Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [74]
“You didn’t feel that?” His mind was still ringing with it, though it had ended in a split second, even before she turned off the switch. Sweat stood out on his face and he felt vaguely sick.
She shook her head, clearly puzzled. “You okay, Owen? What happened?”
Luke hesitated. It was impossible to explain matters of the Force to those unaware of its existence and, given Taselda’s attempt to control him—and Officer Snaplaunce’s account of her attempt to kidnap Callista—in the town he was very careful to whom he spoke. “It’s nothing.”
He took the crystal from Darm’s hand, and held it to the nearest window once more. The threadlike gray striations in the Spook’s heart had changed their orientation, forming two starlike blotches where the terminals had touched.
“If that Spook had had the proper color,” said the prospector with rueful amusement, “I’d just have done myself out of a hundred credits. They can program them, realign the structure to act as a receiver.” She flipped the pale arrowhead of quartz in her hand, then tossed it to Luke.
His hand jerked back, and the crystal fell to the floor and shattered into glittering slivers. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry …”
She kicked the fragments casually out of sight under the recharger. “Not to worry. Like I said, it wasn’t anything they’d take, but even the tiny ones can be reoriented like that with an ion zap.” She frowned at him again, studying his face, which still, Luke feared, showed too much of the sickened shakiness he felt inside. “You sure you’re okay?” She probably meant, thought Luke, that it wasn’t like him to drop things—and after years of a Jedi’s hair-trigger physical training it certainly wasn’t.
Whatever their other properties, the Spook crystals somehow seemed to be foci or triggers for the Force.
“Yeah,” said Luke, and rubbed his temples, trying to gather his wits. “Yeah, I’m fine.” No wonder the planet reverberated with the Force. Could they be used to …?
“There’s a meeting tonight,” went on Darm, her voice breaking into the half-formed train of thought. “Seti Ashgad’s back. Turns out he met with some bigwig in the Republic, how do you like that? We’re all going to his place tonight—you know it? That big old joint that used to belong to some Hutt who ran things around here way long ago. Pretty fancy, but it must get fairly exciting during ground lightning. If you wanted to go I could get you in, introduce you around. People will be there from as far away as Outer Distance. If your friend’s still in settled territory at all, someone will have seen her.”
“Thanks,” said Luke, his sense of confusion, of despair, returning at the mention of her presence on this world. He’d walked past Taselda’s house two or three times in the past twenty-four hours, carefully—had walked past Ashgad’s, too. At least this would be a way in without rousing the suspicions of the too-intelligent Officer Grupp. “I’d like that.”
Darm waved his thanks away, with the easy friendliness of communities where humans—or at least humans of a certain persuasion—feel that they have to stick together. “We’ll find her for you,” she said. “Sooner or later, somebody’ll know. Tonight at twenty hours, then. I’ll come by here at quarter of. Arvid and Gin’ll probably be there as well.”
Luke nodded. After Umolly Darm had left he knelt and touched the broken fragments of crystal with his fingertips, trying to recapture—trying to understand—what it was exactly that he’d felt. But they were only bits of silicon, like the rubbish heaped in all the corners beneath the repair shop’s stilts.
So Taselda’s enemy—whose house had been taken over by Seti Ashgad—had been a Hutt.
An evil Jedi? wondered Luke. Or was that just another of her lies.? A “crime boss,” Grupp had called him, but that could be only a layman’s description of something he did not understand.
Could Hutts be born, imbued with the Force?
There was a time when someone would have asked that about the Khomm people