Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [88]
Only minutes after the easing of the evening’s torrential winds, he saw the line of speeders make the corner between the buildings in ghostly silence. Six of them, shadows only, running without lights above the machinery-cracked permacrete of the roadbed into the hangar yard. He recognized Arvid’s lopsided Aratech with the crude balance-leg beneath it, and Umolly Darm’s skip. Gerney Caslo was riding up beside the prospector, a small, black, vicious-looking blaster rifle cocked up against his thigh. A couple of volunteer guards rode cu-pas behind them, blaster rifles slung in the ready position, faces blacked and eyes glittering in the watery flicker of the stars.
“Fourth in line,” whispered Gerney, and tossed Luke a small, flat can of the dark camouflage paint that hunters used to take the glint off their weapons. “Rendezvous at Ashgad’s if we get split up. Overload the charges on anything you pick up, if it looks like the Therans are going to be able to take it away from you.” Luke blacked his face, and touched up the crude pair of infrared goggles he’d been lent by Aunt Gin with the camo paint. A dozen or more riders met them among the topato towers, the rounded, chubby bipeds moving with surprising quiet. Luke noted that these guards, too, were extremely well armed.
Ashgad was putting out a lot of money to get himself in the position of leader of the ruling faction of the planet, he thought as they left the towers and slowly rising antigrav balls of newer cultivation, glided between the scrubby fields of brope and the algal meadows where blerds grazed like wrinkled lapis mountains. The smell of growing plants faded in his nostrils as the sterile prickle of the wastelands crept over his skin.
There was something he didn’t know. Some piece of information he didn’t have that would make sense of this.
The wastelands stretched out around them like a blanket of salt. The terrible velvet weight of the Force grew heavier on his mind.
Few on the planet seemed to be aware of the Force’s presence here, thought Luke. No one at all seemed to realize that there was some kind of invisible life, some unseen civilization here, silent among the dazzling, wind-scoured canyons. Was Ashgad? Was that what he sought to control here?
Or like Taselda’s enemy, did he seek to control the Force itself?
Ahead of them Luke saw the red-orange spark of laser cannon illuminate the spine of the hills. As if in answer another glinted, sixty degrees around the horizon. Before them, the loose ring of the crystalline Cousins pointed mutely at the stars.
Tiny, tiny in the hard black vault overhead a pinlight exploded, faded. Someone in one of the other speeders cursed the Therans, called them fools and fogeys, and worse things yet for their refusal to welcome outside influences to their world. Raised as he had been, Luke understood. Nobody he’d known as a boy and a teenager had ever considered the rights of the Jawa or the Sand people to the territory occupied by the human colonists of Tatooine, and every one of his adult acquaintances in those days would have been outraged had either indigenous species asserted its undoubted majority rights to determine policy for the planet as a whole.
Stop the import of farming equipment, metal, chips, just because nine-tenths of the population of the planet thought it was wrong for trade to come down out of the skies? Ridiculous! Why don’t you just forbid us to use tools at all and be done with it?
He scratched at a droch bite, slowed his newly repaired speeder as a flicker far up in the sky signaled a red-hot meteorite in entry, a minute capsule of smuggled goods. The mounted guards scattered, minuscule yellow lights from their sensors and heat detectors briefly outlining their camouflaged faces, cu-pas silent, muzzled and booted in the dark. Caslo marked where the capsule came down, every