by the workroom door through which she emerged. In smaller hangars to the side she made out the needlelike nosecone of an elderly Headhunter, and the blunt silhouette of a gutted Skipray Blastboat.
Synthdroids, fallen with equipment or tanks of Puffo-Shield in hand, lay about the Reliant in starlight like wet black heaps of laundry. There was no light, for the Central Control Unit knew where every step and cable and piece of machinery lay, no matter which droid set it down, but it seemed to Leia that the great gulfs of air beyond the permacrete apron were filled with the softest echo of brightness, the glow of the merciless stars amplified by the wasteland of faceted ridge and scree.
Leia looked down from the edge of the apron and her heart froze. I can’t.
It was easily three hundred meters to the base of that first, sheer drop. From there the slope tapered steeply, a shamble of diamonds, bled of color in the etiolated light. An antigrav unit’s lifting capability was directly proportional to the distance from the surface of the ground. The first drop might be so fast that when the lift finally kicked in, it might not do so soon enough or hard enough.
The cable wasn’t even a quarter long enough, and with no way of detaching the hook, she might as well set off flares to announce in which direction she’d gone.
Behind her, in the dark bulk of the house, she saw a light go up, then another.
The image returned to her mind, of Ashgad bending his head down to the mouths and tentacles and groping, wormy nodules of Dzym’s chitinous chest; of Dzym’s ungloved, unseen hands on her face, her wrists. Of the cold sickness that pulled her down toward death.
Here in this high place, unshielded by any walls, she had the curious sensation of the Force being all around her, as if she stood not on a boat in the sea, but on the living ocean bed itself. Strong, strange, it called to her, she thought. Spoke in words she could not understand.
She checked the antigrav unit in her hands.
It wasn’t enough.
It is. The thought was warm wind breathing in her mind. It is.
You’ve got to be kidding!
Leia looked over the edge again. Darkness and starlight and scintillant wastes dropped away like a vast subconscious thought.