by James Luceno
The compact pistol flipped through the air, and Leia lost sight of it in the uncertain light—but she put out her hand anyway, and somehow wasn’t even surprised when the blaster smacked neatly into her palm. She swung the hold-out through a quick arc, firing as fast as she could squeeze the trigger. The stun blasts triggered more discharges from the rock creatures as they sagged and liquefied; the walls around her crawled and crackled with blue fire.
“Artoo! Grab Chewie and get behind me!”
The droid chirped an affirmative and shut down his antitamper field before he extended a pair of manipulators to grip the unconscious Wookiee by the bandolier. Leia covered them, driving back the rock creatures with a barrage of stun blasts. The servos in R2’s locomotors whined in protest as he dragged Chewbacca past Leia. “And see if you can wake him up!”
Keeping up the fire with one hand, she used the other to shake Han. When that didn’t work, she gave him a couple of sharp smacks across his face, which elicited only a thin groan. Finally she grabbed one of his earlobes and pinched it as hard as she could, digging her thumbnail in deep enough to sit him bolt upright with a wide-eyed howl of protest.
“Ow-wow-ow-okay-I’m-awake-lay-off-the-EAR, huh?” Han scrambled to his feet, then half sagged again, dizzily clutching his head. “Woo. What hit me?”
Leia was still firing as she backed up. “What do you think? What am I shooting at?”
“Good question.” Han blinked, trying make his eyes focus through the flashes and flickers of stun blasts and energy crackles. “What are those things?”
“Unfriendly,” Leia said tightly while she blasted another.
“Yeah, sure, make fun of the woozy guy.” He clutched at his hip, but his hand found only an empty holster. “Um, you wouldn’t happen to have seen my blaster lying around anywhere, would you?”
“I’d help you hunt for it, but I’m a little—” She laid down a line of fire that slagged three or four more. “—busy right now, okay? Keep backing up.”
“They’re not behind us?”
“Not yet.”
Han squinted. “How do you know?”
“You want to go look? I know.”
“Right, right, I get it.” Han waved to R2. “Hey, Stubby! A little light, huh?”
R2-D2’s holoprojector swiveled and flared to life, emitting a wide cone of brilliant white light. Han peered into the advancing ranks of the rock creatures that just kept slithering forward—and kept regrowing up from the sludge Leia had melted them into—and tried to keep the desperation out of his voice. “No hint from the Force? A clue? Anything?”
“Just stay back and let me save your life again, will you?” But even as she spoke, her series of stun blasts wholly liquefied a couple of them, and there in the thin puddle of rock gruel Han spotted a blessedly familiar silhouette.
“Now, that’s more like it!” He pounced on it and fished his DL-44 out of the muck, giving it a good shake to clear the works before the stone could reharden. His first shot sent a puff of vaporized rock curling out from the DL’s emitter, but after that it seemed to work just fine.
“I’ll take over here!” he told Leia, stepping up with a wide-dispersal rebound shot off the wall that spread to take out three of the creatures at once. “See what you can do to get Chewie on his feet—these power cells won’t last forever!”
When Leia turned to comply, Chewbacca was already sitting up and dazedly struggling to rise; he was urgently groaning something that Leia’s still-limited knowledge of Shyriiwook couldn’t follow. “What’s he saying? Is that ‘Code Black’? What’s Code Black mean?”
“It means Drop everything and run like hell,” Han said.
Leia looked back over her shoulder at the massed rock creatures that still kept pressing forward no matter how many Han blasted. “He always was the brains of this operation.”
“I was thinking the same thing.” Han had to leap back and dodge, ducking toward her as the rock creatures started to flow out of the walls to either side of him. “Go! Chewie, get the droid! I’m right behind you!”
Chewbacca swept R2 up in his massive hairy arms and shambled off unsteadily, though his gait was strengthening with every step. R2 kept his holoprojector aimed at the ceiling to provide as much light as possible. Leia pelted along after them, throwing glances back to make sure Han was still right behind her, which he was, running hard, firing at random back over his shoulder.
The rock creatures came after them in a swelling wave of stone.
They ran.
Han drew even with her, puffing. “Got any idea … where we’re going?”
“Sure.” Leia’s breath had gone short, too. “Away from them.”
“I mean … do you have a feeling … what might be up ahead?”
“You went pretty fast … from it’s one thing to see Luke do it to Use the Force, Leia, didn’t you?” She tried for her usual crisply tart tone, but the wheeze of her breath only made her sound tired.
“My line of work … you gotta be a … flexible thinker.”
“Just keep running. Follow … him.” She waved a hand toward Chewbacca, who pounded along the cavernway ahead of them. “Don’t know what’s ahead,” she said. “Not escaping … know that much.”
“The Force … tell you that?”
“Uh-uh. The tunnel.” She waved her blaster toward the floor. “Slanting down …”
“Oh … that can’t be good …”
“Look,” she gasped. “I can … slow ’em down. You go on … I’ll catch up—”
“Not a … not a chance. You’re just saying that … as an excuse for a breather,” Han insisted between wheezes. “If anybody’s gonna take a break … it’s me.”
She gave him a fond sidelong smile. “On three?”
“Huh.” He grinned back at her. “How about … on one?”
“Good plan.” Just ahead, the tunnel opened out into a cavern; Chewie and R2 were already inside. There was no way to tell how big the cavern might be, but she knew that the only thing keeping them going this far had been that the rock creatures had had to bunch together inside the tunnel to come at them; in a more open area, they wouldn’t have a chance. Just as she and Han reached the tunnel’s mouth, she sucked in as deep a breath as her starved lungs would hold. “One!”
Shoulder-to-shoulder, they skidded to a stop and wheeled, triggering a storm of stun blasts back along the cavernway. The front ranks of the rock creatures sagged, and melted …
And the ones behind them stopped.
“Hey … hey, how about that?” Han sagged forward, hands to his bent knees, doubled over and panting. “Maybe they’ve … had enough. You think?”
“I … doubt it.”
“Maybe they’re as tired of chasing us … as we are of running …”
Chewbacca howled something incomprehensible. R2 twittered. Neither of them sounded happy. Leia turned, and the rest of her breath left her in a smothered version of one of Han’s Corellian curses. “Or maybe,” she said, “they stopped because we ran exactly where they wanted us to go.”
The cavern was full of bodies.
Dead bodies.
Dozens, maybe hundreds of bodies, half-sunk into the stone—as though it had been liquid and hardened around them. Up to their waists or chests in the floor, pushed into the walls so that only a face or a back of the head was clear. Some of the bodies—human ones—wore what looked like stormtrooper armor, except that it was black as the stone around them. Some—fresher ones, some human, some Mon Calamari, who looked like they might only be sleeping—wore New Republic flight suits.
“For the record?” Han sounded a little shaky. “This is why I didn’t want you to come along.”
An endless swarm of TIE fighters swirled around the Remember Alderaan and the other capital ships of the Republic that were huddled together in Mindor’s radiation-shadow. Republic fire control tracked the fighters desperately to lock in missiles, and gunners poured turbolaser bolts through the vacuum, but the nimble s
tarfighters were almost impossible to hit, and the only TIEs that got close enough to trigger the Remember Alderaan’s antifighter cluster munitions were the ones streaking in for full-speed physical intercepts.
Suicide crashes.
Even a lightly built TIE fighter generated a titanic amount of kinetic energy when traveling at the high end of its sublight velocity; the particle shields of the capital ships couldn’t dissipate it fast enough. A couple of suiciders were enough to trigger a momentary partial shield failure, and if another TIE timed it just right to slip into the gap, the impact could rip through whole decks.
The Remember Alderaan rocked and shuddered under its third such impact; clouds of gas and crystallized water vapor billowed out from three enormous rents in its hull. Like all battle cruisers, the Alderaan was designed to suck up an astonishing amount of damage and go on fighting, but when Lando got the preliminary damage and casualty report on this latest blast, even his legendary unquenchable optimism was pretty well quenched. Over a thousand crew members wounded or missing; a third of his turbolasers out of commission; and one main engine was overheating and would either shut down or melt down sometime in the next three or four minutes.
Lando leaned on the comm board on the Alderaan’s bridge. “Where the hell is our fighter escort?” he snarled. “Somebody has to stop these guys!”
But he knew the answer: the task force’s fighters were overcommitted in support of the ground action against the STOEs—the surface-to-orbit emplacements. He didn’t even have enough to adequately cover his marines, let alone defend his fleet.
“General Calrissian! General, can someone give me a hand?” C-3PO, knocked off his feet by the impact, had somehow gotten himself wedged under the security console. “Oh, what a terrible dent I’m going to have!”
Lando waved a hand and ordered, “Somebody pick up that droid!” because otherwise the blasted thing would just lie there and complain until somebody snapped and blew his gold-plated head off. He turned to his executive officer, a Glassferran, whose three expressionless eyes were fixed on three different tactical holodisplays. “Close the fleet up, Kartill,” he said. “We need to bring the ships together. As close as possible—seal the gaps in our antifighter coverage.”
“We’re practically kissing each other’s shields as it is,” Kartill replied. “And—begging the general’s pardon—being that close together is about to be a serious problem, once those STOEs swing over the horizon.”
“Don’t remind me.” He turned to the officer at the communications board. “Anything from Shysa?”
“Report coming in now, sir. I’ll put it on speaker.”
The crisp sizzle of blasterfire was the only thing that came clearly over the comm channel; everything else was half-buried in static. Lando leaned over the board and tried to keep smiling. “Shysa! Calrissian. I need good news, Fenn! We’re only eight minutes off that gravity gun’s firing window, and I’ve got a whole lot of ships with their bellies hanging out up here!”
C-3PO had reached his feet and now shuffled toward Lando. “General Calrissian—”
“Later. Fenn, do you read?”
The comm crackled with more blasterfire and a louder burst of static that might have been a proton grenade. “We’re making progress, but it’s room-to-room! These black-armor types are dug in and they don’t seem to believe in runnin’ away.”
“Do they believe in dying?”
“Oh, that they have a talent for. Problem is, they keep tryin’ to take our boys with ’em when they go!”
“Keep on it, Fenn. I’ll see if I can organize some help.”
“Anything you can do will be welcome.”
“General Calrissian, please!” C-3PO hovered at Lando’s shoulder, and he sounded even more agitated than usual. “You might be interested—”
“I said later.” Lando pointed at the communications officer. “Open the dedicated channel to Captain Antilles in Rogue One.”
The officer nodded. “Ten seconds, sir.”
Lando turned to C-3PO. “Okay. Ten seconds. What’s so interesting?”
“Well, you may find it interesting; I can’t know for certain,” the droid replied defensively. “But interesting or not, it’s unquestionably significant. In my opinion, that is.”
“Your opinion?”
“General? Captain Antilles,” the officer said.
“Please, General Calrissian, my opinion, on this matter, is most reliable!”
“Lost your chance.” Lando turned back to the comm board. “Wedge. Change of plans. Pull the Rogues off the turbo towers. The Mandos are having trouble securing the gravity gun. If that dome opens up, I want more ordnance going in than coming out, do you read?”
“Copy that, but I’m down three birds. Got a squadron or two you can spare?”
“Don’t make jokes, Wedge. Just get there. A lot of lives are depending on you.”
“We’re used to it, sir.”
“That’s why I wouldn’t give the job to anybody else. Clear skies, Wedge.”
“See you on the far side, General. Rogue Leader out.”
“But—but General Calrissian—”
“Not now, Threepio!” Lando clenched his jaw. He’d had a feeling all along that it might come to this. “Kartill, alert the fleet. We’re going atmospheric.”
All three of the exec’s eyes blinked at once. “Sir?”
“You heard me. Dirtside. Everybody. It’s the only way. If we’re still in orbit ten minutes from now, those STOEs will cut us to pieces.”
“Land? Land where, sir?”
“We’ll worry about that after we’re out of their fire window, yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“General—General, please!”
“Keep bothering me, Threepio, and I swear I’ll hit you so hard you’ll think you’re a garbage loader.”
“But, General, I thought you wanted to find Captain Solo!”
“What?” Lando turned and stared at the skinny protocol droid. “You know something about Han?”
“Possibly. In your brief communication with him—”
“Yeah, that was weird, wasn’t it? We can barely reach our own ships once they’re in that atmosphere, but we could pick up Han’s comlink, and he said he was in some kind of cave—”
“Yes, General. Yes, that’s it precisely. During that communication, I detected a subtle modulation in the carrier wave. Sort of a background noise, one might say.”
“What kind of background noise?”
“It appears to be a retrograde ortho-dialect of Surmo-Clarithian electrospeech interspersed with a creole of the Black Dwarf variant of Imperial digital encryption and a Neimoidian trade cipher—fascinating, really, especially in the structural vocabulation—”
“Threepio.”
“Oh, yes. Of course. Essentially, something was speaking on the comm wave. Or rather, the comm signal was picking up something’s speech.”
“Another comm signal?”
“Oh, no no no, nothing so sophisticated. It’s simply a language—electrospeech is a type of direct energy modulation used by a variety of life-forms; to date, I believe the total known to science numbers over—”
“Forget that. This electrospeech—you understand it?”
The droid drew himself up proudly. “I am fluent in over six million forms of—”
“I don’t need a list. What’d it say?”
“Well—translated as best I can, you understand, their accent is perfectly barbarous—they were about to take a pair of humans captive, and will deliver them to the crypt chamber.”
Lando shook his head. “What crypt chamber? And who’s taking who captive?”
“I’m sure I cannot say who the captors might be; the language would be appropriate for any number of energy-based life-forms.”
“Then why are you wasting my time with this?”
“Oh, well, it’s because these two captives were apparently accompanied by a Wookiee.”
“A Wookiee?”
“It does seem an unlikely coincidence. And they also mention a droid—hmm, parsing … half human size, round as a pillar spine, rotating dome—Artoo! Oh, General Calrissian, we must do something! They have Artoo!”
“All right, all right, slow down.” If whoever this was had R2-D2, they might even have Luke—or at least know what happened to him. That’s what Lando told himself, anyway; somehow it made him feel better to have at least a theoretically valid argument of military necessity for the rescue mission he was already pretty sure he was going to order anyway. “How did that signal punch through in the first place?”
“That’s exactly the point, General. I suspect that the natural frequency of this particular energy-based life-form confines it to a certain variety of electromagnetically active rock—this would be this life-form’s natural environment, as it were—and while this rock may very well interfere with an ordinary comm signal, its conductive properties should actually enable it to resonate with and reinforce a properly modulated—”
“I get it. Can you reproduce this modulation? Can you run it through the ship’s comm?”
“Well—in all modesty, perhaps Artoo would be more—”
Lando gritted his teeth against an almost overpowering urge to twist C-3PO’s head off. “Can you do it?”
“I am fluent in over—”
“Don’t tell me.” Lando pointed at the comm board. “Tell the ship.”
Luke scrambled through the deep cinders with Nick close behind. Taspan had sunk below the horizon; the only light came from the burning wreckage scattered across the floor of the crater, and from the occasional flashes and flares of the battle that raged above.
The cinder crunched and gave way almost like fine sand beneath every step, making the going slow and hard. The crater was also littered with bigger chunks—masses of hardened lava and rocky ejecta, most of which were a featureless, nonreflective black, which made them very hard to see; even Luke only discovered the medium-sized ones by painfully whacking one with his shins. He would have gone more cautiously, but the first time an ion panel blown off a TIE came whistling down and shattered into shrapnel a couple of dozen meters away, he gave up the idea of slow and careful.