Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [103]
What am I thinking about? she reflected cynically, as she ripped a double strip of space tape and fashioned a makeshift handle. I’m the one who’s going to smash to a million pieces.
The night around her, the subtly flashing darkness, whispered, You won’t. We’re here. Trust.
More lights sprang up like startled glowbugs on a summer evening, and she heard Ashgad’s oratorial baritone call, “Liegeus! Here, at once!”
They’d found the synthdroids.
Leia slipped her arm through the handle, clicked over the antigrav unit to its highest output, and stepped off the edge of the platform.
Leia was calling him.
Luke jolted out of sleep, shocked breathless in the chilly dawn.
Encircled by the towering crystal shapes of mountains like molten glass, the image of her was etched on his mind, alone in a world of glass and sky. She was on a stone terrace, wrapped in a white blanket, cinnamon hair lying in a long disheveled braid down her shoulder. There was something about the image that told him that this had happened some time ago, that it had been caught up in the distortions of the Force, but he knew it was real. She looked thin and fragile and badly scared.
Ashgad.
He hadn’t just destroyed her ship, looted it for its weapons. He’d taken her off. Ransom? Negotiation?
An illusion, the result of last night’s discovery on the smuggler drop?
No. As surely as he knew the bones of his body, he knew she was there or had been there. Alive.
The foot of the Mountains of Lightning, Taselda had said. Arvid or Aunt Gin would know the spot. For a moment he considered taking Taselda, only to reject the thought in the next heartbeat.
He rose from his bed, walked to the rear transparisteel, looked down on the peacefully prosaic yard of dust and belcrabbian, water pumps and broken speeder parts, the dark-leaved antigrav balls beyond the walls floating still as cutouts in the clear, early light. It was difficult to remember that this was all manufactured, laboriously carved from a world that admitted no life.
From here, the great, lawless presence of the Force could only be felt a little, dim and far away.
Luke reached out with his mind. Leia. Don’t despair. I’m on my way.
He didn’t know if his thought even reached her, tangled in the distorting effects of the Force on this world. Didn’t know if she could hear, even when it did.
But Callista had told him once that hope, too, can sometimes affect the Force.
“What’s that?”
Muffled in the folds of the black hooded robe and cumbersome breath mask and wig, See-Threepio considered Captain Ugmush’s question to be purely rhetorical. Even one unused to the noises of war, riot, and rebellion should have been able to accurately identify the sound of heavy artillery shelling, the crash of crumbling walls, and the harsh clashing of human voices and blasters.
The Gamorrean captain’s three husbands, however, seemed to take their lady’s exclamation as a straightforward request for information, and went barreling to the round portal that led onto the boarding ramp to see. All three reached the entryway at the same moment and immediately undertook a slugging match for precedence. Captain Ugmush, who had taken on another commission to transport cargo offplanet and was waiting impatiently for delivery, heaved herself from the bridge workstation, where she’d been checking through projections of launch Windows and hyperspace jump points, and proceeded to break up the fight with slaps, squeals, and head bashing, following which the entire family group piled out the door and down the ramp. Engineer Jos, chained to his console, didn’t even raise his eyes.
A further explosion that made the ship rock on its landing gear brought Threepio nervously to his feet. “Captain Ugmush …” He realized his vocal modulators had gone into default register and quickly reset