by James Luceno
Luke looked at him and Nick sighed. “Ah, sorry. Another old friend of mine used to say my mouth’s stuck in hyperdrive. He was a Jedi, too.”
“You knew Old Republic Jedi?”
“Met a few. Only really knew one. Dead now, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Way I heard it, Vader killed him personally.”
Luke let his eyes close. “Vader? You’re sure?”
“Had to be. Nobody but Vader would have had a chance.”
Luke only nodded. Maybe he was getting used to revelations like that. Or maybe it was that he felt like he was still in that stone tomb, hanging in the darkness at the end of the universe … He hadn’t escaped it at all. He’d just turned it inside out.
That darkness—that Darkness—lived inside him now.
He’d clawed his way back to the dream-world of light … but look at what he’d done. All this death. All these lives wasted. It didn’t matter whose fault it was. Not at all. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Everything that lived struggled, and suffered for a brief interval, scrambling in pain and terror to stave off the inevitable tumble back down into the Dark.
And all that suffering, all that struggle … all for nothing.
These weren’t the only wasted lives. Everybody’s life was a waste.
What did it matter if you succeeded beyond your wildest hopes, or if your dreams were shattered and ground to dust? Win or lose, all your triumphs and joys, regrets and fears and disappointments, all ended as a fading echo trapped within a mound of dead meat.
Blame it on the Force.
Why should there be life at all? Why did life have to be nothing more than a thin film of pond scum drifting on an infinite dead sea? Better to have never lived at all than to exist for only a brief moment of struggle and suffering, deluded by the illusion of light.
Better to have never lived at all …
“Hey! Skywalker! You with me? Is anybody in there?”
“Yes—yes,” Luke said. He gave himself a little shake and brought up a hand to rub his eyes. “Yes, sorry. I was just … thinking, I guess.”
“Thinking? You were gone, kid. Your lights were on but there was nobody home. It was scary.”
“Yes,” Luke said. “For me, too.”
CHAPTER 13
Night was falling across the Shadow Realm.
At the center of the system, clouds of asteroids spiraled in toward Taspan’s photosphere. The interaction of the gravity stations and Taspan’s own gravity gave them a kind of order: as they fell inward, tumbling toward the fusion-powered furnace of the star’s surface, the clouds elongated, and curved, and melded from individual clouds to an array of twisting streams like the stripes on a candy sparklemint stick.
Smaller rocks vaporized in Taspan’s corona and chromosphere; larger asteroids ignited on the way down, becoming streaks of fire whose photosphere impacts created splash rings as wide as a major planetoid and hundreds of kilometers tall, as well as central rebound spikes that actually ejected stellar material beyond the critical point where the star’s gravity and magnetic field could contain it, unleashing huge bursts of very hard radiation—which was exciting enough in itself, because it managed to knock down deflector shields throughout the system.
The only shields these bursts didn’t knock down were those of the starfighters making atmospheric attack runs on Lord Shadowspawn’s volcano base—these shields weren’t knocked down because interference from the atmosphere prevented them from being raised in the first place—and those of the Slash-Es and the other Republic cruisers huddling into the radiation-shadow cast by Mindor itself.
And night was falling.
As Mindor turned its face from Taspan, out of the blood-colored west came waves of Republic starfighters. They hurled themselves at the dome’s defenses with reckless abandon, their half-useless laser cannon battering the heavy armor of turbolaser towers. The towers, mounted on gimbals the size of spacecraft, tracked the streaking fighters, their massive guns pumping out so much plasma so fast that they superheated the nearby air into a titanic updraft, blasting a vast rolling mushroom cloud of corrosive sand and dust and smoke from the dome to the stratosphere.
Down through that cloud came wave after wave of TIEs.
There were so many that the atmosphere’s effect on their cannons was irrelevant; they could destroy whole flights of X-wings by simply being airborne obstacles—their presence over the dome forced the Republic pilots to break formation and reduce their speed to avoid midair collisions … and the slightest reduction in speed could be fatal. Turbolaser drive technology had advanced in the years since the destruction of the first Death Star; these were far faster on traverse, and included range-sensitive trajectory-projection software that automatically timed their fire to intercept any starfighter unwary enough to go in a relatively straight line for more than a second at a time.
And against an unshielded X-wing, even a glancing hit from a tower-mounted turbolaser left nothing but an expanding globe of plasma.
Still the X-wings came on, in wave after wave, pilots giving their lives to shield flights of B-wing bombers that swooped in for torpedo runs. The B-wings weren’t after the towers; they focused their fire on six heavily armored domes atop the highest curve of the volcano.
These domes were closed up tight, relying on their multiple-meters-thick ceramofused armor to absorb the shattering blasts of proton torpedoes and detonite-tipped missiles, which it did very well indeed. “We’re barely even leaving dents!” a B-wing pilot shouted over the comm.
“Shut up and keep shooting,” his squad leader ordered.
“But we can’t hurt them as long as those armor domes are closed!”
“The point is, as long as we make ’em keep those armor domes closed, they can’t hurt us!”
Inside those armored domes were the base’s planetary-defense weapons. The five smaller domes that surrounded the vast central dome contained dual-mounted ground-to-orbit ion-turbo cannons: the twin mounted barrels would fire on a precisely timed interval, ensuring that a strike from the ion cannon to disable a capital ship’s shields and electronics would be followed instantly by a disintegrating blast from the turbolaser. Those were deadly enough in themselves, but the central dome housed a weapon against which no ship of the line could defend: the gravity gun.
And once night fell across the battle, every Republic capital ship in the system—clustered in the planetary shadow, to shield them from the ejecta bursts—would be in its field of fire.
This was not their only problem.
Troubling as the stellar ejecta bursts were, they were only the result of ordinary asteroid clusters infalling through Taspan’s corona, chromosphere, and photosphere. When those asteroid clusters included one or more of the thousands of gravity stations, the effect was substantially more spectacular.
The unnaturally steep gravity gradient of the infalling projectors drew stellar tide surges—bulging mounds that swelled like blisters on the surface of the star—and the warping of the local magnetic fields triggered titanic stellar flares bigger around than entire planets, great fountains of thermonuclear flame blasting hundreds of thousands of kilometers up from the surface, racing along beneath the inward spiral of the projectors like unimaginably huge space slugs made of fire.
Before they engulfed each one and slowly subsided back to Taspan’s surface, these fountains also blasted jets of gamma radiation that swept through the system like searchlights of destruction, melting larger asteroids to slag and disintegrating the smaller ones outright. One of these jets brushed the curve of Mindor’s atmosphere, a mere glancing blow as the jet swung across the system’s plane of the ecliptic.
This glancing blow was enough to set a couple of cubic kilometers of the atmosphere on fire.
This had an effect like a slow-motion fusion blast, as the powerful thermal updraft sucked huge quantities of dust up into the firestorm, where the dust ignited in turn, becoming an expanding ringwall of flame that swept acr
oss Mindor’s shattered landscape toward the battle that raged around the volcanic dome.
Sensors at the base, as well as those mounted on the Republic capital ships, were easily able to predict the path and eventual progress of the firestorm; while it would blow itself out short of becoming a planet-wide conflagration, before doing so it would roll right over Shadowspawn’s base like a line of thunderheads whose clouds were toxic smoke and whose rain was fire.
This would be fatal for troops caught in the open, but more pertinently, it would force starfighters on both sides to withdraw or ground themselves; between the natural sensor interference of the atmosphere itself and the thick clouds of fiery smoke, any who sought to continue the fight would be flying entirely blind.
It would also, as was pointed out to Lando Calrissian by Fenn Shysa, force the domes to remain closed over the surface-to-orbit weapons, as well as temporarily overload the heat exchangers that cooled the turbolasers in the rings of towers. “And if you don’t mind me bringin’ it up, General,” Shysa had gone on, “maybe the only tactical error this Shadowspawn character has made so far is that he’s clustered all his planetary-defense weapons together, right on top of that big hill.”
Lando had nodded. “Easier to defend.”
“That they are,” Shysa had agreed. “Even if it’s not them defending ’em, you follow?”
Lando had considered this for a moment. Only a moment; he had never been slow to jump on an opponent’s weakness. “Fenn, my friend,” he’d said slowly, “have I told you today how much I admire the way you think?”
When those smoke-thunderheads rolled over the dome, fire was not their only rain. Screened by the advancing flame front, three Republic capital ships came in low and slow, feeling their way through the atmosphere. The capital ships did not fire on the domes; through the hurricane of dust, smoke, and flame within the firestorm, even the considerable power of their weapons would have taken some time to breach the armor—time they simply did not have.
Two of them scattered a downpour of landers filled with Republic marines into the ring of ion-turbo emplacements. The third of the capital ships was the Remember Alderaan. Its landers dropped into place around the gravity gun.
For a moment, all of the battle was contained by the raging firestorm. Starfighters could not fly, overheated turbolaser towers could not fire, armored domes could not be opened, and no ground forces could leave either the landers or Imperial bunkers.
But the storm didn’t last long; in minutes, the tons of dust and sand and gravel it sucked up into itself reached the tipping point beyond which the debris no longer added to the conflagration but began to smother it. As the storm shrank, the three Republic battle cruisers withdrew behind its retreating face.
Seconds later—while the rock and sand still glowed scarlet with heat—turbolasers began to cough plasma blasts at incoming starfighters. Concealed blast doors swung open across the summit and disgorged streams of armored stormtroopers and files of rumbling hovertanks. Republic landers opened fire with their antipersonnel turrets, and their own troop ramps swung down to make a path for charging marines, and the Battle of Mindor was now joined on the ground. Face-to-face. Blaster-to-blaster.
Knife-to-knife.
When Group Captain Klick and his company of elite commandos had opened the wide arching doorway to the Sorting Center, the place had been in chaos. The bombardment on the surface above sent shock waves through the stone that made the floors shudder and shift continuously like a long, low-level groundquake, and filled the air with a just-above-subsonic rumble like a nonstop roll of thunder; the prisoners, panicked at the rain of dust and chunks of stone from the vault ceiling overhead, rushed the doorway en masse. Klick’s men had driven them back; stun blasts dropped the leading ranks, and full-power blasterfire over their heads sent the others cringing toward the far walls. Klick had kicked his way through the twitching bodies, raised his E-11, and triggered another burst over the heads of the cowering prisoners.
“Down! Facedown! On the floor! Now!” He turned to the trooper beside him. “Sergeant, take Second Platoon and shoot any prisoner still on his, her, or its feet five seconds from now. The rest of you, on me.”
He led them trotting through the black-gleaming fusion-formed cavern to the Election Center’s door.
“Fourth Platoon: front and center.” He stepped to one side. “Seal this door! No one in, no one out. First Platoon: firing position in support of Four. The rest of you, prepare to repel assault.”
A couple of troopers from Fourth Platoon deployed their foamplast canisters. Engineered for a quick-and-dirty seal for envirosuit ruptures or minor hull punctures, foamplast would expand to fill any and all available space around its application point, then harden almost instantly. A thin bead around the edges of the door sealed it permanently in place, and not a moment too soon—only seconds after the foamplast had set, Klick heard the whine of the door’s servos as someone tried to open it from the far side.
“Back!” he snapped. “Company: form up and prime weapons! Prepare to fire on my order!”
For a long, long second the only sound in the Sorting Center was the rustle and snap of blasters being readied and the clacking of the nearest troopers dropping prone, those behind to one knee, and the rear taking firing stances with carbines at their shoulders. Klick himself stepped away from the door; the only way to open a foamplast-sealed door was a breaching charge.
Seconds ticked past with no explosion, and just when Klick began to wonder if he’d imagined the servo whine, a spot high on the right-hand side of the door glowed red and brightened almost instantly to white before it burst and vaporized around a bar of green plasma.
All right, two ways through a foamplast-sealed door, Klick amended silently. Breaching charge, and lightsaber.
A green lightsaber …!
Klick had a terrible premonition. “Hold fire,” he warned. “Anybody shoots before my order, I’ll kill him myself.”
The bar of green plasma cut a ragged oval through the door. When the cut was finished and the oval slab of durasteel fell through a shower of sparks to clang on the fusion-formed stone, Klick did not give the order to fire. He did not give any order at all. He simply stood, staring, awestruck beyond words.
Standing in the doorway were only two men. One was a tallish wiry man with dark skin, and blood trickling sluggishly down his shaven scalp, dressed in Pawn robes and holding an E-11 dangling by its shoulder strap. The other, smaller man was dressed in a sodden and filthy Rebel Alliance flight suit, and his damply tousled hair of radiation-bleached blond stuck in tangles to a tanned face whose features, Klick ever-so-slowly realized, had the exact contours of his very fondest dream …
Klick’s mouth went dry and his legs went numb and he could barely force the words through his slack lips. “Emperor Skywalker …”
He dropped to one knee, undogged his helmet, yanked it off, and inclined his head in reverence. “Down weapons! Down weapons! Buckets off and kneel to your Emperor!” he cried. “Your pardon, my lord, I did not know you!”
Republic marines feverishly tried to dig in around the ion-turbo emplacements while they poured fire into the advancing stormtroopers. Their armored landers added antipersonnel punch with turret-mounted SoroSuub clusterfrag launchers; the whole curve of the base’s summit sparkled with thousands of tiny detonations, each of which scattered high-velocity flechettes, though most of them only clattered off the rocks in a rushing roar like a Chadian monsoon.
The stormtroopers advanced at a run behind the cover of heavily shielded hovertanks. The tanks’ forward cannon arrays pounded away at the landers and blasted marines to bloody bits, and their drivers ran them right up against the landers’ skirt armor. From there the stormtroopers could charge into hand-to-hand—but when they did, the stormtroopers discovered to their considerable dismay that Republic marines, unlike many other enemies, didn’t seem at all intimidated by the stormtroopers’ vibroknucklers, and that the marines favored, for clos
e combat, 18 cm aKraB clip-point vibrodaggers that could cut Mark III armor like rendered gorgan blubber.
Around the dome that housed the gravity gun, twelve landers from the Remember Alderaan had come down in a double ring: four close in around the emplacement with the other eight encircling them. The inner four were too close to the emplacement’s infantry bunkers for artillery or tank fire—so close that the landers’ own antipersonnel turrets could not depress their aim to ground level; all they could do was chip away at the upper curves of the bunkers and the gravity gun’s dome. Black-armored stormtroopers came swarming out from the bunkers like ravenous carrion beetles, using the inner landers themselves as cover from the fire of the surrounding eight while they went to work on the hulls with fusion torches and shaped-blast breaching charges. If any of the stormtroopers found it odd that these twelve landers, unlike the ones around the ion-turbo emplacements, remained tightly sealed instead of disgorging their own swarms of marines, none of them remarked on it.
The explanation for this unusual tactic was discovered by one particular stormtrooper officer, who led one of the strike teams that blasted their way into one of the landers and found no Republic forces at all—only a remote computer link jacked into the pilot’s station, and another jacked into the fire-control board. The lander was not, however, actually empty. It was packed, wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling, with detonite fused to motion detectors.
It was the last thing the officer saw—the simultaneous explosions of all four landers vaporized not only him and his strike team, but also all of the hundreds of stormtroopers nearby, as well as buckling the blast doors of the infantry bunkers.
Though most of the force of the explosions was directed inward toward the bunkers and the gravity gun, the residual blast was enough to rock the other eight landers and to shove several of them skidding a few meters. Before they even came back to rest, their gang ramps had flipped down to unleash a different kind of infantry.