But—
The Melters were at the core of this. Everything came back to them somehow. Meltmassif was their body, or bodies, or the medium in which they lived; meltmassif was the active ingredient in the Pawn Crowns. It was the control crystals and the deadly interlock inside each Pawn’s brain. It was the underlying structure of Blackhole’s entire base. It was the shadow web that Blackhole had used to infect Luke with despair.
It was what he would use to steal Leia’s body.
It was dark where they were. Not just dark, but Dark.
And he was afraid.
Afraid that the Dark really was the truth. The only real truth. That everything else everyone pretended was important was only a deception, a distraction, a game to keep your mind off the eternal oblivion to come. He had spent aeons in the Dark and he knew its awful power.
Everything dies, it would whisper forever in his heart. Even stars burn out.
But if his nerve failed him now, he’d be leaving Leia in that Dark. Alone. Forever. The Dark would swallow her as if she’d never existed. What chance would she have to escape? She wasn’t even a Jedi. How would she find light?
Because that’s what Jedi do, isn’t it? Luke thought. That’s what we’re for.
We’re the ones who bring the light.
So he gathered his courage and focused his mind to open a channel into the Force, because if he was going to dive into the absolute negation of light, he’d better bring along some of his own.
He allowed his consciousness to touch the event horizon of the shadow web’s black hole, and let himself slip across the threshold and fall forever into the Dark.
Nick kept grimacing as he shed the Shadowspawn robe and tried to stuff his aching body into a spare flight suit. Aeona watched him, wincing in sympathy at each grimace. “Hey, are you hurt?”
“Huh?”
“You look like you’re in pain. Do you need bacta?”
“Depends,” Nick said. “Can bacta cure a bad case of Too Old for This Crud?”
“Awww.” She slipped an arm around his shoulders. “You’re just a kid.”
“Yeah. A kid who’s spent a few days getting clubbed by a pack of drunken Gamorreans.”
She nodded fractionally toward where Skywalker knelt, his left hand half-buried in the stone. “When are you going to tell him?” she said softly.
“Tell him what?”
“About Kar,” she said. “You heard what Solo said about the man who took Princess Kissy-Face. It was Kar. It had to be.”
Nick frowned. “It wasn’t Kar. It was Blackhole.”
“Using Kar’s body.”
Nick looked away. “Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t put even a Jedi up against Kar.”
“Me, neither,” Nick said. “If I had a choice.”
“So?”
“So I’m trying to figure my play,” he said. “Telling the truth might be the wrong move here. Skywalker—he’s not like his dad. Kindhearted, you know? If I let him know Kar’s another one of Blackhole’s victims, he might hold back. Going in soft against Kar will just get him killed.”
“Again: So? Is he one of our favorite people?”
Nick looked her in the eye. “He’s saved both our lives two or three times already, and we haven’t known him three hours. You think the galaxy will be a better place without him in it?”
Aeona shook her head, just a bit, then nodded over at the kneeling young Jedi. “Okay, sure. He’s a great guy. But Kar’s your family. He’s the closest thing to family you’ve got left.”
“Yeah. But Kar is—well, you know him. He’s not exactly a good guy.”
“Neither are you.”
Nick nodded. “And if I could get Anakin Skywalker’s children out of here alive? Even one of them? That’s worth Kar’s life. Mine, too.”
“Not to me it isn’t. And I bet not to little Jedi Pretty-Boy, either.”
“That’s why I’m not leaving it up to him.”
“Oh, sure, you’re doing him a big favor: making him kill an innocent man.”
“Kar? Innocent? You’re kidding, right?”
“If Skywalker was gonna kill him for Haruun Kal, or Kessel, or Nar Shadaa, I could see it. I wouldn’t lift a finger to save him. But Kar’s not the villain here. He’s a victim.”
“That doesn’t matter to me.”
“If you say so.” Aeona gave him a skeptical look. “But any stakes you care to wager, three to one says it’ll matter to Skywalker.”
His senses were useless here in the Dark.
Here was no sight, no sound, no touch, no awareness of his body. He had only an inchoate awareness of being part of some kind of indefinable field of energy—or perhaps he was the indefinable field of energy. The only perception he could summon beyond simple awareness of his own existence was of certain modulations in this energy field: unreceivable signals, untouchable textures, unseeable colors. Irretrievably alien. Cold and ancient lives that had never experienced the beat of a heart, the touch of a hand, the taste of air. Impossibly distant, unreachable, born of vanished stars.
Stars, he thought. Yes. That’s it: stars. That’s where they come from. That’s where we meet. Because that’s what I am, too.
Everything in the universe is born of dying stars. Every element is created in the fusion furnace of stellar cores. Every atom that exists was once part of some long-vanished star—and that star was part of others before it, an unbroken chain of ancestry back to the single cosmic fireball that had been the birth of the universe.
It is the death of stars that gives the universe life.
With the idea of stars on which to hang his imagination, he could bring his situation into a kind of focus. Instead of a formless field of barely perceptible energy, he visualized himself as part of a stellar cluster, vast and dim; those alien modulations of energy became distant stars.
Though every true star is functionally the same—a fusion furnace in space—each is also an individual. One may be larger, another hotter; one may be nearing the end of its life cycle, collapsing in upon itself or expanding to destruction, while another might be freshly forming by aggregating the dust and gases of ancient supernovae. In Luke’s imagination, he could read their individual spectra the way he might recognize a human face: they looked tired, and old, and far apart, burning themselves out in the endless Dark.
But he, too, was a star, and the light that shone from him was the Force.
Each and every distant star on which he fixed his attention, however dim it was, instantly brightened as his light fed its own. They drew near, attracted by his energy, captured by his gravitational field, growing ever brighter as they approached, burning hotter, giving off bursts of exotic particles like gusts of delighted laughter. They fell into orbit around him, becoming a new system of infinite complexity wheeling through the Dark in joyous dance.
Here we are, in the Dark, he thought. And it’s not empty. It’s not meaningless. Not with us all here.
It’s beautiful.
And each one he had touched with the Force remained linked to him by pulsing threads of light as they basked gratefully in its power; they had been trapped in this freezing Dark for so long, their only light coming from the burning away of themselves and their kin, forever fading until one by one they would wink from existence…
With that, Luke discovered that he knew them now.
Not as though they had told him about themselves; not as though there was any communication at all. Luke didn’t need to be told. He was part of them now, joined to them by the Force. He knew their lives as if they were his own, because in the light of the Force he was those lives, and they were him.
He knew them as they knew themselves: a corporate entity that was also an array of individuals, nodes of consciousness in a larger network of mind. They had—been born? been created? altered? evolved?—first become aware of themselves (themself?) as alive on Mindor’s rocky, airless sister planet, which Luke knew only as Taspan II; they had no name for the pla
net that Luke could comprehend. There they had lived for untold millennia, basking in Taspan’s unfiltered glare, in fear of nothing save the changes that could be wrought in the meltmassif that was their home by radiation from Taspan’s occasional starspots and stellar storms.
They did not have any comprehension of the cause of the Big Crush; the Imperial weapons research facility on Taspan II had been entirely outside their concern. In those days, they hadn’t even known what humans were; they’d never had experience of noncrystal-based life-forms. The Big Crush itself had been no disaster for them; on the contrary, the planet’s destruction had simply scattered its crust into a vast cloud, with orders of magnitude more surface area to absorb the energy of the star. For the Melters, the Big Crush had been an all-too-brief Golden Age; their culture/mind had blossomed throughout the system, celebrating their accession to Paradise.
For these particular Melters, the Golden Age of Paradise had come to an abrupt and catastrophic end, as the chunks of their shattered home planet had drifted across the orbit of Mindor. Captured by its gravity, they had fallen to its surface in each and every rock storm, and soon found that their new home was less a home than a prison. An oubliette.
A cosmic extermination camp.
Many, many individual Melters had been lost as their rocks had burned away in the atmosphere, and the radiation-absorbing qualities of the vaporized meltmassif screened the survivors from Taspan’s life-giving rays. The survivors were slowly dying of energy asphyxiation.
They were drowning in the Dark.
Each rockfall brought new Melters into Mindor’s lethal gloom, and every meteor that burned away deepened the shadow that was killing them.
That shadow also cut them off from the rest of the Melter community out among the asteroids; they simply did not have the power to drive a signal very far into the planet’s atmosphere. All they could do was wait, struggling to survive, and try to comfort the new victims falling into this planetary prison every day.
Comfort was what the Melters had originally sought from humans, as well; the human nervous system produced a tiny trickle of energy in the general wavelength of the Meltermind, which drew Melters to humans the way a glow rod attracted cave moths.
Cave moths, Luke thought. Perhaps that was what had happened to him at the cave… something in the meltmassif had been stealing light from inside him…
When these organic life-forms, these tiny flickering candle flames of warmth and light in the permanent midnight that was Mindor, had started shooting Melters with stun blasts that randomized the microcrystalline structure of meltmassif, the Melters had begun sequestering them in self-defense. There had never been malice in their attacks at all; they didn’t even understand that their captives were dying—they were unclear on the whole concept of organic death. It wasn’t murder, or war, or even violence, because they really didn’t comprehend any of those concepts, either. Their campaign against humanity had been, to them, merely pest control.
As all this information filtered through his consciousness, Luke at last became aware that the stellar cluster of which he was the center was itself moving, rolling through the Dark as though in orbit around some vastly more massive gravity source, something so huge and dark that it could be seen only by its effect on the stars of the Melters in his cluster. One by one they were peeled from his cluster, stripped away to spiral into decaying orbits around the inescapable void until one by one they flared with a last brief burst of light as they slipped over some invisible event horizon and vanished forever.
An event horizon of the Dark, consuming the last of the light in his universe…
Oh, he thought. I get it. It’s a black hole.
Some kind of metaphor for how Blackhole—how appropriate that old code name seemed now—was controlling the Melters, he figured; Blackhole must be luring them down somehow, cutting them off from each other so their only source of light was what he chose to feed them…
Even thinking about it seemed to increase the imaginary black hole’s gravity gradient; he found himself drifting closer and closer to the event horizon, gathering speed as his spiral orbit tightened, more and more of the stars around him falling away, some to vanish into the black hole’s insatiable maw, others breaking free into higher orbits until he was entirely alone, no star left between him and the black hole…
Except one.
One star like none of the others still swung through an orbit lower than his: a blue-white supergiant, far larger, far brighter than any his imagination had so far produced. This one did not feed upon his Force light, but shone with its own, as brilliant and powerful as his. It fell in a tightening tide-locked gyre down the black hole’s gravity well, and as it fell the relentless pull of the void was stripping a huge jet of energy and mass from it, a fountain of star-stuff ripped from its heart and sucked down across the event horizon to vanish forever in dark beyond the Dark.
And he knew this star was Leia.
He reached out to her, but there was nothing to grasp, nor any hand to grasp it; he’d had some crazy half-formed idea to grab her and slingshot around the black hole and out again, because he’d half forgotten that this was only a vision after all, only a metaphor, and if he tried to stretch it into reality it would shatter. So instead he brought his light to bear, focusing a beam of the Force upon his sister star.
Leia, hang on, he tried to send. Don’t give in to the Dark. I’m coming for you. Hang on.
He felt no response, only overwhelming sadness and crushing despair and that empty, lost meaninglessness at the end of the universe, and he couldn’t even tell if this came from her or from himself. He tried to focus the Force on her, to make his beam of light a conduit for strength that might save her, even as the tiny crack of light he’d found in one imaginary pebble had saved him—but somehow his light could not add to hers. He burned a different color, but no more brightly.
He remembered too well that terrible void, the endless lack that was deeper than any darkness. If only there were some way he could show her that all the light she’d ever need shone from her own self… but that was only a metaphor.
Wasn’t it?
What Ben and Yoda had called the dark side wasn’t actually dark; it had nothing at all to do with the visual spectrum. The phrase dark side of the Force was just an expression. An evocative shorthand to express a broad range of negative characteristics.
A metaphor.
They could have called it the evil side, or the death-and-destruction side, or the enslaving-the-whole-galaxy side. But they didn’t.
They called it the dark side. But they’d never seen dark like this. Or had they?
Maybe they had been here, at the end of all things—or at least glimpsed it. Maybe they had seen the truth of the Dark. Maybe that’s why they never talked about a “light side.” Because there wasn’t one.
But, Luke thought, gazing upon the brilliant blaze that was his sister, just because there’s no “light side” doesn’t mean there’s no light.
He had thought he was bringing light with him into the darkness, by holding on to the Force. Now he saw that the Force’s light didn’t shine on him. It shone through him.
He was the light in the darkness.
He saw it now, and it made sense to him at last. That same light shone through Leia, and as soon as he understood that, he began to sense other lights, pinprick stars far out in the dark. Some of them he recognized: Han, and Lando… Wedge and Tycho, Hobbie and Wes and the rest of the Rogues… Nick, and Aeona Cantor, Lieutenant Tubrimi and Captain Tirossk and so many, many others, sailors and marines, even the impossibly distant spray of vanishingly faint stars that must have been the stormtroopers, for even they were lights in the darkness. All of them were stars.
And every star, every life, was a thing of beauty.
And Leia couldn’t see them. She couldn’t even look their way, not anymore. Her star was tide-locked to the black hole—its gravity would not allow her to turn her face away. He couldn’t even get
her attention.
And the black hole was aware of him now; the abyss he’d stared into was now staring into him. He felt its emptiness that nothing could fill, its bleak hunger that could never be satisfied. In his mind, it swelled toward him like jaws opening to swallow the universe, capturing every scrap of light and hope and love that Luke could channel from the Force. The longer he stared, the more he lost, and nothing he could do would help Leia at all.
Once that maw closed around her, she would be lost to the Dark forever.
All right, he thought. I guess I’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.
He opened his eyes. Han was crouched at his side, his face dark with fear. “Hey, buddy—you all right?”
Luke said, “No.”
Han’s mouth drew into a flat line. “And Leia?”
“She’s alive.”
“And?”
Luke let the shadow in his heart show in his eyes. That was all the answer Han needed. “Okay, then,” he said with a grim nod. “What now?”
Luke stood. “Nick,” he said.
Near one of the Falcon’s landing skids, Nick gave a guilty start. “Uh, yeah?”
“Who is Kar, and what is it you don’t want me to know about him?”
Nick’s jaw dropped. “You—how did you—I mean, what?”
Luke’s expression never flickered. He waited.
“Oh.” Nick lifted a hand to the band of scar around his temples. “I get it,” he sighed. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything you can tell me in five minutes or less,” Luke said, “because that’s about all the time we have to win this fight.”
Witin a second after Cronal had given the order to engage, the stormtrooper who had received that order triggered a relay that initiated a preprogrammed series of instructions to the crews tending an array of gravity stations buried deep below the surface of Mindor. No one beyond the troopers actually posted to them even knew these gravity stations existed. Arranged in a broad ring around the Shadow Base, they were substantially different from those out among the asteroids—both in technology and function. Rather than the fairly standard gravity wells projected by the stations out in the system, these buried stations generated a phenomenon much more along the lines of the gravity slice that had destroyed the Justice; the technology involved, like that of the gravity slice, was the product of the Imperial weapons-development facility on Mindor’s sister planet, the one that had been destroyed in the Big Crush.
Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Page 27