Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [20]
Trouble elsewhere? he wondered. On Pedducis Chorios, perhaps? Or some other world in the vicinity? Sometimes it was difficult to tell, with the Force. It picked up and magnified some alterations in the life-tides of the universe, distorted others. Even now, the tugging grief, the cold panic, he felt had faded; he wasn’t even sure exactly where it had come from.
He turned his eyes toward the growing violet star that was Chorios II, Nam Chorios’s primary. That speck of piercing white beside it should be the planet itself.
A singing surge of the Force washed over him, filled him, sieved the tiny craft like gamma rays. Like coming in to Dagobah that first time, looking at the seething life readings of that strange world, he felt now in the presence of a vastness he could not understand.
No wonder Callista was drawn to this place.
He touched the levers, accelerated into high orbit.
Now the planet was clearly visible. Wastes of slate, smooth and hard as rollerball floors, stretched kilometre after kilometer. Zones of broken rock surrounded them, wall after brittle wall of toothed mountains uneroded by rain or the roots of growing plants. In other places the dry sea floors were covered for thousands of miles in faceted, quartzine gravel that glared as if the world were one great cut-glass gem. Crystal mountains flashed a bleached and broken reflection in the wan light of the tiny, faded whitish sun, chains of them petering out into lines of solitary crystal-rock chimneys, like widely spaced sentinels, far into the shimmering, twilight wastes.
Light and glass, dizzying alien cloudless heights, and among it all, tiny zones of green.
Luke’s hands played fast through the orbital checks, then returned to the subspace, signaling back to the Adamantine, the Borealis.
Nothing. They’d gone into hyperspace by this time, heading back to Coruscant.
Death, his memory whispered. He had felt death, massive death, he thought. His recollection of it was dim and dreamlike, and he could not be sure where, or when, or from what direction the sensation had come.
But Leia was alive. Somewhere, wherever she was, she was alive.
He flipped his scanners to their widest range, but saw only the yellow speck that would be Seti Ashgad’s pieced-together planet-hopper, blinking along at max sublight, heading for home.
His single B-wing should be too small to register on its scanners at this distance, he thought. But it would be best to disappear into the planet’s magnetic field before Ashgad got any closer.
Do not meet with Ashgad.
Why?
Do not go to the Meridian sector.
Luke studied the scan again. This close to Antemeridian, it paid to be cautious, though by all accounts Moff Getelles didn’t have the firepower to bump heads with the fleet at Durren, or the guts to try. And indeed, no sign of any deep-space vessels disturbed the provincial calm of this portion of the Meridian. Just the occasional orange flicker of planet-hoppers, small traders, light cargo haulers going about their petty businesses between the stars.
What did Callista know about Seti Ashgad?
He edged the B-wing into a lower temporary orbit and brought up the coordinates for the town of Hweg Shul.
He would find her, he thought. He would see her again.
The long-range laser cannon took out his rear deflector shield and nicked the stabilizer before he was even out of sight of blackness and stars.
It was only luck it didn’t destroy the craft entirely, luck and probably the difficulty in homing on a vessel at the bottom end of its target mass. Luke flipped at once