Lando weighed the reader in his hand. “Summarize it for me, will you?”
“Well—it claims to be from Lord Shadowspawn, sir. ComOps hasn’t verified authenticity yet, but—”
“But you thought I might want to know about it. Because you think it might have something to do with our missing princess and her two favorite generals.”
“In the transmission, sir, Lord Shadowspawn claims to have captured the entire task force—and he says he will kill them all in three Standard days unless the Republic agrees to an immediate cease-fire … and acknowledges his claim on the Imperial Throne.”
“Really. Hm. Well, well again.”
“But like I said—” The ensign licked nervous sweat from his upper lip. “We don’t know if—ComOps hasn’t verified its authenticity—even if it really is from Shadowspawn, we have no way of knowing if any of it is true—”
“Sure we do. It’s all true,” Lando said. “Luke’s already there. Han and Leia are on their way. Not to mention Rogue Squadron.”
“Sir? I don’t understand.”
“That’s because you’re new around here, son.”
“Sir?”
“Forward your personnel file to my exec. I can use a man like you.”
The ensign’s mouth dropped open. “Sir—? I don’t—I mean, I failed—”
“When you submit your file, put a note in there that I’m promoting you to lieutenant j.g.”
The ensign’s eyes went as wide and slack as his mouth “Sir—?”
“You’ve just saved a general from being bored to death. If I thought I could get away with it, I’d give you a medal, too.” He left the ensign gaping in the hallway.
Inside the conference room, Lando nodded a grin at Shysa and kicked his empty chair out of the way. “Let me handle this.”
He slipped around the corner of the table, to the mercenaries’ side. He sat on the edge and grinned down at the astonished commander. “Okay. Negotiation’s over. You win.”
Shysa frowned. “They do?”
The commander blinked. “We do?”
“Sure. I’ll put it in writing. No Republic forces will land on, permanently orbit, or otherwise occupy this world or this system while you live to serve the Empire. Satisfied?”
“Well, I—ah, I suppose, I mean—well, yes.”
“Great!” Lando’s grin got wider. “Now what?”
“Now?” The commander blinked again. He was still so astonished he entirely forgot he was supposedly refusing to speak Basic. “What do you mean?”
“I mean you’ve won. Your victory is complete. What now?”
“Well, we—I suppose, I mean—”
“How are you planning to get paid?”
“Paid?”
“I have to tell you, our sensors aren’t picking up any sign of Imperial ships dropping out of hyperspace to, y’know, jettison bags of cash or anything.”
The commander’s face clouded over. “I see what you mean.”
“Strikes me,” Lando said carelessly, examining his flawless manicure, “that failure to deliver payment qualifies as a breach of contract, doesn’t it? Not to mention scampering off and leaving you all here to die. Forget that part. I guess they figured that with you all dead, they’d never have to pay. And if you live, well, you’re trapped on a planet deep in Republic space. How are you supposed to collect?”
The commander scowled. “You’re trying to trick me.”
“Not at all.” Lando winked at him. “I’m trying to hire you.”
The commander looked thoughtful.
“Might you and your men be interested in, ah, a new position? Working for people who give a damn whether you live or die? Who will actually—believe it or not—pay you?”
The commander’s scowl got deeper and deeper the longer he thought it over; after what seemed like a long, long time, he turned that scowl on Lando.
The commander said, “In advance?”
CHAPTER 6
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, LUKE SKYWALKER IS DEAD?”
Lord Shadowspawn’s holoprojected image was only a half meter tall, but something in his posture, or his inhumanly corpse-pale face, or the glittering malice that dripped from every word, made the nervous wing commander, Norris Prang, feel even smaller than that. He felt roughly the size of a Kashyyyk mouse-spider, and he had a feeling that Lord Shadowspawn was about to come down on him like a Wookiee’s heel.
He swallowed hard and snugged his gleaming black flight-trooper helmet more tightly into his uncomfortably damp armpit. One good thing about this black armor—the sweat didn’t show much, even when it leaked through the wicking fabric joints and trickled down his chestpiece, which it had started to do right about the same time Lord Shadowspawn had started to smile.
Had Shadowspawn’s teeth always been so large? And so white … and kind of pointy-looking?
He couldn’t remember. In fact, now that he thought of it, he couldn’t remember ever having seen Shadowspawn smile. Until now. Which could not bode well for his future.
Maybe this was why his commanding officer, Group Captain Klick, had insisted that he report this personally. “I had, uh, thought, my lord, that my lord might find this to be good news.”
“You thought?”
“The, uh, death of Luke Skywalker,” the wing commander struggled on gamely, “will be a substantial blow to the Rebels—”
“It would be a substantially greater blow to me. Tell me again. Slowly.”
“The gravity slice worked as well as can be expected, given that the Rebels fired first,” Prang said.
“They have been known to do so.”
“While the Rebel flagship was not entirely destroyed, the g-slice did manage to cut it into three pieces, of which the two largest are currently derelict in orbit. The smallest section included the bridge, which retained some manu—”
“Wing Commander.”
Prang felt himself swallow again. Involuntarily. “Yes, my lord?”
“Speak to me of how you plan to capture Luke Skywalker.”
“Plan to—? My lord, the only evidence we have of his presence is a single unencrypted EM transmission, which could easily have been some kind of a trick.”
“A trick? Luke Skywalker doesn’t use tricks. The only evidence we need is that someone landed a third of a Mon Calamari starship using nothing but attitude thrusters. That’s a Skywalker at work.”
“My lord, the bridge section exploded on impact.”
Shadowspawn’s interstellar-black eyes narrowed dangerously.
“If Luke Skywalker had perished, I would have felt it in the D … in the Force. Find him, Wing Commander. Find him and bring him to me. Alive. No harm must come to him, do you understand? Do this as though your own life depends on it.”
The wing commander threw his hand up in an enthusiastic salute. “It will be done, my lord.”
LUKE TOILED UP THE OUTER SLOPE OF THE CRATER LEFT by the final destruction of the Justice: a ring of half-fused volcanic rock thrown up five meters above a hillside that was itself piled and fused rock. In fact, from here it looked like the whole planet was nothing but fused and blasted rock; the only colors were the dull reds and shabby blues, rot-green and vomit-yellow of exposed minerals, and the iridescent metallic smears left by meteorites from the daily rock storms.
At the lip, he lay flat and slowly, cautiously, lifted the rad sensor above the rim. He used his artificial hand. The scant bacta he and the crew had been able to salvage from the wreck wasn’t sufficient to treat the casualties they already had; no sense adding to the burden by getting himself rad-burned.
At the base of the ring below him, R2 bounced from side to side, whistling a caution. “I know,” Luke said, squinting up at the rad sensor. “But I have to confirm destruction before we abandon this position—we can’t afford to let these guys get their hands on next-generation Mon Cal tech.”
R2’s answer sounded vaguely scolding, and Luke let himself smile. “Once you get that rollerped back in wo
rking order, you can do these jobs again. Till then, though—”
This time, R2’s terrooweepeepeep came out distinctly defensive.
“If you worried as much about yourself as you do about me, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Honestly, I think you spend too much time with Threepio.”
The rad sensor flickered blue, then red, then blue again; radiation levels were low enough that Luke decided he could risk a peek. The interior of the crater was only about fifteen meters deep at its lowest point, though it was several hundred meters in diameter; the sponginess of the volcanic rock appeared to have absorbed a lot of the blast. As for the Justice itself, Luke could see that Mon Calamari scuttling charges were as efficient as everything else they made: he could spot no remaining piece of the ship bigger than his doubled fists. He would have taken a longer look, but the smothering-hot wind was whipping streamers of dust into his face.
He ducked back below the rim, fighting the urge to wipe his eyes until he could produce enough tears to wash out the sand; lacking bacta, a scratched cornea would be no picnic, either. He took a couple of seconds to retie the scrap of battle-dress blouse that he wore across his face. He held his breath till he got the rag in place, and tight. Breathing that dust was even less fun than getting it in his eyes. But keeping out the dust was only a partial solution; the atmosphere itself was mildly caustic. He’d been dirtside barely a Standard hour before a rasp had begun to scrape inside his throat with every breath.
Terroo-weet-weet-weet-weet-weet!
R2’s insistent warning brought Luke’s head around. “What is it?”
The astromech’s holoprojector lit up trails of blue-tinged fire streaked toward the schematized curve of a planetary surface. Luke bared his teeth and turned toward the south, where the lightning-orange sky already blazed with an incoming meteorite storm.
“Great.” He pulled out his comlink and twisted it to the Justice’s command channel. “Tubrimi, come in. Tubrimi, do you read?”
A burst of static was his only reply. Mindor’s heavily ionized, metal-oxide-charged atmosphere made communications difficult at best; the power of a starship’s comm suite was required to broadcast an EM message more than a kilometer or two, especially during a dust storm, since the dust itself was mostly metal oxides, as well: remnants of meteorites and the barren rock they’d struck. He could actually see the caves where the crew had taken shelter, a couple of kilometers away through the rolling hills, but his comlink just didn’t have the juice to punch through. “Artoo! Tightbeam an alert to Tubrimi and Sthonnart! Tell them to break up the perimeter and retreat into the caves—”
Luke frowned. In the Force, a sudden surge of emotion …
Panic. Terror. Shock and rage—and there, at the crew’s caves, two kilometers away: flares of scarlet, flashes of actinic white …
Blasterfire. Thermal detonators.
Battle.
Terroo-oo-weet?
“Don’t wait for confirmation. Just get under cover,” Luke said, leaping from the crater’s rim. “I’ll tell them myself.”
He drew his lightsaber as he ran.
LIEUTENANT TUBRIMI CRUMPLED THE TRANSCRIPT OF the decrypted burst signal in his good hand as he stood up. “All right, you heard the orders,” he said to the pair of ensigns managing the comm gear, his great black eyes swirling straight forward for emphasis. “Get everything packed up and moved into the caves on the double! Everything out of sight until we get a command-coded recall beacon.”
Every step jabbed a lance through his broken shoulder, despite the emergency foam-cast a marine corpsman had sprayed on. Maybe later, there might be some bacta left after the wounded had been stabilized. “Major,” he called as he approached the cave mouth. “General Skywalker’s orders are to set up a—”
He stopped, and his voice trailed away. The cave was empty.
The corpsmen were gone. Even the wounded had just … vanished, leaving behind only a litter of emergency blankets, water packs, and used bacta patches. Tubrimi gaped. “Major Sthonnart? Hey, what’s going on? Are you in there?”
From behind him, all at once: blasterfire on full auto. The ear-shattering blasts of thermal dets. Shouted orders, and the cut-short screams of wounded marines. He whirled back to where the ensigns had been taking down the comm dish unit. They were gone, both of them; the comm dish lay on its side, rocking in the gritty breeze. “Hey—”
He scrambled over a fold of ground just in time to see one of the ensigns—on his back, eyes wide and staring—sink into the solid stone beneath him as though the volcanic rock were only thick oil. He leapt for the ensign’s hand, but before he could get there the ensign had sunk from view—and the rock that closed over where he had gone was solid and cool. As Tubrimi stood up again, looking around wildly for any sign of the hundreds of sailors and marines, something touched his ankle, and darkness exploded across his brain.
LUKE WATCHED THE BATTLE END WHILE HE WAS ON HIS way. Using the Force to leap from rock to rock so swiftly he practically flew also relieved him of the need to watch his footing. He covered the two kilometers in about two minutes.
It didn’t end like an ordinary battle. It just stopped. No carting-away of prisoners. No evacuation of wounded.
Nothing at all.
There were no bodies outside the caves. There were no bodies inside the caves. No sailors. No marines. No astromechs or medical droids. The only sound was the hush of sand stirring in the breeze, and the clicks of cooling stone. The air in the caves reeked of the ozone from recent blasterfire, and pockets of slag still glowed yellow where thermal dets had gone off against the rock. Luke left his blaster in its holster, and clipped his lightsaber back onto his belt. He felt no threat here.
The cave floor was littered with emergency blankets and used bacta packets, ration bars and water jugs, even a few of the DH-17 carbines favored by the marines. Luke drifted through the caves, eyes half-closed, brushing the rock with his fingertips. He felt fading resonances of the same emotions he had sensed, more distantly, from the base of the crater’s rim. But these were only echoes in the Force.
Somehow, in the process of leading the entire task force into a trap, he had also managed to misplace several hundred people. Captured? Not by Imperials, that was for sure. Killed? Disintegrated, leaving not even dust behind? It didn’t seem possible.
It wasn’t possible.
He wasn’t even upset, not really; the magnitude of everything that had happened was too vast, far beyond any emotional response he could imagine. He was numb. Stunned, he supposed.
He sagged, leaning into the rock wall, and let his head hang. “Ben?” he said, softly, sadly, without hope. “Ben, can you hear me? What should I have done? Master Yoda? What was I supposed to do?” In the rustle and hush of the sandy breeze, he heard no answer.
All he knew was that this was all wrong.
He slid down and sat, his back against the stone. He let his head roll back and squeezed his eyes shut. Suddenly he felt like everything was all wrong.
He’d made wrong choices every day of his life. In his mind’s eye floated everyone who’d died because of him. Everyone who’d been hurt. From Mindor to Endor, back to Yavin—back to the corpses that had lain, still smoking, in the ruined doorway of the Lars moisture farm. I guess I sort of thought everything was over. I got my happy ending. I thought I did. I mean, didn’t I do everything you asked me to? Master Yoda, you wanted to break the rule of the Sith. And they’re gone. Ben, you asked me to destroy Darth Vader. I did that, too. Father—even you, Father. You told me that together we would throw down the Emperor. And we did. Now it’s over. But it’s not the end. It’s never the end.
The cave boomed and shivered as the rock storm arrived like an artillery barrage. Luke just sat, head down, letting dust and grit trickle inside the back of his collar as meteorites pounded the hills.
I guess I was still kind of hoping there might be a Happily Ever After in there somewhere. Not even for me. I was ready to die. I still am. It�
�s everybody else. It’s like everything we went through, it was for nothing. We’re still fighting. We’ll always be fighting. It’s like I didn’t actually save anybody.
Gone is the past, he remembered Master Yoda saying once. Imaginary is the future. Always now, even eternity will be. Which Luke had always interpreted as Don’t worry about what’s already done, and don’t worry about what you’ll do later. Do something now.
Which would be fine advice, if he had the faintest clue what that something should be. Maybe if he’d had more experience as a general, he’d know if he should search for his missing men, or return to the crash site and wait for pickup, or try to find some way to signal the task force spaceside. I never should have taken this job. I just don’t know what a general would be doing right now. All I know is what a Jedi …
Then his head came up. I do know what a Jedi would be doing—and it isn’t sitting around feeling sorry for himself, for starters.
Especially, now that he thought of it, because the ground had stopped shuddering and the thunder of the storm outside had changed to the thunder of multiple sonic booms. He got up and walked outside.
The sky was full of TIE fighters whipping through a trans-sonic search grid.
Luke unclipped his lightsaber and thumbed the activator. The blade of brilliant green snarled and spat as its plasma consumed airborne grit. When a TIE fighter swung down through a barrel roll for a closer look, Luke smiled and beckoned with his blade like a ground crewman directing them in for a landing.
Then he put away the lightsaber, lowered himself into a cross-legged meditation posture on the warm rock, and folded his arms to wait.
He waited while the TIE fighters circled his position. He waited while the atmospheric gunships arrived and landed a few hundred meters away. He waited while hundreds of black-armored stormtroopers poured out of the gunships, assembled in ranks, and advanced on him in a broad arc, blasters leveled. He waited while a trooper with a group captain’s flash on his chest stepped cautiously forward and called, “General Skywalker!”
Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 9
