Star Wars: Planet of Twilight Read online

  “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 lightsaber licked out crimson from the shadow and slashed her father in half.

  Leia sprang back from the toppling pieces of the corpse, screaming—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 Kidron, 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 feeling 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 had 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. Som
ething 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 system—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 rollerball floors, stretched kilometre after kilometer. Zones of broken rock surrounded them, wall after brittle wall of toothed mountains uneroded by rain or the roots of growing plants. In other places the dry sea floors were covered for thousands of miles in faceted, quartzine gravel that glared as if the world were one great cut-glass gem. Crystal mountains flashed a bleached and broken reflection in the wan light of the tiny, faded whitish sun, chains of them petering out into lines of solitary crystal-rock chimneys, like widely spaced sentinels, far into the shimmering, twilight wastes.

  Light and glass, dizzying alien cloudless heights, and among it all, tiny zones of green.

  Luke’s hands played fast through the orbital checks, then returned to the subspace, signaling back to the Adamantine, the Borealis.

  Nothing. They’d gone into hyperspace by this time, heading back to Coruscant.

  Death, his memory whispered. He had felt death, massive death, he thought. His recollection of it was dim and dreamlike, and he could not be sure where, or when, or from what direction the sensation had come.

  But Leia was alive. Somewhere, wherever she was, she was alive.

  He flipped his scanners to their widest range, but saw only the yellow speck that would be Seti Ashgad’s pieced-together planet-hopper, blinking along at max sublight, heading for home.

  His single B-wing should be too small to register on its scanners at this distance, he thought. But it would be best to disappear into the planet’s magnetic field before Ashgad got any closer.

  Do not meet with Ashgad.

  Why?

  Do not go to the Meridian sector.

  Luke studied the scan again. This close to Antemeridian, it paid to be cautious, though by all accounts Moff Getelles didn’t have the firepower to bump heads with the fleet at Durren, or the guts to try. And indeed, no sign of any deep-space vessels disturbed the provincial calm of this portion of the Meridian. Just the occasional orange flicker of planet-hoppers, small traders, light cargo haulers going about their petty businesses between the stars.

  What did Callista know about Seti Ashgad?

  He edged the B-wing into a lower temporary orbit and brought up the coordinates for the town of Hweg Shul.

  He would find her, he thought. He would see her again.

  The long-range laser cannon took out his rear deflector shield and nicked the stabilizer before he was even out of sight of blackness and stars.

  It was only luck it didn’t destroy the craft entirely, luck and probably the difficulty in homing on a vessel at the bottom end of its target mass. Luke flipped at once into evasive action, twisting, zagging, plunging toward that vast glittering eternity of dimness and crystal through a flaming howl of atmosphere. A second bolt clipped the B-wing’s airfoil; and as he fought to pull out of the crazy spin, Luke saw the white lances of light slash upward from the ragged line of slate-gray foothills.

  So much for Seti Ashgad’s information about the minimum mass needed to activate the gun stations, thought Luke grimly. Was that what Callista had meant about not trusting the man?

  But Ashgad hadn’t known Luke would even be on Leia’s mission, let alone that he’d be going to Hweg Shul. Nobody but Han and Chewie had known that. He twisted the controls, trying to avoid sliding straight into one of those white lances of killing light. The ground rushed upward, radiant, burning with wan, reflected sun.

  Blast, thought Luke, as the joystick lurched under his hands, don’t quit on me now.

  There was enough play in the remaining stabilizer to land without killing himself—just. The antigrav cradles were still okay. But when he leveled off he’d be a better target. He zagged right, left, dropped instinctively as a beam slicked over his head. Those were live gunners, they had to be. No autostation had that kind of response flexibility. Live gunners who knew what they were doing.

  Huge cliffs; mountains; towering, terrifying, bare monuments of basalt and crystals yawned fathomless below him. He plunged the big fighter down among them, veered through narrowing chasms as a laser bolt splintered a black column of rock a thousand feet high to his left and rained the craft with fragments. The steady, howling winds of the higher atmosphere turned to random hurricanes that smote him from every canyon and crevice. With its long ventral airfoil the B-wing was almost impossible to control. Luke pulled into a level slide, barely avoiding another bolt and a toothed crag of what looked like gray striated quartz, the glare of the sunlight from a million million mirrors nearly blinding.

  He was out of range of the gun stations, hidden in the mountains, plunging down a long, scintillated canyon toward the wasteland beyond. The stabilizer went, and Luke forced the controls over, reached out with his mind to touch the Force, nudge the crazily plunging craft away from the rock walls, past the jutting towers and razor-ridged hogbacks of stone, heading for the blue notch of the canyon mouth.

  Too low. No altitude. He’d never …

  He put out all his will, all the strength of the Force, to lift the B-wing over the last ridge of rose-gold shining glass, edge it down, down …

  Wind slapped him like a monster hand. The B-wing veered wildly, then the airfoil scraped and tore on the pebbled wilderness beyond the canyon. Rocks and dust and fragments of crystal enveloped him in a whirlwind of heat. Shaken nearly out of his bones, Luke held the controls steady, fighting to see, hoping there was nothing ahead of him but more level gravel.

  There was. A transparent boulder the size of a speeder caught what was left of the airfoil. The whole craft slewed sideways, rolled, the delicate S-foils buckling and snapping. Luke feared for one heart-tearing second that his seat restraint would give way, and he’d break his neck on the console. The belts held—there was an explosion of sealant and crash foam—the B-wing rolled twice more, like a barrel, and came to a stop up against something that sent up another splintering cloud of fragments and dust.


  Then stillness, the moaning of the wind, and the dying pitter of pebbles raining down on the laser-cracked hull.

  “Here, Your Excellency.”

  Strong hands helped Leia sit up, put a cup into hers, held it steady while she drank. “How are you feeling?”

  She blinked. The divan had been moved out onto the terrace. Weak, strangely colored sunlight lay in mosaics of glassy brightness across the cinder-colored permacrete walls of the house that loomed over them, glinted on the treeless lunacy of the heaped stone ridges, columns, pinnacles, and buttresses that dwarfed the house on three sides and framed, on the fourth, eternities of flashing gravel, as if the sea had sunk away long ago and left its foam solidified into salt and glass.

  It must be the crystals that pick up and reflect the sunlight, thought Leia, looking around at the huge outcrops of them embedded everywhere in the rocks of the mountains. The small sun gave only thready light in cobalt oceans of sky. Dim stars shone even in the presence of its glow. Because of the light thrown back by the rocks, there seemed to be no shadows anywhere, or a confusing multiplicity of watered ones. The dry air tightened her face, as it had not in the moister mini-climate of the house.

  She turned from those bizarre distances to meet the anxious dark eyes of the man who sat on the divan at her side.

  It was Seti Ashgad’s pilot.

  A nice man, she thought at once. He reminded her a little of the pilot Greglik for some reason, though the physical appearance could not have been more dissimilar. Of medium height and slender build, this man had a sort of saturnine darkness to him in utter contrast with the Rebel pilot’s flamboyant good looks. Maybe it was the nose—an elegant aquiline—or the battered, deeply woven wrinkles around the eyes that spoke of a life lived very hard.

  More probably, she thought, it was something in the expression of the eyes. Odd again, to think of the daredevil Greglik. This man’s eyes were the eyes of one who wouldn’t harm so much as an insect or stand up to someone who was taking shameless advantage of him for fear of hurt feelings. An escaper, she thought. Not escape into drugs—he hadn’t Greglik’s unhealthy complexion—but escape by simply not being there if he could manage to get away.