“It’s not simple,” Luke said. “I’m pretty sure nothing is simple anymore. Do you know they’re producing holothrillers about me? And not, y’know, documentaries about the Death Star assault or anything—they’re just making stuff up!”
“Yeah, I’ve seen ’em.” Han grinned as he fished a handheld holoplayer out of the dejarik console and tossed it onto the table. “Bought it a couple months ago. Gives me something to do while I’m waiting for Leia to wrap up negotiations somewhere or just, y’know, finish her hair.”
“No hair jokes, Solo,” Leia said. “I’m not kidding.”
Luke picked up the player and thumbed the controls over to the title page. Luke Skywalker and the Dragons of Tatooine. “Oh, will you look at this junk?” He shook his head disgustedly and tossed it back to Han, who snagged it neatly from the air. “That’s what I mean. It’s all—just so stupid.”
“What, there’s no dragons on Tatooine?”
“Sure,” Luke said. “Krayt dragons. And they’re dangerous enough, especially if they catch you alone—but look at that illustration! Not only have I never fought one with my lightsaber from bantha-back, I can flat-out guarantee that krayt dragons do not breathe fire!”
“Come on, take it easy, Luke.” Han hefted the reader, smiling fondly. “These’re for kids, y’know? And I gotta tell you, some of ’em are actually pretty good.”
“Especially the ones about you,” Leia muttered darkly.
Luke stared. “Are you putting me on?”
Han shrugged, flushing a little—but just a little; he was constitutionally immune to embarrassment. “You’re not the only hero of the Republic, y’know.”
“Han—”
“Ask him how much he gets paid,” Leia said.
“You get paid?”
“Hey, I’m not a Jedi.” Han’s hands came up as if he was half expecting Luke to throw something. “I, ah, worked out a licensing deal with a couple holoshow producers. After Yavin. You understand.”
“I do?”
“If he does,” Leia said, “maybe he can explain it to me.”
“It was Lando’s idea.” Han was starting to sound defensive. “All right, look, I got into this deal before I really knew what I was doing. The stuff’s pretty bad, but it’s harmless. Han Solo and the Pirates of Kessel, Han Solo in the Lair of the Space Slugs…”
“It’s not harmless.” Luke set his jaw. “Have you seen the one they call Luke Skywalker and the Jedi’s Revenge?”
Han looked dubious. “I thought Jedi don’t get into revenge.”
“They don’t—I mean, we don’t. I don’t know what I mean. They have me slaughtering my own father—to avenge the death of Palpatine! It’s just—so sick.”
“Take it easy, Luke. So the writers spice things up a little. What’s the harm? A little wham-bam just makes you look tough, you know?”
“That’s not how I want to look.”
“People need heroes—and stories like these are the way heroes become heroes.”
“I thought heroes became heroes by doing something heroic.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Yeah, I do. And that’s part of my whole problem. Everybody’s watching me. It’s like they’re trying to figure out who I’ll turn out to be. And trying to figure out a way to turn a profit on it.”
Han spread his hands. “That’s what keeps the galaxy spinning, buddy.”
“Maybe it does,” Luke said. “But I don’t have to be part of it. Maybe that’s what feels so wrong about being a general. It’s like, I don’t know, like I’m pushing myself forward. Like somehow I talked Ackbar into this so I could go on being larger than life.”
“You are larger than life, Luke. That’s what I keep trying to tell you.”
“Being a general… sending other people into places where they have to take someone’s life or get killed themselves…” Luke shook his head again. “Playing the hero when you’re in charge just gets a lot of people hurt.”
“Who’s playing?”
“Luke, this commission is a wonderful opportunity, and not just for you,” Leia put in. “Force powers aren’t the only kind of power, and there are ways of helping people that are a lot more effective than hitting something with a lightsaber. As a Jedi, you might save the occasional, well, princess in distress or some such, but as a general, you can save thousands of lives. Millions. The Defense Force needs you, Luke.”
“I can’t beat you in an argument, Leia. I’m no politician, and the ag school in Anchorhead didn’t have a debate team. But—I’m a Jedi. I’m the Jedi. Becoming a general… it just doesn’t feel right.”
“Well, y’know, I was only a kid at the time,” Han said slowly, “and working for Shrike gave me, y’know, more pressing concerns than following the news, if you get me—but I seem to recall that your friend Kenobi was a general himself, back in the Clone Wars.”
“I know. But he hardly talked about it.”
“He was always modest,” Leia said. “Obi-Wan was part of so many of the stories my fath—my, ah, adoptive father used to tell. He was a great hero of the Republic. That’s why I turned to him when my cover was blown.”
Luke shook his head. “It’s just not the way I’ve always seen myself spending my life.”
“Oh, is that all?” Han said. “C’mon, Luke—nobody ends up living their lives the way they expect.”
“No?” Luke said. “I can think of this one guy—got his own ship, resigned his commission, got the military off his back, pretty much does whatever he wants to do, mostly just flying around the galaxy with his copilot rescuing princesses and such, accountable to no one but himself—”
“Accountable to no one? Are you kidding me?” Han looked appalled. “Luke, have you ever met your sister? Luke Skywalker of Tatooine, let me introduce Princess Leia Organa of whouf—!”
“Of the Extremely Sharp Elbow,” Leia finished for him, having delivered the sharp elbow in question rather briskly to his short ribs.
“Yeah, okay, peace, huh?” Han rubbed his side, a wounded expression on his face. “All kidding aside, Luke, think about it. If you and me both had ended up living the lives we were expecting, we might still have flown at Yavin.”
“You think?”
“Sure,” Han said. “As TIE pilots. Working for Vader.”
Luke looked away.
“Sometimes, things not going according to plan is a gift,” Han said. “You gotta go with the flow, y’know? I mean, trust in the Force, right? Would the Force have brought you this chance if you weren’t supposed to take it?”
“I don’t know,” Luke admitted.
“Why don’t you ask Kenobi himself, the next time he shows up with that Force-ghost thing of his?”
“He’s not a ghost—”
“Whatever. You know what I mean.”
Luke shook his head, sighing. “He… doesn’t come around anymore. It’s been weeks since I’ve seen him. Like he’s drifting away. Too far away to make contact.”
“And maybe that means something,” Leia said. Luke gave her a sharp look, and she replied with a shrug, “I know less about being a Jedi than you do about being a politician… but don’t you think that your indecision itself signifies that you’ve been, well… leaning the wrong way? I mean, don’t you usually just sort of… know?”
“Yeah,” Luke said quietly. “Yeah, usually I do.”
A saying of Yoda’s came back to him so vividly he could almost hear the Master’s voice: If far from the Force you find yourself, trust you can that it is not the Force which moved.
“I suppose,” Luke said reluctantly, “it doesn’t have to be a career…”
A broad grin rolled halfway onto Han’s face. “You’re in?”
Luke nodded. “I guess I am.”
Han clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks, buddy! You’re the greatest!”
“Thanks for what?”
He turned his grin all the way on. “Ackbar swore if I didn’t talk you into this, he was
gonna make me do it. Han Solo and the Rapid Response Task Force just doesn’t have the right ring, you know?”
“Here is Mindor’s effective gravitic radius.” Commander Thavish, the task force’s intelligence coordinator, was the next-youngest guy in the room, and he had five years on Han, let alone Luke. He keyed his thumbstick, and the pinpoint of Mindor grew into a sphere roughly a decimeter in diameter. “Standard englobement puts our Double Sevens here.”
Three new pinpoints formed an equilateral triangle around the planet, roughly parallel to the system’s plane of the ecliptic. The fourth and fifth pinpoints appeared above and below the plane. The five Double Sevens were the strike force’s entire complement of CC-7700/E interdiction cruisers, each capable of projecting a simulated gravity well out to several hundred planetary diameters. When Thavish triggered the representations of the DS’s gravitic influence, the overlapping spheres of effect filled an area roughly five light-minutes across—about ninety million kilometers—in which hyperdrives simply would not function.
“While the E series’ weapons upgrades give the Double Sevens substantial point-defense capability, each of them will require a full squadron fighter screen, because we just don’t have adequate intel on target forces. We could find ourselves facing anything from a few dozen to several thousand of those TIE defenders; the records captured during the Spirana operation indicate that there are still over ten thousand verified-production defenders unaccounted for. Plus, of course, we can’t say for certain that the remaining loyalist territories contain no active production facilities. Not to mention that he might have interceptors or other non-FTL fighters based in-system.”
Captain Trent, commander of the Regulator, leaned closer. “And capital ships?”
“Shadowspawn’s forces have never employed capital ships.”
“Doesn’t mean he ain’t got any.”
“Yes, sir. But there are elements of the system that suggest we will be facing primarily starfighters. It’s just that there’s no way to guess how many.”
T’Chttrk chittered and clicked a question. Her D-series protocol droid, D-P4M, inclined its elegantly tungsten-coated head and murmured, “The commander respectfully requests to be informed of any good news.”
“Commander,” Thavish said, “that is the good news.” He manipulated his thumbstick again. “The bad news looks like this.”
The translucent clouds that had drifted through the simulation thickened as though they could become actually tangible. “These represent our best long-range scans of the debris field from the destruction of Taspan II. The Big Crush, as it is called, resulted from an accident at an Imperial testing facility for a new type of gravity-well projector. The planet was entirely pulverized, producing debris that ranges from pinhole micrometeors to asteroids several kilometers in diameter. This occurred only four Standard years ago; the debris has not yet settled into stable orbits. Worse, the planets were in conjunction at the time of the Big Crush, and Mindor was the inner planet of the two. So as the chunks of Taspan II spiral inward toward the star, Mindor’s own gravity has captured great masses of them into eccentric, unstable orbits around itself.”
Admiral Kalback leaned forward, chin palps twitching. “And there is no way to plot these orbits?”
“Commander, even if we could scan them all—which we can’t—no computer could reliably plot their paths; even the word orbit, I’m afraid, suggests a much more settled situation than we’ll be facing. They are constantly interacting with each other in every conceivable way, from gravitic effects to outright collision. If you’ll direct your attention to these figures—”
Each individual cloud now sported glowing numbers that drifted right along with them. The numbers slowly changed, creeping up or down; when clouds drifted together, the overlap zones produced numbers of their own—higher ones. “These numbers represent our best estimates of the material density of each major debris cloud. Each figure reflects the number of tactically significant objects per cubic kilometer. By tactically significant, we mean large enough to produce substantial damage to a fleet ship, in spite of defensive fire and particle shielding.”
Captain Patrell, the grizzled Corellian commander of the Wait a Minute, swore harshly enough that at least four of the other officers flinched. “Some of those numbers are in the hundreds!”
“Yes, sir.”
The captains exchanged grim looks. The prospect of bringing cruisers that were themselves a respectable fraction of a cubic kilometer into that kind of asteroid storm was bleak.
“Let me put this another way.” Another twist on the thumbstick produced new figures in the clouds. “These new numbers represent the estimated probability of catastrophic impact—one that results in significant degradation of combat function and crew.”
Luke let his eyes drift shut. “Significant degradation of combat function. That means people dying, doesn’t it? Ships crippled or destroyed?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then say so.”
“Sir?”
“That’s an order, Thavish. No euphemisms.” He reflected sadly that five years ago, he hadn’t known, really, what people dying meant—his first real taste of that had been the charred corpses of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, leaking smoke up into the Tatooine twilight…
He’d learned a lot since then. Not all of it was about being a Jedi.
“Yes, sir. Um, is this a Jedi thing, sir?”
“No,” Luke said. “It’s a General Skywalker thing. When you talk about someone as a set of degradable capabilities instead of a person, it’s too easy to think about him that way, too.”
“Yes, sir.” Thavish turned back to the holoimage. “We used the Double Sevens as our baseline, as they’re roughly median size for the task force. A DS at this point, for example, will have a one point eight five percentage chance of a catastrophic impact—”
“That’s less than one in fifty!” Captain Patrell shook his head, chuckling. “For a minute, you had me scared!”
Luke said, eyes still closed, “What’s the time frame?”
“Sir?”
“One point eight five percent in how long?”
“Oh, yes. That percentage chance is on, well, on insertion. That is, uh, instantly.”
Captain Patrell stopped chuckling.
Luke nodded. “And after that?”
“Well—the statistical modeling is complex. It’s a sliding scale, more or less; assuming you’re not instantly, uh, destroyed, we have to calculate the—”
“Let’s say, an hour.”
When the numbers came up, the expressions got even more grim. After one hour, the probability was running over twenty percent. “So, basically,” Luke murmured, “you’re telling us that one hour into this operation, we’ll have lost two ships. If the enemy does nothing at all.”
“Well, the math is a bit more complicated than—”
“Basically.”
Thavish nodded apologetically. “Basically. Yes.”
“It’s a graveyard,” Patrell said. “It’s where capital ships go to die.”
“The Taspan system,” Thavish said, “is an almost perfect starfighter base. In a starfighter, you’re not only a smaller target for the asteroids, but you’re maneuverable enough to dodge them. But to hold Shadowspawn there, we need the interdictors. Otherwise his entire force can simply vanish into hyperspace. But our interdictors are so vulnerable we can’t afford to bring them in.”
“Lord Shadowspawn,” Luke murmured. “Not a stupid man. He knew what he was doing when he picked Mindor.”
He looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath, wishing mightily that he could steal an hour or two to rest and meditate and try to summon some of that Jedi insight he was supposed to have, but there just wasn’t time. If only Ben—or Master Yoda, or even his father—would phase in right now with a word of wisdom… but whatever parts of them remained active in the Force apparently had business elsewhere. Just as they’d had for months now.
No i
nsight from the Force. All he had for insight was his own.
It had better be enough.
He sighed. “Well, we can’t wait them out, and we can’t whittle them down. We can’t even fight a pitched battle. That only leaves one option.”
Admiral Kalback nodded. “Overwhelming force. Shock and awe,” he said.
Commander Thavish tilted his head consideringly. “It might actually save lives, on balance. Ours, at least. Maybe even theirs. If we never give them a chance to think they can fight their way out, they might just surrender.”
“Saving lives is swell, if we can. Winning is more important,” Luke said. “If we let Shadowspawn’s forces escape, they could scatter. Go on the run—break up into small, independent units. We know better than anyone in the galaxy how much damage that kind of decentralized guerrilla insurgency can do—it’s how we brought down the Empire. This might be our last chance to engage Shadowspawn force-on-force.”
Luke looked around the table, meeting each commander’s eyes in turn. “Every one of you needs to understand this. We hold nothing back except a small reserve force, to cover our extraction if things go bad. It’s full commitment. All or nothing.”
One by one, the commanders answered his stare with grim acknowledgment.
“All right,” Luke said. “I want tactical readiness reports within the hour. We move in three.”
Chapter Three
Aeona Cantor lay flat on the jagged hilltop, squinting through electrobinoculars that had gone foggy, their front lenses scored by too much exposure to the clouds of windblown grit that passed for atmosphere here on Mindor. The hunks of broken lava around her masked her silhouette, and she didn’t have to worry about thermal imaging, because the rock around her was warmed by the noontime heat, and the jigsaw hunks of lava glued to her survival suit made perfect camouflage against visible-light sensors. All of which were necessary factors in her position, which was less than ten kilometers from a huge smoking volcanic dome.
The fact that this volcanic dome was huge and smoking was of no interest to her at all; she cared only about the double ring of planetary-defense turbolaser towers that surrounded it, and the gnat clouds of TIE fighters that streamed in and out of every visible cavern mouth on the mountainside.
Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 3