Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [146]
“My friends,” said Daala, “it seems that there is one battle yet to fight.”
21
“He’s behind us.” Leia reared up to her knees, wind and dust tearing at her long hair, and adjusted Aunt Gin’s electrobinoculars. Whipping and veering through the fathomless, glittering gashes of the canyons, scaling hogbacks of diamond scree or dropping down precipices ten and twelve meters deep to catch again on the Mobquet’s antigravs, it was impossible to see behind them for more than thirty meters at the most, sometimes only half that. But Leia knew.
“Beldorion?”
She dropped back down into the sheltered cockpit, began checking loads on the flamethrowers and blaster rifles that Arvid and Umolly Darm had thrust in after them on their departure. She smiled a little grimly at the truly excellent quality of the weapons, all sleek, all new, all black and silver, and all bearing the discreet double-moon logo:
LORONAR WEAPONS DIVISION
“All the finest—All the first.”
As a rule Leia discreetly avoided riding in any vehicle that Luke was driving; but for one of the first times in her life, she was grateful that her brother had developed the skill that had made him one of the best pilots of the Rebellion. And indeed, the Chariot was equipped with internal grav control as well, so she was able to prime and check everything without having her bones jounced out of her body every time the antigravs kicked in as they went over small cliffs—or big cliffs: She was being very careful not to look. She might have been sitting on her own bed at home.
“How’d they import this thing, anyway?” she asked, looking around her at the comfortable black leather of the seats, the small, enclosed bar and the bank of electronic toys and communications equipment. “It’s nearly as big as a B-wing itself.”
“According to Arvid, Loronar must have made seven or eight drops before they got past the gun stations.” Luke flung the Chariot over a chasm that was considerably deeper than he’d supposed, whipped in a long, banking curve over the near-vertical face of a crystalline canyon to take some of the stress, and headed up a ridge like a mating sun dragon taking to the sky. “At least Aunt Gin found pieces of wrecked ones two or three different times. She’s made a fortune charging Ashgad for repairs. She’s bought parts from the Therans, too, so they’ve found some as well. All in the past year, she says.”
“While Q-Varx was putting together the meeting with the ‘head of the Rationalists’ on this world.” Leia shook her head. “I won’t say I’d have trusted Q-Varx with my life, but he seemed sincere. Never in a million years would I have thought he’d be part of something like this.”
“Maybe he was sincere,” said Luke softly. “Maybe he sincerely thought that embroiling the whole sector in warfare and risking the spread of some plague he’d been told they could control were worth the rights of those who seek progress over stagnation. And he can’t have known it was the Death Seed they’d be spreading.”
“He didn’t,” said Leia. “But my point is that he should have. A man in that position can’t afford to be that stupid.”
And all the while Luke was flicking the controls, stretching out his mind and the Force to feel the ground beyond the next ridge, to slip past obstacles before they came into view, he was thinking, There’s something else. There’s something I’m missing.
There was life on the planet. Invisible, intangible, but intelligent, and lambent with the Force.
Don’t let them. Don’t let them.
Don’t let who?
Why did he remember his vision last night, of stormtroopers and Jawas? Why did he feel that whoever it was, who had stood near the broken-down speeder in the canyon, watching him at his repairs, awaited him just beyond the next rise, around the next elbow of the rocky way?
But there was never