Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [141]
“You’ve got to stop this!” he yelled. Everyone was so startled for a moment by the appearance of the Mobquet among them that they did halt.
“You’re being duped!” shouted Luke, turning to the men and women who crouched behind makeshift barricades, guns in hand, to those who had for the moment fallen back from fighting on the laser gun itself. “You’re being used! Seti Ashgad has only one reason for wanting to open this planet—so that he can sell the whole place to Loronar Corporation to strip-mine! He doesn’t care about your farms! He doesn’t care about medical supplies, or water pumps, or machinery for you!”
He looked around him, at the dusty, cut, bloody faces, the battered forms stepping cautiously forth from their places of cover, at the angry eyes, not wanting to believe. Arvid was among them, and Aunt Gin, and the brother-in-law of the owner of the Blue Blerd.
His arms dropped to his sides. “He isn’t doing this for you.”
Someone said, “Shoot the whiner,” and Luke reached forth with the Force and pulled the man’s blaster away before he could get the shot off. The white bolt of energy scattered chips from the wall of the stairway housing behind him.
“A lot you know about it!” yelled someone else.
“I know,” said Luke quietly. “I’ve been into Ashgad’s house. He isn’t doing this for any of you.”
“He’s right.”
Behind Luke, the door opened, very quickly, and closed again—Luke could hear the locks slamming open even as Gerney Caslo and the two men with him made a jump to catch it as it opened.
Leia had stepped through.
Leia grimy, in tatters, her hair hanging down in strings in her eyes and her palms and knuckles bandaged. Leia with strips of space tape and leather binding what remained of her ornamental golden boots, empty-handed but with a blaster on one hip and her lightsaber on the other.
But definitely Leia Organa Solo, known on a thousand news holos to many and certainly, from Seti Ashgad’s faked video, to every man and woman there. There was goggling silence.
“He’s telling the truth,” she said. She reached into one of the thigh pockets of a pair of far-too-big trousers she wore and produced a wad of computer printouts. “Here’s a copy of Ashgad’s correspondent—with the CEO of Loronar, with Moff Getelles of Antemeridian, with pawns and cat’s paws in the Republic Council. Is anyone here a neep?”
Booldrum Caslo stepped forward. “I am, ma’am.”
“Then you’ll recognize the system codes as coming from Ashgad’s computer.”
The chubby man changed the lens ratio of his visiamps and flipped quickly through the hardcopy, then glanced back at Gerney, apologetic. “She’s right. This is Ashgad’s. I installed the components myself.”
Caslo blustered angrily, “Which doesn’t mean you didn’t compose this yourself, girl.” But others were pulling the papers from his cousin’s hands, reading the memoranda, the deals, the concessions.
“An installation in Thornwind Valley? Six-month forcible recruitment? A man can’t live a week up there!”
“Mandatory labor pool?”
“Transfer of matériel—isn’t the real word for that theft?”
“Price freeze standardization on Spooks?”
“At sixty-seven creds?!?”
“Occupation fleet … who said anything about an occupation fleet?”
“The occupation fleet is in orbit now,” said Luke. He pointed upward. Several of the Rationalists had electrobinoculars and focused them skyward, where far overhead pinlights of brightness flared in the star-prickled twilight sky.
Under the spate of exclamations and curses, Leia threw her arms around Luke in a fierce hug. “What about Dzym? Ashgad’s …”
“I know about Dzym,” said Luke.
“If there’s really a battle going on up there—if the Council really did manage