Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [34]
With an exclamation of disgusted alarm, Luke pinched the flesh around the swelling, forcing the thing back and out again. The swelling bubble of blood-dark shell elongated into a repellent abdomen perhaps a centimeter long, that ended in a hard little head and a ring of tiny, wriggling, thorn-tipped legs. It immediately turned between his thumb and forefinger and tried to dig into the ball of his thumb. Luke flicked it away hard, and heard it strike the flat facet of a nearby rock. It bounced down to the slippery canyon floor and scuttered fast for the shadows of the nearest stone.
Luke said, “Yuck!” and pulled his pant leg up farther. His calf was dotted with tiny, reddened swellings, or fading pink patches where the bugs were already burrowing down into the flesh.
“Don’t waste your time on ’em,” advised Arvid, from the other side of the speeder. He tied down a final knot and clambered over the tailfins to Luke’s side. “You probably picked ’em up in the shade around the water.” He pulled up his own sleeve to show at least four swellings on his forearm, one of them with the hard little insect tail just vanishing into the flesh. Casually he pinched the thing free and flicked it away against the deck, grinding it to a little purple blotch with the heel of his boot when it began to crawl toward his foot again.
“They’re kind of gross but they just die and get absorbed. There’s stories of crystal hunters who run out of food in the barrens and stick their hands into holes so they can absorb enough drochs to get energy to make it to a settlement. Not something I’d care to do myself.”
He made a face.
“Drochs?”
Arvid nodded. “They’re everywhere on this planet, and I mean everywhere. Their reproductive rate makes sand bunnies look like Elamposnian monks. Everybody has bites. Sunlight kills ’em. You just keep as clean as you can and don’t worry about it.”
Reflecting on some of the more loathsome—but quite harmless—denizens of Dagobah who’d scavenged crumbs in the corners of Yoda’s dwelling, Luke supposed Arvid had a point.
Fifteen or twenty minutes later, as the piggyback speeders turned from the eye-aching crystal mazes to the plain where the burn marks of Luke’s crash landing could be seen, Luke pulled up his sleeve again. Only a few pinkish splotches remained. He pinched the flesh around one carefully, feeling for the hardness of a foreign body, and found nothing. With his mind—with the techniques of the Force—he probed at the molecules, water, life energy of the muscle tissue itself, and found only the few vanishing traces of an alien energy field, which dissolved even as he observed them, becoming first identical with his own body, then a part of it.
Virtually nothing remained of the B-wing. Scuffmarks, charring, a huge slick of fused gravel where the reactor core had ruptured—even the massive cylinder of the reactor itself was gone. What Luke thought of as the “soft parts” of the ship were scattered broadcast over the harsh ground: the upholstery of the seats, some fragmented plastic from broken couplers, insulation that had been cooked brittle by the crash itself. Everything else had been taken.
“Didn’t think we’d find much.” Arvid scuffed with his toe at the cracked corner of what had been a console housing, and held it up. Even the screws were gone. “They use everything. Why not? Everybody does.” A dry twist of wind flipped his brown hair across his eyes. “I’m really sorry, Owen.”
The sun was sinking. Everywhere the orange and rose and cinnabar of its changing lights glanced and glared off the