Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [31]
But only static replied.
On the screen before them, the bulky but heavily armed traders of the partisan forces opened fire on the E-wing squadrons that were evidently all the orbital base had to send against them. The smaller, lighter ships scattered like silvery flak in the planet’s reflected light.
“Chief of State Organa Solo has been kidnapped!” Threepio tried again. “She’s being held captive on Nam Chorios! We’re not getting through.” He made a few tentative stabs at the controls, but nothing happened. The blue disk of Durren slipped to the edge of the screen, then vanished.
Only space lay before them. Space and eternity, empty and dark as the abyss of a tomb.
Threepio toggled the comm again. “Help!” His faint, despairing cry reached vainly out toward a welter of broken receivers and beings who were in no mood to pay attention. “Can anyone out there hear us? Help!”
5
As Luke maneuvered it down the canyon, the XP-38A sagged lower and lower toward the ground. Either an antigrav cell was giving out or the fuel that powered the cell’s modulator coil was running low. It was impossible to tell which from the defunct and sand-blasted gauges. Luke muttered sotto voce imprecations against those who would let a good piece of machinery like this get into such a condition, and reached out with the Force to boost the vehicle’s rusty belly over a line of palely gleaming transparent rocks—blanched violet, jade green, white blues, all rinsed-out hues like glacier ice.
At the last moment he decided not to use the Force after all and applied the brakes instead. The speeder wibbled to a halt in a way that made Luke think there was a problem with the stabilizers as well. After a moment, like a tired bantha, the small craft settled to the slanted rocks of the canyon floor.
The silence was huge, like the desert silences of Tatooine. Like the desert silence, it breathed.
Then behind him he heard a soft, deadly crackling, and felt the lance of electricity stab the air. Turning, he saw flickering snakes of lightning racing down the face of the cliffs, like skeletal hands, or the wide-flung root systems of a thorn plant, a zone of fast-moving coruscation close to half a mile broad and heading his way.
For an instant he watched it, fascinated. It poured down the face of the cliffs, raced over the jagged rocks at the bottom, sparking and leaping brighter as it raced over the slabs and projections of giant crystals that seemed to grow out of the darker rock. As it came closer he put forth his mind into the Force and raised the speeder in which he sat a few feet above the ground. The ground lightning poured past under it, flowing at the same time along the canyon walls to both sides; he felt the bolts of it that leapt up and struck the bottom of the speeder, jarring him even through its insulation with mild jolts of pain. At the same time he could feel the Force, like a roaring in his mind or hot wind blowing across his face, could almost see it as a sort of ghostly light reflecting back from the clusters and facets of crystals that glowed all around him in the shadows.
The storm, whatever it was, flowed by under him for perhaps five minutes. When it had gone past him he let the speeder ease to the ground and stood up on it, watching the sparkling flood race down the rocks to the open plain, pale in the wan sun. It washed through the edge of the prison colony ruins, flowed along the jeweled ground beyond, vanishing at last in the direction of the line of spiky crystal rock chimneys that stretched away into the wastelands.
Even in the stillness it left, the Force was everywhere. Luke could feel it, like a radiation penetrating his skin.
The planet is dead, he thought. Completely without life, except for the tiny enclaves of human habitation.
But the Force was here.
It comes from Life, Yoda had said. Binding you, me, all life together …
And Callista had come here seeking it. Seeking the key to the frustration, the fear, the terrible forces that had driven her from him.
There is life here, thought Luke, suddenly