Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [110]
Are you familiar with the term mutate, boys and girls? Leia’s mouth twisted in cynical despair. Have you ever heard the words human error? Minor equipment failure? How about that little phrase ’Oh, we didn’t think of THAT’?
Death Seed.
Don’t you dare. Don’t you DARE.
But they already had dared. If Ashgad’s memos were correct, the Death Seed was already spreading through the fleet, crippling it as revolt after revolt broke out across the sector and Admiral Larm’s ships moved in. Apparently Dzym could control the timing of its starts if he were in the area or cared about doing so—otherwise it spread on its own.
Would Beldorion hear her, if she tried to call out to Luke again?
Her hand touched the lightsaber at her belt. She should have listened to Luke, she thought. Spent more time in training. Luke wouldn’t have this trouble.
Neither would Vader, of course.
Panting, hands bleeding, knees torn from the bitter mangling of uneroded stone, Leia gained the crest of the ridge between the two peaks and looked down on the gun station below.
It looked tiny, hundreds of meters below. A blunt black cylinder, doorless and without so much as a centimeter of transparisteel, set close beside the heavy shoulder of rock that gave the place its name. The original black stone had been added to with rude defensive works, reminiscent of a woman in a formal senatorial robe wearing a shade-drinks-and-stereo picnic hat. She could get in, thought Leia, through those bristling wood-and-metal upper works, were she willing to sacrifice her blanket by cutting it into strips to lengthen the cable.
She managed, but only just. Throwing the hook from a precarious balance point at the top of the rock spur, with the help of the pouring wind she was able to lodge it among the bristling beams. Releasing the cable to hang free along the wall, she climbed to the ground again, and stumbled to the place where the cable, added to by blanket strips, reached to within a meter of the gravel.
It had been years since Leia had shinnied up a wall. Once, twenty meters up, pummeled by the wind, arms burning and breath short and hard in her lungs, she felt a wave of dizziness rise over her and thought, I’m going to faint.
She wrapped the cable around her arms, pressed her forehead to the black stone, wind crushing her like a torrent of ice, willed the giddiness to pass. Her body trembled with hunger and fatigue. I’ll never make it.
But she did. She pulled the cable up after her when she reached the top, and crept like an exhausted old woman to the cluster of shielded coils, reflectors, and modulators that rose through the pavement among the jury-rigged defensive works: The great laser cannons pointed at the sky.
Night brought the dim white daytime stars to unwinking brilliance among the tangle of beams and razor wire and lessened the pounding brutality of the wind. Leia cut through the locks on the doors that led down to the station below, afterward barricading the doors as well as she could behind her. The gun station, being without transparisteel, might well be haunted with the same groping, mutating vermin that had attacked her in the stairway of Ashgad’s house. If that were the case, she would be forced to sleep on the roof, and would probably freeze.
She saw none of those things, but there were hundreds of fingernail-size drochs in the stairway. Some turned toward her in the muted beam of her downward-pointing glowrod, and began to crawl purposefully in her direction