Planet of Twilight

by Barbara Hambley

  Star Wars Planet of Twilight

  By Barbara Hambley

  Synopsis

  In this star wars novel, Leia is kidnapped and taken to the planet of nam

  Corios and the crew of her ship are killed with a deadly virus. The only

  ones to escape are the two droids and Luke. Luke has heard that Callista is

  on the planet, but has no idea of Leia's kidnapping. R2 and C3pio escape

  with a pilot badly infected with the virus. he dies and leaves them alone in

  space. Finding their way home proves to be quite an adventure.

  Luke finds himself on a planet where use of the force has dier consequences.

  For Ole and Nedra

  The first to die was a midshipman named Koth Barak.

  One of his fellow crew members on the New Republic escort cruiser Adamantine

  found him slumped across the table in the deck-nine break room, where he'd

  repaired half an hour previously for a cup of caffeine.

  Twenty minutes after Barak should have been back to post, Gunnery Sergeant

  Gallie Wover went looking for him, exasperatedly certain that he'd clicked

  into the infolog banks "just to see if anybody mentions the mission."

  Of course, nobody was going to mention the mission. Though accompanied by

  the Adamantine Chief of State Leia Organa Solo's journey to the Meridian

  sector was an entirely unofficial one. The Rights of Sentience Party would

  have argued--quite correctly--that Seti Ashgad, the man she was to meet at

  the rendezvous point just outside the Chorios systems, held no official

  position on his homeworld of Nam Chorios. To arrange an official conference

  would be to give tacit approval of his, and the Rationalist Party's,

  demands.

  Which was, when it came down to it, the reason for the talks.

  When she entered the deck-nine break room, Sergeant Wover's first

  sight was of the palely flickering blue on blue of the infolog screen.

  "Blast it, Koth, I told you . . ."

  Then she saw the young man stretched unmoving on the far side of the screen,

  head on the break table, eyes shut. Even at a distance of three meters Wover

  didn't like the way he was breathing.

  "Koth!" She rounded the table in two strides, sending the other chairs

  clattering into a corner. She thought his eyelids moved a little when she

  yelled his name. "Koth!"

  Wover hit the emergency call almost without conscious decision. In the few

  moments before the med droids arrived she sniffed the caffeine in the gray

  plastene cup a few centimeters from his limp fingers. It wasn't even cold. A

  thin film of it adhered to the peach fuzz beginnings of what Koth

  optimistically referred to as his mustache.

  The stuff in the cup smelled okay--at least as okay as fleet caffeine ever

  smelled--and there was no question of alcohol or drugs. Not on a Republic

  escort.

  Not where Koth was concerned. He was a good kid.

  Wover was an engine room regular who'd done fifteen years in merchant

  planet-hoppers rather than stay in the regular fleet after Palpatine's goons

  gained power She looked after "her" midshipmen as if they were the sons

  she'd lost to the Rebellion. She would have known if there had been trouble

  with booze or spice or giggle-dust.

  Disease?

  It was any longtime spacer's nightmare. But the "good-faith" team that had

  come onboard yesterday from Seti Ashgad's small vessel had passed through

  the medical scan; and in any case, the planet Nam Chorios had been on the

  books for four centuries without any mention of an endemic planetary virus.

  Everyone on the light of Reason had come straight from the planet.

  Still, Wover pecked the Commander's code on the wall panel.

  "Sir! Wover here. One of the midshipmen's down. The meds haven't gotten here

  yet but . . ." Behind her the break room door swooshed open. She glanced

  over her shoulder to see a couple of Two-Onebees enter with a table, which

  was already unfurling scanners and life-support lines like a monster in a

  bad holovid. "It looks serious.

  No, sir, I don't know what it is, but you might want to check with Her

  Excellency's flagship, and the Light, and let them know. Okay, okay," she

  added, turning as a Two-Onebee posted itself politely in front of her.

  "My heart is yours," she declared jocularly, and the droid paused for a

  moment, data bytes cascading with a faint clicleety-cliclas it laboriously

  assembled the eighty-five percent probability that the remark was a jest.

  "Many thanks, Sergeant Wover," it said politely, "but the organ itself will

  not be necessary. A function reading will suffice."

  The next instant Wover turned, aghast, as the remaining Two-Onebee shifted

  Barak onto the table and hooked him up. Every line of the readouts plunged,

  and soft, tinny alarms began to sound. "Festering groats!" Wover yanked free

  of her examiner to stride to the boy's side.

  "What in the name of daylight . . . gt;."

  Barak's face had gone a waxen gray. The table was already pumping stimulants

  and antishock into the boy's veins, and the Two-Onebee plugged into the

  other side had the blank-eyed look of a droid transmitting to other stations

  within the ship. Wover could see the initial diagnostic lines on the screens

  that ringed the antigray personnel transport unit's sides.

  No virus. No bacteria. No poison.

  No foreign material in Koth Barak's body at all.

  The lines dipped steadily toward zero, then went flat.

  "We have a complicated situation on Nam Chorios, Your Excellency."

  Seti Ashgad turned from the four-meter bubble of the observation viewport,

  to regard the woman who sat, slender and coolly watchful, in one of the

  lounge's gray leather chairs.

  "We meaning whom, Master Ashgadgt;." Leia Organa Solo, Chief of State of the

  New Republic, had a surprising voice, deeper than one might expect.

  A petite, almost fragile-looking woman, her relative youth would have

  surprised anyone who didn't know that from the age of seventeen she'd been

  heavily involved in the Rebellion spearheaded by her father and the great

  stateswoman Mon Mothma With her father's death, she was virtually its core.

  She'd commanded troops, dodged death, and fled halfway across the galaxy

  with a price on her head before she was twenty-three. She was thirty-one now

  and didn't look it, except for her eyes. "The inhabitants of Nam Chorios. Or

  only some of them?"

  "All of them." Ashgad strode back to her, standing too close, trying to

  dominate her with his height and the fact that he was standing and she

  remained in her chair. But she looked up at him with an expression in her

  brown eyes that told him she knew exactly what he was doing, or trying to

  do, and he stepped back. "All of us," he corrected himself.

  "Newcomers and Therans alike."

  Leia folded her hands on her knee, the wide velvet sleeves and voluminous

  skirt of her crimson ceremonial robe picking up the soft sheen of the hidden

  lamps overhead and of the distant
stars hanging in darkness beyond the

  curved bubble of the port. Even five years ago she would have remarked

  tartly on the fact that he was omitting mention of the largest segment of

  the planet's population, those who were neither the technological

  post-Imperial Newcomers nor the ragged Theran cultists who haunted the cold

  and waterless wastes, but ordinary farmers.

  Now she gave him silence, waiting to see what else he would say.

  "I should explain," Ashgad went on, in the rich baritone that so closely

  resembled the recordings she had heard of his father's, "that Nam Chorios is

  a barren and hostile world. Without massive technology it is literally not

  possible to make a living there."

  "The prisoners sent to Nam Chorios by the Grissmath Dynasty seem to have

  managed for the past seven hundred years."

  The man looked momentarily nonplussed. Then he smiled, big and wide and

  white. "Ah, I see Your Excellency has studied the history of the sector." He

  tried to sound pleased about it.

  "Enough to know the background of the situation," replied Leia pleasantly.

  "I know that the Grissmaths shipped their political prisoners there, in the

  hopes that they'd starve to death, and set automated gun stations all over

  the planet to keep them from being rescued. I know that the prisoners not

  only didn't oblige them by dying but that their descendants--and the

  descendants of the guards--are still farming the water seams while the

  Grissmath homeworld of Meridian itself is just a ball of charred radioactive

  waste."

  There was, in fact, very little else in the Registry concerning Nam

  Chorios. The place had been an absolute backwater for centuries. The only

  reason Leia had ever heard of it at all before the current crisis was that

  her father had once observed that the old Emperor Palpatine seemed to be

  using Nam Chorios for its original purpose as a prison world. Forty years

  ago it had been rumored that the elder Seti Ashgad had been kidnapped and

  stranded on that isolated and unapproachable planet by agents of his

  political foe, the then-Senator Palpatine.

  Those rumors had remained unproven until this second Ashgad, like a

  black-haired duplicate of the graying old power broker who had disappeared,

  had made contact with the Council in the wake of the squabbling on the

  planet and asked to be heard.

  Though there was no reason, Leia thought, to make this man aware of how

  little she or anyone knew about the planet or the situation.

  Do not meet frith Ashgad, the message had said, that had reached her,

  literally as she was preparing to board the shuttle to take her to her

  flagship. Do not trust him or accede to any demand that he makes.

  Above all, do not go to the Meridian sector.

  "Very good." He passed the compliment like a kidney stone, though he managed

  a droll and completely automatic little chuckle as a chaser.

  "But the situation isn't as simple as that, of course."

  From a corner of the lounge, where a dark-leaved dyanthis vine shadowed the

  area near the observation port, a soft voice whispered, "They never are, are

  they?"

  "Well, I was given to understand that the only inhabitants of the planet

  before colonization recommenced after the fall of the Empire were

  descendants of the original Meridian prisoners and guards."

  In the shadow of the vine, Ashgad's secretary, Dzym, smiled.

  Leia wasn't sure what to make of her irrational aversion to Dzym.

  There were alien species whom the humans of the galaxy--the Corellians,

  Alderaanians, and others--found repulsive, usually for reasons involving

  subliminal cues like pheromones or subconscious cultural programming. But

  the native Chorians--Oldtimers, they were called, whether they belonged to

  the Theran cult or not--were descended from the same human rootstock. She

  wondered whether her aversion had to do with something simple like diet. She

  was not conscious of any odd smell about the small, brown-skinned man with

  his black hair

  drawn up into a smooth topknot. But she knew that frequently one wasn't

  conscious of such things. It was quite possible that there could be a

  pheromonic reaction below the level of consciousness, perhaps the result of

  inbreeding on a world where communities were widely scattered and had never

  been large. Or it might be an individual thing, something about the

  looseness of that neutral, unexceptional mouth or having to do with the

  flattened-looking tan eyes that never seemed to blink.

  "Are you one of the original Chorians, Master Dzym."

  He was without gesture. Leia realized she had subconsciously been expecting

  him to move in an unpleasing, perhaps a shocking, way. He didn't nod, but

  only said, "My ancestors were among those sent to Nam Chorios by the

  Grissmaths, yes, Your Excellency." Something changed in his eyes, not quite

  glazing over but becoming preoccupied, as if all his attention were suddenly

  directed elsewhere.

  Ashgad went on hastily, as if covering the other man's lapse, "The problem

  is, Your Excellency, that seven hundred and fifty years of complete

  isolation has made the Oldtimer population of Nam Chorios into, if you will

  excuse my frankness, the most iron-bound set of fanatical conservatives this

  side of an academic licensing board.

  They're dirt farmers--I understand. They've had centuries of minimal

  technology and impossibly difficult weather and soil conditions, and you and

  I both know how that makes for conservatism and, to put it bluntly,

  superstition.

  One of the things my father tried to institute on the planet was a modern

  clinic in Hweg Shul. The place can't make enough to keep the med droids up

  and running. The farmers would rather take their sick to some Theran cult

  Listener to be healed with 'power sucked down out of the air."" His hands

  fluttered in a sarcastic, hocus-pocus mime.

  He took a seat in the other gray leather chair, a blocky man in a very plain

  brown tunic and trousers obviously cut and fitted by a standard

  patterning-droid and dressed up with add-ons--gold collar pin, gold-buckled

  belt, pectoral chain--that Leia had seen in old holos of his father. He

  leaned his elbows on his knees, bent forward confidingly.

  "it isn't only the Newcomers that the Rationalist Party is trying to help,

  Your Excellency," he said. "It's the farmers themselves. The Old timers who

  aren't Therans, who just want to survive. Unless something is done to wrest

  control of the old gun stations away from the Theran cultists, who forbid

  any kind of interplanetary trade, these people are going to continue to live

  like . . . like the agricultural slaves they once were. There's a strong

  Rationalist Party on Nam Chorios, and it's growing stronger. We want

  planetary trade with the New Republic. We want technology and proper

  exploitation of the planet's resources. Is that so harmful?"

  "The majority of the planet's inhabitants think it is."

  Ashgad gestured furiously. "The majority of the planet's inhabitants have

  been brainwashed by half a dozen lunatics who get loaded on brachniel root

  and wander around the wasteland having
conversations with rocks! If they

  want their crops to fail and their children to die because they refuse to

  come into the modern world, that's their business, I suppose, though it

  breaks my heart to see it. But they're forbidding Newcomers entrance into

  the modern world as well!"

  Though she knew that Dzym would undoubtedly back up anything Ashgad said--as

  the man's secretary he could scarcely do otherwise--Leia turned to the

  Chorian. He was still sitting without a word, staring into space, as if

  concentrating on some other matter entirely, though now and then he would

  glance at the chronometer on the wall. Beside him, the port offered a

  spectacular view of the ice green and lavender curve of Brachnis Chorios,

  the farthest-flung planet of the several systems that went by that name,

  whose largest moon had been designated as the orbital rendezvous of the

  secret meeting.

  The escort cruiser Adamantine was just visible at the edge of the view, a

  blunt-nosed silvery shape, unreal in the starlight. Below it, close to the

  bright triangle of colored stars that were the primaries of Brachnis, Nam,

  and Pedducis Chorii and pathetically tiny against the cruiser's bulk, hung

  the cluster of linked bronze hulls that was Seti Ashgad's vessel, the Light

  of Reason. Even Leia's flagship, the Borealis, dwarfed it. Assembled of such

  small craft as could slip singly through the watchful screens of Nam

  Chorios's ancient defensive installations, the Light would barely have

  served as a planet-hopper; it could never have taken a hyperspace jump.

  Hence, thought Leia uneasily, this mission. Even before she'd had the

  surreptitious message, their distance from the nearest bases of the New

  Republic's power on Durren and their proximity to the onetime Imperial

  satrapy of the Antemeridian sector, made her nervous.

  Was that all that note had meant? Or was there something more?

  "The Theran cultists are not anyone into whose hands I would be willing to

  place my destiny, Your Excellency," murmured Dzym. He seemed to draw himself

  back into the conversation with an effort, folding his small hands in their

  violet leather gloves. "They hold an astonishing amount of power in the

  Oldtimer settlements along the water seams. How could it be otherwise when

  they are armed, mobile, and have for generations been the only source of

  healing that these people have known?"