by James Luceno
“I’m the captain of this scow,” Han corrected her, but then grinned and took her offered hand. Her hand was warm, and harder than it looked. He just didn’t have it in him to bicker right now. Besides, Leia would probably think he was flirting. “Han Solo.”
Her eyes widened. “For real? The Han Solo?”
He started to flush. “The only one I know.”
“Wow.” She looked impressed. “I mean, the Han Solo who supposedly outdrew Gallandro in a fair fight?”
“Well, y’know …” His face was getting full-on hot all of a sudden. “It wasn’t exactly a fair fight—and I didn’t exactly outdraw him. You shouldn’t believe everything you see on the HoloNet.”
“I don’t,” she said. “I always figured you shot him in the back.”
“Hey, now—”
“That your weapon? BlasTech, huh? Kinda old-fashioned, isn’t it?”
Han dropped his hand to the blaster’s grip and fiddled with it as though uncertain. “Uh, well …”
“I favor the Twenty-one myself.” She nodded toward the number-six cargo hopper, where a weathered but exceedingly well-cared-for blaster belt lay on top. From the holster projected a custom KYD grip that showed an equal amount of wear, and even more care. “Go ahead,” she said. “Feel free. Here—”
She reached over and pulled her blaster from its holster using only two fingers, nice and slow, plenty slowly enough that Han didn’t feel like he needed to shoot her, then spun it around her finger and offered it to him butt-first. “Give it a feel. Combat-action tournament model. Trigger-pull’s smooth as bantha butter, and you can shoot the eyestalks off a terramoth at seventy-five meters.”
Han took the weapon and weighed it in his hand. It was a nice piece, he had to admit. Beautifully balanced, and he said so.
She grinned. “Knew you’d like it.” She nodded toward his holstered blaster. “D’you mind?”
Han shrugged and passed it over.
She squinted into the DL-44’s optical electrosight and whistled. “Nice. Modified for speed-draw, right?” She spun it around her finger. “Little barrel-heavy, though, huh? Wait, what’s this custom work here?”
She took a close look at the gas chamber and collimator. “Oh, I get it—enhanced output. What does it generate, double power?” She gave him another look and that lopsided grin. “Don’t you know that’s illegal?”
He felt himself flushing again. “Okay, give it back.”
“Nah. I like yours better.”
Han blinked. “What?”
“You can have mine. Fair trade. Even counting the custom work, mine’s worth double this old relic. Call it even, huh?” She turned and walked toward a knot of her men. “Hey, Tripp, check this out—I just traded for Han Solo’s blaster! Can you believe it?”
Han was the one who couldn’t believe it. “Now, hold on a minute—”
“Han—” Leia caught his arm. “Look over there—isn’t that Artoo?”
Sure enough, against the far curve of wall a couple of the Mindorese were trying to install a restraining bolt on a blue-domed 4-series astromech that looked suspiciously familiar. Leia moved toward them. “You—you there, where did you get that droid?”
“We found it abandoned. It’s salvage,” one of them snapped back.
“Salvage? Excuse me?” Leia drew herself up in a way Han recognized all too well, so it was his turn to catch her arm.
“Play it smooth, Princess,” he said softly from one side of his mouth while the rest of it gave the Mindorese a reassuringly stupid smile. “Low and slow. I don’t trust these jokers.”
“Han, I told you, these aren’t the enemy—”
“And they aren’t old friends, either.” He caught Chewie’s eye, over where the Wookiee was spraying foamcast around a Mindorese’s injured ankle, and rolled his eyes with a slight sideways nod toward the number-six hopper. Before he turned back to his task, Chewie let one eyelid droop into half a wink. “Listen, how hurt are these guys, really?” Han asked Leia. “How long before we can dump them and get on our way?”
“Well …” Leia tilted her head, considering. “They’re not as bad as you’d expect. Mostly superficial burns—it looks like that crude armor they make out of lava isn’t so crude after all.”
Han nodded grimly. “So: head shots.”
“Han—”
“See what they’re up to with Artoo,” he said. He looked down with distaste at the KYD-21 in his hand, then jammed it into his holster.
Leia nodded. “Maybe I can help you with your salvage,” she said in a friendly way as she came up to the men tinkering with R2’s restraining bolt. Without waiting for a reply, she reached over and put her hand on the bolt—and on his hand, where he held it—and gave him a maybe overly warm smile. He flushed, just a bit, and smiled back.
“Uh, better be careful, lady,” he said. “This little grubber may look harmless enough, but it can deliver a nasty shock—”
“Oh, nonsense,” Leia said briskly as she deactivated the bolt with a decisive twist. “This droid’s been with my family a long time. Artoo, power up. What happened to Luke?”
R2-D2 whistled an affirmative, and his dome swiveled to angle his onboard holoprojector toward the floor. It flickered to life—but the image was of Aeona Cantor. “No,” Leia said. “We know about her. Where’s Luke?”
The little droid whistled again, more insistently, and again showed Aeona.
“Artoo—”
“No, let him run it,” Han said, instinctively lowering his hand to his blaster—and then grimacing at the unfamiliar feel of the KYD’s grip. “I want to see this.”
A recorded voice came from R2-D2’s speaker. “What if whoever shows up isn’t a Jedi?”
The Aeona-image answered, “Then we take their ship and leave ’em to the Melters. Saves having to kill them ourselves.”
Han snarled something that would have been a curse if it had come out in words as he whirled, drew the KYD, and squeezed the trigger just as the emitter centered on Aeona’s forehead.
It made a dry click.
“Say, you are fast.” She grinned at him. “Sorry about the blaster—somebody must have pulled the power cell. So I guess it wasn’t exactly a fair trade after all, huh?”
She drew his beloved BlasTech and leveled it at Han’s face. “This next trade won’t be exactly fair either,” she said. “Because I also really like your ship.”
CHAPTER 10
Deep in darkness, lingering in the shadow cast by the holoeditor’s imaging screen that was the chamber’s only light, an old, old man practiced his Luke Skywalker impression.
“Listen to me, Blackhole or Shadowspawn or whoever you are,” he murmured, forcing his leathery mouth to shape the rounded vowels and mushy consonants of Skywalker’s barbarous Outer Rim accent. “I’m a Jedi, but I never had time for all the training some of the old Jedi were supposed to get … No, no no. Not geht. Almost git—really, barely a vowel at all. G’t.”
The old, old man sighed. To spend the balance of a human lifetime pretending to be a half-educated rube … ultimately, the reward would be worth the sacrifice, of course, and no one would ever know his private humiliation, but still …
Perhaps after a decade or two ruling the reborn Empire, he could allow himself to slowly “pick up” a properly civilized mode of speech, but until then he’d have to keep up the pretense. Perhaps the only thing that could undermine his ultimate victory would be to have these Rebel scum notice that their pet Jedi had suddenly begun talking as if he’d been educated on Coruscant by way of Dromund Kaas.
A desiccated finger stretched forth to key the holoeditor and run the recording back two minutes, so that he could study again every slightest detail of Skywalker’s bearing, his walk, his gestures, the angle of his head, every faintest twitch of his eyebrows. This was critical to the old, old man’s plans; these few recordings, taken from the holocameras embedded in the stygium armor of his black stormtroopers, and from the concealed recorders in the
Cavern of the Shadow Throne, were all he had with which to study the real Luke Skywalker.
Yes, there were all those numberless holothrillers—and studying them had been a useful preparation, especially in creating the theatrical Shadowspawn persona and devising the stage dressings of the Shadow Throne—but the computer-generated Farmboy Hero depicted by these holothrillers would convince none but the ignorantly credulous fans who devoured such preposterously contrived tripe.
When Luke Skywalker emerged from the Battle of Mindor, no one must even suspect that this legendary Jedi hero was only a shell: a living, breathing life-support system for the mind of this old, old man.
This old, old man who once had been known to a select few as Lord Cronal, director of Imperial Intelligence … and to many, many unfortunate enemies of the Empire as Blackhole, the Emperor’s Hand … and who would, after today, be known to the entire galaxy as Luke, the First Skywalker Emperor.
Cronal’s rise to power had started with a vision: a vision of the Dark.
More than a vision, in fact; more than a simple prophecy, or precognition. To the Nightsisters of Dathomir, it was the Heartshadow. Other Force-users had other names for it.
But Cronal called it simply Darksight.
Deep in the area ignorantly described by the Old Republic, and later the Empire, as the “Unknown Regions,” there was a vast cloud of dust and rock and interstellar gas that pulsed with a bloody and forbidding scarlet glow as it radiated away the energy of twelve stellar clusters within. This was the Perann Nebula; the twelve clusters that it surrounded were known collectively as the Nihil Retreat. The absolute rulers of the Nihil Retreat, dreaded masters of dark magicks beyond the grasp of even the Sith, were the Sorcerers of Rhand.
The Sorcerers of Rhand were the only family Cronal would ever know. The Rhandites had plucked him from the arms of the nameless woman who had borne him, and had forged him as a weapon is forged, awakening his insight, refining his will, opening his mind to the One Truth:
Only power is real, and the only real power is the power to destroy. Existence is fleeting. Destruction is eternal.
Every child was born waiting for death. Civilizations fell, and their very ashes were swallowed by time. The stars themselves burned out. Destruction, on the other hand …
Destruction was the will of the universe.
Some called it entropy, and tried to quantify and constrain it with the laws of thermodynamics. Some expressed it with a simple poetic declarative: Things fall apart. Some even tried to dismiss it with a joke: Anything that can go wrong will. But it was not a joke, or poetry; it was not science, nor was it subject to any law.
It was the Way of the Dark.
Destruction was easy … and permanent. When a being was killed, everything he or she would have ever done or possessed, seen or felt, was murdered. And that murder made a permanent change in the structure of the universe—it emptied the universe of an entire life, and left behind only a void.
That void was the foundation of truth.
That was why the Jedi and the Sith would remain forever locked in their pointless battle: because all their philosophy of light versus dark, of service versus mastery, was as meaningless as the whistle of wind through desert rocks. Service and mastery were equally futile, even illusory, in the face of the One Truth. All the endless Jedi vs. Sith nattering of “the dark side of the Force” blinded them one and all to the bare reality that there was nothing but the Dark.
The Dark was not a side of the Force, and it was no mere portion of reality. It was reality. The Sorcerers of Rhand had never spoken of the Force, and Cronal was to this day unsure whether they would have had any understanding of how the Force was viewed and spoken of in the rest of the galaxy. To the Rhandites, it was only the Dark, and the only pertinent feature of the Dark was that it would respond to the will of a properly trained being, so long as that being’s will was in line with the Way of the Dark.
It was the Dark that set world against world, nation against nation, sibling against sibling, child against parent. It was the Dark that brought pestilence and starvation, hatred and war. The Dark was the hidden energy of the cosmos itself: that which pressed galaxy away from galaxy, star away from star until finally each and every world would fade within its own private black hole, moving too swiftly from its neighbors for their light to overtake it.
This was why Cronal had chosen the code name Blackhole: because he had willed himself to become an event horizon of the Dark.
And of all the powers the Dark granted its adepts, the greatest was Darksight. It was Darksight that had led Cronal far from the Nihil Retreat, beyond the Perann Nebula and out of the Unknown Regions altogether, in search of the truth of his visions. It was Darksight that had led him to Dromund Kaas, where he had easily infiltrated and come to dominate that pack of pathetic, self-deluded fools who styled themselves Prophets of the Dark Side.
Imagine, to waste one’s brief foray in life, the fleeting bright instant between the infinite dark before and the eternal dark beyond, in mere study—in trying to learn to use the “dark side of the Force” to merely predict the future.
With Darksight, Cronal could create the future.
He was familiar, in concept, with the pale shadow-imitation of Darksight that had supposedly been employed by some exceptional Jedi and certain among the Sith—the pathetic conjuror’s trick they called battle meditation. Through massive concentration and expenditure of energy, they claimed to subtly influence the course of a single combat, or, for the most powerful among them, an engagement of greater forces, like armies in collision or fleet-to-fleet battles. They claimed that their simplistic Force-powered visualization of a desired outcome would subtly shift probabilities and grant them luck, that it would inspire their allies and demoralize their enemies. Of course, these claims could never be proven, or disproven; any charlatan might simply take credit for any random victory, or ascribe a defeat to the will of the Force—or a supposedly more powerful Force-user practicing his or her own “battle meditation” in service to the opposite side …
Battle meditation. Idiots.
Anyone trained by the Rhandites could have told them: any and all battles, all wars, the very concept of battle itself, served but a single end. Their only function was destruction. Only by setting one’s will upon pure destruction could victory be achieved.
When your will was fixed steadily upon the Way of the Dark, the Dark itself became your partner in all that you did.
Cronal was living proof of this truth. It was Cronal’s Darksight that had attracted the attention of Palpatine and brought Vader to Dromund Kaas; even Kadann, the fool who pretended to be the Supreme Prophet of the Dark Side, never suspected how entirely his order served not some fantasy of Sith power, but the Dark itself … because Cronal had made it so. Palpatine had plucked Cronal from the Prophets and set him apart from even the other elite Emperor’s Hands, for Palpatine had been swift to recognize that his was a gift that transcended mere prophecy. Any fool with a trace of ability could see echoes of the future—Palpatine himself was rather good at it—but Cronal’s ability transcended mere prophecy as hyperdrive transcends the wings of a shadowmoth.
Palpatine had been impressed with the “accuracy” of Cronal’s “predictions” … yet not even the great Darth Sidious had ever suspected that Cronal’s predictions were accurate not because Cronal had seen the future, but because he had chosen that future.
That exact future.
He had decided, and his choice had molded all of history to his will.
That was the power of Darksight: to search among all the possible futures for the one that best suited your own desire and the Way of the Dark … and then to map each step that must be taken to bring you to that future, and bring that future to you.
But to make it happen, you had to bind your desire to the Dark, and dream only of destruction.
Palpatine had been a fool. He had thought he could make the Dark serve him, instead of the opposite. In the
days of the Old Republic, before he had revealed his Sith identity, Palpatine literally could not fail. Every blind flailing gesture of every Jedi who’d set himself against him had turned to his advantage, and even the sheerest accidents of fortune had served his goal … because that goal had been the destruction of the Jedi Order, and the death of the Republic. He’d served the Dark unknowingly, all the while believing that the Dark was only a means to an end, a tool to help him destroy his enemies and clear his path to absolute power.
What he’d never understood was that destruction was his power.
As soon as he’d turned his will to rulership, to building instead of destroying, he had forsaken the Way of the Dark … and everything had begun to go wrong for him. Where before he could not fail, now he’d had no chance of succeeding, because when you turn your back on the Dark, the Dark turns its back on you.
Only days after the Battle of Yavin, Cronal had cast his mind deep into the void, seeking the future of the young Rebel pilot who had destroyed the Death Star, and had found him as an older, more seasoned man, dressed in dark robes—and bearing a lightsaber.
Kneeling before the Emperor, to swear his allegiance to the dark side.
My fate … will be the same as my father’s.
Which was when Cronal finally understood who Darth Vader was, and saw the terrible flaw that would bring the Order of the Sith to its ultimate destruction. A destruction that Cronal not only was determined to survive, but was certain he could transform into an eternal victory for the Dark.
And, not incidentally, eternal life for himself.
Near to eternal, anyway; as long as a single living thing struggled and suffered and fed the Dark with killing and dying, Cronal would be here. His ultimate sacrifice to the Dark would be the survival of his consciousness until the heat death of the Universe … when he would be joined forever with the final oblivion of all that had ever been. All that will ever be.
He would be the last.
