Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Part 28

None of them knew, either, that the convulsions they felt were substantially less than those experienced by other parts of the base. They also had no way to know that the atmospheric integrity of the Sorting Center was being preserved by a large contingent of Melters, who not only kept the cavern tightly sealed, but manipulated their meltma.s.sif to minimize the shocks through the floor. Though all could see another part of the cavern's vault bulge, and droop, and belly downward like a vast droplet of glossy black slime.

One of the largest such droplets turned entirely liquid and drained away, revealing a Corellian light freighter.

In the instant that the Falcon settled onto the cavern floor, a HatchPatch blew off, opening a gap where its belly ramp should have been. The ship's freight lift slammed down as well, and through both openings flooded refugees, both Mindorese, organized by a human man named Tripp, and Republic, commanded by a Mon Calamari lieutenant named Tubrimi.

In seconds, the Falcon's holds were empty of people.

In the c.o.c.kpit, Luke laid a hand on Han's shoulder. "Are you good with this? I'm depending on you."

"I don't like it," Han said.

"I know. But this is how it has to be," Luke said. He triggered the comm. "Air Marshal-you and your men will board immediately. One minute to skids-up."

The reply came instantly. "As you command, my lord emperor!"

Han made a face. "Someday you're gonna explain this Emperor Skywalker b.u.mblefluff, right?"

"No," Luke said. "No, I don't think I will."

In the absolute blackness within the Shadow Egg, Cronal had only one problem left.

The Shadow Egg, as he had mentally dubbed it in the instant of its creation, was his improvised coc.o.o.n of meltma.s.sif in the Cavern of the Shadow Throne. It hovered where the Shadow Throne had once stood, held aloft by the repulsorlifts that had once supported the Throne. There was no longer a lava-fall behind it, nor a lake of molten lava below; whatever remained of the volcano's lifeblood, once the Shadow Base had cut free from the planet, had spilled from its underside in a rain of fire. The Shadow Egg bobbed gently in midair as the shock waves of the Shadow Base's ongoing destruction pa.s.sed over it.

This ongoing destruction was not Cronal's problem; it was not a problem at all. He had counted on it. Had the Republic forces not hit upon their idea of deflecting his own gravity bombs back at him, he would have been forced to blow the Shadow Base up himself.

The Battle of Mindor was to have only one survivor.

Nor was he concerned that all his preparation for his new life had focused upon impersonating Luke Skywalker rather than his sister; one useful lesson he had taken from working with Palpatine was the value in flexible planning. He would, as Leia, simply fake amnesia traumatic brain injury would be an ideal explanation for any stumbles or fumbles he might make upon meeting the princess's old acquaintances-and then discreetly hire one of the countless hacks who scripted holothrillers to make something up. He would, he antic.i.p.ated, even have this holothriller produced. He already had a few ideas for a t.i.tle: Princess Leia and the Shadow Trap, for example. Or, perhaps, Princess Leia and the Black Holes of Mindor.

Nor was he worried about making an escape from his own trap, once the transfer of his consciousness was complete. Buried in meltma.s.sif not far from the Election Center, he had secreted a custom craft to make his escape as Luke. Though in appearance it was a very ordinary-looking Lambda T-4a, its hull was layered with so much additional shielding that there was no cargo capacity at all, and virtually no room for pa.s.sengers. The c.o.c.kpit was altogether fake; a pilot and at most two or three others could be packed into a tiny capsule coc.o.o.ned in additional radiation shielding in the center of what would have been, in an ordinary shuttle, the pa.s.senger compartment.

All necessary planning had been done. All difficulties had been antic.i.p.ated, and all contingencies had been covered. Except one.

The blasted girl simply refused to break.

The incrystallation had gone flawlessly; the raw power of the Vaster body had enabled Cronal to propagate a shadow web of crystalline nerves throughout her body with the speed of frost spidering across supercooled transparisteel. With only a short time available-and no ready supply of thanatizine II-he had proceeded without drug suspension. After all, this was but a mere girl who had, through an accident of genetics, an exceptionally powerful connection to the small fraction of the Dark that Jedi had ignorantly named the Force. He should have been able to overwhelm her by brute strength alone.

He had taken her sight, cut away her hearing, erased her senses of smell and taste and touch. He had stripped her kinesthetic sense, so that she was no longer aware of her own body at all. He had shut down the activity of certain neurotransmitters in her brain, so that she could no longer even remember how being alive had felt.

She wasn't lighting him. She didn't know how. He wouldn't let her remember what fighting was.

She just wouldn't let go.

She had something that her brother had lacked, some inner spark of intransigence that sustained her against the Dark. He couldn't guess what this spark might be; some sort of primitive, girlish emotional attachment, he presumed. Whatever it was, it must be extinguished once and for all; she must sleep forever. The problem was how to do it without killing her outright. The meltma.s.sif shadow nerves would contain only his consciousness; he needed her brain to be fully functioning to maintain autonomic functions. He hadn't gone to all this trouble to simply trade his decaying body for one that was already dead.

This was taking far too long. The boy Jedi had been ready to let himself slip away in a fraction of the time; of course, the boy had given him more to work with. He carried with him an inner darkness that would no doubt have astonished his sister, had she lived long enough to discover it. Had Skywalker not damaged Shadowsp.a.w.n's control crystals, none of this would have been necessary in the first place. But as the situation stood, he could only drive his will deeper into the Dark-to gnaw away her resistance with the single-minded intensity of a Klepthian rock otter chewing into a basalt clam's sh.e.l.l.

But when he finally did break through that resistance, he found her brain not weak and quivering, but hard like a burnberry stone, and shining with a brilliant white light that was not imaginary at all. That light stabbed him like a knife in the eye, and drove him reeling back.

He took that stone in the palm of a hand made of the Dark, and with a Dark rock hammer he struck it... and the imaginary hammer splintered in the imaginary hand. He came at the stone like a gem harpy, and swallowed it into a crop powerful enough to pulverize diamond, but it burned its way out. He made fists of whole galaxies and brought them together to crush this one tiny star, but when their cataclysm faded back into the Dark, the tiny star shone on.

"What is wrong with you?" he shouted at the star in frustration. "What are you, and why won't you die?"

"I can tell you that." The voice came from everywhere, or no where: a young man's tenor, with the flattened, nasal accent of the far Outer Rim.

Cronal jerked upright in the absolute blackness inside the Shadow Egg.

"If you'd made friends with the Melters, instead of making them your slaves, you might have discovered all kinds of things they can do for you." The voice was coming from inside Cronal's head. "As for where I am, well..."

The interior of the Shadow Egg suddenly flared with light: blue-white light, from a crackling energy discharge that spidered across its inner sh.e.l.l. An instant later the sh.e.l.l collapsed, splashing around Cronal's ankles and draining off the repulsorlift platform that supported the obsidian Shadow Throne.

Twenty meters away, on the ledge that curved outward from the tunnel mouth, stood a slim young man in a Republic flight suit who held, loosely and casually in one hand, a lightsaber of brilliant green.

Luke tried to keep his breathing slow and steady, while his heart thumped against his rib cage like a trapped slashrat trying to break free. For an interminable stretching moment after the meltma.s.sif egg had collapsed, all Luke had been able to do was stare blankly and think Look at the size of him...

Kar Vastor crouched before the obsidian throne like a sabercat coiled to spring. One of his enormous hands rested on a blob of meltma.s.sif perched on the throne's seat. His lips had peeled back to reveal teeth long and curving and sharp as stilettos. Luke blinked, and blinked again. Each of his biceps is bigger than my head...

And around him in the Force swirled a storm of darkness unlike any Luke had experienced since the Emperor's death: darkness that could snuff his own paltry light like a candle.

But fear could have power over him only if he let it. He breathed deeply, slowly, and with each exhale he opened himself so that all his fear, all his tension and apprehension, his every tare and concern drained out of hint and flowed away.

How would Ben handle this?

That thought steadied him. He imagined Ben at his side, and held the old Jedi's kindly smile of warm knowing firmly in his mind. "Blackhole," he said, and the calm solidity he heard in his own voice rea.s.sured him even more. "You have one chance to do this the easy way."

Blackhole's response was a low snarl that somehow, in Luke's brain, translated itself into words. The easy way, he growled, would be to swap. Give yourself to be my body, and I'll let your sister go.

Luke shook his head and hefted his lightsaber. "If you fight me, you will be destroyed."

Blackhole's snarl took on a mocking edge. You think you can take me, boy?

"I've killed too many people already today."

Then how will you destroy me?

"You remember Nick, don't you? Your puppet Shadowsp.a.w.n? And his girlfriend. Her name's Aeona. See, Nick knows all about you."

Bring him out so he can watch you die.

"Oh, he's not with me. We dropped off Nick and Aeona on the way here. They're in that custom shuttle of yours."

What?

"I told you: Nick knows all about you. Did you think I was lying? He and Aeona are on their way already. On their way to your real body."

Vastor went very, very still.

"I bet if you close your eyes and concentrate, you can feel where he is. I'm pretty sure you can. Because he can feel where you are. Go ahead, give it a try."

The eyes of the Vastor body went vacant. Luke, calm now, serene and centered in the Force, could also feel Nick's location humming in the meltma.s.sif that shadowed his nerves: far, far off, hurtling through s.p.a.ce, dodging asteroids and looping around a wide arc that would bring it into an orbital intercept with one particular asteroid-one particular chunk of rock left over from the Big Crush, one chunk that was not like the others, despite its absolutely ordinary appearance. No eye could have picked it out among the countless others that swarmed it on all sides; no instrument could have detected the slightest anomaly.

But Nick didn't need instruments, and he didn't need to see it to know where it was.

This chunk of rock-of pure meltma.s.sif, in fact-was very far indeed from ordinary. Within its hollowed core were hidden engines, and a powerful hyperdrive, and the life-support chamber of a very old, very frail man, who from his perfectly concealed position had used a device forged of Sith alchemy not only to control this system, but also to terrorize the galaxy.

"Do you understand now?" Luke asked. "In a few minutes, a very, very angry man will arrive at your life-support capsule. This man does not share my reservations about killing you. I'm pretty sure he's already trying to decide whether he should blast you to atoms or cut his way in and beat you to death with his bare fists.

"So this is what I mean about the easy way. Walk away. Withdraw from the Vastor body and return to your own. Your gravity stations are powered down. You still have time to jump out of the system before Nick gets to you. But you don't have very much time. So I'll tell you again: If you fight me, you will be destroyed."

The Vastor growl lowered to a threatening rumble. I still have the girl.

He reached up to the shapeless ma.s.s of meltma.s.sif on the Shadow Throne; he laid his hand upon it and it slumped to liquid, and then that enormous hand lifted Leia by the neck. She dangled from his fist, limp, lifeless-only through the Force could Luke tell she still lived. Vastor growled again. She can still die, the growl said. You both can.

Luke sighed. "All right, forget the easy way." He took three running steps to the lip of the ledge and jumped.

The Force carried him high over the abyss that had once been the lake of molten lava. He nipped in midair, to make himself into a spear with a lightsaber for a blade. Vastor dropped Leia and vaulted to the far side of the Shadow Throne with a contemptuous grunt as Luke's flight ended with his lightsaber blade driving into the platform.

Luke somersaulted to his feel astride Leia's unconscious form and lifted his blade to garde. "I warned you not to underestimate my powers."

Are you mad? You were never even close to me, fool!

"I wasn't aiming at you."

Vastor's eyes nicked from Luke's face down to the lightsaber hole in the platform, which was now spitting sparks and gouts of smoke that smelled very much like a damaged repulsorlift burning out. Vastor's eyes widened, "What have you DONE?"

With one last gush of black tarry smoke, the repulsorlift shorted out completely, and the Shadow Throne plummeted like the several tons of rock and obsidian it was, to the empty bottom of the formerly lava lake. But instead of falling the several hundred meters to the rocky bottom of the lava lake, after only twenty or so it landed, very hard, on the dorsal hull of a Corellian light freighter that had been hovering there ever since Luke had slipped out through its topside hatch and leapt to the wall, to make his long, slow climb up to the ledge above.

The impact knocked Vastor off his feet; Luke, with Leia in his arms, landed as softly as a Force-using feather pillow.

Vastor sprang to his feet, needle teeth bared in a feral snarl. I will kill every last one of you!

"No," Luke said, "you won't."

A slight sideways tilt of his head invited Vastor to look around, which he did. Which was when he saw the full company of black-armored stormtroopers on a ring ledge about three meters above him, all with weapons aimed at his gigantic chest.

"Air Marshal Klick," Luke called upward. "Tell Kar Vastor your orders."

The black-armored officer stepped forward crisply. "Kar Vastor, I have been directed to prevent, by any and all necessary means, any attempt on your part to do harm to that ship, to the woman, or to Emperor Skywalker."

Emperor Skywalker. Vastor's growl dripped loathing.

"I implore you to remain still, and take no aggressive action," the air marshal said. "The emperor wishes us to minimize bloodshed."

Luke, meanwhile, had taken a couple of steps to one side, where the dorsal access hatch promptly opened to reveal enormous hairy arms, into which Luke delivered his sister.

"Worrough?" Chewhacca asked solicitously, cradling her as though she weighed nothing at all.

"No," Luke said. "She's not all right. Take her below and tell Han to get ready to take us out of here."

He turned back to Vastor. "Now it's your turn, Blackhole. Go back to your own body. You might still make it into hypers.p.a.ce before Nick kills you."

Vastor lowered himself into a crouch. I understand now. I understand how you have defeated me.

It is because I lost my way. I have been trying to create. To build, when I should have destroyed. I abandoned the Way of the Dark, and the Dark-abandoned me.

"I don't care," Luke said. "All I care about is whether we're going to have to kill you. Now if you'll just abandon that body, we can all go home."

I will. But not yet. First, answer a question for me, Skywalker.

Luke shrugged. "If it will end this, sure."

Oh, yes. This will end. And very shortly. Answer me this: Why is the armor of my stormtroopers black?

Luke frowned. He'd never thought about it; he'd sort of a.s.sumed it was merely a style. An element of uniform, to set them apart from Palpatine's stormtroopers.

I'll give you a hint: It's not just paint.

Luke squinted up at the company of black-armored commandos above while with his mind he reached into the Force. Even with all the Force perception he could muster, he could detect nothing unusual about the armor beyond its color. And the color was, well, just black. Wasn't it? Black with faint opalescent highlights, kind of a pearly glitter. It reminded him of something... but he couldn't quite bring it to the surface of his consciousness, because there was something nagging at him, a kind of tickle that grew to an itch that swelled into actual pain... but it was a pain he didn't really feel so much as sense, as if it were happening to someone else.

It was his shadow nerves, that's where he felt it, in his internal crystalline network of...

He couldn't breathe.

The ceramic base of that black armor, its fundamental structure, was not ceramic at all.

He could only stand and blink, and mouth a single word: meltma.s.sif.

As if in confirmation, Vastor collapsed, just crumpled, folding to the deck like a dead man.

"Han... ?" Luke said uncertainly. "Han, I think we need to go."

"Luke!" his comlink crackled. "There's something wrong with Leia-she's, I don't know, she's having some kind of seizure or something. Luke, what do I do?"

"I don't know;" Luke said as he watched Vastor's body do the same: writhe in slow, twisting convulsions like a Riddellian blood-worm baking on a hot fry-rock. There came a clatter from above: blaster rifles slipping from stormtrooper hands to bounce on the stone of the ring ledge. The stormtroopers, each and every one, began to buckle at the knees. They twisted and jerked, bucking in slow motion, clutching at their helmets with gauntleted fingers as though to claw out their own eyes.

"Han," Luke said. "Go. Go now."

He reached out with the Force and slammed shut the Falcon's hatch just as the Vastor body lurched to its feet and reached Luke in one lightning bound. Impossibly powerful hands seized Luke's shoulders as Vastor lifted him like a doll, and shook him and roared rage and bloodl.u.s.t into his face, and there was nothing human left in Vastor's eyes. He sank his teeth into Luke's throat, and bit down.

And on the ring ledge above, the stormtoopers started to scream.