by James Luceno
“Great.” He pulled out his comlink and twisted it to the Justice’s command channel. “Tubrimi, come in. Tubrimi, do you read?”
A burst of static was his only reply. Mindor’s heavily ionized, metal-oxide-charged atmosphere made communications difficult at best; the power of a starship’s comm suite was required to broadcast an EM message more than a kilometer or two, especially during a dust storm, since the dust itself was mostly metal oxides, as well: remnants of meteorites and the barren rock they’d struck. He could actually see the caves where the crew had taken shelter, a couple of kilometers away through the rolling hills, but his comlink just didn’t have the juice to punch through. “Artoo! Tightbeam an alert to Tubrimi and Sthonnart! Tell them to break up the perimeter and retreat into the caves—”
Luke frowned. In the Force, a sudden surge of emotion …
Panic. Terror. Shock and rage—and there, at the crew’s caves, two kilometers away: flares of scarlet, flashes of actinic white …
Blasterfire. Thermal detonators.
Battle.
Terroo-oo-weet?
“Don’t wait for confirmation. Just get under cover,” Luke said, leaping from the crater’s rim. “I’ll tell them myself.”
He drew his lightsaber as he ran.
Lieutenant Tubrimi crumpled the transcript of the decrypted burst signal in his good hand as he stood up. “All right, you heard the orders,” he said to the pair of ensigns managing the comm gear, his great black eyes swirling straight forward for emphasis. “Get everything packed up and moved into the caves on the double! Everything out of sight until we get a command-coded recall beacon.”
Every step jabbed a lance through his broken shoulder, despite the emergency foam-cast a marine corpsman had sprayed on. Maybe later, there might be some bacta left after the wounded had been stabilized. “Major,” he called as he approached the cave mouth. “General Skywalker’s orders are to set up a—”
He stopped, and his voice trailed away. The cave was empty.
The corpsmen were gone. Even the wounded had just … vanished, leaving behind only a litter of emergency blankets, water packs, and used bacta patches. Tubrimi gaped. “Major Sthonnart? Hey, what’s going on? Are you in there?”
From behind him, all at once: blasterfire on full auto. The ear-shattering blasts of thermal dets. Shouted orders, and the cut-short screams of wounded marines. He whirled back to where the ensigns had been taking down the comm dish unit. They were gone, both of them; the comm dish lay on its side, rocking in the gritty breeze. “Hey—”
He scrambled over a fold of ground just in time to see one of the ensigns—on his back, eyes wide and staring—sink into the solid stone beneath him as though the volcanic rock were only thick oil. He leapt for the ensign’s hand, but before he could get there the ensign had sunk from view—and the rock that closed over where he had gone was solid and cool. As Tubrimi stood up again, looking around wildly for any sign of the hundreds of sailors and marines, something touched his ankle, and darkness exploded across his brain.
Luke watched the battle end while he was on his way. Using the Force to leap from rock to rock so swiftly he practically flew also relieved him of the need to watch his footing. He covered the two kilometers in about two minutes.
It didn’t end like an ordinary battle. It just stopped. No carting-away of prisoners. No evacuation of wounded.
Nothing at all.
There were no bodies outside the caves. There were no bodies inside the caves. No sailors. No marines. No astromechs or medical droids. The only sound was the hush of sand stirring in the breeze, and the clicks of cooling stone. The air in the caves reeked of the ozone from recent blasterfire, and pockets of slag still glowed yellow where thermal dets had gone off against the rock. Luke left his blaster in its holster, and clipped his lightsaber back onto his belt. He felt no threat here.
The cave floor was littered with emergency blankets and used bacta packets, ration bars and water jugs, even a few of the DH-17 carbines favored by the marines. Luke drifted through the caves, eyes half-closed, brushing the rock with his fingertips. He felt fading resonances of the same emotions he had sensed, more distantly, from the base of the crater’s rim. But these were only echoes in the Force.
Somehow, in the process of leading the entire task force into a trap, he had also managed to misplace several hundred people. Captured? Not by Imperials, that was for sure. Killed? Disintegrated, leaving not even dust behind? It didn’t seem possible.
It wasn’t possible.
He wasn’t even upset, not really; the magnitude of everything that had happened was too vast, far beyond any emotional response he could imagine. He was numb. Stunned, he supposed.
He sagged, leaning into the rock wall, and let his head hang. “Ben?” he said, softly, sadly, without hope. “Ben, can you hear me? What should I have done? Master Yoda? What was I supposed to do?” In the rustle and hush of the sandy breeze, he heard no answer.
All he knew was that this was all wrong.
He slid down and sat, his back against the stone. He let his head roll back and squeezed his eyes shut. Suddenly he felt like everything was all wrong.
He’d made wrong choices every day of his life. In his mind’s eye floated everyone who’d died because of him. Everyone who’d been hurt. From Mindor to Endor, back to Yavin—back to the corpses that had lain, still smoking, in the ruined doorway of the Lars moisture farm. I guess I sort of thought everything was over. I got my happy ending. I thought I did. I mean, didn’t I do everything you asked me to? Master Yoda, you wanted to break the rule of the Sith. And they’re gone. Ben, you asked me to destroy Darth Vader. I did that, too. Father—even you, Father. You told me that together we would throw down the Emperor. And we did. Now it’s over. But it’s not the end. It’s never the end.
The cave boomed and shivered as the rock storm arrived like an artillery barrage. Luke just sat, head down, letting dust and grit trickle inside the back of his collar as meteorites pounded the hills.
I guess I was still kind of hoping there might be a Happily Ever After in there somewhere. Not even for me. I was ready to die. I still am. It’s everybody else. It’s like everything we went through, it was for nothing. We’re still fighting. We’ll always be fighting. It’s like I didn’t actually save anybody.
Gone is the past, he remembered Master Yoda saying once. Imaginary is the future. Always now, even eternity will be. Which Luke had always interpreted as Don’t worry about what’s already done, and don’t worry about what you’ll do later. Do something now.
Which would be fine advice, if he had the faintest clue what that something should be. Maybe if he’d had more experience as a general, he’d know if he should search for his missing men, or return to the crash site and wait for pickup, or try to find some way to signal the task force spaceside. I never should have taken this job. I just don’t know what a general would be doing right now. All I know is what a Jedi …
Then his head came up. I do know what a Jedi would be doing—and it isn’t sitting around feeling sorry for himself, for starters.
Especially, now that he thought of it, because the ground had stopped shuddering and the thunder of the storm outside had changed to the thunder of multiple sonic booms. He got up and walked outside.
The sky was full of TIE fighters whipping through a trans-sonic search grid.
Luke unclipped his lightsaber and thumbed the activator. The blade of brilliant green snarled and spat as its plasma consumed airborne grit. When a TIE fighter swung down through a barrel roll for a closer look, Luke smiled and beckoned with his blade like a ground crewman directing them in for a landing.
Then he put away the lightsaber, lowered himself into a cross-legged meditation posture on the warm rock, and folded his arms to wait.
He waited while the TIE fighters circled his position. He waited while the atmospheric gunships arrived and landed a few hundred meters away. He waited while hundreds of black-armored stormtroopers pour
ed out of the gunships, assembled in ranks, and advanced on him in a broad arc, blasters leveled. He waited while a trooper with a group captain’s flash on his chest stepped cautiously forward and called, “General Skywalker!”
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 fl
ew 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 platoon 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.