Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [118]
Eerie in the uncertain starlight, it crashed against the metal wall, over and over, bending the metal of its own barrel in its violence, untouched by any hands. Leia pressed back against the parapet, wondering if she were the only one to hear a sound like dim shouting, the clamor of voices within her own mind, crying something she did not understand.
Then the voices dimmed. The grenade launcher fell to the pavement again, its barrel bent nearly ninety degrees. In the silence the yammer of the cu-pas on the ridge behind the gun station sounded suddenly clear.
“The Force,” whispered Callista. “Someone is using the Force.”
Leia shuddered. All desire that Callista’s words had roused in her to learn to use the Force for good trickled away like ice melting in the summer sun. Not if that’s what it is. Not if that’s what I could become, mindless power hammering in rage.
“Beldorion?”
“Maybe,” said Callista. “He still has that power within him, though he can’t use it, or control it, as once he could. That’s why he wanted you under his control.”
Leia shook her head. “I don’t understand.” The very air seemed to whisper with a lambent horror, violence waiting just beyond the finger touch. “The … the Force here. Could it have done something to him?”
“Not the Force,” said Callista. “Dzym. And the drochs. They’re lifedrinkers, Leia. They are the Death Seed plague. The Grissmaths knew. They seeded the planet with drochs, hoping those political foes they exiled here would die. But the light of the sun fragmenting through the crystals here generates a radiation that weakens the electrochemical bonds of their tissues. It prevents the larger drochs from damping the electrochemistry of organic life until they’re absorbed harmlessly by their hosts. The smaller ones it kills outright.
“I don’t know how the prophet Theras knew this,” she went on. “So little is known of him. Certainly he never knew that it was the drochs who caused the plague, only that no ship large enough to carry heavy shielding should be permitted to leave the planet. He may have been a spy, or a politician opposed to the Grissmaths. But at least he understood that the planet must be kept in quarantine. Over the years that must have extended to forbidding larger ships to land. Somehow he must have known there was a connection.”
“And Ashgad took them out in the flesh of the synthdroids,” said Leia softly. “How could he do that? How could he get them past the quarantine screens? How can Dzym control them the way he does?”
“I can’t prove this,” said Callista softly. “But I think the drochs are sentient, after a fashion. Even the littlest ones. They mimic shapes, chemistry, electromagnetic currents, anything, down to the cellular level. That’s why they can’t be detected. I think in some ways they mimic intelligence as well. They become of the same substance as their hosts, even as they’re drawing the life out of them and into themselves. And the big ones, the captain drochs, can draw life out of the victims through the smaller ones, without themselves attaching to their hosts. That’s when they get dangerous,” she went on, shaking her head. “The more life they drink—their victims’ or each other’s—the more intelligent they become. Bigger, and more capable of mutability. Those things you described in the stairwell of Ashgad’s house weren’t related to drochs, they were drochs. Drochs grown big from eating one another, from absorbing one another’s energy. People used to eat them, to absorb life and energy into themselves.”
“Does it work?” The memory of Beldorion digging