Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Part 23

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 att.i.tude 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 s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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 sh.e.l.l 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 corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g motion of its downward pressure, shattered the rocky sh.e.l.l 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 att.i.tude jets and engage the repulsor-lifts!"

"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 sc.r.a.ping 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 c.o.c.kpit.

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 meatus!"

"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 hall power setting. He threw his arm around Leia's shoulders and started hacking 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 h.e.l.l 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 again, then twice more, without ever pulling it past the break, so that it made a succession of dry clicks. He let a m.u.f.fled 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 hoa.r.s.ely.

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 s.p.a.cer's pants, stretched drum-head 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.

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 pa.s.s 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 m.u.f.fled 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 and 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 straight-aways 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 coiners!"

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 turrets 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 pinp.r.i.c.ks to borgleb.a.l.l.s 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. "Urn .. ." he said slowly. "Don't back up."

In the c.o.c.kpit, 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.