by James Luceno
To him, it looked like the Dark.
It would be some consolation for the frustration he had faced these past days. How was it that everywhere he turned, there seemed to be a Skywalker waiting to bar his path?
Still, the Skywalker boy’s weakness had been a gift. How fortunate he was that Skywalker had lacked the strength of character to simply kill him.
Even in Cronal’s wandering through the trackless wastes of hope where he had lost his way, he still had managed to deliver a blow to the infant second Republic from which it would never recover. Not to mention that he still had the advanced gravitic technology made possible by the properties of meltmassif, and he had the Shadow Crown itself.
Yes, he had lost his best chance to acquire a young, powerful, and influential body to carry his consciousness, but he still had his original body with all his powers intact. In a few days—long enough to be certain that every Republic ship still in the Taspan system was crewed only by the dead—he could return, harvest the meltmassif from the asteroid clouds, and begin anew.
He would not repeat his mistake, however. Never again would he seek to build rather than destroy. Never again would he create anything but engines of ever-greater destruction.
Never again would he forsake the Way of the Dark.
His rule of the galaxy would be no mere Second Imperium, it would be the Reign of Death. He would preside over a universe of infinite suffering whose only end would be oblivion, meaningless as life itself.
He would author the final act in the saga of the galaxy.
With that dream to comfort him in his temporary exile, he lowered the Shadow Crown upon his head and sent his will into the Dark beyond darkness, to take control of the mind in the stone.
But where there should have been Dark, he found only light.
White light, brilliant, blinding, a young star born within his head. It seared his mind, blasting away even his memory of darkness. He recoiled convulsively, like a worm encountering red-hot stone. This was more than light; it was the Light.
It was the power to drive off the Dark.
This was inconceivable. What could heat his absolute zero? What could banish his infinite night?
You should know. The voice of the Light was not a voice. It spoke without speaking, communicating not with words, but with understanding. You invited me here.
Skywalker? This light was Skywalker?
In the instant he thought the name, Cronal saw him: a shape of light, absolute, uncompromising, kneeling within the Election Center in the darkest heart of the Shadow Base, his hands solemnly interfolded with the massive paws of Kar Vastor. He had linked his shadow nerves to Vastor’s, and through the intimate connection between Vastor and Cronal he had somehow stretched forth to touch the Shadow Lord himself.
In the Dark, Cronal saw Skywalker smile. Thank you for joining me here. I was a little worried you might get away with that silly crown of yours.
This was impossible. This must be some hallucination, a twisted product of his Darksight run amok. He was in hyperspace! Hyperspace did not, could not, interact with realspace—
I was with Ben Kenobi in hyperspace when he felt the destruction of Alderaan.
No wall can contain the Force.
The Force, the Force, these pathetic Jedi kept nattering on about the Force! Did any of them even faintly comprehend how naive and foolish they were? If any of them had ever had so much as a glimpse of the real power of the Dark, that glimpse would have snuffed their tiny minds like candles in a hurricane—
Was my tiny mind snuffed? I must have missed that part.
Cronal could sense gentle amusement, like a tolerant uncle indulging a child’s tantrum. Fury rose within him like molten lava climbing a volcanic fault. This simple-minded youth had fooled himself into believing his paltry light could fill the infinite Dark? Let him shine alone within eternal night.
Cronal opened himself wholly to the Dark, cracking the very gates of his mind, expanding the sphere of his power like an event horizon yawning to swallow the universe. He surrounded Skywalker’s light, and with a shrug of power he consumed it.
In this arena, minds naked to the Dark contending in nonspace beyond even hyperspace, there was no question of age, or health, or physical strength. Here the only power that counted was the power of will. Skywalker and his so-called Force could never match Cronal’s mastery of the Way of the Dark.
On this level, Cronal was Blackhole. From his grip no light could escape.
Escape? Me? Did you forget that you’re the one who’s running away?
Cronal suddenly felt, unaccountably—and unpleasantly—warm.
At first he dismissed this unwelcome sensation; he was too experienced a servant of the Dark to be distracted by a minor malfunction in his life-support settings. But gradually he became aware that his body—specifically, his body’s skin—did not seem to be warm at all. It was, in fact, chilly. And damp.
As though he had broken out, somehow, in a cold sweat.
He turned his mind back to the Dark, and became again the ultimate black hole. He examined the abyss of darkness he had become and found it to be flawless. Perfect. The ultimate expression of the absolute power of the Dark.
This boy, this infantile Jedi-ling, had thought his meager light could stand against that power? Cronal’s black hole had swallowed every last lumen; Skywalker’s light was gone forever. His puerile Force trick of light had done to Cronal nothing whatsoever.
That’s because I’m not trying to do anything to you. I’m doing something through you.
What?
How could Skywalker still speak?
A creeping dread began to poison Cronal’s smug satisfaction. What if Skywalker was telling the truth? What if the boy had been so easily vanquished because he had intended to be? He had already used his tiny gift of the Force to forge a link through Kar Vastor to Cronal … what if his light had not been destroyed by falling into the black hole that was Cronal’s mind?
What if his light had simply passed through?
That’s where you dark siders always stumble. What’s the opposite of a black hole?
Cronal had heard this cosmological theory before: that matter falling into a black hole passes into another universe … and that matter falling through black holes in other universes could pass into ours, bursting forth in pure, transcendent energy.
The opposite of a black hole was a white fountain.
He thought, I’ve been suckered.
The Sith alchemy that had created the Shadow Crown had imbued it with control over meltmassif in all its forms; to drown Skywalker in the Dark, Cronal had opened a channel into the Crown. Through the Crown.
Through the Shadow Crown, Skywalker’s light could shine upon every crystal of darkness.
Every shadow stormtrooper. Every gravity station. Every millimeter of the shadow web of crystalline nerves in his body, and Vastor’s, and—
And Cronal’s own!
With a snarl, he yanked his mind back into his body; it would require only a second to pull the Crown from his head.
Or it would have, if he could have made his arms work …
In the shimmery glow from the viewscreens within his life-support capsule, Cronal could only sit and watch in horror as his skin began to leak black oil. This black oil flowed from every pore, from his ears and nose and mouth and eyes. This black oil drained even from the channels within the Shadow Crown.
And not until the last drop of it had left his body could Cronal even take a breath.
He did not, however, have time for more than a single breath before the meltmassif rehardened, encasing him wholly in a sarcophagus of stone. The asteroid of meltmassif around his chamber melted, and its shreds vaporized as they fell from the hyperdrive zone. Very soon, the hyperdrive itself fell away, as it had been mounted on the stone, rather than on the chamber.
The chamber, no longer within the hyperdrive’s protective envelope of reality, simply dissolved.
Cronal had
enough time to understand what was happening. He had enough time to feel his body lose its physical cohesion. He had time to feel his very atoms lose their reality and vanish into the infinite nothing of hyperspace.
Han sat on the polyfilm survival blanket under the Falcon’s starboard mandible, hugging his knees and waiting for the sun to rise. Leia lay on the blanket beside him, breathing slowly and easily now. She looked like she was only asleep.
He didn’t think he should wake her up.
The only word Leia had been able to speak had been light. She’d kept asking for light, even with every light source within the Falcon dialed up to maximum. She must have been talking about a different kind of light.
And when Han had gotten the grim news on their situation from Lando, he’d figured that he might as well give her what she was asking for.
Everyone was going to die anyway. There was no escaping this trap. The choice was between being killed by the breakup of Mindor or being roasted alive by Taspan’s stellar flares.
So he’d set down the Falcon on the shattered battlefield, spread the blanket, and made Leia as comfortable as he could. Chewbacca had hung back; he watched over them from the Falcon’s cockpit, out of respect. Humans, he understood, often wanted privacy at times like these.
Han had stayed at Leia’s side as her seizures quieted; he stayed at her side as her every pore oozed black and shiny meltmassif, as it drained off her and puddled on the blanket. And he would stay at her side as the groundquakes strengthened and the killing sun rose over the horizon.
He would be at her side when the planet exploded.
A bitter irony: she had suffered so much from being forced to watch her homeworld destroyed. Now she would die in very much the same brutal fashion as had her family and all her people.
That was why he figured he probably shouldn’t wake her up.
But the Force again displayed that nasty sense of humor; Leia stirred, and her eyelids fluttered. “Han …?”
“I’m here, Leia.” He felt like his heart would burst. “I’m right here.”
Her hand sought his. “So dark …”
“Yeah,” Han said. “But the sun’s coming up.”
“No … not here. Where I was.” She drew in a deep breath and released it in a long, slow sigh. “It was so dark, Han. It was so dark for so long I couldn’t even remember who I was. I couldn’t remember anything.”
Her eyes opened and found his face. “Except for you.”
Han swallowed and squeezed her hand. He didn’t trust his voice.
“It was like … like you were with me,” she murmured. “You were all I had left—and I didn’t need anything else.”
“I’m with you now,” he said, his voice hoarse, unsteady. “We’re together. And we always will be.”
“Han …” She pushed herself up to a sitting position and swiped a hand across her eyes. “Is there anything to eat?”
“What?”
“I’m hungry. Is there any food?”
Han shook his head, baffled. He nodded around at the stormtrooper corpses that littered the field. “Nothing but, y’know, Imperial ration packs. And they’re probably stale.”
“I don’t care.”
“Are you kidding?”
She shrugged, and gave him a smile that even now, even here, minutes from their deaths, made his heart race and his breath go short. “We’ll make it a picnic,” she said. “We’ll have a picnic and watch the sun rise. One last time.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, that sounds good.”
He stripped some ration packs off dead troopers, and they sat together, shoulder-to-shoulder, eating in silence as the horizon began to blaze as though the planet were on fire.
“Well, one thing’s for sure.” Han pushed an echo of his old half grin onto his face. “This is one meal we’ll never forget as long as we live, huh?”
Leia smiled, though her eyes sparkled with tears. “Always the joker. Even now. Even here.”
Han nodded. “Well, y’know, we always get romantic when we’re about to die. It was getting repetitive.”
The ground beneath them spasmed once, then again, and Leia said, “I think we should respect the tradition.”
“You do?”
“Kiss me, Han. One last time.” She lifted a hand to his cheek. Her touch was warm and dry, and impossibly precious to him. “Once for all the kisses we’ll never get.”
He gathered her into his arms and lowered his face to hers—and then a great Wookiee yelp of joy that echoed all the way from the cockpit yanked his head up and popped his eyes open. “What? Chewie, you’re sure?”
Chewbacca pounded on the cockpit’s transparisteel and waved both his arms, frantically beckoning. Han sprang to his feet and lifted Leia as though she weighed nothing at all. “Han—what is it?” she gasped. “What did he say?”
“All those other kisses you were talking about?” His eyes alight, he pulled her toward the Falcon’s freight lift. “He said if we move fast, we might get every one of ’em after all!”
One by one, inside his head, Luke felt the stars wink out.
Linked through Kar to Cronal, through Cronal to the Shadow Crown, and through the Crown’s ancient powers of Sith alchemy to every Melter mind in every scrap of meltmassif in the galaxy, Luke had shone upon them with the light of the Force. This light had drawn them as moonlight draws a shadowmoth, and they found that its inexhaustible flood could fill them to overflowing. Never again would they feed upon light; there would never be the need. They would forever shine with light of their own.
And so they came out from every place the Dark had put them.
Luke felt them go.
He felt them leave the gravity stations. He felt them leave the Shadow Crown, and Cronal’s body, and Leia’s and Kar’s and his own.
And he felt the stormtroopers, in all their thousands throughout the system. He felt every single man who wore Cronal’s black armor. He felt the uncontrollable rage and bloodlust, the almost-mindless battle frenzy that the crystals in their brains had triggered and now sustained. He felt the damage that had been done by the brutal force of the crystals’ growth.
He felt what the crystals’ exit would do.
He did not look away. He did not withdraw his perception. He owed these men that much. Enemies they might be, but still they were men.
None of them had wanted this. None had volunteered for this. None had even cooperated. This had been done to them with casual disregard for their humanity; Luke could not allow its undoing to be the same.
So he stayed with them as the meltmassif in their bodies and their brains liquefied. He stayed with them as it poured forth from their every pore. He stayed with them as the exit of the meltmassif triggered their deadman interlocks.
He stayed with them while every stormtrooper in the entire system, all at once in all their thousands, sagged and shuddered.
And died.
Luke felt every death.
It was all he could do for them.
When he finally withdrew his mind from the Dark, Luke found himself in darkness of the wholly ordinary sort. The flicker of the energy discharge had fled from the chamber that had once been the Election Center.
He knelt in darkness, and from that darkness came a long, slow growl that the Force allowed him to understand as words. Jedi Luke Skywalker. Is it done?
By reaching into the Force, he could feel the surviving Republic ships jump away as the artificial mass-shadows of the destroyed gravity stations shrank and vanished. He felt the final breakup of the Shadow Base, and the final destruction of Mindor under the killing radiation of Taspan’s flares.
All gone, now. Everything was gone.
No more shadows.
“Yes,” Luke said. “Yes, it is done.”
Is this where we die?
“I don’t know,” Luke said. “Probably.”
How long?
Luke sighed. “I don’t know that either. I sealed the chamber when I came in, so we�
��ll have air. For a while. But I don’t know how thick the stone around us might be, now that the mountain’s broken up. I don’t know how much radiation it can block. We could be cooking right now.”
And there is no one who can come for us.
“Their ships can’t protect them. Not from radiation like this.”
Then this will be where our lives end.
“Probably.”
I do not like this place. I do not know how I came to be here, but I know I did not choose this.
“None of us did.”
This is a bad place to die.
“Yes.”
Granted a choice, I would not die beside a Jedi.
“I’m sorry,” Luke said. And meant it.
I have known Jedi. Many, many years ago. That knowing was not a gladness for me. I believed I would never know another, and I rejoiced in that belief.
But it is a gladness for me to be proven wrong.
I am happy to have known you, Jedi Luke Skywalker. You are more than they were.
“That’s—” Luke shook his head blankly, blinking against the darkness. “I mean, thanks, but I barely know anything.”
So you believe. But I say to you: you are greater than the Jedi of former days.
Luke could only frown, and shake his head again. “What makes you say that?”
Because unlike the Knights of old, Jedi Luke Skywalker …
You are not afraid of the dark.
R2-D2 clung to the surface of a tiny asteroid as it rolled along its slow spiral descent toward the stellar sphere of Taspan.
The asteroid was roughly spherical, its diameter perhaps half that of the Millennium Falcon, and it had a very slow rotation, slow enough that the little astromech could drag himself along the asteroid’s dark side by clutching the rock with his manipulator arms. In this way, R2-D2 kept the asteroid between himself and the radiation bursts from Taspan’s stellar flares—bursts that could permanently fry his circuitry in less than a second.
In this way, R2 calculated that he could maintain operational capacity for an additional seven-point-three Standard hours, after which time his asteroid would pass between Taspan and a particularly dense cloud of other asteroids, which would reflect enough hard radiation onto his asteroid’s dark side that he would—he estimated with 89.756 percent certainty—experience sudden catastrophic system failure.
