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?” Chewbacca 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 hyperspace 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 assumed 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: meltmassif.
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 bloodworm 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 bloodlust 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.
CHAPTER 18
AIR MARSHAL KLICK COULD NOT IDENTIFY THE SOUND. Even through his consuming agony, pain so intense that he could no longer stand, he was quite certain that he’d never heard this particular sound before, and right now he couldn’t guess what it might be. The agony, however, he understood very well.
The inside of his armor had turned into needles.
Big needles.
They stabbed every centimeter of him from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. And they didn’t stop once they had pierced his skin. Instead, they grew, lancing deeper into his flesh; they seemed to enter his bloodstream and splinter off, tearing at him from the inside. They went up his nose and in behind his eye sockets, drilling right through the bone of his skull and slicing into his brain. Inside his brain they didn’t hurt—no pain nerves—but he could feel them by what they cut away.
They cut away his honor, and his discipline. They cut away his devotion to the emperor, and his pride in his men. They cut away his memory, and his dreams, his hopes, and his fears. The needles in his brain destroyed everything he had ever been, but they didn’t leave mere emptiness behind …
Each of those empty parts of him boiled with savage unreasoning rage.
His final thought as a conscious being was Ah, that’s what the sound is. It’s me.
Screaming.
The sound of his own screams was all he took with him into the dark. Then there was only rage, and a burning need to kill someone.
Anyone.
THE COUCH NICK WAS STRAPPED ONTO WAS BARELY EVEN a couch at all; it was more like a padded shelf in a slight widening of the crawlspace tube that extended back from the shuttle’s lone pilot’s chair. Nick lay with his eyes closed, watching the dark star in his head.
Watching was not exactly what he was doing. The sense he used was not sight, though the dark star appeared to his vision as a patch of deeper night in the infinite black between the stars. Nor did he touch it, though he could feel how cold it was, how it was a bottomless abyss that swallowed all the warmth in the universe. Nick’s ears rang with an utter lack of sound, and in his nose and mouth was only corruption and decay.
But he did his best to ignore those sensations, because none of them would help him kill that evil son of an inbred ruskakk.
When Nick closed his eyes and turned his whole mind to the task, he simply knew that this dark star of hunger and decay was straight ahead, on the shuttle’s current course. He knew it was moving, and when it smeared into a streak of jump radiation, he knew that too.
“He’s gone into jump,” Aeona said from the pilot’s chair. “Unless there’s more than one of these asteroids with a hyperdrive.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“The navicomputer says his vector’s wrong for the jump-out point.”
“He’s not going for the jump-out point. He’s making for deep space.”
“Then how are we supposed to find him? Guess?”
“I can find him,” Nick said. “He can run, but he can’t hide. Not from me. Get on his vector and jump.”
“How far?”
“Just outside the system.”
He could hear the shrug in her voice. “You’re the boss.”
“If you only knew how long I’ve been waiting to hear you say that.”
He heard the tapping of codes being punched into the navicomputer. The rising whine of the hyperdrive sped them toward jump … then he heard the whine drop as the hyperdrive spun down.
Nick sat up so suddenly he whacked his head on the crawlspace’s ceiling. “What’s going on? Why didn’t we—”
“Fail-safe cut in.” Aeona’s voice was tight. She twisted to glance at him over her shoulder, and the look on her face made his stomach twist. “We’re in a gravity well.”
She checked the shuttle’s sensors. “Mass-shadows all over the place,” she said, low and slow and grim. “They’ve repowered the gravity stations.”
“What? Which ones?”
She lowered her head. “All of them.”
“No way,” Nick snarled. “No fraggin’ way!”
>
“All those ships. All those people. On both sides.” Again she twisted to look at him over her shoulder. Her eyes were haunted. “None of them are getting out. Not one.”
Nick felt hollow inside, as if somebody had reached down his throat and pulled out his guts. He turned half-blind eyes to the meters-thick custom shielding that so nearly filled the entire shuttle. “Just us,” he said. “Nobody else.”
Aeona nodded. “I think we’re the only ones who have a chance to live through this.”
LEIA STILL WRITHED AND TWISTED IN THAT HORRIBLE slow-motion convulsion, despite Han and Chewbacca’s best efforts to calm her and hold her still. “Take her to the cockpit and buckle her into your chair so she can’t hurt herself,” Han said. “I’m going after Luke.”
“Howergh!”
“He’d go back for me,” Han replied grimly. “In fact, he has.”
“Argharoo-oo hrf.”
“I’m not keeping count.” He sprinted for the gangway and clambered up to throw open the dorsal access hatch. When he poked his head out, all he saw was Luke’s tame stormtroopers up on the ring ledge, writhing and howling in incomprehensible agony.
“Hey, bucket-heads!” Han shouted. “What’s wrong with you guys? Where’s L—uh, where’s your emperor?”
All he got in reply was more howling, so he went up another rung on the gangway and peered around. The wreckage of the Falcon’s dorsal quad turret made him wince; all that was left was a flattened mass of crumpled transparisteel under great big gleaming chunks of what looked like obsidian. He made a mental note to bill the repairs to Lando.
Another couple of steps up the gangway raised his angle of vision enough that he could see the crown of the big man’s shaved head over the wreckage and rubble. One step more showed him Luke’s limp, unresisting form hanging from the big man’s grip while that son of a Pervickian dung camel chewed on Luke’s neck—!
Han cleared the hatch in a single leap, and by the time his feet touched the hull his blaster was in his hand. “Hey, monkey-breath! Chew on this!”
But he couldn’t just fire from the hip; Luke was in the way and Han knew stun blasts were useless against the Vastor body. In the fraction of a second that it took him to bring the DL-44 up to eye level to align the sights, the big man’s right hand came free of Luke’s shoulder with a weird ripping sound. Luke’s shoulder, where that hand had been, showed black and glistening like the handful of crystal hairs back in the Melter crypt, and Vastor’s hand was full of the same—and while Han was trying to make sense of that, some invisible force snatched his blaster away.
I have got to learn to hang on to that thing with both hands! Han bounded forward, swept up a jagged hunk of obsidian the size of his doubled fists, and charged, cranking the black glass rock back over his shoulder as if he was going to hurl it overhand—but he hurled himself instead, leaping up onto the rubble, then down again in a headlong dive with the chunk raised high until a scarlet blaster bolt slashed past his face and blew the hunk of obsidian right out of his hand.
He almost went face-first into the hull armor but managed to turn his crash into a clumsy somersault that left him flat on his back, dazed and gasping and staring up at the business end of his blaster. Which was in Luke’s hand.
Luke said, “Didn’t I tell you to go?”
While Han was still blankly mumbling, “Yow. Nice shooting. I think,” the enormous Vastor-thing moaned like someone in terrible pain or fear or both. One huge hand slammed against Luke’s chest, and for all Han could tell, it was like Vastor was the one in trouble and trying desperately to escape. An instant later, Vastor ripped his mouth free of Luke’s neck—and his mouth was full of those black crystal hairs. The wound in Luke’s neck wasn’t bleeding, it was sprouting a thatch of that same blackly glistening fur that was writhing and twisting and growing like it was alive. Vastor gasped like a drowning man and yanked his other hand off Luke’s arm, and before Han could manage even a faint guess as to what was actually going on, Vastor whirled, took four or five running steps for momentum, and made a great big flying leap right off the ship.
Han had no idea if Vastor had fallen to his death, or if he’d caught a grip on the wall, or had maybe even started flapping his arms and flew into orbit. He could only stare up at his young friend and murmur plaintively, “Luke, what the hell?”
“You would have killed him,” Luke said distantly.
“Oh, you think? We kill bad guys. It’s what we do.”
“I don’t,” Luke said. “Not if I can help it. Not anymore.” He looked down at Han with a faint start, as though he’d been lost in a daydream and only now realized where they both were. Wearing a faintly bemused half smile, he flipped the DL-44 end-for-end and offered its grip to Han. “Here. You’ll need this.”
“For what?” Han asked, just as he was starting to realize that the shaft around the Falcon had suddenly gone quiet.
The stormtroopers had stopped screaming.
“Uh-oh.”
He snatched his pistol out of Luke’s hand and popped to his feet as blasters opened up on all sides to rain plasma upon them in a roaring flood. Luke’s lightsaber flared to life and lashed out in invisibly fast arcs that sent bolts out and away in a fan, blasting into the rock of the shaft walls. Choking red-black smoke billowed out from the points of impact, shrouding them in gloom so dense that the Falcon’s exterior floodlights only gave off a yellow-brown glow.
“Stick close.” Luke’s voice was tight with concentration. “I’m not used to having to cover somebody else.”
“Don’t have to tell me twice.” Han squeezed himself into a substantially less-than-Han-sized space at Luke’s back and had barely time to wish that he knew a Jedi who was just a little taller before the Falcon bucked as if it had been kicked. The ship bounced off the shaft wall hard enough that Han had to grab Luke’s shoulder to stay upright. “Chewie, dammit!”
“Not his fault,” Luke said tightly, still carving smoke with his blade to catch stray blaster bolts. “The ship didn’t move. The shaft did. The mountain’s breaking up.”
“Oh, great! Any more good news?”
“Yes,” Luke said. “We’re being boarded.”
Dark shapes hurtled down at them through the gloom—stormtroopers jumping off the ring ledge. Han snarled something wordless that expressed vividly how he felt about having Imperial boots touch his ship and slipped his blaster over Luke’s shoulder, snapping off a pair of double taps that caught two troopers while they were still in the air. The bursts blew them backward far enough that they fell short and tumbled into the shaft below, but dozens made it onto the hull. There were plenty more where they’d come from, and Han had a strong feeling that a stand-up fight against a hundred-some stormtroopers was a losing proposition under the best of circumstances. Which these circumstances weren’t.
“Make for the hatch!” Han fired twice more, dropping one dark silhouette and knocking another spinning off the rim of the hull, while Luke fanned away a flood of return fire. “Let’s see how these sons of monkey-lizards like open space and hard vacuum!”
“You first,” Luke said.
“That’s another thing you won’t have to tell me twice.” Red-glowing spheres sailed in through the smoke: thermal detonators. Some bounced away, but four or five maglocked themselves to the hull. “Uh, Luke?”
“I’ve got them.” With his left hand, Luke swung his lightsaber in a dazzling flourish to spray blaster bolts randomly through the smoke, while his right hand stretched out toward the dets. All of them suddenly jerked themselves loose and flipped over the edge of the ship. Multiple detonations bounced the ship off the wall again. “Go, Han! Go now!”
Han took three steps, then threw himself into a flat dive that became a belly flop and sent him skidding and scraping over the lip of the hatch. He pulled himself in with his free hand and pivoted around his grip to land on his feet on the deck below. “I’m in! Luke, come on!”
More dets went off and lit the smoke with bloody
flame, and there came no sign that Luke had any intention of following him. Han scrambled back up the gangway. “Luke, don’t be an idiot!”
“I’m going after Vastor.” Luke leaned into the gale of blasterfire as he worked his way toward the ship’s edge. “Go. Save Leia! Don’t wait for me.”
“We’re not leaving without you! And if you’re going after that huge crazy thunderbucker, I’m coming with you! You’ll need me!”
“Leia needs you. Stopping the bad guy is my job. Your job is to save the Princess.”
“And since when do I take your orders?”
Luke threw him a glance. For one brief instant his face lit up with one of those old sunny farmboy grins Han hadn’t seen since Hoth. “Watch your fingers.”
“What?”
The hatch slammed down on Han hard enough to knock him down the gangway. He landed hard, rubbing his ringing head. “Luke!”
He hauled himself back up the gangway, but the hatch controls were dark, and the manual dogs were frozen. He snarled and pounded at them with the butt of his blaster, but then it occurred to him that the hull above was crowded with old-line Imperial troopers, the kind who specialized in cracking ships, and any of them who weren’t busy trying to kill Luke would be busy trying to peel the hull so they could flood inside and kill Han and Chewie.
And Leia.
“Hope you know what you’re doing, kid,” Han muttered. It was as close to a good-bye as he could let himself say.
He jammed his blaster back into its holster and pelted headlong for the cockpit. “Chewie! Change of plan!” He skidded into the accessway. “The stun field, Chewie! Charge ’em up!”
“Growf! Heroo geeorrough?”
“He’s not coming.” Han vaulted into his seat. He hit the antipersonnel trigger himself and was treated to the gratifying sight of a couple of stormtroopers falling past the cockpit’s viewports with blue energy still crackling over their black armor. Maybe on some other day he would have stayed and fought it out, but Leia, strapped into Chewbacca’s copilot chair, writhed and moaned and twisted Han’s heart.
Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 31