Han flashed her a grateful glance and charged into the thick of the fight. Leia started backing down the open ramp, still firing. Han lowered his shoulder and just dewbacked his way in, shoving and kicking and smacking a couple of guys with his blaster until he was close enough to Chewbacca that he had to duck to keep the Wookiee from flattening him with his club of unconscious Mindorese. He caught Chewie’s arm, and the battle-maddened Wookiee roared and tried to backhand Han away. Han didn’t take it personally; he just hung on and rode Chewie’s arm while he shouted, “Chewie, it’s me! Code Black, Chewie—you understand? Code Black!”
Chewbacca blinked down at him, and Han watched comprehension snap into those blue eyes. The next flick of those eyes instantly took in the situation, which had actually gotten worse as Chewbacca had battered down man after man; the more Mindorese who went down, the less there were to get in each other’s way—and now a couple of Big Brains among them had remembered the pile of weapons in the number-six hopper and were in the process of digging out blaster carbines, which meant that this situation, already ugly as a drunken monkey-lizard, was about to escalate all the way to Naked Gamorrean.
“Harrraroufgh!” Chewie said, and Han let go of his arm. The Wookiee hoisted the unconscious Mindorese over his head and hurled him into the two guys over by the hopper, then howled to Han his complete agreement with the idea of Code Blacking out of there while they still could. He whipped one vast hairy arm around Han’s waist, yanked him off the ground, and charged for the ramp as if Han were a borgleball and Chewbacca was running him in for the game-winning goal.
“Artoo!” Han shouted, still firing back past the Wookiee’s shoulder. “Where’s that flippin’ droid?”
An instant later, Han spotted the astromech, standing at the ramp-release panel Han had blasted, a manipulator arm and a data socket both shoved into the sparks and smoke sputtering out from the shattered electronics. “Hey, Stubby!” Han yelled. “Now is not the time for field repairs!”
R2-D2’s tootled reply sounded distinctly sarcastic, and when Chewie carried Han past to the ramp, the little droid retracted his tools and whirred along behind just as fast as his locomotor treads would carry him. Leia knelt at the base of the ramp, pouring fire up into the hold without bothering to aim, trusting that the ricochets would cause enough havoc to keep Mindorese heads down.
“Drop me and go get Artoo!” Han shouted, and Chewbacca complied with such unexpected alacrity that Han landed hard on that already-bruised portion of his anatomy. He scrambled to Leia’s side, adding his blasterfire to hers as Chewbacca sprang back up the ramp far enough to seize the droid. R2 squealed as Chewie lifted him; then the Wookiee spun and raced back down for the cavern through a buzzing hailstorm of energy bolts—some of which were now the thick, stretching smears of rifle blasts.
“Fall back!” Han told Leia. “Follow Chewie—I’ll hold ’em here!” Not for long, he thought, but he might be able to buy her a chance to get away.
“I’m not leaving you!” Leia said, still firing. “We go together or not at all!”
“Oh, for the love of—what happened to You’re the captain, Captain?”
“Things change,” Leia said, just before a random bolt clipped her shoulder and knocked her spinning to the cavern floor, which decided the issue, because Han leapt to her side, swept her up in his arms, and—despite her irritable insistence that “I’m fine, Han! It’s barely even a scratch!”—carried her at a dead run toward the mouth of the tunnel where Chewbacca and R2-D2 stood waiting.
“What’s the matter with you idiots?” Han cried at them. “Keep running!”
Chewie replied with a gruff “Hrrowrrh,” which was when Han realized the droid had extended his little parabolic antenna through a hatch in his dome and was now chirruping something that sounded less like his usual attempts at human communication, and more like the feedback from a high-speed electronic encryption protocol. Han skidded to a stop and looked over his shoulder.
Instead of what he expected to see—a flood of heavily armed irregulars streaming down the cargo ramp with rifles blazing—he found instead a narrowing aperture leaking smoke, artificial light, and the occasional badly aimed blaster bolt as the cargo ramp swung closed and latched itself in place.
Han blinked down at R2-D2. “Did you do that?”
The astromech rocked on his locomotors. Bee-woop!
“Not bad, Stubby—can you shut down the engines? Lock out the controls? Anything?”
Tyreepeep loo toooeee wrp! was the droid’s replay, which Han took to mean something along the lines of Maybe if you’d given me a chance to work it a little…
“Han?” Leia said. “Han, it’ll be all right. We’ll get the Falcon back.”
He didn’t hear her. He couldn’t hear her. He could only stand with her in his arms and watch.
Watch as somebody got the Falcon’s repulsorlifts engaged and lit the sublight thrusters. Watch as his ship slowly lifted from the cavern floor and rotated toward the way out. Watch as a flare from the sublights kicked his ship from the cavern.
Watch as his departing ship ripped open his chest, snatched out his heart, and took it along.
He set Leia on her feet. She stayed close against his chest and slid one arm up around his neck. “Han?”
He didn’t react. He only stood staring at the cavern’s empty mouth.
Chewbacca stepped over and draped a hand over Leia’s shoulder. “Rowowr,” he said softly. She nodded and let Han go, then followed Chewie and R2-D2 a little way off into the tunnel.
Han stood there for a long time, with an icy fist clenched inside his chest where his heart should be.
Finally, he took one deep breath and released a long, long sigh.
“Well, that could have gone better,” he said, and turned to follow his friends.
Starfighters filles space around the Remember Alderaan, streaking and looping and whirling so fast that in visible light they became mere smears of motion; even the cruiser’s sensor suite could distinguish friend from foe only belatedly, and by ratios of probability rather than certainty. The battle seemed to intensify by an order of magnitude with every light-second closer to the planet the cruiser moved.
Lando stood at the bridge’s forward viewscreens, hands folded behind him, his face entirely blank, expressionless—only the quick flicker of his eyes from starfighters to cruisers and back again betrayed the level of his concentration. Fenn Shysa had been pacing the deck behind him, faster and faster, becoming more and more agitated as starfighter after starfighter exploded, so many now that hurtling debris from their destructions had overloaded the Alderaan’s particle shields and now rattled the hull and starred cracks into the transparisteel viewports.
Finally Shysa couldn’t take it anymore. “Lando—General Calrissian—we can’t just stand here!”
“I’m standing,” Lando said. “You’re pacing.”
“I have to scramble my men. We should be out there!”
“You can join the battle if you feel that’s best; I’m the last man in the galaxy who’d presume to give orders to Lord Mandalore. But the commandos aren’t your men. Not right now, anyway. They work for me.”
“But—but—” At a loss for words, Shysa could only wave expressively at the battle outside. “We’re cut off already—they’re gonna pin us against the planet—”
Lando turned to him with, astonishingly, a broad smile on his face. “You think?”
“General!” the ComOps officer interrupted, staring into his screen. “We have visual verification—a substantial mass of asteroids inbound for the star. Coronal entry in… three minutes, sir!”
Lando nodded. “Flare activity?”
“Already begun, sir—sensor analysis indicates that we’re about twelve minutes away from a spike in intensity high enough to take down every deflector shield in the system. Then we’ll have maybe an hour, probably less, before we’re all cooked…”
“Okay, you heard the man,” Lando said generally. �
�Send out an all-ships: disengage and make for Mindor’s nightside, then launch escape pods. Tell the Rogues to take two more squadrons and cover the pods—”
“Lando, you have to commit my men! It’ll be a slaughter.”
“No, it won’t.”
“Three squadrons’ll never cover that many pods, and these marauders don’t take prisoners!”
“Doesn’t matter,” Lando said crisply. “Let ’em blow up the pods. It’ll keep them busy.”
“What?”
“All we’re launching is pods, get it? Empty pods.” Lando shook his head. “Think I’m about to set up my forces halfway around the planet from the bad guys? Not this general, my friend.”
“Then—” Fenn stared out through the forward screens, suddenly thoughtful. “Yeah, I get it: from nightside, you have the planet as a shield against the stellar flares… then we come in low-level, through the atmosphere… but if you’re planning to bring capital ships close to that volcano base of theirs, first you’ve got to take out their ground-based artillery—turbolasers, ion cannons… and especially that gravity gun. How do you figure on doing that?”
“Might be a problem.” Lando was still smiling. “You wouldn’t happen to know where I could lay my hands on, say, five or six hundred Mandalorian supercommandos, would you?”
Fenn blinked, blinked again, and then discovered that he was starting to smile, too.
Chapter Twelve
Though he was far from conscious, Luke knew something was wrong.
He felt… cold.
Unbelievably cold. He’d been cold before—a couple years earlier, on Hoth, he’d come within a shaved centimeter of freezing to death before Han had found him—but this was different. That cold had been a creeping numbness, and weakness, and a growing inability to force his hypothermic muscles to move. This cold, though, froze him without the comfort of numbness. Tiny razor-edged crystals of ice—colder than ice, so cold they burned, cold as liquid air—grew inward through his skin at every pore, becoming hairlines of freeze that crept along his nerves.
And with the cold came silence.
Physical silence, deeper than a living creature can truly experience: not just the absence of external sound, but the absence of all concept of sound. No whisper of breath, no hush of blood coursing through arteries, no faintest beat of his heart. Not even the vaguest sensation of vibration, or pressure, or friction on his skin.
But the cold and the silence went deeper than the merely physical. They were in his dreams.
These dreams were glacially slow, actionless, featureless hours of empty staring into empty space, hours becoming years that stretched into numberless millennia, as one by one the stars went out. He could do nothing, for there was nothing to do.
Except watch the stars die.
And in their place was left nothing. Not even absence. Only him.
Floating. Empty of everything. Without thought, without sensation. Forever.
Almost.
His first thought in a million years trickled into his brain over the course of decades. Sleep. This is the end of everything. Nothing left but sleep.
The second thought, by contrast, followed instantly upon the second. Wait… somebody else is thinking with my mind.
Which meant he wasn’t alone at the end of the universe.
Even in frozen dreams of eternity, the Force was strong with him. He opened himself to the Sleep Thought and drew it into the center of his being, where with the Force to guide and sustain him, he could examine the thought, turn it this way and that like an unfamiliar stone.
It had weight, this thought, and texture: like a hunk of volcanic basalt around a uranium core, it was unreasonably dense, and its surface was pebbled, as though it had once been soft and sticky and somebody had rolled it across a field of fine gravel. As he let the Force take his perception into greater and greater focus and detail, he came to understand that each of these pebbles was a person—human or near-human, every single one, bound into an aggregate matrix of frozen stone.
As the Force took him deeper, he came to understand that this stone he held was also holding him; even as he turned it in his hand, it also surrounded and enclosed him—that it was a prison for every one of these pebble-lives, and that these imprisoned lives were also imprisoning him.
He was the stone himself, he discovered: the very matrix of dark frozen stone that bound them all. He trapped them and they trapped him, and neither could let go. They were bound together by the very structure of the universe.
Frozen by the Dark.
And here was another strangeness: Since when did he think of the structure of the universe as capital-D Dark? Even if there might be some trace of truth in that bleak perception, when had he become the kind of man who would surrender to it? If the Dark wanted to drag him into eternal emptiness, it was going to have to fight him for every millimeter.
He started looking for the way out. Which was also, due to the curious paradox inherent in his Force perception, the way in.
The imaginary thought-stone in his imaginary hand was a metaphor, he understood—even as was the frozen stone he had become—but it was also real on a level deeper than nonimaginary eyes could ever see. He was the stone… and so he did not need to reach out to touch the lives represented by the pebbles. He was touching them already.
He only had to pay attention.
But each life-pebble on which he focused gave back no hint of light. No perception even of the human being it represented, only a featureless nonreflective surface like a smoothed and rounded spheroid of powdered graphite. Each one he touched gave back no hope, no purpose, no dream of escape, but instead drew these out from his frozen heart, swallowed them whole, and fed them to the Dark.
And the Dark gave up no trace of evidence that they had ever existed.
All he got from the pebbles was gentle wordless urging to let himself sleep. Struggle is futile. The Dark swallows everything in the end. All his hopes, all his fears, every heroic dream and every tragic reality. Every single distant descendant of everyone who had ever heard of him. All would be gone, leaving not even an echo to hint that they had ever existed. The only answer was sleep. Eternal sleep.
Sleep.
Luke thought, Never.
He had an intuition that was half memory, half guess, and maybe altogether a hint from the Force, because when he again turned that imaginary stone in his imaginary hand, one of those imaginary pebbles of powdered graphite had a crack in it that wasn’t imaginary at all.
And through that crack, tiny beyond tiny, nanometrically infinitesimal, so small that if it hadn’t been imaginary, Luke couldn’t have seen it even with the most advanced instruments in the galaxy, shone the very faintest conceivable glimmer…
Of light.
With the Force to guide him, he focused his perception into a similarly nanometric filament. And through that tiny crack of light within the imaginary stone, Luke found the universe.
Focusing his whole self into his Force perception with all his power and every scrap of the mental discipline that Ben and Master Yoda had pounded into him, Luke could send enough of himself along that filament of light that he could see again—dimly, distantly, through waves of bizarre distortion—and what he saw was sleeves.
Voluminous sleeves, draped together as though concealing folded hands… and beyond them, a floor of smooth stone, illuminated by cold, flickering blues, like the light cast by the screen of a holoplayer. He tried to lift his head, to get a look around, but the view didn’t change, and he realized that the eyes through which he saw were not his.
With that realization, other perceptions began to flower within his consciousness. He became aware that the floor at which his borrowed eyes were staring was connected with him somehow… that it was not ordinary stone at all, but a curious semicolloidal structure of crystal… that it was, inexplicably, somehow alive.
That when he set his mind to it, he could feel the life, like a subsonic hum can raise a tingle on the sk
in. But it wasn’t on his skin that he felt it, it was inside his head… and he felt it because he had crystals of that semicolloidal somehow-living stone growing inside his brain…
No—
Not his brain.
The crystals grew within the other brain, the one connected to the eyes he was borrowing from outside the universe. This became another subject of contemplation, like his imaginary stone, because like that imaginary stone he was both inside this borrowed brain and outside it, pushing in while looking out. And when he touched those crystals with his attention, he could hear—no, feel—the whisper of despair that had murmured to him at the end of the universe.
Sleep. Struggle is futile. All things end. Existence is an illusion. Only the Dark is real.
He could feel now that the whisper came from outside this borrowed brain, even as his own perception did, and that the crystals somehow picked up this whisper and amplified it, adding this brain’s limited Force power to its own, the same as it had done with the other hundreds of brains that Luke could now feel were all linked into this bizarre system.
There was somebody out there.
Luke thought, Blackhole.
And with that thought, he could feel the malignancy that fed this field of Dark: the ancient wheezing cripple entombed within his life-support capsule, who poured his bleak malice through a body-wide webwork of this selfsame crystal…
Just like the one growing within Luke’s own body.
And with that understanding came power: he set his will upon the web of crystal within his body and allowed the Force to give power to his desire; now he was able to clearly perceive the link between his crystals and those within this borrowed brain. Then, when he willed the head to raise, it did, and when he willed the eyes to take in the room, he saw a stone cavern, dimly lit by waves of blue energy discharge that crawled along the stone walls and ceiling like living things—the same crackling discharge Luke had seen in the Cavern of the Shadow Throne—though this energy did no harm to the people gathered here.
Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 17