Lancer and Paleo were equipped with conveyor bridges; they were also the closest to the flying volcano. Lancer, in fact, was able to match trajectories and deploy its conveyor bridge with pinpoint accuracy in less than two minutes.
At the coordinates Luke had given, Lancer discovered only a broad, flat plain of solid rock. Captain Tirossk was understandably reluctant to risk his crew by bringing his ship so close to a flying mountain in the process of shaking itself to pieces simply to deploy a conveyor bridge that nobody could possibly use. He growled over the comm, “Once I anchor the bridge and pump in atmo, what then? Will the rock just magically open up and let people out?”
And because the captain of Lancer occasionally indulged a guilty pleasure by viewing holothrillers such as Luke Skywalker and the Dragons of Tatooine, when Luke replied simply, “Yes. It will.” Tirossk discovered, against all his better instincts, that he believed it would.
Han Solo didn’t share that faith. He didn’t have any faith to spare. He hunched over the Falcon’s controls, glaring out through the cockpit’s transparisteel at the Shadow Base as it swelled entirely too slowly, his knuckles white on the yoke, his teeth clenched as though he could make the ship go faster by pure force of will. Now he twisted to look at Luke, who crouched behind Chewbacca’s seat. “What, your new Melter friends? How do you figure to pull that off when we’re a good two minutes out from you getting that hand on the rock?”
Luke said, “Artoo, I need a signal boost.”
The astromech, socketed behind Han’s seat, extended a datajack toward Luke like a trusting child offering a hand; in the same moment, the comm port on his dome slid open and his parabolic antenna popped up. Luke gripped the extended datajack, and Han watched a thatch of those glossy black crystals grow out of Luke’s hand and thread themselves into the datajack’s ports.
Han grimaced. “No offense, Luke, but that really creeps me out.”
“Imagine it from my side.”
“I’d rather not.”
Luke didn’t quite smile. “Now I need a second or two to concentrate.”
The Lancer swung into position, and its conveyor bridge extended like a tongue going for a taste of the rock. An instant after the bluish shimmer of the force tunnel flickered into existence around it, the rock dimpled and began to melt away, retreating like a time-lapse image of a glacier in high summer. Light sprang upward from the hole, which shaped itself perfectly to the force tunnel. The conveyor bridge extended farther down into the hole, all the way down to the civilians and stormtroopers and Mandalorians waiting there.
First onto the bridge came a pair of Mandalorian mercenaries. They leapt up and grabbed the moving belt, flipping their bodies expertly through the ninety-degree gravity shift; for them, the artificial gravity’s orientation made the bridge seem entirely level, the Lancer now appearing to cruise serenely alongside the volcano instead of hovering above it. They strode briskly in the opposite direction of the belt’s motion so that they could stay in place and assist others through the transition.
A dozen pairs of Mando commandos spaced themselves along the conveyor bridge, while the balance of them helped organize the civilians on the cavern floor. Solicitous stormtroopers assisted any who were too incapacitated by age, injury, or disease to make their own way. Mandos along the bridge reminded everyone to “keep walking. Do not run. If you fall and can’t get up, move to the side and someone will assist you.” In this fashion the Sorting Center began to swiftly empty, despite the pitching and jouncing of the cavern’s floor from the ongoing destruction of the Shadow Base.
None of them knew, either, that the convulsions they felt were substantially less than those experienced by other parts of the base. They also had no way to know that the atmospheric integrity of the Sorting Center was being preserved by a large contingent of Melters, who not only kept the cavern tightly sealed, but manipulated their meltmassif to minimize the shocks through the floor. Though all could see another part of the cavern’s vault bulge, and droop, and belly downward like a vast droplet of glossy black slime.
One of the largest such droplets turned entirely liquid and drained away, revealing a Corellian light freighter.
In the instant that the Falcon settled onto the cavern floor, a HatchPatch blew off, opening a gap where its belly ramp should have been. The ship’s freight lift slammed down as well, and through both openings flooded refugees, both Mindorese, organized by a human man named Tripp, and Republic, commanded by a Mon Calamari lieutenant named Tubrimi.
In seconds, the Falcon’s holds were empty of people.
In the cockpit, Luke laid a hand on Han’s shoulder. “Are you good with this? I’m depending on you.”
“I don’t like it,” Han said.
“I know. But this is how it has to be,” Luke said. He triggered the comm. “Air Marshal—you and your men will board immediately. One minute to skids-up.”
The reply came instantly. “As you command, my lord emperor!”
Han made a face. “Someday you’re gonna explain this Emperor Skywalker bumblefluff, right?”
“No,” Luke said. “No, I don’t think I will.”
IN THE ABSOLUTE BLACKNESS WITHIN THE SHADOW EGG, Cronal had only one problem left.
The Shadow Egg, as he had mentally dubbed it in the instant of its creation, was his improvised cocoon of meltmassif in the Cavern of the Shadow Throne. It hovered where the Shadow Throne had once stood, held aloft by the repulsorlifts that had once supported the Throne. There was no longer a lava-fall behind it, nor a lake of molten lava below; whatever remained of the volcano’s lifeblood, once the Shadow Base had cut free from the planet, had spilled from its underside in a rain of fire. The Shadow Egg bobbed gently in midair as the shock waves of the Shadow Base’s ongoing destruction passed over it.
This ongoing destruction was not Cronal’s problem; it was not a problem at all. He had counted on it. Had the Republic forces not hit upon their idea of deflecting his own gravity bombs back at him, he would have been forced to blow the Shadow Base up himself.
The Battle of Mindor was to have only one survivor.
Nor was he concerned that all his preparation for his new life had focused upon impersonating Luke Skywalker rather than his sister; one useful lesson he had taken from working with Palpatine was the value in flexible planning. He would, as Leia, simply fake amnesia—traumatic brain injury would be an ideal explanation for any stumbles or fumbles he might make upon meeting the Princess’s old acquaintances—and then discreetly hire one of the countless hacks who scripted holothrillers to make something up. He would, he anticipated, even have this holothriller produced. He already had a few ideas for a title: Princess Leia and the Shadow Trap, for example. Or, perhaps, Princess Leia and the Black Holes of Mindor.
Nor was he worried about making an escape from his own trap, once the transfer of his consciousness was complete. Buried in meltmassif not far from the Election Center, he had secreted a custom craft to make his escape as Luke. Though in appearance it was a very ordinary-looking Lambda T-4a, its hull was layered with so much additional shielding that there was no cargo capacity at all, and virtually no room for passengers. The cockpit was altogether fake; a pilot and at most two or three others could be packed into a tiny capsule cocooned in additional radiation shielding in the center of what would have been, in an ordinary shuttle, the passenger compartment.
All necessary planning had been done. All difficulties had been anticipated, and all contingencies had been covered. Except one.
The blasted girl simply refused to break.
The incrystallation had gone flawlessly; the raw power of the Vastor body had enabled Cronal to propagate a shadow web of crystalline nerves throughout her body with the speed of frost spidering across supercooled transparisteel. With only a short time available—and no ready supply of thanatizine II—he had proceeded without drug suspension. After all, this was but a mere girl who had, through an accident of genetics, an exceptionally powerful connection to t
he small fraction of the Dark that Jedi had ignorantly named the Force. He should have been able to overwhelm her by brute strength alone.
He had taken her sight, cut away her hearing, erased her senses of smell and taste and touch. He had stripped her kinesthetic sense, so that she was no longer aware of her own body at all. He had shut down the activity of certain neurotransmitters in her brain, so that she could no longer even remember how being alive had felt.
She wasn’t fighting him. She didn’t know how. He wouldn’t let her remember what fighting was.
She just wouldn’t let go.
She had something that her brother had lacked, some inner spark of intransigence that sustained her against the Dark. He couldn’t guess what this spark might be; some sort of primitive, girlish emotional attachment, he presumed. Whatever it was, it must be extinguished once and for all; she must sleep forever. The problem was how to do it without killing her outright. The meltmassif shadow nerves would contain only his consciousness; he needed her brain to be fully functioning to maintain autonomic functions. He hadn’t gone to all this trouble to simply trade his decaying body for one that was already dead.
This was taking far too long. The boy Jedi had been ready to let himself slip away in a fraction of the time; of course, the boy had given him more to work with. He carried with him an inner darkness that would no doubt have astonished his sister, had she lived long enough to discover it. Had Skywalker not damaged Shadowspawn’s control crystals, none of this would have been necessary in the first place. But as the situation stood, he could only drive his will deeper into the Dark—to gnaw away her resistance with the single-minded intensity of a Klepthian rock otter chewing into a basalt clam’s shell.
But when he finally did break through that resistance, he found her brain not weak and quivering, but hard like a burnberry stone, and shining with a brilliant white light that was not imaginary at all. That light stabbed him like a knife in the eye, and drove him reeling back.
He took that stone in the palm of a hand made of the Dark, and with a Dark rock hammer he struck it … and the imaginary hammer splintered in the imaginary hand. He came at the stone like a gem harpy, and swallowed it into a crop powerful enough to pulverize diamond, but it burned its way out. He made fists of whole galaxies and brought them together to crush this one tiny star, but when their cataclysm faded back into the Dark, the tiny star shone on.
“What is wrong with you?” he shouted at the star in frustration. “What are you, and why won’t you die?”
“I can tell you that.” The voice came from everywhere, or nowhere: a young man’s tenor, with the flattened, nasal accent of the far Outer Rim.
Cronal jerked upright in the absolute blackness inside the Shadow Egg.
“If you’d made friends with the Melters, instead of making them your slaves, you might have discovered all kinds of things they can do for you.” The voice was coming from inside Cronal’s head. “As for where I am, well …”
The interior of the Shadow Egg suddenly flared with light: blue-white light, from a crackling energy discharge that spidered across its inner shell. An instant later the shell collapsed, splashing around Cronal’s ankles and draining off the repulsorlift platform that had supported the Shadow Egg.
Twenty meters away, on the ledge that curved outward from the tunnel mouth, stood a slim young man in a Republic flight suit who held, loosely and casually in one hand, a lightsaber of brilliant green.
LUKE TRIED TO KEEP HIS BREATHING SLOW AND STEADY, while his heart thumped against his rib cage like a trapped slashrat trying to break free. For an interminable stretching moment after the meltmassif egg had collapsed, all Luke had been able to do was stare blankly and think Look at the size of him …
Kar Vastor crouched like a sabercat coiled to spring. One of his enormous hands rested on a blob of meltmassif. His lips had peeled back to reveal teeth long and curving and sharp as stilettos. Luke blinked, and blinked again. Each of his biceps is bigger than my head …
And around him in the Force swirled a storm of darkness unlike any Luke had experienced since the Emperor’s death: darkness that could snuff his own paltry light like a candle.
But fear could have power over him only if he let it. He breathed deeply, slowly, and with each exhale he opened himself so that all his fear, all his tension and apprehension, his every care and concern drained out of him and flowed away.
How would Ben handle this?
That thought steadied him. He imagined Ben at his side, and held the old Jedi’s kindly smile of warm knowing firmly in his mind. “Blackhole,” he said, and the calm solidity he heard in his own voice reassured him even more. “You have one chance to do this the easy way.”
Blackhole’s response was a low snarl that somehow, in Luke’s brain, translated itself into words. The easy way, he growled, would be to swap. Give yourself to be my body, and I’ll let your sister go.
Luke shook his head and hefted his lightsaber. “If you fight me, you will be destroyed.”
Blackhole’s snarl took on a mocking edge. You think you can take me, boy?
“I’ve killed too many people already today.”
Then how will you destroy me?
“You remember Nick, don’t you? Your puppet Shadowspawn? And his girlfriend. Her name’s Aeona. See, Nick knows all about you.”
Bring him out so he can watch you die.
“Oh, he’s not with me. We dropped off Nick and Aeona on the way here. They’re in that custom shuttle of yours.”
What?
“I told you: Nick knows all about you. Did you think I was lying? He and Aeona are on their way already. On their way to your real body.”
Vastor went very, very still.
“I bet if you close your eyes and concentrate, you can feel where he is. I’m pretty sure you can. Because he can feel where you are. Go ahead, give it a try.”
The eyes of the Vastor body went vacant. Luke, calm now, serene and centered in the Force, could also feel Nick’s location humming in the meltmassif that shadowed his nerves: far, far off, hurtling through space, dodging asteroids and looping around a wide arc that would bring it into an orbital intercept with one particular asteroid—one particular chunk of rock left over from the Big Crush, one chunk that was not like the others, despite its absolutely ordinary appearance. No eye could have picked it out among the countless others that swarmed it on all sides; no instrument could have detected the slightest anomaly.
But Nick didn’t need instruments, and he didn’t need to see it to know where it was.
This chunk of rock—of pure meltmassif, in fact—was very far indeed from ordinary. Within its hollowed core were hidden engines, and a powerful hyperdrive, and the life-support chamber of a very old, very frail man, who from his perfectly concealed position had used a device forged of Sith alchemy not only to control this system, but also to terrorize the galaxy.
“Do you understand now?” Luke asked. “In a few minutes, a very, very angry man will arrive at your life-support capsule. This man does not share my reservations about killing you. I’m pretty sure he’s already trying to decide whether he should blast you to atoms or cut his way in and beat you to death with his bare fists.
“So this is what I mean about the easy way. Walk away. Withdraw from the Vastor body and return to your own. Your gravity stations are powered down. You still have time to jump out of the system before Nick gets to you. But you don’t have very much time. So I’ll tell you again: If you fight me, you will be destroyed.”
The Vastor growl lowered to a threatening rumble. I still have the girl.
He reached up to the shapeless mass of meltmassif; he laid his hand upon it and it slumped to liquid, and then that enormous hand lifted Leia by the neck. She dangled from his fist, limp, lifeless—only through the Force could Luke tell she still lived. Vastor growled again. She can still die, the growl said. You both can.
Luke sighed. “All right, forget the easy way.” He took three running step
s to the lip of the ledge and jumped.
The Force carried him high over the abyss that had once been the lake of molten lava. He flipped in midair, to make himself into a spear with a lightsaber for a blade. Vastor dropped Leia and vaulted away with a contemptuous grunt as Luke’s flight ended with his lightsaber blade driving into the platform.
Luke somersaulted to his feet astride Leia’s unconscious form and lifted his blade to garde. “I warned you not to underestimate my powers.”
Are you mad? You were never even close to me, fool!
“I wasn’t aiming at you.”
Vastor’s eyes flicked from Luke’s face down to the lightsaber hole in the platform, which was now spitting sparks and gouts of smoke that smelled very much like a damaged repulsorlift burning out. Vastor’s eyes widened, “What have you DONE?”
With one last gush of black tarry smoke, the repulsorlift shorted out completely, and the platform plummeted like the several tons of rock and obsidian it was, to the empty bottom of the formerly lava lake. But instead of falling the several hundred meters to the rocky bottom of the lava lake, after only twenty or so it landed, very hard, on the dorsal hull of a Corellian light freighter that had been hovering there ever since Luke had slipped out through its topside hatch and leapt to the wall, to make his long, slow climb up to the ledge above.
The impact knocked Vastor off his feet; Luke, with Leia in his arms, landed as softly as a Force-using feather pillow.
Vastor sprang to his feet, needle teeth bared in a feral snarl. I will kill every last one of you!
“No,” Luke said, “you won’t.”
A slight sideways tilt of his head invited Vastor to look around, which he did. Which was when he saw the full company of black-armored stormtroopers on a ring ledge about three meters above him, all with weapons aimed at his gigantic chest.
“Air Marshal Klick,” Luke called upward. “Tell Kar Vastor your orders.”
The black-armored officer stepped forward crisply. “Kar Vastor, I have been directed to prevent, by any and all necessary means, any attempt on your part to do harm to that ship, to the woman, or to Emperor Skywalker.”
Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 30
