Star Wars: Planet of Twilight Read online

  “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, Callista’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 speeder into gear, driving his mind and the Force against the ground again like an enormous, stamping foot.

  More dust bellied up, engulfing the Therans who rushed from the first dust cloud in his direction and sprayed him with gun pellets and curses. The speeder slashed out of the dust cloud, and Luke put it into a long turn, heading back into the nearest canyon of the monstrous, glittering massif through which the B-wing had descended. The shadows swallowed him in a winding maze of dry wadis, chasms, and cracks.

  He could tell when he got too far from the wreckage to hold the heat fusion of the fuel tanks in stasis by the power of the Force. The explosion boomed out over the empty plain, bounced through the dirty jewels of the hills like a flat, heavy word of thunder.

  Luke hoped the Therans—if those people were, in fact, the fanatic cultists of whom Leia had spoken—had gotten away from the craft before it blew.

  Later, in the shelter of a fantastically splintered notch somewhere near the top of the ridge, Luke saw the white flicker of a laser cannon firing skyward again, like threads of perfectly straight lightning pointed into the dull navy blue of the jeweled, arid sky. In time, their target came into view, weaving and dodging in what was clearly an extremely complex preprogrammed pattern: One of the small bronze mini-hulls of the Light of Reason, detached in orbit and making its way separately into the atmosphere.

  Shading his eyes against the shimmering brilliance that radiated from the iridescent gravel, Luke knew when ground control cut in to guide the fragment. Every civilian Luke had ever talked to—Leia included, for years—claimed that a program was as good as a live operator, but he didn’t know a single pilot who couldn’t distinguish the difference. Not one who’d survived more than a few firefights, anyway.

  The mini-hull came in under the lowest point of the gun station’s attitude, leveled off parallel to the rolling adamant of the plain, and streaked away to the north. Far away Luke could descry another threadlike flash of laser brightness in the sky.

  He got to his feet, scrambled up the shining slabs to the top of the ridge. The ceaseless wind flattened his flightsuit to his body, whined softly among the rocks. Five or six kilometers away on the plain below the glassy hogback he saw what looked like the outline of ruined walls, and against the translucent rose and
purple of the surrounding ground, the startlingly green splotches of what he had not yet seen in all this world: vegetation.

  He raised to his eyes the macrobinoculars he’d found under the speeder’s seat—much-mended manuals and probably older than he was, but they worked. They showed him wind-scoured foundations, long stripped of everything usable. At a guess it was one of the old prisons that had formed the original colonies on this world. He traced the treble walls, the placement of blockhouses designed to defend against an attack from within rather than without.

  Still, there was water down there somewhere. The harsh projections of faceted stone cut his hands as he picked his way back down to the speeder, and he shivered a little in the chill as he put the craft into gear and headed down the canyons toward the ruin.

  With clumsy dignity, See-Threepio arranged the body of Yeoman Marcopius in the scout boat’s small specimen-freeze chamber. The craft contained only emergency medical kits, not even a class-3 med droid, much less a stasis box, and though Threepio hooked the boy immediately into life supports and diagnostics, nothing had been able to save him. The diagnostics faithfully reported no anomalous conditions, no poison, no disease, no bacteria, and no virus on one screen, while the other cataloged the absence of oxygen absorption or brain function.

  There was nothing wrong with him. He’d just died.

  The protocol droid coaxed the young man’s limbs into the most dignified position possible in a chamber slightly more than a meter square, then straightened himself up, made a few little human warm-up noises, and proceeded to produce the standard Service for the Departed, complete with music.

  Artoo tweeped a worried inquiry. Threepio paused in mid-fugue and said, “Well, of course I’m playing the Service for the Departed on full-speed fast-forward! We’ll be coming out of hyperspace soon—if poor Yeoman Marcopius’s computations were correct. And I don’t scruple to tell you, Artoo, that I’m very worried that he might already have been feeling ill when he input the calculations to the computer. It takes so little to disarrange an organic brain. Really, only a temperature variation of half a dozen degrees. Who knows where we might emerge from hyperspace? Or if anyone will be within hailing distance to pilot the ship into port?”

  The astromech wibbled another comment.

  “Oh, you’ve checked? We are on the proper course to emerge within hailing distance of the Durren orbital base? Why didn’t you say so before? Now don’t keep interrupting me. It isn’t respectful.”

  He turned back to the young man in the white uniform—the young man who had been their primary hope of a swift and successful planetfall at Durren—assumed a pose of reverent mourning, and whipped through the two-hour service in one seven-second lightspeed burst.

  “There.” He slid the freeze chamber lid shut and turned the locking ring. “The unit is certified to contain any form of communicable disease in the Registry. Once we’ve alerted Fleet authorities as to Master Ashgad’s appalling treachery, poor Yeoman Marcopius’s family can be notified.… Good heavens!” His gold head snapped a quick thirty degrees as a light went up over the infirmary door. “That’s the warning signal. We’d better immobilize to come out of hyperspace.”

  The amber light blinked faster as the two droids ascended the lift to the bridge. Though the scout boat was set for an automatic deceleration and would have emerged from hyperspace whether or not anyone was at the controls, Threepio felt vaguely safer as he stepped into one of the several immobilization niches near the lift door of the bridge. Beyond the vacant chairs of captain and co-pilot, the line of readouts appeared normal. No warning lights shone beneath the great viewports with their swirling lights and darks of mutated starlight and bent gravitational fields. Artoo settled himself in the niche nearest the consoles and extruded an input jack to the dataport at the near end of the board. He tweeped reassuringly as the lockdown lights flowed from their flutter of blinking into steady, burning gold.

  “I know we’re coming out at the far edge of Durren planetary space,” retorted Threepio crossly. “Durren is a major port. Only an idiot would set an automatic deceleration sequence for anywhere that there would be the slightest possibility of encountering another ship.”

  The lights on the bridge shifted and brightened. The gravity field surged as regular power cut in. The weird, mottled-silk patterns of stretched starlight flexed, lined, and gave way suddenly to the blackness of normal space, barely seen behind the small Republic gunship that occupied eighty-five percent of the front viewscreen and toward which the scout boat was barreling full-blast.

  Threepio said, “Oh, dear!” and Artoo let out a screaming whistle of alarm. There was a flash and a glare, then the whole screen washed out in an actinic blaze of blue-white as the gunship blew up—it must have taken a direct hit in the tanks—instants before the scout boat plunged through the surging whirl of debris where it had been.

  The scout boat lurched, heaved, and cartwheeled under the slamming shock waves and pounding debris. Threepio cried, “Oh, dear!” again as the viewscreens cleared and the vast blue disk of Durren appeared, the space between dotted with sparkling clouds of dissipating debris, silver flashes of E-wings and various small craft that looked like planet-hoppers and armored traders spitting laser fire at one another in battle and, farther off, the sprawling, angular, black-and-silver bulk of the Durren orbital base surrounded by a cloud of attacking ships.

  “Great heavens, Artoo, what can possibly be going on? I know the orbital base is being attacked,” he added irritably, in response to his friend’s immediate reply. “But who would do such a thing?”

  Artoo, still jacked into the main computer, plastered the readouts below the viewscreen with stats.

  “They’re all converted trading vessels.” Threepio pushed the stabilizer bars from the front of his niche and toddled to the console for a better look. Though vessel identification had not been part of his original programming, several years with the fugitive Rebel fleet had augmented his databanks in that area by a factor of three.

  “Look at that. Even orbital shuttles have been converted into fighter craft. But why isn’t the Durren base responding with anything larger than an E-wing?”

  Artoo twiddled.

  “Oh, yes. Of course. I was about to do that.” The protocol droid toggled the comm and keyed through to Durren frequencies. His stiff golden fingers navigated the board, switching from channel to channel through the curses of squad commanders, base commanders barking out orders and contravening them in the next breath, and a spate of intelligence and reconnaissance from the planet itself.

  “It’s a rebellion!” said Threepio, shocked. “A factional revolt against the Durren Central Planetary Council! The insurgent coalition has repudiated the Planetary Council’s agreements with the Republic and is even now attacking the main government centers!”

  Artoo beeped a question.

  “Yesterday, it seems, after the Caelus and the Corbantis left the base to deal with reports of pirate attack on Ampliquen. The major attack on the government center began last night, and they began the assault on the base only hours later.”

  He tilted his head, listening again. Between them and the planet, a Kaloth Y-9 trader maneuvered itself out of orbit and headed away out of the system.

  “With attacks being made on all major ports, interplanetary trade is being turned away. Artoo, this is terrible! No ships are able to come in! There’s no effective ground control! But someone will have to come out and get us. Listen …”

  He stabbed the comm toggle. “Durren base, this is the scout boat from the Republic flagship Borealis! Come in, Durren base! Something terrible has happened!”

  Static growled and whined at him, broken fragments of someone’s voice jarring out of the comm and then being drowned again.

  “But Her Excellency has been kidnapped! There was an ambush, a plague …”

  Artoo swiveled on his axis, all lights flashing, and let loose a shrill barrage of twiddles, whoops, and beeps. The taller droi
d turned his horrified attention from the blue curve of the planet, which had grown slowly larger at the top of the screen but was now sliding toward its edge as the scout boat’s trajectory began to carry it past Durren and out toward the empty starriness of space.

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Artoo. Even if there is a traitor in the Council, all communications can’t be monitored!” He turned back to the comm. “You have to listen to us …!”

  But only static replied.

  On the screen before them, the bulky but heavily armed traders of the partisan forces opened fire on the E-wing squadrons that were evidently all the orbital base had to send against them. The smaller, lighter ships scattered like silvery flak in the planet’s reflected light.

  “Chief of State Organa Solo has been kidnapped!” Threepio tried again. “She’s being held captive on Nam Chorios! We’re not getting through.” He made a few tentative stabs at the controls, but nothing happened. The blue disk of Durren slipped to the edge of the screen, then vanished.

  Only space lay before them. Space and eternity, empty and dark as the abyss of a tomb.

  Threepio toggled the comm again. “Help!” His faint, despairing cry reached vainly out toward a welter of broken receivers and beings who were in no mood to pay attention. “Can anyone out there hear us? Help!”

  5

  As Luke maneuvered it down the canyon, the XP-38A sagged lower and lower toward the ground. Either an antigrav cell was giving out or the fuel that powered the cell’s modulator coil was running low. It was impossible to tell which from the defunct and sand-blasted gauges. Luke muttered sotto voce imprecations against those who would let a good piece of machinery like this get into such a condition, and reached out with the Force to boost the vehicle’s rusty belly over a line of palely gleaming transparent rocks—blanched violet, jade green, white blues, all rinsed-out hues like glacier ice.

  At the last moment he decided not to use the Force after all and applied the brakes instead. The speeder wibbled to a halt in a way that made Luke think there was a problem with the stabilizers as well. After a moment, like a tired bantha, the small craft settled to the slanted rocks of the canyon floor.