Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [150]
Only for that. Destruction, death, ruin stretching over planet after planet, only so that Dzym could drink of the lives of everything he touched, without fear.
Luke’s thumb hit the firing button. White light lanced forth.
The next second a terrible concussion ripped his ship, tossed it spinning. He glimpsed the Reliant still going its way untouched, glimpsed something small and fast and black pass over him.… Another shot, and his whole console went red. He scratched and twisted at the joystick, trying to drag the Headhunter to stability, but he was spinning out of control, falling into Nam Chorios’s gravitational pull. As the Z-95 rolled, he pulled her straight and got off a wing laser shot at the Reliant, saw yellow fire explode from her aft engines.
But she didn’t go up. Only drifted, swinging off course, and his long-range pickups brought in the faint crackle of Seti Ashgad’s voice, calling for an intercept.
As the Headhunter began its long fall, Luke saw a small carrack detach from the Imperial fleet, begin to make its way toward the drifting craft.
And before the Imperials knew what they had loosed, the Death Seed would grow across the stars.
Then he was falling.
Cabin grav was out. Against the sickening sensation of freefall, Luke worked to reroute switches, to shuttle power from the now-unneeded shields, trying to summon enough pickup to at least take him in alive. The heat in the cockpit was unbearable, suffocating, the ground a vast lake of molten reflection, rushing to smash him to powder. Hot spiky mountains, black shadow. The crystalline needles of the tsils. He felt the jolt and pull as one of the engines caught, dragged on the joystick, trying to even out into a long, sweeping curve. The retros fired, cutting his speed. He seemed to be descending in a column of fire, falling he knew not where. A laser bolt hissed near him and he thought, Oh, thanks … Presumably he had passed into the range of some other gun station.
Or they’d got Bleak Point fixed.
Flatten the curve. Hold the retros. Cut in the antigravs.
Callista … he thought, wanting more than he had ever wanted anything that he had been able to speak to her again. Callista.
He was above a plain. An enormous sea bed, blinding with the fire of diamonds to the horizon. Snaking lines of tsils, marching away into the distance. The Ten Cousins. Other circles, other lines, pointing toward the great glittering outcrops of Spooks in the hills.
There was a pattern to them, visible only when coming in from above like this. A pattern that tugged at his consciousness, reminded him of half-forgotten dreams.
He pulled back on the joystick as hard as he could, threw his mind open to the Force—because the ground was flashing by so fast he couldn’t see anything of the terrain below—and brought her in.
Afterward he didn’t remember getting out of the Headhunter before it exploded. He knew he’d probably used the Force to damp the physical reactions involved until he’d crawled to more-or-less safety. He had no idea where he was or how close might be his chances of rescue, and somehow that didn’t matter.
If the Imperial Fleet picked up Dzym—Dzym with his enslaved front man Seti Ashgad, with his little dark boxes of crawling life, with his promises of controllable, invisible plague and limitless access to the crystals they needed for those tiny death dealers—there was going to be nothing left of the Republic, of the fragments of the Empire, of any space-going civilization whatever.
Only Dzym, fat and sated and looking around for more.
Luke lay on the spines of the crystal, eyes shut, the smoke of the burning Headhunter in his nostrils, knowing he should get up and knowing that he could not.
Feeling them