Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambley

  that comprised most of the sector.

  "They're just taking the ships into hyperspace, period. Don't you seegt;.

  The whole point has to be that Her Excellency vanishes, without a trace,

  after she's seen to leave the rendezvous safely. They must have one

  turbo-powered holo faker working for them." He put his hand to his chest, as

  if to massage away some deep, troubling ache. "Hang on."

  He eased forward on the levers, sweat sparkling in the cropped

  suede of his hair in the doubled glare of amber and scarlet warning lights.

  The small, boxlike craft slid through the magnetic portal and flipped

  immediately down, around, avoiding the Borealis's stabilizers, picking up

  speed while interacting with a far larger vessel, which was ripping along at

  thousands of kilometers per second.

  Threepio clutched at the back of the empty navigator's station, circuits

  momentarily jammed with alarm. Artoo let out a long, trilling wail as the

  scout boat whipped by inches from the bigger ship's secondary tanks. The

  wake of the flagship's magnetic field tossed and dragged the little craft

  like a chip in a riptide. Marcopius's dark hands flickered and danced from

  levers to joystick to toggles as huge sheets of metal and rivets rocketed

  past the observation ports, alternating with slabs of interstellar blackness

  already shimmering with the light-shift effects of hyperspace sequence. Then

  the scout boat plunged away, spinning dizzily, stars and ships and planets

  reeling in a disorienting tumble past the ports. There was a blinding flash,

  far too near for comfort, as the Borealis plunged into the glimmering void

  of quasi-reality that was called "hyperspace" for lack of any better term.

  Far to starboard, as Marcopius stabilized the spinning scout boat, the Light

  of Reason had left orbit as well, streaking toward the Nam Chorios primary

  like an incandescent teardrop.

  "Shall we go after them?"

  "And do what?" The young yeoman's hands were trembling where they lay on the

  console. "Throw spitballs at them? This is a scout boat, not an E-wing.

  Besides, we're too big to make it past those gun stations they were talking

  about."

  He nodded toward the viewport, where the Light of Reason was diminishing

  into the stars. "Just looking at that ship I'd guess it comes apart and goes

  down to the planet in self-powered sections, leaving the main reactor in

  orbit. It's the only way they could get enough bulk or even limited

  hyperspace capability."

  He guided the scout boat in a long loop, began setting coordinates, an

  expression of grim sorrow aging his face. "What do you know about Pedducis

  Chorios? That's the nearest civilization."

  "Well, it can't really be called civilized," said Threepio judiciously.

  "The local Warlords have taken on so-called advisers--ex-smugglers, Imperial

  renegades, Corporate sector mercenaries, fugitives from both Imperial and

  Republican justice. I shudder to think what would happen to us if we went

  there, or to Her Excellency if anyone there discovered the predicament she

  was in."

  Marcopius nodded, and made another adjustment. "It has to be the fleet

  orbital base at Durren, then." He paused, trying to draw breath, his face

  gray around the lips. "Are either of you programmed to handle one of these

  once we get out of hyperspace?"

  Artoo, who had released himself from his takeoff cradle, let out an

  optimistic trill, and Threepio said firmly, "Oh, no, sir. Upon the single

  occasion that we tried any sort of piloting at all, the results were most

  unsatisfactory. Certainly the more modern craft are entirely beyond our

  programming capacity. I'm a protocol droid, as you know, and though Artoo is

  quite a competent astromech, I'm afraid he has his limitations in other

  areas."

  The young man nodded again, leaning his forehead on his fist, his breath

  going out in a long sigh. Threepio could see he was still shivering With

  shock or exertion, the droid supposed sympathetically.

  Some humans were simply not as resilient as others.

  Encouragingly, Threepio ventured, "It isn't that far to Durren, sir.

  The ship should run well enough until we have to make orbit. If you wish to

  lie down and rest, I can certainly wake you when you're required to pilot

  the ship into base."

  For a long time Yeoman Marcopius didn't answer. Then he murmured, "Yeah. I

  guess that's how it'll have to be."

  He got to his feet, staggering and catching himself on Artoo's stubby bulk.

  The astromech rolled beside him, to help him to the narrow bunk in an alcove

  just beyond the control room door. The young man groped blindly for the

  blanket--Artoo extended his gripper arm and pulled it up over him, and

  emitted a gentle trill of comfort and farewell as he rolled from the room.

  Thirty minutes later, when Threepio returned to ask the youth how long it

  would be before they could subspace the Durren base, he found Marcopius

  dead.

  The Force was everywhere, palpable, warming her like sunlight.

  Lying--on a divan? On the toothed, fist-size crystals that carpeted the old

  sea floor plains as far as vision could descry. -- Leia Organa Solo basked

  in the warmth of the Force. So much warmer than the heatless fingernail of

  the sun, she absorbed it through her skin, as if her body had been rendered

  transparent like the amoebic Plasmars of dark Y'nybeth.

  Someone was saying something to her, but she was deeply asleep and could not

  make out the words.

  She dreamed.

  She was in her father's palace in Aldera. His study was a garden room,

  looking through a double line of smooth, snow-white pillars to a small lawn

  beyond whose curved railing the blue waters of the lake could be seen, the

  endless plains of wind-combed grass beyond. The intoxicating smell of the

  grass blew through on the warm winds, and she could hear the muted whisper

  of the wind chimes among the pillars and the soft cooing and twittering of

  the cairokas, the sounds of her childhood.

  Her father was there. She was presenting her children to him, Jacen and

  Jaina and Anakin grown to teenagers, wearing the faces she knew they would

  one day wear.

  "You've done well, daughter." Bail Organa extended a hand to touch Jaina's

  heavy chestnut hair. The gold ring on his finger gleamed like a fragment of

  the world's final sunset. "What have you taught them, these young Jedi of

  the House of Organa?"

  "I've taught them to love justice, as you loved justice, Father."

  Leia's own voice sounded deep and quiet in the chamber's gentle twilight.

  "I've taught them to respect the rights of all living things. I've taught

  them that the Law is above any single being's will."

  "But we know better." Anakin spoke in the breaking treble of an adolescent,

  and there was an unfamiliar, ugly grin on his face as he stepped forward,

  and a light in his crystal-blue eyes that Leia had never seen in waking

  life. "We're Jedi Knights. We have the Power."

  His light-saber licked out crimson from the shadow and slashed her father in

  half.

  Leia sprang back from the toppling pieces of the co
rpse, scream-ing---Why

  couldn't she scream through the clogging weight of sleep.

  Her father's body lay in pieces in the shadow, cauterized where the blade

  had severed thorax from pelvis, only a trickle of brownish fluid worming

  across the marble floor toward her feet. She cried something, she didn't

  know what. Anakin, Jacen, and Jaina all turned to gaze at her.

  All three had drawn lightsabers. Three blades gleamed, red and shining

  columns of power, the light making six red flames in three pairs of demon

  eyes.

  "We're Jedi, Mother," Jaina said. "There's no Law for us. We can do whatever

  we want."

  Anakin said, "That's your gift to us. We're Jedi because you're Jedi, too.

  We are what you are." He turned to look back at the pieces of Bail Organa's

  body, the eyes open and staring in shock, the outstretched hand with its

  golden ring. "And anyway he wasn't really your father."

  Leia screamed "No! No!"

  The images blurred to darkness and she heard Luke's voice. "Learn to use the

  Force, Leia. You have to."

  "Never!"

  You have to.

  She couldn't swear then that it was Luke's voice. The warmth of the Force

  touched her, comforting, but it seemed that she could see it only through a

  viewport or a doorway. She lay in shadow, and the shadow was cold.

  She heard movement behind her head, and opened her eyes.

  For a time there'd been a man named Greglik who'd piloted a reconditioned

  ore hauler for the Rebel forces, back when they'd been moving from planet to

  planet ahead of Admiral Piett's fleet. Greglik had been a good pilot but an

  addict, whose addictions had deepened until he'd gotten himself and

  seventeen Rebel fighters killed in a stupid collision with an asteroid.

  She remembered him now'. One night in a temporary HQ on Kid-ron, when they

  were watching for an attack, he'd told her about being an addict, about

  mixing drugs to achieve the exact rainbow of mental damage to match any mood

  he sought to erase.

  "Glitterstim's all right if you're blue," he had said, his brown eyes

  dreamy, like a man recalling the great love of his life. "Everything takes

  on a rise, a buzz, a life, as if your whole body had been made new and your

  whole future with it. And for those nights when you've got an itchy anger in

  your soul against all the people who've robbed you or jeered at you, there's

  pyrepenol. Two shots of pyrep and you'll spit on the Fates that spin your

  life thread. When you're hurting for the girl who could have saved you

  if-only, Santherian tenho-root extract's your poison gentle, gentle, like

  the sun breaking clouds at the end of day."

  He'd smiled, and Leia's contempt for the man had transmuted to pity, as she

  comprehended for the first time all that he had done himself out of for the

  sake of those easy illusions. He had been a handsome man, bronzed and fair

  like a charming god, but sexless, as most addicts quickly became, and

  without the courage to face a relationship or hold an opinion of his own.

  "But sometimes there's nothing that'll do it but sweetblossom. It's a good

  thing the blossom's not addictive," he'd added with a grin. "It could grind

  galactic civilization to a halt in a week flat."

  "It's that deadly?" Leia had asked.

  Greglik had laughed. "My darling child, few drugs are that deadly.

  It's what they get you to do to yourself that destroys you. Blossom is

  exactly like sleep. A little of it--two drops, maybe--and it's like you've

  just woken up, before your mind is in gear to do anything You just sit

  around in your pajamas saying, I'll take care of business when I'm feelin a

  bit more the thing. But, of course, you never do. Five drops is good for

  endless sitting, curled up, comfortable, thinking nothing, watching

  addercops spin webs or dust motes make patterns.

  Your mind is perfectly clear, you understand, but the starter won't engage.

  Seven or eight drops and you're paralyzed. Awake, but unmoving, unable to

  move, like those mornings when you open your eyes but your entire body's

  still asleep. A good way to get through--oh--days when things are happening

  to you that you'd rather not feel."

  Leia had thought at the time, Like seeing your world destroyed, and the

  deaths of everyone you know? She'd dealt with that one by helping Luke and

  Han escape with the Death Star plans, by setting in motion the events that

  had blasted Grand Moff Tarkin and the Emperor's cherished superweapon into

  stellar dust.

  She'd changed the subject, and a few weeks later, Greglik had been killed.

  She hadn't thought of him, or that conversation, in years.

  But his words came back to her as she heard the soft snick of the door lock

  unbolting and the rustle of clothing just beyond the line of her sight. She

  tried in panic to turn her head and couldn't.

  She couldn't move at all. Blossom, she thought.

  Panic flooded her.

  Someone was definitely approaching the divan on which she lay.

  The heavy velvet robe of state she'd worn to her meeting with Ashgad still

  wrapped her like a shroud of molded lead. There was a doorway or a long

  transparisteel panel in the wall opposite her feet, and the end of the

  trapezoid of blanched sunlight that fell through it touched her knees,

  heating them uncomfortably under the velvet's folds. The wall around the

  doorway was poured permacrete, lead colored and unplastered; beyond she

  could see a paved terrace and a low permacrete wall and a hugeness of air

  imbued with hard-edged, sugary light.

  Clothing rustled again. She felt the vibration of someone grasping the

  carved headboard of the divan.

  Its legs scraped softly on the permacrete floor as the divan was drawn

  backward, away from the rectangle of sunlight, into the deeper shadows of

  the room.

  Every atom of Leia's body screamed and thrashed and struggled to rise, to

  fight--at least to turn her head. And every atom of the sweetblossom in her

  system laughed at her and held her still.

  The dragging stopped. Get up, get up, get up.

  Dzym came around the head of the divan. He stood gazing down at Leia with

  his large, utterly colorless eyes--(They were brown on the ship.

  I know they were brown on the ship.)--and Leia saw that the skin of his

  throat, where it was revealed by the open neck of his loose gray robe, was

  purplish brown, shiny, and ever so slightly articulated.

  Chitenous, not like human skin at all. When he sat on the divan beside her

  and took her hands in his, she saw between the cuffs of his gloves and those

  of his robe that his wrists were the same.

  He saw she was looking at him and smiled, running a very long, very pointed

  tongue over sharp brown teeth. While his eyes held hers he turned his

  shoulder to her, so that she could not see his hands, and drew off his

  gloves. She felt him lay them over her arm. Then he took her left hand

  between both of his.

  The terrible sinking, the slow ache in her chest were as they had been in

  her stateroom on the Borealis. A growing, spreading coldness.

  The seeping away of her breath.

  I'm dying, thought Leia, as she ha
d then. She saw the secretary's thin, dark

  lips part in what might have been a smile or only a satiated sigh.

  Ecstatic, as he had been on the ship.

  He stood and walked around behind her. Lifting aside her hair, he put his

  hands to the sides of her neck. Something sliced her that wasn't pain and

  wasn't cold, more terrifying than either.

  She thought, Please, no more. She thought, Han . .

  She thought, You'd better finish me off you squalid parasite, because if you

  don't, by my father's hand I swear I'll break your stinking neck.

  She sank into drowning darkness.

  Voices cried out through the Force.

  Hundreds of them--Luke felt their terror and despair. Dying, he thought ....

  He thought also, in that first cold lance of panic, that Leia's was one of

  them, terrified and alone. But in the clamor he couldn't be sure.

  His hand flashed to the comm panel, calling up the far-off images of the

  Borealis and its escort. Readouts showed them on their way to the Coruscant

  jump point; a long-distance visual confirmed. Luke debated for a moment

  trying to contact them--he had a scrambler in the B-wing's comm systems, but

  the possibility of being overheard by Getelles's agents, or by those other,

  nameless threats, held his hand.

  Instead he cut into the pickup channel, and heard Leia's voice dimly making

  her report to Rieekan and Ackbar "... successful conclusion to our

  enterprise. We're on our way home."

  Trouble elsewhere? he wondered. On Pedducis Chorios, perhaps? Or some other

  world in the vicinity? Sometimes it was difficult to tell, with the Force.

  It picked up and magnified some alterations in the life-tides of the

  universe, distorted others. Even now, the tugging grief, the cold panic, he

  felt had faded; he wasn't even sure exactly where it had come from.

  He turned his eyes toward the growing violet star that was Chorios II, Nam

  Chorios's primary. That speck of piercing white beside it should be the

  planet itself.

  A singing surge of the Force washed over him, filled him, sieved the tiny

  craft like gamma rays. Like coming in to Dagobah that first time, looking at

  the seething life readings of that strange world, he felt now in the

  presence of a vastness he could not understand.

  No wonder Callista was drawn to this place.

  He touched the levers, accelerated into high orbit.

  Now the planet was clearly visible. Wastes of slate, smooth and hard as