Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambley

  parsecs. You'll also find the coordinates for the jump point where they

  disappeared."

  "Doesn't matter where they went in," said Han. "If someone found a way to

  alter the jump, they could have come out anywhere from here to the backside

  of last week." He stood up, and helped her to her feet. It was an indication

  of her ease with him--her trust in him--that she had brought her canes with

  her. She took them from him with a smile, and Han felt curiously honored.

  For her to let him see her walking with the canes meant that she regarded

  him as her friend.

  "How long can you hold off the Council?

  "A few- day's," she said. "Maybe a week." The house was equipped with NL-6

  courtesy droids, but Han escorted Mon Mothma to the vestibule himself.

  "We're still trying to get a medical support team out to Durren, or escorts

  to take teams in from the Medical Research Facility on Nim Drovis. As I

  said, the reports are fragmentary, but it doesn't sound good."

  "Unknown?" said Han, looking across at her in the reflected fire glow.

  She hesitated, and in her eyes he saw that it was known. She just didn't

  want to admit what it might be.

  The vestibule doors slid open before them. Mon Mothma's courtesy

  guard-cum-footman got to his feet, a gloomy looking, sandy-haired young man

  whose expression never seemed to alter no matter what was done or said

  around him.

  "You be careful."

  Han gave her a grin. "Your Excellency, the day I start being careful is the

  day I buy myself a foot warmer and a rocking chair. I'll find her."

  But when the door closed behind her and her bodyguard, Han stood for a long

  time in the vestibule, the little red hunk of plast closed in his fist,

  staring at nothing. Thinking about hyperspace. Thinking about interstellar

  space.

  Thinking about Leia.

  Five years since they'd married. Thirteen since they'd met, in the Death

  Star's corridors with blaster fire zapping around them. If he couldn't find

  her . . .

  There was no conclusion to that sentence. No conclusion to the thought. Only

  a darkness as deep as the nightmare of disorientation in realtime space,

  with no starcharts, no navicomputer, no spectroscope, no clue as to which of

  those tiny, infinitely distant lights to aim for.

  His hand tightened around the datacube, and he turned back toward the

  firelight of the parlor, to tell Chewie to get the Falcon into preflight.

  They would head out just before dawn.

  "Sir, I must protest!" The bridge doors of the Pure Sabacc slid open before

  Threepio's determined advance--a considerable improvement over those of the

  storage hold in which he had been incarcerated for the past 2.6 hours while

  the vessel jolted into hyperspace--and the protocol droid marched through to

  behold Captain Bortrek ensconced at the main console, picking his teeth with

  a laser extractor.

  "Artoo-Detoo and I are duly registered to Her Excellency Leia Organa Solo,

  and misap-propriation of any duly registered droid is contrary to Sections

  Seven, Twelve, and Two Hundred and Forty-Three A of the New Republic

  Universal Galactic . . . Artoo-Detoo!" Threepio exclaimed in astonishment,

  as he cleared the doorway and got a better view of the bridge.

  The astromech droid made a sorry little sound.

  As well he might, See-Threepio reflected. All of his access hatches had been

  bodily removed, some to admit sinewy snakes of data cables, some to

  accommodate blocky add-on patches of machinery, which themselves connected

  into at least three of the bridge stations. An enormous switch box had been

  screwed into the little droid's domed cap, connected to what Threepio

  vaguely recognized as the navigational

  computer; another housing had been affixed to his side with silver space

  tape, to pipe information to and from the vessel's central core station. His

  sturdy legs had been unscrewed and lay in a corner, the connecting hydraulic

  cables dangling sadly at his sides. The general impression was that of a

  small life form half-absorbed within a carnivorous flower, streaked with

  grease and glinting with green and orange lights.

  "What in the name of goodness happened to you?"

  "A little creative reprogramming, that's all." Captain Bortrek set down his

  laser extractor. "And I don't give a Ranat's sneeze who you're duly

  registered to, Goldie. You're mine now, like your little friend . . ." He

  jerked a grimy thumb at Artoo. "And I didn't call you here from the hold to

  quote me some pox-festering regulation, either, you understandS. A good

  See-Three unit's worth a pile even without provenante, but don't think I

  couldn't get almost as much for your chips and wiring."

  Threepio considered the matter. "Actually, sir, See-Three units with

  specialized programming like myself sell for a minimum, used, at forty-three

  thousand standard credits, Blue Registry prices. The aggregate of my

  components would only bring in five thousand at the very most . . ."

  "Shut up!"

  "Yes, sir."

  "And come with me down to the hold. I want you to give me a valuation on

  every piece of that garbage so I know Sandro the Hook isn't going to cheat

  me once we get to Celanon City."

  "Are we going to Celanon, sir? A most pleasant planet, I've been told.

  It isn't necessary to return to the hold, you know. While incarcerated there

  I took the opportunity to price your acquisitions to the best of my

  knowledge--which was updated only last week from the Corus-cant Index--and

  the information is still in my memory."

  "No lie?" Captain Bortrek tongued his scarred lip, and studied the golden

  droid speculatively. In the background, Artoo-Detoo made soft whirring

  noises indicative of intensive activity, and the ship's core computer

  flashed and burbled replies. "i tell you what, then, Goldie.

  You come with me and we'll get that stuff sorted out, and maybe when we get

  to Celanon I won't sell you to a travel agent for your programming."

  He stood up, and pulled from a pocket of his embroidered leather vest a

  small flat silver flask, from which he took a drink. By his exhalation, as

  he walked past Threepio and preceded him out the door, the fluid within

  consisted of equal parts grain alcohol, synthetic gylocal stimulant, and

  hyperdrive coolant.

  This was, Threepio learned, a constant in Captain Bortrek's life.

  Over the next several hours, while Threepio shifted the booty in the ship's

  three holds into some semblance of order and Captain Bortrek made notes

  about market value, the human had frequent recourse to the flask, his speech

  becoming both increasingly slurred and increasingly scatological as the

  level of his blood alcohol rose.

  The universe, it appeared, had never been kind to Captain Bortrek,

  conspiring against him in a fashion that Threepio privately considered

  unlikely given the man's relative unimportance. Knowing what he did about

  the Alderaan social structure, shipping regulations, the psychology of law

  enforcement agents, and the statistical behavior patterns of human females,

  Threepio was much inclined to doubt that so many hundreds
of people would

  spend that much time thinking up ways to thwart and injure a small-time

  free-trader who was, by his own assertion, only trying to make a living.

  Still, it was not for droids to contradict humans unless requested to do so

  for informational purposes, so he moved gold reliquaries, and held his

  peace.

  "Now, is it likely--you tell me, Goldie--is it likely that the festering Rim

  Patrol would come after me the minute I showed up--the very festering

  minute!--without provocation--if they hadn't been tipped off' by that

  festering witch-hag ex-wife of mine back on Algar, hunh?

  Is it? I swear she What the stinkin' stang's goin' on with the stinkin'

  lights, fester it?"

  They had dimmed for perhaps the fifth time in an hour, one of several small

  fluctuations of power that Threepio had been aware of. Most of

  them--alterations in the temperature and mix of the atmosphere and shifts in

  the thrum of the Pure Sabacc's engines--had been below the level of human

  perception.

  "I suspect, sir, that those are readjustments of the system as it

  accommodates Artoo-Detoo's presence as a central memory capacitor."

  Captain Bortrek pettishly hurled a necklace of priceless flame opals against

  the opposite wall. "Festerin' droids," he muttered. "Blasted hunks of

  machinery. I was hopin' I'd run across one of them new droids, them

  synthdroids, on Durren. A hundred thousand credits they bring, and I

  wouldn't sell. You seen 'em, Goldie? Beat you by a kilometer."

  He wagged an owlish finger at his unwilling assistant. His fair hair hung

  sweatily over his eyes now, and he had unlaced his red-and-gold leather

  doublet to expose an expanse of gold chains and chest hair.

  "Centrally programmed. They do this crystal attunement

  stunt--CCIR--Centrally Controlled Independent Replicant." He pronounced the

  words with great care, as if afraid of tripping over them. "None of this

  wired-brain stuff you got goin'. They leave their brain back in some central

  location and do what you festerin' tell 'em--six, eight, ten of 'em, however

  many of 'em you want. Central brain. You tell that brain what each of 'em

  should do, and they go do it without givin' you any festerin' lip about it,

  y'understan?"

  "Yes, sir," agreed Threepio.

  "Brain processes it all. Huge distances--you can leave the brain on your

  festerin' ship and go down to a planet with six or ten or however many of

  'em, and you tell 'em, fetch me that, or paste that guy, and they do it.

  They figure out how to do it without none of this, 'Oh, and how do I do

  that, sir?" His whiny voice took on a sarcastic inflection, imitating

  precise droid speech.

  "And they can make 'em like a man or a woman or whatever.

  Doesn't matter. They got a steel skeleton. They grow synthflesh over top of

  it, and as long as they got that little hunk of crystal in their skulls,

  that can listen to the Central Controller, they're yours. And boy, wouldn't

  I like to have one shaped like Amber Levanche." He named the newest holo

  star popular on Coruscant, a woman of whom Threepio had also heard Captain

  Solo speak highly, though to his knowledge Captain Solo had never met the

  young lady.

  He proceeded to describe, in great anatomical detail, exactly what acts of

  sexual congress he would have such a synthdroid perform, though Threepio was

  somewhat at a loss as to why any human would wish to couple with a machine,

  and went on to expound his philosophy of Man's Needs and Man's

  Rights--meaning, Threepio gathered, his own immediate desires irrespective

  of the wishes of the other party. His speech was deteriorating in both form

  and content all the while, but it wasn't until the man pitched forward onto

  his face that Threepio thought to take a sample of the cabin atmosphere, to

  discover that it consisted of nearly 12 percent carbon dioxide and not much

  oxygen at all.

  "Good heavens!" he cried, and hastened to the comm port on the wall.

  "Artoo! Artoo!"

  A quick series of bleeps answered him. Threepio immediately obeyed, hurrying

  to the door and up the corridor toward the bridge. He had gone four or five

  steps when the door, which had closed automatically behind him as usual,

  emitted an ominous clank. The noise stopped the protocol droid in his

  tracks; then he sought the nearest comm port and flicked the toggle. "Artoo,

  now the doors of the hold have locked!"

  A soothing warble. "Well, if you're sure it's all right," replied Threepio

  doubtfully, and continued his steps to the bridge.

  He found Artoo still enmeshed in the console boards, the entire core system

  ablaze with lights like a Midwinter Festival tree and fluttering with the

  soft chatter of nev systems being installed or altered.

  "Artoo, you really must do something about the cabin atmosphere in that

  hold!" said Threepio. "Humans do not do at all well in environments

  containing under twenty percent oxygen. Oh, you've taken care of it?

  Well, it was very, very careless of you to permit the core system to make

  that alteration in the ventilation feeds. But if you've done that already,

  why ever did you request my presence on the bridge?"

  Artoo explained. Rather typically of Artoo's explanations, it did not

  elaborate much.

  "The toolkit? Oh . . . Under which hatch? I see." As he crossed back to his

  friend and opened the requested access cover, he added, "But i'm very sure

  Captain Bortrek would be much handier with this than I am. Oh, very well.

  Which activation switch? Oh, I see. A simple

  backup/overwrite of original motivator settings. still don't see why Captain

  Bortrek couldn't reset your motivators. He's the one who altered them in the

  first place, you know."

  Artoo tweeped apologetically. There were a few minutes of whirring while the

  motivator circuits reset, then the whole core system console began to wink

  and flash again as Artoo did something--it looked to Threepio like he was

  again rerouting instructional paths for data and commands.

  "He's going to be very angry at being locked in the hold, you know," added

  Threepio. "You simply must learn to be more careful, Artoo. We aren't

  designed to . . . detach what? What switching box'."

  Oh, that one . . . I'm sure Captain Bortrek would not approve."

  Another line of wibbles and beeps.

  "Well, on your head be it, but it appears to me he went to a great deal of

  trouble to adapt you as part of the central core. I'm doing it, I'm doing

  it," he added peevishly, bending awkwardly down and grasping the sonic

  extractor with gold fingers never designed for delicate manual work. "At

  least I think i'm doing it. I really think you ought to let Captain Bortrek

  out of the hold first, though. We're going to reach the hyperspace target

  point in an hour, and we need him to take us out and navigate us into

  Celanon."

  He obeyed another string of commands and unfastened the cable lines from the

  gray switching box space taped to Artoo's side. "What do you mean, we're not

  going to Celanon? Of course we're going to Cela-non."

  A pause for more instructions. The central core chat
tered and shifted data

  in waves of green and yellow lights.

  "Nim Drovis? I'm sure he has no intention of returning to the Meridian

  sector. And no, I can't see the switches you're talking about.

  Of course I'm looking!" He bent and squinched sideways as best he could,

  studying the switching box. "I don't see anything of the kind.

  How should I know what a DINN looks like The only DINN I know about is the

  Horansi past participle of the verb adin, 'to clean one's toenails'; the

  Nalros word for 'small hard-shelled insects'; the Gamor-rean adjective

  meaning 'inclined to drool excessively'; Gacerian for 'one who is always

  getting married and divorced'; Algar for ....

  Well, if you can't describe it any better than that I'm afraid that

  switching box is going to stay where it is."

  Amid considerable bickering, the protocol droid laboriously followed Artoo's

  instructions for detaching him from the consoles, resetting certain switches

  in the consoles, and reattaching Artoo's legs.

  Granted the astromech retained several extraneous parts like the switching

  box, which See-Threepio couldn't manage to disconnect, but at least,

  Threepio thought huffily, he hadn't left any bits of Artoo in the consoles.

  "It's all very well to reroute your motivators through the central core to

  get around Captain Bortrek's commands," Threepio said when he was done. "You

  know perfectly well he's just going to hook you up again."

  Experimentally, Artoo leaned forward on his third leg, and trundled, albeit

  with less than his customary speed and accuracy, toward the door.

  Threepio followed. "You'll have to let him out, you know, if we're ever

  going to get out of hyperspace. What?" Artoo had paused in the doorway to

  tweep a command. "Oh, very well." Threepio went back for the toolkit. "It's

  not going to do you the slightest bit of good, you know. We're prisoners of

  a thief and a criminal and will end up peddled to spice-processing factories

  or cannibalized for spare parts the moment we reach Celanon. There's nothing

  else that can be done with black market stolen droids." He clanked down the

  corridor in the wire-trailing wake of his newly asymmetrical friend. "We're

  in the hands of cruel fate. We cannot escape it."

  Artoo made no reply. Instead he made his way to the smaller of the two

  airlocks, where he issued a whole nev string of commands to Threepio