spssshmmmm
The hum got louder, and took on a strange whop-whop-whop rhythm like some kind of mechanical toy, a kid’s gyrothopter or something. The Pawns stopped clawing at him and started falling limp, and Nick began to wonder if maybe he’d underestimated Skywalker’s own bloodthirstiness until he was able to push himself up to a sitting position and get a look at what Skywalker was actually doing.
Make that: what Skywalker’s lightsaber was actually doing.
It whirled through the air with no hand to guide it, spinning very much like the blades of a toy gyrothopter after all, and as it passed any Pawn it would dip and cant for a shaved second, just long enough to strike, and another Pawn would fall limp. Though they weren’t even injured.
Because the blade struck only each Pawn’s Crown.
A quick slash or two and a Crown would fall in smoking pieces, which folded each and every Pawn like a losing sabacc hand. Nick twisted to look at Skywalker.
“Shh.” Luke sat just behind him, eyes closed in a frown of concentration, right hand lifted, palm outward. He was coated head-to-toe with a black oily sheen of liquefied meltmassif. “This isn’t as easy as it looks.”
The shining emerald blade whirled through a last few revolutions; the last couple of Crowns fell to pieces, the last couple of Pawns collapsed, and the lightsaber flipped back to Luke’s hand before its blade shrank away.
Luke opened his eyes. “All right,” he said. “What do we still need?”
“Um, it’s not like we’re out of trouble right now—”
“You mean the stormtroopers outside the door?” Luke hefted his lightsaber. “I’m sure we can figure something out.”
“No, actually, I was talking about being lost somewhere inside an active volcano, and—”
“We’re not lost.”
“We’re not?”
“No.”
“Um, okay.” From past experience, Nick could assume that when a Jedi said something straight out and simple like that, he could usually be taken at his word. “The other problem is that this whole place is lined with meltmassif—remember what happened over at the Shadow Throne? Any second now, Blackhole’s gonna shock the snot out of all of us, and—”
“He won’t.”
“What makes you—”
“Nick,” Luke said, “you worry too much.”
He closed his eyes again, and the slimy black meltmassif goo began to flow across his body… but instead of dripping down, it flowed forward, thickening across Luke’s chest, then it separated itself from him altogether, pooling into a floating sphere like mercury in free fall. Thinning tendrils flowed into the sphere from Luke’s pants, and sleeves, and from the ends of his hair, as well as away from the floor around his legs, so that in only a moment, he could stand on dry, bare floor, and his clothes and face and hair were all entirely clean, and the ball of liquid meltmassif hovering in front of him was the size of his doubled fists.
“Blackhole’s ‘treatment’ has had some side effects he probably didn’t plan on,” Luke said.
“I’m guessing. Can you, like, make it into stuff and make it shock people and everything, like he does?”
Luke shook his head. “I don’t think he actually does that stuff either—it’s more like he’s controlling something that does it, if you get what I’m saying.”
“Sounds like his style; doing it himself would be too much like work.” Nick nodded at the fallen Pawns. “What about these types?”
Luke frowned around the room at them. Not one had moved. Not one had made a sound. He lifted a hand as if he were reaching for a handful of air. He took a deep breath, and his eyes drifted shut. He looked like something was hurting. His head, maybe.
Maybe his heart.
“Nick…” Luke said, barely above a whisper. “Nick, they’re dead. They’re all dead.”
Nick felt like something had stabbed him.
“They’re dead,” Luke repeated numbly. “And I killed them.”
Cronal let his consciousness slip aside from the fading sparks of his fallen Pawns—they had outlived their usefulness anyway. He let his mind slide back down into the harmonics of the crystalline web along his nerves, until once again he could touch the structure of the meltmassif that lined the entire interior of his volcanic dome, and brought his mind into resonance with the alien slave minds who controlled the rock. He could sense their baffled frustration and pain as they tried to extend themselves into the liquefied meltmassif in Skywalker’s chamber, and he could feel the countervailing pressure of Skywalker’s Force-empowered will.
The Jedi had somehow learned to manipulate meltmassif using only the Force!
This did not dismay Cronal, however; on the contrary, it instantly transformed his frustration and doubt into unalloyed delight. A wonderful talent! It meant that once Cronal took over Skywalker’s body, he’d no longer have need of the Sunset Crown.
With Skywalker’s body—and his unparalleled connection to the Force—to complement Cronal’s unparalleled knowledge of Sith alchemy and the unique properties of meltmassif, he would indeed rule the galaxy.
He could, should he choose, become the galaxy.
Every living thing would answer to his will…
All that remained was to permanently impose his will upon Skywalker, though the boy had shown an astonishing gift for defying anyone’s plans for him—even plans enforced by the incalculable power of Cronal’s Darksight. That pesky Jedi training of his!
Cronal reached out through Darksight, his anger mounting, searching for release… and found the last thing he would have expected: another presence, one very near. Very near and very powerful. And yet, he could feel, comparatively untrained.
He frowned. How had it never occurred to him that Skywalker might not be an only child…?
Luke stood frozen, unable to move, unable to think, before the litter of dead Pawns—dead men and women, innocent men and women, dead by his hand. His mind spun with endless splintering echoes of his exchange with Nick on the Shadow Throne.
They’re all innocent?
Most of them. Some of ’em are like me—it’s been a while since I was innocent of anything.
Nick knelt beside one, a middle-aged woman, and probed her neck with his fingertips for any hint of a pulse. He sighed and lowered his head. “I remember—there’s something grown into us. Our skulls. The Pawns’ skulls. An antitamper feature for the crystals and the crowns…”
“A deadman interlock,” Luke murmured.
Nick looked up, his mouth going slack. He lifted a hand to the bruise that swelled on his forehead above his right eye. “That punch…”
Luke nodded distantly. “Must have damaged the interlock, or you would have died right there on the throne.”
Nick’s eyes widened. “And if I had, how would you have gotten yourself—”
“I wouldn’t have,” Luke said. “That punch saved both our lives.”
“Then I guess we’re both lucky you’re such a nice guy.”
“Maybe we are,” Luke murmured. He looked down at the dead. “But it didn’t help them any.”
“Skywalker—Luke—this is not your fault. You didn’t bring them here. You didn’t open their skulls and stick stuff in their brains—you did everything anyone could.”
“Yeah,” Luke said. His voice came out thin and dry as moondust. “I’ll be sure and explain that to their families.”
“Blackhole killed these people. He killed them when he stuck those crystals in their heads.”
“And I pitched in and helped him do it.”
“This is a war, Luke. Innocent people get killed.”
“Maybe so,” Luke said softly. “But they’re not supposed to be killed by Jedi…”
Nick stood. “Come on, kid, snap out of it. Like an old friend of mine used to say, the difference between fighting a war and shoveling grasser poop is that in a war, even the guy in charge gets his hands dirty.”
Luke looked at him and Nick sighed. “Ah, sorry
. Another old friend of mine used to say my mouth’s stuck in hyperdrive. He was a Jedi, too.”
“You knew Old Republic Jedi?”
“Met a few. Only really knew one. Dead now, of course.”
“Of course.”
“Way I heard it, Vader killed him personally.”
Luke let his eyes close. “Vader? You’re sure?”
“Had to be. Nobody but Vader would have had a chance.”
Luke only nodded. Maybe he was getting used to revelations like that. Or maybe it was that he felt like he was still in that stone tomb, hanging in the darkness at the end of the universe… He hadn’t escaped it at all. He’d just turned it inside out.
That darkness—that Darkness—lived inside him now.
He’d clawed his way back to the dream-world of light… but look at what he’d done. All this death. All these lives wasted. It didn’t matter whose fault it was. Not at all. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Everything that lived struggled, and suffered for a brief interval, scrambling in pain and terror to stave off the inevitable tumble back down into the Dark.
And all that suffering, all that struggle… all for nothing.
These weren’t the only wasted lives. Everybody’s life was a waste.
What did it matter if you succeeded beyond your wildest hopes, or if your dreams were shattered and ground to dust? Win or lose, all your triumphs and joys, regrets and fears and disappointments, all ended as a fading echo trapped within a mound of dead meat.
Blame it on the Force.
Why should there be life at all? Why did life have to be nothing more than a thin film of pond scum drifting on an infinite dead sea? Better to have never lived at all than to exist for only a brief moment of struggle and suffering, deluded by the illusion of light.
Better to have never lived at all…
“Hey! Skywalker! You with me? Is anybody in there?”
“Yes—yes,” Luke said. He gave himself a little shake and brought up a hand to rub his eyes. “Yes, sorry. I was just… thinking, I guess.”
“Thinking? You were gone, kid. Your lights were on but there was nobody home. It was scary.”
“Yes,” Luke said. “For me, too.”
Chapter Thirteen
Night was falling across the Shadow Realm.
At the center of the system, clouds of asteroids spiraled in toward Taspan’s photosphere. The interaction of the gravity stations and Taspan’s own gravity gave them a kind of order: as they fell inward, tumbling toward the fusion-powered furnace of the star’s surface, the clouds elongated, and curved, and melded from individual clouds to an array of twisting streams like the stripes on a candy sparklemint stick.
Smaller rocks vaporized in Taspan’s corona and chromosphere; larger asteroids ignited on the way down, becoming streaks of fire whose photosphere impacts created splash rings as wide as a major planetoid and hundreds of kilometers tall, as well as central rebound spikes that actually ejected stellar material beyond the critical point where the star’s gravity and magnetic field could contain it, unleashing huge bursts of very hard radiation—which was exciting enough in itself, because it managed to knock down deflector shields throughout the system.
The only shields these bursts didn’t knock down were those of the starfighters making atmospheric attack runs on Lord Shadowspawn’s volcano base—these shields weren’t knocked down because interference from the atmosphere prevented them from being raised in the first place—and those of the Slash-Es and the other Republic cruisers huddling into the radiation-shadow cast by Mindor itself.
And night was falling.
As Mindor turned its face from Taspan, out of the blood-colored west came waves of Republic starfighters. They hurled themselves at the dome’s defenses with reckless abandon, their half-useless laser cannon battering the heavy armor of turbolaser towers. The towers, mounted on gimbals the size of spacecraft, tracked the streaking fighters, their massive guns pumping out so much plasma so fast that they superheated the nearby air into a titanic updraft, blasting a vast rolling mushroom cloud of corrosive sand and dust and smoke from the dome to the stratosphere.
Down through that cloud came wave after wave of TIEs.
There were so many that the atmosphere’s effect on their cannons was irrelevant; they could destroy whole flights of X-wings by simply being airborne obstacles—their presence over the dome forced the Republic pilots to break formation and reduce their speed to avoid midair collisions… and the slightest reduction in speed could be fatal. Turbolaser drive technology had advanced in the years since the destruction of the first Death Star; these were far faster on traverse, and included range-sensitive trajectory-projection software that automatically timed their fire to intercept any starfighter unwary enough to go in a relatively straight line for more than a second at a time.
And against an unshielded X-wing, even a glancing hit from a tower-mounted turbolaser left nothing but an expanding globe of plasma.
Still the X-wings came on, in wave after wave, pilots giving their lives to shield flights of B-wing bombers that swooped in for torpedo runs. The B-wings weren’t after the towers; they focused their fire on six heavily armored domes atop the highest curve of the volcano.
These domes were closed up tight, relying on their multiple-meters-thick ceramofused armor to absorb the shattering blasts of proton torpedoes and detonite-tipped missiles, which it did very well indeed. “We’re barely even leaving dents!” a B-wing pilot shouted over the comm.
“Shut up and keep shooting,” his squad leader ordered.
“But we can’t hurt them as long as those armor domes are closed!”
“The point is, as long as we make ’em keep those armor domes closed, they can’t hurt us!”
Inside those armored domes were the base’s planetary-defense weapons. The five smaller domes that surrounded the vast central dome contained dual-mounted ground-to-orbit ion-turbo cannons: the twin mounted barrels would fire on a precisely timed interval, ensuring that a strike from the ion cannon to disable a capital ship’s shields and electronics would be followed instantly by a disintegrating blast from the turbolaser. Those were deadly enough in themselves, but the central dome housed a weapon against which no ship of the line could defend: the gravity gun.
And once night fell across the battle, every Republic capital ship in the system—clustered in the planetary shadow, to shield them from the ejecta bursts—would be in its field of fire.
This was not their only problem.
Troubling as the stellar ejecta bursts were, they were only the result of ordinary asteroid clusters infalling through Taspan’s corona, chromosphere, and photosphere. When those asteroid clusters included one or more of the thousands of gravity stations, the effect was substantially more spectacular.
The unnaturally steep gravity gradient of the infalling projectors drew stellar tide surges—bulging mounds that swelled like blisters on the surface of the star—and the warping of the local magnetic fields triggered titanic stellar flares bigger around than entire planets, great fountains of thermonuclear flame blasting hundreds of thousands of kilometers up from the surface, racing along beneath the inward spiral of the projectors like unimaginably huge space slugs made of fire.
Before they engulfed each one and slowly subsided back to Taspan’s surface, these fountains also blasted jets of gamma radiation that swept through the system like searchlights of destruction, melting larger asteroids to slag and disintegrating the smaller ones outright. One of these jets brushed the curve of Mindor’s atmosphere, a mere glancing blow as the jet swung across the system’s plane of the ecliptic.
This glancing blow was enough to set a couple of cubic kilometers of the atmosphere on fire.
This had an effect like a slow-motion fusion blast, as the powerful thermal updraft sucked huge quantities of dust up into the firestorm, where the dust ignited in turn, becoming an expanding ringwall of flame that swept across Mindor’s shattered landscape toward the battle that raged arou
nd the volcanic dome.
Sensors at the base, as well as those mounted on the Republic capital ships, were easily able to predict the path and eventual progress of the firestorm; while it would blow itself out short of becoming a planet-wide conflagration, before doing so it would roll right over Shadowspawn’s base like a line of thunderheads whose clouds were toxic smoke and whose rain was fire.
This would be fatal for troops caught in the open, but more pertinently, it would force starfighters on both sides to withdraw or ground themselves; between the natural sensor interference of the atmosphere itself and the thick clouds of fiery smoke, any who sought to continue the fight would be flying entirely blind.
It would also, as was pointed out to Lando Calrissian by Fenn Shysa, force the domes to remain closed over the surface-to-orbit weapons, as well as temporarily overload the heat exchangers that cooled the turbolasers in the rings of towers. “And if you don’t mind me bringin’ it up, General,” Shysa had gone on, “maybe the only tactical error this Shadowspawn character has made so far is that he’s clustered all his planetary-defense weapons together, right on top of that big hill.”
Lando had nodded. “Easier to defend.”
“That they are,” Shysa had agreed. “Even if it’s not them defending ’em, you follow?”
Lando had considered this for a moment. Only a moment; he had never been slow to jump on an opponent’s weakness. “Fenn, my friend,” he’d said slowly, “have I told you today how much I admire the way you think?”
When those smoke-thunderheads rolled over the dome, fire was not their only rain. Screened by the advancing flame front, three Republic capital ships came in low and slow, feeling their way through the atmosphere. The capital ships did not fire on the domes; through the hurricane of dust, smoke, and flame within the firestorm, even the considerable power of their weapons would have taken some time to breach the armor—time they simply did not have.
Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 19