Star Wars: Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambly

  The astromech, trundling toward the doorway in his wake, denied any expertise in the piloting of the lumpy Gamorrean cubeship. Threepio muttered, “Oh dear, oh dear,” as he followed Artoo out the door and down the ramp, hoping against hope that the situation outside wasn’t going to get any worse.

  The moment he emerged at the foot of the ramp it became evident that it was unlikely that it would—or could—get worse. The next bay over was in flames, black oil smoke and thirty-foot columns of fire pouring skyward and Gopso’o troops and Drovian government forces searing one another with blaster fire and cannister grenades across the wreckage.

  For a moment the docking bay in which the Zicreex lay was quiet. None of the Gamorreans was to be seen. Then under the arcade a door opened and a muddy, shabby little figure darted through. The fugitive slammed the keypad to close the door behind him, pulled a crowbar from the nearest heap of scrap under the arcade, and smashed the lock. The effort was to little avail. It was clear that whoever was on the other side of the door also had crowbars, battering rams, and grenades. The fugitive dashed madly across the open permacrete, and Threepio said in surprise, “Why, it’s Master Yarbolk from the Chug ’n’ Chuck! Master Yarbolk! Over here, Master Yarbolk!”

  The Chadra-Fan needed no further encouragement. He bolted past them and up the entry ramp, instants before the doors gave way and an exceedingly mixed congregation of Drovians—some wearing the Gopso’o scalplock and others, though presumably sympathizers, not so decorated, accompanied by a couple of Durosian and Devaronian lay-about spaceport types—came smashing through. Someone yelled something about a stinking traitor sellout swine, and Threepio, correctly interpreting the remark to reflect on the fugitive Master Yarbolk, pointed toward the doorway that led to the unburning bays beyond.

  “That way!” he boomed in his alternate alien voice. “Unclean hairy undersize journalist!” He hoped the invective was as acceptable to them as it was informative.

  Hollering imprecations, the mob smashed its way through the farther doors at the same moment a twenty-centimeter shell struck the arcade between the burning bay and the one currently occupied by the Zicreex. Threepio let out a squeak of panic and retreated up the ramp as the Drovian government forces scattered, regrouped, and fired on the Gopso’o who were attempting to advance over the wreckage. At the same moment Ugmush and her husbands appeared at a run. They must have passed the mob just within the other doorway, and they added their mite to the battle, firing on the Gopso’o as they lumbered across the permacrete and up the boarding ramp, an assortment of parcels and packing boxes hung over their shoulders and backs.

  Dirty pink curls flying and morrts clinging to her for their very lives, Ugmush burst onto the bridge, screaming, “Get yourselves strapped in, you stupid garbage eaters! What in sithfestering blazes do you think this is, a luxury liner?” She flung herself down behind the console, jabbing keys and flipping levers with far more speed than seemed possible in hands so huge. “Close that festering boarding ramp, you muck-sodden flapdragon, do I have to do everything on this maw-sapping ship? Jos, get us out of here! Fruck, open fire on those festering Gopso’o—hang on, the lot of you! Bunch of crabsucking morrtless soap-using cheesebrains!”

  She rammed the activation levers over, the engineer cut in the power overrides, and in a roar of ground fire, ion cannons, and retro lasers, the Zicreex was airborne and heading out of the ragged billows of smoke, flak and wreckage like a spinning overweight glet-fruit shot from a catapult at the sky.

  Threepio, who hadn’t had time to buckle himself down or even take a seat, picked himself gingerly up and readjusted his breath mask, hoping that either his robe hadn’t come disarranged enough to exhibit his undeniably droidlike legs, or that Ugmush had been too occupied with her velocity computations to notice. Yarbolk, who like him had been hurled to the far corner of the bridge, limped over to assist him in righting Artoo-Detoo, who had rolled a considerable distance and whose distress lights were blinking in several systems, including one of the bolted-on components they hadn’t been able to get rid of after disconnecting him from the Pure Sabacc. Most of the distress lights went out. Artoo tweeped a wan thanks, and without a word, Jos removed the elastic tie from his long hair and offered it to Yarbolk to tie up some of Artoo’s stray cables.

  “Thank you—er—Igpek,” said the Chadra-Fan. “I owe you one.”

  Ugmush turned in her seat, and glared at the furry little journalist out of orange pinhead eyes. “And what the festering muck is that troublemaker doing on my ship?” she demanded. “Don’t you sapheads know there’s a reward out for him on seven systems?”

  15

  They were there.

  Luke froze, lying under the pitted steel belly of the speeder. Listening.

  No sound.

  But they were there, watching him. He knew it. Even through the silent trumpets of the Force in the deep stillness of the wastelands, he could sense their presence. He’d sensed awareness of him again and again since leaving Hweg Shul.

  The invisible watchers.

  The planet’s unseen original inhabitants.

  Effortlessly following his speeder, keeping him in sight.

  Where he lay under the speeder he could see nothing. When the starboard antigrav unit had started to go he’d prudently set the vehicle down with one edge on a sort of bench of basalt, the other side on a lump of frost-green quartz the size of a hassock, so his only view from underneath, as he rejiggered the generator wiring to recharge the defective a-g coil, was straight ahead or straight behind, identical vistas of harsh reflective gravel broken by bigger fragments and hunks of crystal, and, farther off, crystal chimneys piercing the sky.

  He sensed that should he emerge from beneath the speeder and look around him, he would still see no one.

  He lowered his eyelids, trying to call the shape of them within the Force. But such was the interference of the Force on this world, the sheer magnitude of its presence in alien guise, that he could get no clear picture of those invisible ones. Maybe, he thought, that was the point of the interference to begin with.

  Nor could he tell exactly when they had begun to dog him, or feel whether their interest was beneficent, malicious, or merely inquiring.

  They were only there.

  “Who are you?” he called out, aware of his vulnerability, lying on his back under the speeder. “I mean you no harm. You don’t need to be afraid to show yourself to me. Can you show yourselves to me?”

  Their presence drew closer—or something drew closer, a distinct awareness of their awareness of him. He wondered how he knew it was they and not he, she, or it.

  Carefully, he crawled from beneath the speeder, and stood up.

  Pale shadows lay about him; pale daytime stars pierced the dark blue of the sky. Pale sunlight fragmented from the glittering gravel that stretched in all directions, empty to the farthest shore of the long-forgotten sea.

  “It’s the Loronar Corporation.” The Chadra-Fan journalist Yarbolk lowered his husky alto voice, brought out from the pocket of his singed and stained silk vest a handful of green datacubes, held them out as if their mere presence on his hairless, pink palm were proof of what he said. “On every one of these planets, every place in the Meridian sector where there’s been an armed revolt or religious rioting or uprisings from minority tribes or groups or whatever it’s been … the dissident forces are always armed with Loronar weapons. Not bottom-cut sellouts, mind you, like the gunrunners are always peddling to aborigines if they think they can get away with it. Top-of-the-line blasters and grenades and ion cannons. Look at these.”

  He rattled the datacubes like dice in his hand. Artoo-Detoo, taking him at his word, promptly extruded a gripper arm, picked up a cube, and withdrew the arm into his own vitals. “Hey, give that back!” protested Yarbolk, loudly enough that two of Ugmush’s husbands, an armed guard, two very nervous Aqualish smugglers, and the dozen or so others who shared the waiting chamber of the Quarantine Enforcement Cruiser Lycoming t
urned to glare at them, as if blaming them for their present situation.

  The Zicreex had not even made it to the hyperspace jump point when it ran into trouble. Just outside the outlying asteroid fields of the Drovian system they had encountered the Republic cruiser Empyrean, firing furiously with all guns in all directions without any target immediately apparent—not until the flash of one of the cruiser’s shield generators blowing up had illuminated what at first appeared to be a cloud of space debris surrounding the vessel like flies. Within moments, however, it was obvious that the tiny slips of matte black metal were vessels of some kind, pouring concentrated fire on the huge ship and slipping and scattering from return fire like a cloud of butterbats.

  Since the battle lay between the Zicreex and the outer reaches of the system, where it would be safe to jump to hyperspace, the small trader was trapped where it was. Ugmush, the droids, and Yarbolk clustered by the viewport and watched as the Empyrean tried first to battle, then to flee the swarming attackers.

  “Fascinating,” Threepio said, looking over Ugmush’s shoulder as the captain tried to scan up a reading on the nearby area in the hopes of not running afoul of whatever larger vessel was controlling the swarm. “They seem to be nothing more than ambulant weapons. Don’t be silly,” he added, to Artoo, who had surreptitiously hooked into the console behind Ugmush’s broad back. “There has to be a principal ship. Whatever it is, it must have amazing range.”

  Yarbolk, crowding at Ugmush’s elbow and peering back and forth between Artoo’s readouts and those on the console, whispered, “No principal ship. Just weapons. It’s got to be CCIR of some kind.”

  Light flared over their faces as a bolt from one of the tiny ships achieved target. The fire cloud from the exploding cruiser enveloped the daggerlike little weapons; a hundred white stars flared in the dissipating ball of heat and gases as they, too, were destroyed. The score or so which survived simply pivoted, like a school of glimmerfish in the darkness, and moved away. Black painted as they were, they were swiftly lost to sight.

  Yarbolk whispered, “By the Big Green Fish …” And then, “What are you doing?” as Ugmush moved the levers, and the Zicreex swung around.

  “Salvage,” the Gamorrean said. She jerked one meaty hand at the viewport, where the two or three huge chunks of what was left of the cruiser hung glowing in blackness, surrounded by whirling fields of half-melted shielding, metal shards, spears of glass, and vacuum-bloated corpses. “Lots of stuff.”

  Ugmush and her husbands, resplendent in deep-space environmental gear customized to their species for use by mercenaries, were looting the wreck when the Quarantine Enforcement Cruiser Lycoming made its appearance. Its captain, a much-harried Gotal female in charge of a small troop of fighters and a squad of medics from the Coruscant Institute, had picked up the Empyrean’s distress call, and was not amused by the presence of the Gamorrean free traders at the wreck site.

  Threepio supposed it was a credit to his disguise that he’d been put under arrest with the others. Artoo-Detoo had simply been impounded.

  Now the little blue access hatch in Artoo’s side slid open again and his gripper arm deposited the cube on the table in front of Yarbolk. Yarbolk snatched it up possessively and bestowed it in his breast pocket. “TriNebulon’ll pay me a fortune for that,” said the Chadra-Fan. “More so than ever, now.” He hadn’t been groomed in days—most of the grooming parlors in Bagsho had been boarded tight—and his silky golden fur was a mass of dirt and knots. “Did you get a look at that wreckage? The hulls of the attacking vessels, the weapon vessels?”

  “I didn’t examine them closely, no.” Threepio turned his head to look at the pieces of wreckage that Ugmush had taken on board the Zicreex before the QEC had put in its appearance. They were stacked in a corner of the enormous waiting room, labeled and under a very tired- and crabby-looking Sullustan guard.

  Yarbolk lowered his voice still further. “They’re modified Seifax shielded transport shells,” he whispered. “Thousands of them were shipped to Seifax’s new plant on Antemeridias a few months ago—and Seifax is a dummy corporation for Loronar.”

  “You can’t really be serious.” Threepio modulated his voice down, shocked. Though he was not physically uncomfortable in the all-enfolding black robe and leather mask with its breathing tubes and filters, Threepio found the disguise massively inconvenient because the fabric bunched in his joints, interfered with the delicate operation of his hydraulic retractors, and—since like many droids his balance was less acute than humans’—threatened to trip him at every other step.

  “Loronar Corporation is a subscriber to the Republic Registry of Corporations. Their board of directors is made up of individuals of the highest probity and credentials. They were responsible for a good deal of the armament that made the Rebellion possible!”

  “And they turned a five hundred percent profit in the ten years of active Rebellion that preceded the fall of the New Order. Now the Rebellion had its own financial sources, but not that kind of money. Loronar was selling to both sides, probably through dummy corporations like Seifax. And the Seifax plant on Antemeridias has been buying miniaturized hyperspace drives from the Bith. I have a connection in the processing office. Hey,” he added, snatching back another of the datacubes from Artoo, who, apparently still under the impression that look at these was an order, had been systematically picking up the cubes on the table with his gripper and taking them into his data-retrieval port. “You give those back.”

  The droid promptly spat them out in a line onto the table. Yarbolk snatched them up, counted them, and glanced quickly over his shoulder again at the other occupants of the quarantine hold. They were a motley bunch: a scrofulous-looking gray Wookiee and a couple of Aqualish who held together and kept looking from the guards to the doors, the crew of a Squib prospector vessel who protested vehemently and often that they hadn’t heard about any plague, and a rather extravagantly hued Ergesh who occupied three seats and smelled like the garbage pressers of a candy factory.

  “There have been three attempts on my life, since I started on this story,” whispered the Chadra-Fan, and his four wide nostrils quivered in the velvet of his snout. “Loronar Corporation can’t afford for this to be made public. Half their contracts come from the Republic.”

  “Surely Loronar Corporation wouldn’t frank an assassin!”

  Yarbolk sniffed and jabbed one short finger at the protocol droid for emphasis. “Loronar might not do it themselves, but they’d get Getelles to do it. Who do you think put those Gopso’o on me, back on Drovis? My sources at Getelles’s court tell me Loronar is pretty much backing Getelles’s whole household. The local CEO, Dymurra, lives there like a king: sex droids, vibrobaths, plug-ins, glitterstim, four different chefs, self-conforming slippers, independently controlled environments in every room of his mansion, you name it. Some stuff that isn’t legal anywhere. He couldn’t get it without Getelles’s okay. That all adds up to …”

  “Igpek Droon?” called a voice from the inner doorway.

  “That’s you!” hissed Yarbolk, when Threepio didn’t respond.

  “Oh—oh, yes.” Threepio rose quickly, stepping on the hem of his robe as he did so; Yarbolk inconspicuously caught him by the elbow to keep him from going over. The Lycoming’s Captain and Chief Medical Officer both stood in the doorway: female Gotals, their flat gray faces already turning toward him with suspicion as he hastened in their direction, their hornlike sensory organs picking up the synergistic energy fields that betrayed him as a droid.

  “Thank goodness we’ve finally contacted someone in authority!” cried Threepio gratefully, unhooking the straps of his mask and pulling free the blond wig. “You have no idea …”

  He found himself looking down the barrels of two blasters and a disruptor.

  “Don’t come any closer, droid,” snapped the captain. “Tuuve, get a restraining bolt for this one.”

  “But you don’t understand!” protested Threepio. “You must communicate wit
h the New Republic Council immediately! Her Excellency, Chief of State Leia Organa Solo, has been kidnapped! You must …”

  “Not another one,” muttered the Chief Medical Officer to her captain. “What was the last one? A wrecked shipload of Carosi pups with two hours’ oxygen left? And how much tenho-root extract did that one have stashed in its casing?”

  “I beg your pardon!” Threepio drew himself up to his full height, though he had been carefully engineered to be nonthreatening to a wide spectrum of sentient species, Gotals among them. “I am a certified protocol droid belonging to Her Excellency herself! The very idea that I would be programmed to smuggle illicit drugs …”

  “Whoever programmed this one picked a doozy of a cover story,” remarked the captain. She nodded to the Sullustan engineer who had come up behind Threepio with a couple of restraining bolts. “Get His Excellency down to the impound hold and go over him good. And take down the serial numbers.”

  She rubbed her eyes. Her thin, fleshless lips were gray with fatigue and the soft tissue around her eyes was swollen. When he considered it, Threepio supposed that operating a quarantine enforcement vessel along the perimeter of a sector involved in half a dozen separate revolts—without any centralized authority to back up her decisions—must be an extremely wearing task.

  “We’ll put Enforcement on whoever he really belongs to after this is all over, but for now, tag anything you find hidden in the casings and send the microprocessors down to the lab. We need them bad. They need wiring in Maintenance, too.”

  “I protest!” cried Threepio, as the Sullustan troopers laid hold of his arms. “Her Excellency has been kidnapped and …”

  “Her Excellency, for your information, my friend,” said the Gotal, with a weary, gritting edge to her voice, “just transmitted authorization for our mission in this sector, under her personal seal. I’ve just spoken to her.”