“Hold it together, Lieutenant. I’ve gotten people out of tighter spots than this.” Luke stepped up on the command dais and raised his voice. “All bridge personnel—every one of you—get back to your stations. Secure the wounded and the dead, then strap yourselves in. Except for you,” he said to the pilot. “Strap in somewhere else. I’m taking your station.”
“You?” The pilot blinked in astonishment. “But sir—Mon Calamari control systems are not designed for human operation—”
“That’s my problem.” Luke slid into the pilot’s couch. “Yours is finding a place to secure yourself. This ride’s about to get bumpy.”
“Sir?”
“We have crew aboard who are running out of air. So we’ll go get them some.” Luke pointed to the wide brick-colored curve of Mindor. “There’s a whole planetful, right next door.”
“Sir!” Tubrimi gasped. “We don’t have engines—we don’t even have repulsorlifts. You’re not actually suggesting we take this—this fragment of a ship into atmosphere with nothing but attitude thrusters—”
“That’s right. I’m not suggesting. I’m ordering. And I’m not just taking us into the atmosphere.”
Luke stretched his hands out into the electrostatic control fields above the pilot console and let himself smile, just a bit; for the first time in weeks, he felt like a Jedi again. “I’m going to land this thing.”
NONE OF THE NEW REPUBLIC FORCES SAW THE FRAGMENT of the Justice dip into the atmosphere; even the kilometers-long stream of flame and smoke trailing off its burning hull attracted no attention at all. The Republic forces were wholly engaged with the more immediate problem of staying alive.
Gravity wells had erupted throughout the system, their mass-shadow thresholds spreading in a 3-D version of the ripples from a handful of pebbles tossed into a still pool. With their subspace comm and sensors jammed, the New Republic ships couldn’t even guess how many gravity mines or projectors might be hidden among the trillions of asteroids; the overlapping layers of the interdiction field not only wiped out any hope of hyperspace travel, they also suddenly—and in many cases catastrophically—altered the already-unstable orbits of every object in the system smaller than a medium-sized moon, turning what had been a dangerously crowded system into a nightmare of intersecting storms of rock.
And the hail that streamed from these storms was squadron after squadron of TIE interceptors.
The interceptor was not so dominating a weapon as its successor, the defender. With less armor, less weaponry, and no shields or hyperdrive, they were nonetheless incredibly swift and maneuverable, and could be exceedingly difficult opponents, especially when appearing en masse. Here at Mindor—as the desperately scrambling Republic X- and B-wing pilots discovered, to their dismay—en masse translated to (in the words of one flight leader) “thousands of the beggars, comin’ from everywhere all at frappin’ once!”
In the swirling chaos of randomly hurtling asteroids, the interceptors’ lack of shields was actually an advantage, as deflectors don’t affect material objects; the deflectorless interceptors had proportionally more engine power for acceleration and to recharge the capacitors for their laser cannons, and there were so many of them that they could swarm the Republic fighters like Pervian blood crows mobbing a wonderhawk and still have plenty left over to strafe the capital ships, which was why nobody was keeping an eye on the optical sensors or monitoring the Justice’s EM channel, on which was playing a loop of Luke Skywalker’s low, preternaturally calm voice broadcast by an emergency signal buoy orbiting the planet.
“This is New Republic cruiser Justice, Luke Skywalker commanding. Admiral Kalback is dead. The ship has broken up, and there are no escape pods remaining. I have taken the helm and will attempt to set down behind the dawn terminator above the north tropic. Begin the search for survivors at the coordinates on the encoded supplementary frequency. Good luck, and may the Force be with you. Skywalker out.”
Only the Lancer, yanked unexpectedly from hyperspace by the Imperial gravity mines half a light-hour out from Mindor, had the chance to catch the actual landing, such as it was.
Lieutenant Devalo, at ComOps, went ashen as he picked up the broadcast from the signal buoy; when he reported it to Captain Tirossk, the captain’s response was to instantly aim the Lancer’s most powerful optical scope at the day-night terminator of the distant planet. The aged ship’s sensor suite had just barely managed to focus on an image of a long, long smoke trail, and was tracking it down through the atmosphere when it picked up the fringes of a brilliant white flash, followed by a vast expanding ball of smoke-laced flame.
“Oh,” Tirossk said numbly. There was no thought of obscenity now; how he felt could not be expressed in words.
“Was that—” Devalo had to swallow before he could go on. “Was that the Justice?”
“I’m afraid it must have been.” Tirossk sank into his command chair. “I’m afraid …”
“General Skywalker’s ship?”
“No one could have survived that,” Tirossk said. “We’re half a light-hour out. What we just saw, it happened thirty minutes ago.”
Devalo couldn’t even ask the question, but he didn’t have to.
“He died half an hour ago.” Tirossk shook his head, blankly astonished at the bleak weight that settled onto him. “Luke Skywalker is dead.”
CHAPTER 5
HAN SOLO STRETCHED BACK FAR ENOUGH IN THE CONFERENCE room chair that when he laced his fingers together behind his head, he had to jam one knee up under the table to keep from toppling over. He stared at the ceiling and wondered, for the three or four hundredth time that day, if it was possible to die of boredom.
He decided, as he had all the other times, that if such a thing were possible he would have bumped off at least two days ago. If there was anything in the galaxy he hated more than sitting around in a room for hours on end with nothing to do but listen to people yap, it had to be sitting around in a room for hours with nothing to do except listen to Mandalorians yap.
Man, he hated those guys!
Han was no bigot; despite some unfortunate experiences with a certain Mando bounty hunter—who, if the Force believed in justice, was still to this very day screaming as he slowly dissolved in a sarlacc’s digestive juices—he didn’t hate Mandalorians in general. He’d just never met a single one of these stuck-up more-studly-than-thou self-proclaimed MESFACs (Masters of Every Single Flippin’ Aspect of Combat) who could even so much as say “Good morning” without making it sound like he was really saying It better be a good morning, because if you pull anything, I will without hesitation jariler your weak peace-lovin’ Corellian butt till you don’t even know what galaxy you’re in.
He didn’t hate Mandos in general; he only hated the ones he’d actually met.
Further, some screwed-up sense of honor or ethnic pride or something had somehow made these particular Mandalorians unwilling to speak Basic during these talks. Which didn’t stop them from yapping, of course. They just yapped in Mando’a, a language that, to Han’s more-than-somewhat biased ear, made them sound like a pride of sand panthers trying to cough up hairballs bigger than his head. And this hairball-hacking then had to be dutifully translated into Basic for the convenience of the chief New Republic negotiator by the chief negotiator’s high-strung, hypersensitive, relentlessly neurotic protocol droid, who somehow among his six million flippin’ forms of communication had never managed to lose that snooty Core Worlds accent that, after hearing it nonstop for a couple of days cooped up in this room with nothing better to do, made Han want to whop him so hard he’d land somewhere back on Tatooine.
The main consideration that stopped him from engaging in catastrophic droid-remodeling was the presence beside him of the New Republic’s chief negotiator, who was so breathtakingly beautiful that Han couldn’t even glance her way without feeling his heart begin to pound.
She was not only beautiful but brilliant and fiercely courageous, and she had done only one really foolis
h thing in her life: a couple of years ago, she had let herself fall in love with a dashing-but-impoverished tramp-freighter captain—well, okay, a disreputable smuggler on the run from Imperial authorities and various bounty hunters and crime lords, but who was counting?—and Han could never shake this lurking dread that if he, say, did something nasty to C-3PO, who, after all, usually meant well, Leia might suddenly wake up and realize what an awful mistake she’d made.
Not that he would ever admit this, not even to Chewbacca. Not even to himself, most days—his ego was nigh-invulnerable to self-doubt—but on those rare occasions when he found himself getting irritable and depressed because he was stuck somewhere with way too much time to think and not nearly enough to do, these little whispers would start hissing around the back of his head. He could quiet them only by privately reaffirming his personal blood oath that he would never—never ever ever—give the woman he loved a reason to regret falling for him.
Which left him sitting in a conference room in a pressure dome on an unnamed asteroid in some Inner Rim system so obscure he couldn’t remember its name, pretending to give a damn while C-3PO translated yet another string of Mandalorian gabble. “The commander repeats that surrender simply is not possible, and reiterates that the only peaceful solution to this unfortunate situation is for all Rebel—that is, New Republic, of course; he doesn’t seem to understand the distinction, or else is being deliberately obtuse, but no matter—is for all Rebel forces to depart the system forthwith. Of course, this is not his exact phraseology; the literal translation—stripped of vulgarity—is roughly along the lines of You Rebels stay, everybody dies, you Rebels leave, everybody’s happy, which wholly fails to capture the entirely savage brutality of his vocabulary. Really, Princess, having to process such coarse language—my vulgarity-filter capacitors are on the brink of overload!”
Han didn’t even entirely understand what the negotiation was all about; he’d missed the battle completely, as he and Leia had been off somewhere on the far side of nowhere, hammering out the details of bringing into the New Republic a minor star cluster inhabited mainly by hairy spider-looking critters who had thoroughly creeped him out, not least because these, unlike most of the arachnoid races, had very humanoid-looking faces, including mouthfuls of gleaming white, entirely human-looking teeth.
Anyway, by the time he’d brought Leia here at the urgent summons of the local system authority, the Imperial forces had been thoroughly defeated and scattered to the stars—all except five or six hundred Mandalorian mercenaries, who were dug in around several trineutronium power plants on the system’s main inhabited world; the Mandos had proclaimed themselves ready and willing to detonate these installations at the first touchdown of a Republic ship, which would sterilize the planet and kill all three and a half billion people who lived there.
They’d taken the world hostage.
Han had been able to gather, through the endless hours of tense negotiations, that the final order from the fleeing Imperial commander had been for the Mandos to deny the planet to Republic forces “by any and all necessary means.” The Mando commander had interpreted that to mean “Even if you have to kill everybody, including yourselves.” But the New Republic wasn’t about to give back a system that was not only rich in natural resources and manufacturing capacity but had also, in a system-wide referendum, voted overwhelmingly in favor of Republic membership, with something like ninety-seven percent recommending union. Han privately hoped that the three percent diehard ImpSymps all lived right next door to one of those trineutronium plants.
Anyway, the negotiation had disintegrated into a standoff: Leia’s rationality and persuasive powers matched against the rock-ribbed Mandalorians Never Surrender nuttiness of the mercenary commander. It had gotten to the point that Han was actually looking forward to Lando’s arrival.
This was surprising not because of anything to do with Lando himself, whom Han, despite their long and often unhappy history together, actually liked—well, most of the time—but rather with what Lando was bringing to this table. Well, less what than who.
Lando Calrissian, unlike his old buddy Han, had hung on to his general’s commission. He was currently the director of Special Operations, a fancy-sounding title that apparently involved, today, being a highly decorated chauffeur. He was on his way back from Mandalorian space, where he had gone to corral the one guy in the galaxy Lando claimed could change the alleged minds of these commandos: the Big Boss of the Mandalorian Protectors and self-styled Lord Mandalore, Fenn Shysa himself.
Or, as Han usually thought of him, Fenn You-So-Much-as-Look-at-Leia-That-Way-One-More-Time-and-I-Swear-I’m-Gonna-Pop-Your-Mando-Skull-Like-a-Bladdergrape Shysa.
Shysa and his men had given up the mercenary life, and he’d organized his cadre into the kernel of the Protectors—kind of civic-minded volunteer police and freelance do-gooders, more or less. Which meant that Shysa, on top of his born-and-bred MESFAC more-studly-than-thou thing, had piled more-honorable-than-thou, more-self-sacrificing-than-thou, and more-all-around-good-guy-than-thou.
If Han were inclined to be entirely honest about such things—which he was not, on principle—he might have admitted that his problem with the Protector commandant had more to do with a sneaking suspicion that Fenn might also be better-looking-than-thou, and with how much attention this particular Hero of Mandalore paid to Leia. And how much Leia seemed to enjoy it.
This time, though, Han was actually grudgingly willing to let Shysa have the pleasure of spending time in a room with Leia—a conference room, with Han and a few dozen officers as chaperones—as long as it got this situation resolved. He figured this proved he’d grown as a person. A little. Maybe.
Just how questionable that growth might be was amply demonstrated when Leia turned to him, put a hand on his arm to draw him close, and leaned toward him to whisper in his ear; he actually more than half expected that she was about to tell him how much she was looking forward to seeing Shysa again.
Instead, she muttered in a voice stretched thin with tension, “Han, Luke’s in trouble.”
The front legs of Han’s chair bumped back down to the floor. “What?”
Leia gave her head that little shake, one Han knew so well, barely more than a lip-compressed shiver that signaled I don’t know why, but I don’t like this at all. “It’s a—feeling. He might—”
“Hey, I worry about him too, but—” Han laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. “He can take care of himself, you know? The stuff he can do …”
His voice trailed off as he felt the knots of tension in her shoulder; instead of him giving her comfort, she was giving him dread.
A dimple appeared at the corner of her mouth that told Han she was biting the inside of her lower lip. “It’s not just the Mindor raid. I think—I think there’s something … wrong there. Something bad.”
“Something he can’t handle? I mean, we’re talking about Luke, here—Luke I-Must-Face-Vader-and-Palpatine-Alone Skywalker, y’know?” Han thought it was a pretty good line, but it sounded hollow, even to him. He forged on. “How much trouble can he really be in?”
“I—I don’t know, Han!” The twist of uncertainty at the corners of her eyes brought a similar twist to Han’s heart. “If I knew, I wouldn’t even have mentioned it—or else we’d be on our way already.”
“Excuse me, please—I beg your pardon most awfully, Princess—” C-3PO leaned in between them. “Though my vocabulary filter and voice-stress analysis subprogram suggest that your conversation is very likely private, the commander is becoming restive, and is requesting a translation. Not very respectfully, I might add.”
“Ask him if he needs you to translate this—” Han began, but the gesture he’d been referring to was interrupted by Leia’s astonishingly strong grip on his arm.
“Han, can you just—just find out? Try the comm center. The RRTF will be in subspace contact. Just—make sure he’s all right. And tell him to be careful.” Her urgent whisper dropped to a barely
audible hush. “Tell him I have a bad feeling about this.”
HAN TROTTED THROUGH THE HUGE ROCK-DOMED docking bay, buckling his blaster belt and tying down his holster as he went. He threaded through deck gangs busily shifting fighters and shuttles into parking slips, sneezing at the thick petrochemical fumes belched out by overstressed dry-tugs. When he reached the Falcon, the shadow of her starboard mandible was littered with a bewildering array of components in various states of disrepair and disassembly, most of which—to his sadly all-too-experienced eye—appeared to belong to the control assembly of her starboard deflector unit. The party responsible for this wanton destruction of property was currently standing down to his knees in the proximal access hatch—all that could be seen of him was a pair of vast russet-shagged feet on top of a coffin-sized toolbox that rested on a rusty, battered scrap of scaffolding that looked like it had once been some kind of picnic table, while the rest of his vast hairy body was jammed way up into the innards of Han’s ship.
“Chewie—hey, Chewie!”
The feet gave back no reaction, which was no surprise. The growl of dry-tug engines and the electronically amplified orders bawled by the deck bosses were so loud Han could barely even hear himself. He swept up a nearby gauss wrench and whanged the Falcon’s hull hard enough to leave a bright new scar. From deep within the access hatch came a thump Han could feel though the hull—Chewbacca’s head was fully hard enough to dent durasteel—and a brief but heartfelt snarl of Wookiee expletive, which would be enough to erode the confidence of almost any human being in the galaxy. Almost. “Get the ship zipped and clipped,” Han said. “I’ll start the launch sequence. Skids up in ten.”
Chewie howled a protest. Han said, “Well, if we could land somewhere for more than twenty minutes before you start taking the ship apart, we wouldn’t have this—”
Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 7
