Barbara Hambly - Planet of Twilight

They were there.

Luke froze, lying under the pitted steel belly of the speeder. Listening.

No sound.

But they were there, watching him. He knew it. Even through the silent trumpets of the Force in the deep stillness of the wastelands, he could sense their presence.

The invisible watchers.

The planets unseen original inhabitants.

Luke lowered his eyelids, trying to call the shape of them within the Force. But such was the interference of the Force on this world, the sheer magnitude of its presence in alien guise, that he could get no clear picture of those invisible ones. Maybe, he thought, that was the point of the interference to begin with.

Nor could he tell exactly when they had begun to dog him, or feel whether their interest was beneficent, malicious, or merely inquiring.

They were only there.

Who are you? he called out, aware of his vulnerability. I mean you no harm. You dont need to be afraid to show yourself to me. Can you show yourselves to me?

Their presence drew closeror something drew closer, a distinct awareness of their awareness of him. He wondered how he knew it was they and not he, she, or it.

This edition contains the complete text of the original hardcover edition.
NOT ONE WORD HAS BEEN OMITTED .

P LANET OF T WILIGHT
A Bantam Spectra Book

PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published May 1997
Bantam paperback edition / May 1998

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, TM, and 1997 by Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. Used under authorization.

Cover art by Drew Struzan, 1997 by Lucasfilm Ltd.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 96-46341
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eISBN: 978-0-307-79640-0

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v3.1

For Ole and Nedra

The first to die was a midshipman named Koth Barak.

One of his fellow crewmembers on the New Republic escort cruiser Adamantine found him slumped across the table in the deck-nine break room, where hed repaired half an hour previously for a cup of coffeine. Twenty minutes after Barak should have been back to post, Gunnery Sergeant Gallie Wover went looking for him, exasperatedly certain that hed 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 Solos journey to the Meridian sector was an entirely unofficial one. The Rights of Sentience Party would have arguedquite correctlythat 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 Partys, demands.

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

When she entered the deck-nine break room, Sergeant Wovers 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 didnt 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 coffeine in the gray plastene cup a few centimeters from his limp fingers. It wasnt 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 okayat least as okay as fleet coffeine ever smelledand 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 whod done fifteen years in merchant planet-hoppers rather than stay in the regular fleet after Palpatines goons gained power: She looked after her midshipmen as if they were the sons shed 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 spacers nightmare. But the good-faith team that had come onboard yesterday from Seti Ashgads 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 Commanders code on the wall panel.

Sir? Wover here. One of the midshipmens down. The meds havent 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 dont know what it is, but you might want to check with Her Excellencys 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 clickety-click as 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 boys side. What in the name of daylight ?

Baraks face had gone a waxen gray. The table was already pumping stimulants and antishock into the boys 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 antigrav personnel transport units sides.

No virus. No bacteria. No poison.

No foreign material in Koth Baraks body at all.

The lines dipped steadily toward zero, then went flat.

W e 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 lounges gray leather chairs.

We meaning whom, Master Ashgad? 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 didnt know that from the age of seventeen shed been heavily involved in the Rebellion spearheaded by her father and the great stateswoman Mon Mothma: With her fathers death, she was virtually its core. Shed 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 didnt look it, except for her eyes. The inhabitants of Nam Chorios? Or only some of them?