Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [36]
Anger. Violence. A great, swirling turmoil in the Force.
“It isn’t that—that ground lightning I saw earlier, is it?”
Braced against the seat, Arvid shook his head. “Looks like an attack on the station.”
The gun station was a squat, dark complex of permacrete shapes seemingly fused into the black shoulder bones of the hills. By the flare and smolder of laser light, Luke made out the massive cylinder of the outer wall, featureless and scuffed by time and sand storms: No gate, no postern, no door, no windows. The upperworks of the station, where the cannon’s gleaming black snout pointed at the sky, were crowned with a ragged, thorny palisade of projecting buttonwood poles, planks, and what looked like the whole twisted trunks of scrub-loaks, pointing like spears in all directions and strung with catwalks, bridges, and crow’s nests from which the defenders could fire on those below. Tiny lights were entangled in the overhanging masses—lanterns, sodium flares, and here and there an occasional string of jerry-built work-lights against whose sulfurous glare Luke saw moving figures darting among the jackstraw shadows. Arvid brought the speeder to a halt on the crest of a ridge above the little box canyon in which the gun station stood, perhaps a hundred meters from the walls. From this vantage point Luke watched the little band of attackers run back and forth along the curving bastion, firing up into the superstructure with hard, clear bursts of proton light.
“Yep, that’s Gerney Caslo.” Arvid had the macrobinoculars indispensable to any frontier dweller to his eyes, adjusting them as he followed this figure or that. “Gerney’s one of the biggest water sellers between here and Hweg Shul. Without him we’d never have gotten those old pump stations going again. The Oldtimers just let ’em rot, except for the ones in their villages. See that gal there with the white hair? That’s Umolly Darm. She ships out Spook crystals, the long green-and-violet kind you find in clusters up in the deep hills. They make some kind of cross-eyed optical equipment that’s supposed to make flowers grow better on worlds with K-class suns or something. She works for an outfit in Hweg Shul—three suborbitals and they can pretty much ask their own price on whatever they can slip past the gun stations.”
He lowered the macrobinoculars, clearly in no particular hurry to join the attack, though Luke noticed he kept the Merr-Sonn Four propped where he could lay hands on it at seconds’ notice. “She’ll be the one to ask about getting yourself on a ship.” His breath plumed in a diamond cloud. “Her or Seti Ashgad, in Hweg Shul itself. She can wire through for information to the head office in town, if you’d like.”
Below them a faint cheer went up. A small group of what looked like armed farmers and townspeople scrambled onto a speeder that had been backed up to the wall itself. Even without macrobinoculars, Luke could see the extra buoyancy tanks strapped underneath the speeder’s hull. The attackers must have waited until the evening winds died to use antigrav transport at such a distance from the ground.
There must have been some kind of primitive deflector shield on it as well, for the rocks and lances hurled down from above missed it with a suspicious persistency. One of the crouching figures did something to a stripped-down control console, and the speeder began to rise straight up along the wall.
Luke wondered if the defenders were sufficiently wise in the ways of deflector shields to lower a man on a rope below the rising speeder’s level. “You think Mistress Darm might be able to trace an incoming passenger for me?”
“Don’t see why she wouldn’t. Just about everybody who comes in, comes through Hweg Shul.”
From the jackdaw mess of timbers overhead a rope extended. Like a plumb bob on a line, a single lankily graceful figure in grubby crimson, tattered leather, and what appeared to be pieces of very old stormtrooper armor