The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  Han cleared the hatch in a single leap, and by the time his feet touched the hull his blaster was in his hand. “Hey, monkey-breath! Chew on this!”

  But he couldn’t just fire from the hip; Luke was in the way and Han knew stun blasts were useless against the Vastor body. In the fraction of a second that it took him to bring the DL-44 up to eye level to align the sights, the big man’s right hand came free of Luke’s shoulder with a weird ripping sound. Luke’s shoulder, where that hand had been, showed black and glistening like the handful of crystal hairs back in the Melter crypt, and Vastor’s hand was full of the same—and while Han was trying to make sense of that, some invisible force snatched his blaster away.

  I have got to learn to hang on to that thing with both hands! Han bounded forward, swept up a jagged hunk of obsidian the size of his doubled fists, and charged, cranking the black glass rock back over his shoulder as if he was going to hurl it overhand—but he hurled himself instead, leaping up onto the rubble, then down again in a headlong dive with the chunk raised high until a scarlet blaster bolt slashed past his face and blew the hunk of obsidian right out of his hand.

  He almost went face-first into the hull armor but managed to turn his crash into a clumsy somersault that left him flat on his back, dazed and gasping and staring up at the business end of his blaster. Which was in Luke’s hand.

  Luke said, “Didn’t I tell you to go?”

  While Han was still blankly mumbling, “Yow. Nice shooting. I think,” the enormous Vastor-thing moaned like someone in terrible pain or fear or both. One huge hand slammed against Luke’s chest, and for all Han could tell, it was like Vastor was the one in trouble and trying desperately to escape. An instant later, Vastor ripped his mouth free of Luke’s neck—and his mouth was full of those black crystal hairs. The wound in Luke’s neck wasn’t bleeding, it was sprouting a thatch of that same blackly glistening fur that was writhing and twisting and growing like it was alive. Vastor gasped like a drowning man and yanked his other hand off Luke’s arm, and before Han could manage even a faint guess as to what was actually going on, Vastor whirled, took four or five running steps for momentum, and made a great big flying leap right off the ship.

  Han had no idea if Vastor had fallen to his death, or if he’d caught a grip on the wall, or had maybe even started flapping his arms and flew into orbit. He could only stare up at his young friend and murmur plaintively, “Luke, what the hell?”

  “You would have killed him,” Luke said distantly.

  “Oh, you think? We kill bad guys. It’s what we do.”

  “I don’t,” Luke said. “Not if I can help it. Not anymore.” He looked down at Han with a faint start, as though he’d been lost in a daydream and only now realized where they both were. Wearing a faintly bemused half smile, he flipped the DL-44 end-for-end and offered its grip to Han. “Here. You’ll need this.”

  “For what?” Han asked, just as he was starting to realize that the shaft around the Falcon had suddenly gone quiet.

  The stormtroopers had stopped screaming.

  “Uh-oh.”

  He snatched his pistol out of Luke’s hand and popped to his feet as blasters opened up on all sides to rain plasma upon them in a roaring flood. Luke’s lightsaber flared to life and lashed out in invisibly fast arcs that sent bolts out and away in a fan, blasting into the rock of the shaft walls. Choking red-black smoke billowed out from the points of impact, shrouding them in gloom so dense that the Falcon’s exterior floodlights only gave off a yellow-brown glow.

  “Stick close.” Luke’s voice was tight with concentration. “I’m not used to having to cover somebody else.”

  “Don’t have to tell me twice.” Han squeezed himself into a substantially less-than-Han-sized space at Luke’s back and had barely time to wish that he knew a Jedi who was just a little taller before the Falcon bucked as if it had been kicked. The ship bounced off the shaft wall hard enough that Han had to grab Luke’s shoulder to stay upright. “Chewie, dammit!”

  “Not his fault,” Luke said tightly, still carving smoke with his blade to catch stray blaster bolts. “The ship didn’t move. The shaft did. The mountain’s breaking up.”

  “Oh, great! Any more good news?”

  “Yes,” Luke said. “We’re being boarded.”

  Dark shapes hurtled down at them through the gloom—stormtroopers jumping off the ring ledge. Han snarled something wordless that expressed vividly how he felt about having Imperial boots touch his ship and slipped his blaster over Luke’s shoulder, snapping off a pair of double taps that caught two troopers while they were still in the air. The bursts blew them backward far enough that they fell short and tumbled into the shaft below, but dozens made it onto the hull. There were plenty more where they’d come from, and Han had a strong feeling that a stand-up fight against a hundred-some stormtroopers was a losing proposition under the best of circumstances. Which these circumstances weren’t.

  “Make for the hatch!” Han fired twice more, dropping one dark silhouette and knocking another spinning off the rim of the hull, while Luke fanned away a flood of return fire. “Let’s see how these sons of monkey-lizards like open space and hard vacuum!”

  “You first,” Luke said.

  “That’s another thing you won’t have to tell me twice.” Red-glowing spheres sailed in through the smoke: thermal detonators. Some bounced away, but four or five maglocked themselves to the hull. “Uh, Luke?”

  “I’ve got them.” With his left hand, Luke swung his lightsaber in a dazzling flourish to spray blaster bolts randomly through the smoke, while his right hand stretched out toward the dets. All of them suddenly jerked themselves loose and flipped over the edge of the ship. Multiple detonations bounced the ship off the wall again. “Go, Han! Go now!”

  Han took three steps, then threw himself into a flat dive that became a belly flop and sent him skidding and scraping over the lip of the hatch. He pulled himself in with his free hand and pivoted around his grip to land on his feet on the deck below. “I’m in! Luke, come on!”

  More dets went off and lit the smoke with bloody flame, and there came no sign that Luke had any intention of following him. Han scrambled back up the gangway. “Luke, don’t be an idiot!”

  “I’m going after Vastor.” Luke leaned into the gale of blasterfire as he worked his way toward the ship’s edge. “Go. Save Leia! Don’t wait for me.”

  “We’re not leaving without you! And if you’re going after that huge crazy thunderbucker, I’m coming with you! You’ll need me!”

  “Leia needs you. Stopping the bad guy is my job. Your job is to save the Princess.”

  “And since when do I take your orders?”

  Luke threw him a glance. For one brief instant his face lit up with one of those old sunny farmboy grins Han hadn’t seen since Hoth. “Watch your fingers.”

  “What?”

  The hatch slammed down on Han hard enough to knock him down the gangway. He landed hard, rubbing his ringing head. “Luke!”

  He hauled himself back up the gangway, but the hatch controls were dark, and the manual dogs were frozen. He snarled and pounded at them with the butt of his blaster, but then it occurred to him that the hull above was crowded with old-line Imperial troopers, the kind who specialized in cracking ships, and any of them who weren’t busy trying to kill Luke would be busy trying to peel the hull so they could flood inside and kill Han and Chewie.

  And Leia.

  “Hope you know what you’re doing, kid,” Han muttered. It was as close to a good-bye as he could let himself say.

  He jammed his blaster back into its holster and pelted headlong for the cockpit. “Chewie! Change of plan!” He skidded into the accessway. “The stun field, Chewie! Charge ’em up!”

  “Growf! Heroo geeorrough?”

  “He’s not coming.” Han vaulted into his seat. He hit the antipersonnel trigger himself and was treated to the gratifying sight of a couple of stormtroopers falling past the cockpit’s viewports with blue ener
gy still crackling over their black armor. Maybe on some other day he would have stayed and fought it out, but Leia, strapped into Chewbacca’s copilot chair, writhed and moaned and twisted Han’s heart.

  “Luke’s doing his job. We have to do ours,” he said.

  He heeled the ship over, pointed her mandibles straight down at the shaft’s bottom, and kicked in every erg of energy her damaged thrusters could produce. The ship streaked toward a wall of solid rock. Han lit up the quad in his one remaining turret and held down the trigger; the stream of laser bolts chewed into the rock but didn’t blast it away.

  “Strap in,” he said through his teeth. He tightened his grip on the control yoke. “This ride’s gonna start with a bump.”

  The Taspan system exploded into a hurricane of death.

  None of the Republic’s warriors could see the whole picture, but what each of them saw was horrifying enough.

  Lando Calrissian, on the bridge of the Remember Alderaan, watched over the shoulder of the NavOps officer as his sensor readout showed gravity wells sprouting and spreading throughout local space like Turranian flesh fungus on a three-day-old corpse, and all he could say was “No, no, no, this can’t be happening!”

  Wedge Antilles and the pilots of Rogue Squadron stared in frozen horror as thousands of TIE interceptors streamed out of the asteroid fields, hurtling toward the Republic ships at maximum thrust. As each one slipped from the shadows of the asteroids into the full harsh glare of Taspan’s stellar flares, the fierce radiation turned their ships into brilliant stars plunging toward destruction even as the pilots inside them were being roasted alive. They came on without maneuver, without tactics or even formation; the lead ships vanished in silent fireballs as Republic starfighters and the guns of the capital ships laced space with annihilating energy, but the TIEs behind them just came on and on, flying through the wreckage of their comrades, throwing themselves on unswerving suicide runs into the Republic ships clustered in Mindor’s shadow.

  Wait a Minute was the closest to the leading edge of the swarm. Its point-defense guns destroyed dozens of incoming TIEs, but finally one slipped through; after the first impact took out two of his turrets, Captain Patrell ordered his ship into rolling fire, but another TIE hit only meters away from the first, and two more hit after that.

  The ship broke up and finally exploded, and the storm of TIEs just kept coming.

  They streaked straight through the wreckage field and curved toward the next-closest ship, and by that time Wedge and the Rogues and all the remaining Republic starfighters had thrown themselves into the suiciders’ path and lit up space with the fireballs from hundreds of exploding TIEs. The Imperials didn’t even bother fighting back; Wedge didn’t need his tactical navicomputer to calculate the chance that any Republic ship could survive this storm.

  There wasn’t one.

  In the crowded hold of Lancer, the screaming of the stormtroopers had raised hairs on the back of Fenn Shysa’s neck. He didn’t have any idea what was going on, but he understood all too well the fundamental rules of combat, one of which was When you don’t know what’s happening, what’s happening is always bad.

  As the troopers had fallen into seizures, Fenn had jumped atop a cargo container and roared in Mandalorian, “Secure their weapons! Now!,” which was the main reason the slaughter that followed wasn’t much, much worse—but it was still bad enough.

  The mercenaries had leapt to their task like the disciplined warriors they were, deploying in staggered array to keep clear lines of fire open so they could cover each other and, if necessary, shoot the convulsing stormtroopers. Unfortunately, no amount of training or discipline could allow a small cadre of soldiers to instantly control several thousand panicked civilians.

  Some of those civilians had enough military experience to understand that the most useful thing they could do was get themselves out of the way; they dived to the deck and pulled down other civilians around them, but still there were more than a thousand who stood frozen, screamed, or tried to run.

  Those were the first to die.

  The seizures stopped as suddenly as they had begun; the stormtroopers who had not yet been disarmed leapt to their feet or simply rolled into firing position and opened up on the crowd; the mercenaries returned fire, and within a second or two the entire hold was filled with a haze of blasterfire and the stench of burning flesh. The disarmed troopers still had the fist blades that were integral to the gauntlets of their armor, and they fell upon the nearby civilians like Nomarian thunder sharks in a feeding frenzy; they cut and chopped and hacked at their victims, while their fellows took fire from the mercenaries and responded with grenades lobbed at random into the screaming mob.

  “Down blasters!” Fenn roared; the mercenaries were inflicting almost as many civilian casualties as were the maddened troopers. “Down blasters and up blades!”

  And because he was the sort of commander who believed in leading by example, he leapt from the cargo container to land hard on the back of a black-armored trooper and punched his own fist blade through the back of the trooper’s neck. Before that trooper even knew he was dead, Fenn had rolled to his feet and stabbed the next one in the kidney, and as that trooper whirled to face him, the Protector commandant jammed his blade in deep under the man’s chin. He let the dead man fall and looked around for his next target.

  He had plenty to choose from; he didn’t anticipate running short in the foreseeable future—a future that would be, in Fenn’s experienced judgment, exactly as long as the rest of his life.

  The Shadow Base was now breaking up in earnest; one of its damaged gravity drives had already ripped free, spinning away and taking with it a kilometer or so of the base’s rock. The remaining two gravity drives swung through opposing cycles of thrust-angle that were ripping what was left of the base in half. On the base’s surface, the Republic marines found that their docile prisoners were docile no longer. With no regard for their own lives, or for anyone else’s, they mobbed their captors, the troopers in front absorbing fire until the ones that followed could swarm over the dead and dying.

  There was, in the whole of the Taspan system, only one faint reason for any hope at all.

  Deep within the remains of the base, in the heart of the Election Center itself, Kar Vastor could find nowhere else to run.

  Kar crouched, his bare back against an icy wall, in a stone chamber filled with the dead. Corpses in long robes littered the floor, and the room stank of corruption; the only light came from blue spark-chains that crackled across the ceiling. His heart hammered against his ribs, and his breath rasped in his throat. His teeth were bared in an involuntary snarl, and his fingers scrabbled against the stone at his back as if he could somehow dig his way through. All from fear of the small blond man.

  The same small blond man who now stood on the far side of the piles of dead bodies, inoffensive and mild, his expression friendly, his hands, empty of weapons, spread wide in invitation.

  Kar did not know where this place might be, or how he had come to be here; he had no memory of having been anywhere like this maze of stone peopled only by dead men. He knew only that he had never felt such terror.

  Not as a child, lost and alone in the lethal jungles of his homeworld; not in the dock of the Galactic Court on Coruscant; not even in the infinite deadly dark of Kessel’s spice mines. He had come back to himself in the midst of battle, blind with rage, surrounded by armed men on a starship’s hull. He remembered seizing this little man in his unbreakable grip; he remembered sinking his needle teeth into the little man’s throat, biting down like a vine cat strangling an akk wolf.

  And he remembered what the little man had done to him.

  The hands that scrabbled against the wall at his back still sprouted the black crystal hairs. His mouth was full of these crystal hairs, stiff and sharp as needles; when he worked his jaw, they cut and slashed at his palate and punctured his gums. And he could feel them inside him, throughout his body, an infection of dead stone wi
thin his living flesh …

  He snarled wordless animal sounds. What are you?

  The small blond man started toward him. “I’m not your enemy, Kar.”

  Stay back!

  “I can’t. Too many lives depend on me.”

  I’ll kill you! Kar gathered himself to spring. I will rip your head from your body. I will feast upon your guts!

  “It’s all right to be afraid, Kar. This is a frightening place. Things have been done to you here that should never be done to anyone.”

  It’s so … dead. Something broke inside him then; his rage and terror fled, and he sagged to his knees. Nothing but stone and corpses. Everything dead. Dead within. Dead without. Dead forever.

  “Not everything.” Though the small blond man had to step over corpses to reach Kar’s side, his expression of sympathy and compassion never flickered. “You’re alive, Kar. I’m alive.”

  That means nothing. Kar’s eyes burned as if he’d dipped his face in sand. We mean nothing.

  “We’re the only meaning there is.” The small blond man extended a hand. “Trust me or kill me, Kar. In the end, it’ll come out the same. I will not harm you.”

  What are you? His snarl had gone plaintive. What do you want from me?

  “I’m a Jedi. My name is Luke Skywalker,” the small blond man said. “And I want you to take my hand.”

  Deep in hyperspace, Cronal reached up for the Shadow Crown. His life-support chamber was buried within an asteroid of meltmassif; with the Shadow Crown to focus and amplify his control, he could part the stone that shrouded his chamber’s viewports and so enjoy the infinite nothing of hyperspace.

  He loved gazing into hyperspace, the nothing outside the universe. The place beyond even the concept of place … Ordinary mortals sometimes went mad, succumbing to the delirium of hyper-rapture, from gazing too long into the emptiness. Cronal found it soothing: a glimpse into the oblivion beyond the end of all things.