Though he was far from conscious, Luke knew something was wrong.
He felt … cold.
Unbelievably cold. He’d been cold before—a couple years earlier, on Hoth, he’d come within a shaved centimeter of freezing to death before Han had found him—but this was different. That cold had been a creeping numbness, and weakness, and a growing inability to force his hypothermic muscles to move. This cold, though, froze him without the comfort of numbness. Tiny razor-edged crystals of ice—colder than ice, so cold they burned, cold as liquid air—grew inward through his skin at every pore, becoming hairlines of freeze that crept along his nerves.
And with the cold came silence.
Physical silence, deeper than a living creature can truly experience: not just the absence of external sound, but the absence of all concept of sound. No whisper of breath, no hush of blood coursing through arteries, no faintest beat of his heart. Not even the vaguest sensation of vibration, or pressure, or friction on his skin.
But the cold and the silence went deeper than the merely physical. They were in his dreams.
These dreams were glacially slow, actionless, featureless hours of empty staring into empty space, hours becoming years that stretched into numberless millennia, as one by one the stars went out. He could do nothing, for there was nothing to do.
Except watch the stars die.
And in their place was left nothing. Not even absence. Only him.
Floating. Empty of everything. Without thought, without sensation. Forever.
Almost.
His first thought in a million years trickled into his brain over the course of decades. Sleep. This is the end of everything. Nothing left but sleep.
The second thought, by contrast, followed instantly upon the second. Wait … somebody else is thinking with my mind.
Which meant he wasn’t alone at the end of the universe.
Even in frozen dreams of eternity, the Force was strong with him. He opened himself to the Sleep Thought and drew it into the center of his being, where with the Force to guide and sustain him, he could examine the thought, turn it this way and that like an unfamiliar stone.
It had weight, this thought, and texture: like a hunk of volcanic basalt around a uranium core, it was unreasonably dense, and its surface was pebbled, as though it had once been soft and sticky and somebody had rolled it across a field of fine gravel. As he let the Force take his perception into greater and greater focus and detail, he came to understand that each of these pebbles was a person—human or near-human, every single one, bound into an aggregate matrix of frozen stone.
As the Force took him deeper, he came to understand that this stone he held was also holding him; even as he turned it in his hand, it also surrounded and enclosed him—that it was a prison for every one of these pebble-lives, and that these imprisoned lives were also imprisoning him.
He was the stone himself, he discovered: the very matrix of dark frozen stone that bound them all. He trapped them and they trapped him, and neither could let go. They were bound together by the very structure of the universe.
Frozen by the Dark.
And here was another strangeness: Since when did he think of the structure of the universe as capital-D Dark? Even if there might be some trace of truth in that bleak perception, when had he become the kind of man who would surrender to it? If the Dark wanted to drag him into eternal emptiness, it was going to have to fight him for every millimeter.
He started looking for the way out. Which was also, due to the curious paradox inherent in his Force perception, the way in.
The imaginary thought-stone in his imaginary hand was a metaphor, he understood—even as was the frozen stone he had become—but it was also real on a level deeper than nonimaginary eyes could ever see. He was the stone … and so he did not need to reach out to touch the lives represented by the pebbles. He was touching them already.
He only had to pay attention.
But each life-pebble on which he focused gave back no hint of light. No perception even of the human being it represented, only a featureless nonreflective surface like a smoothed and rounded spheroid of powdered graphite. Each one he touched gave back no hope, no purpose, no dream of escape, but instead drew these out from his frozen heart, swallowed them whole, and fed them to the Dark.
And the Dark gave up no trace of evidence that they had ever existed.
All he got from the pebbles was gentle wordless urging to let himself sleep. Struggle is futile. The Dark swallows everything in the end. All his hopes, all his fears, every heroic dream and every tragic reality. Every single distant descendant of everyone who had ever heard of him. All would be gone, leaving not even an echo to hint that they had ever existed. The only answer was sleep. Eternal sleep.
Sleep.
Luke thought, Never.
He had an intuition that was half memory, half guess, and maybe altogether a hint from the Force, because when he again turned that imaginary stone in his imaginary hand, one of those imaginary pebbles of powdered graphite had a crack in it that wasn’t imaginary at all.
And through that crack, tiny beyond tiny, nanometrically infinitesimal, so small that if it hadn’t been imaginary, Luke couldn’t have seen it even with the most advanced instruments in the galaxy, shone the very faintest conceivable glimmer …
Of light.
With the Force to guide him, he focused his perception into a similarly nanometric filament. And through that tiny crack of light within the imaginary stone, Luke found the universe.
Focusing his whole self into his Force perception with all his power and every scrap of the mental discipline that Ben and Master Yoda had pounded into him, Luke could send enough of himself along that filament of light that he could see again—dimly, distantly, through waves of bizarre distortion—and what he saw was sleeves.
Voluminous sleeves, draped together as though concealing folded hands … and beyond them, a floor of smooth stone, illuminated by cold, flickering blues, like the light cast by the screen of a holoplayer. He tried to lift his head, to get a look around, but the view didn’t change, and he realized that the eyes through which he saw were not his.
With that realization, other perceptions began to flower within his consciousness. He became aware that the floor at which his borrowed eyes were staring was connected with him somehow … that it was not ordinary stone at all, but a curious semicolloidal structure of crystal … that it was, inexplicably, somehow alive.
That when he set his mind to it, he could feel the life, like a subsonic hum can raise a tingle on the skin. But it wasn’t on his skin that he felt it, it was inside his head … and he felt it because he had crystals of that semicolloidal somehow-living stone growing inside his brain …
No—
Not his brain.
The crystals grew within the other brain, the one connected to the eyes he was borrowing from outside the universe. This became another subject of contemplation, like his imaginary stone, because like that imaginary stone he was both inside this borrowed brain and outside it, pushing in while looking out. And when he touched those crystals with his attention, he could hear—no, feel—the whisper of despair that had murmured to him at the end of the universe.
Sleep. Struggle is futile. All things end. Existence is an illusion. Only the Dark is real.
He could feel now that the whisper came from outside this borrowed brain, even as his own perception did, and that the crystals somehow picked up this whisper and amplified it, adding this brain’s limited Force power to its own, the same as it had done with the other hundreds of brains that Luke could now feel were all linked into this bizarre system.
There was somebody out there.
And with that thought, he could feel the malignancy that fed this field of Dark: the ancient wheezing cripple entombed within his life-support capsule, who poured his bleak malice through a body-wide webwork of this selfsame crystal …
Just like the one growing within Luke’s own body.
And with that understanding came power: he set his will upon the web of crystal within his body and allowed the Force to give power to his desire; now he was able to clearly perceive the link between his crystals and those within this borrowed brain. Then, when he willed the head to raise, it did, and when he willed the eyes to take in the room, he saw a stone cavern, dimly lit by waves of blue energy discharge that crawled along the stone walls and ceiling like living things—the same crackling discharge Luke had seen in the Cavern of the Shadow Throne—though this energy did no harm to the people gathered here.
The cavern was filled with Moon Hats.
Each and every one among them stood motionless with head lowered, hands folded invisibly within the drape of their sleeves. Each and every one among them faced a large stone pedestal that stood empty in the center of the room. The pedestal was of a single piece with the floor, but not as though it had been carved from it; it looked as if it had grown there, like a tumor. It was about a meter and a half high, and its flat top was roughly the same size and shape as a comfortable single bed. From time to time, with a kind of regularized increase of frequency like the tide coming in, the electric discharge from the walls and ceiling would pause, and shiver in place as though captured between electrodes; then with a painfully bright flash, they would converge upon the stone pedestal and vanish into its surface.
Luke understood. That’s me, he thought. That’s where I am. Buried alive in solid rock.
This didn’t particularly bother him; after spending eternity at the end of the universe, mere death didn’t mean much at all. Death was better than what Blackhole was trying to do to him. With him.
As him.
He didn’t know if he could save himself, but he might be able to help these people. That would have to be enough.
Luke reached out through the crystals with the Force … and found nothing beyond this one lone brain to grasp. Though he could feel them clearly, though he could listen to the whisper of the crystals in their heads, he could find no surface on those crystals that his will could grasp. Exactly like his dream: these were the pebbles of featureless graphite. Nothing there but the Dark.
This one alone had that fissure of light …
In the distant reaches of his memory, he found a lesson of Yoda’s, from one long solstice night, deep in the jungle near Dagobah’s equator. When to the Force you truly give yourself, all you do expresses the truth of who you are, Yoda had said, leaning forward so that the knattik-root campfire painted blue shadows within the deep creases of his ancient face. Then through you the Force will flow, and guide your hand it will, until the greatest good might come of your smallest gesture.
He’d never really understood that lesson. He’d only tried to live according to the principle … but now there was an image slowly breaching the surface of his consciousness. An image of his own hand, delivering a punch.
Just to the right of center, on the forehead of “Lord Shadowspawn.” Which had been precisely the impact required to crack the crystalline matrix inside his brain.
A simple act of mercy, born of no other desire than to end a conflict without taking a life, now had become his own lifeline, by which he could draw himself back from the eternal nothing at the end of the universe.
He could feel his connection now, could sense the control he might exert through this connection; a simple twist of will would seize this body and make it act at his command—he could even, he sensed, send his power with the Force through this body to serve his desire. He could make this man his puppet, and forge his own escape.
Or …
He could abandon his fear, and express the truth of who he was.
For Luke Skywalker, this was not even a choice. Instead of a command, he sent through the link a friendly suggestion.
Hey, Nick, he sent. Why don’t you wake up?
The first inkling Cronal got that something was going terribly wrong came in the form of an alarm Klaxon blaring inside his life-support chamber. The Klaxon shattered his concentration and jerked him back into his own body; for a long moment that seemed to stretch on toward forever, his desiccated flesh could only shudder and twitch while he struggled to catch his breath. Finally he could move his hand to silence the Klaxon, push the Sunset Crown up from his head to its resting place behind his couch, and answer the urgent hail incoming from Group Captain Klick.
He was so rattled by the sudden interruption that he very nearly forgot to restrict his transmission to synthesized audio-only. At the last instant he keyed the proper code, and then had to take several more deep breaths to steady himself again. To let his pet clone commander see, instead of the robust and masterful Lord Shadowspawn, the sunken creases of his ancient face, his slack bloodless lips peeling back from his prominent yellowed teeth, the few tangled wisps of hair that straggled across his wrinkled scalp, to let him hear Cronal’s own weak and wheezing voice—this could have caused considerable difficulty, if not outright disaster.
“Group Captain,” he croaked, his thin wheeze crackling with strain. “Was my order unclear? No interruptions!”
The group captain, of course, could hear only the computer’s synthesized version of Shadowspawn’s sepulchral basso. “My lord, the Rebels are attacking!”
“How do a few fighter squadrons constitute an emergency so dire that you would defy my direct order? Destroy them, and don’t bother me again.”
“More than fighters, my lord. A battle cruiser of Mon Calamari design has initiated orbital bombardment, targeting our ground emplacements, primarily our ion-turbo cannons. We believe it’s in preparation for a surface assault.”
“A Mon Calamari battle cruiser? Impossible. Their sole Mon Cal was destroyed by our gravity slice.”
“Yes, my lord—but this is a new one!”
“Impossible,” Cronal repeated. “No new cruiser could have entered the system so soon—our gravity stations should keep them at least a light-hour away!”
“My lord, the Rebels have opened a temporary jump window.”
“Imposs—” Cronal bit his tongue; clearly none of this was impossible at all. Those bloody Rebels—may the Dark swallow every miserable one!
The group captain went on at some length, describing the battle near the Rebel interdiction ships. Cronal listened in growing disbelief. “Why was I not informed?”
“My lord, your order—”
“Call out every squadron—throw in every reserve! Get every single fighting craft in action now, if you have to draft deckhands to fly them! I want those Rebels so busy they don’t even have time to watch the star flares that will kill them, do you understand?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And detail a company of your best commandos to the Election Center entry; they are to hold that door at all costs. No matter what happens with the battle, no Rebel can be allowed to interrupt what happens within, do you understand? See to it personally.”
“Yes, my lord. I will take personal command. No enemy will breach the Election Center while one trooper lives, my lord!”
“Let it be so,” Cronal snapped. “You have complete authority to command this situation, Group Captain—do not disturb me again!”
“It will be done, my lord.”
Cronal stabbed the cutoff. His joints creaked as he tried to find a comfortable position on the life-support chamber’s couch. So close … he was so close … a few minutes more was all he needed to give himself youth, and strength, a Jedi’s power and the name and face of a hero …
He yanked the Sunset Crown back into place upon his head and closed his eyes.
He sucked in a breath as deep as his withered lungs could hold, then sighed it out as slowly as his hammering heart would permit. He did the same again, and again, until gradually his heart began to slow, and his head began to clear, and he could once again drive his will into the Dark.
There he found, winking like glitterflies on a moonless night, the warm comfort of his Pawns, like little bits of himself scattered out into the Dark to point his way. He focused his mind and stabbed downward to a deeper level of concentration, where he could grasp every one of those little bits of himself and squeeze until he was wholly inside them. Then the slow cycle of breath … until each and every Pawn inhaled when he inhaled … sighed when he sighed … until their very hearts beat in synchrony with his own …
All but one.
Somebody had switched on the lights inside Nick’s head.
He jerked awake, blinking. His eyes wouldn’t focus. “Man … I have been having the weirdest dream …”
He tried to rub his eyes, but his hands were tangled in something … what was this, sleeves? Since when did he wear pajamas? Especially pajamas made out of brocade so thick he could have used it as a survival tent on a Karthrexian glacier … And his head hurt, too, and his neck was stiff, because his head had gained a couple of dozen kilos—must have been some serious party, to leave him with this bad a hangover—and when he did finally free his hands and rub his eyes and massage his vision back into something resembling working order, he took in his surroundings … and blinked some more.
He was standing in a stone chamber along with about forty other people who were all wearing funny hats and robes just like his, who all stood motionless and silent in a crowd around a big stone pedestal with heads lowered and hands folded inside their sleeves, and he said, “Oh, okay. That explains it.”
It hadn’t been a dream.
Okay, sure, a nightmare, maybe—but he was wide awake now and the nightmare was still going on, which meant it was as real as the deep ache in his feet, not to mention his back and his neck. How long had he been standing like this, anyway? Plus there was this knuckle-sized knot of a bruise over his right eye …
Oh, he thought. Oh yeah, I remember.
For a long, long moment, he didn’t move.
He couldn’t guess exactly how long he’d have to make his moves from the first instant he attracted Blackhole’s attention, but he had a pretty good idea what the old ruskakk’s reaction was gonna be: the walls and floor and ceiling of this whole chamber were made of meltmassif.
This was always the problem with Jedi, Nick decided. Whenever there were Jedi around, you ended up in some kind of trouble that nobody in the galaxy could possibly survive. Not even the Jedi himself. And this time, it wasn’t even about dying. It was about getting stuck as Blackhole’s sock puppet for the rest of his natural life. So what was he supposed to do?
On the other hand, doing nothing sure wouldn’t make anything better. He could feel Blackhole inside his head—a cold slimy goo like the trail left behind by a Xerthian hound-slug on a damp autumn day—and he could feel, too, that Blackhole could snatch back control of Nick’s arms and legs and brain anytime he felt like it; the only reason Nick had any self-awareness at all was that Blackhole’s whole attention was focused on the kid inside the stone slab.
Overall, it looked like both of them were pretty well fragged. But, y’know, he reminded himself, that kid is supposed to be a Skywalker. Nick had never been superstitious, but there was something about that name. It seemed to carry the promise, or at least the possibility, that the day might be saved in some incomprehensibly improbable fashion. Even if the situation was so clearly hopeless that only a lunatic would even try.
And so he yanked off his Crown.
It hurt. A lot. And it made this damp juicy ripping sound, very much how Nick imagined the sound of someone ripping his scalp in half like cheap broadcloth.
“Okay: owww!” He threw the Crown on the floor. “That’s it,” he declared as blood began to trickle into his eyes. “Nobody’s putting that thing back on me, because that was the last time I want to take it off.”
“No …” Cronal moaned in the darkness. “It’s not possible … not now, not when I’m so close!”
He stabbed savagely at the comm panel in front of his couch. “Klick! Are you in position?”
“My lord Shadowspawn!” the group captain exclaimed. “We’re on our way!”
Cronal ground out words between ragged yellow stumps of teeth. “When you get there, secure and seal the door. If anyone tries to come out, kill them.”
He reached up to adjust the Sunset Crown upon his wrinkled scalp. As for the inside of the Election Center, he could handle that himself.
Nick gave his robes a quick pat down, hoping he might find a liquefier belted to his waist or something—somebody around here must have one, to have softened the meltmassif to get Skywalker into it in the first place—but he came up blank, of course, because nothing was ever that easy. Not for him. Nick was absolutely certain that on the day of his birth the Force had looked down upon his life, smiled, and cheerfully made an obscene gesture. Or something.
He scanned the room. Thirty-some mostly identical Pawns. Who had the liquefier? Was he supposed to search every single one of them? On the other hand, it occurred to him that the charge emitted by a liquefier was very similar to that of a blaster on stun …
He gazed down thoughtfully at his Crown, suddenly reflecting that it might turn out to be useful after all. He picked it up and went to the door.
“Guard!” he barked in his resonant Shadowspawn voice, lifting the Crown over his head. When one of the troopers outside opened the door, Nick hit him with it.
The impact buckled the stormtrooper’s knees, and Nick—mindful both of the stormtrooper’s helmet and of his homeworld’s ancient adage that “anything worth hitting is worth hitting twice”—smacked him again, harder, which laid the stormtrooper facedown and twitching.
The other door guard cursed and brought his carbine around to open fire with impressive speed—but a couple of kilos of carbonite made an even better shield than it did a club. Nick shoved the Crown right into the carbine’s muzzle and put his shoulder into it, which knocked the trooper backward off-balance; before the trooper could bring his carbine back in line, Nick had the first guard’s carbine in his own hands … and stormtrooper armor, it seemed, was not quite as sturdy as carbonite when it came to absorbing blaster bolts.
Beyond the door, he found a long, down-sloping corridor that looked like it had been melted through shimmery black stone. He had time to mutter, “So on top of everything else, I don’t even know where I fraggin’ am,” before a door at the far end of the corridor opened to reveal a squad of stormtroopers, most likely wondering what all the shooting was about.
“This just keeps getting better and better.” Nick dragged the unconscious trooper inside and blasted the door panel, which exploded in a shower of sparks. The door slid shut, and Nick could only hope it might slow the oncoming troopers for a few seconds. It would have to be enough.
But when he looked up at the Pawns, all the Pawns were looking back at him.
He thought, Oh, this can’t be good.
The Pawns in front of him bunched together, blocking his shot at Skywalker’s pedestal tomb, while the others spread out and began to circle toward him, arms outstretched, without making a sound—and though Nick knew it was because most of them couldn’t actually talk, it was still excessively creepy. He bared his teeth and thumbed the carbine over to full auto.
And hesitated.
He had this instant, extraordinarily vivid vision of trying to explain to the sadly patient face of Luke Skywalker—the man who had spared Nick’s life a couple hours earlier based on nothing more than a pun and a vague intuition that he might be innocent—how I just blew away thirty-some innocent men and women so I could dig you out of there, because he had an overpowering intuition of his own: if Luke Skywalker thought he might save thirty innocent lives by sacrificing his own, he wouldn’t hesitate. Ten innocent lives.
One.
“Or, hell, one not-so-innocent life,” Nick muttered. “Like mine.”
He flipped the carbine’s power setting to stun. “I hate Jedi. Hate ’em. Really, really, really. Hate.”
He had no way to know how a stun blast would affect someone when channeled by the neural network of the Pawn Crowns directly into their unprotected brains, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t be good, and the only thing he was looking forward to less than explaining to Skywalker how he’d killed all these people because he was a bloodthirsty son of a ruskakk was explaining how he’d killed them all because he was too stupid to pour water out of a boot. Fortunately, he didn’t have to stun them to stop them.
He only had to stun the floor.
He opened fire on the ground in front of the feet of the oncoming Pawns, and around each shot, a meter or two of the meltmassif that layered the chamber’s floor instantly liquefied to roughly the viscosity of warm toknut butter. Pawns went down in heaps. Nick turned his fire on the floor between himself and the Pawns blocking the pedestal tomb, and they slipped and fell into a pile of their own, struggling and pawing at each other helplessly.
Not bad, he thought. Maybe not up there with slipping on a raballa peel, but still pretty funny. Now if he only had a real liquefier he could have rehardened the stone, which would have been even better. Loads of comic possibility. Though they were still struggling to rise and kind of climbing over each other, and if a few of them actually reached hard floor that would bring a sudden end to the chuckles. “And now, for my next trick …”
He flipped open the downed trooper’s medpac and loaded an ampoule of vivatherin into the chromostring canister. Then with the chromo in one hand and the carbine in the other, he took a three-step running start, jumped over the gooey floor, and landed on the chest of the nearest downed Pawn. He skidded and slipped and almost went down as the Pawn gasped and clutched at his ankle, but he kicked his way free and lurched forward, stepping on stomachs and legs and probably a head or two until he could claw his way to the pedestal and clamber up on top. As the Pawns tried to pull themselves up after him, he aimed the carbine between his feet and held down the trigger.
The pedestal collapsed into a spreading pile of slimy goo, and Nick found himself sitting on Luke Skywalker’s chest. Without pausing to consider how ridiculous they both must look, Nick triggered the chromostring canister against Luke’s neck. Given the chromostring’s ability to enhance systemic absorption of the vivatherin, Nick figured Skywalker would be jumping back to life any second now, which wouldn’t be a second too soon, because the pedestal’s collapse left Nick and Luke down on the floor with the goo-covered piles of Pawns, who were now climbing over each other to claw at Nick’s ankles and knees and pull him down and drag themselves up him like slashrats chewing down a turk-root trunk, ripping away his robes and gouging at his skin, and they were pushing him deeper and deeper into the muck, which was starting to flow up over his ears and into his eyes, and the more he struggled the more they piled onto him, until he heard what was, for a man in the midst of getting ripped to shreds by a pack of dark-sider-controlled zombies, the sweetest sound in the history of the galaxy:
spssshmmmm
The hum got louder, and took on a strange whop-whop-whop rhythm like some kind of mechanical toy, a kid’s gyrothopter or something. The Pawns stopped clawing at him and started falling limp, and Nick began to wonder if maybe he’d underestimated Skywalker’s own bloodthirstiness until he was able to push himself up to a sitting position and get a look at what Skywalker was actually doing.
Make that: what Skywalker’s lightsaber was actually doing.
It whirled through the air with no hand to guide it, spinning very much like the blades of a toy gyrothopter after all, and as it passed any Pawn it would dip and cant for a shaved second, just long enough to strike, and another Pawn would fall limp. Though they weren’t even injured.
Because the blade struck only each Pawn’s Crown.
A quick slash or two and a Crown would fall in smoking pieces, which folded each and every Pawn like a losing sabacc hand. Nick twisted to look at Skywalker.
“Shh.” Luke sat just behind him, eyes closed in a frown of concentration, right hand lifted, palm outward. He was coated head-to-toe with a black oily sheen of liquefied meltmassif. “This isn’t as easy as it looks.”
The shining emerald blade whirled through a last few revolutions; the last couple of Crowns fell to pieces, the last couple of Pawns collapsed, and the lightsaber flipped back to Luke’s hand before its blade shrank away.
Luke opened his eyes. “All right,” he said. “What do we still need?”
“Um, it’s not like we’re out of trouble right now—”
“You mean the stormtroopers outside the door?” Luke hefted his lightsaber. “I’m sure we can figure something out.”
“No, actually, I was talking about being lost somewhere inside an active volcano, and—”
“We’re not lost.”
“We’re not?”
“No.”
“Um, okay.” From past experience, Nick could assume that when a Jedi said something straight out and simple like that, he could usually be taken at his word. “The other problem is that this whole place is lined with meltmassif—remember what happened over at the Shadow Throne? Any second now, Blackhole’s gonna shock the snot out of all of us, and—”
“He won’t.”
“What makes you—”
“Nick,” Luke said, “you worry too much.”
He closed his eyes again, and the slimy black meltmassif goo began to flow across his body … but instead of dripping down, it flowed forward, thickening across Luke’s chest, then it separated itself from him altogether, pooling into a floating sphere like mercury in free fall. Thinning tendrils flowed into the sphere from Luke’s pants, and sleeves, and from the ends of his hair, as well as away from the floor around his legs, so that in only a moment, he could stand on dry, bare floor, and his clothes and face and hair were all entirely clean, and the ball of liquid meltmassif hovering in front of him was the size of his doubled fists.
“Blackhole’s ‘treatment’ has had some side effects he probably didn’t plan on,” Luke said.
“I’m guessing. Can you, like, make it into stuff and make it shock people and everything, like he does?”
Luke shook his head. “I don’t think he actually does that stuff either—it’s more like he’s controlling something that does it, if you get what I’m saying.”
“Sounds like his style; doing it himself would be too much like work.” Nick nodded at the fallen Pawns. “What about these types?”
Luke frowned around the room at them. Not one had moved. Not one had made a sound. He lifted a hand as if he were reaching for a handful of air. He took a deep breath, and his eyes drifted shut. He looked like something was hurting. His head, maybe.
Maybe his heart.
“Nick …” Luke said, barely above a whisper. “Nick, they’re dead. They’re all dead.”
Nick felt like something had stabbed him.
“They’re dead,” Luke repeated numbly. “And I killed them.”
Cronal let his consciousness slip aside from the fading sparks of his fallen Pawns—they had outlived their usefulness anyway. He let his mind slide back down into the harmonics of the crystalline web along his nerves, until once again he could touch the structure of the meltmassif that lined the entire interior of his volcanic dome, and brought his mind into resonance with the alien slave minds who controlled the rock. He could sense their baffled frustration and pain as they tried to extend themselves into the liquefied meltmassif in Skywalker’s chamber, and he could feel the countervailing pressure of Skywalker’s Force-empowered will.
The Jedi had somehow learned to manipulate meltmassif using only the Force!
This did not dismay Cronal, however; on the contrary, it instantly transformed his frustration and doubt into unalloyed delight. A wonderful talent! It meant that once Cronal took over Skywalker’s body, he’d no longer have need of the Sunset Crown.
With Skywalker’s body—and his unparalleled connection to the Force—to complement Cronal’s unparalleled knowledge of Sith alchemy and the unique properties of meltmassif, he would indeed rule the galaxy.
He could, should he choose, become the galaxy.
Every living thing would answer to his will …
All that remained was to permanently impose his will upon Skywalker, though the boy had shown an astonishing gift for defying anyone’s plans for him—even plans enforced by the incalculable power of Cronal’s Darksight. That pesky Jedi training of his!
Cronal reached out through Darksight, his anger mounting, searching for release … and found the last thing he would have expected: another presence, one very near. Very near and very powerful. And yet, he could feel, comparatively untrained.
He frowned. How had it never occurred to him that Skywalker might not be an only child …?
Luke stood frozen, unable to move, unable to think, before the litter of dead Pawns—dead men and women, innocent men and women, dead by his hand. His mind spun with endless splintering echoes of his exchange with Nick on the Shadow Throne.
They’re all innocent?
Most of them. Some of ’em are like me—it’s been a while since I was innocent of anything.
Nick knelt beside one, a middle-aged woman, and probed her neck with his fingertips for any hint of a pulse. He sighed and lowered his head. “I remember—there’s something grown into us. Our skulls. The Pawns’ skulls. An antitamper feature for the crystals and the crowns …”
“A deadman interlock,” Luke murmured.
Nick looked up, his mouth going slack. He lifted a hand to the bruise that swelled on his forehead above his right eye. “That punch …”
Luke nodded distantly. “Must have damaged the interlock, or you would have died right there on the throne.”
Nick’s eyes widened. “And if I had, how would you have gotten yourself—”
“I wouldn’t have,” Luke said. “That punch saved both our lives.”
“Then I guess we’re both lucky you’re such a nice guy.”
“Maybe we are,” Luke murmured. He looked down at the dead. “But it didn’t help them any.”
“Skywalker—Luke—this is not your fault. You didn’t bring them here. You didn’t open their skulls and stick stuff in their brains—you did everything anyone could.”
“Yeah,” Luke said. His voice came out thin and dry as moondust. “I’ll be sure and explain that to their families.”
“Blackhole killed these people. He killed them when he stuck those crystals in their heads.”
“And I pitched in and helped him do it.”
“This is a war, Luke. Innocent people get killed.”
“Maybe so,” Luke said softly. “But they’re not supposed to be killed by Jedi …”
Nick stood. “Come on, kid, snap out of it. Like an old friend of mine used to say, the difference between fighting a war and shoveling grasser poop is that in a war, even the guy in charge gets his hands dirty.”
Luke looked at him and Nick sighed. “Ah, sorry. Another old friend of mine used to say my mouth’s stuck in hyperdrive. He was a Jedi, too.”
“You knew Old Republic Jedi?”
“Met a few. Only really knew one. Dead now, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Way I heard it, Vader killed him personally.”
Luke let his eyes close. “Vader? You’re sure?”
“Had to be. Nobody but Vader would have had a chance.”
Luke only nodded. Maybe he was getting used to revelations like that. Or maybe it was that he felt like he was still in that stone tomb, hanging in the darkness at the end of the universe … He hadn’t escaped it at all. He’d just turned it inside out.
That darkness—that Darkness—lived inside him now.
He’d clawed his way back to the dream-world of light … but look at what he’d done. All this death. All these lives wasted. It didn’t matter whose fault it was. Not at all. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Everything that lived struggled, and suffered for a brief interval, scrambling in pain and terror to stave off the inevitable tumble back down into the Dark.
And all that suffering, all that struggle … all for nothing.
These weren’t the only wasted lives. Everybody’s life was a waste.
What did it matter if you succeeded beyond your wildest hopes, or if your dreams were shattered and ground to dust? Win or lose, all your triumphs and joys, regrets and fears and disappointments, all ended as a fading echo trapped within a mound of dead meat.
Blame it on the Force.
Why should there be life at all? Why did life have to be nothing more than a thin film of pond scum drifting on an infinite dead sea? Better to have never lived at all than to exist for only a brief moment of struggle and suffering, deluded by the illusion of light.
Better to have never lived at all …
“Hey! Skywalker! You with me? Is anybody in there?”
“Yes—yes,” Luke said. He gave himself a little shake and brought up a hand to rub his eyes. “Yes, sorry. I was just … thinking, I guess.”
“Thinking? You were gone, kid. Your lights were on but there was nobody home. It was scary.”
“Yes,” Luke said. “For me, too.”