Nick trotted along the curving cavernway after Luke, his breath going short. How was it that every time he met a Jedi, the guy turned out to be some kind of nikkle nut? Skywalker had gone from brown dwarf to nova just like flipping a switch. Now Nick could barely keep up with him. “Take it easy, huh? Unless you want me to just, y’know, wait for you here. Which would be fine. Between you and me, I could use a nap.”
“No time.” Skywalker kept going. “You said Blackhole needs somebody who can use the Force. My twin sister’s just as strong as I am—but she doesn’t have my training. Once he gets his paws on her …”
Now he did stop, and turned back to Nick, and the bleak fury in his eyes brought a sudden twist of fear to Nick’s gut. “I won’t let that happen,” Luke said grimly. “That’s all. I won’t. No matter what I have to do.”
“Uh—”
But Luke had already turned and was jogging away.
“Shee, kid. Two minutes ago, things were going pretty good and I could barely get you to talk. Now everything’s going wrong, and you’re making the jump to lightspeed without bothering to board a ship!”
“Yeah, funny how that works,” Luke said. “I guess I can handle things going wrong in the world. I’m used to it. I can do something about it. It’s when things go wrong in here—” He rapped the side of his head with his knuckles as if he were knocking to get in. “—that’s where the problem is.”
“The crystals.”
“I don’t know. All I know is that it makes me want to die. No. Not die. Just … stop.”
“You know what makes me want to just stop?” Nick said. “Running. Especially running in ten kilos of floor-length fraggin’ robe.”
“You want to stay here? Go ahead. I’m sure Blackhole will be happy to make you another crown.”
“Are you this nice to everybody, or am I just special?” Nick sighed and kept on going after him. His time as Shadowspawn was hazy, but not so hazy he couldn’t figure out which way they were going. “Um, Skywalker? This is not the way out of here.”
Luke didn’t even slow down. “That’s because we’re not leaving. I came here to put a stop to all this, even before I knew what was going on. Now that I know, I’m not going anywhere till it’s over.”
“Over how?”
“However.”
“I guess you must be a real Skywalker after all,” Nick said, wheezing a little as he caught up. “This is just the kind of stunt Anakin would have pulled. But I didn’t know he had kids.”
“Neither did he,” Luke said grimly. “You knew my father?”
“Knew of him, more like. Met him a few times. He debriefed me once, after an op. So you really are his son, huh?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
It wasn’t easy to shrug while running in robes, but Nick managed. “He was tall.”
“I’m told I favor my mother,” Luke said dryly, and for a second Nick thought he was going to smile. But only for a second. “You knew my father in the Clone Wars?”
“Kid, in the Clone Wars, everybody knew him. He was the greatest hero in the galaxy. When he died, it was like the end of the universe.” Nick’s gut twisted again at the memory. “It bloody well was the end of the Republic.”
Luke stopped. He looked like something hurt. “When he … died?”
Nick came to a halt gratefully, bending over with hands on his knees while he tried to catch his breath. “Way I heard it, he was the last Jedi standing in the Temple Massacre—when Vader’s Five Hundred First went in and killed all the Padawans.”
“What?”
“That’s where your father was killed: defending children in the Jedi Temple. He was not only the best of the Jedi, he was the last. Nobody ever told you the story?”
Luke’s eyes were closed against some inexpressible pain. “That’s … not the way I heard it.”
“Well, y’know, I wasn’t there, but—”
“And I am the last of the Jedi. I was trained by Ben Kenobi.”
Nick’s jaw dropped. “You mean Obi-Wan? I thought that was, y’know, just more holothriller gunk. Kenobi’s alive?”
“No,” Luke said softly. “Who are you?”
“Me? Nobody. Nobody special,” Nick said. “I was an officer in the GAR—the old Grand Army of the Republic—but I didn’t get along real well with the new management, know what I mean?”
“An officer?” Luke frowned. “Special enough. The Alliance could have used you. The New Republic still can. What have you been doing for the past twenty-five years?”
“Hiding from Vader, mostly. He’s the management I didn’t get along with.”
“You can stop hiding. Vader’s dead.”
“What, just like in the show? That’s good news.”
“If you say so. The Emperor died the same day.”
Nick tapped his head and grimaced. “I haven’t exactly been keeping up with the news. Did you kill him?”
“What? No. No, I didn’t kill either of them.”
“Not exactly like in Luke Skywalker and the Jedi’s Revenge, huh?”
“No,” Luke said, even more softly. “Not like that at all. But they are dead. That part’s true.” He lifted his head as if he was listening to something Nick couldn’t hear. An instant later, a new round of shock waves rattled the cavernway. “When this is over, you and I need to sit down together for a long, long talk.”
Nick’s breathing had barely started to ease. “I’m ready to sit down now.”
“When this is over,” Luke repeated. “For now, we run.”
“I was afraid you were gonna say that …” But Nick was already talking to Skywalker’s retreating back. He wheezed a sigh, hiked up his robe, and went after him. He could hear, coming from up ahead now, the thunder-roll of explosions that were shaking the whole mountain. “Where are we going in such a hurry?”
“I’ll show you.”
They rounded another curve and ahead, the tunnel ended in a narrow ledge. Above the ledge was night, and stars, and streaks of X-wings hurtling down for strafing runs. Below the ledge was a long, long drop down the inner bowl of a huge, ancient caldera that was studded with impact craters and lit by the burning remains of crashed starfighters from both sides. The far rim had crumbled, and much of it still glowed dully with residual heat from the explosions that had shattered it; through the gaps Nick could see, far down the curve of the volcanic dome, turbolaser towers swiveling and pumping gouts of disintegrating energy into the sky.
“Uh,” he said, hanging back from the edge. “Maybe I’ll just wait up here.”
“Maybe you won’t.”
“Have I mentioned that I’ve got, y’know, a minor issue about heights?”
“I’m sorry about that,” Luke said seriously. “But you’re coming along. I have a feeling I’ll need you.”
“But listen—you’re going after your sister, right? Who’s going after Cronal? Somebody’s gonna have to take him out.”
“And you’re volunteering to play assassin?”
Nick cocked his head. “The crystals in my head … I can feel him, sort of. I can find him. I can take him out.”
“I believe you. But no. That’s final.”
“It may be the only way to save your sister. Not to mention you.”
Luke sighed. “And what happens if he gets to her before you get to him? What happens if she doesn’t have somebody like you around to break her out of the treatment, the way you saved me?”
“Then we’ll just have to—” The look on Luke’s face stopped Nick cold. “Uh. Yeah, I can see your problem with that. I guess I’d better be extra fast.”
“I guess you’d better do what you’re told.”
“Hey, news flash, General Skywalker—I’m not one of your soldiers.”
“Hey, news flash, Lord Shadowspawn,” Luke said, a faint smile on his lips but only bleak darkness in his eyes. “You’re a prisoner of war.”
“Aw—aw, c’mon, you’re not serious—”
“You said you knew Jedi,” Luke said. “Ever win an argument with one?”
Nick sighed. “Where to?”
“There.” Luke pointed down into the caldera. “Right there.”
Nick squinted. It looked like featureless rock scattered with wreckage. “What’s the big deal about right there?”
“That,” Luke said with quiet certainty, “is where the Millennium Falcon is about to crash.”
“What? The Millennium Falcon? Like in Han Solo in the Lair of the Space Slugs?”
“Sort of.”
“You’re not kidding? I thought—y’know, I thought that Han Solo was, y’know, a fictional character. That those stories are just, well, stories.”
Luke closed his eyes and extended a hand. His voice took on a distant, distinctly hollow tone. “They are just stories. But Han’s real, and as for the Falcon—look up.”
Nick did. A rising shriek of something large and not so aerodynamic flying very, very fast gave him a half second’s warning before a huge dark shape roared way too close overhead—an oblate disk with the forward cargo mandibles of a Corellian light freighter—that wasn’t really flying so much as it was, well, hurtling, flipping end over end through the air like a deformed coin tossed by a hand the size of this mountain. On fire and out of control, it tumbled toward the crater’s floor and certain destruction.
“Oh,” Nick said. “Awwww—I would have liked to meet him—I love that show …”
“Shh.” Luke’s forehead squeezed into a frown of concentration, and the fingers on his extended hand spread as his breathing deepened. “This isn’t my best trick.”
His fingers twitched as if he were tripping an invisible switch—and out on the dark spinning disk of the freighter, automated attitude thrusters blasted to life, dorsal on the mandibles, ventral to aft above the engines, slowing the ship’s tumble. Nick heard the sudden shriek of overpowered repulsorlifts, and the forward attitude jets swiveled to add their thrust, and the freighter slammed into the ground, which must have been some kind of cinder pit, because the front mandibles drove in almost to the cockpit at a sixty-degree angle … and stuck fast.
And the ship just stayed there. It didn’t fall over. It didn’t blow up. It didn’t do anything that any reasonable person would expect a ship to do after a full-on crash.
Nick stared at it with his mouth open. Some few seconds later, he realized he hadn’t been breathing. “Did you … I mean, did I just see …?” he gasped. “Did you just now catch that ship?”
Luke opened his eyes. “Not exactly.”
“And that’s not your best trick?” Nick shook his head, blinking. “What is your best trick?”
“I hope you never find out,” Luke said. “Come on.”
Leia had known they were in desperate danger even before the floor had melted away beneath her feet. Chewbacca’s sudden reappearance in the cavern they’d fallen into had given her an instant’s hope—but only an instant’s, as the Wookiee was almost immediately felled by these rock creatures and now lay twitching on the ground, smoke curling from his singed fur. Then one of them had flowed around Han’s ankle and shocked him with some kind of energy discharge that had made all his hair stand on end, spitting sparks and smoke, before he collapsed in turn. Another woman might have lost heart then; or when all the rock creatures seemed to turn and converge on her together; or when, just as she was leaping for Han, one of the rock creatures flowed over the glow rod and the cavern plunged into impenetrable darkness … but Leia wasn’t the type to lose heart. Something about being in trouble this deep made her calm and focused. And determined.
Even in the darkness she seemed to somehow just know where Han was—and where the rock creatures weren’t. Her hand found the top of Han’s boot, and she latched on to drag him back—and her efforts were rewarded with an ear-shattering electronically fierce Thooperoo HEEE! as R2 launched himself through the air, so haloed in sparks from his overdriven antitamper field that he lit up the cavern like flares of summer lightning.
Seeing the rock creatures melt to slag at his touch gave her an inspiration. “Artoo! The hold-out!”
The astromech’s dome spun and a concealed hatch popped open, releasing a spring-loaded ejector that had been, less than a year before, engineered to deliver a lightsaber to Luke Skywalker’s hand. What shot forth from it now was no lightsaber, though, but instead a SoroSuub ELG-5C hold-out blaster.
The compact pistol flipped through the air, and Leia lost sight of it in the uncertain light—but she put out her hand anyway, and somehow wasn’t even surprised when the blaster smacked neatly into her palm. She swung the hold-out through a quick arc, firing as fast as she could squeeze the trigger. The stun blasts triggered more discharges from the rock creatures as they sagged and liquefied; the walls around her crawled and crackled with blue fire.
“Artoo! Grab Chewie and get behind me!”
The droid chirped an affirmative and shut down his antitamper field before he extended a pair of manipulators to grip the unconscious Wookiee by the bandolier. Leia covered them, driving back the rock creatures with a barrage of stun blasts. The servos in R2’s locomotors whined in protest as he dragged Chewbacca past Leia. “And see if you can wake him up!”
Keeping up the fire with one hand, she used the other to shake Han. When that didn’t work, she gave him a couple of sharp smacks across his face, which elicited only a thin groan. Finally she grabbed one of his earlobes and pinched it as hard as she could, digging her thumbnail in deep enough to sit him bolt upright with a wide-eyed howl of protest.
“Ow-wow-ow-okay-I’m-awake-lay-off-the-EAR, huh?” Han scrambled to his feet, then half sagged again, dizzily clutching his head. “Woo. What hit me?”
Leia was still firing as she backed up. “What do you think? What am I shooting at?”
“Good question.” Han blinked, trying make his eyes focus through the flashes and flickers of stun blasts and energy crackles. “What are those things?”
“Unfriendly,” Leia said tightly while she blasted another.
“Yeah, sure, make fun of the woozy guy.” He clutched at his hip, but his hand found only an empty holster. “Um, you wouldn’t happen to have seen my blaster lying around anywhere, would you?”
“I’d help you hunt for it, but I’m a little—” She laid down a line of fire that slagged three or four more. “—busy right now, okay? Keep backing up.”
“They’re not behind us?”
“Not yet.”
Han squinted. “How do you know?”
“You want to go look? I know.”
“Right, right, I get it.” Han waved to R2. “Hey, Stubby! A little light, huh?”
R2-D2’s holoprojector swiveled and flared to life, emitting a wide cone of brilliant white light. Han peered into the advancing ranks of the rock creatures that just kept slithering forward—and kept regrowing up from the sludge Leia had melted them into—and tried to keep the desperation out of his voice. “No hint from the Force? A clue? Anything?”
“Just stay back and let me save your life again, will you?” But even as she spoke, her series of stun blasts wholly liquefied a couple of them, and there in the thin puddle of rock gruel Han spotted a blessedly familiar silhouette.
“Now, that’s more like it!” He pounced on it and fished his DL-44 out of the muck, giving it a good shake to clear the works before the stone could reharden. His first shot sent a puff of vaporized rock curling out from the DL’s emitter, but after that it seemed to work just fine.
“I’ll take over here!” he told Leia, stepping up with a wide-dispersal rebound shot off the wall that spread to take out three of the creatures at once. “See what you can do to get Chewie on his feet—these power cells won’t last forever!”
When Leia turned to comply, Chewbacca was already sitting up and dazedly struggling to rise; he was urgently groaning something that Leia’s still-limited knowledge of Shyriiwook couldn’t follow. “What’s he saying? Is that ‘Code Black’? What’s Code Black mean?”
“It means Drop everything and run like hell,” Han said.
Leia looked back over her shoulder at the massed rock creatures that still kept pressing forward no matter how many Han blasted. “He always was the brains of this operation.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” Han had to leap back and dodge, ducking toward her as the rock creatures started to flow out of the walls to either side of him. “Go! Chewie, get the droid! I’m right behind you!”
Chewbacca swept R2 up in his massive hairy arms and shambled off unsteadily, though his gait was strengthening with every step. R2 kept his holoprojector aimed at the ceiling to provide as much light as possible. Leia pelted along after them, throwing glances back to make sure Han was still right behind her, which he was, running hard, firing at random back over his shoulder.
The rock creatures came after them in a swelling wave of stone.
They ran.
Han drew even with her, puffing. “Got any idea … where we’re going?”
“Sure.” Leia’s breath had gone short, too. “Away from them.”
“I mean … do you have a feeling … what might be up ahead?”
“You went pretty fast … from it’s one thing to see Luke do it to Use the Force, Leia, didn’t you?” She tried for her usual crisply tart tone, but the wheeze of her breath only made her sound tired.
“My line of work … you gotta be a … flexible thinker.”
“Just keep running. Follow … him.” She waved a hand toward Chewbacca, who pounded along the cavernway ahead of them. “Don’t know what’s ahead,” she said. “Not escaping … know that much.”
“The Force … tell you that?”
“Uh-uh. The tunnel.” She waved her blaster toward the floor. “Slanting down …”
“Oh … that can’t be good …”
“Look,” she gasped. “I can … slow ’em down. You go on … I’ll catch up—”
“Not a … not a chance. You’re just saying that … as an excuse for a breather,” Han insisted between wheezes. “If anybody’s gonna take a break … it’s me.”
She gave him a fond sidelong smile. “On three?”
“Huh.” He grinned back at her. “How about … on one?”
“Good plan.” Just ahead, the tunnel opened out into a cavern; Chewie and R2 were already inside. There was no way to tell how big the cavern might be, but she knew that the only thing keeping them going this far had been that the rock creatures had had to bunch together inside the tunnel to come at them; in a more open area, they wouldn’t have a chance. Just as she and Han reached the tunnel’s mouth, she sucked in as deep a breath as her starved lungs would hold. “One!”
Shoulder-to-shoulder, they skidded to a stop and wheeled, triggering a storm of stun blasts back along the cavernway. The front ranks of the rock creatures sagged, and melted …
And the ones behind them stopped.
“Hey … hey, how about that?” Han sagged forward, hands to his bent knees, doubled over and panting. “Maybe they’ve … had enough. You think?”
“I … doubt it.”
“Maybe they’re as tired of chasing us … as we are of running …”
Chewbacca howled something incomprehensible. R2 twittered. Neither of them sounded happy. Leia turned, and the rest of her breath left her in a smothered version of one of Han’s Corellian curses. “Or maybe,” she said, “they stopped because we ran exactly where they wanted us to go.”
The cavern was full of bodies.
Dead bodies.
Dozens, maybe hundreds of bodies, half-sunk into the stone—as though it had been liquid and hardened around them. Up to their waists or chests in the floor, pushed into the walls so that only a face or a back of the head was clear. Some of the bodies—human ones—wore what looked like stormtrooper armor, except that it was black as the stone around them. Some—fresher ones, some human, some Mon Calamari, who looked like they might only be sleeping—wore New Republic flight suits.
“For the record?” Han sounded a little shaky. “This is why I didn’t want you to come along.”
An endless swarm of TIE fighters swirled around the Remember Alderaan and the other capital ships of the Republic that were huddled together in Mindor’s radiation-shadow. Republic fire control tracked the fighters desperately to lock in missiles, and gunners poured turbolaser bolts through the vacuum, but the nimble starfighters were almost impossible to hit, and the only TIEs that got close enough to trigger the Remember Alderaan’s antifighter cluster munitions were the ones streaking in for full-speed physical intercepts.
Suicide crashes.
Even a lightly built TIE fighter generated a titanic amount of kinetic energy when traveling at the high end of its sublight velocity; the particle shields of the capital ships couldn’t dissipate it fast enough. A couple of suiciders were enough to trigger a momentary partial shield failure, and if another TIE timed it just right to slip into the gap, the impact could rip through whole decks.
The Remember Alderaan rocked and shuddered under its third such impact; clouds of gas and crystallized water vapor billowed out from three enormous rents in its hull. Like all battle cruisers, the Alderaan was designed to suck up an astonishing amount of damage and go on fighting, but when Lando got the preliminary damage and casualty report on this latest blast, even his legendary unquenchable optimism was pretty well quenched. Over a thousand crew members wounded or missing; a third of his turbolasers out of commission; and one main engine was overheating and would either shut down or melt down sometime in the next three or four minutes.
Lando leaned on the comm board on the Alderaan’s bridge. “Where the hell is our fighter escort?” he snarled. “Somebody has to stop these guys!”
But he knew the answer: the task force’s fighters were overcommitted in support of the ground action against the STOEs—the surface-to-orbit emplacements. He didn’t even have enough to adequately cover his marines, let alone defend his fleet.
“General Calrissian! General, can someone give me a hand?” C-3PO, knocked off his feet by the impact, had somehow gotten himself wedged under the security console. “Oh, what a terrible dent I’m going to have!”
Lando waved a hand and ordered, “Somebody pick up that droid!” because otherwise the blasted thing would just lie there and complain until somebody snapped and blew his gold-plated head off. He turned to his executive officer, a Glassferran, whose three expressionless eyes were fixed on three different tactical holodisplays. “Close the fleet up, Kartill,” he said. “We need to bring the ships together. As close as possible—seal the gaps in our antifighter coverage.”
“We’re practically kissing each other’s shields as it is,” Kartill replied. “And—begging the general’s pardon—being that close together is about to be a serious problem, once those STOEs swing over the horizon.”
“Don’t remind me.” He turned to the officer at the communications board. “Anything from Shysa?”
“Report coming in now, sir. I’ll put it on speaker.”
The crisp sizzle of blasterfire was the only thing that came clearly over the comm channel; everything else was half-buried in static. Lando leaned over the board and tried to keep smiling. “Shysa! Calrissian. I need good news, Fenn! We’re only eight minutes off that gravity gun’s firing window, and I’ve got a whole lot of ships with their bellies hanging out up here!”
C-3PO had reached his feet and now shuffled toward Lando. “General Calrissian—”
“Later. Fenn, do you read?”
The comm crackled with more blasterfire and a louder burst of static that might have been a proton grenade. “We’re making progress, but it’s room-to-room! These black-armor types are dug in and they don’t seem to believe in runnin’ away.”
“Do they believe in dying?”
“Oh, that they have a talent for. Problem is, they keep tryin’ to take our boys with ’em when they go!”
“Keep on it, Fenn. I’ll see if I can organize some help.”
“Anything you can do will be welcome.”
“General Calrissian, please!” C-3PO hovered at Lando’s shoulder, and he sounded even more agitated than usual. “You might be interested—”
“I said later.” Lando pointed at the communications officer. “Open the dedicated channel to Captain Antilles in Rogue One.”
The officer nodded. “Ten seconds, sir.”
Lando turned to C-3PO. “Okay. Ten seconds. What’s so interesting?”
“Well, you may find it interesting; I can’t know for certain,” the droid replied defensively. “But interesting or not, it’s unquestionably significant. In my opinion, that is.”
“Your opinion?”
“General? Captain Antilles,” the officer said.
“Please, General Calrissian, my opinion, on this matter, is most reliable!”
“Lost your chance.” Lando turned back to the comm board. “Wedge. Change of plans. Pull the Rogues off the turbo towers. The Mandos are having trouble securing the gravity gun. If that dome opens up, I want more ordnance going in than coming out, do you read?”
“Copy that, but I’m down three birds. Got a squadron or two you can spare?”
“Don’t make jokes, Wedge. Just get there. A lot of lives are depending on you.”
“We’re used to it, sir.”
“That’s why I wouldn’t give the job to anybody else. Clear skies, Wedge.”
“See you on the far side, General. Rogue Leader out.”
“But—but General Calrissian—”
“Not now, Threepio!” Lando clenched his jaw. He’d had a feeling all along that it might come to this. “Kartill, alert the fleet. We’re going atmospheric.”
All three of the exec’s eyes blinked at once. “Sir?”
“You heard me. Dirtside. Everybody. It’s the only way. If we’re still in orbit ten minutes from now, those STOEs will cut us to pieces.”
“Land? Land where, sir?”
“We’ll worry about that after we’re out of their fire window, yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“General—General, please!”
“Keep bothering me, Threepio, and I swear I’ll hit you so hard you’ll think you’re a garbage loader.”
“But, General, I thought you wanted to find Captain Solo!”
“What?” Lando turned and stared at the skinny protocol droid. “You know something about Han?”
“Possibly. In your brief communication with him—”
“Yeah, that was weird, wasn’t it? We can barely reach our own ships once they’re in that atmosphere, but we could pick up Han’s comlink, and he said he was in some kind of cave—”
“Yes, General. Yes, that’s it precisely. During that communication, I detected a subtle modulation in the carrier wave. Sort of a background noise, one might say.”
“What kind of background noise?”
“It appears to be a retrograde ortho-dialect of Surmo-Clarithian electrospeech interspersed with a creole of the Black Dwarf variant of Imperial digital encryption and a Neimoidian trade cipher—fascinating, really, especially in the structural vocabulation—”
“Threepio.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. Essentially, something was speaking on the comm wave. Or rather, the comm signal was picking up something’s speech.”
“Another comm signal?”
“Oh, no no no, nothing so sophisticated. It’s simply a language—electrospeech is a type of direct energy modulation used by a variety of life-forms; to date, I believe the total known to science numbers over—”
“Forget that. This electrospeech—you understand it?”
The droid drew himself up proudly. “I am fluent in over six million forms of—”
“I don’t need a list. What’d it say?”
“Well—translated as best I can, you understand, their accent is perfectly barbarous—they were about to take a pair of humans captive, and will deliver them to the crypt chamber.”
Lando shook his head. “What crypt chamber? And who’s taking who captive?”
“I’m sure I cannot say who the captors might be; the language would be appropriate for any number of energy-based life-forms.”
“Then why are you wasting my time with this?”
“Oh, well, it’s because these two captives were apparently accompanied by a Wookiee.”
“A Wookiee?”
“It does seem an unlikely coincidence. And they also mention a droid—hmm, parsing … half human size, round as a pillar spine, rotating dome—Artoo! Oh, General Calrissian, we must do something! They have Artoo!”
“All right, all right, slow down.” If whoever this was had R2-D2, they might even have Luke—or at least know what happened to him. That’s what Lando told himself, anyway; somehow it made him feel better to have at least a theoretically valid argument of military necessity for the rescue mission he was already pretty sure he was going to order anyway. “How did that signal punch through in the first place?”
“That’s exactly the point, General. I suspect that the natural frequency of this particular energy-based life-form confines it to a certain variety of electromagnetically active rock—this would be this life-form’s natural environment, as it were—and while this rock may very well interfere with an ordinary comm signal, its conductive properties should actually enable it to resonate with and reinforce a properly modulated—”
“I get it. Can you reproduce this modulation? Can you run it through the ship’s comm?”
“Well—in all modesty, perhaps Artoo would be more—”
Lando gritted his teeth against an almost overpowering urge to twist C-3PO’s head off. “Can you do it?”
“I am fluent in over—”
“Don’t tell me.” Lando pointed at the comm board. “Tell the ship.”
Luke scrambled through the deep cinders with Nick close behind. Taspan had sunk below the horizon; the only light came from the burning wreckage scattered across the floor of the crater, and from the occasional flashes and flares of the battle that raged above.
The cinder crunched and gave way almost like fine sand beneath every step, making the going slow and hard. The crater was also littered with bigger chunks—masses of hardened lava and rocky ejecta, most of which were a featureless, nonreflective black, which made them very hard to see; even Luke only discovered the medium-sized ones by painfully whacking one with his shins. He would have gone more cautiously, but the first time an ion panel blown off a TIE came whistling down and shattered into shrapnel a couple of dozen meters away, he gave up the idea of slow and careful.
They ran hard. At least when Luke caught his foot on a chunk and fell, he could use the Force to flip himself in the air and hit the ground running. Nick didn’t have that option, but somehow he managed to reach the relative shelter beneath the slant of the Falcon’s hull only a few steps behind Luke, even though he was limping, both hands were bleeding, and he had a nasty-looking scrape on his forehead.
The Falcon loomed over them, blacking out the stars. Its attitude thrusters flared and sprayed jets of gas in a seemingly random sequence—trying to rock itself free—and the whine of its repulsorlifts scaled up from merely annoying to a shriek that was making Luke’s teeth ache.
Nick scowled up at the ship’s dark silhouette. “What do we do, knock?”
“No comlink.” Luke held one hand pressed against his ear. “We have to get their attention somehow.”
“Where’s the hatch?”
“Up there.” Luke gestured vaguely overhead; the belly hatch was high up the underside, out of reach. “Maybe we can climb.”
“No problem. I grew up in a jungle. I can climb anything.”
“Not yet. Something’s wrong.”
“Other than their landing? Shee, in the holoshows, Solo’s supposed to be such a hot pilot …”
Luke frowned. “I feel … fear and anger. Aggression. Danger. Han’s my best friend—why would his ship feel hostile?”
“Dunno.” Nick looked around and spotted a slow swing of motion in the darkness above. “Think it might be because that quad turret’s tracking us?”
The Force stabbed Luke with an instant overpowering Move-or-die; in less than an eyeflick his foot lashed out to slam Nick back deeper under the hull and he sprang into the air, back-flipping away. The night ripped open with the choomchoomchoomchoom of high-cyclic cannon fire, burning the air into long streaks of brilliant yellow that lit up the cinder pit like noon on Tatooine, and blowing gouts of white-molten rock in all directions.
The turret tracked Luke, chopping red-hot craters toward him like the footprints of an invisible fire god. He landed and sprang again on a different vector, and by the time the turret followed that leap he was off again on another that took him behind a boulder the size of an adolescent bantha. He pressed his back against it while the turret blasted away at its other side, and from the amount of smoke going up and debris raining down, he was pretty sure that turret’s gunner, whoever he was, figured the easiest way to get him would be to just blast the rock to pieces.
He rolled across to the opposite edge and risked a quick glance. Looked like Nick wasn’t kidding about being able to climb anything; he was clambering up the overhanging slant of the hull faster than a hungry mynock. “Nick! Get off of there!”
Nick reached the gimbal cowling of the quad turret. With Nick hanging half across the transparisteel viewport, the gunner quit blasting; Luke could see him inside, shouting Get your fraggin’ grass off my turret, or something along those lines.
“Nuts to that,” Nick called back. “He can’t shoot me here! Toss me your lightsaber and I’ll shut this ruskakk down with one swipe!”
“No, Nick! Jump! The Falcon’s equipped with a—”
A burst of blue-white energy crackled over the freighter’s hull; the discharge threw Nick tumbling from the turret to the ground, where he landed on his back with an authoritative whump.
“—antipersonnel field projector,” Luke finished belatedly.
The gunner opened up again. Luke extended his hand and summoned the Force; a sharp shove sent Nick skidding, and Luke decided he’d had just about enough of being shot at for one night. He took a deep breath and sent his mind into the Force.
The Falcon loomed large in his perception, as did the thirty or so desperate people he now felt were inside. He shut them out of his consciousness and focused on the ship itself. There—he felt the circuit he was looking for … and he even felt the echo of Leia’s hand upon it! She had touched this only hours earlier. Maybe even less …
But this was a distraction—even more distracting than the shuddering of the boulder as cannon blasts chewed away at its opposite side. The mere awareness of Leia’s recent presence was enough to flood his mind with all manner of fears and hopes that dimmed his perception until he could banish them and focus once more. A few more deep breaths tuned his mind like a targeting laser, and he recovered his hold on the circuit. A slight nudge in the Force, and he felt the circuit trip.
The quad turret went dark, and its guns fell silent. The turret autorotated to face forward between the freighter’s mandibles.
Luke could feel the gunner’s confusion and rising panic; he figured he had at least five seconds before the gunner figured out that the turret drivers had been reset and locked into their forward-fire default position.
Five seconds was more than he needed.
He stood up and raised his hand. High up the underside of the ship’s slant, the belly hatch fell open, spilling light in a stretching rectangle up the night-shadowed hull. One Force-powered leap carried him over the smoking boulder to Nick’s side.
“I’m all right …” Nick wheezed weakly. “Just need a minute to … catch my breath. Or maybe a week. Or two.”
Luke knotted his left fist in the front of Nick’s Shadowspawn robe, gathered the Force around them both, and leapt straight up, over the edge of the freighter’s belly ramp—which, due to the angle at which the ship was stuck, was more like a slide—and skidded down it into the Falcon’s main cargo hold.
Which was full of men and women in curiously constructed armor that looked like it had been made out of lava, nearly all of whom were pointing blaster rifles at him.
For an instant, the only sound was the rattle and snap of rifle stocks being snugged against armored shoulders; in the next instant, the only sound was the lethal hum of a green lightsaber blade held forward at guard.
“Don’t shoot,” Luke said softly. “I’ve killed too many people already today.”
“Weapons down!” The speaker was a hard-looking woman with red hair, sporting a swelling bruise around her left eye. She stood with her left thumb hooked behind her blaster belt while her right hand dangled free and loose near the butt of a slim blaster in a quick-draw rig. “It’s the Jedi! He’s here to help!”
“Yes,” Luke said. “I am the Jedi. And I hope I can help.” That was true on enough different levels to make his stomach hurt—but on the other hand, this was the second time in a row that someone had decided not to mess with him based on who they assumed he was, which was a trend he hoped to encourage. “Where’s Han?”
“Han who?” Her right hand came up, but it came up empty. “Listen, we need you—we need your help. Shadowspawn’s got my—”
“No he doesn’t,” Nick wheezed from behind Luke.
“Nick?” Her eyes sparked and her voice had gone soft and breathless, and Luke could only wonder how he’d thought she was hard-looking; when she gazed past him at Nick, she looked like a Tatooine teenager on the way to her own star-seventeen dance at the Anchorhead community center. She brushed past Luke as if he weren’t even there and threw her arms around him. “Nick! I can’t believe it!”
“Hey, kid. Did you miss me?”
“Did I miss you?” She pulled his face down to hers and planted a kiss on his lips that would have opened the eyes of a dead man.
Luke cleared his throat. “I take it you two know each other?”
“Nick—” Her eyes were still shining when she came up for air, and her cheeks were wet, too. “You’re all right? How did you escape? What are you doing running around with a Jedi?”
“All right? Mostly.” Nick rubbed at the dried blood that crusted his shaven scalp and grimaced. “The running-with-Jedi business, well, we sort of rescued each other. As for escaping … um, you have noticed that the ship we’re on is stuck nose-first in the ground in the middle of a giant pitched battle, haven’t you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, stroking his face. “We’ve got you—that’s all that matters.”
Nick lifted his own hand to tenderly touch her black eye. “Still haven’t learned to duck, huh?”
“You oughta see the other—uh, guy.” She grinned at him. “Now all we have to do is find a place to hole up until the flares subside, and we can shake this rockball’s dust off our boots forever.”
“Um …” Luke said quietly. “No.”
She looked at him. “What?”
“We’re going back for Han.”
“Again: Han who?”
“Don’t.” Luke nodded generally around at the scorch marks and blaster scars that marred the hold’s interior walls, floor, and ceiling. “Are you going to tell me this is all from a slight weapons malfunction?”
Nick turned. “She’s not a pirate.”
“Is there another word for it?”
“Hey, this tub was abandoned when we found it—” the woman said.
“Try to remember who you’re lying to.” Luke sighed. “I know you didn’t kill them. That’s why I haven’t hurt any of you yet. But this has been a really, really hard day for me, and my patience is wearing thin.”
“Hey, c’mon, Skywalker, take it easy,” Nick said. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent explanation.”
“And I’ll be happy to hear it. Just as soon as we get Han and Chewie and Leia back on board this ship.
“Skywalker?” one of the others chimed in. “Any relation to the guy from The Jedi’s Revenge?”
“No,” Luke said with maybe a touch more emphasis than was absolutely necessary. “No relation at all.”
He looked back at the redhead. “Where did you leave them?”
She opened her mouth, but before she could speak Luke raised a hand. “Think before you talk,” he said. “I won’t ask you again.”
She closed her mouth. She looked up at Nick, then back at Luke. “Uhh, okay,” she said slowly. “Look, can we make a deal?”
“Sure,” Luke said. “This deal: You tell me everything I want to know, and do exactly as I say. In exchange, I’ll try to forget that you stole my best friend’s ship and abandoned him and my sister to die.”
“Your sister? Your sister is Princess Kissy-Face?”
“My sister is a princess. Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan,” Luke said evenly. “And if you called her Princess Kissy-Face in person, I can guess who gave you that shiner.”
Nick rubbed his eyes. “Aeona … you didn’t really pirate this ship, did you?”
“Well, what would you have done, if it was me in the meathooks of that ratbag?”
“Something worse, probably. But you’re not gonna win this argument, and there’s no time to try. The bad guys know we’re here, and they’re coming after us.”
Luke said, “You’re sure?”
Nick flashed him a grim look and tapped the thin scar that stretched around his head from temple to temple.
“So? We should be safe enough as long as we don’t try to move,” Aeona said. “Who’s gonna waste their time blasting a crashed ship?”
“Wait five seconds and you can ask ’em.”
Nick barely had time to get the words out before the first explosion ripped away the Falcon’s belly ramp and blasted a gout of flaming slag into the cargo hold that set the whole place on fire.
In the deep shadows of the cavern filled with half-buried dead people, away from R2’s light, Han gathered Leia into his arms. “Leia, I just—I’m sorry things went this way. I just wish you and I had more time. Together.”
She smiled up at him and touched his face. “I know.”
“How is it we only kiss when we’re about to get killed?”
“Just lucky, I guess.” She kissed him, briefly, glancingly, but even that slight contact brought a hot flush of bittersweet regret for all the kisses he was pretty sure they’d never get the chance to share.
“Aroo-oo-ergh! Herowwwougrr.”
“What?” Han pulled away from her. “Are you sure?”
Chewbacca was kneeling alongside a young Mon Calamari who was buried to his armpits. “Herowwwougrr!”
Leia frowned. “What’s he saying?”
Han was already rushing to his copilot’s side. He reached down and pressed his fingertips to the Mon Cal’s face just above his left eye, checking for his sinus pulse. It was there: thin and thready but maintaining the typical syncopated three-beat rhythm. “He’s right!”
“About what?”
“This one’s still alive,” Han said wonderingly. “Looks like some more of them might be, too. Out cold, but breathing.”
“What’s that insignia?” Leia joined him at the Mon Cal’s side. “Artoo, aim the light over here.” When he did, her eyes widened and she pointed at the posting flash next to the rank cartridge on the Mon Cal’s battle-dress blouse. “Han—isn’t that the Justice? The ship Luke was on?”
Han was already up looking at the others. It was a backward progression: the captives became less and less healthy-looking as he went deeper into the cavern. In addition to the Republic soldiers, there were a number of guys in the Lava Gear armor of the Mindorese, but most of them were stormtroopers, and nearly all of them were dead. “It’s like those critters stuck them in here and just … forgot about them.”
Chewie grumbled. Han nodded. “Yeah, not my favorite way to go, either.”
R2 gave out a warning whistle that brought Han back to his feet. He drew his blaster. “That sounds like bad news.”
“Bad enough,” Leia said as she produced the hold-out. In the faint light that spilled out into the tunnel, she could see wave after wave of the rock creatures crowding toward the cavern. “Time to fight.”
Han turned, blaster ready. “I don’t think we’re getting out of this one.”
“Trust in the Force, Han.”
“You trust the Force,” he said. “I’ll trust my blaster.”
Leia frowned down at the hold-out’s power indicator. “The Force never runs out of ammo.”
“No? Then how come it’s not shooting?”
“What happened to never tell me the odds?”
“That’s for when there are odds. When you fall off a cliff, what are the odds you’ll hit the ground?”
“Depends,” she said. “How close are you and the Falcon?”
“Very funny.”
Han’s comlink crackled. He grabbed it and shouted, “Yeah, come in! Come in! We’re in a little trouble here. Do you copy? Do you copy?” but the comlink replied only with a burst of static.
He shook it one more time, then made a face and jammed it back in his pocket. “Had me going there for a second. Come on. If we can hold the doorway, we’ll slow ’em down, anyway.”
But as they moved toward the cavern’s mouth, the creatures started melting out of the walls.
In the deep gloom of his life-support chamber, Cronal withdrew his consciousness from the realm of Darksight, and found himself well pleased. Anyone unfamiliar with the true power of Darksight might have been astonished to find that Skywalker indeed had a sibling who had never trained as a Jedi; this hypothetical anyone would no doubt have been amazed to discover that this sibling had—seemingly of her own accord—presented herself precisely where Cronal needed her to be exactly when he needed her to be there. For Cronal, this was only what he had learned to expect. Left to its own devices, the galaxy and everything in it—from the stars themselves to the tiniest virus—served the Dark.
At least up until some blasted meddler started tricking around with the Force, upsetting the natural order of things.
This was the real problem with Jedi: the Force. Their whole concept of the Force. Always prattling about life and light and justice, as if those silly words actually meant something. He would have found those Jedi fools entirely humorous were it not for their inexplicable ability to occasionally actually interfere with the Way of the Dark.
Palpatine had done a fair job of thinning the Force-user herd, and Skywalker himself had nearly finished the job when he’d tricked Vader and the Emperor into killing each other—because, after all, the Sith could be as troublesome as Jedi if they set their minds to it. And then that Skywalker boy himself had already been more trouble than he was worth.
This problem, however, was on the verge of solving itself, as all such problems were wont to do, when one truly adhered to the Way. He didn’t need the Skywalker Jedi anymore; his sister would be an even better fit—not only had she no actual Force skills to defend her from his dominance, she also had tremendous political potential. Hero of Endor? Sole survivor of the last royal family of Alderaan?
The only difficulty he had left was to retrieve the Skywalker girl from the wild Melters and get her Darkening under way, which task was decidedly complicated by the fact that all his best Pawns were lying dead on the floor of the Election Center. Yet even this difficulty turned out to be another example of how the Dark anticipated and provided for the every need of its most assiduous servant.
He still had the prototype, the test subject upon whom he had experimented to perfect the Darkening process. This subject hadn’t been entirely analogous to Skywalker—his connection to the Force, though astonishingly powerful, was innately of a far darker shade than the boy’s, not to mention that he had never received Jedi training. Or any training, really, which was probably why Cronal had failed to anticipate just how large an obstacle Skywalker’s training would prove to be. He was, however, enormous and physically powerful, and his very arteries pulsed with a certain innate ferocity that Cronal found more than a bit intoxicating. And with the shadow nerve network of meltmassif lacing his body, he had a connection to the fundamental power of the Dark that rivaled Cronal’s own.
The initial test subject had had a number of limitations, though; he was twice Skywalker’s age, and instead of a hero to the entire Rebel Alliance and now the New Republic, he’d been a hunted fugitive for longer than the boy had been alive, with a substantial bounty on his head that still stood. He was also more than a bit distinctive-looking, being over two meters tall and built like a rancor, not to mention having teeth filed sharp as a sabercat’s. He also, owing to some kind of structural brain abnormality that Cronal had been unable to repair, entirely lacked the power of human speech.
All of which made him a less-than-ideal body for Cronal to spend the next few decades inhabiting, and so Cronal had never taken the final step of permanent consciousness transfer … which only made this particular test subject all the more ideal for this particular task: a remote body, through which he could exert the whole of his powers, without risk to himself.
After all, when one needed a job done properly …
And so Cronal closed his eyes and brought the Sunset Crown down from its resting place onto his hairless scalp. When he opened his eyes again, the eyes he opened were not his.
They were the eyes of Kar Vastor.