Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [21]
So much for Seti Ashgad’s information about the minimum mass needed to activate the gun stations, thought Luke grimly. Was that what Callista had meant about not trusting the man?
But Ashgad hadn’t known Luke would even be on Leia’s mission, let alone that he’d be going to Hweg Shul. Nobody but Han and Chewie had known that. He twisted the controls, trying to avoid sliding straight into one of those white lances of killing light. The ground rushed upward, radiant, burning with wan, reflected sun.
Blast, thought Luke, as the joystick lurched under his hands, don’t quit on me now.
There was enough play in the remaining stabilizer to land without killing himself—just. The antigrav cradles were still okay. But when he leveled off he’d be a better target. He zagged right, left, dropped instinctively as a beam slicked over his head. Those were live gunners, they had to be. No autostation had that kind of response flexibility. Live gunners who knew what they were doing.
Huge cliffs; mountains; towering, terrifying, bare monuments of basalt and crystals yawned fathomless below him. He plunged the big fighter down among them, veered through narrowing chasms as a laser bolt splintered a black column of rock a thousand feet high to his left and rained the craft with fragments. The steady, howling winds of the higher atmosphere turned to random hurricanes that smote him from every canyon and crevice. With its long ventral airfoil the B-wing was almost impossible to control. Luke pulled into a level slide, barely avoiding another bolt and a toothed crag of what looked like gray striated quartz, the glare of the sunlight from a million million mirrors nearly blinding.
He was out of range of the gun stations, hidden in the mountains, plunging down a long, scintillated canyon toward the wasteland beyond. The stabilizer went, and Luke forced the controls over, reached out with his mind to touch the Force, nudge the crazily plunging craft away from the rock walls, past the jutting towers and razor-ridged hogbacks of stone, heading for the blue notch of the canyon mouth.
Too low. No altitude. He’d never …
He put out all his will, all the strength of the Force, to lift the B-wing over the last ridge of rose-gold shining glass, edge it down, down …
Wind slapped him like a monster hand. The B-wing veered wildly, then the airfoil scraped and tore on the pebbled wilderness beyond the canyon. Rocks and dust and fragments of crystal enveloped him in a whirlwind of heat. Shaken nearly out of his bones, Luke held the controls steady, fighting to see, hoping there was nothing ahead of him but more level gravel.
There was. A transparent boulder the size of a speeder caught what was left of the airfoil. The whole craft slewed sideways, rolled, the delicate S-foils buckling and snapping. Luke feared for one heart-tearing second that his seat restraint would give way, and he’d break his neck on the console. The belts held—there was an explosion of sealant and crash foam—the B-wing rolled twice more, like a barrel, and came to a stop up against something that sent up another splintering cloud of fragments and dust.
Then stillness, the moaning of the wind, and the dying pitter of pebbles raining down on the laser-cracked hull.
“Here, Your Excellency.”
Strong hands helped Leia sit up, put a cup into hers, held it steady while she drank. “How are you feeling?”
She blinked. The divan had been moved out onto the terrace. Weak, strangely colored sunlight lay in mosaics of glassy brightness across the cinder-colored permacrete walls of the house that loomed over them, glinted on the treeless lunacy of the heaped stone ridges, columns, pinnacles, and buttresses that dwarfed the house on three sides and framed, on the fourth,