Amazon.com
Prepare yourself for a nonstop Leia-fest. The New Republic's new leader is back in bondage again, but at least this time she doesn't have Jabba the Hut slobbering all over her. Kidnapped after a clandestine mission to the former prison-planet Nam Chorios goes awry, Leia relies on her wits, her ever-developing Jedi powers (including some mean saber-swinging), and her pals to escape, survive, and resolve the conflict on the desolate planet. Han, Chewie, and Lando may get short shrift in Planet of Twilight, but Luke gets in some good scenes on the trail of Force-sensitive babe Callista, and the droids provide more than their share of laughs. While veteran writer Hambly doesn't subscribe to the admittedly entertaining shut-up-and-start-blasting school of Star Wars writing, her skilled characterizations and more literary stylings are a welcome addition to the fold. --Paul Hughes
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
-- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
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. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
Kurzbeschreibung
Continuing the }Star Wars{ tradition of action-packed adventure stories, this is the tale of a deadly new enemy who threatens both the New Republic and the Empire with extinction.
-- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine vergriffene oder nicht verfügbare Ausgabe dieses Titels.
Synopsis
On a barren and remote planet, a ruthless warlord seeking to exploit its vast mineral wealth kidnaps Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker searches for his long-lost love Callista, and a long-dormant, sentient lifeform is awakening to threaten the entire galaxy.
Leseprobe. Abdruck erfolgt mit freundlicher Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.
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. 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 coffeine 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 coffeine 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 spacer's nightmare. But 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. 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 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. 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 antigrav 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 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. 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 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. Then he smiled, big and wide and white....
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. 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 coffeine 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 coffeine 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 spacer's nightmare. But 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. 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 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. 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 antigrav 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 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. 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 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. Then he smiled, big and wide and white....
