Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [28]
Mindful of the water he carried, and the unknown distance he’d have to travel before he reached civilization, Luke flung himself into the best-looking of the speeders, checked the fuel gauge, reached back to slash the lines of the two cu-pas tied to the stern, rolled out the other side, and dashed to the next-best one he could find, a raddled XP-38A. That one had more juice in its batteries. He cut loose the cu-pas attached to that one, too—they immediately made tracks for the horizon, gronching and wibbling like enormous pink-and-blue rubber toys—and slammed the speeder into gear, driving his mind and the Force against the ground again like an enormous, stamping foot.
More dust bellied up, engulfing the Therans who rushed from the first dust cloud in his direction and sprayed him with gun pellets and curses. The speeder slashed out of the dust cloud, and Luke put it into a long turn, heading back into the nearest canyon of the monstrous, glittering massif through which the B-wing had descended. The shadows swallowed him in a winding maze of dry wadis, chasms, and cracks.
He could tell when he got too far from the wreckage to hold the heat fusion of the fuel tanks in stasis by the power of the Force. The explosion boomed out over the empty plain, bounced through the dirty jewels of the hills like a flat, heavy word of thunder.
Luke hoped the Therans—if those people were, in fact, the fanatic cultists of whom Leia had spoken—had gotten away from the craft before it blew.
Later, in the shelter of a fantastically splintered notch somewhere near the top of the ridge, Luke saw the white flicker of a laser cannon firing skyward again, like threads of perfectly straight lightning pointed into the dull navy blue of the jeweled, arid sky. In time, their target came into view, weaving and dodging in what was clearly an extremely complex preprogrammed pattern: One of the small bronze mini-hulls of the Light of Reason, detached in orbit and making its way separately into the atmosphere.
Shading his eyes against the shimmering brilliance that radiated from the iridescent gravel, Luke knew when ground control cut in to guide the fragment. Every civilian Luke had ever talked to—Leia included, for years—claimed that a program was as good as a live operator, but he didn’t know a single pilot who couldn’t distinguish the difference. Not one who’d survived more than a few firefights, anyway.
The mini-hull came in under the lowest point of the gun station’s attitude, leveled off parallel to the rolling adamant of the plain, and streaked away to the north. Far away Luke could descry another threadlike flash of laser brightness in the sky.
He got to his feet, scrambled up the shining slabs to the top of the ridge. The ceaseless wind flattened his flightsuit to his body, whined softly among the rocks. Five or six kilometers away on the plain below the glassy hogback he saw what looked like the outline of ruined walls, and against the translucent rose and purple of the surrounding ground, the startlingly green splotches of what he had not yet seen in all this world: vegetation.
He raised to his eyes the macrobinoculars he’d found under the speeder’s seat—much-mended manuals and probably older than he was, but they worked. They showed him wind-scoured foundations, long stripped of everything usable. At a guess it was one of the old prisons that had formed the original colonies on this world. He traced the treble walls, the placement of blockhouses designed to defend against