by James Luceno
Another slide, two bounces, and one last tumble brought R2 to a brief halt, as he fetched up against Chewbacca’s short ribs hard enough to make the Wookiee grunt and wheeze for breath; then the stone opened beneath them for a final time and dropped them another three point six meters, which left the two of them unceremoniously deposited on the smooth stone floor of yet another cavern.
R2 activated a pair of manipulators to shove himself off Chewbacca—which elicited a groan of protest from the half-stunned Wookiee—and righted himself on the cavern floor. There was human-visible light in this cavern, though the light source swung so violently from side to side and up and down that shadows whirled and blended and parted again so swiftly that R2’s photoreceptor lens couldn’t parse the scene; he cycled back to his previous EM sensor band and began to make sense of the situation.
The human-visible light source was revealed to be none other than the glow rod, which was being wielded as an improvised club by Han Solo to swat at a mass of vaguely humanoid shapes while he shouted, “Back off! I’ll bash any one of you who takes one more step! Back off!”
R2 assumed that Captain Solo was either highly agitated or speaking in the confusing idiomatic human code that C-3PO referred to as metaphor, because it was certainly clear—to R2’s sensors, at any rate—that these humanoid shapes to which he spoke did not actually have legs, much less feet, and thus were already certain, regardless of threat or instruction, never to take one more step. It was also entirely clear to R2 that these humanoid shapes were not, in fact, creatures at all, at least not as his programing generally understood the term.
These shapes were only nominally humanoid, in the sense of being generally upright and having a vaguely head-shaped knob on top, as well as a pair—several had more—of arms; these shapes grew upward from the very stone of the cavern itself, more like animated stalagmites than actual living things, but they moved as though directed by some type of consciousness, and they clearly exhibited that peculiar electromagnetic field signature R2 had noted during his precipitous descent. A quick scan of his data files for any reference to this type of apparently mineral life-form came up blank … except for one provisional reference that he had preserved in his short-term cache because he had no internal referent to guide him in choosing where to file it.
It was the recording of Aeona Cantor, when her companion had asked what they should do “if whoever shows up isn’t a Jedi”:
Then we take their stuff and leave ’em to the Melters.
R2 found this to be a satisfactory correlation, and he consequently created a new file tagged with the keywords MINDOR, MINERAL LIFE-FORM (MOTILE), and MELTERS.
This entire process, from Han Solo’s shout to R2-D2’s filing decision, took only .674 of a Standard second, which left R2 plenty of time for a full systems self-check and operational verification while Chewbacca was still rolling to his feet and drawing breath for a Wookiee war whoop.
Chewbacca’s war cry was followed by a headlong charge against the Melters—that these were the “Melters” in question seemed undeniable—that crowded in upon Han Solo and Princess Leia. There was an astonished howl of pain when flesh-and-bone Wookiee fist met stone Melter “head.” This was followed by a blue-crackling energy discharge—which R2 noted was analogous in wavelength and intensity to a charge from a blaster on its maximum stun setting—from the Melter in question. Chewie howled again and went staggering back until he bumped into another Melter and an additional energy discharge cut short the howl and folded the now-unconscious Wookiee like a retracting manipulator.
R2 continued to watch with detached interest as Han Solo shouted “Chewie!” and threw himself against the mass of Melters, whose response was several bursts of that same energy that almost instantly dropped Han Solo twitching on the ground beside his copilot. However, the collapse of Han Solo apparently triggered a similar human emotional response from Princess Leia, who shouted to Han and leapt toward the Melters—and in the .384 second she was actually in the air, R2 called up an array of highly specialized subprocessors that had been originally installed as a customized aftermarket modification by the Royal Engineers of Naboo and later extensively refitted and programmed with a very specific set of behaviors by a particularly gifted tinkerer, who’d had, in his day, a justified reputation as the finest self-taught improvisational engineer the galaxy had ever produced: Anakin Skywalker.
Turbojacks deployed powerfully from the bottoms of R2’s locomotors, kicking him through the air directly into the mass of Melters. His antitamper field sizzled to life with an unusually loud discharge crackle; based on the extraordinary drain on his internal power supply, R2 was able to calculate that the antitamper field was currently operating at triple strength, which was actually beyond its theoretical limit, owing to potentially lethal effects. R2 also noted that when a nearby Melter reached for him with a stone pseudo-arm, the touch of his triple-strength antitamper field instantly liquefied the electrocrystalline structure of the Melter’s stone body … as well as those of the four Melters nearest to it.
With a fierce Thooperoo HEEE!, which was his closest approximation of a Wookiee war whoop, R2-D2 waded into the Melters, sparking them to slag on every side. As long as he had a single remaining erg in his energy supply, he would allow no harm to come to Princess Leia.
He did, however, note one particular flaw in this determination, which was that his level of energy output had already outstripped the self-regeneration capacity of his energy supply, and so that single remaining erg situation was, as C-3PO might say, no mere metaphor. And the walls and floor just kept on humping into lumps that would become new Melters.
For a brief flicker of a millisecond, R2-D2 experienced a power spike in a tiny audio loop in one specific memory core: he heard C-3PO’s voice exclaim We’re doomed.
CHAPTER 14
Nick trotted along the curving cavernway after Luke, his breath going short. How was it that every time he met a Jedi, the guy turned out to be some kind of nikkle nut? Skywalker had gone from brown dwarf to nova just like flipping a switch. Now Nick could barely keep up with him. “Take it easy, huh? Unless you want me to just, y’know, wait for you here. Which would be fine. Between you and me, I could use a nap.”
“No time.” Skywalker kept going. “You said Blackhole needs somebody who can use the Force. My twin sister’s just as strong as I am—but she doesn’t have my training. Once he gets his paws on her …”
Now he did stop, and turned back to Nick, and the bleak fury in his eyes brought a sudden twist of fear to Nick’s gut. “I won’t let that happen,” Luke said grimly. “That’s all. I won’t. No matter what I have to do.”
“Uh—”
But Luke had already turned and was jogging away.
“Shee, kid. Two minutes ago, things were going pretty good and I could barely get you to talk. Now everything’s going wrong, and you’re making the jump to lightspeed without bothering to board a ship!”
“Yeah, funny how that works,” Luke said. “I guess I can handle things going wrong in the world. I’m used to it. I can do something about it. It’s when things go wrong in here—” He rapped the side of his head with his knuckles as if he were knocking to get in. “—that’s where the problem is.”
“The crystals.”
“I don’t know. All I know is that it makes me want to die. No. Not die. Just … stop.”
“You know what makes me want to just stop?” Nick said. “Running. Especially running in ten kilos of floor-length fraggin’ robe.”
“You want to stay here? Go ahead. I’m sure Blackhole will be happy to make you another crown.”
“Are you this nice to everybody, or am I just special?” Nick sighed and kept on going after him. His time as Shadowspawn was hazy, but not so hazy he couldn’t figure out which way they were going. “Um, Skywalker? This is not the way out of here.”
Luke didn’t even slow down. “That’s because we’re not leaving. I came here to put a stop to all this, even before
I knew what was going on. Now that I know, I’m not going anywhere till it’s over.”
“Over how?”
“However.”
“I guess you must be a real Skywalker after all,” Nick said, wheezing a little as he caught up. “This is just the kind of stunt Anakin would have pulled. But I didn’t know he had kids.”
“Neither did he,” Luke said grimly. “You knew my father?”
“Knew of him, more like. Met him a few times. He debriefed me once, after an op. So you really are his son, huh?”
“Is that so hard to believe?”
It wasn’t easy to shrug while running in robes, but Nick managed. “He was tall.”
“I’m told I favor my mother,” Luke said dryly, and for a second Nick thought he was going to smile. But only for a second. “You knew my father in the Clone Wars?”
“Kid, in the Clone Wars, everybody knew him. He was the greatest hero in the galaxy. When he died, it was like the end of the universe.” Nick’s gut twisted again at the memory. “It bloody well was the end of the Republic.”
Luke stopped. He looked like something hurt. “When he … died?”
Nick came to a halt gratefully, bending over with hands on his knees while he tried to catch his breath. “Way I heard it, he was the last Jedi standing in the Temple Massacre—when Vader’s Five Hundred First went in and killed all the Padawans.”
“What?”
“That’s where your father was killed: defending children in the Jedi Temple. He was not only the best of the Jedi, he was the last. Nobody ever told you the story?”
Luke’s eyes were closed against some inexpressible pain. “That’s … not the way I heard it.”
“Well, y’know, I wasn’t there, but—”
“And I am the last of the Jedi. I was trained by Ben Kenobi.”
Nick’s jaw dropped. “You mean Obi-Wan? I thought that was, y’know, just more holothriller gunk. Kenobi’s alive?”
“No,” Luke said softly. “Who are you?”
“Me? Nobody. Nobody special,” Nick said. “I was an officer in the GAR—the old Grand Army of the Republic—but I didn’t get along real well with the new management, know what I mean?”
“An officer?” Luke frowned. “Special enough. The Alliance could have used you. The New Republic still can. What have you been doing for the past twenty-five years?”
“Hiding from Vader, mostly. He’s the management I didn’t get along with.”
“You can stop hiding. Vader’s dead.”
“What, just like in the show? That’s good news.”
“If you say so. The Emperor died the same day.”
Nick tapped his head and grimaced. “I haven’t exactly been keeping up with the news. Did you kill him?”
“What? No. No, I didn’t kill either of them.”
“Not exactly like in Luke Skywalker and the Jedi’s Revenge, huh?”
“No,” Luke said, even more softly. “Not like that at all. But they are dead. That part’s true.” He lifted his head as if he was listening to something Nick couldn’t hear. An instant later, a new round of shock waves rattled the cavernway. “When this is over, you and I need to sit down together for a long, long talk.”
Nick’s breathing had barely started to ease. “I’m ready to sit down now.”
“When this is over,” Luke repeated. “For now, we run.”
“I was afraid you were gonna say that …” But Nick was already talking to Skywalker’s retreating back. He wheezed a sigh, hiked up his robe, and went after him. He could hear, coming from up ahead now, the thunder-roll of explosions that were shaking the whole mountain. “Where are we going in such a hurry?”
“I’ll show you.”
They rounded another curve and ahead, the tunnel ended in a narrow ledge. Above the ledge was night, and stars, and streaks of X-wings hurtling down for strafing runs. Below the ledge was a long, long drop down the inner bowl of a huge, ancient caldera that was studded with impact craters and lit by the burning remains of crashed starfighters from both sides. The far rim had crumbled, and much of it still glowed dully with residual heat from the explosions that had shattered it; through the gaps Nick could see, far down the curve of the volcanic dome, turbolaser towers swiveling and pumping gouts of disintegrating energy into the sky.
“Uh,” he said, hanging back from the edge. “Maybe I’ll just wait up here.”
“Maybe you won’t.”
“Have I mentioned that I’ve got, y’know, a minor issue about heights?”
“I’m sorry about that,” Luke said seriously. “But you’re coming along. I have a feeling I’ll need you.”
“But listen—you’re going after your sister, right? Who’s going after Cronal? Somebody’s gonna have to take him out.”
“And you’re volunteering to play assassin?”
Nick cocked his head. “The crystals in my head … I can feel him, sort of. I can find him. I can take him out.”
“I believe you. But no. That’s final.”
“It may be the only way to save your sister. Not to mention you.”
Luke sighed. “And what happens if he gets to her before you get to him? What happens if she doesn’t have somebody like you around to break her out of the treatment, the way you saved me?”
“Then we’ll just have to—” The look on Luke’s face stopped Nick cold. “Uh. Yeah, I can see your problem with that. I guess I’d better be extra fast.”
“I guess you’d better do what you’re told.”
“Hey, news flash, General Skywalker—I’m not one of your soldiers.”
“Hey, news flash, Lord Shadowspawn,” Luke said, a faint smile on his lips but only bleak darkness in his eyes. “You’re a prisoner of war.”
“Aw—aw, c’mon, you’re not serious—”
“You said you knew Jedi,” Luke said. “Ever win an argument with one?”
Nick sighed. “Where to?”
“There.” Luke pointed down into the caldera. “Right there.”
Nick squinted. It looked like featureless rock scattered with wreckage. “What’s the big deal about right there?”
“That,” Luke said with quiet certainty, “is where the Millennium Falcon is about to crash.”
“What? The Millennium Falcon? Like in Han Solo in the Lair of the Space Slugs?”
“Sort of.”
“You’re not kidding? I thought—y’know, I thought that Han Solo was, y’know, a fictional character. That those stories are just, well, stories.”
Luke closed his eyes and extended a hand. His voice took on a distant, distinctly hollow tone. “They are just stories. But Han’s real, and as for the Falcon—look up.”
Nick did. A rising shriek of something large and not so aerodynamic flying very, very fast gave him a half second’s warning before a huge dark shape roared way too close overhead—an oblate disk with the forward cargo mandibles of a Corellian light freighter—that wasn’t really flying so much as it was, well, hurtling, flipping end over end through the air like a deformed coin tossed by a hand the size of this mountain. On fire and out of control, it tumbled toward the crater’s floor and certain destruction.
“Oh,” Nick said. “Awwww—I would have liked to meet him—I love that show …”
“Shh.” Luke’s forehead squeezed into a frown of concentration, and the fingers on his extended hand spread as his breathing deepened. “This isn’t my best trick.”
His fingers twitched as if he were tripping an invisible switch—and out on the dark spinning disk of the freighter, automated attitude thrusters blasted to life, dorsal on the mandibles, ventral to aft above the engines, slowing the ship’s tumble. Nick heard the sudden shriek of overpowered repulsorlifts, and the forward attitude jets swiveled to add their thrust, and the freighter slammed into the ground, which must have been some kind of cinder pit, because the front mandibles drove in almost to the cockpit at a sixty-degree angle … and stuck fast.
And the ship just stayed ther
e. It didn’t fall over. It didn’t blow up. It didn’t do anything that any reasonable person would expect a ship to do after a full-on crash.
Nick stared at it with his mouth open. Some few seconds later, he realized he hadn’t been breathing. “Did you … I mean, did I just see …?” he gasped. “Did you just now catch that ship?”
Luke opened his eyes. “Not exactly.”
“And that’s not your best trick?” Nick shook his head, blinking. “What is your best trick?”
“I hope you never find out,” Luke said. “Come on.”
Leia had known they were in desperate danger even before the floor had melted away beneath her feet. Chewbacca’s sudden reappearance in the cavern they’d fallen into had given her an instant’s hope—but only an instant’s, as the Wookiee was almost immediately felled by these rock creatures and now lay twitching on the ground, smoke curling from his singed fur. Then one of them had flowed around Han’s ankle and shocked him with some kind of energy discharge that had made all his hair stand on end, spitting sparks and smoke, before he collapsed in turn. Another woman might have lost heart then; or when all the rock creatures seemed to turn and converge on her together; or when, just as she was leaping for Han, one of the rock creatures flowed over the glow rod and the cavern plunged into impenetrable darkness … but Leia wasn’t the type to lose heart. Something about being in trouble this deep made her calm and focused. And determined.
Even in the darkness she seemed to somehow just know where Han was—and where the rock creatures weren’t. Her hand found the top of Han’s boot, and she latched on to drag him back—and her efforts were rewarded with an ear-shattering electronically fierce Thooperoo HEEE! as R2 launched himself through the air, so haloed in sparks from his overdriven antitamper field that he lit up the cavern like flares of summer lightning.
Seeing the rock creatures melt to slag at his touch gave her an inspiration. “Artoo! The hold-out!”
The astromech’s dome spun and a concealed hatch popped open, releasing a spring-loaded ejector that had been, less than a year before, engineered to deliver a lightsaber to Luke Skywalker’s hand. What shot forth from it now was no lightsaber, though, but instead a SoroSuub ELG-5C hold-out blaster.