CHAPTER 13
NIGHT WAS FALLING ACROSS THE SHADOW REALM.
At the center of the system, clouds of asteroids spiraled in toward Taspan’s photosphere. The interaction of the gravity stations and Taspan’s own gravity gave them a kind of order: as they fell inward, tumbling toward the fusion-powered furnace of the star’s surface, the clouds elongated, and curved, and melded from individual clouds to an array of twisting streams like the stripes on a candy sparklemint stick.
Smaller rocks vaporized in Taspan’s corona and chromosphere; larger asteroids ignited on the way down, becoming streaks of fire whose photosphere impacts created splash rings as wide as a major planetoid and hundreds of kilometers tall, as well as central rebound spikes that actually ejected stellar material beyond the critical point where the star’s gravity and magnetic field could contain it, unleashing huge bursts of very hard radiation—which was exciting enough in itself, because it managed to knock down deflector shields throughout the system.
The only shields these bursts didn’t knock down were those of the starfighters making atmospheric attack runs on Lord Shadowspawn’s volcano base—these shields weren’t knocked down because interference from the atmosphere prevented them from being raised in the first place—and those of the Slash-Es and the other Republic cruisers huddling into the radiation-shadow cast by Mindor itself.
And night was falling.
As Mindor turned its face from Taspan, out of the blood-colored west came waves of Republic starfighters. They hurled themselves at the dome’s defenses with reckless abandon, their half-useless laser cannon battering the heavy armor of turbolaser towers. The towers, mounted on gimbals the size of spacecraft, tracked the streaking fighters, their massive guns pumping out so much plasma so fast that they superheated the nearby air into a titanic updraft, blasting a vast rolling mushroom cloud of corrosive sand and dust and smoke from the dome to the stratosphere.
Down through that cloud came wave after wave of TIEs.
There were so many that the atmosphere’s effect on their cannons was irrelevant; they could destroy whole flights of X-wings by simply being airborne obstacles—their presence over the dome forced the Republic pilots to break formation and reduce their speed to avoid midair collisions … and the slightest reduction in speed could be fatal. Turbolaser drive technology had advanced in the years since the destruction of the first Death Star; these were far faster on traverse, and included range-sensitive trajectory-projection software that automatically timed their fire to intercept any starfighter unwary enough to go in a relatively straight line for more than a second at a time.
And against an unshielded X-wing, even a glancing hit from a tower-mounted turbolaser left nothing but an expanding globe of plasma.
Still the X-wings came on, in wave after wave, pilots giving their lives to shield flights of B-wing bombers that swooped in for torpedo runs. The B-wings weren’t after the towers; they focused their fire on six heavily armored domes atop the highest curve of the volcano.
These domes were closed up tight, relying on their multiple-meters-thick ceramofused armor to absorb the shattering blasts of proton torpedoes and detonite-tipped missiles, which it did very well indeed. “We’re barely even leaving dents!” a B-wing pilot shouted over the comm.
“Shut up and keep shooting,” his squad leader ordered.
“But we can’t hurt them as long as those armor domes are closed!”
“The point is, as long as we make ’em keep those armor domes closed, they can’t hurt us!”
Inside those armored domes were the base’s planetary-defense weapons. The five smaller domes that surrounded the vast central dome contained dual-mounted ground-to-orbit ion-turbo cannons: the twin mounted barrels would fire on a precisely timed interval, ensuring that a strike from the ion cannon to disable a capital ship’s shields and electronics would be followed instantly by a disintegrating blast from the turbolaser. Those were deadly enough in themselves, but the central dome housed a weapon against which no ship of the line could defend: the gravity gun.
And once night fell across the battle, every Republic capital ship in the system—clustered in the planetary shadow, to shield them from the ejecta bursts—would be in its field of fire.
This was not their only problem.
Troubling as the stellar ejecta bursts were, they were only the result of ordinary asteroid clusters infalling through Taspan’s corona, chromosphere, and photosphere. When those asteroid clusters included one or more of the thousands of gravity stations, the effect was substantially more spectacular.
The unnaturally steep gravity gradient of the infalling projectors drew stellar tide surges—bulging mounds that swelled like blisters on the surface of the star—and the warping of the local magnetic fields triggered titanic stellar flares bigger around than entire planets, great fountains of thermonuclear flame blasting hundreds of thousands of kilometers up from the surface, racing along beneath the inward spiral of the projectors like unimaginably huge space slugs made of fire.
Before they engulfed each one and slowly subsided back to Taspan’s surface, these fountains also blasted jets of gamma radiation that swept through the system like searchlights of destruction, melting larger asteroids to slag and disintegrating the smaller ones outright. One of these jets brushed the curve of Mindor’s atmosphere, a mere glancing blow as the jet swung across the system’s plane of the ecliptic.
This glancing blow was enough to set a couple of cubic kilometers of the atmosphere on fire.
This had an effect like a slow-motion fusion blast, as the powerful thermal updraft sucked huge quantities of dust up into the firestorm, where the dust ignited in turn, becoming an expanding ringwall of flame that swept across Mindor’s shattered landscape toward the battle that raged around the volcanic dome.
Sensors at the base, as well as those mounted on the Republic capital ships, were easily able to predict the path and eventual progress of the firestorm; while it would blow itself out short of becoming a planet-wide conflagration, before doing so it would roll right over Shadowspawn’s base like a line of thunderheads whose clouds were toxic smoke and whose rain was fire.
This would be fatal for troops caught in the open, but more pertinently, it would force starfighters on both sides to withdraw or ground themselves; between the natural sensor interference of the atmosphere itself and the thick clouds of fiery smoke, any who sought to continue the fight would be flying entirely blind.
It would also, as was pointed out to Lando Calrissian by Fenn Shysa, force the domes to remain closed over the surface-to-orbit weapons, as well as temporarily overload the heat exchangers that cooled the turbolasers in the rings of towers. “And if you don’t mind me bringin’ it up, General,” Shysa had gone on, “maybe the only tactical error this Shadowspawn character has made so far is that he’s clustered all his planetary-defense weapons together, right on top of that big hill.”
Lando had nodded. “Easier to defend.”
“That they are,” Shysa had agreed. “Even if it’s not them defending ’em, you follow?”
Lando had considered this for a moment. Only a moment; he had never been slow to jump on an opponent’s weakness. “Fenn, my friend,” he’d said slowly, “have I told you today how much I admire the way you think?”
When those smoke-thunderheads rolled over the dome, fire was not their only rain. Screened by the advancing flame front, three Republic capital ships came in low and slow, feeling their way through the atmosphere. The capital ships did not fire on the domes; through the hurricane of dust, smoke, and flame within the firestorm, even the considerable power of their weapons would have taken some time to breach the armor—time they simply did not have.
Two of them scattered a downpour of landers filled with Republic marines into the ring of ion-turbo emplacements. The third of the capital ships was the Remember Alderaan. Its landers dropped into place around the gravity gun.
For a moment, all of the battle was contained by the raging firestorm. Starfighters could not fly, overheated turbolaser towers could not fire, armored domes could not be opened, and no ground forces could leave either the landers or Imperial bunkers.
But the storm didn’t last long; in minutes, the tons of dust and sand and gravel it sucked up into itself reached the tipping point beyond which the debris no longer added to the conflagration but began to smother it. As the storm shrank, the three Republic battle cruisers withdrew behind its retreating face.
Seconds later—while the rock and sand still glowed scarlet with heat—turbolasers began to cough plasma blasts at incoming starfighters. Concealed blast doors swung open across the summit and disgorged streams of armored stormtroopers and files of rumbling hovertanks. Republic landers opened fire with their antipersonnel turrets, and their own troop ramps swung down to make a path for charging marines, and the Battle of Mindor was now joined on the ground. Face-to-face. Blaster-to-blaster.
Knife-to-knife.
WHEN GROUP CAPTAIN KLICK AND HIS COMPANY OF elite commandos had opened the wide arching doorway to the Sorting Center, the place had been in chaos. The bombardment on the surface above sent shock waves through the stone that made the floors shudder and shift continuously like a long, low-level groundquake, and filled the air with a just-above-subsonic rumble like a nonstop roll of thunder; the prisoners, panicked at the rain of dust and chunks of stone from the vault ceiling overhead, rushed the doorway en masse. Klick’s men had driven them back; stun blasts dropped the leading ranks, and full-power blasterfire over their heads sent the others cringing toward the far walls. Klick had kicked his way through the twitching bodies, raised his E-11, and triggered another burst over the heads of the cowering prisoners.
“Down! Facedown! On the floor! Now!” He turned to the trooper beside him. “Sergeant, take Second Platoon and shoot any prisoner still on his, her, or its feet five seconds from now. The rest of you, on me.”
He led them trotting through the black-gleaming fusion-formed cavern to the Election Center’s door.
“Fourth Platoon: front and center.” He stepped to one side. “Seal this door! No one in, no one out. First Platoon: firing position in support of Four. The rest of you, prepare to repel assault.”
A couple of troopers from Fourth Platoon deployed their foamplast canisters. Engineered for a quick-and-dirty seal for envirosuit ruptures or minor hull punctures, foamplast would expand to fill any and all available space around its application point, then harden almost instantly. A thin bead around the edges of the door sealed it permanently in place, and not a moment too soon—only seconds after the foamplast had set, Klick heard the whine of the door’s servos as someone tried to open it from the far side.
“Back!” he snapped. “Company: form up and prime weapons! Prepare to fire on my order!”
For a long, long second the only sound in the Sorting Center was the rustle and snap of blasters being readied and the clacking of the nearest troopers dropping prone, those behind to one knee, and the rear taking firing stances with carbines at their shoulders. Klick himself stepped away from the door; the only way to open a foamplast-sealed door was a breaching charge.
Seconds ticked past with no explosion, and just when Klick began to wonder if he’d imagined the servo whine, a spot high on the right-hand side of the door glowed red and brightened almost instantly to white before it burst and vaporized around a bar of green plasma.
All right, two ways through a foamplast-sealed door, Klick amended silently. Breaching charge, and lightsaber.
Klick had a terrible premonition. “Hold fire,” he warned. “Anybody shoots before my order, I’ll kill him myself.”
The bar of green plasma cut a ragged oval through the door. When the cut was finished and the oval slab of durasteel fell through a shower of sparks to clang on the fusion-formed stone, Klick did not give the order to fire. He did not give any order at all. He simply stood, staring, awestruck beyond words.
Standing in the doorway were only two men. One was a tallish wiry man with dark skin, and blood trickling sluggishly down his shaven scalp, dressed in Pawn robes and holding an E-11 dangling by its shoulder strap. The other, smaller man was dressed in a sodden and filthy Rebel Alliance flight suit, and his damply tousled hair of radiation-bleached blond stuck in tangles to a tanned face whose features, Klick ever-so-slowly realized, had the exact contours of his very fondest dream …
Klick’s mouth went dry and his legs went numb and he could barely force the words through his slack lips. “Emperor Skywalker …”
He dropped to one knee, undogged his helmet,
yanked it off, and inclined his head in reverence. “Down weapons!
Down weapons! Buckets off and kneel to your Emperor!” he cried.
“Your pardon, my lord, I did not know you!”
REPUBLIC MARINES FEVERISHLY TRIED TO DIG IN AROUND the ion-turbo emplacements while they poured fire into the advancing stormtroopers. Their armored landers added antipersonnel punch with turret-mounted SoroSuub clusterfrag launchers; the whole curve of the base’s summit sparkled with thousands of tiny detonations, each of which scattered high-velocity flechettes, though most of them only clattered off the rocks in a rushing roar like a Chadian monsoon.
The stormtroopers advanced at a run behind the cover of heavily shielded hovertanks. The tanks’ forward cannon arrays pounded away at the landers and blasted marines to bloody bits, and their drivers ran them right up against the landers’ skirt armor. From there the stormtroopers could charge into hand-to-hand—but when they did, the stormtroopers discovered to their considerable dismay that Republic marines, unlike many other enemies, didn’t seem at all intimidated by the stormtroopers’ vibroknucklers, and that the marines favored, for close combat, 18 cm aKraB clip-point vibrodaggers that could cut Mark III armor like rendered gorgan blubber.
Around the dome that housed the gravity gun, twelve landers from the Remember Alderaan had come down in a double ring: four close in around the emplacement with the other eight encircling them. The inner four were too close to the emplacement’s infantry bunkers for artillery or tank fire—so close that the landers’ own antipersonnel turrets could not depress their aim to ground level; all they could do was chip away at the upper curves of the bunkers and the gravity gun’s dome. Black-armored stormtroopers came swarming out from the bunkers like ravenous carrion beetles, using the inner landers themselves as cover from the fire of the surrounding eight while they went to work on the hulls with fusion torches and shaped-blast breaching charges. If any of the stormtroopers found it odd that these twelve landers, unlike the ones around the ion-turbo emplacements, remained tightly sealed instead of disgorging their own swarms of marines, none of them remarked on it.
The explanation for this unusual tactic was discovered by one particular stormtrooper officer, who led one of the strike teams that blasted their way into one of the landers and found no Republic forces at all—only a remote computer link jacked into the pilot’s station, and another jacked into the fire-control board. The lander was not, however, actually empty. It was packed, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling, with detonite fused to motion detectors.
It was the last thing the officer saw—the simultaneous explosions of all four landers vaporized not only him and his strike team, but also all of the hundreds of stormtroopers nearby, as well as buckling the blast doors of the infantry bunkers.
Though most of the force of the explosions was directed inward toward the bunkers and the gravity gun, the residual blast was enough to rock the other eight landers and to shove several of them skidding a few meters. Before they even came back to rest, their gang ramps had flipped down to unleash a different kind of infantry.
These troops did not shout or howl; they did not charge with blasters roaring. Instead they deployed with silent efficiency, leapfrogging from cover to cover toward the bunkers.
Another black-armored officer got a glimpse of them through his bunker’s damaged blast doors as they came on, and he muttered a curse that the oncoming infantry would have recognized—even though they would have sneered at the officer’s Core Worlds accent—as being a debased hand-me-down dilution of their native tongue. “Fall back!” he shouted. “Barricade the corridors! Hold the corners and crossways!”
Because the last thing this officer wanted to do was waste his men by going head-to-head against Mandalorians.
THE CAVERNS THROUGH WHICH HAN, LEIA, AND CHEWBACCA walked—and R2-D2 rolled—had shrunk to a series of mazy tunnelways. In the light of R2’s extensible torch, the stone looked black but was also semitranslucent, showing gleams of internal crystalline structure like Harterran moonstone.
Han walked between R2 and Chewie, head down, silent. He couldn’t stop thinking about Mindorese running wild all over the Falcon. And who was flying her right now? Whose grubby hands were all over his controls? “Growr,” Chewie agreed softly, seeing Han’s anger. But then he lifted a hand to gesture ahead and said, “Herroowarr hunnoo.”
Han frowned and continued along the tunnel. Leia had been walking briskly since they’d entered the tunnels; she’d given up trying to talk to him after a couple of minutes and now was so far ahead that all he could see of her was the distant swing of her glow rod. He nodded. “I think she’s mad at me. You think she’s mad at me?”
“Meroo hooerrree.”
“It’s not my fault.” Han scowled. It seemed like he said that too often. “It’s not my fault—I warned her, didn’t I? Didn’t I warn her that we’d be sorry for rescuing those scumballs?”
Teeeooorr weep? R2’s whistle came out dry and somewhat ironic, and Han had a pretty good idea what he meant.
“Not sorry about finding you. That’s not what I meant,” he said. “Man … she’s really upset, huh?”
“Rowroo,” Chewbacca said thoughtfully.
“Really?” Han brightened a little. “You think?”
Chewie grumbled a bit more, waving Han on. Han chewed a corner of his lip, staring ahead at the swing of Leia’s glow rod, and came to a decision. “Maybe you’re right. Stay here with the droid.”
“You, too? Look, it’s my problem, let me handle it, huh?” Han started walking faster. Pretty soon he was trotting. “Princess! Hey, Princess, wait up, huh?”
She didn’t even look back. He broke into a run, and when he caught up he fell into step beside her. “Leia, wait. I need to check your shoulder.”
“No time.”
Han frowned. “You say that like you know where we’re going.”
“I do. Sort of.” She pointed the glow rod into the darkness ahead. “That way.”
Han squinted. All he saw was darkness. “What’s that way?”
“Luke.”
“Luke? Are you kid—uh, I mean, you’re sure? How can you be sure?”
She didn’t even look at him. “I’m sure.”
“Oh. Oh, yeah, I guess you are.” Han stopped for a deep breath, then had to hustle to catch up with her again. “Y’know, Leia, this Force stuff, it’s—y’know, it’s one thing to see Luke do it but—”
“But what?” Now she did stop, and she did look at him, and from the flash her eyes picked up off the glow rod he kind of wished he’d been smart enough, about fifteen seconds ago, to bite his tongue in half.
“It’s just that you—y’know, you and I—”
“I’m sorry I make you uncomfortable, General Solo,” she said tartly. “I suppose you’d be better off with someone like—”
“Well, fuse my bus-bars,” Han said. “Chewie was right: you are jealous.”
“What? What did that mountain of mange say about me? I’ll hold him down and shave his—”
“Easy, easy, come on, Leia—”
“I’m not jealous, I’m angry. She took you completely off-guard.”
Han flinched. “Not completely—”
“You think she would have caught you flat-footed if she wasn’t good-looking?”
“Maybe not,” Han allowed through the beginning of a slow grin. “But I am pretty sure that if she wasn’t good-looking, you wouldn’t have hit her so hard.”
“Hope I broke her nose,” Leia muttered darkly, then suddenly answered his grin and added a little chuckle. “ ‘Fuse my bus-bars’? Really?”
Han shrugged, feeling himself start to blush. Again. “Just an expression I’m trying out. When I get too old to be dashing, I’ll have to be colorful.”
“You’re already colorful,” she said. “And you’ll always be dashing.”
“Aw, you take the fun out of everything.”
A burst of static from his comlink made them both jump. “Han! What the hell are you doing?”
Han fished out his comlink. “Lando? I’m standing in a cave, knucklehead. What the hell are you doing? Why are you even in this system?”
“Han, that was Hobbie you just clipped! He’s going down—again! Cease fire and get the hell out of my battle!”
“That was Hobbie I just what?”
“Han, if you don’t stand down, we’ll have to take you down!”
Han started to run, not going anywhere but he just had to move, shouting into the comlink. “Oh, no—oh, no no no, you don’t understand! That’s not us in there—”
“Great! Rogue Leader—light ’er up!”
“Don’t do it! Wedge, don’t! Don’t you dare shoot down my ship!”
“Don’t you mean my ship?” Lando said. “Should have known it wasn’t you—flies like a bantha in a tar pit—you fly more like a constipated nerf with a broken leg—”
“Lando, I’m serious—put one scratch on the Falcon and I’ll—”
“Never find it under all the dents,” Lando finished for him. “Wedge—see if you can take out just the thrusters.”
“Lando—Wedge—” Han grimaced in frustration and turned back to Leia, who had stopped a few meters behind him and now stood motionless, frowning in concentration. “Come on, Princess!”
She shook her head. “Something’s wrong here …”
“Oh, you think? Is it the lost-inside-a-volcano thing? Or the losing-the-Falcon-and-it’s-about-to-be-shot-down thing? Or maybe it’s the we’ve-just-managed-to-lead-all-our-friends-along-with-half-the-Alliance-into-a-giant-death-trap thing?”
“Not so much,” she said. “It’s more the we’ve-been-running-in-the-dark-through-a-cave-and-we-haven’t-fallen-down-a-hole thing.”
“What?”
“Artoo,” she called back along the tunnel, “do an environmental scan and analysis—I think these caves aren’t natural. Something made this—”
Han looked around and froze in place. “You mean,” he said slowly, “some kind of rock-looking critters that can, like, melt themselves out of the walls and floors and stuff?”
“I don’t know, maybe—” She stopped and looked back at Han, who was surrounded by rock-looking critters that appeared to have melted themselves out of the walls and floor.
“Good call,” Han said, and then the floor opened beneath him and he dropped out of sight.
“Han!” Leia sprang toward him, but the stone of the tunnel had gone soft and gooey, and an instant later it parted beneath her feet and she fell into darkness.
THE STORMTROOPER OFFICER WHO KNELT ON THE SHINING black stone of the cavern’s floor stammered out his unlikely story without even rising from one knee; Luke didn’t bother to listen. He barely heard anything after the group captain had started babbling about how powerful a masterpiece he’d found Luke Skywalker and the Jedi’s Revenge to be. Another blasted fan of that blasted show …
Who’d have thought so much damage could be done by one stupid story?
“This was the objective of his entire Great Cause!” the group captain exclaimed. “To rescue you from the evil Rebellion and restore you to your rightful throne!”
“Not exactly me,” Luke muttered.
“My lord Emperor?”
“Forget it.” Luke looked around at the dozens of prisoners prone on the cavern floor. “Who are these people?”
“No one of consequence, my lord—Rebel captives, bound for the slave pits. Don’t concern yourself.”
“Slave pits?” That was all he needed: more innocent lives that he would fail to save. “How many slaves do you have here?”
“Too many, my lord. Possibly several thousand. Even on starvation rations we can barely keep them fed. And the water situation—”
Luke held up a hand. “I get it.” He turned a grim glance on Nick, who only shrugged.
“Don’t look at me,” Nick said. “I’m not the Emperor.”
Darkness closed like a fist around Luke’s heart.
He stood in the doorway, staring. A vast cavern of gleaming black, which seemed to be filled with stormtroopers in armor that matched the stone, all kneeling to him with heads uncovered. Hundreds upon hundreds of other people, regular people, whose only crime was that they’d lived in places Blackhole had targeted, now lying facedown on the smooth cold stone with their hands behind their heads, afraid to even lift their faces to look upon him.
“I’m the Emperor …” he said dully.
And what was wrong with it? Had this not been, after all, his father’s plan for him?
Vader’s plan.
Maybe Vader had understood fully a truth that Anakin Skywalker had only glimpsed: that all striving comes to nothing in the end. That the only answer was to take what you could get. To rule at ease. To enjoy whatever fragmentary instants of pleasure one’s brief life might offer.
What difference did it make? Heroes, villains, kings, and peasants, all went to the same final Dark. Why struggle?
He didn’t have an answer. He remembered answers—answers he’d gotten from Ben, from Yoda, even from Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, empty talk of duty and tradition, of honor and love—but none of them had understood. Not really.
Or maybe they had.
Because what was that talk of duty and honor and love, really? Wasn’t it just their way of controlling him?
“My lord Emperor? Are you unwell?”
Luke shook himself. He took a deep breath and looked at Nick. “Happened again?”
Nick nodded. “You just … went away.”
Luke again lifted a hand to rub his eyes. Now his hand was shaking. “He … did something to me, Nick. I don’t—I can’t fight it …”
“Who did something to you?” The stormtrooper officer was on his feet, and his face flushed red to the roots of his graying hair. “Name this traitor, and my men will destroy him!”
Nick turned to Luke with lifted brows and a sudden sparkle in his eyes; Luke turned his hand outward in a no-arguments, don’t-even-say-it gesture. “No,” Luke said. “No destroying anybody. There’s been too much destroying.”
Another round of distant blasts sent a shiver of shock wave through the cavern. Nick rolled his eyes toward the vault’s ceiling. “Yeah, no kidding. And these guys can help us stop it.”
“No.”
“Skywalker, think about it—” Nick began.
“I can’t,” Luke said. “I can’t think about it. That’s what you don’t understand. Thinking about it will … send me away again. Back into the …”
His voice trailed off. He couldn’t make himself talk about the Dark. Talking about it would break the surface film of light that was all that stood between him and the unbearable truth—it would rupture the illusion that was the only thing keeping him going right now. “I have to—I have to pretend to trust what I’ve always known. I have to act like I believe it’s all still true. That they weren’t all lying to me. That I wasn’t just kidding myself, do you get it?”
“Uh, no. Not really.” Nick’s vivid blue eyes shaded gray with growing concern. “Not really at all.”
“Then just take my word for it.” Luke looked at the group captain. All you have to do is pretend, he told himself. Do what you would have done back when you believed lives were worth saving. Maybe if you pretend long enough, you can fall back into that dream of light … “Okay,” he said. “Okay. New orders. You and your men—” He waved vaguely toward the prisoners. “I want you to take care of them.”
“Yes, my lord.” The group captain turned to the troopers who stood guard over the prone captives and raised his hand. “Second Platoon! You heard the emperor. Prepare to fire on my order!”
“No!” Luke said hastily. “No, that’s not a euphemism. It’s a direct order. I want you to care for them. Tend their wounds. Get them food and water. Keep them safe, do you understand?”
The expression on the group captain’s face showed clearly that he didn’t understand, but nonetheless he saluted. “Yes, my lord!”
“And … and send your men—not just these guys, but all the men you command—send them to do the same for the slaves. All the slaves.”
“You would have my pilots withdraw from the battle?”
“It’s not a battle, it’s a mistake,” Luke said. “A misunderstanding.”
“My lord?”
“Never mind. Round up all slaves. Protect them. As soon as you have them organized and secure, turn them and yourselves over to the Republic—what you call Rebel—forces. You will cooperate in every way with the Republic military, up to and including assisting them in battle.”
“My lord Emperor?” The group captain looked appalled. “You would have us give aid and comfort to the enemy?”
“No,” Luke said. “They’re not your enemy. Not anymore. Do you understand? From this point forward, you and your men are to consider yourselves part of the Republic military. Do not fail me, Group Captain.”
“My lord Emperor!” The group captain’s eyes glazed, but the discipline of obedience was absolute. “My lord, we will not fail!”
“Very well,” Luke said. “You have your orders.”
The group captain saluted again and executed a precise about-face before replacing his helmet. He strode off, barking orders punctuated by crisp hand gestures, and his men snapped to without hesitation.
Luke just stood and watched. He couldn’t think of a reason to move.
“Okay, sure, Skywalker, I get it,” Nick said. “But what now?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? What’s the matter with you?”
Luke shook his head numbly. “It’s like … it’s like I’m still inside the stone, Nick. Except the stone’s inside me.”
“Oh, that makes sense.”
“Sense has nothing to do with it. It just is.”
“This is what you were talking about, right? What did that ruskakk do to you?”
“He infected me,” Luke said listlessly.
“Infected—? With some kind of disease or something? A parasite? What?”
“Worse,” Luke said. “He infected me with the truth.”
“Huh?”
“That it’s all a joke. Not even a funny one. A pointless, stupid waste. A spark of suffering extinguished to eternal nothingness.”
He could see that Nick didn’t understand. That really, he couldn’t understand. How could he? And how could Luke explain? What words could he use to share the Dark? What words could illustrate the hideous illusions that came from being raised by loving parents who seemed to really believe in the ideals of the Old Republic, who’d acted like they’d honestly thought that the Jedi had been real heroes, instead of hidebound, ruthless enforcers of the will of the Republic’s rulers. How could he explain the pointless cruelty of the universe—where you had to just stand with your arms restrained by stormtroopers and watch as the Death Star destroyed your homeworld for no real reason at all …
Wait, Luke thought. His breath went short. “Oh, no,” he said out loud. “Oh, no, no, no … this can’t be happening!”
That flash he’d just had wasn’t a memory.
It was a vision. Of the future.
“What?” Nick said. “Skywalker, talk to me!”
Luke shook himself as if throwing off a dream. “It’s not me inside the stone,” he said. “It’s not me hanging in the Dark at the end of the Universe. It’s her. It’s going to be her.”
“Her who?”
“Leia,” Luke said. “My sister.”
“You have a sister?”
Luke nodded. “And Blackhole’s found her.”
R2-D2 FELL THROUGH DARKNESS.
Fell was not entirely the right word for what had transpired since the stone beneath his treads had suddenly melted away and dropped him and Chewbacca through the tunnel’s floor. It was more akin to some sort of bizarre carnival ride, with sudden stops and sideways slippages and all manner of other contortions of downward progress that R2’s internal vocabulation data simply did not have words for.
For that matter, darkness wasn’t entirely accurate either. While a human eye would see nothing but featureless black, for R2, it wasn’t dark at all; his internal sensors could register a substantial span of the electromagnetic spectrum, several hundred thousand times wider than the tiny human range they referred to as “visual light.” The entire downward fall/slide/lurch/bump/twist/jolt process was alive with all manner of electromagnetic radiation; of particular interest to R2 were the intermittent flickers of a magnetic field signature that was very similar in frequency to that emitted by the nervous systems of many oxygen-breathing organics.
It looked like the rock was thinking.
Not only that, it looked like the rock was thinking with a number of distinct minds, which seemed to have some sort of self-reinforcing phase relationship, analogous to the process in social insects by which discussion leads to consensus.
Which was a development that R2 would have liked to investigate more thoroughly, but he was currently preoccupied by constantly recalibrating his internal gyromagnetic stabilizer to keep himself from landing, when he did eventually land, on his damaged locomotor arm; this ongoing recalibration—owing to the bewildering unpredictability of the shifting magnetic fields—took up most of R2’s processing capacity.
Another slide, two bounces, and one last tumble brought R2 to a brief halt, as he fetched up against Chewbacca’s short ribs hard enough to make the Wookiee grunt and wheeze for breath; then the stone opened beneath them for a final time and dropped them another three point six meters, which left the two of them unceremoniously deposited on the smooth stone floor of yet another cavern.
R2 activated a pair of manipulators to shove himself off Chewbacca—which elicited a groan of protest from the half-stunned Wookiee—and righted himself on the cavern floor. There was human-visible light in this cavern, though the light source swung so violently from side to side and up and down that shadows whirled and blended and parted again so swiftly that R2’s photoreceptor lens couldn’t parse the scene; he cycled back to his previous EM sensor band and began to make sense of the situation.
The human-visible light source was revealed to be none other than the glow rod, which was being wielded as an improvised club by Han Solo to swat at a mass of vaguely humanoid shapes while he shouted, “Back off! I’ll bash any one of you who takes one more step! Back off!”
R2 assumed that Captain Solo was either highly agitated or speaking in the confusing idiomatic human code that C-3PO referred to as metaphor, because it was certainly clear—to R2’s sensors, at any rate—that these humanoid shapes to which he spoke did not actually have legs, much less feet, and thus were already certain, regardless of threat or instruction, never to take one more step. It was also entirely clear to R2 that these humanoid shapes were not, in fact, creatures at all, at least not as his programing generally understood the term.
These shapes were only nominally humanoid, in the sense of being generally upright and having a vaguely head-shaped knob on top, as well as a pair—several had more—of arms; these shapes grew upward from the very stone of the cavern itself, more like animated stalagmites than actual living things, but they moved as though directed by some type of consciousness, and they clearly exhibited that peculiar electromagnetic field signature R2 had noted during his precipitous descent. A quick scan of his data files for any reference to this type of apparently mineral life-form came up blank … except for one provisional reference that he had preserved in his short-term cache because he had no internal referent to guide him in choosing where to file it.
It was the recording of Aeona Cantor, when her companion had asked what they should do “if whoever shows up isn’t a Jedi”:
Then we take their stuff and leave ’em to the Melters.
R2 found this to be a satisfactory correlation, and he consequently created a new file tagged with the keywords MINDOR, MINERAL LIFE-FORM (MOTILE), and MELTERS.
This entire process, from Han Solo’s shout to R2-D2’s filing decision, took only .674 of a Standard second, which left R2 plenty of time for a full systems self-check and operational verification while Chewbacca was still rolling to his feet and drawing breath for a Wookiee war whoop.
Chewbacca’s war cry was followed by a headlong charge against the Melters—that these were the “Melters” in question seemed undeniable—that crowded in upon Han Solo and Princess Leia. There was an astonished howl of pain when flesh-and-bone Wookiee fist met stone Melter “head.” This was followed by a blue-crackling energy discharge—which R2 noted was analogous in wavelength and intensity to a charge from a blaster on its maximum stun setting—from the Melter in question. Chewie howled again and went staggering back until he bumped into another Melter and an additional energy discharge cut short the howl and folded the now-unconscious Wookiee like a retracting manipulator.
R2 continued to watch with detached interest as Han Solo shouted “Chewie!” and threw himself against the mass of Melters, whose response was several bursts of that same energy that almost instantly dropped Han Solo twitching on the ground beside his copilot. However, the collapse of Han Solo apparently triggered a similar human emotional response from Princess Leia, who shouted to Han and leapt toward the Melters—and in the .384 second she was actually in the air, R2 called up an array of highly specialized subprocessors that had been originally installed as a customized aftermarket modification by the Royal Engineers of Naboo and later extensively refitted and programmed with a very specific set of behaviors by a particularly gifted tinkerer, who’d had, in his day, a justified reputation as the finest self-taught improvisational engineer the galaxy had ever produced: Anakin Skywalker.
Turbojacks deployed powerfully from the bottoms of R2’s locomotors, kicking him through the air directly into the mass of Melters. His antitamper field sizzled to life with an unusually loud discharge crackle; based on the extraordinary drain on his internal power supply, R2 was able to calculate that the antitamper field was currently operating at triple strength, which was actually beyond its theoretical limit, owing to potentially lethal effects. R2 also noted that when a nearby Melter reached for him with a stone pseudo-arm, the touch of his triple-strength antitamper field instantly liquefied the electrocrystalline structure of the Melter’s stone body … as well as those of the four Melters nearest to it.
With a fierce Thooperoo HEEE!, which was his closest approximation of a Wookiee war whoop, R2-D2 waded into the Melters, sparking them to slag on every side. As long as he had a single remaining erg in his energy supply, he would allow no harm to come to Princess Leia.
He did, however, note one particular flaw in this determination, which was that his level of energy output had already outstripped the self-regeneration capacity of his energy supply, and so that single remaining erg situation was, as C-3PO might say, no mere metaphor. And the walls and floor just kept on humping into lumps that would become new Melters.
For a brief flicker of a millisecond, R2-D2 experienced a power spike in a tiny audio loop in one specific memory core: he heard C-3PO’s voice exclaim We’re doomed.