Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambley

  free See-Three unit and an astromech with nobody's name on them."

  He fished in his sporran again, and brought out a red-burnished

  twenty-credit cylinder, which he dropped into the half-full basket of

  credits on top of Artoo's cap. "Buy your tickets in a human name--Igpek

  Droon really is a small-time trader, if you want to use his--and get

  yourselves out of here. Good luck. Thanks for the music."

  There was another crescendo of mayhem, closer this time, and with it the

  bass roar of ion cannons. Yarbolk Yemm shifted to the front of his belt the

  small recording devices he wore, and scampered off across the bridge in the

  direction of the noise, a bright, wet little form of pink-and-blue silk and

  matted fur. A moment later combatants came pouring out of the narrow street

  visible some twenty meters farther down the canal, a knot of uniformed

  Drovians, a couple of humans, and a Ho'Din all defending themselves against

  a much larger contingent of

  differently uniformed Drovians, whose shaved crania bore long topknots in

  which random shapes of colored plastic and rubber had been braided--animal

  totems, Threepio's programming informed him, and a lively trade item from

  the larger interplanetary corporations seeking to purchase the bulk protein

  from the Gopso'o slug ranches.

  "Good gracious!" exclaimed the protocol droid. "Artoo, that's Captain Solo!"

  Heavily armed and aided by strategic betrayals of the outlying guard

  stations, the Gopso'o clansmen poured into the town. In the enclaves within

  Bagsho itself where the Gopso'o lived in low-paid, ill-educated obscurity,

  they emerged from their foul-water tenements with new weapons in their

  hands, shouting the names of their murdered ancestors and of the Twenty-Five

  Personifications of Virtue and firing on their oppressors and anyone they

  associated with their oppressors.

  "Stinkin' scumtoes," growled Sergeant Hral Piksoar, voice nasal and bubbly

  around the zwil plug because its pincers were fully occupied with the ion

  cannon it was trying to site. "Well, you better be proud of your handiwork,

  Solo . . ."

  "Me proud?" yelped Solo, and flattened behind the corner of an alley wall to

  return fire. "I never even heard of Nim Drovis until last week!" Down in

  this district the canals hadn't been disinfected for weeks. At the sound of

  voices and the trample of feet, the scummy, rain-pocked waters bulged and

  surged, and Han could see the molds beginning to emerge, glistening vilely

  in the dim reflection of street-lamps blocks away.

  "Republic'll send us troops, they said. No need to have big standing armies.

  The festerin' Republic will help out if there's need. Well, we sent for

  troops, pal . . ."

  "Captain Solo had nothing to do with the dispatch of emergency forces," put

  in Dr. Oolos severely. He leaned a long viridian arm around the corner and

  popped off four or five shots at almost complete ran-dom--Han guessed the

  physician had never had a weapon in his hands in his life--and ducked back

  under a storm of return fire. "There is a prague in the military bases of

  this sector . . ."

  "All I know is your festerin' Republic said they'd be here, and they

  festerin' ain't." Hral Piksoar cursed as laser fire clipped the back of its

  rearmost tentacle. "And where have your patrols been that that kind of

  armament's gettin' through, hanh? Those maggot suckers got canister guns,

  for the love of Truth and Beauty!" It spit a yellowish stream of zwil.

  "Lando!" Han thumbed the toggle on the comlink, keeping a worried eye on the

  molds creeping toward them in a slobbering orange line.

  "We're on our way back. The Gopso'o are overrunning this whole sector.

  Alert the port guards if they don't know already and tell 'em we're coming

  through. Have the Falcon ready for liftoff the minute we're on board."

  "What the blue blazes is goin' on." yelled Lando's distracted voice back.

  "We already know about the Gopso'o, old buddy, we just got done drivin' 'em

  off the docking pads. You better get here in the next ten minutes or there

  ain't gonna be liftoff."

  Solo cursed, and fired a blast of hot plasma at the oncoming molds, which

  melted in an unbelievably foul-smelling sizzle under the blast itself and

  kept right on coming. At the head of the alley, Hral Piksoar and its fellow

  troopers were holding their own, though two were down, Dr. Oolos plastering

  in synthflesh and cauterizing arteries with grim speed. It would be fairly

  simple, thought Han, for himself or the long-legged Ho'Din to dash, jump,

  and spring through the mottled field of advancing molds--they moved in

  clumps, and an agile human could get through between them if he or she kept

  moving--leaving the bottom-heavy Drovians behind. By the same token, once

  they were through the molds and across the canal--there was a ramshackle

  plank bridge about ten meters farther down--the oncoming Gopso'o would be

  too slow and heavyset to pursue through the molds.

  His eyes went immediately to the high walls that hemmed them in.

  Since from time immemorial there had never been a day on Nim Drovis without

  torrential rain, the architecture of Bagsho was of a solid order, heavy

  stone walls broken by lines of the thick timbers that supported additional

  floors. Even in these shoddy tenement districts by the Thousand Stinking

  Ditches, this type of building prevailed, the residents using the round,

  projecting ends of the floor timbers as fastening points for balconies,

  plank gardens, and bird traps. Han tore the length of emergency cable from

  his belt, primed the stubby firing tube, and shot

  the cable hook upward, to lodge in a timber some five meters down the alley

  and nearly that distance above the mold-crawling pavement.

  "Can you swing?" he yelled to Hral Piksoar, pointing to the low balcony

  above the canal bank beyond the advancing molds and close to the plank

  bridge.

  The sergeant regarded the thin cable with extreme doubt--Drovi-ans averaged

  twice the weight of moderately sized adult humansbut Han said, "It's tested

  at a thousand."

  "What about my pals?" Hral Piksoar nodded back to the two downed troopers.

  "Are you kidding, Sarge." said the larger of the two, struggling to sit up.

  "Between the slime-festering Gopso'o and them molds, believe me, I'll try

  it. I got one good tentacle still."

  At their weight, Drovians are not good acrobats, but by scrambling up a

  makeshift heap of boards, broken doors, and furniture looted from the ground

  floor of one of the buildings opening into the alleyway, they could get

  enough height to make the swing to a low balcony, and thence clamber down

  and across the plank bridge. There was no problem of them throwing back the

  weighted end of the cable to the next swinger--Drovian tentacles are like

  mechanical pistons and with that many different sensory devices on their

  bodies, their aim is exceptional.

  Han and Dr. Oolos went last, maintaining cover fire against the Gopso'o who

  maneuvered, crouching, everywhere on the street outside and on the balconies

  of the various tenements above street level. It would only be a matter of


  time, Han knew, before they made their way through the mazes of alleys and

  tenements to surround the retreating party; only a matter of time, he

  reflected dourly, before the masses of advancing molds grew too thick and

  too insistent to be driven back.

  Since their first run-in with the Gopso'o, every summons Hral Piksoar had

  sent out for reinforcements had been met with, "We'll be there when we can."

  A polite euphemism, Han knew, for "You're on your own, pal."

  Laser fire skinned the wall above him, tearing his face with burning chips

  of rock. He aimed for the muzzle flash but didn't know whether he scored. No

  body fell from the balcony where it had originated, but no return fire came,

  either. Behind him, Dr. Oolos yelled, "Solo!"

  The last Drovian had swung to safety. The molds were thick over the street

  now, churning sluggishly, the whole enclosed seam of the alley rank with

  oozing digestive acids and with the smoke of charring where the Drovians

  were forcing them to keep their distance. "Can you make it?" yelled Solo.

  After the physician had volunteered to escort him back to the docking

  bay--Solo suspected out of a very real fear that the Drovian troops would

  abandon him in the event of an attack--he'd hate to see the Ho'Din miss his

  grip and have the flesh burned off his bones by carnivorous fungi.

  Dr. Oolos fired off a last shot at the molds that were now,, only fractions

  of a meter from his and Solo's boots. He caught the end of the cable the

  waiting Drovians had flung to him, clambered up the pile of broken

  furnishings. "I can but try."

  "This way!" insisted Threepio, pausing in the mouth of one of the warren of

  noisome, unpaved alleyways between the end of the bridge where they had

  parted from Yarbolk, and the spot where they had last seen Solo and his

  party duck around a corner. "I can hear the shooting!"

  Artoo made no reply. He could have remarked that there was shooting all over

  the district now--the shrill, zapping whine of hand blasters, the

  unmistakable crunch of Caspel cannister shot, the vibrant roar of ion

  cannons and blaster rifles--but did not. He only set off determinedly across

  a small, muddy square.

  "Artoo, don't be foolish!" cried the protocol droid, deeply distressed.

  "Oh, dear, I'm afraid those circuits we couldn't get out of you on the Pure

  Sabacc have disrupted your directional system! That alley won't take you

  anywhere near where we last saw`' Captain Solo!"

  Nevertheless, he toddled in pursuit of the determined astromech, well aware

  that on his own he did not possess the information necessary to facilitate

  Her Excellency's rescue. It was his responsibility to deliver Artoo safe and

  sound to Captain Solo whether Artoo cooperated or not.

  And to his great surprise, the next corner they rounded showed them Solo,

  the tall Ho'Din, and the Drovian troops, just pelting across a plank bridge

  while a much larger force of Gopso'o fired at them futilely from the other

  side of an alleyway choked with slobbering, aggressive

  orange and yellow fungi, like a knee-deep river of mucus between the

  confining alley walls.

  Unfortunately, Artoo had led them out of the maze several meters too far up

  the alley, so that the Gopso'o, the molds, and the width of the canal lay

  between the two droids and the fleeing Drovians. Amid a welter of blaster

  fire Threepio called out, "Captain Solo! Captain Solo!"

  but such were the vocal volume modulations necessary for a protocol droid,

  his words did not carry over the razor-wire shriek of the blasters.

  Even as Threepio was trying to ascertain how to get through the Gopso'o and

  the molds--which though they could not digest the two droids they would

  certainly gum up their means of locomotion--Solo, who was in the rear, made

  it across the plank bridge and turned the cutting ray of his blaster on the

  jerry-built catwalk, exploding it in a dazzle of flame and dropping it into

  the canal.

  Solo, the Ho'Din, and the Drovians disappeared at a run down the narrow

  street beyond.

  What ensued reminded Threepio of nothing so much as an obstacle course of

  the sort invented by military computers to test the reflexes of humans and

  droids--such droids as were specially fitted for military usage, he

  reflected bitterly. Artoo, who seemed to know where he was going or to think

  he did, led the way' around corners, across tiny squares where recent shell

  holes from grenades or cannister shot were rapidly filling with muddy

  rainwater, down narrow walkways above canals oozing with purulent, creeping

  life. And everywhere there was shooting, small bands of topknotted or

  nontopknotted natives of Nim Drovis firing at one another from doorways and

  balconies, groups of them looting burning stores and houses with the oily

  smoke thick in the air.

  Bodies lay in the street, soaked with rain and half-covered, some of them,

  with slowly feeding molds. In places the narrow streets were so torn up by

  blaster shot and grenades that the underlying dirt, soaked with the pouring

  gray' rain, made an impassable soup of muck. In others, barricades had been

  erected of furniture, broken paving stones, and timbers, sometimes occupied

  by combatants of one side or the other locked in deadly blaster duels,

  sometimes festooned only with the dead.

  "We have to find Captain Solo," nattered Threepio, catching his balance on

  the wall of a narrow through-passage where the flooded goo came up to his

  precisely articulated knees. "He will be here in search of Her Excellency,

  of course. The Council must know by this time that something has befallen

  her. Even without free communication, he'll be searching the sector."

  Artoo, brown as if painted with a slurry of mud, tweeted in response.

  "The docking bays!" cried Threepio. "Artoo! You're a genius! Of course

  that's where they'll be going!"

  They reached the docking bays only moments after the advancing Gopso'o

  closed in around the spaceport facilities. Blaster fire splattered hot and

  vicious among the wide, sheltered permacrete pads. In places the Drovian

  troops had set up ion cannons, driving the Gopso'o back or holding them to

  the few pads they'd managed to take over. Artoo stolidly led the way along

  walls scorched by waves of smoking plasma, through baggage tunnels, and

  under temporary plastic shelters burning in clouds of stinking smoke.

  Threepio cried, "There!" as they emerged into the sheltered cargo porch

  fronting the wide permacrete space of a bay, where the familiar shape of the

  Millennium Falcon crouched, entry ramp down, like a great gray-and-rust heap

  of junk in the streaming rain.

  A spattering of blaster fire tore up the pavement before them. Two troops of

  natives--one the uniformed Drovian troopers, the other a band of

  Gopso'o--held the two entrances to the bay. Those under the same porch as

  Artoo and Threepio were, unfortunately, the Gopso'o, a ragged assemblage of

  ill-clad guerrilla fighters armed to the teeth with the finest of weaponry.

  The Drovians under the other porch, which lay at ninety degrees, were fewer

  in number, but Threepio could distinguish the red-and-vi
olet headstalks of

  the Ho'Din who'd been with Solo, and, crouched behind a barricade, Captain

  Han Solo himself.

  "Captain Solo!" cried Threepio. "It's us! Don't leave us!"

  More laser fire drowned his well-modulated voice. Solo broke cover, dashed

  across the open pavement in a lightstorm of covering fire.

  The Gopso'o in the porch fell back--Threepio could not but observe

  that most of them were far inferior shots when compared with the

  Drovians--he said to Artoo, "Now!" and called out to the sergeant of the

  Drovians, "Let us through! We're friends!"

  He called out--for better understanding--in Drovian, a language used chiefly

  by Gopso'o; the ruling Drovians tended to speak Basic, even to one another.

  A storm of shot drove them back.

  Han Solo made a long rolling dive and plunged up the boarding ramp.

  Someone within the ship was surely watching, for the ramp started to lift

  the moment the captain's body touched its end. It almost literally gulped

  him up, like a steel monster slurping up a treat.

  Threepio made a despairing try at stepping out into the bay and retreated

  hastily with a scorch mark across his stained and muddy chest perilously

  close to his power-supply jacks.

  "Don't leave us!"

  White fire poured from the Millennium Falcon's vents.

  Artoo let out a despairing wail.

  The souped-up freighter tore a hole in the rain-black clouds and was gone.

  Luke was still sufficiently furious the following evening to consider

  telling Gerney Caslo to pick up his own smuggler drop and take it to

  perdition in his pocket, but something Arvid said to him changed his mind.

  It was only a chance remark, when Luke met the young farmer the following

  day, to the effect that Caslo was Ashgad's business agent in Hweg Shul, but

  it caused Luke to think. Ashgad had clearly been doing everything he could

  to rouse the local Rationalists to fury. It didn't take many data to figure

  out that it was to Ashgad's benefit to have a private army ready to drive

  the Therans out of the gun stations and open the planet to trade. As the

  wealthiest man Luke had so far encountered, heir to the crime boss

  Beldorion, Ashgad would be in a position to act as middleman for the

  community once trade started coming in.

  Only for a few years, true, thought Luke. Did he think he could control the