by Troy Denning
Luke frowned. “And that would be?”
“I was two,” Ben reminded him. “And by all accounts, I didn’t feel guilty about anything at that age.”
Luke grinned. “Good point, but I still don’t think we should worry too much about this tentacle monster of yours.”
“It’s not my tentacle monster,” Ben retorted, miffed at having his concerns mocked. “You’re the one who made me dredge it up.”
Luke’s expression hardened into admonishment. “But you’re the one who’s still afraid of it.”
The observation struck home. Whether or not the dark presence he remembered was real, he had emerged from Shelter wary of abandonment and frightened of the Force. And it had been those fears that had allowed Jacen to lead him into darkness.
Ben sighed. “Right. Whatever this thing is, I’ve got to face it.” After a moment, he asked, “So how do we find these Mind Drinkers?”
“‘The path of True Enlightenment runs through the Chasm of Perfect Darkness.’” Luke was quoting Tadar’Ro, the Aing-Tii monk who had told them that Jacen had left the Kathol Rift to search out the Mind Drinkers. “‘The way is narrow and treacherous, but if you can follow it, you will find what you seek.’”
Ben swung his gaze back toward the black holes ahead. The brilliant whorls of their accretion disks were burning hottest and brightest along their inner rims, where a mixture of in-falling gas and dust was being compressed to unimaginable densities as it vanished into the sharp-edged darkness of twin event horizons.
“Wait. Tadar’Ro said perfect darkness, right?” Ben started to have a bad feeling about the monk’s instructions. “Like, beyond an event horizon?”
“Actually, it’s probably very bright on the way down a black hole,” Luke pointed out. “Just because gravity is too strong for light to escape doesn’t mean it can’t exist, and there’s all that gas compressing and glowing as it’s sucked deeper and deeper.”
“Yeah, but you’re dead,” Ben said, “and everything is dark when you’re dead. Still, I see what you mean. I doubt Tadar’Ro expects us to fly down a black hole.”
“No, not down one.”
There was just enough anxiety in Luke’s voice to make Ben glance into the mirrored section again. His father was frowning out at the two black holes, staring into the fiery cloud between them and looking just worried enough to twist Ben’s stomach into a cold knot.
“Between them?” Ben could see what his father was thinking, and it didn’t make him happy. In any system of two large bodies, there were five areas where the centrifugal and gravitational forces would neutralize each other and hold a smaller body—such as a satellite or asteroid—in perpetual equilibrium. Of those five locations, only one was directly between the two bodies. “You mean Stable Zone One?”
Luke nodded. “The Chasm of Perfect Darkness is an ancient Ashla parable referring to the twin perils of ego and ignorance,” he explained. “The Tythonians spoke of it as a deep dark canyon flanked by high, ever-crumbling cliffs.”
“So life is the chasm, darkness is falling all around,” Ben said, taking an educated guess as to the parable’s meaning, “and the only way to stay in the light is to go down the middle.”
Luke smiled. “You’ve got a real feeling for mystic guidance.” He lifted his hands away from the yoke. “You have the ship, son.”
“Me? Now?” Ben considered pointing out that his father was by far the better pilot—but that wasn’t the issue, of course. If Ben was going to face his fears, he needed to handle the flying himself. He swallowed hard, squared his shoulders, then confirmed, “I have the ship.”
Ben deactivated the mirror panel and accelerated toward the black holes. As the Shadow drew closer, their dark orbs rapidly began to swell and drift toward opposite sides of the cockpit, until all that could be seen of them were tall slivers of darkness hanging along the rear edges of the canopy. Ahead lay a fiery confluence of superheated gas, swirling in from two different directions and so bright it hurt Ben’s eyes even through the Shadow’s blast-tinting.
He checked the primary display and found only bright static; the navigation sensors were awash in electromagnetic blast from compressing gas. The Shadow’s internal sensors were working just fine, however, and they showed the ship’s hull temperature rising rapidly as they penetrated the cloud. It wouldn’t take long for that to become dangerous, Ben knew. Soon the fierce heat inside the accretion disk would start fouling guidance systems and control relays. Eventually, it would compromise hull integrity.
“Dad, how about doing something with those sensor filters?” Ben asked. “My navigational readings are snow.”
“Adjusting the filters won’t change anything,” Luke said calmly. “We’re flying between a pair of black holes, remember?”
Ben exhaled in exasperation, then cursed under his breath and continued to stare out into the fiery ribbons ahead. At best, he could make out a confluence zone where the two accretion disks were brushing against each other, and the painful brilliance made it difficult to tell even that much.
“How am I supposed to navigate?” Ben complained. “I can’t see anything.”
Luke remained silent.
Ben felt the hint of disapproval in his father’s Force aura and experienced a flash of rebellion. He let out a cleansing breath, allowing the feeling to run its course and depart on a cushion of stale air, then saw how he had been blinded by his anxiety over the navigation difficulties.
“Oh …right,” Ben said, feeling more than a little foolish. “Trust the Force.”
“No worries,” Luke said, sounding amused. “The first time I tried something this crazy, I had to be reminded, too.”
“Well, at least I have an excuse.” Ben took the navigation sensors offline so the static wouldn’t interfere with his concentration. “It’s hard to focus with your dad looking over your shoulder.”
Luke’s crash webbing clicked open. “In that case, maybe I should get some—”
“Who are you kidding?” Ben shoved the yoke over, flipping the Shadow into a tight barrel roll. “You just want to bite your nails in private.”
“The thought hadn’t crossed my mind,” Luke said, dropping back into his seat. “Until now, ungrateful offspring.”
Ben laughed, then leveled out and checked the hull temperature. It was climbing even faster than he had feared. He closed his eyes and—hoping the gas was not so thick that friction would aggravate the problem—shoved the throttles forward.
It did not take long before Ben began to sense a calm place a little to port. He adjusted course and extended his Force awareness in that direction, then started to feel a strange, nebulous presence that reminded him of something he could not quite place—of something dark and diffuse, spread across a great distance.
Ben opened his eyes again. “Dad, do you feel—”
“Yes, like the Killiks,” Luke said. “We might be dealing with a hive-mind.”
A cold shudder was already racing down Ben’s spine. His father had barely uttered the word Killiks before the memory of his stint as an unwilling Gorog Joiner came flooding back, and for the second time in less than an hour he found himself desperately wanting to withdraw from the Force. Gorog had been a dark side nest, secretly controlling the entire Killik civilization while it fed on captured Chiss, and Ben had fallen under its sway for a short time when he was only five. It had been the most terrifying and confusing time of his childhood, and had Jacen not recognized what was happening and helped Ben find his way back to the Force and his true family, he doubted very much that he would have been able to break free at all.
Thankfully, the presence ahead was not all that similar to Gorog’s. There was certainly a darkness to it, and it was clearly composed of many different beings joined together across a vast distance—most of space ahead, really. But the distribution seemed more mottled than a Killik hive-mind, as though dozens of distinct individuals were joined together in something vaguely similar to a battle-meld.
/> Ben was about to clarify his impressions for his father when a familiar presence began to slither up inside him. It was cold and condemning, like a friend betrayed, and he could feel how angry it was about the intrusion into its lair. The Force grew stormy and foreboding, and an electric prickle of danger sense raced down Ben’s spine. He could feel the darkness gathering against him, trying to push him away, and that only hardened his resolve to finally face the specter. He opened himself up, grabbed hold in the Force, and began to pull.
The presence jerked back, then tried to shrink away. It was too late. Ben already had a firm grasp, and he was determined to follow it back to its physical location. He checked the hull temperature and saw that it was hovering in the yellow danger zone. Then he focused his attention forward and saw—actually saw—a thumbnail-sized darkness tunneling through the swirling fires ahead. He pointed their nose toward the black oval, then shoved the throttles to the overload stops and watched the fiery ribbons of gas stream past the cockpit.
The ribbons grew brighter and more deeply colored as the ship penetrated the accretion disk, and soon the gas grew so dense that the Shadow began to buck and shudder in its turbulence. Ben held on tight to the yoke … and to the dark presence he was clasping in the Force.
His father’s voice sounded behind him. “Uh, Ben?”
“It’s okay, Dad,” Ben said. “I’ve got an approach lane.”
“A what?” Luke sounded genuinely surprised. “I hope you realize the hull temperature is almost into the red.”
“Dad!” Ben snapped. “Will you please let me concentrate?”
Luke fell silent for a moment, then exhaled loudly. “Ben, the gas here is too dense for these velocities. We’re practically flying through an atmo—”
“Your idea,” Ben interrupted. The black oval swelled to the size of a fist. “Trust me!”
“Ben, trust me doesn’t work for Jedi the way it does for your uncle Han. We don’t have his luck.”
“Maybe that would change if we trusted it more often,” Ben retorted.
The black oval continued to expand until it was the size of a hatch. Ben fought the turbulence and somehow kept the Shadow’s nose pointed toward it, then the ship was inside the darkness, flying smooth and surrounded by a dim cone of orange radiance. Startled by the abrupt transition and struggling to adjust to the sudden change of light, Ben feared for an instant that the dark presence had led him off-course—perhaps even out of the accretion disks altogether.
Then the cone of orange began to simultaneously compress and fade, becoming a dark tunnel, and a far worse possibility occurred to him.
“Say, Dad, would we know if we were flying down a black hole?”
“Probably not,” Luke said. “The time-space distortion would make the journey last forever, at least relative to Coruscant-standard time. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no reason,” Ben said, deciding not to alarm his father any more than necessary. If he had flown them past an event horizon, it was too late to do anything about it now. “Just curious.”
Luke laughed, then said, “Relax, Ben. We’re not flying down a black hole—but will you please slow down? If you keep this up, you really are going to melt the hull.”
Ben glanced at his display and frowned. The hull temperature had climbed into the critical zone, which made no sense at all. The surrounding darkness and the lack of turbulence meant they were no longer being blasted by heat from the accretion disk. The hull ought to be cooling rapidly, and if it wasn’t …
Ben jerked the throttles back and was pitched against his crash webbing as friction instantly began to slow the Shadow. The area surrounding them wasn’t dark because it was empty—it was dark because it was filled with cold matter. They had entered Stable Zone One, where gas, dust, and who-knew-what-else was floating in limbo between the two black holes. Worried that they weren’t decelerating fast enough, he used the maneuvering thrusters to slow the ship down even further … then realized that during the excitement, he had lost contact with the dark presence he had been using as a reluctant guide.
“Blast,” Ben said. He expanded his Force awareness again, but felt only the same meld-like presence he had sensed earlier—and it was too diffuse to be much of a navigation beacon. “We’re back to flying blind. I can’t feel anything useful now.”
“That’s not really a problem,” Luke pointed out. “There’s only one place in here where anything can have a permanent habitat.”
Ben nodded. “Right.”
Stable Zone One wasn’t actually very stable. Even the slightest perturbation would start a mass on a long, slow fall into one of the adjacent gravity wells. Therefore, anything permanently located inside the zone could only be at the precise center, because that was the only place where the forces were in absolute equilibrium.
Ben brought the navigation sensors back up. This time, the screen showed nothing but a small fan of light at the bottom, rapidly fading to darkness as the signals were obscured by cold gas and dust. He activated the Shadow’s forward flood lamps and continued onward. The beams tunneled ahead for perhaps a kilometer before vanishing into the black fog of dust and gas. Ben decelerated even further, then adjusted headings until all external forces affecting the Shadow’s travel vector were exactly zero, and set a waypoint. Theoretically, at least, they were now on course for the heart of the stable zone.
When Ben shifted his attention forward again, he saw a blue fleck of debris floating in the light beam ahead. He instantly fired the maneuvering thrusters to decelerate more, but in space, even a relative creep was a velocity of hundreds of kilometers an hour, and they covered half the distance to the object before the Shadow responded.
Instead of the stony boulder or ice ball that Ben had expected, the object turned out to be a young Duros. Ben could tell that he was a Duros because he wasn’t wearing a pressure helmet, and his blue, noseless face and big red eyes were clearly visible above the collar of a standard Jedi-issue flight suit. Hanging on his shoulder was what, at that distance, appeared to be a portable missile launcher.
“Dad?” Ben asked. “Are you seeing this?”
“Duros, no helmet?”
“Right.”
Luke nodded. “Then yes, I—”
The Duros was silhouetted by a white flash, and the silver halo of an oncoming missile began to swell in front of the Shadow’s cockpit. Ben shoved the yoke forward and hit the thrusters, but even a Jedi’s reflexes weren’t that quick. A metallic bang echoed through the hull, and damage alarms began to shriek and blink. In almost the same instant, the Duros and the missile launcher floated past mere meters above the cockpit, and the muffled thud of an impact sounded from far back in the stern.
“Definitely no hallucination,” Luke commented.
“Dad, that looked like—”
“Qwallo Mode, I know,” Luke replied. Mode was a young Jedi Knight who had disappeared on a standard courier run about a year earlier. When an exhaustive search had failed to find any trace of him, the Masters had finally concluded that he had perished. “He’s a long way from the Tapani sector.”
“Assuming that was Qwallo.” Ben extended his Force awareness behind them, but did not sense any hint of the Jedi’s presence. “Should I make another sweep to see if we can recover him?”
Luke thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Even if he’s still alive, let’s not give him another shot at the Shadow. Before we start taking those kinds of chances, we need to figure out what’s going on here.”
“Yeah,” Ben agreed. “Like how come he didn’t need a helmet.”
“And how he got here in the first place—and why he’s shooting at us.” Luke clicked out of his crash webbing, then added, “I’ll handle the damage. If you see anyone else floating around with a missile launcher and no pressure suit, don’t ask questions, just—”
“Open fire.” Ben deployed the blaster cannons, then checked the damage display and saw that they were bleeding both air and hyper-drive coolant. T
o make matters worse, the yoke was sticking, and that could mean a lot of things—none of them good. “Got it. We’ve taken enough damage.”
Ben switched his threat array to the primary display. At the top of the screen, the gray form of a mass shadow was clarifying out of the darkness. A yellow number-bar was adding tons to the mass estimate faster than the eye could follow, but he was alarmed to see that it was already into the high five digits and climbing toward six. There was no indication yet of the object’s overall shape or energy output, but the tonnage alone suggested something at least as large as an assault carrier.
Unsure whether it was better to slow down to prevent a collision or accelerate to avoid being an easy target, Ben started to weave and bob. There was just a vague hint of danger tickling the base of his skull, but that only meant nothing had set its sights on the Shadow yet.
On the third bob downward, the yoke jammed forward and wouldn’t come back. Ben cursed and tried to muscle it, but he was fighting the hydraulic system, and if he fought it too hard, he would break a control cable. He hit the emergency pressure release, dumping the control system’s entire reservoir into space, and then checked his threat array again.
The mass ahead was no longer a shadow. A silvery, elongated oval had taken shape in the middle of the display, the number-bar in its core now climbing past seven million tons. The oval was slowly drifting toward the bottom of the screen and shedding alphanumeric designators, indicating the presence of a debris field and the danger of an impending collision with the object itself. Ben hit the maneuvering thrusters hard, and the Shadow decelerated.
He heard a toolbox clang into the main cabin’s rear bulkhead, and his father’s alarmed voice came over the intercom speaker. “What did you hit?”
“Nothing yet.” Ben pulled back on the yoke, using his own strength to force the vector plates down. “The control yoke’s power assist is gone, and we’ve reached a debris field.”
