“Slave pits?” That was all he needed: more innocent lives that he would fail to save. “How many slaves do you have here?”
“Too many, my lord. Possibly several thousand. Even on starvation rations we can barely keep them fed. And the water situation—”
Luke held up a hand. “I get it.” He turned a grim glance on Nick, who only shrugged.
“Don’t look at me,” Nick said. “I’m not the Emperor.”
Darkness closed like a fist around Luke’s heart.
He stood in the doorway, staring. A vast cavern of gleaming black, which seemed to be filled with stormtroopers in armor that matched the stone, all kneeling to him with heads uncovered. Hundreds upon hundreds of other people, regular people, whose only crime was that they’d lived in places Blackhole had targeted, now lying facedown on the smooth cold stone with their hands behind their heads, afraid to even lift their faces to look upon him.
“I’m the Emperor …” he said dully.
And what was wrong with it? Had this not been, after all, his father’s plan for him?
Vader’s plan.
Maybe Vader had understood fully a truth that Anakin Skywalker had only glimpsed: that all striving comes to nothing in the end. That the only answer was to take what you could get. To rule at ease. To enjoy whatever fragmentary instants of pleasure one’s brief life might offer.
What difference did it make? Heroes, villains, kings, and peasants, all went to the same final Dark. Why struggle?
He didn’t have an answer. He remembered answers—answers he’d gotten from Ben, from Yoda, even from Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, empty talk of duty and tradition, of honor and love—but none of them had understood. Not really.
Or maybe they had.
Because what was that talk of duty and honor and love, really? Wasn’t it just their way of controlling him?
“My lord Emperor? Are you unwell?”
Luke shook himself. He took a deep breath and looked at Nick. “Happened again?”
Nick nodded. “You just … went away.”
Luke again lifted a hand to rub his eyes. Now his hand was shaking. “He … did something to me, Nick. I don’t—I can’t fight it …”
“Who did something to you?” The stormtrooper officer was on his feet, and his face flushed red to the roots of his graying hair. “Name this traitor, and my men will destroy him!”
Nick turned to Luke with lifted brows and a sudden sparkle in his eyes; Luke turned his hand outward in a no-arguments, don’t-even-say-it gesture. “No,” Luke said. “No destroying anybody. There’s been too much destroying.”
Another round of distant blasts sent a shiver of shock wave through the cavern. Nick rolled his eyes toward the vault’s ceiling. “Yeah, no kidding. And these guys can help us stop it.”
“No.”
“Skywalker, think about it—” Nick began.
“I can’t,” Luke said. “I can’t think about it. That’s what you don’t understand. Thinking about it will … send me away again. Back into the …”
His voice trailed off. He couldn’t make himself talk about the Dark. Talking about it would break the surface film of light that was all that stood between him and the unbearable truth—it would rupture the illusion that was the only thing keeping him going right now. “I have to—I have to pretend to trust what I’ve always known. I have to act like I believe it’s all still true. That they weren’t all lying to me. That I wasn’t just kidding myself, do you get it?”
“Uh, no. Not really.” Nick’s vivid blue eyes shaded gray with growing concern. “Not really at all.”
“Then just take my word for it.” Luke looked at the group captain. All you have to do is pretend, he told himself. Do what you would have done back when you believed lives were worth saving. Maybe if you pretend long enough, you can fall back into that dream of light … “Okay,” he said. “Okay. New orders. You and your men—” He waved vaguely toward the prisoners. “I want you to take care of them.”
“Yes, my lord.” The group captain turned to the troopers who stood guard over the prone captives and raised his hand. “Second Platoon! You heard the emperor. Prepare to fire on my order!”
“No!” Luke said hastily. “No, that’s not a euphemism. It’s a direct order. I want you to care for them. Tend their wounds. Get them food and water. Keep them safe, do you understand?”
The expression on the group captain’s face showed clearly that he didn’t understand, but nonetheless he saluted. “Yes, my lord!”
“And … and send your men—not just these guys, but all the men you command—send them to do the same for the slaves. All the slaves.”
“You would have my pilots withdraw from the battle?”
“It’s not a battle, it’s a mistake,” Luke said. “A misunderstanding.”
“My lord?”
“Never mind. Round up all slaves. Protect them. As soon as you have them organized and secure, turn them and yourselves over to the Republic—what you call Rebel—forces. You will cooperate in every way with the Republic military, up to and including assisting them in battle.”
“My lord Emperor?” The group captain looked appalled. “You would have us give aid and comfort to the enemy?”
“No,” Luke said. “They’re not your enemy. Not anymore. Do you understand? From this point forward, you and your men are to consider yourselves part of the Republic military. Do not fail me, Group Captain.”
“My lord Emperor!” The group captain’s eyes glazed, but the discipline of obedience was absolute. “My lord, we will not fail!”
“Very well,” Luke said. “You have your orders.”
The group captain saluted again and executed a precise about-face before replacing his helmet. He strode off, barking orders punctuated by crisp hand gestures, and his men snapped to without hesitation.
Luke just stood and watched. He couldn’t think of a reason to move.
“Okay, sure, Skywalker, I get it,” Nick said. “But what now?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know? What’s the matter with you?”
Luke shook his head numbly. “It’s like … it’s like I’m still inside the stone, Nick. Except the stone’s inside me.”
“Oh, that makes sense.”
“Sense has nothing to do with it. It just is.”
“This is what you were talking about, right? What did that ruskakk do to you?”
“He infected me,” Luke said listlessly.
“Infected—? With some kind of disease or something? A parasite? What?”
“Worse,” Luke said. “He infected me with the truth.”
“Huh?”
“That it’s all a joke. Not even a funny one. A pointless, stupid waste. A spark of suffering extinguished to eternal nothingness.”
He could see that Nick didn’t understand. That really, he couldn’t understand. How could he? And how could Luke explain? What words could he use to share the Dark? What words could illustrate the hideous illusions that came from being raised by loving parents who seemed to really believe in the ideals of the Old Republic, who’d acted like they’d honestly thought that the Jedi had been real heroes, instead of hidebound, ruthless enforcers of the will of the Republic’s rulers. How could he explain the pointless cruelty of the universe—where you had to just stand with your arms restrained by stormtroopers and watch as the Death Star destroyed your homeworld for no real reason at all …
Wait, Luke thought. His breath went short. “Oh, no,” he said out loud. “Oh, no, no, no … this can’t be happening!”
That flash he’d just had wasn’t a memory.
It was a vision. Of the future.
“What?” Nick said. “Skywalker, talk to me!”
Luke shook himself as if throwing off a dream. “It’s not me inside the stone,” he said. “It’s not me hanging in the Dark at the end of the Universe. It’s her. It’s going to be her.”
“Her who?”
&
nbsp; “Leia,” Luke said. “My sister.”
“You have a sister?”
Luke nodded. “And Blackhole’s found her.”
R2-D2 FELL THROUGH DARKNESS.
Fell was not entirely the right word for what had transpired since the stone beneath his treads had suddenly melted away and dropped him and Chewbacca through the tunnel’s floor. It was more akin to some sort of bizarre carnival ride, with sudden stops and sideways slippages and all manner of other contortions of downward progress that R2’s internal vocabulation data simply did not have words for.
For that matter, darkness wasn’t entirely accurate either. While a human eye would see nothing but featureless black, for R2, it wasn’t dark at all; his internal sensors could register a substantial span of the electromagnetic spectrum, several hundred thousand times wider than the tiny human range they referred to as “visual light.” The entire downward fall/slide/lurch/bump/twist/jolt process was alive with all manner of electromagnetic radiation; of particular interest to R2 were the intermittent flickers of a magnetic field signature that was very similar in frequency to that emitted by the nervous systems of many oxygen-breathing organics.
It looked like the rock was thinking.
Not only that, it looked like the rock was thinking with a number of distinct minds, which seemed to have some sort of self-reinforcing phase relationship, analogous to the process in social insects by which discussion leads to consensus.
Which was a development that R2 would have liked to investigate more thoroughly, but he was currently preoccupied by constantly recalibrating his internal gyromagnetic stabilizer to keep himself from landing, when he did eventually land, on his damaged locomotor arm; this ongoing recalibration—owing to the bewildering unpredictability of the shifting magnetic fields—took up most of R2’s processing capacity.
Another slide, two bounces, and one last tumble brought R2 to a brief halt, as he fetched up against Chewbacca’s short ribs hard enough to make the Wookiee grunt and wheeze for breath; then the stone opened beneath them for a final time and dropped them another three point six meters, which left the two of them unceremoniously deposited on the smooth stone floor of yet another cavern.
R2 activated a pair of manipulators to shove himself off Chewbacca—which elicited a groan of protest from the half-stunned Wookiee—and righted himself on the cavern floor. There was human-visible light in this cavern, though the light source swung so violently from side to side and up and down that shadows whirled and blended and parted again so swiftly that R2’s photoreceptor lens couldn’t parse the scene; he cycled back to his previous EM sensor band and began to make sense of the situation.
The human-visible light source was revealed to be none other than the glow rod, which was being wielded as an improvised club by Han Solo to swat at a mass of vaguely humanoid shapes while he shouted, “Back off! I’ll bash any one of you who takes one more step! Back off!”
R2 assumed that Captain Solo was either highly agitated or speaking in the confusing idiomatic human code that C-3PO referred to as metaphor, because it was certainly clear—to R2’s sensors, at any rate—that these humanoid shapes to which he spoke did not actually have legs, much less feet, and thus were already certain, regardless of threat or instruction, never to take one more step. It was also entirely clear to R2 that these humanoid shapes were not, in fact, creatures at all, at least not as his programing generally understood the term.
These shapes were only nominally humanoid, in the sense of being generally upright and having a vaguely head-shaped knob on top, as well as a pair—several had more—of arms; these shapes grew upward from the very stone of the cavern itself, more like animated stalagmites than actual living things, but they moved as though directed by some type of consciousness, and they clearly exhibited that peculiar electromagnetic field signature R2 had noted during his precipitous descent. A quick scan of his data files for any reference to this type of apparently mineral life-form came up blank … except for one provisional reference that he had preserved in his short-term cache because he had no internal referent to guide him in choosing where to file it.
It was the recording of Aeona Cantor, when her companion had asked what they should do “if whoever shows up isn’t a Jedi”:
Then we take their stuff and leave ’em to the Melters.
R2 found this to be a satisfactory correlation, and he consequently created a new file tagged with the keywords MINDOR, MINERAL LIFE-FORM (MOTILE), and MELTERS.
This entire process, from Han Solo’s shout to R2-D2’s filing decision, took only .674 of a Standard second, which left R2 plenty of time for a full systems self-check and operational verification while Chewbacca was still rolling to his feet and drawing breath for a Wookiee war whoop.
Chewbacca’s war cry was followed by a headlong charge against the Melters—that these were the “Melters” in question seemed undeniable—that crowded in upon Han Solo and Princess Leia. There was an astonished howl of pain when flesh-and-bone Wookiee fist met stone Melter “head.” This was followed by a blue-crackling energy discharge—which R2 noted was analogous in wavelength and intensity to a charge from a blaster on its maximum stun setting—from the Melter in question. Chewie howled again and went staggering back until he bumped into another Melter and an additional energy discharge cut short the howl and folded the now-unconscious Wookiee like a retracting manipulator.
R2 continued to watch with detached interest as Han Solo shouted “Chewie!” and threw himself against the mass of Melters, whose response was several bursts of that same energy that almost instantly dropped Han Solo twitching on the ground beside his copilot. However, the collapse of Han Solo apparently triggered a similar human emotional response from Princess Leia, who shouted to Han and leapt toward the Melters—and in the .384 second she was actually in the air, R2 called up an array of highly specialized subprocessors that had been originally installed as a customized aftermarket modification by the Royal Engineers of Naboo and later extensively refitted and programmed with a very specific set of behaviors by a particularly gifted tinkerer, who’d had, in his day, a justified reputation as the finest self-taught improvisational engineer the galaxy had ever produced: Anakin Skywalker.
Turbojacks deployed powerfully from the bottoms of R2’s locomotors, kicking him through the air directly into the mass of Melters. His antitamper field sizzled to life with an unusually loud discharge crackle; based on the extraordinary drain on his internal power supply, R2 was able to calculate that the antitamper field was currently operating at triple strength, which was actually beyond its theoretical limit, owing to potentially lethal effects. R2 also noted that when a nearby Melter reached for him with a stone pseudo-arm, the touch of his triple-strength antitamper field instantly liquefied the electrocrystalline structure of the Melter’s stone body … as well as those of the four Melters nearest to it.
With a fierce Thooperoo HEEE!, which was his closest approximation of a Wookiee war whoop, R2-D2 waded into the Melters, sparking them to slag on every side. As long as he had a single remaining erg in his energy supply, he would allow no harm to come to Princess Leia.
He did, however, note one particular flaw in this determination, which was that his level of energy output had already outstripped the self-regeneration capacity of his energy supply, and so that single remaining erg situation was, as C-3PO might say, no mere metaphor. And the walls and floor just kept on humping into lumps that would become new Melters.
For a brief flicker of a millisecond, R2-D2 experienced a power spike in a tiny audio loop in one specific memory core: he heard C-3PO’s voice exclaim We’re doomed.
CHAPTER 14
NICK TROTTED ALONG THE CURVING CAVERNWAY AFTER Luke, his breath going short. How was it that every time he met a Jedi, the guy turned out to be some kind of nikkle nut? Skywalker had gone from brown dwarf to nova just like flipping a switch. Now Nick could barely keep up with him. “Take it easy, huh? Unless you want me to just, y’know, wait for you he
re. Which would be fine. Between you and me, I could use a nap.”
“No time.” Skywalker kept going. “You said Blackhole needs somebody who can use the Force. My twin sister’s just as strong as I am—but she doesn’t have my training. Once he gets his paws on her …”
Now he did stop, and turned back to Nick, and the bleak fury in his eyes brought a sudden twist of fear to Nick’s gut. “I won’t let that happen,” Luke said grimly. “That’s all. I won’t. No matter what I have to do.”
“Uh—”
But Luke had already turned and was jogging away.
“Shee, kid. Two minutes ago, things were going pretty good and I could barely get you to talk. Now everything’s going wrong, and you’re making the jump to lightspeed without bothering to board a ship!”
“Yeah, funny how that works,” Luke said. “I guess I can handle things going wrong in the world. I’m used to it. I can do something about it. It’s when things go wrong in here—” He rapped the side of his head with his knuckles as if he were knocking to get in. “—that’s where the problem is.”
“The crystals.”
“I don’t know. All I know is that it makes me want to die. No. Not die. Just … stop.”
“You know what makes me want to just stop?” Nick said. “Running. Especially running in ten kilos of floor-length fraggin’ robe.”
“You want to stay here? Go ahead. I’m sure Blackhole will be happy to make you another crown.”
“Are you this nice to everybody, or am I just special?” Nick sighed and kept on going after him. His time as Shadowspawn was hazy, but not so hazy he couldn’t figure out which way they were going. “Um, Skywalker? This is not the way out of here.”
Luke didn’t even slow down. “That’s because we’re not leaving. I came here to put a stop to all this, even before I knew what was going on. Now that I know, I’m not going anywhere till it’s over.”
“Over how?”
“However.”
“I guess you must be a real Skywalker after all,” Nick said, wheezing a little as he caught up. “This is just the kind of stunt Anakin would have pulled. But I didn’t know he had kids.”
Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 21
