They'd only used, after all, the images they could find in his mind the
indigenous inhabitant, brain gutted and forced to work for the
stormtroopers.
You've been alive all this time.
All this time, they agreed, a gentle vibration like music, rising from the
crystals beneath him, from the tsils, from the mountains; rising up into his
bones. From all time For all time. Thinking and dreaming] and speaking and
singing. The sea formed us, and the sea went away.
The planet fed us, from the fires of her heart. Little people here and there
but not important. Not until they took us. Took our . . and the word was
impossible to translate in his mind, "brother/self" he thought--a part of
their minds.
The deep tide of their anger flowed over him, anger for their kidnapped kin.
Taken and enslaved, zapped with the horrible electronic realignment, as the
Jawas had been zapped in his dream, so that they became slaves.
Through the minds of the tsils Luke saw those enslaved ones, imprisoned both
in the Needles and in the synthdroids; slaves but still kindred, still tsils
in their hearts. He sensed the incomprehension of those slow timeless beings
about what it was that they saw, but he himself understood.
The cabin of the Reliant. Two synthdroids lying dazed, eyes staring, on the
floor, their flesh a rotting mass but their minds receiving impres sions,
still and calm, without pain. Seti Ashgad sat at the controls, his face a
welted, bleeding mass, gasping, fighting for breath. His hair, his clothing,
his body crawled with drochs, freed of their fear of the crystal-imbued
light of Nam Chorios; while Luke, through the eyes of the synthdroids,
watched, he saw a thumb-size brown insect crawl into Ashgad's mouth.
And Dzym stood behind him. Dzym with his robe open to the waist, every
pulsing orifice and squirming pendule moving, while Dzym himself stared at
the Imperial carrack's approach in the main screen with hungry delight in
his eyes.
"Reliant?" crackled a voice over the comm system. "Reliant, this is Grand
Admiral Larm of the Antemeridian sector."
Luke was so startled, so dazzled by the vision, that he could barely gather
his thoughts. Can you still talk to them?
Confusion, murmuring--a dim comprehension of the horror, the pain, of those
enslaved and taken away. But no focus. No direction or guide.
They could see this, but could not understand, as Luke had not understood
the dream that the tsils--the planet's Guardian inhabitants-had sent to him.
A second vision flashed in his mind, of the Reliant rising against the great
glowing purple-white gem of the planet, seen from space. Of the carrack
drawing closer to it, and, weirdly, of the voices transmitted between them,
picked up over the electronic consciousness of the Needles themselves and
relayed back to their kindred tsils.
"This is Grand Admiral Larm, of the Antemeridian sector Imperial Fleet.
In the name of Moff Getelles, i am empowered to greet you personally."
With doubled vision he saw the square gray ship, the silvery carrack, and in
the same consciousness saw the Reliant's bridge again. Seti Ashgad raised
his head like a drunken man, barely conscious of what was being said.
Dzym threw back his head and laughed, his eyes sparking in the darkness with
two flames of unholy triumph.
Luke took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. It crossed his mind, very
briefly, to wonder what this was going to do to his own mind, his own brain,
but through the tsils, through the great white crystals in the ground, the
green crystals in the high cliffs, he was aware of the pain of those that
had been taken away, and he knew he could not let them remain in that agony.
Through me, he said. Focus through me.
He felt their awareness converge on his. The Force in them, the Force that
had been growing slowly, strangely, from their utterly alien life, twining
with the Force within his bones and flesh and mind.
Tell them to destroy Ashgad's ship he said, reaching out his mind to those
hovering, darting consciousnesses out in the black gulfs of space.
Understanding what they were now, and how to reach them. Do this for me and
I swear to you, wherever they, are, whoever has bought them throughout the
galaxy, I swear to you they will be brought back here.
He felt the consultation of them, like an endless green wave spreading out
across the plain, through the mountains, over the planet. A deep vibration,
like the ripple on a still pond. And then it came back, Force and more
Force--shining oceanic currents of it, streaming through his body,
unbearably bright. Tearing him apart. He cried out in pain, kneeling upright
in the diamond wastes, focusing his mind; calling the Force to his flesh.
Reaching out toward the darkness of space, where the Imperial carrack was
docking against the Reliant.
He saw Seti Ashgad trying to get to his feet from the main console,
stumbling and falling among the dead synthdroids that littered the floor.
Saw Dzym draw in a breath of ecstasy, of anticipation, of world-devouring
delight.
Luke's eyes were closed, so he didn't see, far, far above in the hard blue
unchanging sky, the tiny brightness of an explosion.
Then he fainted, and lay unconscious, alone beside the slow rising pillar of
oily smoke in the midst of the wasteland of light.
Given the circumstances under which they had last parted, the eventual
journey down to the surface of Nam Chorios could not be other than awkward
for both Han Solo and Admiral Daala, once in charge of the security of the
Imperial Weapons Installation in the Maw cluster.
See-Threepio, who accompanied them with Chewbacca, Artoo-Detoo, and a
considerable number of Daala's comrades, did his best to ease the tension by
filling Solo in on the events leading up to Leia's kidnapping, on the state
of the Meridian sector as observed by himself and Artoo-Detoo on their
travels, and on Yarbolk Yemm's well-documented contention that the whole
thing was a ploy originated by Gnifmak Dymurra, CEO of Loronar Corporation,
as a means of obtaining hypercomplex polarized crystals from their only
known source on Nam Chorios, for the manufacture of both synthdroids and
CCIR Needles.
He was at a loss to account for the fact that those supposedly programmable
Needles had unexpectedly left off attacking the small Republic fleet and had
descended on the square gray ship rising from the planet's surface, blasting
it and the Imperial carrack that had gone out to tow it to the safety of the
Imperial fleet into sparkling fragments of eternity. A prima facie
observation of the attack, even without the wildly furious and speculative
jabber intercepted from Admiral Larm aboard the carrack, made clear beyond a
doubt that this was not what Admiral Larm had had in mind.
Even as the debris cloud of the Reliant and its escort was dispersing, the
entire squadron of Needles had turned with the precision of a dance troupe
and had swirled down into the atmosphere, heading for the surface of the
planet.
It was a moot point whether A
dmiral Larm's successor would have continued
his attack--his forces still outnumbered the Republic ships almost three to
one, and Solo's little fleet had been badly mauled--had not Admiral Daala's
ships come out of hyperspace at that point, and descended on the Imperial
vessels like black, avenging night.
"From the time I was sixteen, the fleet has been my life." Arms folded,
booted feet apart, Daala glanced over her shoulder at Han, the growing glare
of the planet below already so bright as to cast cold, queer shadows on her
face. The forward lounge of a Seinar Sentinel landing shuttle included a
curving sweep of viewport, as well as small amenities like a cold-cabinet
containing wine and beer. Trails of condensation whipped and swirled up the
transparisteel viewport, so that the Admiral seemed vreathed in misty light.
"Service. Order. The triumph over the forces of chaos . . ." She cocked her
head, as the soft throb of the engines altered with the transfer to
repulsorlifts. A hard fold appeared at the corner of her mouth, the track of
some bitter thought. "All of my life, and all that i could have had, I laid
on the altar of the fleet, and I was satisfied. And now... this."
"Well," said Han softly, "I can understand. You're not the only one who's
ever been betrayed."
She started to jeer something back at him, then stopped herself and averted
her face. Beyond the shifting vapor trails and their reflected brilliance,
the starry darkness was yielding to a deep cobalt noon.
"No," she said, her voice unwontedly quiet. "Perhaps not."
"Oh, look," exclaimed Threepio, from the other side of the lounge.
"The CCIRs all appear to have crash-landed. There, see?" A thread of smoke
curled into the still air. "How remarkable that they would have maintained
so tight a formation in the face of what was quite clearly a controller
malfunction."
"Yeah, well, maybe we better pick up a couple of them and see what we can
learn about getting them to malfunction again."
As if Threepio had not spoken, Daala said, "You know her policies, Solo."
Once she would never have acknowledged him as her equal, or spoken to him
without scorn in her voice. "Will your Chief of State keep her hands off the
Chorios systems, once their value is known to her?"
"I don't know what the Council's gonna say," said Han truthfully.
"But I do know Lei--Her Excellency--just went through one laser blast raking
over because she refused to interfere in a planet that couldn't get a
majority for interference. So as long as you folks keep the majority on
Pedducis I'd say you're pretty safe."
He rose, and walked over to stand beside her and look at the world that to
him had, up until this time, been only a name.
"What a rock! There're people living down there?"
Chewbacca yowled an observation.
"Oh, right. One crummy little block there and about four houses way over in
the distance. I can see we're at a major population center of the sector."
Daala remarked drily, "At the moment, Captain Solo, I can think of few views
more pleasant than that of an entire planet utterly devoid of human life."
The homing beacon from the surface brought them, not to the fortress of Seti
Ashgad, but to the Bleak Point gun station sixteen kilometers away, where
the plain of glass-bright crystal made a landing area for the shuttle. A
light freighter already occupied the site--"As long as that station's out of
commission," said a brisk little woman with long white hair, as the doors of
the shuttle opened, "I'd be a fool not to take a cargo of majie offplanet
and see what I can bring back. I'll get the cream of the market. Well, what
do we got here?" she demanded, turning, as Han, Chewie, and the two droids
descended the boarding ramp and looked around them at the glaring landscape.
Wreckage from the Force storm scattered the gravel for half a kilometer
around the walls of the tower, snarls of wire, broken beams, weapons burst
by the violence of Beldorion's uncontrolled will. Rationalists and Therans
alike were gathering around the walls, and the plain was a parking lot of
speeders, speeder bikes, and cu-pas warbling and wheezing and scratching
themselves. A caravan of very dusty, very primitively dressed Therans
clustered together, gazing in wonderment at the speeders; at Umolly Darm's
freighter; and at the sleek, deadly shape of Daala's shuttle. From their
midst two figures broke away, crossing to Han and Chewie at a run.
Battered, dusty, blotched with grime and smoke and blood, Han realized it
was Luke and Leia. Leia cried, "Han!" and threw herself into his arms,
crushed against him, face pressed to his shirt and leaving an enormous
smutch of slime-dried dust there. Looking down into her face, he realized
that he himself was unshaven and smutted with soot from that last
burn-through of the defensive shielding that had almost accounted for the
Falcon in the last moments before Daala and her fleet had made their
appearance.
"Leia!" They were hugging like schoolkids, rocking in each other's arms--Han
felt an idiotic urge to whirl her in his arms and dance.
"Admiral Larm . . ." she began.
"Is space dust," finished Han. "His fleet went back to Antemeridian to give
him a nice memorial service. I don't think they're gonna be back."
"You know what happened?"
"Pretty much. The plague's over three-quarters of the sector, there doesn't
seem to be any way of stopping it. The boys at Med Central say it's like the
Death Seed . . ."
stick, wearing the same sort of padded jacket and loose, ragged robe that
the Therans had on. "And the--the Guardian tsils have agreed to send some of
their number off planet, to the sector medical facility, to be installed in
apparatus that will destroy the drochs. Once we've got
the sentient Spook crystals to channel light through, it shouldn't be hard
to destroy the drochs wherever they are. All they ask in exchange is that we
return every' Spook crystal that has ever been taken off and programmed."
"And you're gonna explain that to Loronar how."
"I'm going to explain," said Leia sweetly, "that without their cooperation,
the entire story of their support of the epidemic will be released for
general consumption, accompanied by sanctions that will put them out of
business in a week."
Han nodded judiciously. "You got me sold."
"Once the Guardians are able to get offplanet," said Luke quietly, "I don't
think Loronar's going to have much of a market for Needles anymore. The
CCIRs worked because the central controllers mimicked the vibrations of the
Guardians themselves. But even reprogrammed, the enslaved Spooks will know
and obey the voices of the Guardians, their--their family, their
alter-selves. The living crystals that have inhabited this planet since
first it was formed.
"They knew about the drochs," he went on, speaking to Leia. "They were
aware, when the Grissmath Dynasty seeded the planet with them to kill its
political emigres. They did their best, for seven and
a half centuries, to
keep the drochs from getting offplanet. They invaded the dreams of the
prophet Theras and his followers, taking whatever forms they found there,
whatever they would believe, and instructing them to keep anything larger
than about the size of a B-wing from taking off.
Anything bigger would have sufficient shielding to protect the drochs from
the radiation. But there's nothing, really, to keep large cargoes from
coming in. And there are seams of mineral wealth, platinum and rock ivory,
deep in the mountains that can be exported in small enough quantities to be
ray screened and still support those who take them off."
"Which is just fine with me," put in Umolly Darm, hurrying past with Arvid
and his aunt. "I never liked that Spook crystal business. Too fragile, the
ones with good color were too far back in the hills, and even a box or two
of the things gave me the willies. That Theran Listener Be is already
putting together an expedition for rock ivory with me and Arvid here."
She hurried on her way, Arvid waving back at Luke, to the stock freighter
that stood some distance from the gun station's walls.
Leia glanced in the direction of the shuttle and then back inquiringly at
Han. "An old friend," said Han, rather drily. "She showed up at the last
minute to help us out. She wants to have a diplomatic discussion and some
assurances from you."
Leia nodded, "All right."
She turned back, "Luke?"
He and Liegeus were among the Therans, shaking hands with those who had
found Luke in the wastelands, sent by the voices in their Listeners' minds;
bidding good-bye to the Rationalists, to Booldrum Caslo and his landlord and
Aunt Gin. Luke paused for a moment, looking around, and Liegeus said, "We'd
best be going, Luke. I've gotten the gun station back online again. It will
be forbidding egress from this world in very short order now."
And, when Luke still hesitated, the older man added gently, "I think that
there is nothing further that you can do here."
So close, thought Luke desperately. So close. if I could just tell her . . .
Whatever dark the world may send . . .
He remembered her eyes, in the sunset light of Yavin Four's towers.
Remembered the pain in her voice, in that final message.
I have my own odyssey . . .
Tell her what, that would not give her still greater pain?