Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [32]
Luke could have raised the speeder with his mind and floated it down to the ruins at the canyon’s foot. By the same token, he understood, Yoda himself could have flown wherever he wanted to travel or could have built himself a palatial dwelling of rock instead of the mud hovel in Dagobah’s swamps. Ben Kenobi could have ruled a small planet.
Wars do not make one great, the little Master had said.
And neither did the ability to tote a mass of metal where one could just as easily walk.
Luke dug his canteen from the speeder, checked the lightsaber at his belt and the blaster he’d found with the macrobinoculars under the seat, and started down the canyon on foot.
Little remained of the Grissmath prison colony after some seven centuries. It had been situated above a ground water seam but evidently the hidden moisture had proved insufficient when terraforming had gone beyond crom and the simple gomex mosses that broke down the minerals of unyielding rock into soil that such plants as balcrabbian and brachniel could use. Without careful cultivation, most of the intermediate growths of the artificial ecosystems had died before they’d reached the stage of being self-sufficient. Lichens and podhoy still grew everywhere around the walls, as if the entire place had been dunked in a vat of crimson mud that had left a rough scum; close to the broken pump housing, a little soil remained, where hardy balcrabbian plants spread their leaves.
Luke sensed a human presence there moments before his danger-trained eye picked out the dull metal of another speeder concealed in the shadows of a broken foundation. He drew around himself the aura of advanced inconspicuousness that Yoda had spoken about and that later Callista, recalling her own training, had taught him: Beyond a doubt the same means by which old Ben had wandered around the Death Star utterly unnoticed by the most highly trained troops of the Empire.
The owner of the speeder sat in the dappled shade of the balcrabbian, protected from the wind, where the long-ruptured pump dribbled a series of tiny pools among the broken pavement. A young man, six or seven years junior to Luke, Corellian or maybe Alderaan stock, to judge by the brown hair, the medium build. He reminded Luke of any of the dozens of young farmers he’d known on Tatooine, trying to wrest a living from an inhospitable world. The duranex of his jumpsuit, though one of the toughest fabrics known, was patched and frayed, and the leather of the utility belt and satchel he wore much mended. He looked up quickly when Luke deliberately scraped the side of his boot on a lump of old-style permacrete. The young man’s hand flashed to the long, primitive pellet gun at his side, but something about Luke seemed to convince him that this wasn’t the danger he’d been fearing. He put the weapon down again and raised his hand with a grin.
“Where’d you drop out of, brother? Don’t tell me you were on that B-wing they brought down.”
Luke grinned back ingenuously. “I just want the name of the guy who said B-wings were too small to draw their fire, that’s all. Owen Lars,” he introduced himself, holding out his hand.
The young man rose. “Arvid Scraf. Were you modified for cargo? Trying to make Hweg Shul? Something the size of a B-wing usually can get through the automatics. Smugglers use them sometimes, but I’ve heard they’re tricky. The Therans must have been in the base itself when the sensors picked you up. They can take them off auto and fire themselves, if they want.”
Luke knelt by the water, dipped his half-empty canteen. The harsh dryness of the air, chilly as it was, filled him with a curious sense of having come home.
“That’s my luck. I once picked up half a crate of glitterstim for twenty-five hundred credits, only the guy who sold it to me forgot to tell me he’d stolen it and it had sensor relays in it. I hadn’t even cleared the atmosphere when I had