Star Wars.

Planet of Twilight.

by Barbara Hambly.

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, n.o.body 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 s.p.a.cer's nightmare. But the "good-faith" team that had come onboard yesterday from Seti Ashgad's small vessel had pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sembled 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...."

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 Ashgad>." Leia Organa Solo, Chief of State of the New Republic, had a surprising voice, deeper than one might expect.

A pet.i.te, 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 ma.s.sive 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 pa.s.sed 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, superst.i.tion.

One of the things my father tried to inst.i.tute 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 cl.u.s.ter of linked bronze hulls that was Seti Ashgad's vessel, the Light of Reason. Even Leia's flagship, the Borealis, dwarfed it. a.s.sembled 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 hypers.p.a.ce jump.

Hence, thought Leia uneasily, this mission. Even before she'd had the surrept.i.tious 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?"

Beyond the dyanthis leaves that masked the edges of the observation port, Leia's eye was caught by a flickering of the lights along the Adamantine's gleaming sides. She saw that in the rear quarter of the escort ship, a number of them had blinked out.

"What do you mean, you can't get through?" Commander Zoalin turned, harried, from the comm board, which had blazed into life like a festival lamp, to stab yet another flashing switch. "Are you not getting an answer from the Borealis, or what?"

"It seems to be a simple signal block, sir." Communications Chief Oran touched her forehead in a nervous salute. "Lega.s.si is running a scan for it."

In the small screen, Oran turned in her chair, granting the Commander a glimpse of the comm center, on whose main board a huge readout of the Adamantine's comm circuits was illuminated in glowing yellow lines.

Red lights flowed along them, synaptic testing for a blockage or interference in the power transmission, easy enough to find and correct under ordinary circ.u.mstances.

But the circ.u.mstances had gone from ordinary to hideous in just under ten minutes. And by the red lights flaring all over his comm board; by the hastily gasped message from the infirmary; and by the sudden absence of anyone replying or reporting from maintenance, shuttles, power, and several other ship sections, things were plunging from bad to worse with the speed of a decaying orbit.

"Lega.s.si?" ()ran rose from her chair. Zoalin saw' past her that the chair he had thought empty in front of the scan console was, in fact, occupied.

Yeoman Lega.s.si had collapsed forward over his console, squa-mous salmon-colored hands clutching the edge of the board spasmodically, in time to the dreadful shudders that ran like waves through his frame.

Zoalin thought, Calamari aren't supposed to be affected by human viruses... If this was a virus.

Neither, of course, were Sull.u.s.tans or Nalroni, both of which species were represented by crew members who had reported ill in the past five minutes. Zoalin seemed to recall from his xenoNology courses that Nalroni and Mon Calamari were a textbook example of mutually exclusive immune systems. What a Nalroni could get, a Calamari literally couldn't.

"Lega.s.si?" Oran bent over the Mon Calamari's shivering body.

"Lega.s.si, what...?" She staggered a little, almost as if she had been struck, and put a hand to her chest. Groping, as if trying to ma.s.sage away some numbness or pain.

"Commander Zoalin," stated the calm voice of Two-Onebee, the head of the infirmary section, on the channel that he had left open, "I regret to report that bacta tank therapy appears to accelerate rather than r.e.t.a.r.d dissolution of subjects, by a factor of nearly thirty-five percent, as far as can be a.n.a.lyzed."

With the measured tones sounding in his earclip, Zoalin flicked the central console screen from image to image, keying through to corridors.

here the search teams in quest of the signal block device turned toward the infirmary as first one, then another of their number would stop, lean against the wall, knead and rub at the chest or head or side.

The view cut to sick bay', where the calm and tireless droids operated mechanical lifts to remove Sergeant Wover's lifeless, dripping body from the bacta tank; to the shuttle bay control room where the last yeoman on duty lay dying alone in a corner by the door.

Fifteen minutes, thought Zoalin blankly. fifteen minutes since Wover signaled from the deck-nine break room.

He hadn't even severed the connection when the other calls had started pouring in. Midshipman Gasto down. Engineering Chief Cho P'qun down.

Sir, we can't get any signal from maintenance...

"Foursi." He clicked through a channel to the Central Computer's Operating Signal Division-Division 4C. "Emergency reprogramming request.

All maintenance droids of the..." His head was aching-his chest, too. He found it difficult to breathe. Stress, he told himself. And no wonder. He had to find the signal block, had to get in touch with the Chief of State's flagship. Had to get a signal out to the Sector Medical Facility on Nim Drovis.

"All maintenance droids of the See-Three category. Search for nonstandard equipment in..." What color would the lines be, that a signal blocker would be cut into? "Nonstandard equipment in the green lines." He hoped that was right. His head was throbbing. "Implement immediately."

Not that it would do much good, he thought. Droids were systematic.

Their method of hunting for nonstandard equipment would be to start at the Adamantine's nose and work to the stern, investigating every hatch and relay, rather than checking the most obvious places first, the places where some member of Seti Ashgad's small good-faith party might have made a few moments for himself alone.

Not that it had to be Ashgad. A signal blocker could have been set with a timer. The thing could have been planted in the Adamantine before their inconspicuous departure from Hesperidium.

Zoalin found that without thinking about it, he had slumped back into his chair. His hands and feet felt cold. He cut into the image of the flagship Borealis, distant against the blackness of the stars. So close, but kilometers away in the palely shimmering green glow of the planet beneath.

Had this, whatever it was, broken out there, too. Was Captain Ioa trying to reach him.