“Luke’s doing his job. We have to do ours,” he said.
He heeled the ship over, pointed her mandibles straight down at the shaft’s bottom, and kicked in every erg of energy her damaged thrusters could produce. The ship streaked toward a wall of solid rock. Han lit up the quad in his one remaining turret and held down the trigger; the stream of laser bolts chewed into the rock but didn’t blast it away.
“Strap in,” he said through his teeth. He tightened his grip on the control yoke. “This ride’s gonna start with a bump.”
THE TASPAN SYSTEM EXPLODED INTO A HURRICANE OF death.
None of the Republic’s warriors could see the whole picture, but what each of them saw was horrifying enough.
Lando Calrissian, on the bridge of the Remember Alderaan, watched over the shoulder of the NavOps officer as his sensor readout showed gravity wells sprouting and spreading throughout local space like Turranian flesh fungus on a three-day-old corpse, and all he could say was “No, no, no, this can’t be happening!”
Wedge Antilles and the pilots of Rogue Squadron stared in frozen horror as thousands of TIE interceptors streamed out of the asteroid fields, hurtling toward the Republic ships at maximum thrust. As each one slipped from the shadows of the asteroids into the full harsh glare of Taspan’s stellar flares, the fierce radiation turned their ships into brilliant stars plunging toward destruction even as the pilots inside them were being roasted alive. They came on without maneuver, without tactics or even formation; the lead ships vanished in silent fireballs as Republic starfighters and the guns of the capital ships laced space with annihilating energy, but the TIEs behind them just came on and on, flying through the wreckage of their comrades, throwing themselves on unswerving suicide runs into the Republic ships clustered in Mindor’s shadow.
Wait a Minute was the closest to the leading edge of the swarm. Its point-defense guns destroyed dozens of incoming TIEs, but finally one slipped through; after the first impact took out two of his turrets, Captain Patrell ordered his ship into rolling fire, but another TIE hit only meters away from the first, and two more hit after that.
The ship broke up and finally exploded, and the storm of TIEs just kept coming.
They streaked straight through the wreckage field and curved toward the next-closest ship, and by that time Wedge and the Rogues and all the remaining Republic starfighters had thrown themselves into the suiciders’ path and lit up space with the fireballs from hundreds of exploding TIEs. The Imperials didn’t even bother fighting back; Wedge didn’t need his tactical navicomputer to calculate the chance that any Republic ship could survive this storm.
There wasn’t one.
In the crowded hold of Lancer, the screaming of the stormtroopers had raised hairs on the back of Fenn Shysa’s neck. He didn’t have any idea what was going on, but he understood all too well the fundamental rules of combat, one of which was When you don’t know what’s happening, what’s happening is always bad.
As the troopers had fallen into seizures, Fenn had jumped atop a cargo container and roared in Mandalorian, “Secure their weapons! Now!,” which was the main reason the slaughter that followed wasn’t much, much worse—but it was still bad enough.
The mercenaries had leapt to their task like the disciplined warriors they were, deploying in staggered array to keep clear lines of fire open so they could cover each other and, if necessary, shoot the convulsing stormtroopers. Unfortunately, no amount of training or discipline could allow a small cadre of soldiers to instantly control several thousand panicked civilians.
Some of those civilians had enough military experience to understand that the most useful thing they could do was get themselves out of the way; they dived to the deck and pulled down other civilians around them, but still there were more than a thousand who stood frozen, screamed, or tried to run.
Those were the first to die.
The seizures stopped as suddenly as they had begun; the stormtroopers who had not yet been disarmed leapt to their feet or simply rolled into firing position and opened up on the crowd; the mercenaries returned fire, and within a second or two the entire hold was filled with a haze of blasterfire and the stench of burning flesh. The disarmed troopers still had the fist blades that were integral to the gauntlets of their armor, and they fell upon the nearby civilians like Nomarian thunder sharks in a feeding frenzy; they cut and chopped and hacked at their victims, while their fellows took fire from the mercenaries and responded with grenades lobbed at random into the screaming mob.
“Down blasters!” Fenn roared; the mercenaries were inflicting almost as many civilian casualties as were the maddened troopers. “Down blasters and up blades!”
And because he was the sort of commander who believed in leading by example, he leapt from the cargo container to land hard on the back of a black-armored trooper and punched his own fist blade through the back of the trooper’s neck. Before that trooper even knew he was dead, Fenn had rolled to his feet and stabbed the next one in the kidney, and as that trooper whirled to face him, the Protector commandant jammed his blade in deep under the man’s chin. He let the dead man fall and looked around for his next target.
He had plenty to choose from; he didn’t anticipate running short in the foreseeable future—a future that would be, in Fenn’s experienced judgment, exactly as long as the rest of his life.
The Shadow Base was now breaking up in earnest; one of its damaged gravity drives had already ripped free, spinning away and taking with it a kilometer or so of the base’s rock. The remaining two gravity drives swung through opposing cycles of thrust-angle that were ripping what was left of the base in half. On the base’s surface, the Republic marines found that their docile prisoners were docile no longer. With no regard for their own lives, or for anyone else’s, they mobbed their captors, the troopers in front absorbing fire until the ones that followed could swarm over the dead and dying.
There was, in the whole of the Taspan system, only one faint reason for any hope at all.
Deep within the remains of the base, in the heart of the Election Center itself, Kar Vastor could find nowhere else to run.
KAR CROUCHED, HIS BARE BACK AGAINST AN ICY WALL, in a stone chamber filled with the dead. Corpses in long robes littered the floor, and the room stank of corruption; the only light came from blue spark-chains that crackled across the ceiling. His heart hammered against his ribs, and his breath rasped in his throat. His teeth were bared in an involuntary snarl, and his fingers scrabbled against the stone at his back as if he could somehow dig his way through. All from fear of the small blond man.
The same small blond man who now stood on the far side of the piles of dead bodies, inoffensive and mild, his expression friendly, his hands, empty of weapons, spread wide in invitation.
Kar did not know where this place might be, or how he had come to be here; he had no memory of having been anywhere like this maze of stone peopled only by dead men. He knew only that he had never felt such terror.
Not as a child, lost and alone in the lethal jungles of his homeworld; not in the dock of the Galactic Court on Coruscant; not even in the infinite deadly dark of Kessel’s spice mines. He had come back to himself in the midst of battle, blind with rage, surrounded by armed men on a starship’s hull. He remembered seizing this little man in his unbreakable grip; he remembered sinking his needle teeth into the little man’s throat, biting down like a vine cat strangling an akk wolf.
And he remembered what the little man had done to him.
The hands that scrabbled against the wall at his back still sprouted the black crystal hairs. His mouth was full of these crystal hairs, stiff and sharp as needles; when he worked his jaw, they cut and slashed at his palate and punctured his gums. And he could feel them inside him, throughout his body, an infection of dead stone within his living flesh …
He snarled wordless animal sounds. What are you?
The small blond man started toward him. “I’m not your enemy, Kar.”
Stay back!
“I can’t. Too many lives depend on me.”
I’ll kill you! Kar gathered himself to spring. I will rip your head from your body. I will feast upon your guts!
“It’s all right to be afraid, Kar. This is a frightening place. Things have been done to you here that should never be done to anyone.”
It’s so … dead. Something broke inside him then; his rage and terror fled, and he sagged to his knees. Nothing but stone and corpses. Everything dead. Dead within. Dead without. Dead forever.
“Not everything.” Though the small blond man had to step over corpses to reach Kar’s side, his expression of sympathy and compassion never flickered. “You’re alive, Kar. I’m alive.”
That means nothing. Kar’s eyes burned as if he’d dipped his face in sand. We mean nothing.
“We’re the only meaning there is.” The small blond man extended a hand. “Trust me or kill me, Kar. In the end, it’ll come out the same. I will not harm you.”
What are you? His snarl had gone plaintive. What do you want from me?
“I’m a Jedi. My name is Luke Skywalker,” the small blond man said. “And I want you to take my hand.”
DEEP IN HYPERSPACE, CRONAL REACHED UP FOR THE Shadow Crown. His life-support chamber was buried within an asteroid of meltmassif; with the Shadow Crown to focus and amplify his control, he could part the stone that shrouded his chamber’s viewports and so enjoy the infinite nothing of hyperspace.
He loved gazing into hyperspace, the nothing outside the universe. The place beyond even the concept of place … Ordinary mortals sometimes went mad, succumbing to the delirium of hyper-rapture, from gazing too long into the emptiness. Cronal found it soothing: a glimpse into the oblivion beyond the end of all things.
To him, it looked like the Dark.
It would be some consolation for the frustration he had faced these past days. How was it that everywhere he turned, there seemed to be a Skywalker waiting to bar his path?
Still, the Skywalker boy’s weakness had been a gift. How fortunate he was that Skywalker had lacked the strength of character to simply kill him.
Even in Cronal’s wandering through the trackless wastes of hope where he had lost his way, he still had managed to deliver a blow to the infant second Republic from which it would never recover. Not to mention that he still had the advanced gravitic technology made possible by the properties of meltmassif, and he had the Shadow Crown itself.
Yes, he had lost his best chance to acquire a young, powerful, and influential body to carry his consciousness, but he still had his original body with all his powers intact. In a few days—long enough to be certain that every Republic ship still in the Taspan system was crewed only by the dead—he could return, harvest the meltmassif from the asteroid clouds, and begin anew.
He would not repeat his mistake, however. Never again would he seek to build rather than destroy. Never again would he create anything but engines of ever-greater destruction.
Never again would he forsake the Way of the Dark.
His rule of the galaxy would be no mere Second Imperium, it would be the Reign of Death. He would preside over a universe of infinite suffering whose only end would be oblivion, meaningless as life itself.
He would author the final act in the saga of the galaxy.
With that dream to comfort him in his temporary exile, he lowered the Shadow Crown upon his head and sent his will into the Dark beyond darkness, to take control of the mind in the stone.
But where there should have been Dark, he found only light.
White light, brilliant, blinding, a young star born within his head. It seared his mind, blasting away even his memory of darkness. He recoiled convulsively, like a worm encountering red-hot stone. This was more than light; it was the Light.
It was the power to drive off the Dark.
This was inconceivable. What could heat his absolute zero? What could banish his infinite night?
You should know. The voice of the Light was not a voice. It spoke without speaking, communicating not with words, but with understanding. You invited me here.
Skywalker? This light was Skywalker?
In the instant he thought the name, Cronal saw him: a shape of light, absolute, uncompromising, kneeling within the Election Center in the darkest heart of the Shadow Base, his hands solemnly interfolded with the massive paws of Kar Vastor. He had linked his shadow nerves to Vastor’s, and through the intimate connection between Vastor and Cronal he had somehow stretched forth to touch the Shadow Lord himself.
In the Dark, Cronal saw Skywalker smile. Thank you for joining me here. I was a little worried you might get away with that silly crown of yours.
This was impossible. This must be some hallucination, a twisted product of his Darksight run amok. He was in hyperspace! Hyperspace did not, could not, interact with realspace—
I was with Ben Kenobi in hyperspace when he felt the destruction of Alderaan.
No wall can contain the Force.
The Force, the Force, these pathetic Jedi kept nattering on about the Force! Did any of them even faintly comprehend how naive and foolish they were? If any of them had ever had so much as a glimpse of the real power of the Dark, that glimpse would have snuffed their tiny minds like candles in a hurricane—
Was my tiny mind snuffed? I must have missed that part.
Cronal could sense gentle amusement, like a tolerant uncle indulging a child’s tantrum. Fury rose within him like molten lava climbing a volcanic fault. This simple-minded youth had fooled himself into believing his paltry light could fill the infinite Dark? Let him shine alone within eternal night.
Cronal opened himself wholly to the Dark, cracking the very gates of his mind, expanding the sphere of his power like an event horizon yawning to swallow the universe. He surrounded Skywalker’s light, and with a shrug of power he consumed it.
In this arena, minds naked to the Dark contending in nonspace beyond even hyperspace, there was no question of age, or health, or physical strength. Here the only power that counted was the power of will. Skywalker and his so-called Force could never match Cronal’s mastery of the Way of the Dark.
On this level, Cronal was Blackhole. From his grip no light could escape.
Escape? Me? Did you forget that you’re the one who’s running away?
Cronal suddenly felt, unaccountably—and unpleasantly—warm.
At first he dismissed this unwelcome sensation; he was too experienced a servant of the Dark to be distracted by a minor malfunction in his life-support settings. But gradually he became aware that his body—specifically, his body’s skin—did not seem to be warm at all. It was, in fact, chilly. And damp.
As though he had broken out, somehow, in a cold sweat.
He turned his mind back to the Dark, and became again the ultimate black hole. He examined the abyss of darkness he had become and found it to be flawless. Perfect. The ultimate expression of the absolute power of the Dark.
This boy, this infantile Jedi-ling, had thought his meager light could stand against that power? Cronal’s black hole had swallowed every last lumen; Skywalker’s light was gone forever. His puerile Force trick of light had done to Cronal nothing whatsoever.
That’s because I’m not trying to do anything to you. I’m doing something through you.
What?
How could Skywalker still speak?
A creeping dread began to poison Cronal’s smug satisfaction. What if Skywalker was telling the truth? What if the boy had been so easily vanquished because he had intended to be? He had already used his tiny gift of the Force to forge a link through Kar Vastor to Cronal … what if his light had not been destroyed by falling into the black hole that was Cronal’s mind?
What if his light had simply passed through?
That’s where you dark siders always stumble. What’s the opposite of a black hole?
Cronal had heard this cosmological theory before: that matter falling into a black hole passes into another
universe … and that matter falling through black holes in other universes could pass into ours, bursting forth in pure, transcendent energy.
The opposite of a black hole was a white fountain.
He thought, I’ve been suckered.
The Sith alchemy that had created the Shadow Crown had imbued it with control over meltmassif in all its forms; to drown Skywalker in the Dark, Cronal had opened a channel into the Crown. Through the Crown.
Through the Shadow Crown, Skywalker’s light could shine upon every crystal of darkness.
Every shadow stormtrooper. Every gravity station. Every millimeter of the shadow web of crystalline nerves in his body, and Vastor’s, and—
And Cronal’s own!
With a snarl, he yanked his mind back into his body; it would require only a second to pull the Crown from his head.
Or it would have, if he could have made his arms work …
In the shimmery glow from the viewscreens within his life-support capsule, Cronal could only sit and watch in horror as his skin began to leak black oil. This black oil flowed from every pore, from his ears and nose and mouth and eyes. This black oil drained even from the channels within the Shadow Crown.
And not until the last drop of it had left his body could Cronal even take a breath.
He did not, however, have time for more than a single breath before the meltmassif rehardened, encasing him wholly in a sarcophagus of stone. The asteroid of meltmassif around his chamber melted, and its shreds vaporized as they fell from the hyperdrive zone. Very soon, the hyperdrive itself fell away, as it had been mounted on the stone, rather than on the chamber.
The chamber, no longer within the hyperdrive’s protective envelope of reality, simply dissolved.
Cronal had enough time to understand what was happening. He had enough time to feel his body lose its physical cohesion. He had time to feel his very atoms lose their reality and vanish into the infinite nothing of hyperspace.
HAN SAT ON THE POLYFILM SURVIVAL BLANKET UNDER the Falcon’s starboard mandible, hugging his knees and waiting for the sun to rise. Leia lay on the blanket beside him, breathing slowly and easily now. She looked like she was only asleep.
Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 32
