Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [38]
Seti Ashgad’s ship, thought Luke. Beyond a doubt the attack on the gun station had been coordinated—in who knew how many places?—to better the populist leader’s chances of a safe return.
With the tiny explosion above the atmosphere, the erstwhile attackers began to curse and threaten again, striking out for no purpose now, but out of frustration and anger. Arvid shoved the accelerator again in bitter silence, and Luke’s eyes were drawn back to the little braided-haired man on the wall and the tall, thin form beside him, before the jutting boulders and crystal chimneys hid the gun station from sight.
Where the last, scattered lines of rocks gave way to the emptiness of the starlit sea bottoms, Arvid’s speeder overtook the retreating clumps of combatants, men and women in sand-scoured orange or yellow or green work-suits, rifles over their shoulders or blasters hanging at the utility belts that were the hallmark of frontier dwellers throughout the Outer Rim. Now and then speeders or bikes carrying Oldtimers would pass them and the Newcomers would curse and shake their fists, but no further hostilities occurred.
Some distance from the gun station, Luke saw a line of immobilized speeders drawn up, most of them in little better shape than Arvid’s Aratech. The Newcomers were clambering into them. One man called out, “That you, Arvid?” and a woman’s voice added, “Where have you been, child?” It was an elderly lady who reminded Luke a little bit of his aunt Beru, with Beru’s weather-worn complexion and air of quiet competence. “And where’d you get that speeder? She badly stove up?”
“Belongs to Owen here, Aunt Gin.” Arvid waved at Luke. “He—uh—took it in trade for an injury.”
Aunt Gin guided her clapped-out swoop over to pace Arvid’s vehicle, smiled slowly as her expert eye, even in the intermittent wobbling glare of the sodium lamps, identified the probable origins of the craft strapped onto the cargo deck. “Did he indeed? And what do you do, Owen?”
“I’m a speeder mechanic, on my way through to Hweg Shul.” Luke stowed Arvid’s proton blaster back under the seat. “Arvid was kind enough to offer me a lift out of the hills when her tanks packed up.” He tucked his gloved hands under his armpits against the cold.
“Owen’ll be staying with us the night, that okay, Gin?” asked the young man, with every sign of the kind of casual friendship Luke had never managed to achieve with his own guardians. “I thought I’d take him on to Hweg Shul in the morning.”
“Sounds dandy,” agreed Gin. “Always provided he doesn’t want to stick around and work awhile. We can’t pay much,” she added to Luke, “but with your board found, you can save a little for the city. We can use the help.”
“We coulda used the help an hour ago,” grumbled a thickset man with a beard like a bantha in molt, coming up on the other side in an antediluvian SoroSuub Skimmer.
Under the jarring movement of the speeders’ lights, Luke was aware that the ground had changed. He felt the shift in the air first, the easing of the bitter dryness. Now the gravel gave place to thin, dusty soil, and he glimpsed the hardy plants familiar to colonial terraformers: Bolter, snigvine, and the ubiquitous clumps of balcrabbian. Ahead of him, against the dim, ambient light of a settlement, a line of scrubby buttonwood trees reared their tattered crowns; and beyond those the weird, floating shadows of tethered antigrav balls, bristling with smoor, brope, and what smelled like majie. After the silence of the wastelands, the soft grunts of blerds and the burble of grazers sounded weirdly loud; the droning of mikkets and the harsh, clattering flight of nocturnal nafen.
Great, thought Luke. Drochs and nafen. He wondered if there was a planet in the galaxy that those bad-tempered brown pests hadn’t managed to colonize, growing from minuscule juveniles hiding in packing-material and necessitating inevitable rounds of inoculations, since they always picked up some kind of local disease, mutated it, and fed it back to colonists and indigenous ecosystems with their bites.
“What was