by James Luceno
Group Captain Klick had been Squadron Leader Klick nearly a year before, on that black day when Lord Vader’s treason, and his cowardly murder of Palpatine the Great, had allowed the Rebel Alliance to escape the trap at the moons of Endor. The destruction of the second Death Star had been nothing compared with the shattering dislocation Imperial forces had suffered at the loss of their beloved Emperor. Without the leadership of the great man, the Imperial military had splintered into competing factions squabbling over whatever scraps of territory could be secured by local Moffs or regional Admiralty commanders. Conflicts had smoldered, and even some skirmishes had flared, Imperial against Imperial.
Then had come Shadowspawn.
No one knew his real name. No one knew from whence he’d come. But it was clear to all who so much as heard his voice that this was no mere Moff, no general or admiral with delusions of Imperial grandeur. To be received into Shadowspawn’s presence was as awe-inspiring as standing before the Emperor himself.
When rumor had begun to spark throughout the Imperial regions of a new leader, a man of mystery with the cunning and charisma of a second coming of Palpatine, Klick had been promoted to wing commander in the service of Admiral Kraven, the self-styled warlord of a Mid Rim stellar cluster, and sent with his squadrons to destroy this upstart. But the upstart in question had received Klick’s fighter wing with welcome instead of combat … and greeted him with an array of authentic command codes, even Palpatine’s own secret codes that had been buried in the deep core programming Klick had received in the crèche on Kamino. Shadowspawn claimed to have been handpicked by Palpatine to be his steward, to hold the throne in trust for Palpatine’s chosen heir; Palpatine had given these codes to him so that every loyal clone would know Shadowspawn for the galaxy’s rightful, if temporary, ruler.
It had been Shadowspawn who had revealed to Klick the tale of Vader’s treason, the monster’s cowardly murder of his longtime friend and benefactor, a tale so dark and gruesome that even now, Klick shuddered to think of it. Why, Vader would have died years ago, without the caring and generosity of the great man he would eventually assassinate; it was well known among the clones that Darth Vader had been a charity case, his life saved free of any charge at one of Palpatine’s great legacies, the Emperor Palpatine Surgical Reconstruction Center on Coruscant. Palpatine’s caring and generosity had not only saved Vader’s life, but had gifted him with mechanical arms and legs, remaking a helpless cripple into perhaps the most feared and powerful man the galaxy had ever known.
It was all just a small part of the greatest holothriller Klick had ever seen, the one Shadowspawn himself had created and was now circulating among the systems still loyal to the Imperial Dream: Luke Skywalker and the Jedi’s Revenge.
The holothriller had shown in vivid detail how Vader’s madness had grown with his unholy ambition, how the Dark Lord had pretended to play along with Palpatine’s quest to rescue the last remaining child of the Jedi hero, Anakin Skywalker, from the evil web of lies in which the Rebels had snared him. How on the day when Luke Skywalker had finally stood before Palpatine on the bridge of the second Death Star, when the Emperor had declared his great love for Skywalker’s father—who, as all honest clones knew, had been the Emperor’s most beloved protégé until his tragic, untimely death in the Jedi Rebellion—Vader’s mind had finally snapped.
It was Vader, as Luke Skywalker and the Jedi’s Revenge made so painfully clear, who had always secretly dreamed of being Palpatine’s successor. It was Vader, in his madness, who had believed himself to be Palpatine’s beloved protégé; he had even tried to bend young Skywalker’s mind to evil, to recruit the virtuous young Jedi in his treasonous plans, but young Skywalker had roundly rejected Vader’s insane machinations. And so, on that dark day among the moons of Endor, when Palpatine had revealed to young Skywalker that he, and he alone, the son of Palpatine’s beloved companion, the child of the sole Jedi to remain loyal to the Senate and the Chancellor during the Jedi Rebellion, was to be the new Emperor, Vader could no longer control his rage. With a roar of mindless fury, he’d attacked like a blood-mad rancor.
As the innocent young Skywalker had looked on in horror, the black-armored monster had fallen upon the frail old man who had once befriended him. Only after Palpatine had been mortally wounded had young Skywalker snapped from his daze. With righteous fury, he had risen up against the most feared fighter in the galaxy, and had struck down the black-armored assassin, the murderer of his late father’s greatest friend. But it was too late to save Palpatine; poor Skywalker could only avenge the great man’s death.
Though Klick knew that what he’d seen was only a dramatic reenactment, there was something so real about it, so powerful—a truth greater than any mere facts.
It was Luke Skywalker’s grief and guilt at his failure to save the Emperor, Shadowspawn had explained, that had driven him back into the grasp of the Rebels. Skywalker believed that he deserved no better than to be just another outlaw among the thieves, pirates, and murderers of the Rebel Alliance.
“And this is what I ask of you, Wing Commander,” Lord Shadowspawn had said to Klick on that day. “That you join me in my quest to fulfill the dying wish of our Beloved Emperor: to heal the broken heart of the son of the last true Jedi hero, and to put Luke Skywalker, Palpatine’s chosen heir, in his rightful place as the absolute ruler of our Galactic Empire.”
Klick had been proud to surrender his forces to the great Lord Shadowspawn’s epic struggle to bring the shattered galaxy together again; there was no greater honor he could imagine than to lay down his life for Palpatine’s chosen heir, and Lord Shadowspawn had rewarded his devotion with promotion and command of his own fighter group. He only hoped that he could somehow survive the coming struggle, that someday he might have the privilege to kneel and pledge his service in person to the newly anointed emperor.
Now, far beyond the archway along the fusion-formed corridor of stone, one of the Pawns paused and turned, as though he had somehow sensed Klick’s thought. A pale hand came up and beckoned.
Klick followed them into the Election Center.
This was not Klick’s first visit to the Election Center; he knew what to expect. He’d tried to train himself not to look at the Elect. He’d tried to school himself not to hear them. He’d tried to discipline his mind to think of the Elect as the privileged, the chosen, the luckiest of the lucky, yanked from despair into this once-in-a-millennium opportunity to serve the Great Cause.
Tried, and failed.
Every time he entered this place, the Elect were not invisible, nor inaudible, and he’d never be able to think of them as lucky. They were always, and would always be, terrified victims, helplessly screaming or sobbing or pleading for their lives, sentient sacrifices tragically necessary to Shadowspawn’s plan for Skywalker’s eventual victory.
The Pawns ahead of him dragged the stunned prisoner to a vacant Pawning Table: a slab-like pedestal of stone, molded from the local meltmassif. They let the prisoner slump over its edge as they drew their neural stunners; a short burst from each into the surface of the Pawning Table altered the electrocrystalline structure of the meltmassif, liquefying a coffin-sized area in the smooth stone into a fluid that had the consistency of cold barkmeal. Then the Pawns lifted the prisoner onto the table, pressing his limp body into the liquid stone, which flowed around his limbs until only his head was exposed. They carefully supported his chin as the stone resolidified around him, molding the hardening rock up along his neck and around his jaw.
Then a burst of precisely calibrated radiation flash-burned off all the hair on his head and face, and the Pawns produced a pair of self-cauterizing laser bone saws and began to cut away the top of his skull.
This was not what produced the screaming, sobbing, and pleading that characterized the Pawning process; the Elect were never even awake enough to experience the messy details of having the upper hemispheres of their skulls removed. The screaming, sobbing, and pleading would begin after a par
ticular Elect had awakened, as a series of neural probes selectively stimulated differing nerve clusters of their exposed brains. The anguish, however, was short-lived; soon the neural probes would identify the precise location of, say, the tickle reflex, and the screams would instantly be replaced by giggling. Shortly, stimulation of olfactory neurons would have the giggling Elect asking for a slice of the grilled bantha steak he believed himself to be smelling, and perhaps a mug of that delightfully rich hot chocolate that he was quite certain someone must have been brewing just out of sight.
And at each and every point, from the nerves that registered the color blue to the nerves that controlled the curl of the Elect’s toes, the Pawns would place a tiny crystal of meltmassif, the same stone as the Table. The same stone as the entire Election Center, and the vault outside. And after the skull was replaced, these crystals would grow into a gem-like latticework spreading throughout the Elect’s brain cavity.
Every Pawn had a head full of diamonds.
Klick did not know what criteria might be used to choose the Elect. Nor did he comprehend the subtle gradations of rank among the Pawns, why and how some seemed to be in charge at some times, and at other times seemed to take the orders of those they had recently commanded. All he knew was that once an Elect had been fitted with his crescent Crown and released as a full Pawn, he was instantly the superior of any trooper or pilot or officer. His slightest gesture was to be obeyed as though it had proceeded from Lord Shadowspawn himself. Very few of the Pawns ever spoke, but some peculiar eloquence in their gestures could make their orders instantly clear to even the dimmest nat-born trooper; Klick suspected it was some arcane use of the Force.
He’d never understood the Force, though he did not doubt its existence; he’d seen the Force used in action by countless Jedi during the Clone Wars. He had no interest in understanding. He’d been bred not for insight, but for obedience. He was content to allow the Force to remain a convenient mystery: one he could use to explain whatever he might find otherwise inexplicable.
Like, for example, how Lord Shadowspawn was able to shape meltmassif seemingly with the power of his will alone. A simple electromagnetic burst was enough to temporarily break down the curious crystalline structure of the rock, but that could not explain how, when Shadowspawn was near and set his will upon it, the meltmassif seemed almost alive. Klick had witnessed it more than once: Shadowspawn would stretch forth his hand, and the stone would flow and shape itself into whatever fantastical form might suit the Lord’s wildest desire.
Ahead, another Pawn beckoned. This Pawn stood at a blank slate-gray wall of meltmassif, but as Klick marched toward it, the Pawn swept a hand as though to usher him on, and the stone dimpled, drawing away from him in a bubble that became a shaft a few meters long. Klick entered the shaft without hesitation, and didn’t even blink as the stone flowed together to seal itself behind him, cutting off all light along with the possibility of retreat. He kept marching through the absolute darkness without breaking stride, trusting that the stone would continue to open before him and close behind.
And if the stone should fail to part before him, should Lord Shadowspawn see fit to entomb him alive as a punishment for his failure, he would stand and wait until his air ran out, and then he would go to sleep forever. No clone spawned in Kaminoan pods and raised in crèche school could even comprehend the concept of claustrophobia, much less suffer from it.
The faintest of breezes stirred his hair, and the sound of his boot heels on the stone took on added resonance, a multiplicity of echoes: though he could not see it, the stone had opened before him into a chamber of perfect night.
“Hold, Group Captain.” In the lightless void, Lord Shadowspawn’s voice came from every direction and from none at all, as though the darkness itself spoke these words. “Stand and report.”
“My lord.” Klick inclined his head. “I regret to inform my lord that—”
“Do not regret, Klick. Only inform.”
“The ship you ordered us—ah, that we were ordered to strike, my lord, along the Corellian Run. It was a Rebel ambush. The Corellian Queen was not even a ship at all, only a shell—a mock-up, really, full of Rebel starfighters. Somehow—” Klick swallowed, hard. His next words would be someone’s death sentence. Possibly his own. “Somehow they knew we were coming.”
“Did they?”
“They must have, my lord. Not only were they lying in wait, they had a new weapon, a torpedo of a type I’ve never seen, that seemed to be specifically designed to engage our superior defenders. My starfighters were forced to retreat with almost thirty percent casualties. My lord—” Klick swallowed again. “My lord, there must be a Rebel spy. Here, on Mindor.”
“Must there? Can you conceive no alternate explanation?”
“I—I can’t imagine, my lord.”
“I can. But continue. There is more, is there not?”
“Yes, my lord. We have detected a signal. Some sort of subspace transponder. We’ve traced it to the defenders damaged in the engagement on the Corellian Run. We detected it when—” Klick swallowed hard, as if he was trying to down a mouthful of rocks. “When the subspace jamming system was deactivated.”
“Ah.”
“It’s the work of this Rebel spy, my lord. It must be.”
“It was not. The jammers were deactivated by my order.”
“My lord?” Klick blinked rapidly as he tried to take this in. Would Shadowspawn betray his very own Great Cause? “My lord—I fear those torpedoes were used to plant some sort of tracking device—”
“At last!”
“My lord?”
“Klick, you have done well. Very well indeed.”
“My lord, I believe the Rebels have found us! According to the most recent intelligence reports, they have an entire task force on constant ready alert—my lord, a fleet could be on its way here right now!”
“Could be? No. It is.”
Klick blinked even faster. “Shall I sound general quarters, my lord?”
“Of course not. We can’t have our unexpected guests discover that we’ve been expecting them, can we? Are we so rude?”
“I, ah, well—” Klick hoped the question was only rhetorical.
“Order the Combat Space Patrol to stand down and return to their bases. But they are to stay with their craft and keep their engines hot. Also, order all the gravity crews to stand ready for initiation on my command.”
“But if they strike while our forces are grounded, our losses—my lord, it could cost us the battle!”
“We will lose this battle,” said the voice from the darkness. “We must. Losing this battle is how we will deliver the Empire to its rightful ruler: Emperor Skywalker!”
CHAPTER 4
The lone passenger shuttle gleamed in Taspan’s light as it left the atmosphere, slipping neatly through the hurtling asteroids that crowded Mindor’s low planetary orbit. As it left LPO, the shuttle traced a long, gracefully curving path, swinging wide to avoid the clouds of radioactive debris that were all that remained of Shadowspawn’s sizable force of TIE defenders.
On the battle bridge of the Justice, Lieutenant Tubrimi rolled the vast black orb of his left eye back from his console. “Unarmed shuttle, sir. A single lifesign—human, sir! It’s hailing us under terms of the truce.” The red-gold streaks in his iris brightened with excitement. “It’s Shadowspawn, sir!”
Admiral Kalback shifted forward in his command chair. Nictitating membranes swept his eyes and retreated only halfway—the Mon Calamari version of a satisfied smile. “Accept the hail.”
The lieutenant swept his webbed fingers through a complex curve in the air above his console, and the battle bridge’s holoprojectors flickered to life.
The image they formed was of a tall human male, standing motionless in robes so long that they draped in folds around his feet. His hands were similarly hidden, folded before him within voluminous sleeves. His face was pale as a corpse’s and as expressionless, and his eyes were rimmed
in black. He wore some sort of curious headgear: an inverted crescent as broad as his substantial shoulders, which framed his head as though his face were a mountain, looming in silhouette before a cloud-blackened sun half below the horizon.
“Unidentified Rebel command cruiser,” the image intoned in a voice black as a subterranean cavern, “I am Lord Shadowspawn. You have defeated us. I respectfully request permission to board, that I may formally treat for the lives of my men.”
Lieutenant Tubrimi said, “That’s all of it,” and the image flickered out.
The admiral had never been a particularly demonstrative being, but there was quiet joy in his voice as he turned to the young human who stood beside his chair. “It seems congratulations are in order, General.”
The general stood exactly as he had throughout the operation: motionless on the Justice’s battle bridge, hands folded behind him, a faint frown painting his brow. Beside him, maglocked to the deck, waiting with electronic patience, stood an R2-droid series model. The general seemed to be listening to some faint and distant sound, far beyond the confines of the ship, and it appeared that he didn’t like what he was hearing.
Shadowspawn’s voice … he couldn’t pin it down. There had been something weird about it, some strange resonance, that struck him as both too familiar and just plain wrong.
“General?” Admiral Kalback repeated. “My congratulations—”
Luke replied grimly, “Not yet.”
The battle had gone like chronowork. The sudden appearance of the Twenty-third Combat Starfighter Wing coming out of hyperspace at the very limit of Mindor’s gravity well had apparently caught Shadowspawn’s forces entirely by surprise; the Twenty-third’s Y-wings had managed two devastating torpedo runs on the warlord’s base before the first TIE defenders on combat patrol had been able to get back to engage the Twenty-third’s X- and B-wings; the Ys managed several more runs during the ensuing dogfight. The battle at the edge of Mindor’s atmosphere had drawn in the rest of the combat patrols from across the system, leaving clear space for all twelve of the Rapid Response Task Force’s capital ships to jump in.