by James Luceno
All of which made him a less-than-ideal body for Cronal to spend the next few decades inhabiting, and so Cronal had never taken the final step of permanent consciousness transfer … which only made this particular test subject all the more ideal for this particular task: a remote body, through which he could exert the whole of his powers, without risk to himself.
After all, when one needed a job done properly …
And so Cronal closed his eyes and brought the Sunset Crown down from its resting place onto his hairless scalp. When he opened his eyes again, the eyes he opened were not his.
They were the eyes of Kar Vastor.
CHAPTER 15
Luke hit the deck rolling. His flight suit was flame-retardant, but that wouldn’t stop the molten cinder and white-hot shards of the Falcon’s armor that the explosion had blown in through the hatch from burning right through it. Rolling might not have done him much good either, except that the Falcon’s automated fire suppressors were squirting supercooled extinguishing foam all over the cargo hold. Luke got himself good and coated with the gunk, then struggled up to his hands and knees.
Nick and Aeona and most of the others were similarly down and rolling, but a few just stood and screamed as they burned. Luke stretched out into the Force and flattened every one of them with a single hard shove, which might not have been necessary since the ongoing explosions were bouncing the ship around enough that nobody would have been on their feet much longer anyway, but Luke wasn’t about to leave that to chance.
He kicked off the wall and slid through the cascading foam over to Nick and Aeona, shouting above the blasts and screams. “Get your people secured and ready to move, and have them seal that ramp door! You’ll find three or four HatchPatch units in the rear storage compartment. Any questions?”
“Yeah—who put you in charge?” Aeona snapped.
“You did, sweetheart,” Nick said. “When you marooned his sister and his best friend. Suck it up and do what you’re told.”
Her eyes flashed like a blaster charging to overload. “You are gonna be in so much trouble …”
“If we live through this, you can spank me.”
“Don’t think I won’t.”
“Get yourself to the cockpit,” Luke told her. “Activate as many thrusters as you can bring online, and on my order fire them full ahead.”
“Ahead? That’ll only drive us deeper into the ground!”
“Someday, girl,” Nick said, “you and I are gonna have a talk about arguing with Jedi. He’s got a plan.” He turned to Luke. “Tell me you’ve got a plan.”
“More or less.” Luke got up—with a little help from the Force to keep his balance in the soapy, slippery extinguishing foam—and started trotting aft.
“That’s not the most reassuring thing you could have said. Where are you going?”
“Quad turret,” Luke said without slowing.
“Skywalker, give me the other one,” Nick said.
Luke stopped and looked back. “Can you shoot?”
Nick made it to his feet. “I can clip the wings of a Perthrillian nightwasp at a thousand meters and never wake it up.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“Hey, the guys in there right now couldn’t even hit me.”
“Good point. Come on.”
When they got to the access junction, both turrets were empty. “Looks like they bailed.”
Luke moved into one of the turrets and nodded out the transparisteel at the carpet of fire that was the cinder pit. “Do you blame them?”
Nick only shrugged as he belted himself in. “It’s not the worst idea these guys have had today,” he called back.
Luke got himself buckled, as well. With a flick of the Force, he reinitialized the circuit that had deactivated the ventral turret. “Nice friends you have.”
“She’s not a bad person,” Nick insisted as he twisted the control yoke back and forth, checking the turret’s servo response. “She just doesn’t have a lot of patience for the little things.”
“Little things like laws and justice and other people’s lives?” The turret’s tactical screen lit up with unfriendlies. “Here they come!”
Nick hauled on the control yoke and triggered the guns even before the turret swung into line, stitching a curving stream of cannon bolts up the inner wall of the caldera just as a flight of a dozen or so TIEs whipped over the rim and streaked down on strafing runs. The lead TIE flew right into Nick’s fire and its cockpit viewscreen shattered; it plowed straight on down into the cinder pit at full speed and exploded, but the rest of his shots glanced off armor and collector panels. “This is gonna be a problem,” Nick said through his teeth. “Got one, though.”
Luke was holding down the triggers in his own turret. “It wasn’t starfighters that set this whole crater on fire. Watch out for bombers.”
“Copy that.”
TIEs swooped down upon them and cannon blasts rocked the ship; Nick caught another one right in the eyeball, then one more. He let out a whoop. “That’s three! How many you drop so far, Skywalker?”
“None,” Luke said tightly.
“What, I’m outshooting you?” Nick poured enough fire into another TIE’s collector panel that it lost control and crashed into its wingman. “Shee, they don’t make Jedi like they used to.”
“Nick, be quiet.”
“Hey, I’m not gloating—well, maybe a little—”
“I know. I need to concentrate.”
“On what?” Nick twisted around so he could look up at Skywalker and out through the dorsal turret, which was when he understood why Skywalker hadn’t shot down any ships. He wasn’t shooting at the ships. Nick also understood why it was that no missiles or bombs or cannons were blasting the Falcon to tiny bits.
Because that’s what Skywalker had been shooting: the missiles and bombs and cannon fire raining down from the swarm of enemy ships.
“Oh,” Nick said softly. He went back to shooting. But he couldn’t stop looking at the flames licking upward from the burning cinder pit, and he couldn’t help noticing that while Skywalker’s blasts were intercepting the cannon bolts and missiles that would actually hit the Falcon, all the near-misses were splashing so much molten rock around that it’d probably be melting through the ship’s hull armor any second now anyway. Just as he realized this, the turret’s tactical screen showed blips for six TIE bombers inbound, and when he pointed all this out to Skywalker, the young Jedi’s only response was to key the cockpit channel on the intercom. “Hey—” He glanced over at Nick. “What’s her name again?”
“Aeona.”
“Aeona, this is Luke. I hope you got some thrusters hot.”
“We’re a long way off full power—”
“We’ll take what we’ve got. Full ahead. Angle the attitude jets for extra boost.”
“Skywalker?” Nick said. “You just ordered her to bury this ship in a river of molten fraggin’ lava.”
“Yes. Reset your turret to default position and fire on my order.”
“Um, you do know that default is forward? Which is down.” Desperation sharpened his voice. “You do know that’s the opposite of up, which is where the bad guys are coming from?”
“Nick,” Luke said, “you’re arguing with a Jedi again.”
Nick’s response was a snarl of frustration that contained, as its only intelligible words, nikkle-nut Jedi ruskakk as he jabbed toggles on the turret’s fire-control board.
Luke no longer looked at his own tactical screen. He didn’t even glance outside the turret. He didn’t need to see outside; he was paying attention to inside.
Inside his head. Inside the Force.
He felt the Falcon’s quad turrets swing into line; he felt the TIE bombers whip down over the rim of the caldera, and he felt them release unguided proton bombs in a mechanically precise sequence; he felt the arc of the falling bombs, and he felt their impact points, and he felt how their blast radii would overlap precisely at the Falcon’s positio
n and crush the ship like a discarded ration pack.
He said, “Nick. Now.”
The quads opened up at full power, blasting chains of laser bolts straight down into the lake of fire between the ship’s forward mandibles. The impact area flashed to superheated plasma that shot gouts of burning rock up over the Falcon’s hull armor. At the same instant, the port dorsal attitude thrusters fired in tandem with the starboard ventrals, exerting a powerful rotational force that, as the quads continued to vaporize and liquefy the cinder in which the mandibles were buried, was literally screwing the ship into the ground.
“You think this is helping?” Nick yelped.
“Shh. This isn’t my best trick, either.”
Luke focused on nothing until he could feel everything. Nick’s chatter, his own fatigue, the battle outside, and the doom lowering upon Leia all flowed into him and out again like water, leaving no trace behind. He let himself become clear as a crystal bell, so that he could chime with one pure note.
That note was a tiny twist of intention that the Force channeled high into the atmosphere to gently—very gently—nudge the falling proton bombs. This very gentle nudge altered their trajectories by no more than a degree or two apiece, giving each a bit of an outward curve, so that instead of landing in a precise ring one hundred meters in diameter with the Falcon at its centerpoint, they landed in an equally precise ring four hundred meters in diameter, which meant that their overlapping blast radii did not so much crumple the ship as give it a very, very firm squeeze, much like how one might squeeze a rakmelon pip between one’s fingers. And very much like this metaphoric rakmelon pip, the Falcon squirted free with considerable force.
Straight down.
That should have presented a greater problem, but the explosion of the proton bombs further weakened what turned out to be the cracked and fragile upper shell of a vast volcanic bubble that formed the floor of the cinder pit; the shock waves from the bombs, combined with the cannon fire from the Falcon’s turrets and the corkscrewing motion of its downward pressure, shattered the rocky shell so that the ship broke through and plummeted down a rugged natural vent that was several hundred meters deep, falling through a rain of boulders, jagged rock shards, and burning cinder while it bounced and clanged off rocks on either side.
Nick’s comment of “Whoa-aye-yi-yi-yiiii …” trailed off to silence when he ran out of breath. Luke was clambering out of his turret. “Aeona! Autosequence the attitude jets and engage the repulsorlifts!”
“Oh, you think?”
Luke braced himself in the access hatch as the Falcon jerked itself level. The repulsorlift engines screamed. The ship slammed into the pile of rubble at the bottom of the vent with much clanging and screeching of tortured metal, and finally sat, while rocks and cinder and unidentified debris clattered down on top of it.
Nick blinked at the pile of rubble on which his turret currently rested. “Okay, that was original. You know if she’d been half a second slower with the repulsorlifts, you’d have been scraping what was left of me out of here with a spatula.” He leaned forward to peer up through the dorsal turret at the tiny ragged disk of firelight and blaster flashes that was the hole through which they’d fallen. “And you did this on purpose?”
“Sort of. I knew we had to get underground; I just wasn’t sure how we’d do it. Nice of the bad guys to help us out, huh?”
“Remind me to send ’em a thank-you card.”
Luke fished out a comlink as he headed forward. “Aeona, cut the thrusters and cycle all power to the repulsorlifts. I’m on my way.”
“On your way where?” Nick asked.
“Somebody has to fly this bucket.”
“Fly it? Down here?”
“Yes. And from what I’ve seen of your girlfriend’s piloting skills, she’s not my first choice.”
“You sure you can do it?”
“There’s only one man alive who can fly this ship better than I can.”
“Then maybe we should get him.”
“That’s exactly my plan. Take the dorsal turret and mind your tactical screens.”
“Huh? What for?”
“TIE fighters.”
Nick craned his neck. Down through that tiny-looking opening far, far above came a stream of starfighters. “Ohhh, great. What’s gonna stop them from blowing us to atoms while you get this crate up and moving?”
Luke grinned at him, but that grin didn’t look so much happy as it looked like a predator’s fang display. “You are,” he said, and ran for the cockpit.
Han and Leia stood back-to-back in the middle of a tightening ring of rock creatures, sweeping their blasters through short arcs to spread the stun charges around, but each blast bought them only a few seconds, and neither had more than a handful of shots remaining. Chewbacca lay unconscious, half-buried in rehardened stone, and R2-D2 lay on his side, photoprojector dark, smoke trailing up from his burnt-out capacitors. The only light in the cavern came from the crackling energy that played over the creatures as they pushed closer and closer.
“This is a stupid way to die!” Han snarled, slagging another couple of them with a single shot. “We don’t know what these things are, we don’t know what they’re doing here, we don’t even know why they’re mad at us!”
“They’re not mad,” Leia said breathlessly as she fired again, and once more. “I can feel it. They don’t even want to hurt us. Not really. They only want to bury us in the rock and go about their business.”
“What—we just show up in the wrong place at the wrong time and we’re gonna die for it?”
“Han—” Leia triggered her hold-out and got not even a glow from the muzzle. “Han, I’m out.”
“All right, all right,” Han said through his teeth; his DL’s grip alert had been tingling for the last four or five shots, which meant he had only a handful left, even at this half-power setting. He threw his arm around Leia’s shoulders and started backing up, throwing a shot or two behind to start a gap in the ring of creatures. “Stick close. Maybe we can work over to some of their current guests. Maybe somebody’s got a charged blaster tucked away somewhere we can get at it—”
“Somebody’s coming,” Leia said. “Han—somebody’s out there! Coming for us!”
“Is it Luke? Please say it’s Luke.” He silently swore that if she said yes, he would never, ever make another joke about the Force, or Jedi, or lightsabers, or really, anything else. For the rest of his life. Or longer, if necessary.
Over by the cavern mouth, rock creatures suddenly collapsed into puddles of liquid stone.
Leia said, her voice hushed, “It’s not Luke.”
The collapse spread like a slow-motion shock wave; creature after creature simply melted away, their electric crackles fading to silence; as the last of them fell, their light winked out, leaving the cavern in a darkness beyond darkness. Darkness like being blind.
Darkness as if the existence of light had been only a dream.
In that absolute night, something growled.
“What the hell was that?” Han asked. It had sounded like a Corellian sand panther warning off an intruder in its den.
“It says,” Leia said, low, “The dark is your refuge. Enter the dark as a weary traveler enters sleep.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? And since when do you speak … whatever that is?”
“I don’t. I just … understand him somehow.”
More growls, moving now; Han tracked the sound with the emitter of his DL-44. “What’s he saying now?”
Her arms tightened around his chest. “He says he can smell your fear.”
“Yeah? Smell this.” Han popped off another stun blast. In the instant of glare, he saw it. Him. A dark shape, bigger than the sand panther he sounded like, darting along the wall. Han fired again, and again, but his shots splashed harmlessly on the stone; this guy—this thing, whatever—moved too fast for Han to even get a clear look at it. He set his jaw and very lightly flicked the DL’s trigger twice, then agai
n, then twice more, without ever pulling it past the break, so that it made a succession of dry clicks. He let a muffled curse escape through his teeth.
The growling became a deep, dry chuckle that he didn’t need Leia to translate.
“You think that’s funny? Turn on a light and I’ll show you something funny!”
“Han, don’t antagonize him!” Leia whispered.
“Why not? You think anything I do is gonna make this worse?”
“Yes,” she said. “I think he’s here for me. I think if you can keep your mouth shut, he might let you live.”
There came another deep, half-growled chuckle that didn’t need translating, and from off to Han’s left, a faint glow began, greenish and cold. In the featureless dark, he couldn’t tell how big it might be, or how far away, but the glow spread slowly, growing into an amorphous patch of light, and in the middle of that light there was a darkness, a shadow, in the shape of a man’s splayed hand. The glow spidered outward around the hand, sending forth filaments that themselves spread like ice crystals forming on the inside of a window, limning the silhouette of a huge, powerful man, crouching on the floor like a katarn preparing to spring. The glow came from some kind of luminescent lichen that seemed to grow outward from the man’s hand; the bigger it got, the faster it spread, until in one final rush it coated the entire floor and walls of the cavern and grew together across the ceiling.
Han’s mouth was dry as sand, and he had to cough his throat clear. “Did—did he do that?”
“I think so,” Leia whispered hoarsely.
The man stood. Han tried to swallow his mouthful of imaginary sand and adjusted his grip on his blaster. This guy was huge.
He was almost as tall as Chewbacca, and twice as broad across his bare chest and shoulders. He wore spacer’s pants, stretched drumhead tight across thighs as big around as Han’s waist. His skin was dark as timmosun, his hairless scalp shone as if it had been polished, and when he smiled, his teeth looked jagged and sharp enough to make a Barabel jealous.
