landing bay whose doors, surprisingly, stood open. They passed inside,
Yarbolk pausing to crank the doors shut manually from within.
The bay was tiny and almost completely filled by the lumpy ovoid of the
Aqualish smugglers' vessel. Beyond the dark, silvery green egg of the ship,
the magnetic field glimmered faintly around the oval shape of the entry
port. Yarbolk hooked Artoo's coax links into the access hatch beside the bay
door "Figure five minutes should do us?"
Artoo tweeped.
"You can get that baby started in that short a time?"
Artoo tweeped again, indignantly.
"()kay, okay. Once you get it to turn over those things are candy to fly. I
doubt she's got the juice in her to make it to Cybloc, but I know a fellow'
on Budpok who'll buy her, no questions asked, cargo and all. The proceeds
should get me back to the Core, and you to Cybloc no problem."
"Not again," groaned Threepio, as he, Artoo, and Yarbolk hastened across the
decking to the Aqualish ship. "I do hope we can arrive at a more convincing
disguise this time. I must say that I am quite frankly becoming very tired
of being treated as the potential personal property of every sentient being
we meet."
"Not to worry." Yarbolk pulled the hatch shut behind them and twirled the
locking rings--for a space-going civilization, the Aqualish had some
surprisingly primitive features on their ships. He toddled ahead of the two
droids to the bridge, where he hooked Artoo into the computer core again and
perched on the stool before the console, his furry little feet dangling.
"I have a plan--one that doesn't depend on you two pretending to be anything
you're not."
Threepio said nothing, but in the portion of his central processing unit
that formed opinions as protocol paradigms for communications facilitation,
he reflected that he was heartily sick of plans.
They were undoubtedly doomed.
From the dense shadow at the base of the plateau, Luke looked up the
striated cliff-face at the matte black jumble of Seti Ashgad's compound, and
wondered how many of those glowing rectangles of yellow' and white denoted
occupation. Was one of them Leia's prison? Or were they holding her
somewhere in the heart of the house, within the rock of the plateau itself?
Shivering in the dense cold, he reached out with his mind, seeking to touch
hers--Leia . . .--but did not know if she could hear. In the darkness, the
whisper of the Force around him was very strong, pressing on his mind,
tugging at all his thoughts, so that he was hard put to keep it at bay. Even
as there were ways of using the Force to keep from being seen, so it was
possible to keep from making an image on certain types of sensors. Luke
hoped that such minor use wasn't sufficient to trigger a reaction elsewhere
on the planet.
What was happening elsewhere in the galaxy as a result of Leia's
kidnapping--what other events that kidnapping would have been coordinated
with--he didn't like to think.
He'd brought a toolkit from Croig's shop--leaving most of his slender
finances to pay for it--and it didn't take long to rewire the alarm and
spring the door-catches. His small glowrod showed him a permacrete parking
bay containing a sleek black Mobquet Chariot, and by the stains on the floor
there were two other speeders usually in residence, one of them with a
faulty rear coil. Turbolift doors gleamed dully in the light. Luke ran the
beam along the wall, seeking a stairway
door, and drochs the size of his thumb waddled and skittered out of his way.
The stairway, he thought, was going to be bad.
The Force was life, Yoda had said Connecting all living things.
What he felt, standing in the doorway to the stair and reaching up with
whatever senses he could muster, Luke had never felt before and never wanted
to feel again Life, thick and cloying. Life huge and all-encompassing--there
couldn't possibly be that many creatures in the stairwell! Billions,
billions.
. . The sense of life there was overwhelming, and yet there was something
hideously wrong with it. Something ugly, evil, rotted. A dirty miasma, a
had no idea how to interpret this, no concept of what this meant, or even if
his perception were accurate. He couldn't even tell if it was billions of
lives he felt, or only one, huge and vile and waiting.
But Leia had to be up there The lightsaber hummed to life in his hand.
He maneuvered the little clip-on glowrod from the toolkit onto the front
flap-pocket of his coverall, flicked it on.
Permacrete steps ascended to a landing, then turned out of his view.
Darkness, and something moving along the walls. With the choking inner sense
of evil it was impossible to determine anything else about what might be up
there, shape or size or sound or smell.
Cautiously, Luke began to climb.
He passed one landing, two, then three. Each break in the stair was twenty
steps up. The plateau looked well over three hundred meters high, but there
was no telling how deep the foundations of the house extended. As far as
Luke could tell, there were no holocams or viewers in the stairwell only a
close-crowding monotony of permacrete walls, grimy with the brown tracks of
drochs. The join of the walls and floor was almost sepia with the noisome
exudations of their bodies.
Pain stabbed him in the calf and he looked down to see half a dozen huge
drochs--the length of his thumb wriggling and climbing up his boots. Several
had bitten through his pants leg and into the flesh already.
Disgusted, he pulled a hypo-driver from his belt and used the shaft of it to
dislodge those that hadn't bitten yet, but more were crawling purposefully
toward him across the floor.
As he bent down, the light of his little glowrod fell on them, and to his
surprise he saw that several of the biggest had definite limbs,
pincer-clawed or tentacular, sometimes both on the same organism. He stepped
quicker, reminding himself that Arvid said they simply died and dissolved in
the flesh ....
But the pain in his calf was followed by weariness, a cold lassitude, an
ache in his chest, and the sudden, overwhelming desire for sleep.
He stepped around a corner, and onto another landing, and there they were.
The floor was brown with them. Among the glistening mass there were half a
dozen nearly the size of Luke's hand, spider-shaped or arthropod, some with
the batrachian, springing legs of a Cabuloid pad-hopper ....
Luke fell back, appalled, and something struck him from behind, fastening to
his back between the shoulder blades, and pain like the slice of a chisel
jabbed the back of his neck.
He flung himself back against the wall, crushing whatever it was against the
permacrete, but as if that had been a signal the drochs on the floor hopped
and skittered and flowed toward him. The pain on his neck still reechoed,
though a sticky fluid trickling down his back told him that whatever had
attacked him was dead. He turned to flee down the stairs and saw
that the
drochs had gathered in behind him, big and small, some of them huge, legged,
toothed, and fast as lizards.
Weakness flowed over him with the agony of a hundred bites, as if all his
veins had been opened--not blood loss, he knew at once, but life-loss, the
draining of the electrochemical field of his nervous system, of the life
essence of his flesh and heart.
He fell against the wall, clinging to the permacrete to stay upright,
knowing that if he went down among them he was a dead man indeed.
They evaded the slashes of his lightsaber, a weapon too big to touch them,
too slow for all its speed. On the steps ahead of him Luke saw the biggest
droch of all, nearly twice the size of his two fists bunched together,
carcinomorphic, staring at him with two bright eyes on short stalks, and he
thought, It's sentient. Or nearly so.
And he knew' somehow that it was this thing that had orchestrated the attack
on him, letting him come so far up the steps that there was no chance of
descent.
He cut at it, staggering with weakness. The thing sprang aside.
Luke's knees gave out and he fell, gasping, dizzy, pain stabbing him as if
he were rolled in needles ....
And he summoned the Force.
Like a shining wind he called it, and like a shining wind it came, tearing
the drochs from his body as Vader had once torn cabinets and spools and
railings from the infrastructure of the carbon-freeze chamber on Bespin to
hurl at him. But the drochs he hurled away, crushing them against the walls,
staggering to rise as more flowed toward him, from up the stairs and from
below.
He thought, I can't do this. The balance of the Force is broken. This will
destroy some other place ....
But when they fastened on him again, stabbing with greedy mouths through the
ripped cloth of his suit, panic and horror seized him, and he knew that he
must use the Force or die.
Like a whirlwind the psychokinetic energy ripped and chopped at them,
plucked them up and flung them against the walls, down the steps, and Luke
had glimpses, in the jarring swirl of splintered light, of the bigger drochs
seizing and fastening their mouths upon the smaller, then hurling themselves
at him. The choking sensation of rotted, fermented life blotted his brain,
more and more life, as if each droch were bloated on the lives of those it
drank.
In For more creds, so let's rob the bank, thought Luke. No sense in being
inconspicuous now. He directed the Force before him, and staggered up the
stairs, climbing on his hands and knees, while above him he had the sense of
the big arthropod droch retreating, claws clicking on the floor, eye-stalks
watching him like evil stars out of the darkness.
"What's that?" Leia whirled at something that was less a sound than a
stabbing in her mind, a tightening in her chest, flicking her consciousness
like a whip. From deep below them in the locked and sealed tower came a
crashing sound, something falling. The Listener Be caught up a white lamp
and sprang up the steps to the downward-leading door, pressed himself to it
like a spider. At the same moment one of the other Therans camped on the
roof cried out, pointing. With a shiver Leia saw one of the clapped-out
grenade launchers rise from where it lay and begin to smite itself against
the black shielding of the central gun.
Eerie in the uncertain starlight, it crashed against the metal wall, over
and over, bending the metal of its own barrel in its violence, untouched by
any hands. Leia pressed back against the parapet, wondering if she were the
only one to hear a sound like dim shouting, the clamor of voices within her
own mind, crying something she did not understand.
Then the voices dimmed. The grenade launcher fell to the pavement again, its
barrel bent nearly ninety degrees. In the silence the
yammer of the cu-pas on the ridge behind the gun station sounded suddenly
clear.
"The Force," whispered Callista. "Someone is using the Force."
Leia shuddered. All desire that Callista's words had roused in her to learn
to use the Force for good trickled away like ice melting in the summer sun.
Not if that's what it is. Not if that's what I could become, mindless p ower
hammerinq in raqe.
"BeldorionV' "Maybe," said Callista. "He still has that power within him,
though he can't use it, or control it, as once he could. That's why he
wanted you under his control."
Leia shook her head. "I don't understand." The very air seemed to whisper
with a lambent horror, violence waiting just beyond the finger touch. "The .
. . the Force here. Could it have done something to him?"
"Not the Force," said Callista. "Dzym. And the drochs. They're lifedrinkers,
Leia. They are the Death Seed plague. The Grissmaths knew.
They seeded the planet with drochs, hoping those political foes they exiled
here would die. But the light of the sun fragmenting through the crystals
here generates a radiation that weakens the electrochemical bonds of their
tissues. It prevents the larger drochs from damping the electrochemistry of
organic life until they're absorbed harmlessly by their hosts. The smaller
ones it kills outright.
"I don't know how the prophet Theras knew this," she went on.
"So little is known of him. Certainly he never knew' that it was the drochs
who caused the plague, only that no ship large enough to carry heavy
shielding should be permitted to leave the planet. He may have been a spy,
or a politician opposed to the Grissmaths. But at least he understood that
the planet must be kept in quarantine. Over the years that must have
extended to forbidding larger ships to land. Somehow he must have known
there was a connection."
"And Ashgad took them out in the flesh of the synthdroids," said Leia
softly. "How could he do that? How could he get them past the quarantine
screens? How can Dzym control them the way he does?
"I can't prove this," said Callista softly. "But I think the drochs are
sentient, after a fashion. Even the littlest ones. They mimic shapes,
chemistry, electromagnetic currents, anything, down to the cellular level.
That's why they can't be detected. I think in some ways they mimic
intelligence as well. They become of the same substance as their hosts, even
as they're drawing the life out of them and into themselves.
And the big ones, the captain drochs, can draw life out of the victims
through the smaller ones, without themselves attaching to their hosts.
That's when they get dangerous," she went on, shaking her head. "The more
life they drink--their victims' or each other's--the more intelligent they
become. Bigger, and more capable of mutability.
Those things you described in the stairwell of Ashgad's house weren't
related to drochs, they were drochs. Drochs grown big from eating one
another, from absorbing one another's energy. People used to eat them, to
absorb life and energy into themselves."
"Does it work? The memory of Beldorion digging around in his cushions and
popping drochs into that huge, slime-dribbling
slit of mouth came
revoltingly back to her.
"In its way," said Callista. "In its way."
The stab of pain, of terror, struck Leia again, the voices clamoring in her
brain, and a hundred meters off the black mouth of a canyon suddenly spewed
forth a whirl of dust, like sparkling smoke in the starlight. Not a breath
of wind stirred, but she saw boulders, slabs of crystal and granite and
basalt, leap like fish in the maelstrom, and heard the hammer and crash of
them striking the canyon's walls. Panic closed her throat. Callista sprang
to the top of the parapet, barely touching the maze of beams and wire for
balance, staring out across the salt-white wasteland at the sudden whirl and
rise of dust from that direction that collected slabs and boulders as it
came. Beneath them in the gun station, other things were falling, or
hammering frenziedly against the walls.
Then the horror sank again, the voices in her mind stilled. Leia wondered
why she thought they had been saying her name.
Callista stepped down, her gray-black veils stilled, though they had whipped
around her as if wind-blown while she listened. "That's too big for it to be
simply Beldorion looking for you." Her eyes were grave.
"Something else is going on. This is only my opinion, you understand, but I
think that the drochs become part of the brain of those who eat
them. And the bigger ones, if they're eaten, exert influence even after
they're consumed. I know the bigger drochs--the truly big ones, the size of
a pittin--can control the little ones. 1)zym ...."
"Callista!" Be cried out a warning. At the same moment sudden wind erupted
from below the parapet, pouring out of the canyons all around the gun
station. Grit ripped Leia's face, chunks of gravel and flying arrowheads of
broken crystal gouged her cheeks and forehead.
Above them and on all sides the beams and timbers of the defensive works
began to shake, wire and rivets groaning and writhing like live things.
Scarred face cut by shrapnel, arms covered with drochs digging into his
flesh, the Listener emerged from the doorway of the tower and ran to where
Callista stood, even as the grenade launchers, the stacks of pellet guns and
spears, were sent sprawling by the kick of some giant, invisible foot. One
of the flamethrowers began to spout fire.
Be caught it up, hurled it over the parapet--Leia saw it flare like a torch