by James Luceno
“Lando, you have to commit my men! It’ll be a slaughter.”
“No, it won’t.”
“Three squadrons’ll never cover that many pods, and these marauders don’t take prisoners!”
“Doesn’t matter,” Lando said crisply. “Let ’em blow up the pods. It’ll keep them busy.”
“What?”
“All we’re launching is pods, get it? Empty pods.” Lando shook his head. “Think I’m about to set up my forces halfway around the planet from the bad guys? Not this general, my friend.”
“Then—” Fenn stared out through the forward screens, suddenly thoughtful. “Yeah, I get it: from nightside, you have the planet as a shield against the stellar flares … then we come in low-level, through the atmosphere … but if you’re planning to bring capital ships close to that volcano base of theirs, first you’ve got to take out their ground-based artillery—turbolasers, ion cannons … and especially that gravity gun. How do you figure on doing that?”
“Might be a problem.” Lando was still smiling. “You wouldn’t happen to know where I could lay my hands on, say, five or six hundred Mandalorian supercommandos, would you?”
Fenn blinked, blinked again, and then discovered that he was starting to smile, too.
CHAPTER 12
Though he was far from conscious, Luke knew something was wrong.
He felt … cold.
Unbelievably cold. He’d been cold before—a couple years earlier, on Hoth, he’d come within a shaved centimeter of freezing to death before Han had found him—but this was different. That cold had been a creeping numbness, and weakness, and a growing inability to force his hypothermic muscles to move. This cold, though, froze him without the comfort of numbness. Tiny razor-edged crystals of ice—colder than ice, so cold they burned, cold as liquid air—grew inward through his skin at every pore, becoming hairlines of freeze that crept along his nerves.
And with the cold came silence.
Physical silence, deeper than a living creature can truly experience: not just the absence of external sound, but the absence of all concept of sound. No whisper of breath, no hush of blood coursing through arteries, no faintest beat of his heart. Not even the vaguest sensation of vibration, or pressure, or friction on his skin.
But the cold and the silence went deeper than the merely physical. They were in his dreams.
These dreams were glacially slow, actionless, featureless hours of empty staring into empty space, hours becoming years that stretched into numberless millennia, as one by one the stars went out. He could do nothing, for there was nothing to do.
Except watch the stars die.
And in their place was left nothing. Not even absence. Only him.
Floating. Empty of everything. Without thought, without sensation. Forever.
Almost.
His first thought in a million years trickled into his brain over the course of decades. Sleep. This is the end of everything. Nothing left but sleep.
The second thought, by contrast, followed instantly upon the second. Wait … somebody else is thinking with my mind.
Which meant he wasn’t alone at the end of the universe.
Even in frozen dreams of eternity, the Force was strong with him. He opened himself to the Sleep Thought and drew it into the center of his being, where with the Force to guide and sustain him, he could examine the thought, turn it this way and that like an unfamiliar stone.
It had weight, this thought, and texture: like a hunk of volcanic basalt around a uranium core, it was unreasonably dense, and its surface was pebbled, as though it had once been soft and sticky and somebody had rolled it across a field of fine gravel. As he let the Force take his perception into greater and greater focus and detail, he came to understand that each of these pebbles was a person—human or near-human, every single one, bound into an aggregate matrix of frozen stone.
As the Force took him deeper, he came to understand that this stone he held was also holding him; even as he turned it in his hand, it also surrounded and enclosed him—that it was a prison for every one of these pebble-lives, and that these imprisoned lives were also imprisoning him.
He was the stone himself, he discovered: the very matrix of dark frozen stone that bound them all. He trapped them and they trapped him, and neither could let go. They were bound together by the very structure of the universe.
Frozen by the Dark.
And here was another strangeness: Since when did he think of the structure of the universe as capital-D Dark? Even if there might be some trace of truth in that bleak perception, when had he become the kind of man who would surrender to it? If the Dark wanted to drag him into eternal emptiness, it was going to have to fight him for every millimeter.
He started looking for the way out. Which was also, due to the curious paradox inherent in his Force perception, the way in.
The imaginary thought-stone in his imaginary hand was a metaphor, he understood—even as was the frozen stone he had become—but it was also real on a level deeper than nonimaginary eyes could ever see. He was the stone … and so he did not need to reach out to touch the lives represented by the pebbles. He was touching them already.
He only had to pay attention.
But each life-pebble on which he focused gave back no hint of light. No perception even of the human being it represented, only a featureless nonreflective surface like a smoothed and rounded spheroid of powdered graphite. Each one he touched gave back no hope, no purpose, no dream of escape, but instead drew these out from his frozen heart, swallowed them whole, and fed them to the Dark.
And the Dark gave up no trace of evidence that they had ever existed.
All he got from the pebbles was gentle wordless urging to let himself sleep. Struggle is futile. The Dark swallows everything in the end. All his hopes, all his fears, every heroic dream and every tragic reality. Every single distant descendant of everyone who had ever heard of him. All would be gone, leaving not even an echo to hint that they had ever existed. The only answer was sleep. Eternal sleep.
Sleep.
Luke thought, Never.
He had an intuition that was half memory, half guess, and maybe altogether a hint from the Force, because when he again turned that imaginary stone in his imaginary hand, one of those imaginary pebbles of powdered graphite had a crack in it that wasn’t imaginary at all.
And through that crack, tiny beyond tiny, nanometrically infinitesimal, so small that if it hadn’t been imaginary, Luke couldn’t have seen it even with the most advanced instruments in the galaxy, shone the very faintest conceivable glimmer …
Of light.
With the Force to guide him, he focused his perception into a similarly nanometric filament. And through that tiny crack of light within the imaginary stone, Luke found the universe.
Focusing his whole self into his Force perception with all his power and every scrap of the mental discipline that Ben and Master Yoda had pounded into him, Luke could send enough of himself along that filament of light that he could see again—dimly, distantly, through waves of bizarre distortion—and what he saw was sleeves.
Voluminous sleeves, draped together as though concealing folded hands … and beyond them, a floor of smooth stone, illuminated by cold, flickering blues, like the light cast by the screen of a holoplayer. He tried to lift his head, to get a look around, but the view didn’t change, and he realized that the eyes through which he saw were not his.
With that realization, other perceptions began to flower within his consciousness. He became aware that the floor at which his borrowed eyes were staring was connected with him somehow … that it was not ordinary stone at all, but a curious semicolloidal structure of crystal … that it was, inexplicably, somehow alive.
That when he set his mind to it, he could feel the life, like a subsonic hum can raise a tingle on the skin. But it wasn’t on his skin that he felt it, it was inside his head … and he felt it because he had crystals of that semicolloidal somehow-living sto
ne growing inside his brain …
No—
Not his brain.
The crystals grew within the other brain, the one connected to the eyes he was borrowing from outside the universe. This became another subject of contemplation, like his imaginary stone, because like that imaginary stone he was both inside this borrowed brain and outside it, pushing in while looking out. And when he touched those crystals with his attention, he could hear—no, feel—the whisper of despair that had murmured to him at the end of the universe.
Sleep. Struggle is futile. All things end. Existence is an illusion. Only the Dark is real.
He could feel now that the whisper came from outside this borrowed brain, even as his own perception did, and that the crystals somehow picked up this whisper and amplified it, adding this brain’s limited Force power to its own, the same as it had done with the other hundreds of brains that Luke could now feel were all linked into this bizarre system.
There was somebody out there.
Luke thought, Blackhole.
And with that thought, he could feel the malignancy that fed this field of Dark: the ancient wheezing cripple entombed within his life-support capsule, who poured his bleak malice through a body-wide webwork of this selfsame crystal …
Just like the one growing within Luke’s own body.
And with that understanding came power: he set his will upon the web of crystal within his body and allowed the Force to give power to his desire; now he was able to clearly perceive the link between his crystals and those within this borrowed brain. Then, when he willed the head to raise, it did, and when he willed the eyes to take in the room, he saw a stone cavern, dimly lit by waves of blue energy discharge that crawled along the stone walls and ceiling like living things—the same crackling discharge Luke had seen in the Cavern of the Shadow Throne—though this energy did no harm to the people gathered here.
The cavern was filled with Moon Hats.
Each and every one among them stood motionless with head lowered, hands folded invisibly within the drape of their sleeves. Each and every one among them faced a large stone pedestal that stood empty in the center of the room. The pedestal was of a single piece with the floor, but not as though it had been carved from it; it looked as if it had grown there, like a tumor. It was about a meter and a half high, and its flat top was roughly the same size and shape as a comfortable single bed. From time to time, with a kind of regularized increase of frequency like the tide coming in, the electric discharge from the walls and ceiling would pause, and shiver in place as though captured between electrodes; then with a painfully bright flash, they would converge upon the stone pedestal and vanish into its surface.
Luke understood. That’s me, he thought. That’s where I am. Buried alive in solid rock.
This didn’t particularly bother him; after spending eternity at the end of the universe, mere death didn’t mean much at all. Death was better than what Blackhole was trying to do to him. With him.
As him.
He didn’t know if he could save himself, but he might be able to help these people. That would have to be enough.
Luke reached out through the crystals with the Force … and found nothing beyond this one lone brain to grasp. Though he could feel them clearly, though he could listen to the whisper of the crystals in their heads, he could find no surface on those crystals that his will could grasp. Exactly like his dream: these were the pebbles of featureless graphite. Nothing there but the Dark.
This one alone had that fissure of light …
In the distant reaches of his memory, he found a lesson of Yoda’s, from one long solstice night, deep in the jungle near Dagobah’s equator. When to the Force you truly give yourself, all you do expresses the truth of who you are, Yoda had said, leaning forward so that the knattik-root campfire painted blue shadows within the deep creases of his ancient face. Then through you the Force will flow, and guide your hand it will, until the greatest good might come of your smallest gesture.
He’d never really understood that lesson. He’d only tried to live according to the principle … but now there was an image slowly breaching the surface of his consciousness. An image of his own hand, delivering a punch.
Just to the right of center, on the forehead of “Lord Shadowspawn.” Which had been precisely the impact required to crack the crystalline matrix inside his brain.
A simple act of mercy, born of no other desire than to end a conflict without taking a life, now had become his own lifeline, by which he could draw himself back from the eternal nothing at the end of the universe.
He could feel his connection now, could sense the control he might exert through this connection; a simple twist of will would seize this body and make it act at his command—he could even, he sensed, send his power with the Force through this body to serve his desire. He could make this man his puppet, and forge his own escape.
Or …
He could abandon his fear, and express the truth of who he was.
For Luke Skywalker, this was not even a choice. Instead of a command, he sent through the link a friendly suggestion.
Hey, Nick, he sent. Why don’t you wake up?
The first inkling Cronal got that something was going terribly wrong came in the form of an alarm Klaxon blaring inside his life-support chamber. The Klaxon shattered his concentration and jerked him back into his own body; for a long moment that seemed to stretch on toward forever, his desiccated flesh could only shudder and twitch while he struggled to catch his breath. Finally he could move his hand to silence the Klaxon, push the Sunset Crown up from his head to its resting place behind his couch, and answer the urgent hail incoming from Group Captain Klick.
He was so rattled by the sudden interruption that he very nearly forgot to restrict his transmission to synthesized audio-only. At the last instant he keyed the proper code, and then had to take several more deep breaths to steady himself again. To let his pet clone commander see, instead of the robust and masterful Lord Shadowspawn, the sunken creases of his ancient face, his slack bloodless lips peeling back from his prominent yellowed teeth, the few tangled wisps of hair that straggled across his wrinkled scalp, to let him hear Cronal’s own weak and wheezing voice—this could have caused considerable difficulty, if not outright disaster.
“Group Captain,” he croaked, his thin wheeze crackling with strain. “Was my order unclear? No interruptions!”
The group captain, of course, could hear only the computer’s synthesized version of Shadowspawn’s sepulchral basso. “My lord, the Rebels are attacking!”
“How do a few fighter squadrons constitute an emergency so dire that you would defy my direct order? Destroy them, and don’t bother me again.”
“More than fighters, my lord. A battle cruiser of Mon Calamari design has initiated orbital bombardment, targeting our ground emplacements, primarily our ion-turbo cannons. We believe it’s in preparation for a surface assault.”
“A Mon Calamari battle cruiser? Impossible. Their sole Mon Cal was destroyed by our gravity slice.”
“Yes, my lord—but this is a new one!”
“Impossible,” Cronal repeated. “No new cruiser could have entered the system so soon—our gravity stations should keep them at least a light-hour away!”
“My lord, the Rebels have opened a temporary jump window.”
“Imposs—” Cronal bit his tongue; clearly none of this was impossible at all. Those bloody Rebels—may the Dark swallow every miserable one!
The group captain went on at some length, describing the battle near the Rebel interdiction ships. Cronal listened in growing disbelief. “Why was I not informed?”
“My lord, your order—”
“Call out every squadron—throw in every reserve! Get every single fighting craft in action now, if you have to draft deckhands to fly them! I want those Rebels so busy they don’t even have time to watch the star flares that will kill them, do you understand?”
“Yes, my lord.”
“And detail a company of your best commandos to the Election Center entry; they are to hold that door at all costs. No matter what happens with the battle, no Rebel can be allowed to interrupt what happens within, do you understand? See to it personally.”
“Yes, my lord. I will take personal command. No enemy will breach the Election Center while one trooper lives, my lord!”
“Let it be so,” Cronal snapped. “You have complete authority to command this situation, Group Captain—do not disturb me again!”
“It will be done, my lord.”
Cronal stabbed the cutoff. His joints creaked as he tried to find a comfortable position on the life-support chamber’s couch. So close … he was so close … a few minutes more was all he needed to give himself youth, and strength, a Jedi’s power and the name and face of a hero …
He yanked the Sunset Crown back into place upon his head and closed his eyes.
He sucked in a breath as deep as his withered lungs could hold, then sighed it out as slowly as his hammering heart would permit. He did the same again, and again, until gradually his heart began to slow, and his head began to clear, and he could once again drive his will into the Dark.
There he found, winking like glitterflies on a moonless night, the warm comfort of his Pawns, like little bits of himself scattered out into the Dark to point his way. He focused his mind and stabbed downward to a deeper level of concentration, where he could grasp every one of those little bits of himself and squeeze until he was wholly inside them. Then the slow cycle of breath … until each and every Pawn inhaled when he inhaled … sighed when he sighed … until their very hearts beat in synchrony with his own …
All but one.
Somebody had switched on the lights inside Nick’s head.
He jerked awake, blinking. His eyes wouldn’t focus. “Man … I have been having the weirdest dream …”
He tried to rub his eyes, but his hands were tangled in something … what was this, sleeves? Since when did he wear pajamas? Especially pajamas made out of brocade so thick he could have used it as a survival tent on a Karthrexian glacier … And his head hurt, too, and his neck was stiff, because his head had gained a couple of dozen kilos—must have been some serious party, to leave him with this bad a hangover—and when he did finally free his hands and rub his eyes and massage his vision back into something resembling working order, he took in his surroundings … and blinked some more.