by James Luceno
He was standing in a stone chamber along with about forty other people who were all wearing funny hats and robes just like his, who all stood motionless and silent in a crowd around a big stone pedestal with heads lowered and hands folded inside their sleeves, and he said, “Oh, okay. That explains it.”
It hadn’t been a dream.
Okay, sure, a nightmare, maybe—but he was wide awake now and the nightmare was still going on, which meant it was as real as the deep ache in his feet, not to mention his back and his neck. How long had he been standing like this, anyway? Plus there was this knuckle-sized knot of a bruise over his right eye …
Oh, he thought. Oh yeah, I remember.
For a long, long moment, he didn’t move.
He couldn’t guess exactly how long he’d have to make his moves from the first instant he attracted Blackhole’s attention, but he had a pretty good idea what the old ruskakk’s reaction was gonna be: the walls and floor and ceiling of this whole chamber were made of meltmassif.
This was always the problem with Jedi, Nick decided. Whenever there were Jedi around, you ended up in some kind of trouble that nobody in the galaxy could possibly survive. Not even the Jedi himself. And this time, it wasn’t even about dying. It was about getting stuck as Blackhole’s sock puppet for the rest of his natural life. So what was he supposed to do?
On the other hand, doing nothing sure wouldn’t make anything better. He could feel Blackhole inside his head—a cold slimy goo like the trail left behind by a Xerthian hound-slug on a damp autumn day—and he could feel, too, that Blackhole could snatch back control of Nick’s arms and legs and brain anytime he felt like it; the only reason Nick had any self-awareness at all was that Blackhole’s whole attention was focused on the kid inside the stone slab.
Overall, it looked like both of them were pretty well fragged. But, y’know, he reminded himself, that kid is supposed to be a Skywalker. Nick had never been superstitious, but there was something about that name. It seemed to carry the promise, or at least the possibility, that the day might be saved in some incomprehensibly improbable fashion. Even if the situation was so clearly hopeless that only a lunatic would even try.
And so he yanked off his Crown.
It hurt. A lot. And it made this damp juicy ripping sound, very much how Nick imagined the sound of someone ripping his scalp in half like cheap broadcloth.
“Okay: owww!” He threw the Crown on the floor. “That’s it,” he declared as blood began to trickle into his eyes. “Nobody’s putting that thing back on me, because that was the last time I want to take it off.”
“No …” Cronal moaned in the darkness. “It’s not possible … not now, not when I’m so close!”
He stabbed savagely at the comm panel in front of his couch. “Klick! Are you in position?”
“My lord Shadowspawn!” the group captain exclaimed. “We’re on our way!”
Cronal ground out words between ragged yellow stumps of teeth. “When you get there, secure and seal the door. If anyone tries to come out, kill them.”
He reached up to adjust the Sunset Crown upon his wrinkled scalp. As for the inside of the Election Center, he could handle that himself.
Nick gave his robes a quick pat down, hoping he might find a liquefier belted to his waist or something—somebody around here must have one, to have softened the meltmassif to get Skywalker into it in the first place—but he came up blank, of course, because nothing was ever that easy. Not for him. Nick was absolutely certain that on the day of his birth the Force had looked down upon his life, smiled, and cheerfully made an obscene gesture. Or something.
He scanned the room. Thirty-some mostly identical Pawns. Who had the liquefier? Was he supposed to search every single one of them? On the other hand, it occurred to him that the charge emitted by a liquefier was very similar to that of a blaster on stun …
He gazed down thoughtfully at his Crown, suddenly reflecting that it might turn out to be useful after all. He picked it up and went to the door.
“Guard!” he barked in his resonant Shadowspawn voice, lifting the Crown over his head. When one of the troopers outside opened the door, Nick hit him with it.
Hard.
The impact buckled the stormtrooper’s knees, and Nick—mindful both of the stormtrooper’s helmet and of his homeworld’s ancient adage that “anything worth hitting is worth hitting twice”—smacked him again, harder, which laid the stormtrooper facedown and twitching.
The other door guard cursed and brought his carbine around to open fire with impressive speed—but a couple of kilos of carbonite made an even better shield than it did a club. Nick shoved the Crown right into the carbine’s muzzle and put his shoulder into it, which knocked the trooper backward off-balance; before the trooper could bring his carbine back in line, Nick had the first guard’s carbine in his own hands … and stormtrooper armor, it seemed, was not quite as sturdy as carbonite when it came to absorbing blaster bolts.
Beyond the door, he found a long, down-sloping corridor that looked like it had been melted through shimmery black stone. He had time to mutter, “So on top of everything else, I don’t even know where I fraggin’ am,” before a door at the far end of the corridor opened to reveal a squad of stormtroopers, most likely wondering what all the shooting was about.
“This just keeps getting better and better.” Nick dragged the unconscious trooper inside and blasted the door panel, which exploded in a shower of sparks. The door slid shut, and Nick could only hope it might slow the oncoming troopers for a few seconds. It would have to be enough.
But when he looked up at the Pawns, all the Pawns were looking back at him.
He thought, Oh, this can’t be good.
The Pawns in front of him bunched together, blocking his shot at Skywalker’s pedestal tomb, while the others spread out and began to circle toward him, arms outstretched, without making a sound—and though Nick knew it was because most of them couldn’t actually talk, it was still excessively creepy. He bared his teeth and thumbed the carbine over to full auto.
And hesitated.
He had this instant, extraordinarily vivid vision of trying to explain to the sadly patient face of Luke Skywalker—the man who had spared Nick’s life a couple hours earlier based on nothing more than a pun and a vague intuition that he might be innocent—how I just blew away thirty-some innocent men and women so I could dig you out of there, because he had an overpowering intuition of his own: if Luke Skywalker thought he might save thirty innocent lives by sacrificing his own, he wouldn’t hesitate. Ten innocent lives.
One.
“Or, hell, one not-so-innocent life,” Nick muttered. “Like mine.”
He flipped the carbine’s power setting to stun. “I hate Jedi. Hate ’em. Really, really, really. Hate.”
He had no way to know how a stun blast would affect someone when channeled by the neural network of the Pawn Crowns directly into their unprotected brains, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t be good, and the only thing he was looking forward to less than explaining to Skywalker how he’d killed all these people because he was a bloodthirsty son of a ruskakk was explaining how he’d killed them all because he was too stupid to pour water out of a boot. Fortunately, he didn’t have to stun them to stop them.
He only had to stun the floor.
He opened fire on the ground in front of the feet of the oncoming Pawns, and around each shot, a meter or two of the meltmassif that layered the chamber’s floor instantly liquefied to roughly the viscosity of warm toknut butter. Pawns went down in heaps. Nick turned his fire on the floor between himself and the Pawns blocking the pedestal tomb, and they slipped and fell into a pile of their own, struggling and pawing at each other helplessly.
Not bad, he thought. Maybe not up there with slipping on a raballa peel, but still pretty funny. Now if he only had a real liquefier he could have rehardened the stone, which would have been even better. Loads of comic possibility. Though they were still struggling to rise and kind
of climbing over each other, and if a few of them actually reached hard floor that would bring a sudden end to the chuckles. “And now, for my next trick …”
He flipped open the downed trooper’s medpac and loaded an ampoule of vivatherin into the chromostring canister. Then with the chromo in one hand and the carbine in the other, he took a three-step running start, jumped over the gooey floor, and landed on the chest of the nearest downed Pawn. He skidded and slipped and almost went down as the Pawn gasped and clutched at his ankle, but he kicked his way free and lurched forward, stepping on stomachs and legs and probably a head or two until he could claw his way to the pedestal and clamber up on top. As the Pawns tried to pull themselves up after him, he aimed the carbine between his feet and held down the trigger.
The pedestal collapsed into a spreading pile of slimy goo, and Nick found himself sitting on Luke Skywalker’s chest. Without pausing to consider how ridiculous they both must look, Nick triggered the chromostring canister against Luke’s neck. Given the chromostring’s ability to enhance systemic absorption of the vivatherin, Nick figured Skywalker would be jumping back to life any second now, which wouldn’t be a second too soon, because the pedestal’s collapse left Nick and Luke down on the floor with the goo-covered piles of Pawns, who were now climbing over each other to claw at Nick’s ankles and knees and pull him down and drag themselves up him like slashrats chewing down a turk-root trunk, ripping away his robes and gouging at his skin, and they were pushing him deeper and deeper into the muck, which was starting to flow up over his ears and into his eyes, and the more he struggled the more they piled onto him, until he heard what was, for a man in the midst of getting ripped to shreds by a pack of dark-sider-controlled zombies, the sweetest sound in the history of the galaxy:
spssshmmmm
The hum got louder, and took on a strange whop-whop-whop rhythm like some kind of mechanical toy, a kid’s gyrothopter or something. The Pawns stopped clawing at him and started falling limp, and Nick began to wonder if maybe he’d underestimated Skywalker’s own bloodthirstiness until he was able to push himself up to a sitting position and get a look at what Skywalker was actually doing.
Make that: what Skywalker’s lightsaber was actually doing.
It whirled through the air with no hand to guide it, spinning very much like the blades of a toy gyrothopter after all, and as it passed any Pawn it would dip and cant for a shaved second, just long enough to strike, and another Pawn would fall limp. Though they weren’t even injured.
Because the blade struck only each Pawn’s Crown.
A quick slash or two and a Crown would fall in smoking pieces, which folded each and every Pawn like a losing sabacc hand. Nick twisted to look at Skywalker.
“Shh.” Luke sat just behind him, eyes closed in a frown of concentration, right hand lifted, palm outward. He was coated head-to-toe with a black oily sheen of liquefied meltmassif. “This isn’t as easy as it looks.”
The shining emerald blade whirled through a last few revolutions; the last couple of Crowns fell to pieces, the last couple of Pawns collapsed, and the lightsaber flipped back to Luke’s hand before its blade shrank away.
Luke opened his eyes. “All right,” he said. “What do we still need?”
“Um, it’s not like we’re out of trouble right now—”
“You mean the stormtroopers outside the door?” Luke hefted his lightsaber. “I’m sure we can figure something out.”
“No, actually, I was talking about being lost somewhere inside an active volcano, and—”
“We’re not lost.”
“We’re not?”
“No.”
“Um, okay.” From past experience, Nick could assume that when a Jedi said something straight out and simple like that, he could usually be taken at his word. “The other problem is that this whole place is lined with meltmassif—remember what happened over at the Shadow Throne? Any second now, Blackhole’s gonna shock the snot out of all of us, and—”
“He won’t.”
“What makes you—”
“Nick,” Luke said, “you worry too much.”
He closed his eyes again, and the slimy black meltmassif goo began to flow across his body … but instead of dripping down, it flowed forward, thickening across Luke’s chest, then it separated itself from him altogether, pooling into a floating sphere like mercury in free fall. Thinning tendrils flowed into the sphere from Luke’s pants, and sleeves, and from the ends of his hair, as well as away from the floor around his legs, so that in only a moment, he could stand on dry, bare floor, and his clothes and face and hair were all entirely clean, and the ball of liquid meltmassif hovering in front of him was the size of his doubled fists.
“Blackhole’s ‘treatment’ has had some side effects he probably didn’t plan on,” Luke said.
“I’m guessing. Can you, like, make it into stuff and make it shock people and everything, like he does?”
Luke shook his head. “I don’t think he actually does that stuff either—it’s more like he’s controlling something that does it, if you get what I’m saying.”
“Sounds like his style; doing it himself would be too much like work.” Nick nodded at the fallen Pawns. “What about these types?”
Luke frowned around the room at them. Not one had moved. Not one had made a sound. He lifted a hand as if he were reaching for a handful of air. He took a deep breath, and his eyes drifted shut. He looked like something was hurting. His head, maybe.
Maybe his heart.
“Nick …” Luke said, barely above a whisper. “Nick, they’re dead. They’re all dead.”
Nick felt like something had stabbed him.
“They’re dead,” Luke repeated numbly. “And I killed them.”
Cronal let his consciousness slip aside from the fading sparks of his fallen Pawns—they had outlived their usefulness anyway. He let his mind slide back down into the harmonics of the crystalline web along his nerves, until once again he could touch the structure of the meltmassif that lined the entire interior of his volcanic dome, and brought his mind into resonance with the alien slave minds who controlled the rock. He could sense their baffled frustration and pain as they tried to extend themselves into the liquefied meltmassif in Skywalker’s chamber, and he could feel the countervailing pressure of Skywalker’s Force-empowered will.
The Jedi had somehow learned to manipulate meltmassif using only the Force!
This did not dismay Cronal, however; on the contrary, it instantly transformed his frustration and doubt into unalloyed delight. A wonderful talent! It meant that once Cronal took over Skywalker’s body, he’d no longer have need of the Sunset Crown.
With Skywalker’s body—and his unparalleled connection to the Force—to complement Cronal’s unparalleled knowledge of Sith alchemy and the unique properties of meltmassif, he would indeed rule the galaxy.
He could, should he choose, become the galaxy.
Every living thing would answer to his will …
All that remained was to permanently impose his will upon Skywalker, though the boy had shown an astonishing gift for defying anyone’s plans for him—even plans enforced by the incalculable power of Cronal’s Darksight. That pesky Jedi training of his!
Cronal reached out through Darksight, his anger mounting, searching for release … and found the last thing he would have expected: another presence, one very near. Very near and very powerful. And yet, he could feel, comparatively untrained.
He frowned. How had it never occurred to him that Skywalker might not be an only child …?
Luke stood frozen, unable to move, unable to think, before the litter of dead Pawns—dead men and women, innocent men and women, dead by his hand. His mind spun with endless splintering echoes of his exchange with Nick on the Shadow Throne.
They’re all innocent?
Most of them. Some of ’em are like me—it’s been a while since I was innocent of anything.
Nick knelt beside one, a middle-aged woman, and pr
obed her neck with his fingertips for any hint of a pulse. He sighed and lowered his head. “I remember—there’s something grown into us. Our skulls. The Pawns’ skulls. An antitamper feature for the crystals and the crowns …”
“A deadman interlock,” Luke murmured.
Nick looked up, his mouth going slack. He lifted a hand to the bruise that swelled on his forehead above his right eye. “That punch …”
Luke nodded distantly. “Must have damaged the interlock, or you would have died right there on the throne.”
Nick’s eyes widened. “And if I had, how would you have gotten yourself—”
“I wouldn’t have,” Luke said. “That punch saved both our lives.”
“Then I guess we’re both lucky you’re such a nice guy.”
“Maybe we are,” Luke murmured. He looked down at the dead. “But it didn’t help them any.”
“Skywalker—Luke—this is not your fault. You didn’t bring them here. You didn’t open their skulls and stick stuff in their brains—you did everything anyone could.”
“Yeah,” Luke said. His voice came out thin and dry as moondust. “I’ll be sure and explain that to their families.”
“Blackhole killed these people. He killed them when he stuck those crystals in their heads.”
“And I pitched in and helped him do it.”
“This is a war, Luke. Innocent people get killed.”
“Maybe so,” Luke said softly. “But they’re not supposed to be killed by Jedi …”
Nick stood. “Come on, kid, snap out of it. Like an old friend of mine used to say, the difference between fighting a war and shoveling grasser poop is that in a war, even the guy in charge gets his hands dirty.”
