by James Kahn
Piett smirked. “I have my orders from the Emperor himself. He has something special planned for this Rebel scum.” He accented the specialness with a long pause, for the inquisitive captain to savor. “We are only to keep them from escaping.”
The Emperor, Lord Vader, and Luke watched the aerial battle rage from the safety of the throne room in the Death Star.
It was a scene of pandemonium. Silent, crystalline explosions surrounded by green, violet, or magenta auras. Wildly vicious dogfights. Gracefully floating crags of melted steel; icicle sprays that might have been blood.
Luke watched in horror, as another Rebel ship toppled against the unseeable deflector shield, exploding in a fiery concussion.
Vader watched Luke. His boy was powerful, stronger than he’d imagined. And still pliable. Not lost yet—either to the sickening, weakly side of the Force, that had to beg for everything it received; or to the Emperor, who feared Luke with reason.
There was yet time to take Luke for his own—to retake him. To join with him in dark majesty. To rule the galaxy together. It would only take patience and a little wizardry to show Luke the exquisite satisfactions of the dark way and to pry him from the Emperor’s terrified clutch.
Vader knew Luke had seen it, too—the Emperor’s fear. He was a clever boy, young Luke, Vader smiled grimly to himself. He was his father’s son.
The Emperor interrupted Vader’s contemplation with a cackled remark to Luke. “As you can see, my young apprentice, the deflector shield is still in place. Your friends have failed! And now...” he raised his spindly hand above his head to mark this moment: “Witness the power of this fully armed and operational battle station.” He walked over to the comlink and spoke in a gravelly whisper, as if to a lover. “Fire at will, Commander.”
In shock, and in foreknowledge, Luke looked out across the surface of the Death Star, to the space battle beyond and to the bulk of the Rebel fleet beyond that.
Down in the bowels of the Death Star, Commander Jerjerrod gave an order. It was with mixed feelings that he issued the command, because it meant the final destruction of the Rebel insurrectionists—which meant an end to the state of war, which Jerjerrod cherished above all things. But second to ongoing war itself Jerjerrod loved total annihilation; so while tempered with regret, this order was not entirely without thrill.
At Jerjerrod’s instruction, a controller pulled a switch, which ignited a blinking panel. Two hooded Imperial soldiers pushed a series of buttons. A thick beam of light slowly pulsed from a long, heavily blockaded shaft. On the outer surface of the completed half of the Death Star, a giant laser dish began to glow.
Luke watched in impotent horror, as the unbelievably huge laser beam radiated out from the muzzle of the Death Star. It touched -for only an instant—one of the Rebel Star Cruisers that was surging in the midst of the heaviest fighting. And in the next instant, the Star Cruiser was vaporized. Blown to dust. Returned to its most elemental particles, in a single burst of light.
In the numbing grip of despair, with the hollowest of voids devouring his heart, Luke’s eyes, alone, glinted—for he saw, again, his lightsaber, lying unattended on the throne. And in this bleak and livid moment, the dark side was much with him.
= VIII =
ADMIRAL Ackbar stood on the bridge in stunned disbelief, looking out the observation window at the place where, a moment before, the Rebel Star Cruiser Liberty had just been engaged in a furious long-range battle. Now, there was nothing. Only empty space, powdered with a fine dust that sparkled in the light of more distant explosions. Ackbar stared in silence.
Around him, confusion was rampant. Flustered controllers were still trying to contact the Liberty, while fleet captains ran from screen to port, shouting, directing, misdirecting.
An aide handed Ackbar the comlink. General Calrissian’s voice was coming through.
“Home-one, this is Gold Leader. That blast came from the Death Star! Repeat, the Death Star is operational!”
“We saw it,” Ackbar answered wearily. “All craft prepare to retreat.”
“I’m not going to give up and run!” Lando shouted back. He’d come a long way to be in this game.
“We have no choice, General Calrissian. Our cruisers can’t repel firepower of that magnitude!”
“You won’t get a second chance at this, Admiral. Han will have that shield down—we’ve got to give him more time. Head for those Star Destroyers.”
Ackbar looked around him. A huge charge of flak rumbled the ship, painting a brief, waxen light over the window. Calrissian was right: there would be no second chance. It was now, or it was the end.
He turned to his First Star captain. “Move the fleet forward.”
“Yes, sir.” The man paused. “Sir, we don’t stand much of a chance against those Star Destroyers. They out-gun us, and they’re more heavily armored.”
“I know,” Ackbar said softly.
The captain left. An aide approached.
“Forward ships have made contact with the Imperial fleet, sir.”
“Concentrate your fire on their power generators. If we can knock out their shields, our fighters might stand a chance against them.”
The ship was rocked by another explosion—a laserbolt hit to one of the aft gyrostabilizers.
“Intensify auxiliary shields!” someone yelled.
The pitch of the battle augmented another notch.
Beyond the window of the throne room, the Rebel fleet was being decimated in the soundless vacuum of space, while inside, the only sound was the Emperor’s thready cackle. Luke continued his spiral into desperation as the Death Star laser beam incinerated ship after ship.
The Emperor hissed. “Your fleet is lost—and your friends on the Endor Moon will not survive...” He pushed a comlink button on the arm of his throne and spoke into it with relish. “Commander Jerjerrod, should the Rebels manage to blow up the shield generator, you will turn this battle station onto the Endor Moon and destroy it.”
“Yes, Your Highness,” came the voice over the receiver, “but we have several battalions stationed on—”
“You will destroy it!” the Emperor’s whisper was more final than any scream.
“Yes, Your Highness.”
Palpatine turned back to Luke—the former, shaking with glee; the latter, with outrage.
“There is no escape, my young pupil. The Alliance will die—as will your friends.”
Luke’s face was contorted, reflecting his spirit. Vader watched him carefully, as did the Emperor. The lightsaber began to shake on its resting place. The young Jedi’s hand was trembling, his lips pulled back in grimace, his teeth grinding.
The Emperor smiled. “Good. I can feel your anger. I am defenseless—take your weapon. Strike me down with all of your hatred, and your journey toward the dark side will be complete.” He laughed, and laughed.
Luke was able to resist no longer. The lightsaber rattled violently on the throne a moment, then flew into his hand, impelled by the Force. He ignited it a moment later and swung it with his full weight downward toward the Emperor’s skull.
In that instant, Vader’s blade flashed into view, parrying Luke’s attack an inch above the Emperor’s head. Sparks flew like forging steel, bathing Palpatine’s grinning face in a hellish glare.
Luke jumped back, and turned, lightsaber upraised, to face his father. Vader extended his own blade, poised to do battle.
The Emperor sighed with pleasure and sat in his throne, facing the combatants—the sole audience to this dire, aggrieved contest.
Han, Leia, Chewbacca, and the rest of the strike team were escorted out of the bunker by their captors. The sight that greeted them was substantially different from the way the grassy area had appeared when they’d entered. The clearing was now filled with Imperial troops.
Hundreds of them, in white or black armor—some standing at ease, some viewing the scene from atop their two-legged walkers, some leaning on their speeder bikes. If the situation had appea
red hopeless inside the bunker, it looked even worse now.
Han and Leia turned to each other full of feeling. All they’d struggled for, all they’d dreamed of--gone, now. Even so, they’d had each other for a short while at least. They’d come together from opposite ends of a wasteland of emotional isolation: Han had never known love, so enamored of himself was he: Leia had never known love, so wrapped up in social upheaval was she, so intent on embracing all of humanity. And somewhere between his glassy infatuation for the one, and her glowing fervor for the all, they’d found a shady place where two could huddle, grow, even feel nourished.
But that, too, was cut short, now. The end seemed near. So much was there to say, they couldn’t find a single word. Instead, they only joined hands, speaking through their fingers in these final minutes of companionship.
That’s when Threepio and Artoo jauntily entered the clearing, beeping and jabbering excitedly to each other. They stopped cold in their tracks when they saw what the clearing had become... and found all eyes suddenly focused on them.
“Oh, dear,” Threepio whimpered. In a second, he and Artoo had turned around and run right back into the woods from which they’d just come. Six stormtroopers charged in after them.
The Imperial soldiers were in time to see the two droids duck behind a large tree, some twenty yards into the forest. They rushed after the robots. As they rounded the tree, they found Artoo and Threepio standing there quietly, waiting to be taken. The guards moved to take them. They moved too slowly.
Fifteen Ewoks dropped out of the overhanging branches, quickly overpowering the Imperial troops with rocks and clubs. At that, Teebo—perched in another tree—raised a ram’s horn to his lips and sounded three long blasts from its bell. That was the signal for the Ewoks to attack.
Hundreds of them descended upon the clearing from all sides, throwing themselves against the might of the Imperial army with unrestrained zeal. The scene was unabridged chaos.
Stormtroopers fired their laser pistols at the furry creatures, killing or wounding many—only to be overrun by dozens more in their place. Biker scouts chased squealing Ewoks into the woods--and were knocked from their bikes by volleys of rocks launched from the trees.
In the first confused moments of the attack, Chewie dove into the foliage, while Han and Leia hit the dirt in the cover of the arches that flanked the bunker door. Explosions all around kept them pinned from leaving; the bunker door itself was closed again, and locked.
Han punched out the stolen code on the control panel keys—but this time, the door didn’t open. It had been reprogrammed as soon as they’d been caught. “The terminal doesn’t work now,” he muttered.
Leia stretched for a laser pistol lying in the dirt, just out of reach, beside a felled stormtrooper. Shots were crisscrossing from every direction, though.
“We need Artoo,” she shouted.
Han nodded, took out his comlink, pushed the sequence that signaled the little droid and reached for the weapon Leia couldn’t get as the fighting stormed all around them.
Artoo and Threepio were huddled behind a log when Artoo got the message. He suddenly blurted out an excited whistle and shot off toward the battlefield.
“Artoo!” Threepio shouted. “Where are you going? Wait for me!” Nearly beside himself, the golden droid tore off after his best friend.
Biker scouts raced over and around the scurrying droids, blasting away at the Ewoks who grew fiercer every time their fur was scorched. The little bears were hanging on the legs of the Imperial Walkers, hobbling the appendages with lengths of vine, or injuring the joint mechanisms by forcing pebbles and twigs into the hinges. They were knocking scouts off their bikes, by stringing vine between trees at throat level. They were throwing rocks, jumping out of trees, impaling with spears, entangling with nets. They were everywhere.
Scores of them rallied behind Chewbacca, who had grown rather fond of them during the course of the previous night. He’d become their mascot; and they, his little country cousins. So it was with a special ferocity, now, that they came to each other’s aid. Chewie was flinging stormtroopers left and right, in a selfless Wookiee frenzy, any time he saw them physically harming his small friends. The Ewoks, for their part, formed equally self-sacrificing cadres to do nothing but follow Chewbacca and throw themselves upon any soldiers who started getting the upper hand with him.
It was a wild, strange battle.
Artoo and Threepio finally made it to the bunker door. Han and Leia provided cover fire with guns they’d finally managed to scrounge. Artoo moved quickly to the terminal, plugged in his computer arm, began scanning. Before he’d even computed the weather codes, though, a laser bolt explosion ripped the entrance-way, disengaging Artoo’s cable arm, spilling him to the dirt.
His head began to smolder, his fittings to leak. All of a sudden every compartment sprang open, every nozzle gushed or smoked, every wheel spun—and then stopped. Threepio rushed to his wounded companion, as Han examined the bunker terminal.
“Maybe I can hotwire this thing,” Solo mumbled.
Meanwhile the Ewoks had erected a primitive catapult at the other side of the field. They fired a large boulder at one of the walkers—the machine vibrated seriously, but did not topple. It turned, and headed for the catapult, laser cannon firing. The Ewoks scattered. When the walker was ten feet away, the Ewoks chopped a mass of restraining vines, and two huge, balanced trunks crashed down on top of the Imperial war wagon, halting it for good.
The next phase of the assault began. Ewoks in kite-like animal-skin hang-gliders started dropping rocks on the stormtroopers, or dive-bombing with spears. Teebo, who led the attack, was hit in the wing with laser fire during the first volley and crashed into a gnarled root. A charging walker clumped forward to crush him, but Wicket swooped down just in time, yanking Teebo to safety. In swerving out of the walker’s way, though, Wicket smashed into a racing speeder bike—they all went tumbling into the dense foliage.
And so it went.
The casualties mounted.
High above, it was no different. A thousand deadly dogfights and cannon bombardments were erupting all over the skies, while the Death Star laser beam methodically disintegrated the Rebel ships.
In the Millennium Falcon, Lando steered like a maniac through an obstacle course of the giant, floating Imperial Star Destroyers--trading laser bolts with them, dodging flak, outracing TIE fighters.
Desperately, he was shouting into his comlink, over the noise of continuous explosions, talking to Ackbar in the Alliance command ship. “I said closer! Move in as close as you can and engage the Star Destroyers at point blank range—that way the Death Star won’t be able to fire at us without knocking out its own ships!”
“But no one’s ever gone nose to nose at that range, between supervessels like their destroyers and our cruisers!” Ackbar fumed at the unthinkable—but their options were running out.
“Great!” yelled Lando, skimming over the surface of the destroyer. “Then we’re inventing a new kind of combat!”
“We know nothing about the tactics of such a confrontation!” Ackbar protested.
“We know as much as they do!” Lando hollered. “And they’ll think we know more!” Bluffing was always dangerous in the last hand: but sometimes, when all your money was in the pot, it was the only way to win—and Lando never played to lose.
“At that close-range, we won’t last long against Star Destroyers.” Ackbar was already feeling giddy with resignation.
“We’ll last longer than we will against that Death Star and we might just take a few of them with us!” Lando whooped. With a jolt, one of his forward guns was blown away. He put the Falcon into a controlled spin, and careened around the belly of the Imperial leviathan.
With little else to lose, Ackbar decided to try Calrissian’s strategy. In the next minutes, dozens of Rebel Cruisers moved in astronomically close to the Imperial Star Destroyers—and the colossal antagonists began blasting away at each other, like ta
nks at twenty paces, while hundreds of tiny fighters raced across their surfaces, zipping between laser bolts as they chased around the massive hulls.
Slowly, Luke and Vader circled. Lightsaber high above his head, Luke readied his attack from classic first-position; the Dark Lord held a lateral stance, in classic answer. Without announcement, Luke brought his blade straight down—then, when Vader moved to parry, Luke feinted and cut low. Vader counterparried, let the impact direct his sword toward Luke’s throat... but Luke met the riposte and stepped back. The first blows, traded without injury. Again, they circled.
Vader was impressed with Luke’s speed. Pleased, even. It was a pity, almost, he couldn’t let the boy kill the Emperor yet. Luke wasn’t ready for that, emotionally. There was still a chance Luke would return to his friends if he destroyed the Emperor now. He needed more extensive tutelage, first—training by both Vader and Palpatine—before he’d be ready to assume his place at Vader’s right hand, ruling the galaxy.
So Vader had to shepherd the boy through periods like this, stop him from doing damage in the wrong places—or in the right places prematurely.
Before Vader could gather his thoughts much further, though, Luke attacked again—much more aggressively. He advanced in a flurry of lunges, each met with a loud crack of Vader’s phosphorescent saber. The Dark Lord retreated a step at every slash, swiveling once to bring his cutting beam up viciously—but Luke batted it away, pushing Vader back yet again. The Lord of the Sith momentarily lost his footing on the stairs and tumbled to his knees.
Luke stood above him, at the top of the staircase, heady with his own power. It was in his hands, now, he knew it was: he could take Vader. Take his blade, take his life. Take his place at the Emperor’s side. Yes, even that. Luke didn’t bury the thought, this time; he gloried in it. He engorged himself with its juices, felt its power tingle his cheeks. It made him feverish, this thought, with lust so overpowering as to totally obliterate all other considerations.
