by James Luceno
But when he finally did break through that resistance, he found her brain not weak and quivering, but hard like a burnberry stone, and shining with a brilliant white light that was not imaginary at all. That light stabbed him like a knife in the eye, and drove him reeling back.
He took that stone in the palm of a hand made of the Dark, and with a Dark rock hammer he struck it … and the imaginary hammer splintered in the imaginary hand. He came at the stone like a gem harpy, and swallowed it into a crop powerful enough to pulverize diamond, but it burned its way out. He made fists of whole galaxies and brought them together to crush this one tiny star, but when their cataclysm faded back into the Dark, the tiny star shone on.
“What is wrong with you?” he shouted at the star in frustration. “What are you, and why won’t you die?”
“I can tell you that.” The voice came from everywhere, or nowhere: a young man’s tenor, with the flattened, nasal accent of the far Outer Rim.
Cronal jerked upright in the absolute blackness inside the Shadow Egg.
“If you’d made friends with the Melters, instead of making them your slaves, you might have discovered all kinds of things they can do for you.” The voice was coming from inside Cronal’s head. “As for where I am, well …”
The interior of the Shadow Egg suddenly flared with light: blue-white light, from a crackling energy discharge that spidered across its inner shell. An instant later the shell collapsed, splashing around Cronal’s ankles and draining off the repulsorlift platform that had supported the Shadow Egg.
Twenty meters away, on the ledge that curved outward from the tunnel mouth, stood a slim young man in a Republic flight suit who held, loosely and casually in one hand, a lightsaber of brilliant green.
Luke tried to keep his breathing slow and steady, while his heart thumped against his rib cage like a trapped slashrat trying to break free. For an interminable stretching moment after the meltmassif egg had collapsed, all Luke had been able to do was stare blankly and think Look at the size of him …
Kar Vastor crouched like a sabercat coiled to spring. One of his enormous hands rested on a blob of meltmassif. His lips had peeled back to reveal teeth long and curving and sharp as stilettos. Luke blinked, and blinked again. Each of his biceps is bigger than my head …
And around him in the Force swirled a storm of darkness unlike any Luke had experienced since the Emperor’s death: darkness that could snuff his own paltry light like a candle.
But fear could have power over him only if he let it. He breathed deeply, slowly, and with each exhale he opened himself so that all his fear, all his tension and apprehension, his every care and concern drained out of him and flowed away.
How would Ben handle this?
That thought steadied him. He imagined Ben at his side, and held the old Jedi’s kindly smile of warm knowing firmly in his mind. “Blackhole,” he said, and the calm solidity he heard in his own voice reassured him even more. “You have one chance to do this the easy way.”
Blackhole’s response was a low snarl that somehow, in Luke’s brain, translated itself into words. The easy way, he growled, would be to swap. Give yourself to be my body, and I’ll let your sister go.
Luke shook his head and hefted his lightsaber. “If you fight me, you will be destroyed.”
Blackhole’s snarl took on a mocking edge. You think you can take me, boy?
“I’ve killed too many people already today.”
Then how will you destroy me?
“You remember Nick, don’t you? Your puppet Shadowspawn? And his girlfriend. Her name’s Aeona. See, Nick knows all about you.”
Bring him out so he can watch you die.
“Oh, he’s not with me. We dropped off Nick and Aeona on the way here. They’re in that custom shuttle of yours.”
What?
“I told you: Nick knows all about you. Did you think I was lying? He and Aeona are on their way already. On their way to your real body.”
Vastor went very, very still.
“I bet if you close your eyes and concentrate, you can feel where he is. I’m pretty sure you can. Because he can feel where you are. Go ahead, give it a try.”
The eyes of the Vastor body went vacant. Luke, calm now, serene and centered in the Force, could also feel Nick’s location humming in the meltmassif that shadowed his nerves: far, far off, hurtling through space, dodging asteroids and looping around a wide arc that would bring it into an orbital intercept with one particular asteroid—one particular chunk of rock left over from the Big Crush, one chunk that was not like the others, despite its absolutely ordinary appearance. No eye could have picked it out among the countless others that swarmed it on all sides; no instrument could have detected the slightest anomaly.
But Nick didn’t need instruments, and he didn’t need to see it to know where it was.
This chunk of rock—of pure meltmassif, in fact—was very far indeed from ordinary. Within its hollowed core were hidden engines, and a powerful hyperdrive, and the life-support chamber of a very old, very frail man, who from his perfectly concealed position had used a device forged of Sith alchemy not only to control this system, but also to terrorize the galaxy.
“Do you understand now?” Luke asked. “In a few minutes, a very, very angry man will arrive at your life-support capsule. This man does not share my reservations about killing you. I’m pretty sure he’s already trying to decide whether he should blast you to atoms or cut his way in and beat you to death with his bare fists.
“So this is what I mean about the easy way. Walk away. Withdraw from the Vastor body and return to your own. Your gravity stations are powered down. You still have time to jump out of the system before Nick gets to you. But you don’t have very much time. So I’ll tell you again: If you fight me, you will be destroyed.”
The Vastor growl lowered to a threatening rumble. I still have the girl.
He reached up to the shapeless mass of meltmassif; he laid his hand upon it and it slumped to liquid, and then that enormous hand lifted Leia by the neck. She dangled from his fist, limp, lifeless—only through the Force could Luke tell she still lived. Vastor growled again. She can still die, the growl said. You both can.
Luke sighed. “All right, forget the easy way.” He took three running steps to the lip of the ledge and jumped.
The Force carried him high over the abyss that had once been the lake of molten lava. He flipped in midair, to make himself into a spear with a lightsaber for a blade. Vastor dropped Leia and vaulted away with a contemptuous grunt as Luke’s flight ended with his lightsaber blade driving into the platform.
Luke somersaulted to his feet astride Leia’s unconscious form and lifted his blade to garde. “I warned you not to underestimate my powers.”
Are you mad? You were never even close to me, fool!
“I wasn’t aiming at you.”
Vastor’s eyes flicked from Luke’s face down to the lightsaber hole in the platform, which was now spitting sparks and gouts of smoke that smelled very much like a damaged repulsorlift burning out. Vastor’s eyes widened, “What have you DONE?”
With one last gush of black tarry smoke, the repulsorlift shorted out completely, and the platform plummeted like the several tons of rock and obsidian it was, to the empty bottom of the formerly lava lake. But instead of falling the several hundred meters to the rocky bottom of the lava lake, after only twenty or so it landed, very hard, on the dorsal hull of a Corellian light freighter that had been hovering there ever since Luke had slipped out through its topside hatch and leapt to the wall, to make his long, slow climb up to the ledge above.
The impact knocked Vastor off his feet; Luke, with Leia in his arms, landed as softly as a Force-using feather pillow.
Vastor sprang to his feet, needle teeth bared in a feral snarl. I will kill every last one of you!
“No,” Luke said, “you won’t.”
A slight sideways tilt of his head invited Vastor to look around, which he did. Which was when
he saw the full company of black-armored stormtroopers on a ring ledge about three meters above him, all with weapons aimed at his gigantic chest.
“Air Marshal Klick,” Luke called upward. “Tell Kar Vastor your orders.”
The black-armored officer stepped forward crisply. “Kar Vastor, I have been directed to prevent, by any and all necessary means, any attempt on your part to do harm to that ship, to the woman, or to Emperor Skywalker.”
Emperor Skywalker. Vastor’s growl dripped loathing.
“I implore you to remain still, and take no aggressive action,” the air marshal said. “The emperor wishes us to minimize bloodshed.”
Luke, meanwhile, had taken a couple of steps to one side, where the dorsal access hatch promptly opened to reveal enormous hairy arms, into which Luke delivered his sister.
“Worrough?” Chewbacca asked solicitously, cradling her as though she weighed nothing at all.
“No,” Luke said. “She’s not all right. Take her below and tell Han to get ready to take us out of here.”
He turned back to Vastor. “Now it’s your turn, Blackhole. Go back to your own body. You might still make it into hyperspace before Nick kills you.”
Vastor lowered himself into a crouch. I understand now. I understand how you have defeated me.
It is because I lost my way. I have been trying to create. To build, when I should have destroyed. I abandoned the Way of the Dark, and the Dark abandoned me.
“I don’t care,” Luke said. “All I care about is whether we’re going to have to kill you. Now if you’ll just abandon that body, we can all go home.”
I will. But not yet. First, answer a question for me, Skywalker.
Luke shrugged. “If it will end this, sure.”
Oh, yes. This will end. And very shortly. Answer me this: Why is the armor of my stormtroopers black?
Luke frowned. He’d never thought about it; he’d sort of assumed it was merely a style. An element of uniform, to set them apart from Palpatine’s stormtroopers.
I’ll give you a hint: It’s not just paint.
Luke squinted up at the company of black-armored commandos above while with his mind he reached into the Force. Even with all the Force perception he could muster, he could detect nothing unusual about the armor beyond its color. And the color was, well, just black. Wasn’t it? Black with faint opalescent highlights, kind of a pearly glitter. It reminded him of something … but he couldn’t quite bring it to the surface of his consciousness, because there was something nagging at him, a kind of tickle that grew to an itch that swelled into actual pain … but it was a pain he didn’t really feel so much as sense, as if it were happening to someone else.
It was his shadow nerves, that’s where he felt it, in his internal crystalline network of …
He couldn’t breathe.
The ceramic base of that black armor, its fundamental structure, was not ceramic at all.
He could only stand and blink, and mouth a single word: meltmassif.
As if in confirmation, Vastor collapsed, just crumpled, folding to the deck like a dead man.
“Han …?” Luke said uncertainly. “Han, I think we need to go.”
“Luke!” his comlink crackled. “There’s something wrong with Leia—she’s, I don’t know, she’s having some kind of seizure or something. Luke, what do I do?”
“I don’t know,” Luke said as he watched Vastor’s body do the same: writhe in slow, twisting convulsions like a Riddellian bloodworm baking on a hot fry-rock. There came a clatter from above: blaster rifles slipping from stormtrooper hands to bounce on the stone of the ring ledge. The stormtroopers, each and every one, began to buckle at the knees. They twisted and jerked, bucking in slow motion, clutching at their helmets with gauntleted fingers as though to claw out their own eyes.
“Han,” Luke said. “Go. Go now.”
He reached out with the Force and slammed shut the Falcon’s hatch just as the Vastor body lurched to its feet and reached Luke in one lightning bound. Impossibly powerful hands seized Luke’s shoulders as Vastor lifted him like a doll, and shook him and roared rage and bloodlust into his face, and there was nothing human left in Vastor’s eyes. He sank his teeth into Luke’s throat, and bit down.
And on the ring ledge above, the stormtoopers started to scream.
CHAPTER 18
Air Marshal Klick could not identify the sound. Even through his consuming agony, pain so intense that he could no longer stand, he was quite certain that he’d never heard this particular sound before, and right now he couldn’t guess what it might be. The agony, however, he understood very well.
The inside of his armor had turned into needles.
Big needles.
They stabbed every centimeter of him from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. And they didn’t stop once they had pierced his skin. Instead, they grew, lancing deeper into his flesh; they seemed to enter his bloodstream and splinter off, tearing at him from the inside. They went up his nose and in behind his eye sockets, drilling right through the bone of his skull and slicing into his brain. Inside his brain they didn’t hurt—no pain nerves—but he could feel them by what they cut away.
They cut away his honor, and his discipline. They cut away his devotion to the emperor, and his pride in his men. They cut away his memory, and his dreams, his hopes, and his fears. The needles in his brain destroyed everything he had ever been, but they didn’t leave mere emptiness behind …
Each of those empty parts of him boiled with savage unreasoning rage.
His final thought as a conscious being was Ah, that’s what the sound is. It’s me.
Screaming.
The sound of his own screams was all he took with him into the dark. Then there was only rage, and a burning need to kill someone.
Anyone.
The couch Nick was strapped onto was barely even a couch at all; it was more like a padded shelf in a slight widening of the crawlspace tube that extended back from the shuttle’s lone pilot’s chair. Nick lay with his eyes closed, watching the dark star in his head.
Watching was not exactly what he was doing. The sense he used was not sight, though the dark star appeared to his vision as a patch of deeper night in the infinite black between the stars. Nor did he touch it, though he could feel how cold it was, how it was a bottomless abyss that swallowed all the warmth in the universe. Nick’s ears rang with an utter lack of sound, and in his nose and mouth was only corruption and decay.
But he did his best to ignore those sensations, because none of them would help him kill that evil son of an inbred ruskakk.
When Nick closed his eyes and turned his whole mind to the task, he simply knew that this dark star of hunger and decay was straight ahead, on the shuttle’s current course. He knew it was moving, and when it smeared into a streak of jump radiation, he knew that too.
“He’s gone into jump,” Aeona said from the pilot’s chair. “Unless there’s more than one of these asteroids with a hyperdrive.”
“Yeah,” Nick said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“The navicomputer says his vector’s wrong for the jump-out point.”
“He’s not going for the jump-out point. He’s making for deep space.”
“Then how are we supposed to find him? Guess?”
“I can find him,” Nick said. “He can run, but he can’t hide. Not from me. Get on his vector and jump.”
“How far?”
“Just outside the system.”
He could hear the shrug in her voice. “You’re the boss.”
“If you only knew how long I’ve been waiting to hear you say that.”
He heard the tapping of codes being punched into the navicomputer. The rising whine of the hyperdrive sped them toward jump … then he heard the whine drop as the hyperdrive spun down.
Nick sat up so suddenly he whacked his head on the crawlspace’s ceiling. “What’s going on? Why didn’t we—”
“Fail-safe cut in.” Aeona’s voice was tigh
t. She twisted to glance at him over her shoulder, and the look on her face made his stomach twist. “We’re in a gravity well.”
She checked the shuttle’s sensors. “Mass-shadows all over the place,” she said, low and slow and grim. “They’ve repowered the gravity stations.”
“What? Which ones?”
She lowered her head. “All of them.”
“No way,” Nick snarled. “No fraggin’ way!”
“All those ships. All those people. On both sides.” Again she twisted to look at him over her shoulder. Her eyes were haunted. “None of them are getting out. Not one.”
Nick felt hollow inside, as if somebody had reached down his throat and pulled out his guts. He turned half-blind eyes to the meters-thick custom shielding that so nearly filled the entire shuttle. “Just us,” he said. “Nobody else.”
Aeona nodded. “I think we’re the only ones who have a chance to live through this.”
Leia still writhed and twisted in that horrible slow-motion convulsion, despite Han and Chewbacca’s best efforts to calm her and hold her still. “Take her to the cockpit and buckle her into your chair so she can’t hurt herself,” Han said. “I’m going after Luke.”
“Howergh!”
“He’d go back for me,” Han replied grimly. “In fact, he has.”
“Argharoo-oo hrf.”
“I’m not keeping count.” He sprinted for the gangway and clambered up to throw open the dorsal access hatch. When he poked his head out, all he saw was Luke’s tame stormtroopers up on the ring ledge, writhing and howling in incomprehensible agony.
“Hey, bucket-heads!” Han shouted. “What’s wrong with you guys? Where’s L—uh, where’s your emperor?”
All he got in reply was more howling, so he went up another rung on the gangway and peered around. The wreckage of the Falcon’s dorsal quad turret made him wince; all that was left was a flattened mass of crumpled transparisteel under great big gleaming chunks of what looked like obsidian. He made a mental note to bill the repairs to Lando.
Another couple of steps up the gangway raised his angle of vision enough that he could see the crown of the big man’s shaved head over the wreckage and rubble. One step more showed him Luke’s limp, unresisting form hanging from the big man’s grip while that son of a Pervickian dung camel chewed on Luke’s neck—!