by Steve Perry
It wasn’t easy, and it didn’t seem to be getting any easier. He wished he felt sure of himself, but the fact was, he didn’t. He felt as if a weight were riding on him, more than he’d ever thought possible. A few years ago, he’d been a farm boy, working with Uncle Owen, going nowhere. Now there was Han, the Empire, the Alliance, Vader—
No. Not now. That’s in the past and in the future, this wire is the now. Concentrate or you’re going to fall off it.
He reached for the energy, felt the flux begin to flow. It was bright and warm and life-giving, and he called it to himself, sought to wrap it around his form like a suit of armor.
The Force: Once again, it was there for him. Yes …
But there was something else there, too. In a place that was removed but somehow right next to him, he felt that pull he had been told about. A hard, powerful coldness, the opposite of what his teachers had presented to him. The antithesis of light. That which Vader embraced.
The dark side.
No! He pushed it away. Refused to look at it. Took another deep breath. Felt the Force permeate him, felt it attune itself to him. Or maybe it was the other way around. It didn’t matter.
When they were one, he started to walk.
The high wire suddenly seemed as wide as a public sidewalk. It was natural, the Force, but this part always felt like magic, as if he could do miracles using it. He’d seen Yoda raise the X-wing from the swamp using his mind. It was possible to do things that might look like miracles.
As he lifted his foot to take another step, he remembered other things about his time on Dagobah.
Under the soft, damp ground, in the cave …
Darth Vader came toward him.
Vader! Here! How could that be?
Luke pulled his lightsaber, lit it, brought it up. The gleaming blue white of his blade met Vader’s reddish beam as they crossed in on-guard salute. The power hum and energy crackle grew louder.
Suddenly Vader swung, a powerful cut at Luke’s left side—
Luke jerked his blade up and over, dropped the point, blocked the slash; it hit so hard it vibrated him, nearly tore his lightsaber from his grip—
He smelled the mold around him, heard the power hum of the lightsabers, saw Vader with a crystal clarity. All his senses came to life, as sharp as they’d ever been, sharp as a warehouse full of vibro-shivs—
Vader cut again, now at Luke’s head, and Luke’s panicked overhead block barely stopped it, barely—he was so strong!
Again Vader chopped at him, a blow that would have cut Luke in half had he not jammed his own weapon out, just in time!
Vader was too strong for him, Luke knew. Only his anger could save him from being killed. He remembered Ben, remembered Vader hacking him down—
Unthinking rage drove him. Luke whipped his blade around backhanded, all of his arm and shoulder and wrists behind it, and—
The cut took Vader’s head off.
Time seemed to drag like some heavy anchor. He stared. Vader’s body dropped, oh-so-slowly … and the severed head fell to the ground and rolled.
Rolled. Then stopped. There was no blood—
There came a bright flash, a sudden blast of light and purple smoke, and the mask covering Vader’s face shattered, shattered and vanished, revealing, revealing—
The face of Luke Skywalker.
No!
The insurgent memory had flashed by much faster than the events had actually taken. He had moved but a single step in reality. Amazing what one’s mind could do. Even so, he nearly fell from the wire as he lost contact with the Force.
Stop this! he told himself.
He took a deep breath, balanced uneasily, reached for the Force again.
There, he had it. He steadied, started walking, one with the Force again, flowing.
Halfway across the wire, he started to run. He told himself it was part of the test. He told himself that the Force was with him and he could live up to his name without fear, that anything was possible to one trained as a Jedi Knight. It was what he had been taught. He wanted to believe it.
He didn’t want to believe that he ran because he could feel the dark side walking the wire behind him, catfooted and evil, following him. Following like the memory of his face on Vader’s severed head, following and—
—and gaining …
Xizor leaned back in his form-chair. The chair, which had a bad circuit he kept meaning to have repaired, took this move as an inquiry. Its voxchip said, “What is your wish, Prince Sheeezor?” It slurred his name, dragging out the first syllable. He shook his head. “Nothing save that you be silent,” he said.
The chair’s vox shut up. The machineries within the cloned leather seat hummed and adjusted the support to Xizor’s new position. He sighed. He was rich beyond the income of many entire planets, and he had a malfunctioning form-chair that couldn’t even pronounce his name correctly. He made a note to have it replaced, now, today, immediately, as soon as he was finished with his business here this morning.
He looked at the one-sixth-scale holoproj frozen in front of him, then up at the woman standing across the desk. She was as beautiful, if not as ethnic, as the two Epicanthix women fighters in the holograph between them. But her beauty was of a different order. She had long and silky blond hair, pale and clear blue eyes, an exquisite figure. Normal human males would find her attractive. There were no flaws in Guri’s face or form, but there was a coolness about her, and that was easily explained if you knew the reason: Guri was an HRD, a human replica droid, and unique. She could visually pass for a woman anywhere in the galaxy, could eat, drink, and perform all of the more personal functions of a woman without anybody the wiser. And she was the only one of her kind programmed to be an assassin. She could kill without raising her ersatz heartbeat, never a qualm of conscience.
She’d cost him nine million credits.
Xizor steepled his fingers and raised an eyebrow at Guri.
“The Pike sisters,” Guri said, glancing at the holo. “Genetic twins, not clones. The one on the right is Zan, the other is Zu. Zan has green eyes, Zu has one green and one blue eye, the only noticeable difference. They are masters of teräs käsi, the Bunduki art called ‘steel hands.’ Twenty-six standard years old, no political affiliations, no criminal records in any of the major systems, and, as far as we are able to determine, completely amoral. They are for hire to the highest bidder, and they have never worked for Black Sun. They have also never been defeated in open combat. This”—she nodded at the unmoving holoproj image again—“is what they do for fun when they aren’t working.” Guri’s voice was, in contrast to her appearance, warm, inviting, a rich alto. She activated the hologram.
Xizor smiled, revealing his own perfect teeth. The holo had shown the two women mopping the floor with eight Imperial stormtroopers in some rat’s nest of a spaceport bar. The soldiers had been big, strong, well trained, and armed. The women weren’t even breathing hard when they finished. “They’ll do,” he said. “Make it happen.”
Guri nodded once, turned, and left. She looked as good from behind as she did from the front.
Nine million and worth every decicred. He wished he had a dozen more like her. Unfortunately, her creator was no longer among the living. A pity.
So. Two more handpicked assassins now under his command. Assassins with no ties to Black Sun, not before and, with Guri’s expert manipulation, not ever.
Xizor glanced up at the ceiling. He’d had the pattern of the galaxy installed into the glowtiles. When the lights were dim—and they usually were—he had an edge-on view of the home galaxy floating holographically there, with more than a million individual glowing dust-small stars hand-drawn in it. It had taken the artist three months and had cost a warlord’s ransom, but the Dark Prince could not spend what he already had even if he tried hard, and more than that kept flowing in all the time. Credits were nothing; he had billions. A way of keeping score, that was all. Not important.
He looked at the holograph
again. Beautiful and deadly, these two, a combination he enjoyed. He himself was of the Falleen, a species whose distant ancestors had been reptilian, and who had evolved into what was generally considered the most beautiful of all humanoid species. He was over a hundred years old, but he looked thirty. He was tall, had a topknot ponytail jutting up from his otherwise bald head and a hard body crafted by stim units. He also exuded natural pheromones that made most of the human-stock species feel instantly attracted to him, and his skin color, normally a dusky green, changed with the rise of those pheromones, shading from the cool into the warm spectrum. His handsomeness and appeal were tools, nothing more. He was the Dark Prince, Underlord of Black Sun, one of the three most powerful men in the galaxy. He could also kick a sunfruit off the top of a tall humanoid’s head without a warm-up stretch, and he could lift twice his own weight over his head using only his own muscles. He could claim a sound—if admittedly devious—mind in a sound body.
His galactic influence was surpassed only by the Emperor and the Dark Lord of the Sith, Darth Vader.
He smiled at the image before him again. Third—but about to become second, if his plans went as intended. It had been months since he’d overheard the Emperor and Vader talking of a threat they’d perceived, months, and now the preliminaries were done. Xizor was ready to move in earnest.
“Time?” he said.
His room computer answered and gave it to him.
Ah. Only an hour remained before his meeting. It was but a short walk through the protected corridors to Vader’s, not much beyond where the Emperor’s massive gray-green stone and mirror-crystal palace thrust itself up into the high atmosphere. A few kilometers, no more; a brisk stroll would put him there in a few minutes. No hurry. He did not want to arrive early.
A chime announced a visitor.
“Enter,” Xizor said. His bodyguards were not here, but there was no need for them in his sanctum—no one could penetrate its defenses. And only a few of his underlings had the right to visit him here, all of them loyal. As loyal as fear could make them.
One of his sublieutenants, Mayth Duvel, came in and bowed low. “My prince Xizor.”
“Yes?”
“I have a petition from the Nezriti Organization. They wish an alliance with Black Sun.”
Xizor gave Duvel a measured smile. “I’m sure they do.”
Duvel produced a small package. “They offer a token of their esteem.”
Xizor took the package, thumbed it open. Inside was a gem. It was an oval-cut, bloodred Tumanian pressure-ruby, a very rare stone, apparently flawless, and easily worth several million credits. The Dark Prince held it up, turned it in his fingers, nodded. Then he tossed it onto his desktop. It bounced once, slid to a stop next to his drinking cup. If it had fallen onto the floor, he would not have bent to retrieve it, and if the cleaning droid came in later and sucked it up, well, so what? “Tell them we’ll consider it.”
Duvel bowed and backed away.
When he was gone, Xizor stood, stretched his neck and back. The evolved reptilian ridge over his spine elevated slightly, felt sharp against his fingertips as he rubbed it. There were other applicants waiting to see him, and ordinarily he would sit and attend to their petitions, but not today. Now it was time to go and see Vader. By going there instead of insisting that Vader come here, he was giving away an advantage, appearing to be himself a supplicant. No matter. That was part of it; there must not seem to be any contention between them. No one must suspect that he felt anything but the greatest respect for the Dark Lord of the Sith, not if his plans were going to succeed. And succeed they would, he did not doubt it.
Because they always did.
2
Leia sat in a bad cantina in the bad part of Mos Eisley.
You really had to work at it to earn both of those low distinctions. Calling this place a dive would have elevated it four notches. The table was expanded metal, aluminum plate turned into a cheap and easy-to-clean mesh—probably they used a high-pressure solvent hose to wash everything into that drain in the middle of a sunken spot over there in the floor. If they opened the door to the arid outside, it would dry in a hurry. The cup of whatever vile brew it was she had in front of her was certainly losing more liquid to evaporation than to her drinking from it. The air refreshing system must have had a bad circuit—the place was hot, the desert air outside seeping in along with the gutter scum who came to hang out here. It smelled like a bantha stable in the hot summer, and the only good thing about the place was that the light was dim enough so she didn’t have to look too closely at the patrons—from a dozen different species and none of them particularly savory-looking examples at that.
Lando must have done it on purpose, picking this pit in which to meet, just to get a rise out of her. Well. When he finally arrived, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. For a time, she’d hated him, until she understood his apparent betrayal of Han had only been a ruse to help save them from Vader. Lando had given up a lot for that, and they all owed him for it.
Still, this wasn’t a bar she would have gone into without a good reason—a very good reason—and not a place she would have gone alone, despite her protests that she didn’t need a bodyguard. But need one or not, she had one—Chewbacca sat next to her, glowering at the assorted patrons. The only reason Chewie had left her with Luke after the last encounter with Vader was to go with Lando to Tatooine to set up Han’s rescue. Once Leia had arrived, Chewie had stayed as close to her as part of her wardrobe. It was irritating.
Lando had explained it: “Chewie owes Han a life debt. That’s a big deal among Wookiees. Han told him to take care of you. Until Han tells him otherwise, that’s what he’s going to do.”
Leia had tried to be firm. She told Chewie, “I appreciate it, but you don’t have to.”
It was no use, Lando told her. As long as he was alive, Chewbacca was going to be with her, and that was that. She didn’t even speak Wookiee, save for a couple of swear words she thought she recognized, but Lando had smiled and told her she might as well get used to it.
She almost had, after a fashion. Chewie could understand a number of languages, and while he couldn’t speak them, he could usually make known what he wanted somebody to know.
Leia liked Chewie okay, but here was another reason to find and free Han—so he could call the Wookiee off.
Then again, even though she would never admit it, there were times when having a two-meter-tall Wookiee around was useful. Such as in this wonderful place.
During the last hour, she’d had to look a little closer at several of the patrons than she liked. Despite the fact that she wore old and threadbare freight handler’s coveralls spotted and stained with lube, had her hair wound into a tight and unattractive bun, and did not meet anyone’s gaze, there had been a steady parade of various humans and aliens to her table, trying to pick her up—also despite the fact that a fully grown and armed Wookiee sat at the same table.
Males. Didn’t seem to matter what species they were when they wanted female company. And it didn’t seem to matter what species the female was, either.
Chewie made it clear they weren’t welcome, and between his size and bowcaster, nobody much wanted to argue the point. But new ones kept coming.
Chewie growled at a bulbous-headed Bith who banged into the table. The alien, whose species was normally well behaved and peaceful, had obviously had way too much to drink, if he would even think it possible that he and Leia could find anything in common. The Bith looked at Chewie’s bared teeth, hiccuped, then tottered off.
Leia said, “Look, I appreciate your help, but I can handle these guys.”
Chewie turned his head to one side and regarded her, a gesture she was coming to realize meant skepticism and amusement mixed about equally.
She took it as a challenge. “Hey, next time somebody comes over, just watch me. You can do it without threats, you know.”
It didn’t take long. The next pest in the rotation was a Devaronian, a horned
humanoid who—surprise—wanted to buy Leia a drink.
“Thank you, but I’m waiting for somebody.”
The Devaronian said, “Well, why don’t I keep you company until they get here? Perhaps they were delayed? It might be a long wait.”
“Thank you, but I have company.” She nodded at Chewie.
The alien ignored the gesture and, since the Wookiee didn’t speak or point his weapon, kept right on talking.
“I’m really quite pleasant to have around, you know. Many fems have thought so. Many.” He leered at her, his pointed teeth looking particularly white against his red lips. Shot his tongue out and sucked it back in; it was as long as her forearm.
Spare me, Leia thought. So much for the easy way.
“No. Go away.”
“You don’t know what you are missing, little one.” His leer grew wider, making him look more demonic.
She glanced at Chewie, who was about to start laughing, she could tell. She glared at the Devaronian.
“I’ll try to get over it. Leave.”
“Just one drink. And I can show you my Weranian holocards; they are very, ah … stimulating.”
He started to sit across from her.
Leia pulled the small blaster she had tucked into her coverall pocket, brought it out over the table where the Devaronian could see it. She pointed it at the ceiling and thumbed the power setting button from “stun” to “kill.”
He saw that, too.
Very quickly he said, “Ah, well, perhaps another time. I, ah, just recalled that, ah, I left the converter charging on my ship. You’ll excuse me.”
He hurried away. Amazing what waving a blaster under an obnoxious would-be suitor’s nose would do to improve his manners.
Chewie did laugh now. Said something, and she had a pretty good idea of what it meant.
“Nobody likes an obnoxious Wookiee,” she said. But she smiled. That point went to Chewie, and she was woman enough to admit it.
