Star Wars: Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambly

“She left authorized holograms of herself for contingency purposes before she left on the secret mission!” cried Threepio. “That’s standard procedure. Of course they would need her authorization to establish a quarantine zone, but she isn’t really there! My counterpart and I are the only ones who know her true whereabouts!”

  The two Gotals—members of a species notoriously distrustful of droids, an understandable prejudice given the sensitivity of their sensory organs—exchanged an eloquent glance.

  “But I tell you I was there! Two battle cruisers disappeared! The Borealis and the Adamantine …”

  The surgeon frowned. “Your cousin’s on the Adamantine, isn’t he, Captain?”

  The captain nodded. “And the Adamantine left for Celanon at the beginning of the week.”

  “That was only a cover story!” wailed Threepio, as the guards pulled him in the direction of the doors. “Her mission in this sector was top secret! The Adamantine was destroyed …”

  The captain’s eyes hardened to steel. “Get him out of here,” she said softly to the guards. “Get that R2 as well, would you? You tell them in Impound to flush those microprocessors good.”

  The guard saluted, and asked, “What about the Chadra-Fan they came on board with?”

  The Gotal captain fished in her pocket for a slip of pink flimsiplast. Threepio thought it was a message slip of some kind, but there was no official heading, only a private scramble code across the top. Her eyes narrowed furtively as she looked over at Yarbolk, who was still sitting next to Artoo and trying to look inconspicuous. Then she turned to Threepio. “What’s your friend’s name?”

  Unless programmed to give alternate information, droids are devastatingly truthful, even those whose business is protocol and diplomacy. “Yarbolk Yemm,” provided Threepio unhesitatingly. “I understand that he’s a journalist for TriNebulon.”

  There was momentary silence. Then the captain said, “That’s him,” and signaled to another guard as she started across the room toward the Chadra-Fan.

  Yarbolk saw them coming and sprang to his feet. Everyone in the waiting hall had been relieved of whatever weaponry he or she’d possessed, and in any case the guards were heavily armed. He bolted toward the doors, but they did not open. Turning at bay, he raised his hands in protest or surrender as the Gotal captain pulled her blaster from her side and fired a stun beam into his chest from a distance of less than a meter. The shock of it threw the little journalist back against the door, where he slumped slowly to the floor in a tangle of golden fur and pink-and-blue silk.

  The Gotal captain glanced around her. Under the watchful eyes of the guards, none of the others in the room had moved. Perhaps, deduced Threepio, they had their own reasons for wishing to remain inconspicuous. The captain spoke to the guards nearest her, in a voice so low that only a droid’s acute audio receptors could pick up what she said.

  She said, “Airlock three.”

  Stretched in the crevice of a glittering cliff face, Leia shaded her eyes against the rising sun glare. Wind made her face feel as if it had been chemically processed. From her high ledge she could see back along the maze of canyons, harsh edged and broken as old tectonic upheavals had left them, every surface a mirror magnifying the heatless light.

  If they were looking for her, she couldn’t tell it.

  Certainly she saw nothing. Ashgad could easily program simple tracker droids to her physical parameters: movement, mass, and body temperature. For this reason she had sacrificed the antigrav unit and one of the heaters, sending it drifting away down the canyon as a decoy. Beldorion’s decayed powers might sense the difference, but Leia was willing to bet that even had the Force not lain like a crackling magnetic field over the entire planet, the effort was beyond the one-time Knight.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, weary to exhaustion. She still didn’t know why she hadn’t been dashed to jelly at the foot of the mesa—there must have been more juice in the coil than she’d thought. She felt like she’d dodged, and run, and scrambled a hundred kilometers since then.

  Opening her eyes again, she unfolded the map. Years on the run with the Rebel forces had taught her to read elevation maps. She identified the canyon she’d climbed up, and the two peaks between which she had to clamber to come down on the deserted gun station at Bleak Point. There was no water marked anywhere on the map, so she didn’t know whether there would be a pump of any kind at her destination. Only about a quarter of the water in the pitcher remained, and she didn’t know how long it would take her to get a message out …

  … If the gun station still contained working equipment capable of subspace range.

  Stiffly, achingly, she bent to examine the wreckage of her gold-stamped ceremonial boots, and with bleeding fingers ripped another length of silver space tape to add to the existing crisscross of repairs.

  If Ashgad didn’t have some means of picking up and tracking such a signal.

  If there were anyone alive to hear.

  She tried not to think about the Death Seed and about how much her feet hurt.

  The Death Seed.

  The echo of it returned again and again to her mind.

  Idiot, idiot, idiot. She slung the sealed pitcher over her back once more and started the long, cautious, terrible process of following the ledge back along the cliff toward the high-up cluster of amethyst peaks that were her next landmark.

  She’d seen records of other governments, other armies, other men who had attempted to use plague as a weapon. Hathrox III came to mind. It had been twelve centuries, according to the records unearthed there, and the place was still on the Registry as a Standing Hazard. The team that had retrieved the records had all died, as had the crew of their rescue ship and the entire staff of the quarantine facility to which they’d been taken. According to the records—tapped into by remote at a distance—the terrorist organization that had developed that particular quasivirus had had a “fool-proof” antivirus.

  Are you familiar with the term mutate, boys and girls? Leia’s mouth twisted in cynical despair. Have you ever heard the words human error? Minor equipment failure? How about that little phrase ’Oh, we didn’t think of THAT’?

  Death Seed.

  Don’t you dare. Don’t you DARE.

  But they already had dared. If Ashgad’s memos were correct, the Death Seed was already spreading through the fleet, crippling it as revolt after revolt broke out across the sector and Admiral Larm’s ships moved in. Apparently Dzym could control the timing of its starts if he were in the area or cared about doing so—otherwise it spread on its own.

  Would Beldorion hear her, if she tried to call out to Luke again?

  Her hand touched the lightsaber at her belt. She should have listened to Luke, she thought. Spent more time in training. Luke wouldn’t have this trouble.

  Neither would Vader, of course.

  Panting, hands bleeding, knees torn from the bitter mangling of uneroded stone, Leia gained the crest of the ridge between the two peaks and looked down on the gun station below.

  It looked tiny, hundreds of meters below. A blunt black cylinder, doorless and without so much as a centimeter of transparisteel, set close beside the heavy shoulder of rock that gave the place its name. The original black stone had been added to with rude defensive works, reminiscent of a woman in a formal senatorial robe wearing a shade-drinks-and-stereo picnic hat. She could get in, thought Leia, through those bristling wood-and-metal upper works, were she willing to sacrifice her blanket by cutting it into strips to lengthen the cable.

  She managed, but only just. Throwing the hook from a precarious balance point at the top of the rock spur, with the help of the pouring wind she was able to lodge it among the bristling beams. Releasing the cable to hang free along the wall, she climbed to the ground again, and stumbled to the place where the cable, added to by blanket strips, reached to within a meter of the gravel.

  It had been years since Leia had shinnied up a wall. Once, twenty meters up, pummeled by the wind, arms
burning and breath short and hard in her lungs, she felt a wave of dizziness rise over her and thought, I’m going to faint.

  She wrapped the cable around her arms, pressed her forehead to the black stone, wind crushing her like a torrent of ice, willed the giddiness to pass. Her body trembled with hunger and fatigue. I’ll never make it.

  But she did. She pulled the cable up after her when she reached the top, and crept like an exhausted old woman to the cluster of shielded coils, reflectors, and modulators that rose through the pavement among the jury-rigged defensive works: The great laser cannons pointed at the sky.

  Night brought the dim white daytime stars to unwinking brilliance among the tangle of beams and razor wire and lessened the pounding brutality of the wind. Leia cut through the locks on the doors that led down to the station below, afterward barricading the doors as well as she could behind her. The gun station, being without transparisteel, might well be haunted with the same groping, mutating vermin that had attacked her in the stairway of Ashgad’s house. If that were the case, she would be forced to sleep on the roof, and would probably freeze.

  She saw none of those things, but there were hundreds of fingernail-size drochs in the stairway. Some turned toward her in the muted beam of her downward-pointing glowrod, and began to crawl purposefully in her direction up the steps. Leia activated her lightsaber and flicked them with its tip. Those she touched sizzled and curled into balls of charred death. The others crawled after her, as she descended the stair.

  The equipment in the station was old, but serviceable. Most of the gun coils themselves were sealed, but the controls were open, a simple switching mechanism transferring targeting from the sealed computers to manual. They have to have teaching of some kind. She flicked the test switches experimentally, studied the readouts. The targeting equipment was elementary, but nobody who hadn’t been trained could have used it. Something the Listeners pass along with the doctrines they hear from the voices in the wastelands?

  Why would they want to destroy ships coming in and ships going out? Just because they want to keep the world primitive?

  Or was there something else?

  Sharp pain stabbed the calf of her leg. Looking down, she saw three or four huge drochs burrowing through the strips of space tape wrapped around her legs. Exhaustion and a slight breathlessness dragged at her, as it had after the attack by the creatures in the stairwell. They must be related to drochs, she thought, backing away from the targeting consoles and shining the glowrod all around her. The floor was dotted with the round, flat shapes of the insects. Keep moving, she thought. Don’t let your feet stay too long in any one place.

  The gun chamber was enormous, round, obviously occupying all of one level of the squat tower. Nothing in it even suggested communication equipment to her. Lamp fixtures hung dead from the smoke-black vaults.

  A steel ladder in the center of the floor communicated with the lower level, and there was equipment there, too, sealed behind soot-stained and filthy black metal. Wornout blankets, heaps of arrows and spears, boxes of metal bullets, explosive ceramic pellets, and paper-wrapped gravel shot strewed the floor. Leia leaned against the ladder, fighting a wave of dizziness, her body trembling and suddenly cold. Drochs, she thought. Sunlight will make me feel better. But she realized it could just as easily have been exhaustion, hunger, and the fatigue of unaccustomed hardship.

  Far above her, she heard the sudden slither and crash of falling beams and furniture.

  The barricade! Her heart froze. Boots clumped with muffled tread on the floor above, and the hard white beam of a sodium light veered and flickered down the opening in the floor. Voices murmured. A quick glance around showed her there was no further ladder down—the rest of the tower must be taken up with the power supply of the guns themselves. Though she knew the dark spaces between the equipment were crawling with drochs, Leia wedged herself between two anonymous black boxes, bruised hand gripping the lightsaber. The light from above grew stronger, moving with the movement of being carried, turned, scanned along the floor. Someone said, “Look,” and was shushed.

  The dead drochs, thought Leia. And then, I must have left tracks in the dust of the floor as well

  Her whole body ached with the thought of having to fight. Luke, she thought, if I get out of this alive I’m going to start training with you, at least to get into condition.

  Her cold hands slid over the switch on the lightsaber.

  Light poured from above, and a shadow came down two steps of the ladder, then dropped lightly to the floor and stepped at once into shadows, a trained warrior seeking cover. Other shadows clustered above, blocking most of the light, but a stray beam of it caught a sand-scoured red coat, a whirlwind of smoke-colored veils, the metal plates and buckles of heavy boots. There was movement, and with a faint hum the sun-yellow blade of a lightsaber stabbed into existence.

  A woman’s voice said, “Come out.”

  Leia lowered her weapon, suddenly dizzy. “Callista?” she said.

  The blade lowered, and the red figure before her put up a black-gloved hand to push away the veils that wrapped her face. “Leia?”

  16

  “We are the weapons of the Force.” Callista’s strong fingers pulled the roll of silver space tape taut, while she fished one-handed in the pocket of her crimson coat for a knife. Above her, the iron beams of the gun station’s defensive works lost themselves in the darkness, like a deadly sieve of razor wire set to trap the cold diamond stars. “We always have been, since the beginning of the Order; since people first began to understand the existence of the Force.”

  Leia said softly, “That’s what scares me.”

  “I know.”

  She sliced off the tape, finished attaching a cutout sole of cu-pa leather to the broken ruin of Leia’s boot, and handed it back, folding up and pocketing the knife, one-handed again, with the quick economy of a longtime jury-rigger. The face that had been Cray Mingla’s had changed. Look as she might for the features of the young scientist she had known, the woman who had given up her body to Callista that she herself might seek her lover on the Other Side, Leia could see only the lost Jedi, the woman her brother so deeply loved. In colorless starlight, no trace of Cray’s blond remained in the thick masses of Callista’s hair. Dark with the darkness, in daylight it would be the soft, medium-brown that it had been turning when last she’d seen this woman with Luke. Her gray eyes were mostly hidden in the shadows of level dark brows.

  “I don’t think Luke understands that, really.” Callista moved her head a little at some sound on the other side of the great black gun muzzle, pointing skyward in the center of the station’s open roof. It was only one of the other Therans setting up a small but powerful electroheater to make supper, calling out to a couple of the young women of the troop. The evening wind had stilled. Bé, the troop Listener, a twig of a man who might have been thirty or fifty, passed like a shadow among the riders who spread blankets, cleaned weapons, spoke softly among themselves all around.

  The Force was a dark sea, sounding in the night. Leia wondered if Callista could feel it as she could.

  “People have tried to use him,” Callista went on, “from the moment he put out his hand and summoned his lightsaber to come to him. Vader wanted to turn him. Palpatine wanted his services. Palpatine’s clone managed to enslave him for a time. But Luke is strong, stronger than he knows. And Luke has a single purpose. I suppose you could say that he has a pure heart.”

  She folded her arms, more relaxed than Leia had seen her toward the end there, in Luke’s presence. Her breath made a smoke of diamonds as she spoke. “Luke doesn’t hunger after power. In some ways I don’t think he understands those who do.”

  “No.” Leia had never thought of it in those terms, but she recognized that Callista was right. Luke had never sought to be a commander of anything except a wing squadron. He wasn’t the tactician Han was. At the Jedi Academy, all he sought was to teach, to learn, to further the ways of the Force for all. He w
anted a Jedi Order so that he could be part of it, not for the sake of having pupils at his beck and call.

  “But you understand.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you understand why I had to leave.”

  Leia sighed, a whisper of regret. “Yes.” In a way, she had always understood.

  There was silence for a time, the crystals of the high peaks catching the fragmented glare of the bitter stars. “I’m like Luke,” Callista went on, speaking softly, almost to herself. “I never wanted power. Only to learn. Only to be with other people who understand. But people use those who have our power, Leia. Vader wanted to use you. If he hadn’t spoken of his intention to do so, I don’t think Luke would have been angry enough to go after him, to fight him to the death. You told me how Thrawn and Pellaeon tried to kidnap your children, how C’baoth wanted them as weapons of his own ambition. I’ve seen how hard you try to teach Jacen and Jaina to listen to their own hearts, to have a sense of fairness, of justice. So they won’t be pawns. So they won’t be twisted. But for a long time they’ll be weak, because they’re children, and it’s easy to influence children by love and hate and lies.”

  “Yes,” said Leia again. She pulled on her boot, drew more closely about her the thick coat of rough-woven raw majie that someone had lent her, and walked over to the parapet beside which Callista sat. She had told the younger woman of her dream and of the fear that had followed her since.

  “I want them to be happy,” she said, and leaned her cheek on the wind-scoured metal of the beam. “I want them to be children, to have the birthright of their innocence. But at the same time, I know they can’t just follow any path they want. With their powers in the Force, I have to teach them to distinguish lies from truth, to seek justice the way my father … the way Bail Organa sought justice. I have to … to protect the next generation from them. The way I have to protect the present generation from myself.”

  Looking down at the woman still seated against the parapet, she saw in the lost Jedi’s starlit eyes the understanding of what she meant. Of the darker fear that lay wrapped in the images of the dream.