Star Wars: Planet of Twilight

From Library Journal When Chief of State Leia Organa Solo refuses to interfere with the politics on Nam Chorios, minority leader Seti Ashgad imprisons her on the mineral-rich planet and releases the Death Seed plague. Hambly (Sisters of the Night, LJ 10/15/95) vividly creates an intriguing planet, creepy villains, and an exciting adventure for fans of the Star WarsR saga. Recommended. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Hambly's previous Star Wars novel, Children of the Jedi (1995), was arguably the finest in the successful movie spin-off series. This one is just as good. On a grisly desert planet called Nam Chorios, two factions are battling for power. One kidnaps Leia Organa Solo, sending Han, Luke, and the two droids on a desperate chase after her, with Luke also seeking his beloved Callista, who is supposed to be on Nam Chorios. Meanwhile, one faction spreads a murderous plague, and remnants of the overthrown empire threaten to join the party. In due course, everybody is united on Nam Chorios--Luke after a starship crash, Leia after a hairbreadth escape, and Han and the droids after surviving a planetary crisis (a savage parody of current real-world Balkan warfare). Eventually, Luke realizes that Callista must go on alone until she regains her Force powers, the crystals that are being exported from Nam Chorios as weapons are recognized as sapient life-forms, and our old friend Admiral Daala at last abandons the crumbling imperial cause for the cause of peace. Hambly is superior to most of the other SW authors at vivid world building, humor (she does Ce-ethreepio marvelously well), and understanding the characters. This book deserves an audience extending far beyond that of fans responding to its movie tie-in nature. Roland Green From the Publisher The Star Wars ® saga continues in hardcover. Renat Chorios is abackwater land that serves as a sanctuary for a peaceful religious cult. Butpeace is threatened with the rise of a sinister warlord who takes Princess Leiahostage by tricking her into attending a diplomatic meeting. Meanwhile Lukecontinues his search for his lost love, and finds that the force has someuncontrollable and deadly powers in this strange land. At the center of theturmoil lies a once-dormant life form capable of destroying the entiregalaxy. , (TM) and 1997 Lucasfilm Ltd. All rights reserved. Used under authorization. From the Inside Flap ar Wars(r) saga continues in hardcover.xa0xa0Renat Chorios is a backwater land that serves as a sanctuary for a peaceful religious cult.xa0xa0But peace is threatened with the rise of a sinister warlord who takes Princess Leia hostage by tricking her into attending a diplomatic meeting.xa0xa0Meanwhile Luke continues his search for his lost love, and finds that the force has some uncontrollable and deadly powers in this strange land.xa0xa0At the center of the turmoil lies a once-dormant life form capable of destroying the entire galaxy. Barbara Hambly attended the University of California and spent a year at the University of Bordeaux, France, obtaining a master's degree in medieval history. She has worked as both a teacher and a technical editor, but her first love has always been history. Ms. Hambly lives in Los Angeles with two Pekingese, a cat, and another writer. She is at work on the fourth Benjamin January novel, Sent Down the River . Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 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 he'd 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 he'd clicked into the infolog banks "just to see if anybody mentions the mission."Of course, nobody was going to mention the mission.xa0xa0Though accompanied by the Adamantine , Chief of State Leia Organa Solo's journey to the Meridian sector was an entirely unofficial one.xa0xa0The 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.xa0xa0To 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 screenxa0xa0"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.xa0xa0Even at a distance of three meters Wover didn't like the way he was breathing."Koth!"xa0xa0She rounded the table in two strides, sending the other chairs clattering into a corner.xa0xa0She thought his eyelids moved a little when she yelled his name.xa0xa0"Koth!"Wover hit the emergency call almost without conscious decision.xa0xa0In the few moments before the med droids arrived she sniffed the coffeine in the gray plastene cup a few centimeters from his limp fingers.xa0xa0It wasn't even cold.xa0xa0A thin film of it adhered to the peach fuzz beginnings of what Koth optimistically referred to as his mustache.xa0xa0The stuff in the cup smelled okay--at least as okay as fleet coffeine ever smelled--and there was no question of alcohol or drugs.xa0xa0Not on a Republic escort.xa0xa0Not where Koth was concerned.xa0xa0He 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.xa0xa0She would have known if there had been trouble with booze or spice or giggle-dust.Disease?It was any longtime spacer's nightmare.xa0xa0But the "good-faith" team that had come onboard yesterday from Seti Ashgad's small vessel had passed through the medical scan; and in any ease, the planet Nam Chorios had been on the books for four centuries without any mention of an endemic planetary virus.xa0xa0Everyone on the Light of Reason had come straight from the planet.Still, Wover pecked the Commander's code on the wall panel."Sir?xa0xa0Wover here.xa0xa0One of the midshipmen's down.xa0xa0The meds haven't gotten here yet but..."xa0xa0Behind her the break room door swooshed open.xa0xa0She 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.xa0xa0"It looks serious.xa0xa0No, 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.xa0xa0Okay, okay," she added, turning as a Two-Onebee posted itself politely in front of her.xa0xa0"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 85 percent probability that the remark was a jest."Many thanks, Sergeant Wover," it said politely, "but the organ itself will not be necessary.xa0xa0A function reading will suffice."The next instant Wover turned, aghast, as the remaining Two-Onebee shifted Barak onto the table and hooked him up.xa0xa0Every line of the readouts plunged, and soft, tinny alarms began to sound.xa0xa0"Festering groats!"xa0xa0Wover yanked free of her examiner to stride to the boy's side.xa0xa0"What in the name of daylight ...?"Barak's face had gone a waxen gray.xa0xa0The 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.xa0xa0Wover could see the initial diagnostic lines on the screens that ringed the antigrav personnel transport unit's sides.No virus.xa0xa0No bacteria.xa0xa0No 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."xa0xa0Seti 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?"xa0xa0Leia Organa Solo, Chief of State of the New Republic, had a surprising voice, deeper than one might expect.xa0xa0A 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.xa0xa0She'd commanded troops, dodged death, and fled halfway across the galaxy with a price on her head before she was twenty-three.xa0xa0She was thirty-one now and didn't look it, except for her eyes.xa0xa0"The inhabitants of Nam Chorios?xa0xa0Or only some of them?""All of them."xa0xa0Ashgad 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.xa0xa0But 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.xa0xa0"All of us," he corrected himself.xa0xa0"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.xa0xa0Even 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.xa0xa0Now 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.xa0xa0Without 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.xa0xa0Then he smiled, big and wide and white. "Ah, I see Your Excellency has studied the history of the sector."xa0xa0He tried to sound pleased about it."Enough to know the background of the situation," replied Leia pleasantly.xa0xa0"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.xa0xa0I know not only that the prisoners 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 Meridias 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.xa0xa0The 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.xa0xa0Forty 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.xa0xa0Those rumors had remained unproven until this second Ashgad, like a blackhaired 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 with 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.xa0xa0Above all, do not go to the Meridian sector. "Very good!"xa0xa0He passed the compliment like a kidney stone, though he managed a droll and completely automatic little chuckle as a chaser.xa0xa0"But the situation isn't as simple as that, of course."From a corner of the lounge, wher... Read more