And at each and every point, from the nerves that registered the color blue to the nerves that controlled the curl of the Elect’s toes, the Pawns would place a tiny crystal of meltmassif, the same stone as the Table. The same stone as the entire Election Center, and the vault outside. And after the skull was replaced, these crystals would grow into a gem-like latticework spreading throughout the Elect’s brain cavity.
Every Pawn had a head full of diamonds.
Klick did not know what criteria might be used to choose the Elect. Nor did he comprehend the subtle gradations of rank among the Pawns, why and how some seemed to be in charge at some times, and at other times seemed to take the orders of those they had recently commanded. All he knew was that once an Elect had been fitted with his crescent Crown and released as a full Pawn, he was instantly the superior of any trooper or pilot or officer. His slightest gesture was to be obeyed as though it had proceeded from Lord Shadowspawn himself. Very few of the Pawns ever spoke, but some peculiar eloquence in their gestures could make their orders instantly clear to even the dimmest nat-born trooper; Klick suspected it was some arcane use of the Force.
He’d never understood the Force, though he did not doubt its existence; he’d seen the Force used in action by countless Jedi during the Clone Wars. He had no interest in understanding. He’d been bred not for insight, but for obedience. He was content to allow the Force to remain a convenient mystery: one he could use to explain whatever he might find otherwise inexplicable.
Like, for example, how Lord Shadowspawn was able to shape meltmassif seemingly with the power of his will alone. A simple electromagnetic burst was enough to temporarily break down the curious crystalline structure of the rock, but that could not explain how, when Shadowspawn was near and set his will upon it, the meltmassif seemed almost alive. Klick had witnessed it more than once: Shadowspawn would stretch forth his hand, and the stone would flow and shape itself into whatever fantastical form might suit the Lord’s wildest desire.
Ahead, another Pawn beckoned. This Pawn stood at a blank slate-gray wall of meltmassif, but as Klick marched toward it, the Pawn swept a hand as though to usher him on, and the stone dimpled, drawing away from him in a bubble that became a shaft a few meters long. Klick entered the shaft without hesitation, and didn’t even blink as the stone flowed together to seal itself behind him, cutting off all light along with the possibility of retreat. He kept marching through the absolute darkness without breaking stride, trusting that the stone would continue to open before him and close behind.
And if the stone should fail to part before him, should Lord Shadowspawn see fit to entomb him alive as a punishment for his failure, he would stand and wait until his air ran out, and then he would go to sleep forever. No clone spawned in Kaminoan pods and raised in crèche school could even comprehend the concept of claustrophobia, much less suffer from it.
The faintest of breezes stirred his hair, and the sound of his boot heels on the stone took on added resonance, a multiplicity of echoes: though he could not see it, the stone had opened before him into a chamber of perfect night.
“Hold, Group Captain.” In the lightless void, Lord Shadowspawn’s voice came from every direction and from none at all, as though the darkness itself spoke these words. “Stand and report.”
“My lord.” Klick inclined his head. “I regret to inform my lord that—”
“Do not regret, Klick. Only inform.”
“The ship you ordered us—ah, that we were ordered to strike, my lord, along the Corellian Run. It was a Rebel ambush. The Corellian Queen was not even a ship at all, only a shell—a mock-up, really, full of Rebel starfighters. Somehow—” Klick swallowed, hard. His next words would be someone’s death sentence. Possibly his own. “Somehow they knew we were coming.”
“Did they?”
“They must have, my lord. Not only were they lying in wait, they had a new weapon, a torpedo of a type I’ve never seen, that seemed to be specifically designed to engage our superior defenders. My starfighters were forced to retreat with almost thirty percent casualties. My lord—” Klick swallowed again. “My lord, there must be a Rebel spy. Here, on Mindor.”
“Must there? Can you conceive no alternate explanation?”
“I—I can’t imagine, my lord.”
“I can. But continue. There is more, is there not?”
“Yes, my lord. We have detected a signal. Some sort of subspace transponder. We’ve traced it to the defenders damaged in the engagement on the Corellian Run. We detected it when—” Klick swallowed hard, as if he was trying to down a mouthful of rocks. “When the subspace jamming system was deactivated.”
“Ah.”
“It’s the work of this Rebel spy, my lord. It must be.”
“It was not. The jammers were deactivated by my order.”
“My lord?” Klick blinked rapidly as he tried to take this in. Would Shadowspawn betray his very own Great Cause? “My lord—I fear those torpedoes were used to plant some sort of tracking device—”
“At last!”
“My lord?”
“Klick, you have done well. Very well indeed.”
“My lord, I believe the Rebels have found us! According to the most recent intelligence reports, they have an entire task force on constant ready alert—my lord, a fleet could be on its way here right now!”
“Could be? No. It is.”
Klick blinked even faster. “Shall I sound general quarters, my lord?”
“Of course not. We can’t have our unexpected guests discover that we’ve been expecting them, can we? Are we so rude?”
“I, ah, well—” Klick hoped the question was only rhetorical.
“Order the Combat Space Patrol to stand down and return to their bases. But they are to stay with their craft and keep their engines hot. Also, order all the gravity crews to stand ready for initiation on my command.”
“But if they strike while our forces are grounded, our losses—my lord, it could cost us the battle!”
“We will lose this battle,” said the voice from the darkness. “We must. Losing this battle is how we will deliver the Empire to its rightful ruler: Emperor Skywalker!”
CHAPTER 4
THE LONE PASSENGER SHUTTLE GLEAMED IN TASPAN’S light as it left the atmosphere, slipping neatly through the hurtling asteroids that crowded Mindor’s low planetary orbit. As it left LPO, the shuttle traced a long, gracefully curving path, swinging wide to avoid the clouds of radioactive debris that were all that remained of Shadowspawn’s sizable force of TIE defenders.
On the battle bridge of the Justice, Lieutenant Tubrimi rolled the vast black orb of his left eye back from his console. “Unarmed shuttle, sir. A single lifesign—human, sir! It’s hailing us under terms of the truce.” The red-gold streaks in his iris brightened with excitement. “It’s Shadowspawn, sir!”
Admiral Kalback shifted forward in his command chair. Nictitating membranes swept his eyes and retreated only halfway—the Mon Calamari version of a satisfied smile. “Accept the hail.”
The lieutenant swept his webbed fingers through a complex curve in the air above his console, and the battle bridge’s holoprojectors flickered to life.
The image they formed was of a tall human male, standing motionless in robes so long that they draped in folds around his feet. His hands were similarly hidden, folded before him within voluminous sleeves. His face was pale as a corpse’s and as expressionless, and his eyes were rimmed in black. He wore some sort of curious headgear: an inverted crescent as broad as his substantial shoulders, which framed his head as though his face were a mountain, looming in silhouette before a cloud-blackened sun half below the horizon.
“Unidentified Rebel command cruiser,” the image intoned in a voice black as a subterranean cavern, “I am Lord Shadowspawn. You have defeated us. I respectfully request permission to board, that I may formally treat for the lives of my men.”
Lieutenant Tubrimi said, “That’s all of it,” and the image flicke
red out.
The admiral had never been a particularly demonstrative being, but there was quiet joy in his voice as he turned to the young human who stood beside his chair. “It seems congratulations are in order, General.”
The general stood exactly as he had throughout the operation: motionless on the Justice’s battle bridge, hands folded behind him, a faint frown painting his brow. Beside him, maglocked to the deck, waiting with electronic patience, stood an R2-droid series model. The general seemed to be listening to some faint and distant sound, far beyond the confines of the ship, and it appeared that he didn’t like what he was hearing.
Shadowspawn’s voice … he couldn’t pin it down. There had been something weird about it, some strange resonance, that struck him as both too familiar and just plain wrong.
“General?” Admiral Kalback repeated. “My congratulations—”
Luke replied grimly, “Not yet.”
The battle had gone like chronowork. The sudden appearance of the Twenty-third Combat Starfighter Wing coming out of hyperspace at the very limit of Mindor’s gravity well had apparently caught Shadowspawn’s forces entirely by surprise; the Twenty-third’s Y-wings had managed two devastating torpedo runs on the warlord’s base before the first TIE defenders on combat patrol had been able to get back to engage the Twenty-third’s X- and B-wings; the Ys managed several more runs during the ensuing dogfight. The battle at the edge of Mindor’s atmosphere had drawn in the rest of the combat patrols from across the system, leaving clear space for all twelve of the Rapid Response Task Force’s capital ships to jump in.
The five Slash-Es had come out of jump in a precise formation—a regular tetrahedral dipyramid, to be exact—with the planet of Mindor at its geometric center. Once their gravity-well generators activated, they bracketed the planet with a mass-shadow more than seven light-minutes across. But before the generators were triggered, the other seven ships had jumped in. Six of these remaining seven were a motley collection of various styles and makes, from a pair of refitted Acclamator II assault cruisers to a battered old Techno Union Bulwark-class battleship, dating from before the Clone Wars; all they had in common were retrofitted Class 0.6 hyperdrives, multiple-redundancy deflector and particle shields, and the ability to transport a minimum of three full squadrons of starfighters apiece. Adding to the ungainly, cobbled-together appearance of these ships were the vast number of pre–Clone Wars Jadthu landers maglocked to their hulls, which not only added their own very substantial armor as additional protection for the cruisers, but also gave the four non-atmosphere-capable ships the capacity to hot-ground a fairly large chunk of their marine complements in exceedingly short order.
The final ship was the Justice, flagship of the task force: a sleek, graceful Mon Cal cruiser, sister ship to the legendary Liberty. This twelve-hundred-meter work of art was almost literally the Liberty’s sister; constructed simultaneously, she resembled her famous sibling more than almost any two ships ever to come out of the fantastical imaginations of Mon Calamari designers. The Justice had been intended to complement the Liberty’s speed and sheer destructive potential with more powerful shielding, additional docking bays, and vastly expanded troop capacity, because the Mon Calamari designers worked hand-in-glove with their equally imaginative strategists, who knew that while blowing things up was all well and good, wars were actually won by boots on the ground. Lots of them.
Of the eighteen thousand Republic marines deployed with the RRTF, nearly eight thousand were on the Justice alone, and the additional hangar bays that made her look, as Luke Skywalker had remarked when he first saw her, “a little bit pregnant,” could carry ten full starfighter squadrons as well as a repair-and-refit shop deck more capable than most Republic stardocks.
The cruisers had taken up station in the centers of each face of the dipyramid marked off by the Slash-Es, and deployed two each of their starfighter squadrons. The Slash-Es were able to deploy a squadron apiece. With complete hyperspace interdiction and the sheer volume of firepower available to the cruisers and the twenty squadrons of starfighters, the marauders had been swiftly overwhelmed, and not a single Imperial craft had escaped the perimeter.
By the time the Justice had cruised majestically into a geostationary orbit above what clearly seemed to be the marauder base—it being the only installation on the planet defended by massive ground-based turbolaser batteries and eight planetary-defense ion cannons—the marauders’ surviving starfighters had retreated to underground hangars.
It was over.
The lone frown among the jubilant bridge crew of the Justice belonged to Luke Skywalker. “It’s not over.”
Admiral Kalback blinked. “It was a brilliant plan—”
“It was an obvious plan.”
“Yet it went precisely as you devised.”
“That’s the problem.”
“General?”
“When was the last time you heard of a battle that went exactly as planned?”
Kalback’s right eye swiveled independently to join his left, and the stately old officer leaned gently toward him. “When was the last time a battle was planned by a Jedi?”
“I couldn’t say,” Luke murmured. “But I bet it wasn’t this smooth. And since when does a Lord of the Empire worry about the lives of his men?”
The admiral flicked his left eye toward his rear and back again: a shrug. “We’ve cleared local space; his force is confined to the planet, which qualifies this as dirtside operations. That makes it your call, General.”
“Then we make the best of bad choices. Tell him to hold station and present his conditions. We can negotiate from here.”
“Prepare to transmit,” Kalback said.
When Tubrimi signaled his readiness, the admiral rose. “Lord Shadowspawn, I am Admiral Kalback.” The depth and dignity of his voice was more than equal to Shadowspawn’s. “This is not a Rebel cruiser, sir; there is no Rebellion any longer. This ship is the Justice, flagship of the New Republic’s Rapid Response Task Force. On behalf of the Joint Command, we are prepared to consider your offer of surrender. Hold your position, and transmit when ready.”
He signaled to Tubrimi to cut transmission. “Let’s give him time to think that over.”
“I’m the one who’s thinking it over.” Luke paced the deck, frowning at the various sensor readouts on the battle bridge. “I think it’s a trap.”
Kalback’s eyes twitched. “A trap? A trap for what? With what? We’ve crushed them.”
“It’s still a trap.”
“Is this some Jedi insight? Do you feel it in the Force?”
Luke shook his head. “Artoo, bring up a tactical display.”
R2-D2 whistled a cheerful assent and rolled away from Luke’s side, extending his datalink toward the nearest port. Lieutenant Tubrimi swung around and waved his webbed hand. “I have it, sir.”
“Leave it to Artoo,” Luke said. “Mind your station.”
“But—with all due respect, sir, even astromechs of substantially more advanced design than that old Artoo unit find our information technology almost imposs …” The lieutenant’s voice trailed off as the battle bridge’s holoprojector array flared to life, filling the room with a schematized holorepresentation of the Taspan.
Luke let himself smile, just a bit. “That old Artoo unit, Lieutenant, is not exactly an ordinary astromech. I trust him more than most people I know.”
The lieutenant’s nictitating membranes slid halfway across his eyes and flittered there for a second or two as he turned back to his console: the Mon Cal equivalent of a sheepish blush. “Yes, ah … sorry, sir. It won’t happen again, sir.”
Luke reached out and laid a hand on the lieutenant’s shoulder. “It should happen again, Lieutenant. Being a general doesn’t make me infallible.”
“But, sir—the general is also a Jedi, sir.”
Luke sighed. “Jedi aren’t infallible, either.” He turned once more to Admiral Kalback. “If you were based in this system, how would you have se
t up your defenses?”
Kalback’s eyes rolled to take in the whole cloud-fogged system at a glance, and nodded slowly. “Without capital ships, I suppose I would have based my starfighters in the asteroids.”
“Me, too,” Luke said. “If I were Shadowspawn, I wouldn’t even have a base. Hollow out a couple dozen of the bigger asteroids, and they become your carriers and base stations. It wouldn’t take much to make them practically invisible. It’s the perfect camouflage.”
“Then we’re lucky you’re not Shadowspawn.”
“Ben Kenobi used to tell me there’s no such thing as luck. Think about it: I’m a brand-new general. A few weeks ago I was just a jumped-up fighter jock. If I could think of it in a couple seconds, how did Shadowspawn miss it when he’s had months?” Luke paced through the holodisplay and waved a hand at the pinpoints that represented the CC-7700/Es. “Look at those asteroid clouds. How many good places are there to station interdiction ships?”
Kalback responded only with a thoughtful blink.
“So if you knew your enemy had to bring capital ships, and you knew pretty much exactly where those capital ships had to go, what would you have done?”
“I’d have filled those points with mines,” Kalback said. “And concentrated my starfighters nearby.”
“But he set up his base—and his forces—on the planet.” Luke nodded at R2-D2. “Artoo, bring it up.”
The tiny shining disk of Mindor swelled to engulf and erase the rest of the system. It was an ugly place.
What had once been a lush and beautiful resort world was now mere rockball, battered clean of life by the endless rain of meteorites left over from the Big Crush; the only significant geographic features were the ubiquitous volcanoes that boiled from cracks in the planet’s crust. Even the oceans had shriveled to widely scattered toxic sumps, churning at the very bottoms of what had once been the sea floor, and the atmosphere was so charged with vaporized metal and mineral salts that it formed a significant barrier to all forms of realspace communications; Lord Shadowspawn’s initial transmission requesting the truce, for example, had been voice-only, with significant static interference.
Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 5
