Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [111]
The equipment in the station was old, but serviceable. Most of the gun coils themselves were sealed, but the controls were open, a simple switching mechanism transferring targeting from the sealed computers to manual. They have to have teaching of some kind. She flicked the test switches experimentally, studied the readouts. The targeting equipment was elementary, but nobody who hadn’t been trained could have used it. Something the Listeners pass along with the doctrines they hear from the voices in the wastelands?
Why would they want to destroy ships coming in and ships going out? Just because they want to keep the world primitive?
Or was there something else?
Sharp pain stabbed the calf of her leg. Looking down, she saw three or four huge drochs burrowing through the strips of space tape wrapped around her legs. Exhaustion and a slight breathlessness dragged at her, as it had after the attack by the creatures in the stairwell. They must be related to drochs, she thought, backing away from the targeting consoles and shining the glowrod all around her. The floor was dotted with the round, flat shapes of the insects. Keep moving, she thought. Don’t let your feet stay too long in any one place.
The gun chamber was enormous, round, obviously occupying all of one level of the squat tower. Nothing in it even suggested communication equipment to her. Lamp fixtures hung dead from the smoke-black vaults.
A steel ladder in the center of the floor communicated with the lower level, and there was equipment there, too, sealed behind soot-stained and filthy black metal. Wornout blankets, heaps of arrows and spears, boxes of metal bullets, explosive ceramic pellets, and paper-wrapped gravel shot strewed the floor. Leia leaned against the ladder, fighting a wave of dizziness, her body trembling and suddenly cold. Drochs, she thought. Sunlight will make me feel better. But she realized it could just as easily have been exhaustion, hunger, and the fatigue of unaccustomed hardship.
Far above her, she heard the sudden slither and crash of falling beams and furniture.
The barricade! Her heart froze. Boots clumped with muffled tread on the floor above, and the hard white beam of a sodium light veered and flickered down the opening in the floor. Voices murmured. A quick glance around showed her there was no further ladder down—the rest of the tower must be taken up with the power supply of the guns themselves. Though she knew the dark spaces between the equipment were crawling with drochs, Leia wedged herself between two anonymous black boxes, bruised hand gripping the lightsaber. The light from above grew stronger, moving with the movement of being carried, turned, scanned along the floor. Someone said, “Look,” and was shushed.
The dead drochs, thought Leia. And then, I must have left tracks in the dust of the floor as well
Her whole body ached with the thought of having to fight. Luke, she thought, if I get out of this alive I’m going to start training with you, at least to get into condition.
Her cold hands slid over the switch on the lightsaber.
Light poured from above, and a shadow came down two steps of the ladder, then dropped lightly to the floor and stepped at once into shadows, a trained warrior seeking cover. Other shadows clustered above, blocking most of the light, but a stray beam of it caught a sand-scoured red coat, a whirlwind of smoke-colored veils, the metal plates and buckles of heavy boots. There was movement, and with a faint hum the sun-yellow blade of a lightsaber stabbed into existence.
A woman’s voice said, “Come out.”
Leia lowered her weapon, suddenly dizzy. “Callista?” she said.
The blade lowered, and the red figure before her put up a black-gloved hand to push away the veils that wrapped her face. “Leia?”
16
“We are the weapons of the Force.” Callista’s strong fingers pulled the roll of silver space