by James Luceno
The huge dark man spread his hands wide and welcoming. He wasn’t so much growling now as making a kind of whirring sound, like a cloud of flying insects.
“He says Here’s your light. What now? Will you shoot me with your empty blaster?”
Han said, “You mean this empty blaster?” and shot him.
The stun blast burst across the huge man’s chest, and he swayed but didn’t fall, so Han shot him again. And once more for good measure, because it was his last shot and he didn’t have anything better to do with it.
“Guess you never heard of the Smuggler’s Click, huh?” Han smiled at him. “Sure did sound like I was trying to fire an empty blaster, didn’t it?”
Han stopped smiling when he realized the huge man was smiling back.
The stun blasts didn’t seem to have affected him at all—though Han discovered to his astonishment that the man was standing ankle-deep in a puddle of liquefied stone.
Before Han could make sense of what he saw, the man had leapt across the floor and seized Han by the throat with one enormous hand and lifted him effortlessly into the air. Han smacked him across the face with his empty blaster hard enough to lay open one cheek to the bone, but the huge man didn’t seem to notice; he only cupped Han’s chin with his other hand and began to push his head back, and back, while pulling with the hand that wrapped Han’s neck and growling.
Cartilage crackled and something popped in his cervical vertebrae, and the only sound Han could make was a thin gargling rasp. He was starting to seriously wonder if maybe Leia’d had the right idea with her don’t antagonize him thing, until she shouted something that sounded, blurred and vague through the roaring in his ears, like Stop! If he dies so do I!, which Han thought was a pretty darn silly threat to make, since both of them dying appeared to be the point of this whole exercise—but to his foggily half-conscious astonishment, the pressure on his neck slackened and the roar in his ears faded as blood began to circulate again.
“Let him go.” Leia stood with the empty hold-out’s emitter jammed up under her own chin and her finger on the trigger. “I mean it.”
The huge hand opened, and Han sagged to the floor, gasping. The man stood with hands once again open and spread. Leia said, “Now back away from him. Slowly.”
The huge man took a step back, but only one.
“Keep going.”
The man dropped to one knee and slowly lowered his right hand to the floor, and in the instant his palm touched the luminescent lichen, the entire cavern went dark.
Han felt an inhumanly swift rush pass by him; he kicked blindly in the darkness but missed. All he could do was croak, “Leia, look out!”
“Han—” Whatever she’d hoped to say was smothered to snorts and gasping; then there were only muffled sounds of struggle. Han scrambled to his feet in the darkness and lunged toward the noise. Something hit him across the legs and he fell—
And the floor he fell on splashed.
This can’t be good, he thought. He managed to make it to his hands and knees … and the gooey floor hardened again, becoming stone that clamped solid around feet, calves, knees, and hands, and over his wrists to halfway up his forearms. “Let me go! Let me go, you freak! Don’t touch her. Don’t you dare touch her! Leia!”
The darkness gave back only empty echoes.
He knelt there, panting in pain and desperation. He tried to yank his hands free. He tried until his elbows creaked and his arms cramped. He couldn’t even wiggle his fingers. His toes he could wiggle—inside his boots—but his legs were entombed even more securely than his hands.
There was nothing he could do. Nothing at all.
And Leia was in the hands of the giant. Who was he? Han couldn’t guess. He couldn’t make any of this make sense.
And he was probably going to die without ever figuring it out.
Trust in the Force, she’d said. Well, if the Force had any plans to give him the occasional hand, he couldn’t think of a better time than right now.
“So?” he said out loud. “You there? Can you spare a little luck for your last Jedi’s best friend?”
From his vest pocket came a burst of static, and then a voice. “Han? Han, do you read? Han, come in! It’s Luke!”
Which would have been a real stroke of luck, practically an outright miracle, the kind of thing that would have made him a believer forever … if it weren’t for the fact that both his hands were encased in stone, so there was no way to fish the comlink out of his pocket and respond.
Han decided that the Force, if it actually did exist and work the way Luke and Leia always claimed it did, had a really, really nasty sense of humor.
The Falcon rocketed through the maze of caverns at incredible speed—speed that to Nick felt even faster owing to the tightening ridges of rock that threatened to take his head off, if not the entire turret, and the jagged outcroppings the ship had to dodge, and the constant bang and groan and screech of metal slamming into or rasping over stone—and behind it, the smaller, more nimble TIEs just kept coming. Only the twists and turns of the cavern maze sheltered them from the TIEs’ cannon fire; through the rare straightaways where the starfighters might have a shot, Nick pounded fire back into them from the dorsal turret. At close range and with no room to maneuver, no chance to even change the angle of their approach, TIE after TIE got an eyeballful of laser bolts and crashed or exploded.
His line about the Perthrillian nightwasp’s wings had been a boast—but it hadn’t been an empty boast.
Nick just kept shooting and tried not to think about the blur of rocky walls whipping past his turret so close that if he could open a window he could touch them … at the risk of having his arm torn off. “I hope you know where you’re going!”
“Just feeling my way.” Skywalker sounded almost cheerful. “How are we doing back there?”
Nick scowled at the twists and turns and sideways openings that so swiftly receded into the absolute darkness behind. “We’re in pretty good shape as long as they don’t come up with a way to shoot around corners!”
Then out of the darkness a matched pair of shining blue-white globes of energy swung into view and streaked straight toward him. “Spoke too soon.” He hauled on the turret yoke and tried to bring his guns to bear on those hurtling globes as they whipped through high-g pursuit arcs. “Torpedoes inbound. Looks like those bombers have caught up with us.”
“Target the torps.”
“Way ahead of you,” he said through his teeth as his line of laser bolts intersected the flight path of the nearer torpedo, but the other one shot through the blast and kept on coming. Nick, cursing the turret’s glacial traverse—“I’d be better off throwing rocks!”—finally brought the guns into line and intercepted the torpedo only a couple of dozen meters short of the Falcon’s sublights. “That was too close! Can you route control of the other turret through this one?”
“The other turret’s busy right now,” Skywalker said, as the ventral quad opened up and cannon bolts shot through the darkness to blast a narrow opening ahead.
The Falcon hit the not-quite-big-enough gap with the velocity of a point-blank bowcaster bolt. With a grinding whannng! and an impact that just about bounced Nick’s head through the transparisteel, the ship crashed through. “That was a little tight. I think we lost something.”
“Looks like the sensor dish,” Nick said, watching it tumble past him and vanish into the darkness behind.
“Oh, great. Han’s still teasing Lando about losing his last dish inside the second Death Star. I’ll never hear the end of this.”
“You’ll never hear the start of it if we don’t get out of here!” Nick said as four more hurtling blue stars swung into view, far back but coming on so fast they swelled from pinpricks to borgleballs in no more time than it took him to mutter, “Four? How am I supposed to take out four?”
He trained the quad cannons on the roof of the cavern just behind the ship and held down the triggers, filling the tunnel behind with clouds of
smoke and dust—which weren’t any impediment for the oncoming torpedoes—as well as a whole lot of chunks of falling rock. Which were.
The first torpedo clipped a falling boulder and glanced upward into the ceiling; its explosion brought down a curtain of cave-in that caught the other three torps in quick succession, close enough behind that the ship’s exterior floodlamps clearly illuminated the wall of tumbled and jumped stone that sealed the tunnel from top to bottom.
“Good luck finding a way to get bombers around that,” he muttered, feeling really pretty pleased with himself, until he realized he could still see the cave-in. That it wasn’t getting any farther away. “Hey, why are we stopped?”
“Look forward.”
Nick swiveled the turret. He said, “Oh.”
They’d run out of tunnel. Ahead was only a blank wall of stone. And behind, he’d just managed take the only way out and seal it up tighter than a Hrthgingian firegem vault.
“Um …” he said slowly. “Don’t back up.”
In the cockpit, Luke stared at the stone ahead in grim frustration. He’d been sure they were going the right way. Sure in the way he felt sure when the Force was telling him just how sure he should really feel. “I don’t get it,” he said, shaking his head. He turned to Aeona, who was strapped into the copilot couch. “This is wrong. This shouldn’t be here.”
“Don’t waste time worrying about what should be. Worry about what is.”
Luke decided not to tell her she sounded like Yoda.
She looked drawn, and there was a haunted edge in her voice. “Worry about finding a way out of here.”
He gave her a sympathetic look. “Claustrophobic?”
“Just a little,” she said with a reluctant nod. “But enough.”
“Me, too. Especially today. Don’t worry. The first thing you do when you’re lost is stop somewhere and ask for directions.” He keyed the comm system and entered Leia’s comlink code. “Leia? Leia, please respond. It’s Luke.”
No response. Not even static. “Leia, come in.”
“You can forget about that,” Aeona said. She waved a hand at the rock wall outside. “See the opalescence in that black stone, how it kind of shimmers? Looks like this whole cavern runs through a vein of meltmassif—that’s a kind of rock that—”
“I know what it is.” Luke flexed his hands; he could feel that shadowy echo of his nervous system—those tiny thin hairlines of crystal that spread throughout his body. “What’s it got to do with communications?”
“It blocks comm frequencies,” she said. “You’d need the comm suite of a capital ship to even have a chance of punching through.”
“Oh, is that all?” Luke found himself wearing a half smile very much like the one he imagined he’d be seeing on Han’s face right about now. He began toggling switches and striking keys. “Give me a minute, here.”
“I’m telling you it won’t help.”
“This ship was the personal vehicle of a commanding general in the Alliance of Free Planets.” He completed the sequence, and a hatch opened in the rear bulkhead to display an enormous state-of-the-art comm unit. “He resigned his commission, but Han’s just not the type to give back upgrades, you know? This unit can punch a signal all the way to the galactic rim. It’ll draw most of the power from the reactor core, but we’re not going anywhere anyway.” He looked up at the comm unit. “Leia? Are you there?”
Still no response. Luke frowned and clicked over to Han’s setting. “Han? Han, do you read? Han, come in! It’s Luke!”
The comm channel sputtered. “General Skywalker! We heard you’re in a bit of trouble.”
Luke frowned. “Lando? What are you doing in this system?”
“Asking myself that same question about sixty times an hour. What’s your position?”
“I’m not sure. Underground somewhere. I’m trying to find Leia—I could feel her in the Force near here, but I can’t anymore.”
“We lost contact with Han and Leia only a few minutes ago. Han said something about being in a cave. That’s why we’re monitoring his comlink setting. Listen, you’re not the only ones in trouble here. We could lose the whole task force.”
“We’ll lose more than that,” Luke muttered.
“Sorry? Didn’t copy that. Can you repeat?”
“No. Never mind.”
“Luke, I’m doing the best I can, but we really need you in this fight. How soon can you resume command?”
“I—can’t. It’ll take too long to explain. You run the battle, Lando. You’re a better general than I’ll ever be, anyway.”
“Couldn’t prove it by today. Keep me apprised; you just say the word and command is yours. Listen, there’s someone here who wants to speak with you.”
“Oh, oh, Master Luke! Oh, thank goodness you’re all right!”
“All right is a bit of an overstatement,” Luke said. “But it’s good to hear your voice, Threepio.”
“Oh, Master Luke, I’m most concerned! The Princess and Captain Solo are in terrible danger—and so are you!”
“I know,” Luke said. “But how do you know?”
“I have been monitoring the communications of their attackers—despite their perfectly barbarous diction. I am fluent in over—”
“You’ve told me before. What attackers? Where are they?”
“Please hurry, Master Luke—Artoo may have already been destroyed!”
“Threepio, tell me where they are!”
“Quite nearby, actually—no more than fifteen meters away, directly outward along the planetary radius.”
“They’re right above us?”
“Oh, yes. Their attackers have located you precisely—they’ve been discussing whether to, ah—the phrase translates roughly as imprison, or sequester, but it’s clearly some form of attack—whether to attack you now, or if they should pursue the Half-One, whoever that may be.”
Luke was no longer listening; he frowned dubiously up at the ceiling of smooth black stone above the cockpit. “Fifteen meters—that’s an awful lot of rock to cut through, even with a lightsaber.”
“That’s not ordinary rock,” Aeona said. “It’s meltmassif.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Then your friends are lucky I’m around, because I do. Which is something I hope you’ll explain to them when we find them, because I have a feeling they might be a little cranky with me.”
She reached over to the antipersonnel system and triggered the hull chargers. “Take it up,” she said. “Nice and slow.”
“Oh,” Luke said, understanding as the stun charge crackled over the Falcon’s skin. “I would have figured that out. Eventually.”
“Sure, I know,” she said sympathetically. “You’ve had kind of a tough day.”
“That’s one way to put it.” The ship rose to touch the meltmassif overhead. The stone instantly liquefied, sluicing down over the hull armor to pool in the small closed-off section of tunnel below. “How long does this stuff take to reharden?”
“I’m not sure. Why?”
“TIE fighters don’t have antipersonnel systems, and laser cannons can’t be set for stun.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “So we don’t have to worry a lot about unwelcome company. How much farther?”
Luke searched the Force. “Right … about … here.”
The Falcon breached the surface of the now-liquid stone like an Aquarian demonsquid hunting a leaping gnooroop. Rivers of meltmassif drained off the hull, as well as off and around a filthy human who clung fiercely to the only part of the ship that wasn’t sparking with several thousand volts of stun charge: the cockpit window.
Luke … Though inaudible, the words were clear on Han’s lips. He took her, Luke. She’s gone.
Cronal paused in the archway of the Cavern of the Shadow Throne. His Throne still hovered on its platform of meltmassif, all dark and sinister in the bloody glow of the lava-fall behind it. Looking upon the cavern through Kar Vastor’s eyes, he felt a bit me
lancholy; it truly was a pity that his magnificently staged reality holodrama would never reach the broad audience it deserved.
But such were the vicissitudes of life and art; rather than mourning his spoiled masterpiece, he resolved to focus entirely upon the truly important task of permanently securing a new and healthy body. Not to mention killing everyone who might know, or even suspect, that this young and lovely girl was in fact an old and ugly man.
He shifted the unconscious Skywalker girl from the massive shoulder of his stolen body and set her gently down.
He could not help taking a moment to contemplate her, as she lay upon the stone, lovely and graceful even in unconsciousness. He could not help recalling how he had watched her, through his years in Imperial Intelligence; he’d monitored her anti-Imperial activities for a considerable span prior to her open break and alleged treason at the time of the Alderaan affair. Young Senator Organa, he mused. Princess Leia Skywalker, hiding in plain sight for all those years. Who’d have thought it?
She was a superior choice to her brother in almost every way. After all, she was no Jedi; in her body, no one would expect him to go gallivanting across the galaxy, risking his life to save strangers. No, after the traumatic experience of surviving the Imperial trap that had taken the lives of her brother, her raffish paramour, and so many of her friends and allies, she would reluctantly retire from her life of adventure and devote herself full-time to politics.
She was perfect.
He closed his eyes and let his mind slip partially back into the ancient decrepit body that lay in its life-support chamber. From within that skull, he could send forth his mind into the rock from which the cavern had been shaped, and seize once more the wills of the creatures that used it as their physical forms.
The bridge that had connected the cavern’s ledge to the Throne grew once more, carrying the Skywalker girl and Kar Vastor’s bulk out to the platform of the Shadow Throne before once more shrinking away. The stone of the platform itself rippled and spread and curved upward to entomb the unconscious girl and the immobile man in a seamless rocky shell that hovered far out above the lake of molten lava.
