He made a face.

"Drochs?"

Arvid nodded. "They're everywhere on this planet, and I mean everywhere.

Their reproductive rate makes sand bunnies look like Elamposnian monks.

Everybody has bites. Sunlight kills 'em. You just keep as clean as you can and don't worry about it."

Reflecting on some of the more loathsome-but quite harmless-denizens of Dagobah who'd scavenged crumbs in the corners of Yoda's dwelling, Luke supposed Arvid had a point.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, as the piggyback speeders turned from the eye-aching crystal mazes to the plain where the burn marks of Luke's crash landing could be seen, Luke pulled up his sleeve again.

Only a few pinkish splotches remained. He pinched the flesh around one carefully, feeling for the hardness of a foreign body, and found nothing.

With his mind-with the techniques of the Force-he probed at the molecules, water, life energy of the muscle tissue itself, and found only the few vanishing traces of an alien energy field, which dissolved even as he observed them, becoming first identical with his own body, then a part of it.

Virtually nothing remained of the B-wing. Scuffmarks, charring, a huge slick of fused gravel where the reactor core had ruptured-even the ma.s.sive cylinder of the reactor itself was gone. What Luke thought of as the "soft parts" of the ship were scattered broadcast over the harsh ground: the upholstery of the seats, some fragmented plastic from broken couplers, insulation that had been cooked brittle by the crash itself.

Everything else had been taken.

"Didn't think we'd find much." Arvid scuffed with his toe at the cracked corner of what had been a console housing, and held it up.

Even the screws were gone. "They use everything. Why not>. Everybody does." A dry twist of wind flipped his brown hair across his eyes.

"I'm really sorry, Owen."

The sun was sinking. Everywhere the orange and rose and cinnabar of its changing lights glanced and glared off the gravel, rocks, the towering crystal chimneys, so that Luke felt as if he were trapped in the midst of a limitless, heatless lava flow that stretched to the ends of the world.

The wind had swelled to a torrent, and the temperature was plunging fast.

"At least you got one of their speeders. That's something." Arvid lowered his voice. "Uh-you didn't owe anything on that cargo, did you>." He worked his fingers into clumsy hand-knitted gloves, and tossed Luke a disreputable coat he'd pulled from beneath the speeder's seat. His breath was already a cloud of mist. "That was on your craft?" I mean, to people who'd make trouble for you?"

Luke was about to disclaim further interest in his fict.i.tious cargo, but another thought crossed his mind. He lowered his voice also, although it was patently obvious there was no one and nothing to hear them for hundreds of kilometers, and said, "Well, I'd sure rather a couple of individuals thought I bought it in the crash until I can come up with a little working capital again, if you know what I mean."

Arvid nodded, with a prompt understanding that made Luke wonder how often smugglers made landfall on this planet. With Pedducis Chorios so close it made sense.

"You can put up with me at my aunt's in Ruby Gulch tonight,"

Arvid said. "You'll freeze, out of doors. Aunt Gin'll give you top price for the speeder, too, if you want to sell, and that should be enough to get you a launch off planet when you get to Hweg Shul."

"Thank you," said Luke, and pulled closer about him the ragged, too-big jacket. "I appreciate it."

"Well, we don't get a lot of strangers." Arvid looked a little shy as they clambered back into the Aratech. "The Oldtimers are all each others'

cousins, but those of us who've come here in the last ten years or so, we sort of like to hear how things are going, back toward the Core. You know?"

Luke knew. For the next hour and a half, while Arvid fought the evening wind across the sea floor plains by the light of a couple of wavery chemical lamps, he entertained the young man with smuggler stories gleaned secondhand from Mara and Han and Lando, with tales of the Rebellion edited together from his own adventures and those of Leia and Winter and Wedge. To these he added news and gossip and hints enough to imply that he was a minor-league planet-hopper making his living as best he could in the chaos without giving allegiance to either side, much as Han had been, once upon a time.

And, as he himself would have been, ten or twelve years and several lifetimes ago, Arvid was enchanted.

The young man had gone many hours out of his way to help Luke.

Though Luke was tired and would rather have dozed, or asked questions about this eerie world of light and ungiving gla.s.s, he knew that such entertainment as he could provide was payment for Arvid's trouble.

There would be time later, he thought, to learn what he had come here to learn.

Against the darkness, far-off light speared the sky.

"What the...?"

"That'll be the gun station!" Arvid braced his feet against a ballast bag and threw his weight on the steering lever. "Big one-over by Bleak Point..."

The speeder sagged heavily, the hot flares of its lamplight sparkling on the facets below them. The wind had fallen with full darkness, and in the stillness the cold deepened until Luke's ears and teeth ached.

"There's a couple blaster rifles under the seat, Owen, if you'd be so kind."

Luke fished out a Seinar proton blaster and a venerable Merr-Sonn Standard Four.

"You take the proton," offered Arvid generously, as he tromped the accelerator and the scattered boulders and chimneys flashed and whirled past them with horrifying speed. "The Four's got her ways-I better handle her."

"Uh-you probably better." Luke checked out the Seinar. The geriatric weapon had been refitted repeatedly, like every other piece of equipment he'd seen on the planet, but it was spotlessly clean and the charges were topped. "What's going on?" The fitful blasts of light ahead were coming from ground level, not pointed at the sky. Luke balanced himself on a stanchion and stood up, wind slapping his gray flightsuit, focusing his mind through the darkness, reaching toward the source of the intermittent glare.

Anger. Violence. A great, swirling turmoil in the Force.

"It isn't that-that ground lightning I saw earlier, is it."

Braced against the seat, Arvid shook his head. "Looks like an attack on the station."

The gun station was a squat, dark complex of permacrete shapes seemingly fused into the black shoulder bones of the hills. By the flare and smolder of laser light, Luke made out the ma.s.sive cylinder of the outer wall, featureless and sculled by time and sand storms: No gate, no postern, no door, no windows. The upperworks of the station, where the cannon's gleaming black snout pointed at the sky, were crowned with a ragged, th.o.r.n.y palisade of projecting b.u.t.tonwood poles, planks, and what looked like the whole twisted trunks of scrub-loaks, pointing like spears in all directions and strung with catwalks, bridges, and crow's nests from which the defenders could fire on those below. Tiny lights were entangled in the overhanging ma.s.ses-lanterns, sodium flares, and here and there an occasional string of jerry-built worklights against whose sulfurous glare Luke saw moving figures darting among the jackstraw shadows. Arvid brought the speeder to a halt on the crest of a ridge above the little box canyon in which the gun station stood, per haps a hundred meters from the walls. From this vantage point Luke watched the little band of attackers run back and forth along the curving bastion, firing up into the superstructure with hard, clear bursts of proton light.

"Yep, that's Gerney Caslo." Arvid had the macrobinoculars indispensable to any frontier dweller to his eyes, adjusting them as he foLlowed this figure or that. "Gerney's one of the biggest water sellers between here and Hweg Shul. Without him we'd never have gotten those old pump stations going again. The Oldtimers just let 'em rot, except for the ones in their villages. See that gal there with the white hair? That's [lmolly Darm.

She ships out Spook crystals, the long green-and-violet kind you find in cl.u.s.ters up in the deep hills.

They make some kind of cross-eyed optical equipment that's supposed to make flowers grow better on worlds with K-cla.s.s suns or something. She works for an outfit in Hweg Shul-three suborbitals and they can pretty much ask their own price on whatever they can slip past the gun stations."

He lowered the macrobinoculars, clearly in no particular hurry to join the attack, though Luke noticed he kept the Merr-Sonn Four propped where he could lay hands on it at seconds' notice. "She'll be the one to ask about getting yourself on a ship." His breath plumed in a diamond cloud.

"Her or Seti Ashgad, in Hweg Shul itself. She can wire through for information to the head office in town, if you'd like."

Below them a faint cheer went up. A small group of what looked like armed farmers and townspeople scrambled onto a speeder that had been backed up to the wall itself. Even without macrobinoculars, Luke could see the extra buoyancy tanks strapped underneath the speeder's hull.

The attackers must have waited until the evening winds died to use antigrav transport at such a distance from the ground.

There must have been some kind of primitive deflector shield on it as well, for the rocks and lances hurled down from above missed it with a suspicious persistency. One of the crouching figures did something to a stripped-down control console, and the speeder began to rise straight up along the wall.

Luke wondered if the defenders were sufficiently wise in the ways of deflector shields to lower a man on a rope below the rising speeder's level. "You think Mistress Darm might be able to trace an incoming pa.s.senger for me?"

"Don't see why she wouldn't. Just about everybody who comes in, comes through Hweg Shul."

From the jackdaw mess of timbers overhead a rope extended. Like a plumb bob on a line, a single lankily graceful figure in grubby crimson, tattered leather, and what appeared to be pieces of very old stormtrooper armor rappelled casually down the permacrete face, far enough from the speeder with its little gang of attackers so that the curve of the wall offered a shadow of protection against laser bolts.

Only a perfect shot could have struck the solitary defender, and none of those on the speeder was that good. The bolts seared wild off the hard black wall, leaving long dirty scars but no chips. The Grissmaths had built well.

At precisely the right moment the defender wrapped an extra bight or two of line around one arm and, herting a beltful of grenades in the other hand, kicked away from the wall in a long, flying parabola, coming pendulum like close to the underside of the makeshift a.s.sault platform.

The men on the platform fired wildly down at the bloodred form swinging toward them through the darkness, but the rail of the speeder impeded their aim.

The timing was flawless. The lone defender hurled the belt of grenades up into the speeder's undercarriage, with an expert flick that tangled it with the emergency balance gear, then struck the wall and kicked off again, swooping on the end of the line back into darkness.

The line was already shortening, those hidden in the superstructure pulling the grenade thrower in. The platform headed groundward, seconds ticking away-the crew bailed at eight meters, jumping outward, and the speeder exploded in a rain of red-hot shrapnel two meters above where the attackers' heads would have been had anyone still been standing underneath.

Searchlights flowed out over the gravel from the direction of the open plain. Lances and arrows glittered in flight, and a smattering of red laser fire st.i.tched the night, accompanied by the flat snaps of pellet guns. Focusing his mind through the Force to pierce the darkness, Luke saw a ragged agglomerate of men and women approaching in speeders and on speeder bikes, more poorly dressed than the a.s.sault forceswhom he presumed to be Newcomers-but without the raffish tatters of the Therans.

They were far more numerous than either of the other groups, however, well over a hundred strong. The Newcomers turned, yelling and brandishing their weapons, and Luke could make out curses and accusations on the harsh night air. Very few shots were fired once the two sides joined. It seemed more like an enormous brawl, men and women pulling and pushing, hitting with clubs or wrenches or hoes, grappling and punching and pulling hair-enemies, he thought, but enemies who know they'll be meeting one another in the same food store tomorrow morning.

"Are those the Oldtimers?" he guessed, and Arvid nodded sourly.

"Cheesebrained idiots," muttered the younger man. "What business is it of theirs if we bring in ships or hOP. If we trade our crops for pumps and processors and transportS. They can live like animals if they want to, but why make us do it?"

Disgusted, he shoved over the levers, backed the speeder, and headed down the ridge. Luke thought, Maybe because it's their planet?

Over his shoulder he saw forms standing among the struts and timbers of the gun station's superstructure, silhouetted against the glare of the lights: the thin, gawky, graceful form of the crimson warrior and the lean, tiny shape of what looked like a youngish man with long, braided hair. Behind them, a thin lance of cold green light stabbed straight upward from the station's main gun, losing itself in the sheer distance of the night overhead.

A moment later a second light shot up from far over the hills. Tiny in the infinite distance above, a bright pin of fire burst in the sky.

"Sithsp.a.w.n," whispered Arvid, with a quick glance over his shoulder, as quickly reverting to the ground ahead. "Something's coming in."

The attackers around the wall ceased to shove and curse. They, and the Oldtimers who had taken them from the rear, only stood in sullen groups, panting like dragons in the cold. They glared upward as the gun station's cannon flared again.

"Got one of them," muttered Arvid, braking to a halt at the foot of the ridge. "Didn't get them all, though. Gerney'll know what stuff came in and what they'll be charging for it."

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 worksuits, 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 pa.s.s 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 b.u.t.ton-wood trees reared their tattered crowns; and beyond those the weird, floating shadows of tethered antigray b.a.l.l.s, bristling with smoot, 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. mikkets 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 that all about?" he asked ingenuously, wondering how much power Ashgad actually had.

The heavyset man made an angry gesture. "We just got sick and tired, that's all. We got word a planet-hopper was sending in a shipment of chips and droid parts, and them motherless Therans were out to blast them because that brainhaired Listener of theirs told them droids were against nature or something. Blast it, if they got a problem with droids, we'll import Bandies-they're tough enough to do the work of droids, if you keep 'em fed, and just smart enough to pick and haul but don't make trouble. t hear we can ship 'em in cheap from Antemeridian."

"Oh, come on, Gerney," interrupted Gin irritably. "If the Listeners don't like droids, you bet they'll object to slaves!"

"Bandies aren't slaves!" flared Gerney Caslo. "That's like calling a cupa a slave! You're as bad as my cousin Booldrum! Bandies breed like sand bunnies, work like droids, and they're better off with somebody taking care of 'em."

"That's a matter of opinion."

"Oh, just 'cause some bleeding-heart rigged a big-deal Sentience Test..."

"Bandies are sentient," said Luke quietly. "They may not be terribly bright, but that's their privilege. I've met humans who weren't terribly bright, either. They deserve better than slavery."

"And who're you?" Gerney glared belligerently across at the slight, beard-stubbled form sitting relaxed on the speeder bench in the near darkness. His voice turned heavily sarcastic. "You another one going to lecture us on the motherless rights of motherless sentience the motherless galaxy over?"

"Anyway, that wasn't all of it," put in Aunt Gin quickly. She looked up at Luke, "You come in off the hills, pilgrim. You didn't happen to meet Therans, did you. See them up to anything?

"Besides stripping my ship of everything but the s.p.a.ce tape, you mean?

He grinned, understanding her attempt to head off a quarrel, and she grinned back. Silver s.p.a.ce tape was a standing joke among colonists, as it had been among the Rebels: Everything was held together with it, from household appliances to-allegedly-the Imperial Palace on Coruscant.

"No, it's serious." The woman Arvid had pointed out as Umolly Darm moved over carefully to the side of Caslo's skimmer, small and trim and pretty with an ion cannon slung casually on her shoulder. She must have muscles like a rancor, thought Luke. "About six hours before the attack there was a... I don't know what. I've heard the Oldtim-ers talk about Force storms, and this must have been one of them.

Weirdest thing i've ever seen. Every tool came flying off the bench, whirling around the room like a cyclone. Boxes of crystals heaving and scattering rocks and jumping off the shelves. Down the street at the grocery it was like somebody hit the shelves with a dirtmover.

Tinnin Droo and Nap Socker were working at their smelter; it leapt up like a live thing, they say.... They don't think Socker's going to pull through, he was burned so bad."

Her blue eyes narrowed, troubled and darkly angry. "They always did say the Listeners had some kind of special power. I never heard of this kind of thing, never. They-the Oldtimers-say there used to be these Force storms, a hundred, two hundred years ago."

"The Oldtimers say," said Gerney Caslo with a sneer. "Like they say their Healers can cure a man of everything from petal fever to a broken leg just by laying hands on him." He looked Luke up and down again.

"When'd you meet these Therans, friend. And what was they up to?"

Luke shook his head. "They attacked me with lances and pellet rifles when my ship came down, that's all," he said. "I escaped."

Six hours before the attack on the gun station.