Star Wars: Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambly

  Leia looked up, startled. “But the original Ashgad …” she began, and their eyes met. Liegeus looked away, and she could see by the flinch of his mouth that, still disoriented from the migraine, he’d said more than he meant. He ushered her gently into her room and, stepping quickly out, closed the door between them.

  Leia groped blindly for the head of her bed, sat down, weak in the knees. She felt light-headed from thirst and a little ill from the struggle with Beldorion; glancing in the direction of the water pitcher, she got to her feet, carried it outside to the terrace, and dumped all the remaining water over the railing. Right now her thirst was too great, and she might forget later that she should not drink.

  She needed her mind clear. Is it because of the sweetblossom? she wondered. Did Liegeus mean something else, and I’m reading this into it because I’m drugged? Is there some other real explanation?

  But the only one she could think of for Liegeus’s words—the only conclusion she could draw—was that the man who had proclaimed himself the son of Seti Ashgad, the Emperor Palpatine’s old rival for Senatorial power, was in fact the man himself.

  “Okay, what have we got?” Han Solo swung himself down the ladder from the observation port, crossed in two strides to Lando Calrissian’s station at the long-range scanners. Bands of red and yellow light played upward across the conman’s swarthy features; Lando flicked a calibration switch, altering the flow of the reflections to show the glitch in the spectrograph readings that had caused him to send a flag signal up to Han.

  “Looks like a heat reading on the fifth planet of that system there. Damonite Yors B—nothing there, never has been. The graph’s cooling fast …” He tapped the black bands in the colored spectrum, “… but those are reactor fuel lines.”

  Han reached past his shoulder to punch through a more accurate readout and swore.

  “Good thing I brought my mittens.” Lando reached to adjust another screen. “That’s sure big enough for the Adamantine. By the heat streak in the atmosphere they’ve been down there for about ten hours.”

  Han was already at the main console, keying the course. “Hang on, Leia,” he whispered. “Don’t check out on me now.”

  Planetfall was a nightmare. The whole atmosphere a whirling wrack of storms, the Falcon was buffeted and thrown like a plastene plate in a riptide. Han and Chewbacca worked side by side over the console, fighting ion storms that struck them in sheets and fritzed out the sensors that were their only guide to the terrain below. Han allowed himself to think of nothing, to be aware of nothing except the elusive spot of heat on the readout—the spot that slowly dimmed from orange to brown in the hours it took them to struggle down through titanic gales.

  She couldn’t die, he thought. He had literally no idea—none—of what he would do, what would become of him, if she should die.

  He couldn’t imagine life without her.

  Through a millrace of flying atmospheric garbage, the sensors began to pick out the debris track on the ice below. Most of it was imbedded meters deep already in the long, hard melt slick where the primordial planetary ice had been liquified by the passage of the crashing ship, to refreeze within minutes; a rummage of hull fragments, broken-off stabilizers, deformed nodules unrecognizable already from atmospheric friction. The slick ran at a steeply acute angle toward a chasm in the ice, kilometers deep and nearly half a kilometer across. Han brought the Falcon in low over it, holding his breath as he followed the trail—It didn’t go over. Tell me it didn’t go over.

  The ice slick ended in a shallow vee at the chasm’s edge.

  “There she is,” said Lando.

  For a minute Han thought his friend was speaking of Leia herself, rather than the wreckage of the ship.

  There was a ledge that you could have put a small manufacturing plant on, forty or fifty meters below the edge of the chasm—the drop was unguessably deep beyond that, and the visibility appalling. The crashing ship’s hull had ruptured when it had gone over the edge of the glacier plain above, and the whole business balanced near the dropoff to the deeper chasm like a billion-credit house with a seaside view. A dull rubicund glow showed where the dying engines lay, through the buckled panels and flying ice.

  The serial numbers were visible.

  “What ship is that?”

  Chewie was already punching them in. The Corbantis, out of Durren orbital. Reported missing barely two hours before the Falcon had lifted out of Hesperidium.

  Not the Adamantine. Not the Borealis. Han didn’t know whether to feel relief or despair.

  It was a fight to bring the Millennium Falcon around for another pass, to put her down on the lip of the first drop, a dozen meters from the V-shaped notch where the Corbantis had gone over. They dropped a towline first, using the notch as a site, so that the weighted end of sixty-five meters of megafilament cable hung down the face of that first cliff only a short distance from the wreck. Leaving Lando at the Falcon’s controls, Han and Chewie suited up and went out, following the line across the waste, hanging on for dear life against the butcher winds that obscured the face plates of their e-suits with flying ice, and let themselves down the ragged black mess of frozen cliff toward the dying glow of the wreck.

  Even the powerful sodium glare of the e-suits’ lights couldn’t pierce the swirling murk to show much of the damage on the ship. Against the howl of static Han yelled into the helmet mike, “Small craft!” and pointed at the burn marks that scored the hull. Chewie roared assent. “You see any kind of Destroyer track on the sensors, Chewie? Anything that could have carried TIEs or fighters?” The Wookiee demurred. Farther on, the smashed silvery disk of a shield generator dangled from the ice- and blast-scarred metal in the wobbling white glow of the e-suits’ light. “That’s heavy guns for a planet-hopper, even if you could get one out this far.”

  Chewbacca’s growl rumbled in Han’s earpiece. The Wookiee pilot knew more about out-of-the-way smuggler bases in this part of the galaxy than the average miser knew about the contents of his or her creditbox, and Han believed him when he said there was no place in forty parsecs where a planet-hopper fleet could have put in.

  Great, Han thought. So there’s a Destroyer—or a fleet of Destroyers—roving around out here someplace. Just what I needed to make my day complete.

  The crew they found in the outer holds were dead. Under the white mounds of frost and ice it was difficult to tell, but Han thought these were men and women who’d died during the initial battle. In addition to the ruptured coolant lines and dangling wires indicative of major systems blowouts, the holes in the outer hull through which Han and the Wookiee climbed were too huge for the emergency sealant systems to cope with. The blast doors had shut at once, to save the atmosphere in the rest of the ship, and Chewbacca had to cut out the switch boxes to manually let himself and Han through.

  Beyond, the bodies were simply white with frost. They glittered softly in the dark, hundreds of them, oriented along the corridors like iron filings in a magnetic field, crawling inward to the warmer heart of the ship as the cold seeped through the breached insulation and killed them as they crawled.

  They lay facedown. Han was glad of it. He’d seen men and women who had died of cold, and mostly their faces were peaceful. Still, picking his way among the corpses like some clumsy intruder in his green plast e-suit, he would just as soon not see their faces.

  Farther in, a few panels still glowed with power, candle-dim spots of amber or red. Radiation warning lights were on all over the ship, and a garbled female voice from the tannoy repeated over and over, with the pleasant persistence of a droid, that radiation levels were critically high, and all crewmembers were advised to implement antiradiation procedure D-4 in mitigation. After seven or eight times through the announcement Han wanted to find that droid and hammer it into tiny fragments, but it went on as a demented background to the escalating hell of the search as long as he and Chewie remained on the dying ship.

  There was enough heat now to make their suits smoke
—the gauges on his wrist showed Han that they were just a touch below the freezing point of alcohol—and the dead were not so thick on the floors. Into his helmet mike he said, “They’re in the reactors.”

  Chewie nodded. Night caught on the snows of Hoth, Han had slit open the body of his dead tauntaun so that its lingering warmth might keep his friend Luke from dying of cold and shock. What remained of the Corbantis crew, by the same expedient, had made their way inward, to crouch by the fading heat of the reactors in a last despairing bid to outlast the cold until rescue could arrive. This was where Han and Chewie found them, radiation burned as if they’d been rolled in a supernova, seventeen of them still alive among twisted heaps of the dead. Two more died during the agonizing process of loading them onto antigrav tables from sick bay and struggling out across the windswept waste and up the cliffside to the Falcon with them: One by one, fifteen exhausting journeys that left Han and Chewbacca numb with fatigue as they rigged salvaged life-support equipment in holds originally stocked with the smuggled glitterstim and rock ivory that had been Han’s stock-in-trade years ago. On the last of the journeys to get extra stasis fluids and antishock drugs, Han downloaded the vessel’s logs.

  “Where do we take ’em?” asked Lando, as he guided the bucking, heeling freighter up through the insanity of the atmosphere again. Han stood slumped for a moment in the doorway of the bridge, almost too tired to move. It was one of the few times he’d seen his friend shocked out of his cockiness, quiet in the face of catastrophe. Then he crossed to the auxiliary controls, stumbling with fatigue as he walked. “Hey, I can do this, man,” added Lando, looking up quickly. “You go back there and lie down. Some of those guys in the holds look better than you do.”

  Han gave him a universal gesture and dropped into the chair, but beyond this he made no attempt to help in liftoff. It had taken nearly ten hours to transfer all the survivors, and he knew he was far too tired to be at the controls of anything more complicated than a self-conforming chair. Battered as he felt, it itched him to see anyone handling the Falcon but himself.

  “Bagsho is probably our best bet.” He shut his eyes, leaned his forehead on his fists in an attempt to block out the memory of the reactor core, the huddled shapes of the bodies pressed against one another in the small pockets of heat from the coils. Most of those who’d survived were the ones who’d had time to put on some kind of protective clothing, but there were over a dozen in radiation suits who’d died anyway, blind, burned husks of flesh. There’d been no chance, none whatsoever, that Leia had been anywhere on or near that vessel since she’d snipped the ceremonial ribbons at its maiden launch. His near-hysterical desire to double-check every corpse in the reactor chamber, every corpse in the ship, was, he knew, only that: hysteria.

  But he couldn’t stop seeing her there: flesh burned purple and slick, hair gone, eyes gone …

  He pulled a deep breath and made himself continue, fairly casually, “The sector medical facility’s there, and a small base. At least we can check in about enemy movements in this sector. I didn’t see signs of really heavy artillery but it takes more than just a couple of planet-hoppers to put out a cruiser.”

  “Enemy?” Lando didn’t turn his head—he was concentrating hard on keeping the Falcon from being flipped into eternity by the tearing forces of the stratosphere—but there was a world of gesture in his voice. “What enemy? The partisans in Durren? That crazy wildcat pirate fleet or invasion or whatever it is that’s supposed to be hitting Ampliquen? The palace coup that’s going on in Kay-Gee? There isn’t …”

  Something hit the Falcon like the zap of a live wire.

  Solo gave a yelp of protest and was diving for the control panel even as the lurch of impact hurled him off his feet. Behind him down the corridor he heard Chewie roar. Lando yelled, “What the …?” and Solo scrambled to hands and knees, almost made it to his feet when another impact jolted him halfway across the bridge.

  “Where are they coming from?”

  “There’s nothing out there!” screamed Lando, slamming the controls into a straight-up dive that took them out of the final whirling shrouds of the atmosphere and into the black of space. Another laser beam caught the shields and overload lights went on like a red-and-amber Winterfeast display over the main console. Han was already piling up the ladder to the gunnery turret, cursing and wondering if this had anything to do with Leia’s disappearance, with the dying battlecruiser on the planet below, or if this was just some little dividend from bored galactic gods who thought Solo had had it too easy lately.

  There was nothing on the targeting screen.

  Another laser bolt hit them and the readout showed a thin patch the size of a sabacc table in the port underside shield.

  Solo cursed and hit the recalibrate switch. At the same moment Lando’s voice yelled in his earjack, “You see ’em?”

  Solo saw.

  They were like microscopic dust on the monitor—Blast it, those things couldn’t be more than a couple of meters long! Each was about the bulk of a laser cannon, barely large enough to accommodate a pilot.… How the blazes did they get them out here? Where was their command base?

  Another jarring impact, and the stars veered wildly as Lando evaded. Against the black of space he saw only a quick gleam through the turret ports. Whatever they were, they were painted matte black and bore no lights at all.

  Blast it, they were everywhere! Solo got off a scattering of shots but it was like trying to hit gnats with a smashball club. At the same time his hands jammed the controls before him, ratcheting down to the lowest calibration, trying hard to get a look at the things. “Where are they coming from?” he shouted again into the comm.

  “There’s nothing on the scan!” yelled Lando’s voice back. “No base, no ship …”

  “Well, they sure couldn’t come through hyperspace at that size! Blast it!” Another hit, and the thin patch in the shield was registering as a hole now. Han tried to get off another couple shots, but Lando was flipping and swerving the ship to cover the open shield. Han hoped those guys in the holds were still strapped in tight. Not that any of them was conscious enough to care.

  “Drones?”

  “You can’t send a drone through hyperspace! And that’s no drone shooting!”

  The methane storms of Damonite fell away behind them, a glowing acid yellow disk against the blackness that whirled past the glassine ports as Lando dropped and cut and dodged. Han wasted another couple of shots and had a quick look at something as the Falcon swept through a little gaggle of the attacking ships.

  Were they ships at all? thought Han. Did they have live pilots? He wasn’t sure. They were maybe two and a half meters long and less than a meter through, fulgin cylinders bristling with the knobs of what looked like miniaturized laser cannon. What did they have in there, little guys the size of his thumb?

  “Get us outa here!” he yelled, though he knew for a fact that was exactly what Lando was trying to do.

  The tiny ships surrounded them like a cloud of piranha-beetles, whipping and following every move and quite effectively impeding any chance of breaking into hyperspace. Another red light went on, meaning another shield had gone. There was a perceptible jar, and from the gun turret Han saw the white flicker of lightning spread across the whole surface of the Falcon below and around him as the shields tried to compensate. At the same moment Lando yelled in his earjack, “They’re not going for the decoy transmissions, so they can’t be drones!”

  “I’m gonna clear us a path!” Han yelled back, as a blast of white at the corner of his eye told him the miniature ships had taken out some part of the Falcon’s upper structures. “Straight through seven by six bearing zero, punch it on three!”

  “Han, old buddy, what …?”

  “Do it!” At the same moment he hit every fore cannon he had, straight columns of white destruction flowing out in an almost continuous burst at seven by six. Like a pittin chasing its shadow, the Falcon followed the path of the light, faster and f
aster, Han watching the slow-growing flare of destruction ahead of them and calculating by feel rather than by instrumentation when the last possible moment would be to jump without hurling themselves into their own fire. The little bronze toothpick ships came pouring back in the wake of the blast, firing at the now-steady target following the heels of the light.

  He counted, “One … two …” (This had better work …) The last of the shields went in a flare of white, and red glare bathed Han’s face from the sides, white from the front as the Falcon dove toward the laser ruin ahead …

  “Three!”

  Lando hit it—he had reflexes like a tingball set—and the stars stretched into lines of white.

  10

  “I never thanked you.” Leia stepped through the tall arch that led from her small terrace into the shadowy chamber. Liegeus, who had come in with a synthdroid bearing food and another pitcher of water, paused in the act of setting them down, shook his head.

  “Don’t,” he said, and the pain in his voice, the shame, told her a thousand things that he hadn’t meant. Their eyes met for a time. Then he said to the synthdroid, “You may go.”

  The door swished shut behind it. Leia could see the dark patch of necrosis on the back of its neck, and smell the faint stink of rot in its wake. She didn’t know how to ask what she wanted to know without raising suspicions, so she only said, “Why are you here? How did you come here? Beldorion called you a philosopher.”

  “And I am,” sighed Liegeus. He made a move as if he would fuss with the water pitcher, the covered dish of aromatic and exquisitely cooked insect life, but let his hand fall to his side again. He faced her. “A wanderer. A blot on the familial escutcheon. They don’t speak my name. Alas, it has also been my misfortune to be a competent designer of artificial intelligence systems for spacecraft, and a very, very good holo faker.”

  “A holo faker?”

  “Of course, my dear. It was my art, my hobby—the source of my joy and the material for a thousand silly pranks in my youth. The bane of my existence, now: Beldorion has drafted me into editing and retaping his formidable library of Huttese pornography. Even my stint on Gamorr, ghost-writing love poems for the boars to pass off as their own when they go courting in the wintertime, wasn’t so fearful.”