by James Luceno
They ran hard. At least when Luke caught his foot on a chunk and fell, he could use the Force to flip himself in the air and hit the ground running. Nick didn’t have that option, but somehow he managed to reach the relative shelter beneath the slant of the Falcon’s hull only a few steps behind Luke, even though he was limping, both hands were bleeding, and he had a nasty-looking scrape on his forehead.
The Falcon loomed over them, blacking out the stars. Its attitude thrusters flared and sprayed jets of gas in a seemingly random sequence—trying to rock itself free—and the whine of its repulsorlifts scaled up from merely annoying to a shriek that was making Luke’s teeth ache.
Nick scowled up at the ship’s dark silhouette. “What do we do, knock?”
“No comlink.” Luke held one hand pressed against his ear. “We have to get their attention somehow.”
“Where’s the hatch?”
“Up there.” Luke gestured vaguely overhead; the belly hatch was high up the underside, out of reach. “Maybe we can climb.”
“No problem. I grew up in a jungle. I can climb anything.”
“Not yet. Something’s wrong.”
“Other than their landing? Shee, in the holoshows, Solo’s supposed to be such a hot pilot …”
Luke frowned. “I feel … fear and anger. Aggression. Danger. Han’s my best friend—why would his ship feel hostile?”
“Dunno.” Nick looked around and spotted a slow swing of motion in the darkness above. “Think it might be because that quad turret’s tracking us?”
The Force stabbed Luke with an instant overpowering Move-or-die; in less than an eyeflick his foot lashed out to slam Nick back deeper under the hull and he sprang into the air, back-flipping away. The night ripped open with the choomchoomchoomchoom of high-cyclic cannon fire, burning the air into long streaks of brilliant yellow that lit up the cinder pit like noon on Tatooine, and blowing gouts of white-molten rock in all directions.
The turret tracked Luke, chopping red-hot craters toward him like the footprints of an invisible fire god. He landed and sprang again on a different vector, and by the time the turret followed that leap he was off again on another that took him behind a boulder the size of an adolescent bantha. He pressed his back against it while the turret blasted away at its other side, and from the amount of smoke going up and debris raining down, he was pretty sure that turret’s gunner, whoever he was, figured the easiest way to get him would be to just blast the rock to pieces.
He rolled across to the opposite edge and risked a quick glance. Looked like Nick wasn’t kidding about being able to climb anything; he was clambering up the overhanging slant of the hull faster than a hungry mynock. “Nick! Get off of there!”
Nick reached the gimbal cowling of the quad turret. With Nick hanging half across the transparisteel viewport, the gunner quit blasting; Luke could see him inside, shouting Get your fraggin’ grass off my turret, or something along those lines.
“Nuts to that,” Nick called back. “He can’t shoot me here! Toss me your lightsaber and I’ll shut this ruskakk down with one swipe!”
“No, Nick! Jump! The Falcon’s equipped with a—”
A burst of blue-white energy crackled over the freighter’s hull; the discharge threw Nick tumbling from the turret to the ground, where he landed on his back with an authoritative whump.
“—antipersonnel field projector,” Luke finished belatedly.
The gunner opened up again. Luke extended his hand and summoned the Force; a sharp shove sent Nick skidding, and Luke decided he’d had just about enough of being shot at for one night. He took a deep breath and sent his mind into the Force.
The Falcon loomed large in his perception, as did the thirty or so desperate people he now felt were inside. He shut them out of his consciousness and focused on the ship itself. There—he felt the circuit he was looking for … and he even felt the echo of Leia’s hand upon it! She had touched this only hours earlier. Maybe even less …
But this was a distraction—even more distracting than the shuddering of the boulder as cannon blasts chewed away at its opposite side. The mere awareness of Leia’s recent presence was enough to flood his mind with all manner of fears and hopes that dimmed his perception until he could banish them and focus once more. A few more deep breaths tuned his mind like a targeting laser, and he recovered his hold on the circuit. A slight nudge in the Force, and he felt the circuit trip.
The quad turret went dark, and its guns fell silent. The turret autorotated to face forward between the freighter’s mandibles.
Luke could feel the gunner’s confusion and rising panic; he figured he had at least five seconds before the gunner figured out that the turret drivers had been reset and locked into their forward-fire default position.
Five seconds was more than he needed.
He stood up and raised his hand. High up the underside of the ship’s slant, the belly hatch fell open, spilling light in a stretching rectangle up the night-shadowed hull. One Force-powered leap carried him over the smoking boulder to Nick’s side.
“I’m all right …” Nick wheezed weakly. “Just need a minute to … catch my breath. Or maybe a week. Or two.”
Luke knotted his left fist in the front of Nick’s Shadowspawn robe, gathered the Force around them both, and leapt straight up, over the edge of the freighter’s belly ramp—which, due to the angle at which the ship was stuck, was more like a slide—and skidded down it into the Falcon’s main cargo hold.
Which was full of men and women in curiously constructed armor that looked like it had been made out of lava, nearly all of whom were pointing blaster rifles at him.
For an instant, the only sound was the rattle and snap of rifle stocks being snugged against armored shoulders; in the next instant, the only sound was the lethal hum of a green lightsaber blade held forward at guard.
“Don’t shoot,” Luke said softly. “I’ve killed too many people already today.”
“Weapons down!” The speaker was a hard-looking woman with red hair, sporting a swelling bruise around her left eye. She stood with her left thumb hooked behind her blaster belt while her right hand dangled free and loose near the butt of a slim blaster in a quick-draw rig. “It’s the Jedi! He’s here to help!”
“Yes,” Luke said. “I am the Jedi. And I hope I can help.” That was true on enough different levels to make his stomach hurt—but on the other hand, this was the second time in a row that someone had decided not to mess with him based on who they assumed he was, which was a trend he hoped to encourage. “Where’s Han?”
“Han who?” Her right hand came up, but it came up empty. “Listen, we need you—we need your help. Shadowspawn’s got my—”
“No he doesn’t,” Nick wheezed from behind Luke.
“Nick?” Her eyes sparked and her voice had gone soft and breathless, and Luke could only wonder how he’d thought she was hard-looking; when she gazed past him at Nick, she looked like a Tatooine teenager on the way to her own star-seventeen dance at the Anchorhead community center. She brushed past Luke as if he weren’t even there and threw her arms around him. “Nick! I can’t believe it!”
“Hey, kid. Did you miss me?”
“Did I miss you?” She pulled his face down to hers and planted a kiss on his lips that would have opened the eyes of a dead man.
Luke cleared his throat. “I take it you two know each other?”
“Nick—” Her eyes were still shining when she came up for air, and her cheeks were wet, too. “You’re all right? How did you escape? What are you doing running around with a Jedi?”
“All right? Mostly.” Nick rubbed at the dried blood that crusted his shaven scalp and grimaced. “The running-with-Jedi business, well, we sort of rescued each other. As for escaping … um, you have noticed that the ship we’re on is stuck nose-first in the ground in the middle of a giant pitched battle, haven’t you?”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said, stroking his face. “We’ve got you—that’s all that mat
ters.”
Nick lifted his own hand to tenderly touch her black eye. “Still haven’t learned to duck, huh?”
“You oughta see the other—uh, guy.” She grinned at him. “Now all we have to do is find a place to hole up until the flares subside, and we can shake this rockball’s dust off our boots forever.”
“Um …” Luke said quietly. “No.”
She looked at him. “What?”
“We’re going back for Han.”
“Again: Han who?”
“Don’t.” Luke nodded generally around at the scorch marks and blaster scars that marred the hold’s interior walls, floor, and ceiling. “Are you going to tell me this is all from a slight weapons malfunction?”
Nick turned. “She’s not a pirate.”
“Is there another word for it?”
“Hey, this tub was abandoned when we found it—” the woman said.
“Try to remember who you’re lying to.” Luke sighed. “I know you didn’t kill them. That’s why I haven’t hurt any of you yet. But this has been a really, really hard day for me, and my patience is wearing thin.”
“Hey, c’mon, Skywalker, take it easy,” Nick said. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent explanation.”
“And I’ll be happy to hear it. Just as soon as we get Han and Chewie and Leia back on board this ship.
“Skywalker?” one of the others chimed in. “Any relation to the guy from The Jedi’s Revenge?”
“No,” Luke said with maybe a touch more emphasis than was absolutely necessary. “No relation at all.”
He looked back at the redhead. “Where did you leave them?”
She opened her mouth, but before she could speak Luke raised a hand. “Think before you talk,” he said. “I won’t ask you again.”
She closed her mouth. She looked up at Nick, then back at Luke. “Uhh, okay,” she said slowly. “Look, can we make a deal?”
“Sure,” Luke said. “This deal: You tell me everything I want to know, and do exactly as I say. In exchange, I’ll try to forget that you stole my best friend’s ship and abandoned him and my sister to die.”
“Your sister? Your sister is Princess Kissy-Face?”
“My sister is a princess. Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan,” Luke said evenly. “And if you called her Princess Kissy-Face in person, I can guess who gave you that shiner.”
Nick rubbed his eyes. “Aeona … you didn’t really pirate this ship, did you?”
“Well, what would you have done, if it was me in the meathooks of that ratbag?”
“Something worse, probably. But you’re not gonna win this argument, and there’s no time to try. The bad guys know we’re here, and they’re coming after us.”
Luke said, “You’re sure?”
Nick flashed him a grim look and tapped the thin scar that stretched around his head from temple to temple.
“So? We should be safe enough as long as we don’t try to move,” Aeona said. “Who’s gonna waste their time blasting a crashed ship?”
“Wait five seconds and you can ask ’em.”
Nick barely had time to get the words out before the first explosion ripped away the Falcon’s belly ramp and blasted a gout of flaming slag into the cargo hold that set the whole place on fire.
In the deep shadows of the cavern filled with half-buried dead people, away from R2’s light, Han gathered Leia into his arms. “Leia, I just—I’m sorry things went this way. I just wish you and I had more time. Together.”
She smiled up at him and touched his face. “I know.”
“How is it we only kiss when we’re about to get killed?”
“Just lucky, I guess.” She kissed him, briefly, glancingly, but even that slight contact brought a hot flush of bittersweet regret for all the kisses he was pretty sure they’d never get the chance to share.
“Aroo-oo-ergh! Herowwwougrr.”
“What?” Han pulled away from her. “Are you sure?”
Chewbacca was kneeling alongside a young Mon Calamari who was buried to his armpits. “Herowwwougrr!”
Leia frowned. “What’s he saying?”
Han was already rushing to his copilot’s side. He reached down and pressed his fingertips to the Mon Cal’s face just above his left eye, checking for his sinus pulse. It was there: thin and thready but maintaining the typical syncopated three-beat rhythm. “He’s right!”
“About what?”
“This one’s still alive,” Han said wonderingly. “Looks like some more of them might be, too. Out cold, but breathing.”
“What’s that insignia?” Leia joined him at the Mon Cal’s side. “Artoo, aim the light over here.” When he did, her eyes widened and she pointed at the posting flash next to the rank cartridge on the Mon Cal’s battle-dress blouse. “Han—isn’t that the Justice? The ship Luke was on?”
Han was already up looking at the others. It was a backward progression: the captives became less and less healthy-looking as he went deeper into the cavern. In addition to the Republic soldiers, there were a number of guys in the Lava Gear armor of the Mindorese, but most of them were stormtroopers, and nearly all of them were dead. “It’s like those critters stuck them in here and just … forgot about them.”
Chewie grumbled. Han nodded. “Yeah, not my favorite way to go, either.”
R2 gave out a warning whistle that brought Han back to his feet. He drew his blaster. “That sounds like bad news.”
“Bad enough,” Leia said as she produced the hold-out. In the faint light that spilled out into the tunnel, she could see wave after wave of the rock creatures crowding toward the cavern. “Time to fight.”
Han turned, blaster ready. “I don’t think we’re getting out of this one.”
“Trust in the Force, Han.”
“You trust the Force,” he said. “I’ll trust my blaster.”
Leia frowned down at the hold-out’s power indicator. “The Force never runs out of ammo.”
“No? Then how come it’s not shooting?”
“What happened to never tell me the odds?”
“That’s for when there are odds. When you fall off a cliff, what are the odds you’ll hit the ground?”
“Depends,” she said. “How close are you and the Falcon?”
“Very funny.”
Han’s comlink crackled. He grabbed it and shouted, “Yeah, come in! Come in! We’re in a little trouble here. Do you copy? Do you copy?” but the comlink replied only with a burst of static.
He shook it one more time, then made a face and jammed it back in his pocket. “Had me going there for a second. Come on. If we can hold the doorway, we’ll slow ’em down, anyway.”
But as they moved toward the cavern’s mouth, the creatures started melting out of the walls.
In the deep gloom of his life-support chamber, Cronal withdrew his consciousness from the realm of Darksight, and found himself well pleased. Anyone unfamiliar with the true power of Darksight might have been astonished to find that Skywalker indeed had a sibling who had never trained as a Jedi; this hypothetical anyone would no doubt have been amazed to discover that this sibling had—seemingly of her own accord—presented herself precisely where Cronal needed her to be exactly when he needed her to be there. For Cronal, this was only what he had learned to expect. Left to its own devices, the galaxy and everything in it—from the stars themselves to the tiniest virus—served the Dark.
At least up until some blasted meddler started tricking around with the Force, upsetting the natural order of things.
This was the real problem with Jedi: the Force. Their whole concept of the Force. Always prattling about life and light and justice, as if those silly words actually meant something. He would have found those Jedi fools entirely humorous were it not for their inexplicable ability to occasionally actually interfere with the Way of the Dark.
Palpatine had done a fair job of thinning the Force-user herd, and Skywalker himself had nearly finished the job when he’d tricked Vader and the Emperor into ki
lling each other—because, after all, the Sith could be as troublesome as Jedi if they set their minds to it. And then that Skywalker boy himself had already been more trouble than he was worth.
This problem, however, was on the verge of solving itself, as all such problems were wont to do, when one truly adhered to the Way. He didn’t need the Skywalker Jedi anymore; his sister would be an even better fit—not only had she no actual Force skills to defend her from his dominance, she also had tremendous political potential. Hero of Endor? Sole survivor of the last royal family of Alderaan?
The only difficulty he had left was to retrieve the Skywalker girl from the wild Melters and get her Darkening under way, which task was decidedly complicated by the fact that all his best Pawns were lying dead on the floor of the Election Center. Yet even this difficulty turned out to be another example of how the Dark anticipated and provided for the every need of its most assiduous servant.
He still had the prototype, the test subject upon whom he had experimented to perfect the Darkening process. This subject hadn’t been entirely analogous to Skywalker—his connection to the Force, though astonishingly powerful, was innately of a far darker shade than the boy’s, not to mention that he had never received Jedi training. Or any training, really, which was probably why Cronal had failed to anticipate just how large an obstacle Skywalker’s training would prove to be. He was, however, enormous and physically powerful, and his very arteries pulsed with a certain innate ferocity that Cronal found more than a bit intoxicating. And with the shadow nerve network of meltmassif lacing his body, he had a connection to the fundamental power of the Dark that rivaled Cronal’s own.
The initial test subject had had a number of limitations, though; he was twice Skywalker’s age, and instead of a hero to the entire Rebel Alliance and now the New Republic, he’d been a hunted fugitive for longer than the boy had been alive, with a substantial bounty on his head that still stood. He was also more than a bit distinctive-looking, being over two meters tall and built like a rancor, not to mention having teeth filed sharp as a sabercat’s. He also, owing to some kind of structural brain abnormality that Cronal had been unable to repair, entirely lacked the power of human speech.