Star Wars - Planet Of Twilight (23 page)

But all this, he realized, was something he'd learned over the course of years with the Rebellion, years of dealing with the sophisticated technologies and scientific neepery available on Coruscant and its inner worlds. As a kid on Tatooine--and had he grown to adulthood there, as Uncle Owen and Uncle Owen's friends had--he'd had no more suspicion that truth could be skillfully edited than he'd had the ability to fly.

They believed what they saw.

They believed Seti Ashgad.

And they were furious.

Ashgad was up on the dais artfully giving the impression that he was mollifying the crowd without in any way lessening their outrage.

Luke slipped past the synthdroids by the door, crossed through the smaller chamber beyond, his boots making no sound in the carpet, too angry to remain. He was aware of the synthdroids watching him--their Central Control tinit, wherever it was, was undoubtedly programmed with the faces of every Rationalist on the planet. But no one stopped him.

He stepped through a pair of long windows to the outside, breathing hard with fury, and made his way through the thickets of blueleaf and aromatic shrubs to the street. The wind had died to a dull hammering with the coming of full darkness. The voices in the dining hall still echoed in his ears, yelling vituperation at his sister.

Beyond the edges of the settlements, the tsils glistened like spikes of ice in the cold-eyed starlight of the wastes. The ground was lustrous with frost, and the cold was like iron. He felt the Force all around him, breathing--waiting.

There were people out there in the waste, not far away. Though they bore no lights he sensed them dimly eddies, stirrings in the Force.

Therans?

Probably. Watching Seti Ashgad's house.

Release your anger, his father had said. Release your anger.

He had meant it then as a lure, a come-on--use your anger in combat--a fool's trick.

But now Luke truly released his anger, let go of it let it rise like steam, to be absorbed and defused by the stars. There was entirely too much anger afoot that night anyway, deliberately being stirred up, raised like a magician raising power back in that house. Rid of it, Luke was able to think clearly again, to ask questions. And the chief question was What does Seti Ashgad stand to gain?

Under pouring rain, the port of Bagsho on Nim Drovis crawled with troops.

Han had alerted the Med Center from orbit that he had fifteen critical cases of radiation sickness on board. Ism Oolos, the Ho'Din physician he'd talked to over subspace, awaited him in the docking bay with an emergency team, surrounded by a squad of uniformed Drovians who seized Han's arms the minute he came down the Falcon's ramp, shoved him up against the nearest wall, and searched him none too gently.

“Is this really necessary?” demanded Dr. Oolos indignantly; Han also expressed himself to the head of the Drovian squad along the same lines but with considerably greater emphasis.

“Doc, if you'd seen some of the armaments coming in for the Gopso'o tribes, you wouldn't be asking that.” The Drovian sergeant pulled out its esophageal plug to make the remark, and shoved it back in with a squish. Since the onset of high-tech civilization in the wake of Old Republic military bases, most Drovians--who had been a pastoral network of tribes when contacted--had acquired the habit of sucking zwil--a cake-flavoring agent common to Algarine cuisine--through the mucous membranes of their breathing tubes via fist-size spongy plugs saturated with the stuff. Four-fifths of the soldiers wore plugs of various sizes and the air was thick with the dreamy, cinnamon-vanilla scent, where it wasn't heavy with the odors of wet vegetation, mildews inadvertently imported from every corner of the galaxy, and the oily smoke of burning.

“You must excuse us.” Dr. Oolos ducked his bright-tentacled head as he accompanied Han, the sergeant, two troopers, and the med team back up the ramp. “The Gopso'o have been restless for months--ances-tral enemies of the Drovians . . .” He lowered his soft voice and his twenty-five-meter height to speak without the sergeant hearing. “Not a particle of difference between them, you understand, except that they have been at blood feud for, literally, centuries. I have heard the original issue was whether the root word for truth is in the singular case or the plural, but so many atrocities were committed on both sides that, of course, it barely matters now. The Drovians were the ones who made interstellar contact first, so, of course, they're the dominant tribe, but . . .”

“They're killing each other over a festering grammatical construction?”

Han couldn't keep his voice down. Dr. Oolos winced and gestured him quiet, but it was too late. The Drovian sergeant grabbed Han's arm in a viselike pincer "I'm killin' those moldspawns because they killed my family, see? Because they disemboweled Garnu Hral Eschen, because they tore the flesh off the bones of the children of Ethras, because they .

. ."

“All right,” said Han hastily, as the sergeant was dragging him closer and closer to the muzzle of its gun. “Uh--Chewie . . .” He turned just in time to make it appear to the Wookiee, emerging from the door of the bridge, that he was in no actual danger and manufactured a cheerful grin. “Chewie, this is Sergeant . . .”

“Sergeant Knezex Hral Piksoar.” The sergeant shoved its plug back into its breathing apparatus again; a little thread of greenish mucus squirted out around the side to join the glistening crust that caked the lower part of its face.

“it's necessary that they be permitted to search the ship,” the Ho'Din informed them gently. “It's purely a formality. With local unrest as violent as it has been, and with forty deaths from the plague so far on the Republic base . . .”

“Forty?” Han stared up at the willowy form towering over him, aghast.

"I fear so. It's why I questioned you so closely before I was permitted to give you medical clearance to make planetfall.

Authorities here have put the whole base under quarantine."

Hral Piksoar allowed them into the first of the several storage holds Han had converted to emergency sick bays. It held its weapons trained in four directions while Dr. Oolos and his team passed swiftly from victim to victim, injecting antishock and stabilizers, transferring the suppurating, hairless, muttering forms to stasis boxes on antigrav tables. The other two troopers disappeared down the hallways to continue their search for illegal weaponry. Han felt the back of his neck prickle at this violation, but knew that a Donnybrook at this point would result in not only himself, Lando, and Chewie spending the night in the local ohokey, but these fifteen survivors in all probability continuing for hours longer in their nightmare pain.

For himself, he'd have taken a poke at Hral Piksoar in a heartbeat, the minute the goon laid a pincer on him. But he'd been through two parsees of hyperspace hearing the feeble whispers of agony from the men and women hooked up to makeshift life support every time he walked down these corridors.

Maybe he was learning something from Leia, he thought, willing the flush of anger from his face.

“What's the story?” he asked softly, as the treelike physician ducked through into the next hold. “You tell me there's forty guys down with the plague on the base here; we get attacked by something I've never seen anywhere out there a partisan revolt on Durren--somebody sure shot down these poor bastards . . .”

“Galactic Med Central is trying to contain the plague,” said Dr. Oolos worriedly. “Trying hard.” His head tendrils flexed uneasily, a hundred shades of crimson and scarlet ribbed and straked with violet;

his dark eyes were filled with concern. “They bring them to us dying of no perceptible ailment--no virus, no bacteria, no poison, no allergy. Bacta-tank therapy only seems to accelerate the progress of the slow bleeding away of life.”

He shook his head, and glanced across at Sergeant Hral Piksoar, who was peering paranoically around the corner and into the hall. “With Gopso'o raids on the suburbs--bombings of public buildings--they've seized one minor spaceport already--the atmosphere here has been terrible, unbelievable.” He touched a gas mask hanging from his belt, and followed his team back into the corridor with the last of the victims, Han striding in his wake. “Take one of these with you if you plan to leave the vessel for any reason. The Gopso'o are rumored to be using bilal and rush gas in their attacks, though we haven't had any documented cases yet at the center.”

“Think again if you think we're gonna leave this vessel.” Lando Calrissian stepped through the door of the bridge as they passed it, dark face taut with anger but fear in his eyes. “My advice to you, old buddy, is to seal and lift.”

“Not without finding out something about what's out there.” Leaving Lando and Dr. Oolos in the corridor, Han ducked back onto the bridge and scooped up the five wafers onto which he'd downloaded the unfortunate Corbantis's log. “Can you get me an unscrambler for this, Doc? I need to know what and who axed that ship and anything else they might have seen out there before it happened.”

“I'll certainly try.” Dr. Oolos held out his hand for the wafers--Han glanced at Sergeant Hral Piksoar, coming down the corridor toward them, and simply pocketed the information himself. Through the Falcon's open boarding ramp the sound of shots could be clearly heard, the heavy, percussive cough of ion cannons almost drowning the harsher zap of blasters.

To Lando he whispered, “Don't take the engines all the way down and keep an eye on the lift-off window. I'll be back in two hours.”

Lando followed them to the doorway. The med team made a little caravan across the rain-pocked permacrete of the bay, water sluicing off the mist-filled coffins of the stasis boxes. Drovian guards surrounded them, weapons at the ready, as if they expected the burned, pain-racked husks inside to leap out with guns blazing in the cause of the Gopso'o tribe. “And what if you're not?”

Han ducked his head against the rain, which was as warm as bathwater as he stepped out into it. “If I haven't linked with you by then,” he said, feeling for the comlink in his pocket, “take off. Tell Chewie whatever you have to, to keep him from coming to look for me.” By the sound of it the shots were closer, and a confusion of voices.

The wet air was rank with smoke. “But find Leia. Whatever it costs.”

Human beings were most odd.

Given the capabilities of a high-quality' protocol unit to reproduce any given language, complete with its inflections and tonalities, See-Threepio could, of course, duplicate nearly any of the thirty thousand songs popular in the Core Worlds over the past seventy-five standard years verbatim, note by note and tone for tone. It was not a function he filled particularly often, for there were automatons and semianimates with larger speaker units and better bass range who could do the job more efficiently, but he could do it. Postulating that on a relatively backward world such as Nim Drovis those in quest of entertainment would pay a certain amount per song (with the appropriate royalty percentage figured for members of the Galactic Society of Recording Artists), he had calculated that even in such a moderate establishment as the Wookiee's Codpiece he and Artoo-Detoo should be able to earn enough in an evening to defray the costs of third-class passage to Cybloc XII.

But, as the assistant manager of that pink plush-lined cavern had phrased it, “You sound like a festerin' jizz-box. I got a festerin' jizz-box right over there in that corner.”

And Threepio, even had his programming permitted him to argue with a human, would have been hard put to find grounds for disagreement.

Before seeking another resort of public entertainment, therefore, he gave the matter some thought.

It was, as usual for Nim Drovis, pouring rain, and those citizens for whom consumption of liquid befuddlement took precedence over defending their homes and families, if any, from the street fighting in sporadic progress all over the city were scarcely a promising lot. The denizens of the Chug 'n' Chuck seemed to consist mostly of Drovian soldiers on three-hour furlough, professional mold-and-fungus removers--a hard-bitten lot with their flame and acid throwers slung over their backs, Drovian molds and fungi being what they were--a scattering of the small-time providers of goods and services prohibited at the more polite levels of society; and the joy-boys and lollygirls associated with every species represented on the planet, together with their forbidding looking business managers. Given their wholesale absorption of alcohol, sundry chemicals, and spice, Threepio did not hold high hopes for his and Attoo's success in this venue, either, but he was surprised.

Entertainment, he had long ago deduced, seemed (as far as he could judge) to be based on random mixtures of incongruous elements.

Therefore, taking into account the words of the assistant manager of the Wookiee's Codpiece, he had acquired a concertinium, a set of violion twitch bells capable of activation through one of his chest jacks, and a drum for Artoo. Randomly digitalizing patterns of notes for every one of those thirty thousand songs popular in the Core Worlds over the past seventy-five years for reproduction on these three instruments and re-calibrating his voice circuits to reproduce the tones of such luminaries as Framjan Spathen and Razzledy Croom, he was able to produce quite passable music, although Artoo, as a result of the switch boxes and Pure Sabacc's computer circuits still taped and jacked and wired into him, was a little eccentric as far as the rhythm line was concerned. Threepio was quite proud of the result; and had his audience been sober, he was sure they would have appreciated just how good the entertainment was.

And indeed, the one individual in the C'hug 'n' Chuck not engaged either in boozing himself into insensibility or behaving toward the opposite sex in a manner usually reserved for one's honeymoon did applaud Threepio's rendition of Gayman Neeloid's “The Sound of Her Wings” and tossed a credit piece into the basket perched, hatlike, on Attoo's domed cap.

“Can you play Mondegrene's Fugue in K?” he asked, naming a classical piece of great antiquity and grandeur, which Threepio had only heard performed by full orchestra with thunder cannons and a dual-spectrum light organ.