by James Luceno
And stopped.
The trooper wasn’t fighting back. He wasn’t struggling at all. He simply stood with his empty hands raised and waited to see if Fenn would slaughter him like a fattened grundill.
Fenn blinked, unable to believe what he was seeing. He was even less able to believe what he saw next, which was a black-armored stormtrooper stepping through the hatchway from which had come the surprise attack. He tensed and gathered himself, but the stormtrooper lifted an armored gauntlet, empty, palm forward.
“Ni dinu ner gaan naakyc, jorcu ni nu copaani kyr’a-mur ner vod,” the stormtrooper said.
Fenn Shysa could only stare in disbelief.
The guy’s inflections were kind of weird—he had a definite Coruscanti accent—but his meaning was absolutely clear, and his use of Mando’a was flawless.
Honor my offer of truce, for I would not willingly shed my brother’s blood.
“What?”
“Lord Mandalore. Emperor Skywalker sends his regards,” the stormtrooper said in Basic. He wore the rank flash of a group captain. “The situation has changed.”
Fenn’s mouth fell open. “Emperor … Skywalker?”
The situation has changed appeared to be the understatement of the decade.
“We have secured the surface-to-orbit emplacements,” the group captain said. “General Calrissian requests that you help us evacuate the civilians. Several thousand civilians, whom we were ordered by Emperor Skywalker to protect.”
And in the end, Fenn Shysa could only blink some more and wonder if maybe he’d taken a couple of shots to the head and just hadn’t noticed. Or something. But nonetheless he and the mercenary commander followed the group captain back through chamber after chamber choked with rubble and stinking of ozone and charred flesh, back to the scene of the battle at the twin redoubts that guarded the massive blast doors. The group captain clicked a brief code into the door panel, and the enormous slabs of durasteel began to grind open.
In the interior control room of the gravity gun, several dozen stormtroopers stood in ranks as orderly as if they were presenting for inspection, their hands clasped on top of their heads. Their rifles had been stacked with millimetric precision in the center of the room; on the deck beside them, their sidearms were arranged in a perfectly spaced grid. Behind the weapons stood a pyramid of gleaming black stormtrooper helmets, which reminded Fenn unpleasantly of the stacks of severed heads built by the Jaltiri tribals of Toskhowwl VI.
“I can’t—this is incredible,” he said. “We couldn’t even get close—we were tryin’ to cut through the walls and gettin’ nowhere—”
“That’s because you didn’t have the override codes for the blast doors,” the group captain said reasonably.
“And they just surrendered?”
“At my order.” The group captain sounded as though this sort of thing happened every day. “I am their superior officer. No stormtrooper would dream of disobedience.”
“If they had?”
“This might well have presented some difficulty, as I and my men have been instructed by Emperor Skywalker to minimize further bloodshed. I’m grateful that I didn’t have to make the decision.”
“Group Captain—”
“Air Marshal,” the stormtrooper corrected him with firm but quiet pride. “I have been honored with a battlefield promotion from the emperor himself.”
“Emperor Skywalker,” Fenn said slowly, struggling to beat this conversation into something resembling sense.
“The chosen heir of Palpatine the Great,” the fresh-minted air marshal said primly. “Haven’t you seen Luke Skywalker and the Jedi’s Revenge?”
“Um …”
“It’s a dramatization, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But it’s based on actual events.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s very powerful. A masterpiece,” the air marshal told him. “It changed my life.”
Fenn still couldn’t get his mind around it. “When a fella says a holodrama changed his life,” he said, “he’s usually just exaggeratin’.”
“I’m not exaggerating.”
“I’m startin’ to believe you.”
“Now, if you would summon your men and follow me,” the air marshal said as he turned and walked briskly away. “Though General Calrissian’s forces are doing their best to delay or prevent it, catastrophic destruction of this facility may commence as soon as six minutes from now.”
He had barely gotten the words out when the floor seemed to drop half a meter, then spring back up to slam them all off their feet. At the same time a terrific roar came up from the floor and out from the walls and battered them like invisible mallets crushing the breath from their chests. The echoes of the roar shook the dome until its armor shrieked and twisted and started to tear, and chunks of permacrete ripped loose from the walls and fell from the ceiling …
When the roar finally subsided to a mere grinding rumble, Fenn managed to sit up, coughing permacrete dust from his throat. “A bit optimistic about that six minutes, weren’t you?”
CHAPTER 17
The first of the gravity bombs was a direct hit: its impact blasted seven or eight hundred meters of the leading edge of the flying volcano into a bunch of high-velocity asteroids streaking through a cloud of expanding plasma. Two entire banks of the massive gravity-drive thrusters that the flying volcano depended upon for maneuvering were destroyed, and the central coordinating nexus was damaged, which destabilized the remaining three banks. These three banks of gravity-drive thrusters began to swing and blast in random directions as their autocompensators tried and failed to discover a configuration that would continue to guide the base along its programmed trajectory.
The resulting stresses began to rip the Shadow Base apart.
This process substantially accelerated with the arrival, in brisk succession, of the rest of the gravity bombs. The three remaining Slash-Es raced in at a steep deflection, overdriving their gravity projectors in a vain hope of dragging them far enough off-course that the mountain had a chance to survive, but the bombs came in a great deal faster than they had gone out, having picked up considerable velocity in their slingshot around the planet.
Which meant that some 3,426 civilians—citizens of the Republic who had been violently kidnapped and forced into slavery, who were currently crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in what had once been the Sorting Center—had roughly four minutes to live.
In slightly less than those four minutes, the breakup of the Shadow Base would rupture the pressure seal around the Sorting Center and expose them all to hard vacuum. Further, the only landers available to shuttle evacuees away were not only far too few to hold more than a tenth of their number, but were also currently moored on the exterior of the flying volcano. To reach them, the evacuees would have to cross hundreds of meters of that selfsame hard vacuum—without the benefit of environment suits.
Han stared through the cockpit’s transparisteel, his face bleak as empty space. “They don’t have a chance.”
“They do have a chance,” Nick insisted from the seat behind Chewie’s seat. “The same chance you had. They’ve got a Skywalker on their side.”
“You think that’s enough?”
“It was for you,” Nick pointed out. “Skywalker’s got a plan. He’s always got a plan.” He turned to Luke and lowered his voice. “Uh, you do have a plan, don’t you?”
“As a matter of fact,” Luke said, “I do.”
Luke had, before he had ever assumed command, familiarized himself with every detail of every ship that would form any part of the RRTF. So he knew that three Corellian frigates attached to the task force had been converted from heavy freighters. He also knew that some of their original equipment had been preserved in its original configuration, to avoid a ridiculously expensive refit.
One piece of this original equipment was a conveyor bridge, intended to transfer cargo to or from another ship out of atmosphere. It was essentially a fr
amework supporting a moving belt some six meters wide and a hundred meters long, enclosed in a force tunnel to maintain atmosphere, and carrying multiple small artificial gravity generators, ensuring not only that the cargo being transferred would stay in contact with the belt, but also that any transfers would take place “downhill.”
Lancer and Paleo were equipped with conveyor bridges; they were also the closest to the flying volcano. Lancer, in fact, was able to match trajectories and deploy its conveyor bridge with pinpoint accuracy in less than two minutes.
At the coordinates Luke had given, Lancer discovered only a broad, flat plain of solid rock. Captain Tirossk was understandably reluctant to risk his crew by bringing his ship so close to a flying mountain in the process of shaking itself to pieces simply to deploy a conveyor bridge that nobody could possibly use. He growled over the comm, “Once I anchor the bridge and pump in atmo, what then? Will the rock just magically open up and let people out?”
And because the captain of Lancer occasionally indulged a guilty pleasure by viewing holothrillers such as Luke Skywalker and the Dragons of Tatooine, when Luke replied simply, “Yes. It will.” Tirossk discovered, against all his better instincts, that he believed it would.
Han Solo didn’t share that faith. He didn’t have any faith to spare. He hunched over the Falcon’s controls, glaring out through the cockpit’s transparisteel at the Shadow Base as it swelled entirely too slowly, his knuckles white on the yoke, his teeth clenched as though he could make the ship go faster by pure force of will. Now he twisted to look at Luke, who crouched behind Chewbacca’s seat. “What, your new Melter friends? How do you figure to pull that off when we’re a good two minutes out from you getting that hand on the rock?”
Luke said, “Artoo, I need a signal boost.”
The astromech, socketed behind Han’s seat, extended a datajack toward Luke like a trusting child offering a hand; in the same moment, the comm port on his dome slid open and his parabolic antenna popped up. Luke gripped the extended datajack, and Han watched a thatch of those glossy black crystals grow out of Luke’s hand and thread themselves into the datajack’s ports.
Han grimaced. “No offense, Luke, but that really creeps me out.”
“Imagine it from my side.”
“I’d rather not.”
Luke didn’t quite smile. “Now I need a second or two to concentrate.”
The Lancer swung into position, and its conveyor bridge extended like a tongue going for a taste of the rock. An instant after the bluish shimmer of the force tunnel flickered into existence around it, the rock dimpled and began to melt away, retreating like a time-lapse image of a glacier in high summer. Light sprang upward from the hole, which shaped itself perfectly to the force tunnel. The conveyor bridge extended farther down into the hole, all the way down to the civilians and stormtroopers and Mandalorians waiting there.
First onto the bridge came a pair of Mandalorian mercenaries. They leapt up and grabbed the moving belt, flipping their bodies expertly through the ninety-degree gravity shift; for them, the artificial gravity’s orientation made the bridge seem entirely level, the Lancer now appearing to cruise serenely alongside the volcano instead of hovering above it. They strode briskly in the opposite direction of the belt’s motion so that they could stay in place and assist others through the transition.
A dozen pairs of Mando commandos spaced themselves along the conveyor bridge, while the balance of them helped organize the civilians on the cavern floor. Solicitous stormtroopers assisted any who were too incapacitated by age, injury, or disease to make their own way. Mandos along the bridge reminded everyone to “keep walking. Do not run. If you fall and can’t get up, move to the side and someone will assist you.” In this fashion the Sorting Center began to swiftly empty, despite the pitching and jouncing of the cavern’s floor from the ongoing destruction of the Shadow Base.
None of them knew, either, that the convulsions they felt were substantially less than those experienced by other parts of the base. They also had no way to know that the atmospheric integrity of the Sorting Center was being preserved by a large contingent of Melters, who not only kept the cavern tightly sealed, but manipulated their meltmassif to minimize the shocks through the floor. Though all could see another part of the cavern’s vault bulge, and droop, and belly downward like a vast droplet of glossy black slime.
One of the largest such droplets turned entirely liquid and drained away, revealing a Corellian light freighter.
In the instant that the Falcon settled onto the cavern floor, a HatchPatch blew off, opening a gap where its belly ramp should have been. The ship’s freight lift slammed down as well, and through both openings flooded refugees, both Mindorese, organized by a human man named Tripp, and Republic, commanded by a Mon Calamari lieutenant named Tubrimi.
In seconds, the Falcon’s holds were empty of people.
In the cockpit, Luke laid a hand on Han’s shoulder. “Are you good with this? I’m depending on you.”
“I don’t like it,” Han said.
“I know. But this is how it has to be,” Luke said. He triggered the comm. “Air Marshal—you and your men will board immediately. One minute to skids-up.”
The reply came instantly. “As you command, my lord emperor!”
Han made a face. “Someday you’re gonna explain this Emperor Skywalker bumblefluff, right?”
“No,” Luke said. “No, I don’t think I will.”
In the absolute blackness within the Shadow Egg, Cronal had only one problem left.
The Shadow Egg, as he had mentally dubbed it in the instant of its creation, was his improvised cocoon of meltmassif in the Cavern of the Shadow Throne. It hovered where the Shadow Throne had once stood, held aloft by the repulsorlifts that had once supported the Throne. There was no longer a lava-fall behind it, nor a lake of molten lava below; whatever remained of the volcano’s lifeblood, once the Shadow Base had cut free from the planet, had spilled from its underside in a rain of fire. The Shadow Egg bobbed gently in midair as the shock waves of the Shadow Base’s ongoing destruction passed over it.
This ongoing destruction was not Cronal’s problem; it was not a problem at all. He had counted on it. Had the Republic forces not hit upon their idea of deflecting his own gravity bombs back at him, he would have been forced to blow the Shadow Base up himself.
The Battle of Mindor was to have only one survivor.
Nor was he concerned that all his preparation for his new life had focused upon impersonating Luke Skywalker rather than his sister; one useful lesson he had taken from working with Palpatine was the value in flexible planning. He would, as Leia, simply fake amnesia—traumatic brain injury would be an ideal explanation for any stumbles or fumbles he might make upon meeting the Princess’s old acquaintances—and then discreetly hire one of the countless hacks who scripted holothrillers to make something up. He would, he anticipated, even have this holothriller produced. He already had a few ideas for a title: Princess Leia and the Shadow Trap, for example. Or, perhaps, Princess Leia and the Black Holes of Mindor.
Nor was he worried about making an escape from his own trap, once the transfer of his consciousness was complete. Buried in meltmassif not far from the Election Center, he had secreted a custom craft to make his escape as Luke. Though in appearance it was a very ordinary-looking Lambda T-4a, its hull was layered with so much additional shielding that there was no cargo capacity at all, and virtually no room for passengers. The cockpit was altogether fake; a pilot and at most two or three others could be packed into a tiny capsule cocooned in additional radiation shielding in the center of what would have been, in an ordinary shuttle, the passenger compartment.
All necessary planning had been done. All difficulties had been anticipated, and all contingencies had been covered. Except one.
The blasted girl simply refused to break.
The incrystallation had gone flawlessly; the raw power of the Vastor body had enabled Cronal to propagate a shadow web of cryst
alline nerves throughout her body with the speed of frost spidering across supercooled transparisteel. With only a short time available—and no ready supply of thanatizine II—he had proceeded without drug suspension. After all, this was but a mere girl who had, through an accident of genetics, an exceptionally powerful connection to the small fraction of the Dark that Jedi had ignorantly named the Force. He should have been able to overwhelm her by brute strength alone.
He had taken her sight, cut away her hearing, erased her senses of smell and taste and touch. He had stripped her kinesthetic sense, so that she was no longer aware of her own body at all. He had shut down the activity of certain neurotransmitters in her brain, so that she could no longer even remember how being alive had felt.
She wasn’t fighting him. She didn’t know how. He wouldn’t let her remember what fighting was.
She just wouldn’t let go.
She had something that her brother had lacked, some inner spark of intransigence that sustained her against the Dark. He couldn’t guess what this spark might be; some sort of primitive, girlish emotional attachment, he presumed. Whatever it was, it must be extinguished once and for all; she must sleep forever. The problem was how to do it without killing her outright. The meltmassif shadow nerves would contain only his consciousness; he needed her brain to be fully functioning to maintain autonomic functions. He hadn’t gone to all this trouble to simply trade his decaying body for one that was already dead.
This was taking far too long. The boy Jedi had been ready to let himself slip away in a fraction of the time; of course, the boy had given him more to work with. He carried with him an inner darkness that would no doubt have astonished his sister, had she lived long enough to discover it. Had Skywalker not damaged Shadowspawn’s control crystals, none of this would have been necessary in the first place. But as the situation stood, he could only drive his will deeper into the Dark—to gnaw away her resistance with the single-minded intensity of a Klepthian rock otter chewing into a basalt clam’s shell.