by James Luceno
Cronal decided that this should very likely be sufficient to prevent unwelcome interruption.
Now all that remained was to ensure that his new body would not be consumed in the stellar conflagration that was already beginning. A palsied hand groped through the darkness to the chamber’s voice modulator, which would transform his creaky wheeze into Shadowspawn’s liquid basso, then he keyed a preset secure comm channel.
“Yes, my lord? Is it time?”
“It is,” Cronal said simply. “Engage.”
Then again he closed his eyes and returned his consciousness to the Vastor body. He didn’t bother to open that stolen body’s stolen eyes, for within the tomb of stone was only darkness. He had no need for eyes.
He tuned his stolen brain to the proper frequency for control and pushed, and the stone of their tomb responded. Ultrafine hairlines of crystal began to thread themselves in through the Skywalker girl’s pores, and in with the crystals came the full power of his will.
Sleep. This is the end of everything. Nothing left but sleep.
Sleep forever.
As soon as the cavern floor had rehardened enough to support the Falcon’s weight, Luke set her down and lowered the freight lift in the engineering bay. He unstrapped himself from the pilot’s couch and got up. “Come with me.”
Aeona stared out through the cockpit’s transparisteel. “I—can’t. I can’t go out there.”
“Yes, you can.”
“No—no, I mean it, Jedi. You don’t know what this place is.”
“Then tell me.”
“It’s a Melter crypt.” She wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. “Melters are—I don’t know what they are. You heard your friend on the comm. The attackers he was talking about, they have to be Melters. They … just come out of the walls. Or up from the ground. Anywhere there’s meltmassif. If they touch you it’s like a stun blast. Then they carry you to a crypt and stick you into the rock.”
She looked at Luke with haunted eyes. “And they leave you there.”
Luke nodded out toward the people partially entombed around the walls and in the floor. “So I see.”
“I’ve been marooned on this planet for weeks, trying to get Nick back. That’s why I’m hooked up with the Mindorese. They needed a leader. I needed troops. But the Melters …” She shook her head. “They’d hit us without any warning at all. Sometimes we could hold ’em off long enough to get away … sometimes people got left behind. We found a few. A couple were even still alive. But they were never the same. Not after their time in the dark.”
“I can imagine.”
“Can you imagine being trapped like that? Alone in the dark? Darker than dark. Darker than empty space.”
“Yes,” Luke said. “I can.”
“That’s how I got a little claustrophobic, you know? There’s nothing darker than the inside of a cave.”
Luke could have told her different. “If you say so.”
“So you understand why I can’t go out into a Melter crypt.”
“I understand why you don’t want to. But you’re going anyway.”
“What, you’re going to make me?”
Luke tilted his head. “It’s the only way I can think of to stop Han from killing you on sight.”
Her hand drifted near her tied-down holster. “I’m not so easy to kill.”
“You don’t understand. Han’s my best friend.” Luke said gently. “If one of you has to die, it’ll be you.”
Aeona said, “Uh.”
“I want you to be absolutely clear on this. There should be no doubt in your mind. None at all.”
“No,” she said. “I read you. I do.”
“Then let’s go.”
They took the main corridor aft, avoiding the cargo holds that were still filled with Aeona’s troopers. When they got to the engineering bay, Luke motioned to Aeona to wait at the hatch while he went in. Han, arms and legs caked with shards of hardened meltmassif, was already standing on the freight lift, jittering with impatience. “Luke! Come on, we have to go! We have to go after her. Bring me up!”
Luke sighed. “You didn’t see who was with me in the cockpit.”
“There was somebody with you? How did you get the Falcon back from those pirates? Please tell me you killed them all. Especially that redheaded piece of—”
“Not exactly.” He beckoned to Aeona. “She’s here to apologize.”
Her face darkened. “Apologize?” she snapped. “You didn’t say anything about—”
“I’m saying it now.”
Han jumped back, his hand full of blaster and his face full of murder. “You! You stole my ship!”
She ducked and took cover on the far side of the hatchway. “Brought it back, didn’t I?”
“Han. Put your blaster away.” Maybe being a general for a few months was paying off; Luke’s tone of authority stopped Han cold. “I mean it.”
“Ah, whatever,” Han said with a disgusted shrug. He spun the blaster around his finger. “It’s empty anyway.”
Luke nodded. “Aeona?”
She reluctantly came back through the hatch. “Uh, hey, Solo. Sorry. Really.”
“Sorry?” Han flushed. “Sorry?”
“Hey, what do you want from me? He said apologize. I’m apologizing.”
“Aeona,” Luke said quietly. “Tell him why you did it.”
“Huh? What does that have to do with anything?”
“It might make a difference. To him.”
She sighed. “I needed your ship, Solo. My—uh, there’s this guy, and we’re kind of together—”
Han’s eyes narrowed, and his lips compressed. “You’re in love with this guy, and he’s in trouble.”
“Actually, he’s in your quad turret.”
Han waved this off. “But you’re in love with him.”
She looked away. “I figured this assault would be my only chance to get him back alive. I couldn’t even make a try without a ship, and I just didn’t have time to play nice about it, okay?”
“You could have asked,” Han growled.
“And if you said no, we’d still have had to fight you—and fight you without having the drop on you. Which, from what I’ve heard about you, isn’t exactly a good idea.”
Han’s flush deepened. “Well …”
“Easier to get forgiveness than permission, right? Isn’t that how you do it when someone you love is in danger? I seem to recall a couple stories …”
“All right, all right,” he said. “Drop it.”
“I’m not asking you two to like each other,” Luke said. “But you have to at least tolerate each other. Any problems between you will have to wait until we all live through this. Understood?”
“Wow,” Han said. “Who put you in charge?”
Aeona snorted. “I asked him the same thing.”
“Let me put it another way,” Luke said patiently. “Every second I have to waste worrying if you two will shoot each other is another second we’re not using to rescue Leia and get us all off this planet and out of this system before the whole thing burns.”
He jumped down to the lift platform. “Aeona, muster your Mindorese and start helping the survivors. Han, you look after Chewie. Make sure he doesn’t kill anybody when he wakes up, huh?”
“Yeah, he’s grumpy in the morning,” Han said. “What are you gonna do now?”
“Me?”
Luke stared down at his left hand, the flesh one. He flexed it into a fist and straightened it again, feeling the unfamiliar energy that trickled through the crystalline shadow web that mirrored his nerves. He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed himself into a deeper, more intimate connection with the Force; with the Force to guide him, he touched the shadow web with his mind and bent it to his will. When he opened his eyes again, his hand had sprouted a thin thatch of glistening black crystal threads, finer than human hair.
Han flinched and made a face. “What is that?”
Luke moved off the freight lif
t and knelt, lowering his palm to the floor. “That,” he said, “is how I’m going to talk with the Melters.”
Making contact with the Melters wasn’t the hard part. Luke simply laid his left hand on the shimmering black stone of the crypt wall. His hand’s sprouted thatch of shadow web melded instantly with the stone’s crystalline structure …
And they were there. He could feel them.
It was an unfamiliar sensation, vaguely analogous to sight—he sensed them in the stone the way one human might see another from a distance.
Getting their attention wasn’t hard, either. They became aware of him in the same instant that he perceived them—and they knew he perceived them. He sensed their instant curiosity and puzzlement, and felt the interchange of lightning-fast pulses of energy between them like a conversation in a language he could not understand.
The hard part was actually talking to them.
They sent tentative, questing pulses toward him in what could have been a cautious hello, and he felt his own shadow web respond, but not like an answer. More like an echo, or a harmonic overtone—as though the dark mirror of his nervous system was warping into some kind of resonance with their signal. To communicate with them, he would have to send his mind fully into the shadow web alongside his nerves, into his internal void that swallowed even the memory of light. He’d have to join them in the dark.
In the Dark.
To bring his consciousness into resonance with the Melters would require that he not only stare into that abyss, but dive into it headfirst. To drown himself in the void. To let the dark close over his face and seep into his ears and eyes and down his throat and entomb him in the empty, meaningless end of all things.
But—
The Melters were at the core of this. Everything came back to them somehow. Meltmassif was their body, or bodies, or the medium in which they lived; meltmassif was the active ingredient in the Pawn Crowns. It was the control crystals and the deadly interlock inside each Pawn’s brain. It was the underlying structure of Blackhole’s entire base. It was the shadow web that Blackhole had used to infect Luke with despair.
It was what he would use to steal Leia’s body.
It was dark where they were. Not just dark, but Dark.
And he was afraid.
Afraid that the Dark really was the truth. The only real truth. That everything else everyone pretended was important was only a deception, a distraction, a game to keep your mind off the eternal oblivion to come. He had spent aeons in the Dark and he knew its awful power.
Everything dies, it would whisper forever in his heart. Even stars burn out.
But if his nerve failed him now, he’d be leaving Leia in that Dark. Alone. Forever. The Dark would swallow her as if she’d never existed. What chance would she have to escape? She wasn’t even a Jedi. How would she find light?
Because that’s what Jedi do, isn’t it? Luke thought. That’s what we’re for.
We’re the ones who bring the light.
So he gathered his courage and focused his mind to open a channel into the Force, because if he was going to dive into the absolute negation of light, he’d better bring along some of his own.
He allowed his consciousness to touch the event horizon of the shadow web’s black hole, and let himself slip across the threshold and fall forever into the Dark.
Nick kept grimacing as he shed the Shadowspawn robe and tried to stuff his aching body into a spare flight suit. Aeona watched him, wincing in sympathy at each grimace. “Hey, are you hurt?”
“Huh?”
“You look like you’re in pain. Do you need bacta?”
“Depends,” Nick said. “Can bacta cure a bad case of Too Old for This Crud?”
“Awww.” She slipped an arm around his shoulders. “You’re just a kid.”
“Yeah. A kid who’s spent a few days getting clubbed by a pack of drunken Gamorreans.”
She nodded fractionally toward where Skywalker knelt, his left hand half-buried in the stone. “When are you going to tell him?” she said softly.
“Tell him what?”
“About Kar,” she said. “You heard what Solo said about the man who took Princess Kissy-Face. It was Kar. It had to be.”
Nick frowned. “It wasn’t Kar. It was Blackhole.”
“Using Kar’s body.”
Nick looked away. “Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t put even a Jedi up against Kar.”
“Me, neither,” Nick said. “If I had a choice.”
“So?”
“So I’m trying to figure my play,” he said. “Telling the truth might be the wrong move here. Skywalker—he’s not like his dad. Kindhearted, you know? If I let him know Kar’s another one of Blackhole’s victims, he might hold back. Going in soft against Kar will just get him killed.”
“Again: So? Is he one of our favorite people?”
Nick looked her in the eye. “He’s saved both our lives two or three times already, and we haven’t known him three hours. You think the galaxy will be a better place without him in it?”
Aeona shook her head, just a bit, then nodded over at the kneeling young Jedi. “Okay, sure. He’s a great guy. But Kar’s your family. He’s the closest thing to family you’ve got left.”
“Yeah. But Kar is—well, you know him. He’s not exactly a good guy.”
“Neither are you.”
Nick nodded. “And if I could get Anakin Skywalker’s children out of here alive? Even one of them? That’s worth Kar’s life. Mine, too.”
“Not to me it isn’t. And I bet not to little Jedi Pretty-Boy, either.”
“That’s why I’m not leaving it up to him.”
“Oh, sure, you’re doing him a big favor: making him kill an innocent man.”
“Kar? Innocent? You’re kidding, right?”
“If Skywalker was gonna kill him for Haruun Kal, or Kessel, or Nar Shadaa, I could see it. I wouldn’t lift a finger to save him. But Kar’s not the villain here. He’s a victim.”
“That doesn’t matter to me.”
“If you say so.” Aeona gave him a skeptical look. “But any stakes you care to wager, three to one says it’ll matter to Skywalker.”
His senses were useless here in the Dark.
Here was no sight, no sound, no touch, no awareness of his body. He had only an inchoate awareness of being part of some kind of indefinable field of energy—or perhaps he was the indefinable field of energy. The only perception he could summon beyond simple awareness of his own existence was of certain modulations in this energy field: unreceivable signals, untouchable textures, unseeable colors. Irretrievably alien. Cold and ancient lives that had never experienced the beat of a heart, the touch of a hand, the taste of air. Impossibly distant, unreachable, born of vanished stars.
Stars, he thought. Yes. That’s it: stars. That’s where they come from. That’s where we meet. Because that’s what I am, too.
Everything in the universe is born of dying stars. Every element is created in the fusion furnace of stellar cores. Every atom that exists was once part of some long-vanished star—and that star was part of others before it, an unbroken chain of ancestry back to the single cosmic fireball that had been the birth of the universe.
It is the death of stars that gives the universe life.
With the idea of stars on which to hang his imagination, he could bring his situation into a kind of focus. Instead of a formless field of barely perceptible energy, he visualized himself as part of a stellar cluster, vast and dim; those alien modulations of energy became distant stars.
Though every true star is functionally the same—a fusion furnace in space—each is also an individual. One may be larger, another hotter; one may be nearing the end of its life cycle, collapsing in upon itself or expanding to destruction, while another might be freshly forming by aggregating the dust and gases of ancient supernovae. In Luke’s imagination, he could read their individual spectra the way he might recognize a human face: they looked tired, and old, and
far apart, burning themselves out in the endless Dark.
But he, too, was a star, and the light that shone from him was the Force.
Each and every distant star on which he fixed his attention, however dim it was, instantly brightened as his light fed its own. They drew near, attracted by his energy, captured by his gravitational field, growing ever brighter as they approached, burning hotter, giving off bursts of exotic particles like gusts of delighted laughter. They fell into orbit around him, becoming a new system of infinite complexity wheeling through the Dark in joyous dance.
Here we are, in the Dark, he thought. And it’s not empty. It’s not meaningless. Not with us all here.
It’s beautiful.
And each one he had touched with the Force remained linked to him by pulsing threads of light as they basked gratefully in its power; they had been trapped in this freezing Dark for so long, their only light coming from the burning away of themselves and their kin, forever fading until one by one they would wink from existence …
With that, Luke discovered that he knew them now.
Not as though they had told him about themselves; not as though there was any communication at all. Luke didn’t need to be told. He was part of them now, joined to them by the Force. He knew their lives as if they were his own, because in the light of the Force he was those lives, and they were him.
He knew them as they knew themselves: a corporate entity that was also an array of individuals, nodes of consciousness in a larger network of mind. They had—been born? been created? altered? evolved?—first become aware of themselves (themself?) as alive on Mindor’s rocky, airless sister planet, which Luke knew only as Taspan II; they had no name for the planet that Luke could comprehend. There they had lived for untold millennia, basking in Taspan’s unfiltered glare, in fear of nothing save the changes that could be wrought in the meltmassif that was their home by radiation from Taspan’s occasional starspots and stellar storms.
They did not have any comprehension of the cause of the Big Crush; the Imperial weapons research facility on Taspan II had been entirely outside their concern. In those days, they hadn’t even known what humans were; they’d never had experience of noncrystal-based life-forms. The Big Crush itself had been no disaster for them; on the contrary, the planet’s destruction had simply scattered its crust into a vast cloud, with orders of magnitude more surface area to absorb the energy of the star. For the Melters, the Big Crush had been an all-too-brief Golden Age; their culture/mind had blossomed throughout the system, celebrating their accession to Paradise.