Dark Force Rising

by Timothy Zahn

  C’baoth awakened suddenly, his black-edged dreams giving way to the sudden realization that someone was approaching.

  For a moment he lay there in the darkness, his long white beard scratching gently against his chest as he breathed, his mind reaching out through the Force to track along the road from the High Castle to the cluster of villages at the base of the rim mountains. It was hard to concentrate—so very hard—but with a perverse grimness he ignored the fatigue-driven pain and kept at it. There … no … there. A lone man riding a Cracian Thumper, laboring over one of the steeper sections of the roadway. Most likely a messenger, come to bring him some news from the villagers below. Something trifling, no doubt, but something that they felt their new Master should know.

  Master. The word echoed through C’baoth’s mind, sparking a windblown tangle of thoughts and feelings. The Imperials who pleaded for him to help them fight their battles—they called him Master, too. So had the people of Wayland, whose lives he had been content to rule before Grand Admiral Thrawn and his promise of Jedi followers had lured him away.

  The people of Wayland had meant it. The people here on Jomark weren’t quite sure yet whether they did or not. The Imperials didn’t mean it at all.

  C’baoth felt his lip twist in disgust. No, they most certainly did not. They made him fight their battles for them—drove him by their disbelief to do things he hadn’t attempted for years and years. And then, when he’d succeeded in doing the impossible, they still held tightly to their private contempt for him, hiding it behind those ysalamiri creatures and the strange empty spaces they somehow created in the Force.

  But he knew. He’d seen the sideways looks among the officers, and the brief but muttered discussions between them. He’d felt the edginess of the crew, submitting by Imperial order to his influence on their combat skills but clearly disliking the very thought of it. And he’d watched Captain Aban sit there in his command chair on the Bellicose, shouting and blaspheming at him even while calling him Master, spitting anger and impotent rage as C’baoth calmly inflicted his punishment on the Rebel ship that had dared to strike at his ship.

  The messenger below was approaching the High Castle gate now. Reaching out with the Force to call his robe to him, C’baoth got out of bed, feeling a brief rush of vertigo as he stood erect. Yes, it had been difficult, that business of taking command of the Bellicose’s turbolaser crews for the few seconds it had required to annihilate that Rebel ship. It had gone beyond any previous stretch of concentration and control, and the mental aches he was feeling now were the payment for that stretch.

  He tightened the robe sash around him, thinking back. Yes, it had been hard. And yet, at the same time, it had also been strangely exhilarating. On Wayland, he had personally commanded a whole city-state, one with a larger population than that which nestled beneath the High Castle. But there, he’d long since gone beyond the need to impose his will by force. The humans and Psadans had submitted to his authority early on; even the Myneyrshi, with their lingering resentment of his rule, had learned to obey his orders without question.

  The Imperials, as well as the people of Jomark, were going to have to learn that same lesson.

  Back when Grand Admiral Thrawn had first goaded C’baoth into this alliance, he’d implied that C’baoth had been too long without a real challenge. Perhaps the Grand Admiral had also secretly thought that this challenge of running the Empire’s war would prove too much for a single Jedi Master to handle.

  C’baoth smiled tightly in the darkness. If that was what the glowing-eyed Grand Admiral thought, he was going to be in for a surprise. Because when Luke Skywalker finally got here, C’baoth would face perhaps the most subtle challenge of his life: to bend and twist another Jedi to his will without the other even being aware of what was happening to him.

  And when he’d succeeded, there would be two of them … and who could tell what might be possible then?

  The messenger had dismounted from his Thumper and was standing beside the gate now, his sense that of a man prepared to await the convenience of his Master, no matter how long that wait might be. That was good: exactly the proper attitude. Giving his robe sash one final tug, C’baoth headed through the maze of darkened rooms toward the door, to hear what his new subjects wished to tell him.

  CHAPTER

  7

  With a delicacy that always seemed so incongruous in a being his size, Chewbacca maneuvered the Falcon into his precisely selected orbital slot above the lush green moon of Endor. Rumbling under his breath, he switched over the power linkages and cut the engines back to standby.

  Seated in the copilot seat, Leia took a deep breath, wincing as one of the twins kicked her from inside. “Doesn’t look like Khabarakh’s here yet,” she commented, realizing even as she said it how superfluous the comment was. She’d been watching the sensors from the moment they dropped out of lightspeed; and given there were no other ships anywhere in the system, there wasn’t much chance that they could have missed him. But with the familiar engine roar now cut back down to a whisper, the silence felt strange and even a little eerie to her.

  Chewbacca growled a question. “We wait, I guess,” Leia shrugged. “Actually, we’re almost a day early—we got here faster than I’d expected.”

  Chewbacca turned back to his board, growling his own interpretation of the Noghri’s absence. “Oh, come on,” Leia chided him. “If he’d decided to make this meeting into a trap, don’t you think they’d have had a couple of Star Destroyers and an Interdictor Cruiser waiting to meet us?”

  “Your Highness?” Threepio’s voice called from down the tunnel. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I believe I’ve located the fault in the Carbanti countermeasures package. Could you ask Chewbacca to step back for a moment?”

  Leia raised her eyebrows in mild surprise as she looked at Chewbacca. As was depressingly normal with the Falcon, several bits of equipment had gone out early in the flight from Coruscant. Up to his elbows with more important repairs, Chewbacca had assigned the relatively low-priority work on the Carbanti to Threepio. Leia had had no objections, though given the results the last time Threepio had tried to work on the Falcon, she hadn’t expected very much to come of it. “We’ll make a repair droid out of him yet,” she said to Chewbacca. “Your influence, no doubt.”

  The Wookiee snorted his opinion of that as he got out of the pilot’s seat and headed back to see what Threepio had found. The cockpit door slid open, closed again behind him.

  Leaving the cockpit that much quieter.

  “You see that planet down there, my dears?” Leia murmured, rubbing her belly gently. “That’s Endor. Where the Rebel Alliance finally triumphed over the Empire, and the New Republic began.”

  Or at least, she amended silently to herself, that was what the histories someday would say. That the death of the Empire occurred at Endor, with all the rest of it merely a mopping-up action.

  A mopping-up action which had lasted five years, so far. And could wind up lasting another twenty, the way things were going.

  She let her eyes drift across the brilliant mottled green world turning slowly beneath them, wondering yet again why she’d chosen this place for her rendezvous with Khabarakh. True, it was a system that practically every being in both the Republic and Imperial sections of the galaxy had heard of and knew how to find. And with the major planes of contention long gone from this sector, it was a quiet enough place for two ships to meet.

  But there were memories here, too, some of which Leia would just as soon not bring to mind. Before they’d triumphed, they’d very nearly lost everything.

  From down the tunnel, Chewbacca roared a question. “Hang on, I’ll check,” Leia called back. Leaning over the board, she keyed a switch. “It reads ‘standby/modulo,’ ” she reported. “Wait a minute—now it reads ‘system ready.’ Do you want me to—?”

  And abruptly, without any warning, a black curtain seemed to drop across her vision.…

  Slowly, she became awa
re that there was a metallic voice calling to her. “Your Highness,” it said over and over again. “Your Highness. Can you hear me? Please, Your Highness, can you hear me?” She opened her eyes, vaguely surprised to discover they were closed, to find Chewbacca leaning over her with an open medpack gripped in one huge hand, an agitated Threepio hovering like a nervous mother bird behind him. “I’m all right,” she managed. “What happened?”

  “You shouted for help,” Threepio put in before Chewbacca could answer. “At least, we thought it was for help,” he amended helpfully. “You were brief and rather incoherent.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Leia told him. It was starting to come back now, like moonlight through the edge of a cloud. The menace, the rage; the hatred, the despair. “You didn’t feel it, did you?” she asked Chewbacca.

  He growled a negative, watching her closely. “I felt nothing either,” Threepio put in.

  Leia shook her head. “I don’t know what it could have been. One minute I was sitting there, and then the next—”

  She broke off, a sudden horrible thought striking her. “Chewie—where does this orbit take us? Does it ever pass through the position where the Death Star blew up?”

  Chewbacca stared at her a moment, rumbling something deep in his throat. Then, shifting the medpack to his other hand, he reached past her to key the computer. The answer came almost immediately.

  “Five minutes ago,” Leia murmured, feeling cold. “That would be just about right, wouldn’t it?”

  Chewbacca growled an affirmative, then a question. “I really don’t know,” she had to admit. “It sounds a little like something Luke went through on—during his Jedi training,” she amended, remembering just in time that Luke still wanted Dagobah’s significance to be kept a secret. “But he saw a vision. All I felt was … I don’t know. It was anger and bitterness; but at the same time, there was something almost sad about it. No—sad isn’t the right word.” She shook her head, sudden tears welling inexplicably up in her eyes. “I don’t know. Look, I’m all right. You two can go on back to what you were doing.”

  Chewbacca rumbled under his breath again, clearly not convinced. But he said nothing else as he closed the medpack and pushed past Threepio. The cockpit door slid open for him; with the proverbial Wookiee disdain for subtlety, he locked it in that position before disappearing down the tunnel into the main body of the ship.

  Leia focused on Threepio. “You, too,” she told him. “Go on—you still have work to do back there. I’m all right. Really.”

  “Well … very well, Your Highness,” the droid said, clearly no happier than Chewbacca was. “If you’re certain.”

  “I am. Go on, scat.”

  Threepio dithered another moment, then obediently shuffled out of the cockpit.

  And the silence resumed. A silence that was thicker, somehow, than it had been before. And much darker.

  Leia set her teeth firmly together. “I will not be intimidated,” she said aloud to the silence. “Not here; not anywhere.”

  The silence didn’t reply. After a minute Leia reached over to the board and keyed in a course alteration that would keep them from again passing through the spot where the Emperor had died. Refusing to be intimidated, after all, didn’t mean deliberately asking for trouble.

  And after that, there was nothing left to do but wait. And wonder if Khabarakh would indeed come.

  The topmost bit of the walled city Ilic poked through the clutching trees of the jungle pressing tightly around it, looking to Han for all the world like some sort of dome-topped, silver-skinned droid drowning in a sea of green quicksand. “Any idea how we land on that thing?” he asked.

  “Probably through those vents near the top,” Lando said, pointing at the Lady Luck’s main display. “They read large enough for anything up to about W-class space barge to get into.”

  Han nodded, fingers plucking restlessly at the soft armrest of his copilot seat. There weren’t a lot of things in the galaxy that could make him nervous, but having to sit there while someone else made a tricky landing was one of them. “This is even a crazier place to live than that Nomad City thing of yours,” he growled.

  “No argument from me,” Lando agreed, adjusting their altitude a bit. Several seconds later than Han would have done it. “At least on Nkllon we don’t have to worry about getting eaten by some exotic plant. But that’s economics for you. At last count there were eight cities in this part of New Cov, and two more being built.”

  Han grimaced. And all because of those same exotic plants. Or to be specific, the exotic biomolecules that could be harvested from them. The Covies seemed to think the profit was worth having to live in armored cities all the time. No one knew what the plants thought about it. “They’re still crazy,” he said. “Watch out—they may have magnetic airlocks on those entrance ducts.”

  Lando gave him a patient look. “Will you relax? I have flown ships before, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Han muttered. Setting his teeth together, he settled in to suffer through the landing.

  It wasn’t as bad as he’d expected. Lando got his clearance from Control and guided the Lady Luck with reasonable skill into the flaring maw of one of the entrance ducts, following the curved pipe down and inward to a brightly lit landing area just beneath the transparisteel dome that topped the city walls. Inbound customs were a mere formality, though given the planet’s dependence on exports, the outbound scrutiny would probably be a lot tighter. They were officially welcomed to Ilic by a professional greeter with a professional smile, given a data card with maps of the city and surrounding territory, and then turned loose.

  “That wasn’t so hard,” Lando commented as they rode a sliding spiral ramp down through the spacious open center. At each level walkways led outward from the ramp to the market, administrative, and living areas of the city. “Where are we supposed to be meeting Luke?”

  “Three more levels down, in one of the entertainment districts,” Han told him. “The Imperial library didn’t have much detail on this place, but it did mention a little tap-cafe called the Mishra attached to some half-size version they’ve got of the old Grandis Mon theater on Coruscant. I got the impression it was land of a watering hole for local big shots.”

  “Sounds like a good place to meet,” Lando agreed. He threw Han a sideways look. “So. You ready to show me the hook yet?”

  Han frowned. “Hook?”

  “Come on, you old pirate,” Lando snorted. “You pick me up at Sluis Van, ask for a lift out to New Cov, send Luke on ahead for this cloak-and-blade rendezvous—and you expect me to believe you’re just going to wave goodbye now and let me go back to Nkllon?”

  Han gave his friend his best wounded look. “Come on, Lando—”

  “The hook, Han. Let me see the hook.”

  Han sighed theatrically. “There isn’t any hook, Lando,” he said. “You can leave for Nkllon any time you want to. ’Course,” he added casually, “if you hung around a little and gave us a hand, you might be able to work a deal here to unload any spare metals you had lying around. Like, oh, a stockpile of hfredium or something.”

  Carefully keeping his eyes forward, he could still feel the heat of Lando’s glare. “Luke told you about that, didn’t he?” Lando demanded.

  Han shrugged. “He might have mentioned it,” he conceded.

  Lando hissed between clenched teeth. “I’m going to strangle him,” he announced. “Jedi or not, I’m going to strangle him.”

  “Oh, come on, Lando,” Han soothed. “You hang around a couple days, you listen to people’s jabberings, you maybe dig us out a lead or two about what Fey’lya’s got going here, and that’s it. You go home and back to your mining operation, and we never bother you again.”

  “I’ve heard that before,” Lando countered. But Han could hear the resignation in his voice. “What makes you think Fey’lya’s got contacts on New Cov?”

  “Because during the war, this was the only place his Bothans ever seemed to care about def
ending—”

  He broke off, grabbing Lando’s arm and turning both of them hard to the right toward the central column of the spiral walkway. “What—” Lando managed.

  “Quiet!” Han hissed, trying to simultaneously hide his face and still watch the figure he’d spotted leaving the ramp one level down. “That Bothan down there to the left—see him?”

  Lando turned slightly, peering in the indicated direction out of the corner of his eye. “What about him?”

  “It’s Tav Breil’lya. One of Fey’lya’s top aides.”

  “You’re kidding,” Lando said, frowning down at the alien. “How can you tell?”

  “That neckpiece he wears—some kind of family crest or something. I’ve seen it dozens of times at Council meetings.” Han chewed at his lip, trying to think. If that really was Breil’lya over there, finding out what he was up to could save them a lot of time. But Luke was probably sitting in the tapcafe downstairs right now waiting for them … “I’m going to follow him,” he told Lando, shoving his data pad and the city map into the other’s hands. “You head down to the Mishra, grab Luke, and catch up with me.”

  “But—”

  “If you’re not with me in an hour I’ll try calling on the comlink,” Han cut him off, stepping toward the outside of the ramp. They were nearly to the Bothan’s level now. “Don’t call me—I might be someplace I wouldn’t want a callbeep going off.” He stepped off the ramp onto the walkway.

  “Good luck,” Lando called softly after him.

  There was a good scattering of aliens among the humans wandering around Ilic, but Breil’lya’s cream-colored fur stood out of the crowd enough to make him easy to follow. Which was just as well. If Han could recognize the Bothan, the Bothan could probably recognize him right back, and it would be risky to have to get too close.