Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [148]
A couple of Spook crystals lay on the permacrete, a trail from the cleared space where the boxes had been. There were drochs, too, tiny ones, dying in the glare of the pallid sunlight, where they had fallen out of whatever shielded container Dzym had carried them in.
And, on the other side of the open bay, stood the Headhunter, its engine hatch open, a gutted tangle of wires hanging down.
Luke swore, and raced across to it. Leia was already running toward the Blastboat, which was likewise gutted but otherwise unharmed. “Can you fix it?” she yelled, scrambling up to the canopy. “They didn’t have time to cripple the guns.”
“I think so. The readouts on the central core look okay. They were in too much of a hurry.… Get me the toolkit from the bench.”
Leia sprang down, dashed to the repair bench, swung the red metal energy cart around, and dragged it over as Luke stripped off the remains of his shirt and began making a fast diagnostic. “Get the guns,” he yelled, from halfway within the hatch. “They just pull out once you undo the locks, but you’ll have to reattach the cores …”
She snatched up an extractor and core couplers and raced across the permacrete to the Blastboat as if they were the children of the Rebellion again, with the Imperials coming in and code scramble blazing from every makeshift klaxon on the base.
Listening. Listening. Knowing what was coming, power and anger and the decayed dark sludge of what had once been genuine, trained ability to use the Force.
She had one gun pulled and dragged over to the Headhunter and was starting on a second when she knew she could afford to wait no longer. Luke was buried in the hatches of the Z-95—the Reliant ascending like an ash-colored plague angel to the rendezvous with the Loronar fleet …
And she heard his breath. Stertorous, rasping, like the beat of gluey tides. The wave of ammoniac reek rolled across the permacrete, and the nigrous shock wave of decayed Force. Leia dropped from the Blastboat and ran lightly toward the door, stripping off and dropping her jacket, unhooking and throwing aside her blaster, knowing what the Force could do to blasters.
Beldorion the Splendid moved fast. He crossed the outer court in a series of great bounds and slithers, huge muscle rolling beneath his squamous hide. Fluid leaked from his mouth and his eyes were twin balefires, glittering with a single, evil obsession that he did not even recognize as being not his own.
In the curtains of sun-glittering dust that filled the open gateway of the launch bay a woman stood, slender and tiny in the moving aura of misty light.
Taselda? His old rival, his old enemy, flashed to mind …
No.
The little Jedi woman, the woman Ashgad had brought, the woman Dzym had wanted, a small shining figure in the shadows, with the pale glory of a lightsaber shining like tamed starfire in her hand.
“Don’t test me, little Princess.” His own blade stretched forth with a deadly thrumming, a pallid and sickly violet. “It has been years. I may be a lazy old slug now, but I am Beldorion still.”
Heart beating fast, Leia studied him, remembering how Jabba had moved, sidelong and looping, using the center of the body as a balance point. She recalled the one time Jabba had become displeased with someone at his court—the fat housekeeper who danced or was it his long-suffering cook?—and had gone after her or him with a stick. Recalled the deadly speed of even that obese and sluggish bulk.
Yet she felt no fear.
She didn’t reply and could feel that it displeased him. He was the kind, she realized, who liked to expound before he killed.
Good.
“You were a sweet little girl. Don’t make me—”
Leia struck. Step, step, thrust, as Callista had shown her,