Luke rose.
The assembled stormtroopers tensed. Several hundred blaster carbines snapped to shoulder-ready.
The group captain called again. “General Skywalker! Are you Luke Skywalker?”
“If it’s not too much of a cliché, take me to your leader.” Luke held out his lightsaber, inert, on his open palm, and smiled. “If it is too much of a cliché, take me anyway.”
R2-D2 HAD PASSED THE ROCK STORM IN A SNUG LITTLE lava cave near the rim of the crater, unconcernedly repairing his rollerped’s damaged arm. When the meteorite strikes got powerful enough to interfere with the repairs—a few of the ground shocks bounced the little droid around his lava cave like a Touranian jumping-stone in a bumble-dice cup—R2 just drilled four of his auxiliary manipulators into the sides of the cave to anchor himself in place and went on. With his enormous array of onboard tools, a good-enough repair was simple, though R2 did file a memo in his maintenance archive to have the arm replaced the next time he could find his way into a fully outfitted service center.
Soon the rock storm’s thunder had faded, and R2’s auditory sensors registered the characteristic shriek of air whistling through the accumulator panels of TIE fighters—always heard when TIEs were used in-atmosphere. R2’s onboard threat-assessment algorithm estimated the shrieks to be coming from several kilometers overhead, which meant that a quick peek outside carried an acceptably low level of risk. First came an extensible minidish, with which R2 made a quick scan of sensor channels; discovering no droid-sensitive scans in progress, the little astromech extended his now-functional locomotor arms, deanchored his manipulators, and whirred up to the surface.
“There you are, my little beauty!” The shout registered in R2’s auditory sensors as a series of sonic impulses whose wave characteristics corresponded to the natural vocal production of a human male speaking Basic with a distinctively Inner Rim accent; R2 instantly filed a copy in his medium-term audio log, because he knew from long experience that C-3PO derived a great deal of pleasure-analogue from analyzing distinctive vowel/consonant interactions to deduce the planet of origin—and region of that planet—not only of the speaker in question, but also of the speaker’s parents, childhood companions, teachers, and, if applicable, mate or mates. R2 himself was confident—over seventy-three percent probability—that this accent would turn out to be native to Mindor, but he was content to leave such final determinations to the expert. After all, every droid has to be good at something … and C-3PO had a long history of unpleasantly human-like insistence on his innate superiority in such matters, so R2 also filed a memo to pretend complete ignorance, which he estimated might prevent as much as thirty-seven minutes of pointless bickering.
R2’s threat-assessment algorithm also registered the origination point of the shout—some eighty-seven degrees from planetary north, at a range of less than three meters—and so when the shouter grabbed the little droid, R2’s antitamper capacitors were already fully charged. “Aeona! I’ve got him! I’ve got hiyouerghh …” was the new shout, the youerghh being the shouter’s response to receiving a burst of static discharge that hurled him back a meter or so and left him twitching on the lava, sparks still spitting from half-charred gloves.
“Boakie!” a different human male, though with a similar accent, shouted. “That little grubber killed Boakie! Give me that ion blaster—”
“Cancel that!” This voice, by contrast, was clearly the product of a human female, who, based on the harmonic overtones of authority, was equally clearly accustomed to instant obedience. “Stow the blaster, Tripp.”
“But—but it killed Boakie—”
“He’s not dead. He’s just learning about keeping his hands to himself. Now stow that blaster before I take it away and feed it to you.”
“But I was only—”
“Tripp.”
“All right, Aeona. I mean, jeesh, you can’t fault a guy for getting—”
“Sure I can. Now back off. I want to talk to this thing.”
There was motion among the rocks. To R2’s optical array, it looked like the lava itself had come to life and was closing in. This being new to R2’s long, long data chain of filed experience, the little droid dutifully recorded the lava’s approach.
R2 also subjected this recording to real-time multi-spectrum analysis and discovered, through a combination of thermal and bioelectric field output, that what appeared to be living rock was instead nineteen human beings who were wearing rocks—the humans appeared to have constructed a rough analogue of Imperial stormtrooper armor out of chunks of lava attached somehow to the ragged remnants of survival suits. Which was a particularly compelling example, R2 observed in a note appended to the file, of the endless human inventiveness with camouflage.
“Hey, little guy,” the authoritative woman said, approaching R2 with open, empty hands, crouching a little, as though the droid might be a nervous Shistavanen cub. “What are you doing all alone, way out here? Waiting for somebody?”
“Waiting for a junk dealer, I bet,” the one called Tripp said. “Can you believe how old that thing is? If it ain’t defective, who’d leave it out here? I say we blast it and break it up for parts.”
“What counts around here is what I say,” the woman growled, then put on that same gentle, friendly tone as she turned back to R2. “Don’t mind him.”
“But—but listen, Aeona, seriously. Our last three astromechs are barely functional—and they’re all newer than this one. We really need those parts!”
The woman’s face shifted into an expression that R2’s optical-analysis algorithm couldn’t parse, which triggered his threat-assessment system to initiate a measured response: R2 decided that a prudent course would be to warn these humans of the possible consequences of aggressive action.
A quick scan of his data archives brought up a recording of the rescue of Han Solo on Tatooine: the chaotic battle above the Pit of Carkoon aboard the sail barge of Jabba the Hutt. A bit of judicious editing—to intersplice a more recent recording—replaced Gamorrean guards and other servitors of the Hutt crime lord with human beings in armor improvised of broken lava, and replaced the deck of the Hutt’s caravel with the devastated landscape of Mindor. This process took only .78 second, and when it was complete, R2 initiated its holoprojector array to display its handiwork: a miniature Luke Skywalker wielding a lightsaber of shining green, who leapt and spun and somersaulted among images of R2’s captors, cutting them down on every side.
“What is that supposed to be?” Tripp said. “Is that little grubber threatening us?”
“Shut up.” The woman—Aeona—dropped to one knee and leaned in to get a better look at R2’s holodisplay, and for a moment her face softened, her eyes went wide, and her voice went hushed with awe. “That’s a Jedi …”
“You don’t really believe that thing, do you?” Tripp shook his head, one hand on the DEMP blaster. “The Empire wiped out the Jedi before I was born.”
“Not before I was born.” The woman stared at Luke’s image. “This little fella belongs to a Jedi. That’s who he’s waiting for. I’m thinking maybe we should wait with him—I’d really like to meet this Jedi, when he finally shows up. We could use his help.”
“What if whoever shows up turns out not to be a Jedi?”
She stood, and shook off that gentle expression like a bad dream. “Then we take their ship and leave ’em to the Melters.” She shrugged. “Saves having to kill them ourselves.”
THE GUNSHIP SET DOWN ON A BROAD LANDING FIELD IN the shadow of turbolaser towers. One of the black-armored stormtroopers gestured with his blaster rifle. “Out.”
Luke looked at the towers, at the hundreds of gunships in neatly ordered ranks, up at the mouths of caverns high above on the curve of the volcanic dome, in and out of which flew clouds of TIE fighters.
They sure didn’t seem worried about him getting a look at their defenses. No surprise there; he didn’t figure they had any plans to ever let him go.
A whole plato
on of stormtroopers in gleaming black armor surrounded him, marching with weapons ready. The two behind him had blaster carbines aimed at the middle of his back, and fingers on their triggers. Their sergeant marched ahead. Behind them all, at a vantage that kept them all in view together, walked what Luke had come to assume was some kind of political officer.
Rather than armor, this individual wore dark, vaguely Vaderish clothing and a cape, and a curious hat, or headgear—a jet-black version of the odd half-moon hat that the putative Lord Shadowspawn had worn in the holoprojections. This individual had the pale, frozen face and jet-black eyes of Shadowspawn, as well—exactly, in fact. Luke might have assumed that this individual was in fact Shadowspawn himself, were it not that the drape of the jet-black cape clearly showed that the body beneath was female—and a short, fairly plump female at that.
She carried his lightsaber, and she stank of the dark side.
She’d been on the troop carrier that had brought him here from the caves. She never spoke, but her slightest gesture was enough to make a trooper snap to his duty with a will. Here in the installation, among the hundreds, maybe thousands of troopers, he had seen some dozens of these headgear types. They all had the same face—had to be some sort of holomask—and all of them seemed to get the same deference from the black stormtroopers. And there didn’t seem to be any Imperial regulars here at all, just the black stormtroopers and these dark-side Moon Hats.
And the Moon Hats all had this same dark-side stink: an aura of wrongness so palpable that Luke could close his eyes and target them by the revulsion they inspired.
The base’s defenses weren’t impressive, just five ion-turbo surface-to-orbit dual cannons and a double ring of turbolaser batteries that appeared to be calibrated for surface work—antiarmor and the like. Of course, those were only the fixed defenses; what sorts of mobile fighting craft the warlord might possess was impossible to guess, because the base itself appeared to have been hollowed out of the interior of a volcanic dome more than five kilometers across. Luke figured that with a little crowding, he could have fit most of the RRTF inside there and had room to spare—especially since there was no way to know how deep some of those vast steam-billowing caverns might prove to be.
And there was a single emplacement of some kind at the uppermost curve of the volcanic dome, in the middle of the ring of surface-to-orbit cannons. It appeared to be covered in some kind of heavily armored shell. He turned to one of the stormtroopers who marched at his side and pointed up at it. “Tell me what that is.”
He felt a pulse from the Force, and he looked over his shoulder in time to see the Moon Hat touch fingertips to her lips, then flatten her hand, palm down. One of the troopers behind him jabbed Luke in the kidney with the muzzle of his carbine. Hard. “You heard her.”
“I did?”
“No talking. We know what Jedi can do.”
Luke shrugged and kept walking, a little stiffly until the knot in his back eased. “Please don’t hit me.”
This earned him a carbine stock across the back of his head hard enough to buckle his knees. “Didn’t you hear me?”
Luke straightened again and shook the stars out of his head. He paused long enough to look over his shoulder. “I heard you. But I don’t see any particular reason to obey you.”
“Obey this.”
The Force whispered a warning, and Luke whirled in time to catch the oncoming butt of the blaster carbine in the palm of his flesh hand and hold it fast. “I said please.”
The astonished stormtrooper tried to yank his carbine free, but instead Luke tightened his grip and let the Force add strength to his arm; a twist of the wrist shattered the carbine’s stock to plastite splinters. The other stormtrooper swore and triggered an autoburst from his carbine. Luke’s other hand, the prosthetic hand that had replaced the one his father had taken, came up in an arc that precisely followed the motions of the carbine’s muzzle and caught all five bolts squarely in its palm.
“Please don’t shoot me, either.” He turned the palm upward in a friendly shrug and let the astonished troopers stare at the only effect of the Force-blunted blasterfire: a faint curl of steam that trailed upward from his unmarked palm. “Let’s try to end the day with nobody else dying, shall we?”
The stormtrooper sneered, “Tell that to Lord Shadowspawn.”
“I plan to,” Luke said. “That’s why I’m here.”
CHAPTER 7
HAN SOLO WAS STRONGLY OF THE OPINION THAT SPACE battles, despite how much fun certain demented thrill-monkeys—say, any member of Rogue Squadron—liked to claim they can be, ranked somewhere below being kissed by a Traptoforian razor slug, and only a whisker above being dropped headfirst into a barrel of bantha poop. He’d been in this one for less than five minutes, and so far it had done nothing to change his opinion.
It wasn’t like he hadn’t been expecting trouble. He’d been expecting trouble ever since he’d ditched those Mando negotiations. That expectation of trouble had become absolute certainty when he and Chewie had hit the jump point three light-years from Mindor and been yanked out of hyperspace and ambushed by a couple dozen TIE defenders, which hadn’t been an actual problem because he was not, despite Leia’s occasional insistence, an idiot. He’d preset the final leg in the Falcon’s navicomputer, so they had been in and out of the jump point before those astonished Imps could so much as shout “Emperor’s black bones!” or whatever stupid pretend curse they liked to shout when caught with their armored pants around their armored ankles.
If he hadn’t been so worried about Luke, he might even have stuck around and taught a few of them the value of real cursing, Corellian-style—Corellian curses being a synergistic blend of vulgarity, obscenity, and outright blasphemy that were the only things really worth saying when one was in the middle of being blown to monatomic dust.
Also, the navicomputer preset should have dropped them out of hyperspace about twenty light-minutes from Mindor, which would, in theory, have given him and Chewie plenty of time to get a solid read on the situation with the Falcon’s medium-range sensors before deciding whether to go on in or head back out, because Han—recent military service notwithstanding—still tried, at least in spirit, to adhere to the principles outlined in the Combat Litany of the Smuggler’s Creed:
Never fight when you can bluff.
Never bluff when you can run.
Never run when you can sneak.
If no one knows you’re there, you win.
This was the theory, anyway. The distinction between theory and reality was announced by the mass-proximity Klaxon in the Falcon’s cockpit, which unleashed an ear-shattering blast that was underlined by the Falcon being unceremoniously dumped back into realspace in the middle of a battle between three Corellian frigates, half a dozen fighter wings, and a giant cloud of TIE interceptors that was, unbelievably, taking place in the middle of an even-more-giant meteor storm.
THE X-WING PILOT AND HIS WINGMAN WERE LINING UP desperate deflection shots at an oncoming formation of six TIE interceptors when an ancient, battered YT-1300 freighter suddenly arrived in the middle of their dogfight, blocking those last-ditch shots.
The wingman’s demand to know what a saucer-shaped relic from Old Republic days was doing in the middle of a space battle quickly turned into a gasp of awe as the battered hulk slewed into an astonishingly precise skew-flip that turned its sublights into weapons to blast a pair of interceptors enough off-course that they slammed into a nearby asteroid. At that point, the relic in question hurtled headlong at the remaining four of the TIE flight—who were boxed together by the maze of asteroids—barrel-rolling through a storm of laserfire while unleashing a salvo of concussion missiles with either astonishing accuracy or even more astonishing luck, so that after a single pass the freighter streaked away, hurtling off through the maze of asteroids after having dusted six interceptors in under five seconds.
Inside the freighter’s cockpit, Han didn’t have a chance to celebrate his victory. Bleeding fr
om a minor scalp wound he’d collected off the front viewport strut owing to not being fully strapped into his pilot’s couch, he was busy yanking the control yoke this way and that, thumbing fire-control switches wholly at random, and ducking and throwing his weight as though he could bodily increase the ship’s maneuverability to help dodge the meteors that kept denting his hull. All the while he kept screaming at the top of his lungs things like “Chewie, we need those deflectors! We really, really do!” and “Is that smoke? Why am I smelling smoke?” From the forward service access came half-panicked yowls of frustration and apology: in the haste of their sudden takeoff, the problem in the balky forward deflector-array control assembly had failed to get entirely repaired, which could be a seriously fatal problem in the middle of a couple of hundred enemy starfighters, a number of which were now apparently right on his tail. But he ignored Chewie’s yowls, because on top of everything else he was dealing with, something was entirely screwed up with local space: the Falcon’s navicomputer couldn’t make any kind of sense out of the trajectories of all the different rocks swirling around, and the ship was yawing and starting to tumble in a way he hadn’t experienced since his legendary race through the Kessel Run, where tidal effects from the local black holes had—
“Hey …” Han straightened up, his face suddenly clearing. It was like Kessel—exactly like Kessel! He checked a sensor; sure enough, the asteroids were clustered around a powerful mass well, almost certainly produced by a gravity mine or projector somewhere in the middle. “That’s it! Chewie, forget the deflectors! Give me particle shields forward! Now!”
Chewbacca replied with a series of growling snorts and hoots that translated, roughly, as You’d better not be thinking what I know you’re thinking!
Han grinned, remembering a vaguely similar situation some years before. He gave the same answer now. “They’d be crazy to follow us, wouldn’t they?”
Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 10