Star Wars: Planet of Twilight Read online

  The Daysong folks objected violently to the synthdroids too, of course, on the grounds that synthflesh was living and had rights as well.

  The Theran Listeners, wandering around the desert holding conversations with rocks, couldn’t possibly be crazier.

  Leia leaned her head against the back of the chair, tired beyond words. Tired, she thought suddenly, as her hands and feet grew cold, beyond what she should be. It didn’t exactly hurt her to breathe, but every breath was an effort. The hand she raised, or tried to raise, to rub the ache behind her sternum felt as if she’d been manacled with lead.

  This is ridiculous, she thought. Every member of Seti Ashgad’s party and yesterday’s good-faith inspection of the vessel had been scanned. Of course they’d been scanned. No virus, no microbe, no poison … nothing had been detected.

  Dizziness swamped her. She reached across the table for the comm button, but collapsed halfway and slid to the floor in a great sigh of velvet robe.

  “Your Excellency?” The door swished open. “Your Excellency, I have been attempting to monitor fleet communications, and … Your Excellency!”

  Threepio toddled into the stateroom, golden hands flying up in a singularly human gesture of alarm. “Your Excellency, whatever is the matter?”

  Artoo-Detoo, close on the protocol droid’s shining metal heels, rolled up to Leia’s side and directed a scanner beam over her. He tweeped informatively.

  “I know she’s not well, you stupid bucket of bolts! And don’t you go quoting heart-rate readings to me.” He was already at the wall comm unit. “Infirmary? Infirmary? There’s no answer!” He turned dramatically to his counterpart. “Something terrible is going on! I attempted to get in touch with the Adamantine just now to check on our departure for the rendezvous point and there was no answer! We must …”

  The stateroom door slid open, framing in its tall rectangle the slumped, small form of Dzym.

  “Oh, Master Dzym!” cried Threepio. “Something terrible has happened! You must inform the emergency services …”

  The man only stepped clear of the opener beam of the doorway and walked to Leia’s side. He seemed a trifle unsteady on his feet, as if drunk or drugged. His colorless eyes half-shut, he wore on his face an expression Threepio—never truly good at interpretation of human facial expression despite the most advanced of pattern-recognition software—could not define or even guess at: ecstasy, concentration, dreamy pain. He stood beside Leia for a time, looking down at her. Then he half-knelt and began to pull off his violet leather gloves.

  The door swished open behind him. “Dzym!” cried Ashgad, striding through as his secretary slewed around.

  Dzym got quickly to his feet, pulling his glove on once again. Ashgad dropped to one knee at Leia’s side.

  “Oh, Master Ashgad …” began Threepio, starting forward.

  Ashgad said briefly, “Push him aside,” and one of the fair-haired, androgynous synthdroids stepped through the door after him, and shoved Threepio hard across the room. The synthdroid had the startling strength of cable and hydraulic joints, and Threepio, for all his excellent construction, was only middling well balanced. He went crashing down in the corner, flailing and struggling to get up.

  “Stop it,” said Ashgad, looking up at Dzym, holding his gaze: Meaning, obscure to any onlooker, passed between them that they both understood. “Release her.”

  “My lord, she may revive before …”

  “Release her! Now!”

  Dzym’s mouth turned pettishly down for a moment. He shut his eyes in momentary concentration. Then he drew a little breath, and said, “Very well. The action is stopped.”

  Ashgad turned back to Leia. Artoo-Detoo, standing over her with his single little clamper-arm extended downward as if to try to rouse her, swung back to his upright mode and backed hastily.

  “Wait!” cried Threepio. “No!” For the first time, he had an almost human intuition that this man had not the smallest intention of taking the Chief of State to the infirmary. “Artoo, stop them!”

  But Ashgad was human, and Artoo, though he had a certain defensive capability with his electronic welder, could no more have attacked him than he could have danced on a tightrope. It was something that normally programmed droids simply could not do.

  Ashgad got to his feet, with Leia limp in his arms, the red velvet of her robes hanging nearly to the floor. To the synthdroid, Ashgad began to say, “You’re to wait until the brig is … Yes, Liegeus?”

  The thin, tired-looking man whom Threepio recognized as the brig’s pilot stepped in as the door swished open once more. “It’s finished,” the pilot said. “I’ve launched the slave relay with the time-delayed projections of final reports for both vessels. I used scrap from the active files of both onboard computers. The messages should be indistinguishable from real transmissions.”

  His face was white in the dark, graying tousle of his hair, and there was a tautness to his mouth, as if he had just finished being sick. “Everyone on board both ships appears to be dead or incapacitated.”

  He glanced over at Dzym, whose eyes had gone dreamy again. Dzym smiled and murmured, “Yes. Oh, yes.”

  The man Liegeus looked away from him, pain and loathing in his eyes. “The synthdroids have taken one of the shuttles over to the escort ship. They should have no trouble boarding.”

  “Very good.” Ashgad glanced at the wall chronometer. “It should take about thirty minutes for us to return to the Light of Reason and take her far enough from these ships for safety.”

  The door opened as they turned to enter the anteroom. Through it, Threepio could glimpse Noghri Ezrakh, sprawled on the floor across the threshold, still moving feebly but his face livid with the pallor of approaching death. Ashgad, with Leia in his arms, stepped over him, and over the others, human and Noghri, lying on the floor beyond, the crimson velvet dragging over their faces. Dzym knelt for a moment at Ezrakh’s side, passed his gloved hands lightly across the dying bodyguard’s face and throat, his face suffused with pleasure; Liegeus averted his eyes and avoided touching him as he passed.

  The closing door cut off the sight of them, and whatever Ashgad said next.

  “Oh, do something!” cried Threepio, and tried to get to his feet. Artoo rolled over to him and extended his welder as a sort of lever arm to help him up. “Why didn’t you do something, you ignorant little adding machine! We have to stop them! Guards! Guards! They’re kidnapping the Chief of State!”

  The anteroom door swooshed wide at Threepio’s touch. The protocol droid hesitated over the body of Ezrakh, dead now, eyes staring in horror, then turned helplessly away. With the opening of the door into the corridor he stopped in alarm. Two other Noghri lay on the floor, one still breathing with slow, harsh, stertorous gasps, the other utterly still. They bore no marks of violence or struggle.

  “Shuttle bay!” cried Threepio, punching the code on the wall comm. “Shuttle bay! They have to be stopped!”

  There was no answer but the whine of a signal blocker somewhere in the system.

  He hastened after Artoo, who hadn’t even paused, trundling down the corridor and making a little detour around the dead guards. “What can have caused it? Symptomatic analysis indicates …”

  Artoo stopped, with such suddenness that Threepio nearly cannonaded into him, over the body of a third Academy guard. He extended his gripper arm to prod the young man’s shoulder, and Threepio saw that this one, the bodyguard Marcopius, bore on the side of his head the mark of a heavy blow.

  “Yeoman Marcopius, Master Ashgad has kidnapped Her Excellency!” cried Threepio, at the first sign of reviving consciousness.

  Sitting up, the youth said a word that Threepio knew in close to a million languages but was programmed never to utter in any of them. “The whole ship’s been poisoned!” He rolled to his feet with a nimbleness that caused the droid a momentary flash of envy.

  “I beg your pardon, sir, but the symptoms are less those of poison than of disease,” reported Threepi
o worriedly. “Specifically, my databanks show a ninety percent correlation with the Death Seed plague of seven centuries ago. But how such a thing came to pass …”

  “Whatever it is, they’re panicking down in the infirmary.” The boy scooped up his ceremonial weapon and strode so quickly along the corridor as he spoke that the two droids could barely keep pace. “The engine crew sealed themselves off. I caught that pilot of Ashgad’s—if he is a pilot—doing something with the transmission records …”

  “They’re going to do something to both vessels, something to destroy them!” said Threepio. “They said they had to get their own ship out of range. We’re doomed!”

  “Not if we can get to one of the scout boats, we’re not.”

  Beyond the vast portal of the magnetic hatch, the stars were already moving when Yeoman Marcopius and the two droids reached the shuttle bay floor. The shuttle brig was already gone, a dwindling gray flake in the blackness. The three bay guards lay dead on the floor, unmarked and peaceful. Far off the Light of Reason was a tiny berry, a cluster of minute bronze, black, and silver minihulls, and farther still the silver arrowhead of the Adamantine could be seen moving, too.

  “Where are they going?” cried Threepio, stopping dead in his tracks to watch. He thought he saw something move in the shadows, something tiny scuttling along the wall, and turned his head in an attempt at visual tracking. “There isn’t anyone alive on that ship, I heard them say so …”

  Marcopius grabbed his arm and dragged him up the small scout craft’s ramp. “They’re taking it out of the vicinity of the Chorios systems,” said the boy, slamming shut the scout boat’s hatch behind them and dropping into the chair behind the bridge controls. “If Ashgad kidnapped Lady Solo—if he found some way to poison the crews on both ships, or whatever he did—he’s not going to want record of either ship disappearing too soon after the rendezvous.” He was jerking over levers, checking readouts, activating the emergency relays to open the magnetic portal once again, while beyond the portal the stars glided quicker and quicker as the tiny dots of the Chorios systems fell behind.

  “He’s going to want to say, Oh, they were all fine when they pulled out of here. Look at this.” He cut into the coded deep-space Net channel. Its screen flashed an image of the two Republic cruisers making their serene way toward the standard Coruscant jump point on the far side of the Chorios systems. Immediately afterward the image of Leia’s face appeared, reporting the conference successfully concluded.

  Brassy lights flared over Marcopius’s dark frown, and the cool, neutral voice of an emergency recording began to announce monotonously, “This vessel is in stage two of hyperspace sequence. Taking a scout craft out at this time is extremely dangerous. Contact the main bridge and review your instructions. This vessel is in stage two of hyperspace sequence …”

  “Hyperspace!” wailed Threepio. “Who could be taking it into …”

  “One of the synthdroids. No one else is alive.” Marcopius delicately lifted the scout boat from its moorings and swung its nose weightlessly toward the black rectangle of the portal. “Can’t you shut that thing up?”

  “I’m terribly sorry, Yeoman Marcopius, but my program forbids me to tamper with safety equipment of any kind.”

  The young man made a final sequence of adjustments, lip between his teeth, sweat glistening on his forehead, while the warning voice repeated over and over that it was extremely dangerous to take out a scout craft of any kind. Ahead of them, through the portal, they saw the Adamantine flash bright as it turned, accelerating, then vanished in a spangle of hyperblue light.

  “Where can they be going?” nattered Threepio. “That’s nowhere near the hyperspace jump point for Coruscant. If we can somehow extrapolate from the jump point to learn where they’re going …”

  “They’re not going anywhere.” Marcopius was breathing hard now, setting the controls. On the decoder screen before them the digitalized images of the flagship and its escort continued to float among the empty, lifeless worlds that comprised most of the sector. “They’re just taking the ships into hyperspace, period. Don’t you see? 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 spit-balls 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 for 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 requir
ed 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.

  3

  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.