by James Luceno
For these particular Melters, the Golden Age of Paradise had come to an abrupt and catastrophic end, as the chunks of their shattered home planet had drifted across the orbit of Mindor. Captured by its gravity, they had fallen to its surface in each and every rock storm, and soon found that their new home was less a home than a prison. An oubliette.
A cosmic extermination camp.
Many, many individual Melters had been lost as their rocks had burned away in the atmosphere, and the radiation-absorbing qualities of the vaporized meltmassif screened the survivors from Taspan’s life-giving rays. The survivors were slowly dying of energy asphyxiation.
They were drowning in the Dark.
Each rockfall brought new Melters into Mindor’s lethal gloom, and every meteor that burned away deepened the shadow that was killing them.
That shadow also cut them off from the rest of the Melter community out among the asteroids; they simply did not have the power to drive a signal very far into the planet’s atmosphere. All they could do was wait, struggling to survive, and try to comfort the new victims falling into this planetary prison every day.
Comfort was what the Melters had originally sought from humans, as well; the human nervous system produced a tiny trickle of energy in the general wavelength of the Meltermind, which drew Melters to humans the way a glow rod attracted cave moths.
Cave moths, Luke thought. Perhaps that was what had happened to him at the cave … something in the meltmassif had been stealing light from inside him …
When these organic life-forms, these tiny flickering candle flames of warmth and light in the permanent midnight that was Mindor, had started shooting Melters with stun blasts that randomized the microcrystalline structure of meltmassif, the Melters had begun sequestering them in self-defense. There had never been malice in their attacks at all; they didn’t even understand that their captives were dying—they were unclear on the whole concept of organic death. It wasn’t murder, or war, or even violence, because they really didn’t comprehend any of those concepts, either. Their campaign against humanity had been, to them, merely pest control.
As all this information filtered through his consciousness, Luke at last became aware that the stellar cluster of which he was the center was itself moving, rolling through the Dark as though in orbit around some vastly more massive gravity source, something so huge and dark that it could be seen only by its effect on the stars of the Melters in his cluster. One by one they were peeled from his cluster, stripped away to spiral into decaying orbits around the inescapable void until one by one they flared with a last brief burst of light as they slipped over some invisible event horizon and vanished forever.
An event horizon of the Dark, consuming the last of the light in his universe …
Oh, he thought. I get it. It’s a black hole.
Some kind of metaphor for how Blackhole—how appropriate that old code name seemed now—was controlling the Melters, he figured; Blackhole must be luring them down somehow, cutting them off from each other so their only source of light was what he chose to feed them …
Even thinking about it seemed to increase the imaginary black hole’s gravity gradient; he found himself drifting closer and closer to the event horizon, gathering speed as his spiral orbit tightened, more and more of the stars around him falling away, some to vanish into the black hole’s insatiable maw, others breaking free into higher orbits until he was entirely alone, no star left between him and the black hole …
Except one.
One star like none of the others still swung through an orbit lower than his: a blue-white supergiant, far larger, far brighter than any his imagination had so far produced. This one did not feed upon his Force light, but shone with its own, as brilliant and powerful as his. It fell in a tightening tide-locked gyre down the black hole’s gravity well, and as it fell the relentless pull of the void was stripping a huge jet of energy and mass from it, a fountain of star-stuff ripped from its heart and sucked down across the event horizon to vanish forever in dark beyond the Dark.
And he knew this star was Leia.
He reached out to her, but there was nothing to grasp, nor any hand to grasp it; he’d had some crazy half-formed idea to grab her and slingshot around the black hole and out again, because he’d half forgotten that this was only a vision after all, only a metaphor, and if he tried to stretch it into reality it would shatter. So instead he brought his light to bear, focusing a beam of the Force upon his sister star.
Leia, hang on, he tried to send. Don’t give in to the Dark. I’m coming for you. Hang on.
He felt no response, only overwhelming sadness and crushing despair and that empty, lost meaninglessness at the end of the universe, and he couldn’t even tell if this came from her or from himself. He tried to focus the Force on her, to make his beam of light a conduit for strength that might save her, even as the tiny crack of light he’d found in one imaginary pebble had saved him—but somehow his light could not add to hers. He burned a different color, but no more brightly.
He remembered too well that terrible void, the endless lack that was deeper than any darkness. If only there were some way he could show her that all the light she’d ever need shone from her own self … but that was only a metaphor.
Wasn’t it?
What Ben and Yoda had called the dark side wasn’t actually dark; it had nothing at all to do with the visual spectrum. The phrase dark side of the Force was just an expression. An evocative shorthand to express a broad range of negative characteristics.
A metaphor.
They could have called it the evil side, or the death-and-destruction side, or the enslaving-the-whole-galaxy side. But they didn’t.
They called it the dark side. But they’d never seen dark like this. Or had they?
Maybe they had been here, at the end of all things—or at least glimpsed it. Maybe they had seen the truth of the Dark. Maybe that’s why they never talked about a “light side.” Because there wasn’t one.
But, Luke thought, gazing upon the brilliant blaze that was his sister, just because there’s no “light side” doesn’t mean there’s no light.
He had thought he was bringing light with him into the darkness, by holding on to the Force. Now he saw that the Force’s light didn’t shine on him. It shone through him.
He was the light in the darkness.
He saw it now, and it made sense to him at last. That same light shone through Leia, and as soon as he understood that, he began to sense other lights, pinprick stars far out in the dark. Some of them he recognized: Han, and Lando … Wedge and Tycho, Hobbie and Wes and the rest of the Rogues … Nick, and Aeona Cantor, Lieutenant Tubrimi and Captain Tirossk and so many, many others, sailors and marines, even the impossibly distant spray of vanishingly faint stars that must have been the stormtroopers, for even they were lights in the darkness. All of them were stars.
And every star, every life, was a thing of beauty.
And Leia couldn’t see them. She couldn’t even look their way, not anymore. Her star was tide-locked to the black hole—its gravity would not allow her to turn her face away. He couldn’t even get her attention.
And the black hole was aware of him now; the abyss he’d stared into was now staring into him. He felt its emptiness that nothing could fill, its bleak hunger that could never be satisfied. In his mind, it swelled toward him like jaws opening to swallow the universe, capturing every scrap of light and hope and love that Luke could channel from the Force. The longer he stared, the more he lost, and nothing he could do would help Leia at all.
Once that maw closed around her, she would be lost to the Dark forever.
All right, he thought. I guess I’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.
He opened his eyes. Han was crouched at his side, his face dark with fear. “Hey, buddy—you all right?”
Luke said, “No.”
Han’s mouth drew into a flat line. “And Leia?”
“She’s alive.”
“And?”
Luke let the shadow in his heart show in his eyes. That was all the answer Han needed. “Okay, then,” he said with a grim nod. “What now?”
Luke stood. “Nick,” he said.
Near one of the Falcon’s landing skids, Nick gave a guilty start. “Uh, yeah?”
“Who is Kar, and what is it you don’t want me to know about him?”
Nick’s jaw dropped. “You—how did you—I mean, what?”
Luke’s expression never flickered. He waited.
“Oh.” Nick lifted a hand to the band of scar around his temples. “I get it,” he sighed. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything you can tell me in five minutes or less,” Luke said, “because that’s about all the time we have to win this fight.”
Within a second after Cronal had given the order to engage, the stormtrooper who had received that order triggered a relay that initiated a preprogrammed series of instructions to the crews tending an array of gravity stations buried deep below the surface of Mindor. No one beyond the troopers actually posted to them even knew these gravity stations existed. Arranged in a broad ring around the Shadow Base, they were substantially different from those out among the asteroids—both in technology and function. Rather than the fairly standard gravity wells projected by the stations out in the system, these buried stations generated a phenomenon much more along the lines of the gravity slice that had destroyed the Justice; the technology involved, like that of the gravity slice, was the product of the Imperial weapons-development facility on Mindor’s sister planet, the one that had been destroyed in the Big Crush.
In fact, the phenomenon produced by these buried stations was precisely what had caused the Big Crush.
The stations powered up. Planes of invisible energy spidered through the rock between them, beneath the vast volcanic dome of the Shadow Base; where these planes intersected, they produced lines of gravitational gradient on the order of small black holes, instantly consuming the rock they touched and producing a titanic blast of extremely hard radiation that flashed the surrounding rock into superheated plasma. This released more radiation to vaporize more rock, in a growing cascade that soon sliced through the surface of the planet above in a ring around the base.
To the troopers who crewed the ring of ground-defense turbolaser towers, this was instantly lethal; the radiation flarewall came out of the ground at a shallow angle that touched the towers and vaporized them in a fraction of a second. The Republic marines and trooper infantry, dug in and fighting on the surface around the ion-turbo STOEs on the dome itself, had a second or two to look up into the blinding white that surrounded them before it melted their armor and burned every exposed soldier to fine black ash, while the empty crater left by the dome’s departure filled almost instantly with molten lava that boiled over and spread over the ground on all sides, consuming everything that had survived the initial blast.
The only effects felt by Fenn Shysa and the Mandalorian mercenaries, grimly fighting room-to-room through the gravity-gun emplacement, was the sudden loss of comm channels and a deep rumbling vibration like a distant groundquake, followed by a subtle increase in perceived weight, as though every man had instantly gained a kilo or two.
To the pilots of Rogue Squadron, dogfighting over the base, it looked like the entire volcanic dome had been cupped in a huge bowl of impossibly bright light that swiftly darkened as the ionizing radiation ignited the atmosphere in a firestorm that sucked sand and dust and rock upward to mask its glare. The next thing they noticed was the shrieking of cockpit radiation alarms—and that the radiation seemed to have cooked their positional sensors: Though the sensors insisted that their starfighters were still high above the planet, their eyes told them they were falling swiftly toward the dome.
It was Wes Janson who first shouted the truth over the comm. “Wait, I get it! We’re not falling toward the base—it’s coming up at us!”
Characteristically, the most comprehensive grasp of the situation, as well as its most succinct analysis, belonged to Lando Calrissian. From the bridge of the Remember Alderaan, hovering with the rest of the task force in a sea of vast impact craters below the horizon, he watched the radiation flare and the mushroom clouds … and then watched the entire volcanic dome rise from the mushroom cloud and accelerate toward space.
He understood instinctively what was happening. The volcano itself was a solid mass of radiation-resistant stone; the base would be entirely impervious even to the gargantuan power of the stellar flares. All the bad guys would have to do was cruise away, beyond the perimeter of the gravity wells; then they could use the volcano itself as a radiation shield, to shelter whatever smaller craft they might want to use to flash away into hyperspace.
Using skills fine-tuned by a lifetime of living by his ability to instantly assess odds and opportunities, he reflected with part of his mind that it was actually a pretty nifty idea. He filed it away for future consideration; after all, there were a number of systems where intense stellar radiation made conventional ships too dangerous to use. But a flying shield, to provide cover for ships moving in and out?
There were some definite possibilities here.
Then another part of his brain—the part that ignored odds and opportunities to focus directly on threats to life and limb—reminded him that none of these “definite possibilities” would ever come to pass if his ship was destroyed along with the rest of the Rapid Response Task Force, which was an increasing likelihood, because the ion-turbo emplacements and that insanely dangerous gravity gun were on the upper curve of the dome, which meant they had just lifted off along with the rest of the base. Which meant that once the base achieved orbit, a simple half-barrel roll would aim those weapons back down at the surface of Mindor.
At anywhere on the planet’s surface. Including the craters where the Remember Alderaan and the rest of the Rapid Response Task Force were currently hiding. A hiding place they could not leave, because to swing around to the sunside of the planet would expose the ships to the stellar flares and destroy them just as conclusively.
Lando’s comprehensive grasp and succinct analysis of the situation required only four words.
“This,” he said, “is a problem.”
CHAPTER 16
Watching the flying volcano slowly rotate as it rose into Mindor’s night sky pricked beads of sweat across Lando’s brow. The lieutenant at TacOps reported an estimated eighty seconds to the firing window for the nearside ion-turbo cannons, and only twenty seconds more for the full array, including the gravity gun. “Fenn,” he muttered into his personal comlink, “give me some good news. I mean it.”
When this request reached Fenn Shysa, the Protector commandant was lying flat behind the remnants of a blast-shattered wall within the gravity gun’s infantry bunker, along with the mercenary commander and six commandos, all shrouded in smoke and covered in rock dust and all doing their best to impersonate several hundred bloodthirsty Mandalorians. This was for the benefit of two full companies of stormtrooper heavy infantry who were holding a pair of redoubts to either side of a blast door that looked like it could withstand a good-sized fusion bomb. The purpose of this impersonation was to distract the stormtroopers from the actual several hundred bloodthirsty Mandalorians, who were about to cut through a wall on the redoubt’s flank. Any second now.
Or perhaps any minute now.
He hoped.
“There’s nothing good to tell, Lando!” Fenn had to shout to hear himself over the whine of blasterfire and the rolling crashes of thermal dets and heavy weapons. He stuck his rifle up over the rubble and sprayed fire blindly into the smoke. “This place is armored like a Hutt’s treasure vault—our breaching charges barely even leave scorch marks! Maybe your marines have something heavier?”
On the Remember Alderaan’s bridge, Lando rubbed his eyes; from what he’d seen, he didn’t figure any marines had survived except the ones already fighting within the ion-turbo emplacements. He took a deep b
reath. “All right, Plan B.”
He snapped out a series of orders that had his entire bridge crew staring at him blankly, mouths agape. “You heard me,” he said. “Do it!”
The bridge officers jerked back to their panels. Lando turned to C-3PO. “What are you waiting for?”
“Me?” The droid pressed a hand to his chest. “What am I supposed to do?”
“This ship has Mon Cal systems. The interdiction ships are Corellian,” Lando explained as patiently as he could manage. “They don’t talk the same language.”
“Well, of course they don’t.” C-3PO gave a burst of static that sounded suspiciously like a contemptuous sniff. “I’ve never met a Corellian system that had any manners at all, whereas Remember Alderaan—despite her somewhat coarse sense of humor—is a system of exceptional refinement. Even elegance—”
“Yes, fine, whatever,” Lando said. “Those Corellian ships also don’t have the calculating power to pull this off—we need to give them access to Alderaan’s processor array.”
“My goodness! That would require the services of—”
“The most capable and sophisticated protocol droid ever constructed,” Lando finished for him, with an encouraging smile. “Get to work.”
C-3PO gasped. “General! Me? What a lovely thing to say! Really, I am most gratified—”
“Be gratified while you work.” Lando turned away and again triggered his personal comlink. “Fenn, I need you to fall back.”
There was silence for a second or two, then a grim, “How far?”
