Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight (9 page)

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 Ash-gad'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 svirling 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 vievscreen 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 Cadus 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 droid 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 . . . I” But only static replied.

On the screen before them, the bulky but heavily armed traders of the partisan forces opened fire on the A-Wing squadrons that were evidently all the orbital base had to send against them. The smaller, lighter ships scattered like silvery fish 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!"

As Luke maneuvered it down the canyon, the XP-38A sagged lower and lower toward the ground. Either an antigray cell was giving out or the fuel that powered the cell's modulator coil was running low. It w, as 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.

The silence was huge, like the desert silences of Tatooine. Like the desert silence, it breathed.

Then behind him he heard a soft, deadly crackling, and felt the lance of electricity stab the air. Turning, he saw flickering snakes of lightning racing down the face of the cliffs, like skeletal hands, or the wide-flung root systems of a thorn plant, a zone of fast-moving corusca-tion close to half a mile broad and heading his way.

For an instant he watched it, fascinated. It poured down the face of the cliffs, raced over the jagged rocks at the bottom, sparking and leaping brighter as it raced over the slabs and projections of giant crystals that seemed to grow out of the darker rock. As it came closer he put forth his mind into the Force and raised the speeder in which he sat a few' feet above the ground. The ground lightning poured past under it, moving at the same time along the canyon walls to both sides; he felt the bolts of it that leapt up and struck the bottom of the speeder, jarring him even through its insulation with mild jolts of pain. At the same time he could feel the Force, like a roaring in his mind or hot wind blowing across his face, could almost see it as a sort of ghostly light reflecting back from the clusters and facets of crystals that glowed all around him in the shadows.

The storm, whatever it was, flowed by under him for perhaps five minutes. When it had gone past him he let the speeder ease to the ground and stood up on it, watching the sparkling flood race down the rocks to the open plain, pale in the wan sun. It washed through the edge of the prison colony ruins, flowed along the jeweled ground beyond, vanishing at last in the direction of the line of spiky crystal rock chimneys that stretched away into the wastelands.

Even in the stillness it left, the Force was everywhere. Luke could feel it, like a radiation penetrating his skin.

The planet is dead, he thought. Completely without life, except for the tin), enclaves of human habitation.

But the Force was here.

It comes from Life, Yoda had said. Binding you, me, all life together . . .

And Callista had come here seeking it. Seeking the key to the frustration, the fear, the terrible forces that had driven her from him.

There is life here, thought Luke, suddenly aware of it, sure of it.

life somewhere. He wondered if the ruins he'd seen contained some clue as to why no mention had ever been made, in any survey of the planet ever taken.

Luke could have raised the speeder with his mind and floated it down to the ruins at the canyon's foot. By the same token, he understood, Yoda himself could have flown wherever he wanted to travel or could have built himself a palatial dwelling of rock instead of the mud hovel in Dagobah's swamps. Ben Kenobi could have ruled a small planet.

Wars do not make one great, the little Master had said.

And neither did the ability to tote a mass of metal where one could just as easily walk.

Luke dug his canteen from the speeder, checked the lightsaber at his belt and the blaster he'd found with the macrobinoculars under the seat, and started down the canyon on foot.

Little remained of the Grissmath prison colony after some seven centuries. It had been situated above a ground water seam but evidently the hidden moisture had proved insufficient when terraforming had gone beyond crom and the simple gomex mosses that broke down the minerals of unyielding rock into soil that such plants as balcrabbian and brachniel could use. Without careful cultivation, most of the intermediate growths of the artificial ecosystems had died before they'd reached the stage of being self-sufficient. Lichens and podhoy still grew everywhere around the walls, as if the entire place had been dunked in a vat of crimson mud that had left a rough scum; close to the broken pump housing, a little soil remained, where hardy balcrabbian plants spread their leaves.