Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambley

risk of telltale debris. And what do you care, anyway?" Dymurra paid for the

  synthdroids, not you."

  "And that makes it all right?" Ashgad turned impatiently from the railing to

  face the huge, reclining shape. "With an attitude like that, it's no wonder

  you're no longer ruling this territory, Beldorion."

  "Anyway," rumbled Beldorion cryptically, "the price is about to come down on

  them, isn't it? And what's three hundred thousand credits, if you can get

  rid of all evidence of where Her Excellency is and what became of her?" Once

  Rieekan goes into a coma, the Council's going to be chasing its tail for

  days, each member trying to keep the next from being named successor."

  He swelled up a little and produced a burp of cosmic proportions, leaking

  green drool from his mouth and releasing a vast breath of gases that Leia

  could smell from the terrace above. He rolled a little and delved with one

  tiny, muscular hand into a washtub-size porcelain bowl of some kind of

  pink-and-orange snack food that rested on the duvet at his side. Even Ashgad

  turned his face aside in disgust.

  "And don't speak to me about not ruling this Force-benighted planet

  anymore," the Hutt added, around a mouthful of small, squirming things.

  "No one forced me--me, Beldorion the Splendid, geldorion of the Ruby

  Eyes--to retire. I ruled this world longer than your petty Empire existed,

  and I ruled it well."

  He shoved another handful of whatever it was into his enormous mouth.

  Some of it escaped and made it nearly to the edge of his duvet before he

  tongued it up. "So don't tell me I was too wasteful or too lazy to know what

  I'm talking about." He extended one hand, and Leia felt it.

  The Force.

  A silver cup, probably kept in some kind of cooling bowl under the gazebo's

  black shade, floated into sight and drifted across toward the stubby,

  outstretched yellow fingers with their golden rings.

  And all around her, Leia felt the air change, as if the iridescent sunlight

  had thickened or changed its composition Itchy, swirling, angry.

  Beldorion the Hutt had been trained as a Jedi.

  And against his use of the Force, there was a stirring, a reaction, a

  movement in the Force itself that Leia, though only marginally adept with

  her Jedi powers, felt like sandpaper on the inside of her skull.

  Leia's knees felt weak, and she retreated to the divan again, catching the

  head of it for balance, shivering within the garnet weight of the state

  robe.

  The Borealis, sent into hyperspace blind and unprogrammed, never to emerge

  .... But if what Dzym said was true, if the Death Seed plague had been on

  board, that was just as well.

  She had had the Death Seed. She shook her head. It was impossible, according

  to the records no one recovered.

  And Minister Rieekan, her second-in-command in the Council . . When Rieekan

  goes into his coma . . .

  I have to warn him. I have to warn someone . . .

  She dropped onto the divan, shaking in every limb with weakness and shock.

  Panic and rage struggled against the thickness of the sweet-blossom that

  clogged her brain, a fury to escape, to outwit them.

  And the drug whispered its reply, Of course you should. But not just now.

  Something in the pocket of her robe pressed into her thigh, hard and

  uncomfortable. Leia frowned, trying to recall what she'd carried with her in

  the garment's bulky folds to the meeting with Ashgad. The answer was, of

  course, Nothing. The velvet garment of state was sufficiently heavy without

  adding weight to it.

  But in that case, who could have put something there, and when She fished

  and fumbled around until she found the pocket in the lining, originally

  designed to carry a recording device or, depending on who the wearer planned

  to meet, a hold-out blaster.

  Clumsy with the effects of the sweetblossom, her fingers closed on metal.

  It was her lightsaber.

  She brought it out, stared at it in a kind of shock. Touched the switch, the

  quivering laser blade humming faintly, pale blue and nearly invisible in the

  odd, morning light.

  Luke's voice came to her, Keep up with your lightsaber practice. You need

  it. And like an echo, the voice of the Anakin she had never heard, We have

  the Power . . .

  She pushed the ugly dream from her mind. But she couldn't push from her the

  knowledge of what they were The grandchildren of Darth Vader, with only the

  teaching of Law and Justice between the New Republic and that terrible

  dream. She remembered all the efforts that had been made to kidnap them, to

  use them, to twist them into tools for greed or obsession. And all the while

  people assumed that she would teach them better, teach them not to use their

  powers for selfishness or impulse, while she watched the jackals of the

  broken Empire and the members of her own Council squabble and snatch and

  waste time and lives.

  And Luke kept urging her to take up that personal, frightening power the

  power of Palpatine. The power to have it all her own way.

  She touched the switch again. The shining blade was gone.

  Artoo. Dimly she remembered Threepio's despairing wails into the comm, and

  as she slid toward cold darkness, the soft clickety-whirr of the astromech's

  servos near her. Artoo knew I was in danger. He helped me the only way he

  could.

  She closed her eyes, fighting tears.

  I will kill them, she thought, the cold fury breaking through the

  sluggishness of the drug. Ashgad, and Dzym, and that foul Hutt, and Liegeus

  with his drugged drinks and phony concern. Whatever they're up to, I'll

  destroy them.

  Before Liegeus came back, she thought, she'd better check out her room for

  whatever escape she could find.

  The air was softer indoors, subtly modified to escape the piercing dryness.

  That meant magnetic shields on the doors and windows--not cheap--and some

  kind of mist generators in the ceilings. Away from the jewellike refractions

  of the sunlight the shadows were thick, and the massive walls sheltered a

  sour muskiness that no air-conditioning could disperse.

  Anyplace a Hutt occupied smelled of Hutt, of course. Nobody ever liked that

  heavy, rotted odor. On Tatooine, Leia had learned to hate it, though her

  experience of living in Jabba's palace had served her well during her

  negotiations with Durga the Hutt on Nal Hutta. She was one of the few

  diplomats who could deal with highly odorous species like Hutts and Vordums

  unjudgmentally and relatively unflinchingly. One couldn't, she knew,

  discredit their intelligence just because their digestive enzymes were set

  up to deal with everything from tree roots to petroleum by-products.

  There were bugs, too. She saw them, tiny and purplish brown, skittering

  along the densest shadows at the base of the wall and under the small,

  roughly constructed chest of drawers that was the room's single other piece

  of furniture. Most storage was in wall niches, natural in a world where only

  intensive agriculture on the part of its unwilling inhabitants centuries ago

  had been able to eventually produce woody plants large enough to make

>   furniture out of. The niche doors and the old-fashioned manual outer door of

  the room were high-impact plastic.

  There were bugs in most of the niches, fleeing even the muted indoor light.

  Leia shivered with distaste as she shut the doors again.

  In the end she tore strips from the heavy interfacing between the velvet of

  the robe and its silken lining to bind the lightsaber to the small of her

  back under her long, Billowing red-and-bronze figured gown.

  Liegeus Vorn had worn a sort of loose tunic, trousers, and vest, probably

  standard in an economy poorly supplied with raw materials or the leisure for

  frivolity in fashionable fit. At a guess, whatever clothing they gave her to

  wear would be too big. Every hand-me-down she'd ever gotten from the Rebel

  pilots during the years on the run had been so.

  Moving around the room to search had cleared her mind a little. Luke, she

  thought. Luke getting into the B-wing, sliding the cockpit closed--Luke's

  spirit thanking her for the final touch of farewell.

  She had no idea where Ashgad's house was in relation to the city of Hweg

  Shul, which according to the Registry was the only large settlement on the

  planet. Even given fairly primitive transportation they could be hundreds of

  thousands of kilometers away. If Ashgad had ships of at least planet-hopper

  capability--not to speak of synthdroids--he probably had landspeeders as

  well.

  She scratched the back of her wrist, where a small red bug bite showed her

  that whatever those little bugs were, they were pests. The sleepy temptation

  still lay heavy on her, to return to the divan on the sunlit terrace, to sit

  blinking out over that endless nothingness of glittering gravel,

  contemplating its colors grayish whites, pinks, dusky blues, and green like

  unpolished tourmaline, an endless bed from which the sun glare winked like a

  leaden kaleidoscope.

  I can't, she thought, shaking straight her gown again and pulling on the

  velvet robe. When the drug wears off a little more i'll have to put out a

  call to Luke.

  If Luke hadn't contracted the plague on the ship. If his B-wing hadn't

  smashed into the planet with his dead or dying body aboard.

  She leaned her forehead against the handleless corridor door. I got out of

  the Termination Block of the Death Star, she thought grimly. I can get out

  of here.

  "You're to leave her alone!" Ashgad's voice, muffled and distant, came to

  her through the door.

  Dzym's reply, soft though it was, sounded shockingly near. The secretary

  must have been less than a meter from the door. "What can you mean, my lord?

  "I mean Liegeus told me you'd visited her." Ashgad's voice grew louder, even

  though he was keeping his tone down. The tap of his boots brought him to

  where Dzym must be standing. She could almost see him, towering over the

  smaller man. "Stay away from her."

  "She is a Jedi, Lord," murmured Dzym, and there was a note in his voice, a

  dreamy greediness, that twisted Leia's stomach with nauseated panic. "I was

  only seeking to keep her under control."

  "I know what you were seeking to do," replied Ashgad shortly.

  "The sweetblossom will keep her under control without help from you.

  You're not to go near her, understand? Skywalker's her brother. He'll know

  if she dies."

  "Here, Lord?" Dzym's voice sank to a whisper. "On this world?"

  "We can't take the chance of the Council naming a successor. Until

  everything is accomplished, let her alone."

  His boots began to retreat. There was no sound from Dzym. He hadn't budged,

  standing next to the door. She heard Ashgad stop, probably looking back.

  Still in arm's-reach of her, Dzym murmured, "And then?"

  She could almost see him rubbing his gloved hands.

  There was a long silence. "And then we'll see."

  Luke hung for several minutes in the seat restraint, getting his breath.

  Part of his mind he kept stretched out to the Force, manipulating the power

  of fusion and heat to keep the small impulse fuel reserves from exploding;

  part he extended, listening, probing across the harsh landscape for signs of

  danger.

  People were on their way.

  His mind picked up the radiant buzz of hostility. Theran fanatics, almost

  certainly. He hung at a forty-five-degree angle above the jagged jumble of

  what was left of the control board, seat, and flooring; the tiny space stank

  of leaked coolants and crash-foam. Huge gaps in the hull where the metal had

  buckled on final impact let through slabs of thin, fragmented-looking light.

  Sand and pebbles had come through, too, and

  lay in tiny dunes and pools among the wreckage. Dust made a shimmering scrim

  in the air.

  Luke wound his left arm in the straps, twisted his body so that his right

  hand could reach the snap locks on his harness. Swinging down and bracing

  his feet on the wrecked console, he experienced a moment of surprise that he

  was still alive, much less relatively unhurt, barring a wrenched shoulder,

  strap bruises, and the general sense of having gone over the side of

  Beggar's Canyon in a not very well constructed barrel.

  The locker where he'd stowed food, water, a blaster, and spare power

  batteries was well and truly jammed shut.

  And judging by the angry vibration in the Force, company would be arriving

  in five minutes or less.

  Luke had used the kinetic displacement of the Force on occasion to open

  locks, but the door itself was jammed. He pushed up his right sleeve;

  shifted the relative strength of his robotic right hand to its highest; and,

  bracing the heel of his hand against the crumpled metal of the locker door,

  bent the least-solidly stuck corner inward until the triangular gap was

  large enough for him to reach through and fish out the water flask, with the

  intention of getting the weapon next because he could already hear the hum

  of badly tuned speeder engines and the clashing crunch of padded hooves on

  gravel.

  He couldn't get purchase on the blaster in time to free it before the weight

  of springing bodies rocked the fighter. Shadows fell across the gaps in the

  buckled hull as Luke snaked his arm free empty-handed, sprang to his feet,

  and slithered through the smaller split in the other side of the tiny

  cockpit moments before the crashing racket of expanding-gas percussive

  weapons echoed like thunder in the tiny space, and a shower of high-velocity

  stone pellets spattered the space where he had been.

  There were a lot of attackers Twenty or twenty-five, Luke estimated,

  dropping to the gravel in a long roll to get back under the shelter of the

  broken S-foil. Men and women both, as far as he was able to tell, for in the

  sharp cold they were wrapped in thick vests and jackets, sometimes covered

  by ragged burnooses, their heads further protected by veils or wide-brimmed

  hats. In addition to the scatterguns they had bows--both autobows and

  primitive longbows--as well as short javelins, and they surrounded the

  wrecked B-wing completely.

  Luke didn't want to have anything to do with any of them.

  There are a thousand ways to use the Force in a fight, Ca
llista's old

  master, Djinn, had told her. And a thousand and one ways to use the Force to

  avoid a fight. Luke now used something Djinn had taught her, and she him, so

  simple a use of kinetic displacement that he was embarrassed not to have

  thought of it himself years ago. His mind jarred at the gravel underfoot,

  and the gravel coughed forth dust.

  A lot of dust.

  The problem with that trick was that you had to be ready for it yourself.

  Luke had already picked his line of retreat through the closing ring of

  Therans and was dragging up the neck of his flightsuit to cover his nose and

  mouth, squinting his eyes for what protection he could find, even as he

  launched himself out of the shelter of the B-wing. He'd always had a good

  sense of direction, and Yoda had drummed into him an almost supernatural

  ability to orient himself in an emergency. He knew in which direction the

  Theran speeders and riding-beasts lay and made for them amid a roar of

  gunfire and a rain of projectiles, half-seen ghostly bodies rushing about in

  all directions in the sudden gray-white obscurity of suspended grit.

  The field effect of the dust was an extremely localized one, rapidly

  dispersing in the remains of the dying wind. The Theran speeders lay outside

  its plumy, smoking ring, as grubby a collection of fifth-hand makeshift

  junkers as Luke had seen this side of the Rebellion's worst days aged

  Void-Spiders, XP-291s, and something that looked like the offspring of a

  Mobquet Floater and a packing crate engineered by a gene splicer who'd had

  too much glitterstim. Among them a dozen cu-pas were prancing and yammering,

  the brightly hued, hot-weather cousins of tauntuans whose pea-sized

  intellectual powers made the snow lizards appear to be candidates for

  sentient status--and doctoral degrees--by comparison.

  Mindful of the water he carried, and the unknown distance he'd have to

  travel before he reached civilization, Luke flung himself into the

  best-looking of the speeders, checked the fuel gauge, reached back to

  slash the lines of the two cu-pas tied to the stern, rolled out the other

  side, and dashed to the next-best one he could find, a raddled XP-38A.

  That one had more juice in its batteries. He cut loose the cu-pas attached

  to that one, too--they immediately made tracks for the horizon, gronching

  and wibbling like enormous pink-and-blue rubber toys--and slammed the