CHAPTER 18

AIR MARSHAL KLICK COULD NOT IDENTIFY THE SOUND. Even through his consuming agony, pain so intense that he could no longer stand, he was quite certain that he’d never heard this particular sound before, and right now he couldn’t guess what it might be. The agony, however, he understood very well.

The inside of his armor had turned into needles.

Big needles.

They stabbed every centimeter of him from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. And they didn’t stop once they had pierced his skin. Instead, they grew, lancing deeper into his flesh; they seemed to enter his bloodstream and splinter off, tearing at him from the inside. They went up his nose and in behind his eye sockets, drilling right through the bone of his skull and slicing into his brain. Inside his brain they didn’t hurt—no pain nerves—but he could feel them by what they cut away.

They cut away his honor, and his discipline. They cut away his devotion to the emperor, and his pride in his men. They cut away his memory, and his dreams, his hopes, and his fears. The needles in his brain destroyed everything he had ever been, but they didn’t leave mere emptiness behind …

Each of those empty parts of him boiled with savage unreasoning rage.

His final thought as a conscious being was Ah, that’s what the sound is. It’s me.

Screaming.

The sound of his own screams was all he took with him into the dark. Then there was only rage, and a burning need to kill someone.

Anyone.

THE COUCH NICK WAS STRAPPED ONTO WAS BARELY EVEN a couch at all; it was more like a padded shelf in a slight widening of the crawlspace tube that extended back from the shuttle’s lone pilot’s chair. Nick lay with his eyes closed, watching the dark star in his head.

Watching was not exactly what he was doing. The sense he used was not sight, though the dark star appeared to his vision as a patch of deeper night in the infinite black between the stars. Nor did he touch it, though he could feel how cold it was, how it was a bottomless abyss that swallowed all the warmth in the universe. Nick’s ears rang with an utter lack of sound, and in his nose and mouth was only corruption and decay.

But he did his best to ignore those sensations, because none of them would help him kill that evil son of an inbred ruskakk.

When Nick closed his eyes and turned his whole mind to the task, he simply knew that this dark star of hunger and decay was straight ahead, on the shuttle’s current course. He knew it was moving, and when it smeared into a streak of jump radiation, he knew that too.

“He’s gone into jump,” Aeona said from the pilot’s chair. “Unless there’s more than one of these asteroids with a hyperdrive.”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “It doesn’t matter.”

“The navicomputer says his vector’s wrong for the jump-out point.”

“He’s not going for the jump-out point. He’s making for deep space.”

“Then how are we supposed to find him? Guess?”

“I can find him,” Nick said. “He can run, but he can’t hide. Not from me. Get on his vector and jump.”

“How far?”

“Just outside the system.”

He could hear the shrug in her voice. “You’re the boss.”

“If you only knew how long I’ve been waiting to hear you say that.”

He heard the tapping of codes being punched into the navicomputer. The rising whine of the hyperdrive sped them toward jump … then he heard the whine drop as the hyperdrive spun down.

Nick sat up so suddenly he whacked his head on the crawlspace’s ceiling. “What’s going on? Why didn’t we—”

“Fail-safe cut in.” Aeona’s voice was tight. She twisted to glance at him over her shoulder, and the look on her face made his stomach twist. “We’re in a gravity well.”

She checked the shuttle’s sensors. “Mass-shadows all over the place,” she said, low and slow and grim. “They’ve repowered the gravity stations.”

“What? Which ones?”

She lowered her head. “All of them.”

“No way,” Nick snarled. “No fraggin’ way!”

“All those ships. All those people. On both sides.” Again she twisted to look at him over her shoulder. Her eyes were haunted. “None of them are getting out. Not one.”

Nick felt hollow inside, as if somebody had reached down his throat and pulled out his guts. He turned half-blind eyes to the meters-thick custom shielding that so nearly filled the entire shuttle. “Just us,” he said. “Nobody else.”

Aeona nodded. “I think we’re the only ones who have a chance to live through this.”

LEIA STILL WRITHED AND TWISTED IN THAT HORRIBLE slow-motion convulsion, despite Han and Chewbacca’s best efforts to calm her and hold her still. “Take her to the cockpit and buckle her into your chair so she can’t hurt herself,” Han said. “I’m going after Luke.”

“Howergh!”

“He’d go back for me,” Han replied grimly. “In fact, he has.”

“Argharoo-oo hrf.”

“I’m not keeping count.” He sprinted for the gangway and clambered up to throw open the dorsal access hatch. When he poked his head out, all he saw was Luke’s tame stormtroopers up on the ring ledge, writhing and howling in incomprehensible agony.

“Hey, bucket-heads!” Han shouted. “What’s wrong with you guys? Where’s L—uh, where’s your emperor?”

All he got in reply was more howling, so he went up another rung on the gangway and peered around. The wreckage of the Falcon’s dorsal quad turret made him wince; all that was left was a flattened mass of crumpled transparisteel under great big gleaming chunks of what looked like obsidian. He made a mental note to bill the repairs to Lando.

Another couple of steps up the gangway raised his angle of vision enough that he could see the crown of the big man’s shaved head over the wreckage and rubble. One step more showed him Luke’s limp, unresisting form hanging from the big man’s grip while that son of a Pervickian dung camel chewed on Luke’s neck—!

Han cleared the hatch in a single leap, and by the time his feet touched the hull his blaster was in his hand. “Hey, monkey-breath! Chew on this!”

But he couldn’t just fire from the hip; Luke was in the way and Han knew stun blasts were useless against the Vastor body. In the fraction of a second that it took him to bring the DL-44 up to eye level to align the sights, the big man’s right hand came free of Luke’s shoulder with a weird ripping sound. Luke’s shoulder, where that hand had been, showed black and glistening like the handful of crystal hairs back in the Melter crypt, and Vastor’s hand was full of the same—and while Han was trying to make sense of that, some invisible force snatched his blaster away.

I have got to learn to hang on to that thing with both hands! Han bounded forward, swept up a jagged hunk of obsidian the size of his doubled fists, and charged, cranking the black glass rock back over his shoulder as if he was going to hurl it overhand—but he hurled himself instead, leaping up onto the rubble, then down again in a headlong dive with the chunk raised high until a scarlet blaster bolt slashed past his face and blew the hunk of obsidian right out of his hand.

He almost went face-first into the hull armor but managed to turn his crash into a clumsy somersault that left him flat on his back, dazed and gasping and staring up at the business end of his blaster. Which was in Luke’s hand.

Luke said, “Didn’t I tell you to go?”

While Han was still blankly mumbling, “Yow. Nice shooting. I think,” the enormous Vastor-thing moaned like someone in terrible pain or fear or both. One huge hand slammed against Luke’s chest, and for all Han could tell, it was like Vastor was the one in trouble and trying desperately to escape. An instant later, Vastor ripped his mouth free of Luke’s neck—and his mouth was full of those black crystal hairs. The wound in Luke’s neck wasn’t bleeding, it was sprouting a thatch of that same blackly glistening fur that was writhing and twisting and growing like it was alive. Vastor gasped like a drowning man and yanked his other hand off Luke’s arm, and before Han could manage even a faint guess as to what was actually going on, Vastor whirled, took four or five running steps for momentum, and made a great big flying leap right off the ship.

Han had no idea if Vastor had fallen to his death, or if he’d caught a grip on the wall, or had maybe even started flapping his arms and flew into orbit. He could only stare up at his young friend and murmur plaintively, “Luke, what the hell?”

“You would have killed him,” Luke said distantly.

“Oh, you think? We kill bad guys. It’s what we do.”

“I don’t,” Luke said. “Not if I can help it. Not anymore.” He looked down at Han with a faint start, as though he’d been lost in a daydream and only now realized where they both were. Wearing a faintly bemused half smile, he flipped the DL-44 end-for-end and offered its grip to Han. “Here. You’ll need this.”

“For what?” Han asked, just as he was starting to realize that the shaft around the Falcon had suddenly gone quiet.

The stormtroopers had stopped screaming.

“Uh-oh.”

He snatched his pistol out of Luke’s hand and popped to his feet as blasters opened up on all sides to rain plasma upon them in a roaring flood. Luke’s lightsaber flared to life and lashed out in invisibly fast arcs that sent bolts out and away in a fan, blasting into the rock of the shaft walls. Choking red-black smoke billowed out from the points of impact, shrouding them in gloom so dense that the Falcon’s exterior floodlights only gave off a yellow-brown glow.

“Stick close.” Luke’s voice was tight with concentration. “I’m not used to having to cover somebody else.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice.” Han squeezed himself into a substantially less-than-Han-sized space at Luke’s back and had barely time to wish that he knew a Jedi who was just a little taller before the Falcon bucked as if it had been kicked. The ship bounced off the shaft wall hard enough that Han had to grab Luke’s shoulder to stay upright. “Chewie, dammit!”

“Not his fault,” Luke said tightly, still carving smoke with his blade to catch stray blaster bolts. “The ship didn’t move. The shaft did. The mountain’s breaking up.”

“Oh, great! Any more good news?”

“Yes,” Luke said. “We’re being boarded.”

Dark shapes hurtled down at them through the gloom—stormtroopers jumping off the ring ledge. Han snarled something wordless that expressed vividly how he felt about having Imperial boots touch his ship and slipped his blaster over Luke’s shoulder, snapping off a pair of double taps that caught two troopers while they were still in the air. The bursts blew them backward far enough that they fell short and tumbled into the shaft below, but dozens made it onto the hull. There were plenty more where they’d come from, and Han had a strong feeling that a stand-up fight against a hundred-some stormtroopers was a losing proposition under the best of circumstances. Which these circumstances weren’t.

“Make for the hatch!” Han fired twice more, dropping one dark silhouette and knocking another spinning off the rim of the hull, while Luke fanned away a flood of return fire. “Let’s see how these sons of monkey-lizards like open space and hard vacuum!”

“You first,” Luke said.

“That’s another thing you won’t have to tell me twice.” Red-glowing spheres sailed in through the smoke: thermal detonators. Some bounced away, but four or five maglocked themselves to the hull. “Uh, Luke?”

“I’ve got them.” With his left hand, Luke swung his lightsaber in a dazzling flourish to spray blaster bolts randomly through the smoke, while his right hand stretched out toward the dets. All of them suddenly jerked themselves loose and flipped over the edge of the ship. Multiple detonations bounced the ship off the wall again. “Go, Han! Go now!”

Han took three steps, then threw himself into a flat dive that became a belly flop and sent him skidding and scraping over the lip of the hatch. He pulled himself in with his free hand and pivoted around his grip to land on his feet on the deck below. “I’m in! Luke, come on!”

More dets went off and lit the smoke with bloody flame, and there came no sign that Luke had any intention of following him. Han scrambled back up the gangway. “Luke, don’t be an idiot!”

“I’m going after Vastor.” Luke leaned into the gale of blasterfire as he worked his way toward the ship’s edge. “Go. Save Leia! Don’t wait for me.”

“We’re not leaving without you! And if you’re going after that huge crazy thunderbucker, I’m coming with you! You’ll need me!”

“Leia needs you. Stopping the bad guy is my job. Your job is to save the Princess.”

“And since when do I take your orders?”

Luke threw him a glance. For one brief instant his face lit up with one of those old sunny farmboy grins Han hadn’t seen since Hoth. “Watch your fingers.”

“What?”

The hatch slammed down on Han hard enough to knock him down the gangway. He landed hard, rubbing his ringing head. “Luke!”

He hauled himself back up the gangway, but the hatch controls were dark, and the manual dogs were frozen. He snarled and pounded at them with the butt of his blaster, but then it occurred to him that the hull above was crowded with old-line Imperial troopers, the kind who specialized in cracking ships, and any of them who weren’t busy trying to kill Luke would be busy trying to peel the hull so they could flood inside and kill Han and Chewie.

And Leia.

“Hope you know what you’re doing, kid,” Han muttered. It was as close to a good-bye as he could let himself say.

He jammed his blaster back into its holster and pelted headlong for the cockpit. “Chewie! Change of plan!” He skidded into the accessway. “The stun field, Chewie! Charge ’em up!”

“Growf! Heroo geeorrough?”

“He’s not coming.” Han vaulted into his seat. He hit the antipersonnel trigger himself and was treated to the gratifying sight of a couple of stormtroopers falling past the cockpit’s viewports with blue energy still crackling over their black armor. Maybe on some other day he would have stayed and fought it out, but Leia, strapped into Chewbacca’s copilot chair, writhed and moaned and twisted Han’s heart.

“Luke’s doing his job. We have to do ours,” he said.

He heeled the ship over, pointed her mandibles straight down at the shaft’s bottom, and kicked in every erg of energy her damaged thrusters could produce. The ship streaked toward a wall of solid rock. Han lit up the quad in his one remaining turret and held down the trigger; the stream of laser bolts chewed into the rock but didn’t blast it away.

“Strap in,” he said through his teeth. He tightened his grip on the control yoke. “This ride’s gonna start with a bump.”

THE TASPAN SYSTEM EXPLODED INTO A HURRICANE OF death.

None of the Republic’s warriors could see the whole picture, but what each of them saw was horrifying enough.

Lando Calrissian, on the bridge of the Remember Alderaan, watched over the shoulder of the NavOps officer as his sensor readout showed gravity wells sprouting and spreading throughout local space like Turranian flesh fungus on a three-day-old corpse, and all he could say was “No, no, no, this can’t be happening!”

Wedge Antilles and the pilots of Rogue Squadron stared in frozen horror as thousands of TIE interceptors streamed out of the asteroid fields, hurtling toward the Republic ships at maximum thrust. As each one slipped from the shadows of the asteroids into the full harsh glare of Taspan’s stellar flares, the fierce radiation turned their ships into brilliant stars plunging toward destruction even as the pilots inside them were being roasted alive. They came on without maneuver, without tactics or even formation; the lead ships vanished in silent fireballs as Republic starfighters and the guns of the capital ships laced space with annihilating energy, but the TIEs behind them just came on and on, flying through the wreckage of their comrades, throwing themselves on unswerving suicide runs into the Republic ships clustered in Mindor’s shadow.

Wait a Minute was the closest to the leading edge of the swarm. Its point-defense guns destroyed dozens of incoming TIEs, but finally one slipped through; after the first impact took out two of his turrets, Captain Patrell ordered his ship into rolling fire, but another TIE hit only meters away from the first, and two more hit after that.

The ship broke up and finally exploded, and the storm of TIEs just kept coming.

They streaked straight through the wreckage field and curved toward the next-closest ship, and by that time Wedge and the Rogues and all the remaining Republic starfighters had thrown themselves into the suiciders’ path and lit up space with the fireballs from hundreds of exploding TIEs. The Imperials didn’t even bother fighting back; Wedge didn’t need his tactical navicomputer to calculate the chance that any Republic ship could survive this storm.

There wasn’t one.

In the crowded hold of Lancer, the screaming of the stormtroopers had raised hairs on the back of Fenn Shysa’s neck. He didn’t have any idea what was going on, but he understood all too well the fundamental rules of combat, one of which was When you don’t know what’s happening, what’s happening is always bad.

As the troopers had fallen into seizures, Fenn had jumped atop a cargo container and roared in Mandalorian, “Secure their weapons! Now!,” which was the main reason the slaughter that followed wasn’t much, much worse—but it was still bad enough.

The mercenaries had leapt to their task like the disciplined warriors they were, deploying in staggered array to keep clear lines of fire open so they could cover each other and, if necessary, shoot the convulsing stormtroopers. Unfortunately, no amount of training or discipline could allow a small cadre of soldiers to instantly control several thousand panicked civilians.

Some of those civilians had enough military experience to understand that the most useful thing they could do was get themselves out of the way; they dived to the deck and pulled down other civilians around them, but still there were more than a thousand who stood frozen, screamed, or tried to run.

Those were the first to die.

The seizures stopped as suddenly as they had begun; the stormtroopers who had not yet been disarmed leapt to their feet or simply rolled into firing position and opened up on the crowd; the mercenaries returned fire, and within a second or two the entire hold was filled with a haze of blasterfire and the stench of burning flesh. The disarmed troopers still had the fist blades that were integral to the gauntlets of their armor, and they fell upon the nearby civilians like Nomarian thunder sharks in a feeding frenzy; they cut and chopped and hacked at their victims, while their fellows took fire from the mercenaries and responded with grenades lobbed at random into the screaming mob.

“Down blasters!” Fenn roared; the mercenaries were inflicting almost as many civilian casualties as were the maddened troopers. “Down blasters and up blades!”

And because he was the sort of commander who believed in leading by example, he leapt from the cargo container to land hard on the back of a black-armored trooper and punched his own fist blade through the back of the trooper’s neck. Before that trooper even knew he was dead, Fenn had rolled to his feet and stabbed the next one in the kidney, and as that trooper whirled to face him, the Protector commandant jammed his blade in deep under the man’s chin. He let the dead man fall and looked around for his next target.

He had plenty to choose from; he didn’t anticipate running short in the foreseeable future—a future that would be, in Fenn’s experienced judgment, exactly as long as the rest of his life.

The Shadow Base was now breaking up in earnest; one of its damaged gravity drives had already ripped free, spinning away and taking with it a kilometer or so of the base’s rock. The remaining two gravity drives swung through opposing cycles of thrust-angle that were ripping what was left of the base in half. On the base’s surface, the Republic marines found that their docile prisoners were docile no longer. With no regard for their own lives, or for anyone else’s, they mobbed their captors, the troopers in front absorbing fire until the ones that followed could swarm over the dead and dying.

There was, in the whole of the Taspan system, only one faint reason for any hope at all.

Deep within the remains of the base, in the heart of the Election Center itself, Kar Vastor could find nowhere else to run.

KAR CROUCHED, HIS BARE BACK AGAINST AN ICY WALL, in a stone chamber filled with the dead. Corpses in long robes littered the floor, and the room stank of corruption; the only light came from blue spark-chains that crackled across the ceiling. His heart hammered against his ribs, and his breath rasped in his throat. His teeth were bared in an involuntary snarl, and his fingers scrabbled against the stone at his back as if he could somehow dig his way through. All from fear of the small blond man.

The same small blond man who now stood on the far side of the piles of dead bodies, inoffensive and mild, his expression friendly, his hands, empty of weapons, spread wide in invitation.

Kar did not know where this place might be, or how he had come to be here; he had no memory of having been anywhere like this maze of stone peopled only by dead men. He knew only that he had never felt such terror.

Not as a child, lost and alone in the lethal jungles of his homeworld; not in the dock of the Galactic Court on Coruscant; not even in the infinite deadly dark of Kessel’s spice mines. He had come back to himself in the midst of battle, blind with rage, surrounded by armed men on a starship’s hull. He remembered seizing this little man in his unbreakable grip; he remembered sinking his needle teeth into the little man’s throat, biting down like a vine cat strangling an akk wolf.

And he remembered what the little man had done to him.

The hands that scrabbled against the wall at his back still sprouted the black crystal hairs. His mouth was full of these crystal hairs, stiff and sharp as needles; when he worked his jaw, they cut and slashed at his palate and punctured his gums. And he could feel them inside him, throughout his body, an infection of dead stone within his living flesh …

He snarled wordless animal sounds. What are you?

The small blond man started toward him. “I’m not your enemy, Kar.”

Stay back!

“I can’t. Too many lives depend on me.”

I’ll kill you! Kar gathered himself to spring. I will rip your head from your body. I will feast upon your guts!

“It’s all right to be afraid, Kar. This is a frightening place. Things have been done to you here that should never be done to anyone.”

It’s so … dead. Something broke inside him then; his rage and terror fled, and he sagged to his knees. Nothing but stone and corpses. Everything dead. Dead within. Dead without. Dead forever.

“Not everything.” Though the small blond man had to step over corpses to reach Kar’s side, his expression of sympathy and compassion never flickered. “You’re alive, Kar. I’m alive.”

That means nothing. Kar’s eyes burned as if he’d dipped his face in sand. We mean nothing.

“We’re the only meaning there is.” The small blond man extended a hand. “Trust me or kill me, Kar. In the end, it’ll come out the same. I will not harm you.”

What are you? His snarl had gone plaintive. What do you want from me?

“I’m a Jedi. My name is Luke Skywalker,” the small blond man said. “And I want you to take my hand.”

DEEP IN HYPERSPACE, CRONAL REACHED UP FOR THE Shadow Crown. His life-support chamber was buried within an asteroid of meltmassif; with the Shadow Crown to focus and amplify his control, he could part the stone that shrouded his chamber’s viewports and so enjoy the infinite nothing of hyperspace.

He loved gazing into hyperspace, the nothing outside the universe. The place beyond even the concept of place … Ordinary mortals sometimes went mad, succumbing to the delirium of hyper-rapture, from gazing too long into the emptiness. Cronal found it soothing: a glimpse into the oblivion beyond the end of all things.

To him, it looked like the Dark.

It would be some consolation for the frustration he had faced these past days. How was it that everywhere he turned, there seemed to be a Skywalker waiting to bar his path?

Still, the Skywalker boy’s weakness had been a gift. How fortunate he was that Skywalker had lacked the strength of character to simply kill him.

Even in Cronal’s wandering through the trackless wastes of hope where he had lost his way, he still had managed to deliver a blow to the infant second Republic from which it would never recover. Not to mention that he still had the advanced gravitic technology made possible by the properties of meltmassif, and he had the Shadow Crown itself.

Yes, he had lost his best chance to acquire a young, powerful, and influential body to carry his consciousness, but he still had his original body with all his powers intact. In a few days—long enough to be certain that every Republic ship still in the Taspan system was crewed only by the dead—he could return, harvest the meltmassif from the asteroid clouds, and begin anew.

He would not repeat his mistake, however. Never again would he seek to build rather than destroy. Never again would he create anything but engines of ever-greater destruction.

Never again would he forsake the Way of the Dark.

His rule of the galaxy would be no mere Second Imperium, it would be the Reign of Death. He would preside over a universe of infinite suffering whose only end would be oblivion, meaningless as life itself.

He would author the final act in the saga of the galaxy.

With that dream to comfort him in his temporary exile, he lowered the Shadow Crown upon his head and sent his will into the Dark beyond darkness, to take control of the mind in the stone.

But where there should have been Dark, he found only light.

White light, brilliant, blinding, a young star born within his head. It seared his mind, blasting away even his memory of darkness. He recoiled convulsively, like a worm encountering red-hot stone. This was more than light; it was the Light.

It was the power to drive off the Dark.

This was inconceivable. What could heat his absolute zero? What could banish his infinite night?

You should know. The voice of the Light was not a voice. It spoke without speaking, communicating not with words, but with understanding. You invited me here.

Skywalker? This light was Skywalker?

In the instant he thought the name, Cronal saw him: a shape of light, absolute, uncompromising, kneeling within the Election Center in the darkest heart of the Shadow Base, his hands solemnly interfolded with the massive paws of Kar Vastor. He had linked his shadow nerves to Vastor’s, and through the intimate connection between Vastor and Cronal he had somehow stretched forth to touch the Shadow Lord himself.

In the Dark, Cronal saw Skywalker smile. Thank you for joining me here. I was a little worried you might get away with that silly crown of yours.

This was impossible. This must be some hallucination, a twisted product of his Darksight run amok. He was in hyperspace! Hyperspace did not, could not, interact with realspace—

I was with Ben Kenobi in hyperspace when he felt the destruction of Alderaan.

No wall can contain the Force.

The Force, the Force, these pathetic Jedi kept nattering on about the Force! Did any of them even faintly comprehend how naive and foolish they were? If any of them had ever had so much as a glimpse of the real power of the Dark, that glimpse would have snuffed their tiny minds like candles in a hurricane—

Was my tiny mind snuffed? I must have missed that part.

Cronal could sense gentle amusement, like a tolerant uncle indulging a child’s tantrum. Fury rose within him like molten lava climbing a volcanic fault. This simple-minded youth had fooled himself into believing his paltry light could fill the infinite Dark? Let him shine alone within eternal night.

Cronal opened himself wholly to the Dark, cracking the very gates of his mind, expanding the sphere of his power like an event horizon yawning to swallow the universe. He surrounded Skywalker’s light, and with a shrug of power he consumed it.

In this arena, minds naked to the Dark contending in nonspace beyond even hyperspace, there was no question of age, or health, or physical strength. Here the only power that counted was the power of will. Skywalker and his so-called Force could never match Cronal’s mastery of the Way of the Dark.

On this level, Cronal was Blackhole. From his grip no light could escape.

Escape? Me? Did you forget that you’re the one who’s running away?

Cronal suddenly felt, unaccountably—and unpleasantly—warm.

At first he dismissed this unwelcome sensation; he was too experienced a servant of the Dark to be distracted by a minor malfunction in his life-support settings. But gradually he became aware that his body—specifically, his body’s skin—did not seem to be warm at all. It was, in fact, chilly. And damp.

As though he had broken out, somehow, in a cold sweat.

He turned his mind back to the Dark, and became again the ultimate black hole. He examined the abyss of darkness he had become and found it to be flawless. Perfect. The ultimate expression of the absolute power of the Dark.

This boy, this infantile Jedi-ling, had thought his meager light could stand against that power? Cronal’s black hole had swallowed every last lumen; Skywalker’s light was gone forever. His puerile Force trick of light had done to Cronal nothing whatsoever.

That’s because I’m not trying to do anything to you. I’m doing something through you.

What?

How could Skywalker still speak?

A creeping dread began to poison Cronal’s smug satisfaction. What if Skywalker was telling the truth? What if the boy had been so easily vanquished because he had intended to be? He had already used his tiny gift of the Force to forge a link through Kar Vastor to Cronal … what if his light had not been destroyed by falling into the black hole that was Cronal’s mind?

What if his light had simply passed through?

That’s where you dark siders always stumble. What’s the opposite of a black hole?

Cronal had heard this cosmological theory before: that matter falling into a black hole passes into another universe … and that matter falling through black holes in other universes could pass into ours, bursting forth in pure, transcendent energy.

The opposite of a black hole was a white fountain.

He thought, I’ve been suckered.

The Sith alchemy that had created the Shadow Crown had imbued it with control over meltmassif in all its forms; to drown Skywalker in the Dark, Cronal had opened a channel into the Crown. Through the Crown.

Through the Shadow Crown, Skywalker’s light could shine upon every crystal of darkness.

Every shadow stormtrooper. Every gravity station. Every millimeter of the shadow web of crystalline nerves in his body, and Vastor’s, and—

And Cronal’s own!

With a snarl, he yanked his mind back into his body; it would require only a second to pull the Crown from his head.

Or it would have, if he could have made his arms work …

In the shimmery glow from the viewscreens within his life-support capsule, Cronal could only sit and watch in horror as his skin began to leak black oil. This black oil flowed from every pore, from his ears and nose and mouth and eyes. This black oil drained even from the channels within the Shadow Crown.

And not until the last drop of it had left his body could Cronal even take a breath.

He did not, however, have time for more than a single breath before the meltmassif rehardened, encasing him wholly in a sarcophagus of stone. The asteroid of meltmassif around his chamber melted, and its shreds vaporized as they fell from the hyperdrive zone. Very soon, the hyperdrive itself fell away, as it had been mounted on the stone, rather than on the chamber.

The chamber, no longer within the hyperdrive’s protective envelope of reality, simply dissolved.

Cronal had enough time to understand what was happening. He had enough time to feel his body lose its physical cohesion. He had time to feel his very atoms lose their reality and vanish into the infinite nothing of hyperspace.

HAN SAT ON THE POLYFILM SURVIVAL BLANKET UNDER the Falcon’s starboard mandible, hugging his knees and waiting for the sun to rise. Leia lay on the blanket beside him, breathing slowly and easily now. She looked like she was only asleep.

He didn’t think he should wake her up.

The only word Leia had been able to speak had been light. She’d kept asking for light, even with every light source within the Falcon dialed up to maximum. She must have been talking about a different kind of light.

And when Han had gotten the grim news on their situation from Lando, he’d figured that he might as well give her what she was asking for.

Everyone was going to die anyway. There was no escaping this trap. The choice was between being killed by the breakup of Mindor or being roasted alive by Taspan’s stellar flares.

So he’d set down the Falcon on the shattered battlefield, spread the blanket, and made Leia as comfortable as he could. Chewbacca had hung back; he watched over them from the Falcon’s cockpit, out of respect. Humans, he understood, often wanted privacy at times like these.

Han had stayed at Leia’s side as her seizures quieted; he stayed at her side as her every pore oozed black and shiny meltmassif, as it drained off her and puddled on the blanket. And he would stay at her side as the groundquakes strengthened and the killing sun rose over the horizon.

He would be at her side when the planet exploded.

A bitter irony: she had suffered so much from being forced to watch her homeworld destroyed. Now she would die in very much the same brutal fashion as had her family and all her people.

That was why he figured he probably shouldn’t wake her up.

But the Force again displayed that nasty sense of humor; Leia stirred, and her eyelids fluttered. “Han …?”

“I’m here, Leia.” He felt like his heart would burst. “I’m right here.”

Her hand sought his. “So dark …”

“Yeah,” Han said. “But the sun’s coming up.”

“No … not here. Where I was.” She drew in a deep breath and released it in a long, slow sigh. “It was so dark, Han. It was so dark for so long I couldn’t even remember who I was. I couldn’t remember anything.”

Her eyes opened and found his face. “Except for you.”

Han swallowed and squeezed her hand. He didn’t trust his voice.

“It was like … like you were with me,” she murmured. “You were all I had left—and I didn’t need anything else.”

“I’m with you now,” he said, his voice hoarse, unsteady. “We’re together. And we always will be.”

“Han …” She pushed herself up to a sitting position and swiped a hand across her eyes. “Is there anything to eat?”

“What?”

“I’m hungry. Is there any food?”

Han shook his head, baffled. He nodded around at the stormtrooper corpses that littered the field. “Nothing but, y’know, Imperial ration packs. And they’re probably stale.”

“I don’t care.”

“Are you kidding?”

She shrugged, and gave him a smile that even now, even here, minutes from their deaths, made his heart race and his breath go short. “We’ll make it a picnic,” she said. “We’ll have a picnic and watch the sun rise. One last time.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

He stripped some ration packs off dead troopers, and they sat together, shoulder-to-shoulder, eating in silence as the horizon began to blaze as though the planet were on fire.

“Well, one thing’s for sure.” Han pushed an echo of his old half grin onto his face. “This is one meal we’ll never forget as long as we live, huh?”

Leia smiled, though her eyes sparkled with tears. “Always the joker. Even now. Even here.”

Han nodded. “Well, y’know, we always get romantic when we’re about to die. It was getting repetitive.”

The ground beneath them spasmed once, then again, and Leia said, “I think we should respect the tradition.”

“You do?”

“Kiss me, Han. One last time.” She lifted a hand to his cheek. Her touch was warm and dry, and impossibly precious to him. “Once for all the kisses we’ll never get.”

He gathered her into his arms and lowered his face to hers—and then a great Wookiee yelp of joy that echoed all the way from the cockpit yanked his head up and popped his eyes open. “What? Chewie, you’re sure?”

Chewbacca pounded on the cockpit’s transparisteel and waved both his arms, frantically beckoning. Han sprang to his feet and lifted Leia as though she weighed nothing at all. “Han—what is it?” she gasped. “What did he say?”

“All those other kisses you were talking about?” His eyes alight, he pulled her toward the Falcon’s freight lift. “He said if we move fast, we might get every one of ’em after all!”

ONE BY ONE, INSIDE HIS HEAD, LUKE FELT THE STARS wink out.

Linked through Kar to Cronal, through Cronal to the Shadow Crown, and through the Crown’s ancient powers of Sith alchemy to every Melter mind in every scrap of meltmassif in the galaxy, Luke had shone upon them with the light of the Force. This light had drawn them as moonlight draws a shadowmoth, and they found that its inexhaustible flood could fill them to overflowing. Never again would they feed upon light; there would never be the need. They would forever shine with light of their own.

And so they came out from every place the Dark had put them.

Luke felt them go.

He felt them leave the gravity stations. He felt them leave the Shadow Crown, and Cronal’s body, and Leia’s and Kar’s and his own.

And he felt the stormtroopers, in all their thousands throughout the system. He felt every single man who wore Cronal’s black armor. He felt the uncontrollable rage and bloodlust, the almost-mindless battle frenzy that the crystals in their brains had triggered and now sustained. He felt the damage that had been done by the brutal force of the crystals’ growth.

He felt what the crystals’ exit would do.

He did not look away. He did not withdraw his perception. He owed these men that much. Enemies they might be, but still they were men.

None of them had wanted this. None had volunteered for this. None had even cooperated. This had been done to them with casual disregard for their humanity; Luke could not allow its undoing to be the same.

So he stayed with them as the meltmassif in their bodies and their brains liquefied. He stayed with them as it poured forth from their every pore. He stayed with them as the exit of the meltmassif triggered their deadman interlocks.

He stayed with them while every stormtrooper in the entire system, all at once in all their thousands, sagged and shuddered.

And died.

Luke felt every death.

It was all he could do for them.

WHEN HE FINALLY WITHDREW HIS MIND FROM THE Dark, Luke found himself in darkness of the wholly ordinary sort. The flicker of the energy discharge had fled from the chamber that had once been the Election Center.

He knelt in darkness, and from that darkness came a long, slow growl that the Force allowed him to understand as words. Jedi Luke Skywalker. Is it done?

By reaching into the Force, he could feel the surviving Republic ships jump away as the artificial mass-shadows of the destroyed gravity stations shrank and vanished. He felt the final breakup of the Shadow Base, and the final destruction of Mindor under the killing radiation of Taspan’s flares.

All gone, now. Everything was gone.

No more shadows.

“Yes,” Luke said. “Yes, it is done.”

Is this where we die?

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “Probably.”

How long?

Luke sighed. “I don’t know that either. I sealed the chamber when I came in, so we’ll have air. For a while. But I don’t know how thick the stone around us might be, now that the mountain’s broken up. I don’t know how much radiation it can block. We could be cooking right now.”

And there is no one who can come for us.

“Their ships can’t protect them. Not from radiation like this.”

Then this will be where our lives end.

“Probably.”

I do not like this place. I do not know how I came to be here, but I know I did not choose this.

“None of us did.”

This is a bad place to die.

“Yes.”

Granted a choice, I would not die beside a Jedi.

“I’m sorry,” Luke said. And meant it.

I have known Jedi. Many, many years ago. That knowing was not a gladness for me. I believed I would never know another, and I rejoiced in that belief.

But it is a gladness for me to be proven wrong.

I am happy to have known you, Jedi Luke Skywalker. You are more than they were.

“That’s—” Luke shook his head blankly, blinking against the darkness. “I mean, thanks, but I barely know anything.”

So you believe. But I say to you: you are greater than the Jedi of former days.

Luke could only frown, and shake his head again. “What makes you say that?”

Because unlike the Knights of old, Jedi Luke Skywalker …

You are not afraid of the dark.

R2-D2 CLUNG TO THE SURFACE OF A TINY ASTEROID AS it rolled along its slow spiral descent toward the stellar sphere of Taspan.

The asteroid was roughly spherical, its diameter perhaps half that of the Millennium Falcon, and it had a very slow rotation, slow enough that the little astromech could drag himself along the asteroid’s dark side by clutching the rock with his manipulator arms. In this way, R2-D2 kept the asteroid between himself and the radiation bursts from Taspan’s stellar flares—bursts that could permanently fry his circuitry in less than a second.

In this way, R2 calculated that he could maintain operational capacity for an additional seven-point-three Standard hours, after which time his asteroid would pass between Taspan and a particularly dense cloud of other asteroids, which would reflect enough hard radiation onto his asteroid’s dark side that he would—he estimated with 89.756 percent certainty—experience sudden catastrophic system failure.

Permanent shutdown.

Should he through some fluke survive that transit, he was reasonably certain—83.973 percent—that he would survive an additional two-point-three Standard hours.

He was not distressed by the prospect of shutdown; he had spent several seconds calculating his overall chance of personal survival before he had judiciously overridden the Falcon’s trash-ejector system and had it bump him into space less than a second before the ship had blasted free of the disintegrating Shadow Base. That chance had been so tiny as to defy the description probability; he had, he calculated, roughly the same chance of remaining operational as he did of undergoing a quantum phase transition that would instantaneously transform him into a Lofquarian gooney bird.

However: He had been instructed more than once, very firmly and in no uncertain terms by Princess Leia herself, to take good care of Luke Skywalker. Considerations of personal survival were irrelevant to his assigned task.

He did not concern himself with survival. Every minute or so, however, he spent a millisecond or two accessing a few directories in his very, very extensive library of recordings of his adventures with the only droid in his long, long existence who he could truthfully label my friend: C-3PO. He did not anticipate that he would miss C-3PO; he did not anticipate that he would be capable of missing anyone or anything. He did, however, experience a peculiar sensation in his social-interaction subroutines every time he accessed these particular directories. It was a sensation both positive and negative, and it was largely impossible, to R2’s considerable puzzlement, to quantify.

He supposed, after much computation, that he must be regretting that he would never see his friend again, while at the same time he was taking considerable comfort from the knowledge that his friend was, and would be for the foreseeable future, quite safe.

Somehow that seemed to make him more able to focus on the task at hand.

When the Falcon had departed without Luke on board, R2 had known exactly what to do, and he had done it. Once free of the trash ejector, he had tuned his sensor suite to register Master Luke’s personal chemical signature—his scent—and tracked Luke’s progress through the Shadow Base, right up until the trail had ended abruptly at a stone wall. Having no instructions or programming that appeared to offer him any useful alternative courses of action, he had settled in to wait.

R2 had waited while the gravity stations depowered, and while the fleet departed. He had waited through the breakup of the Shadow Base, and through the explosion of the planet. And he was waiting still.

He was entirely—one hundred percent—certain that Luke had been on the opposite side of that stone wall, which was now part of the surface of this tiny asteroid.

Luke was inside this ball of rock, and though Luke’s own chance of personal survival was only fractionally greater than R2’s—which was to say, for all practical purposes, nonexistent—the astromech would continue to clamber along the asteroid’s dark side and keep himself functional until he could do so no longer, because there remained a very slight, but measurable, chance that he might still be able to somehow help.

A peculiar motion among the starfield attracted his attention. One particular asteroid—one point of very bright radiation reflected from Taspan—moved somewhat more across the system’s plane of the ecliptic than along it. Further: This bright point’s motion was clearly retrograde; its heading was against the general direction of the asteroid field. Finally: This point of light did not travel with the consistent velocity that would be expected from a body whose motion was subject only to the laws of orbital mechanics; on the contrary, it accelerated, then slowed, then sped up again.

There was only one probable explanation.

Activating the telescopic zoom feature of his optical sensor, he was able to confirm his calculation: This object was indeed a ship.

Specifically, a Lambda T-4a shuttle.

R2-D2 opened the comm hatch in his dome and extended his parabolic antenna. He aimed it precisely—after calculating the lightspeed delay—at where the shuttle would be when his transmission would arrive, and began to broadcast a distress beacon code with all his considerable energy. Once he had established contact with the shuttle’s brain, he was able to explain the details of the situation and trust that the ship’s brain would be able to communicate the pertinent facts to its pilot.

The shuttle’s vector shifted to an intercept course with gratifying alacrity. The shuttle swung around to the asteroid’s light side, extended a docking claw, and seized the asteroid, drawing them close enough together to enclose the asteroid in its hyperdrive envelope. Then it made the jump to lightspeed.

R2-D2 spent the hyperspace transition reviewing his calculations, but they were impeccable.

The designs of an evil but brilliant man had been thwarted. Luke would survive, Princess Leia and Han Solo had escaped, C-3PO was assuredly safe, and R2-D2—to the best of his self-diagnostic subroutine’s ability to determine—had not, in fact, undergone a quantum phase transition into a Lofquarian gooney bird.

The odds against this outcome were literally incalculable.

The universe, R2 decided, was an astonishing place.