Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Read online

  The cavern was filled with Moon Hats.

  Each and every one among them stood motionless with head lowered, hands folded invisibly within the drape of their sleeves. Each and every one among them faced a large stone pedestal that stood empty in the center of the room. The pedestal was of a single piece with the floor, but not as though it had been carved from it; it looked as if it had grown there, like a tumor. It was about a meter and a half high, and its flat top was roughly the same size and shape as a comfortable single bed. From time to time, with a kind of regularized increase of frequency like the tide coming in, the electric discharge from the walls and ceiling would pause, and shiver in place as though captured between electrodes; then with a painfully bright flash, they would converge upon the stone pedestal and vanish into its surface.

  Luke understood. That’s me, he thought. That’s where I am. Buried alive in solid rock.

  This didn’t particularly bother him; after spending eternity at the end of the universe, mere death didn’t mean much at all. Death was better than what Blackhole was trying to do to him. With him.

  As him.

  He didn’t know if he could save himself, but he might be able to help these people. That would have to be enough.

  Luke reached out through the crystals with the Force… and found nothing beyond this one lone brain to grasp. Though he could feel them clearly, though he could listen to the whisper of the crystals in their heads, he could find no surface on those crystals that his will could grasp. Exactly like his dream: these were the pebbles of featureless graphite. Nothing there but the Dark.

  This one alone had that fissure of light…

  In the distant reaches of his memory, he found a lesson of Yoda’s, from one long solstice night, deep in the jungle near Dagobah’s equator. When to the Force you truly give yourself, all you do expresses the truth of who you are, Yoda had said, leaning forward so that the knattik-root campfire painted blue shadows within the deep creases of his ancient face. Then through you the Force will flow, and guide your hand it will, until the greatest good might come of your smallest gesture.

  He’d never really understood that lesson. He’d only tried to live according to the principle… but now there was an image slowly breaching the surface of his consciousness. An image of his own hand, delivering a punch.

  Just to the right of center, on the forehead of “Lord Shadowspawn.” Which had been precisely the impact required to crack the crystalline matrix inside his brain.

  A simple act of mercy, born of no other desire than to end a conflict without taking a life, now had become his own lifeline, by which he could draw himself back from the eternal nothing at the end of the universe.

  He could feel his connection now, could sense the control he might exert through this connection; a simple twist of will would seize this body and make it act at his command—he could even, he sensed, send his power with the Force through this body to serve his desire. He could make this man his puppet, and forge his own escape.

  Or…

  He could abandon his fear, and express the truth of who he was.

  For Luke Skywalker, this was not even a choice. Instead of a command, he sent through the link a friendly suggestion.

  Hey, Nick, he sent. Why don’t you wake up?

  The first inkling Cronal got that something was going terribly wrong came in the form of an alarm Klaxon blaring inside his life-support chamber. The Klaxon shattered his concentration and jerked him back into his own body; for a long moment that seemed to stretch on toward forever, his desiccated flesh could only shudder and twitch while he struggled to catch his breath. Finally he could move his hand to silence the Klaxon, push the Sunset Crown up from his head to its resting place behind his couch, and answer the urgent hail incoming from Group Captain Klick.

  He was so rattled by the sudden interruption that he very nearly forgot to restrict his transmission to synthesized audio-only. At the last instant he keyed the proper code, and then had to take several more deep breaths to steady himself again. To let his pet clone commander see, instead of the robust and masterful Lord Shadowspawn, the sunken creases of his ancient face, his slack bloodless lips peeling back from his prominent yellowed teeth, the few tangled wisps of hair that straggled across his wrinkled scalp, to let him hear Cronal’s own weak and wheezing voice—this could have caused considerable difficulty, if not outright disaster.

  “Group Captain,” he croaked, his thin wheeze crackling with strain. “Was my order unclear? No interruptions!”

  The group captain, of course, could hear only the computer’s synthesized version of Shadowspawn’s sepulchral basso. “My lord, the Rebels are attacking!”

  “How do a few fighter squadrons constitute an emergency so dire that you would defy my direct order? Destroy them, and don’t bother me again.”

  “More than fighters, my lord. A battle cruiser of Mon Calamari design has initiated orbital bombardment, targeting our ground emplacements, primarily our ion-turbo cannons. We believe it’s in preparation for a surface assault.”

  “A Mon Calamari battle cruiser? Impossible. Their sole Mon Cal was destroyed by our gravity slice.”

  “Yes, my lord—but this is a new one!”

  “Impossible,” Cronal repeated. “No new cruiser could have entered the system so soon—our gravity stations should keep them at least a light-hour away!”

  “My lord, the Rebels have opened a temporary jump window.”

  “Imposs—” Cronal bit his tongue; clearly none of this was impossible at all. Those bloody Rebels—may the Dark swallow every miserable one!

  The group captain went on at some length, describing the battle near the Rebel interdiction ships. Cronal listened in growing disbelief. “Why was I not informed?”

  “My lord, your order—”

  “Call out every squadron—throw in every reserve! Get every single fighting craft in action now, if you have to draft deckhands to fly them! I want those Rebels so busy they don’t even have time to watch the star flares that will kill them, do you understand?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “And detail a company of your best commandos to the Election Center entry; they are to hold that door at all costs. No matter what happens with the battle, no Rebel can be allowed to interrupt what happens within, do you understand? See to it personally.”

  “Yes, my lord. I will take personal command. No enemy will breach the Election Center while one trooper lives, my lord!”

  “Let it be so,” Cronal snapped. “You have complete authority to command this situation, Group Captain—do not disturb me again!”

  “It will be done, my lord.”

  Cronal stabbed the cutoff. His joints creaked as he tried to find a comfortable position on the life-support chamber’s couch. So close… he was so close… a few minutes more was all he needed to give himself youth, and strength, a Jedi’s power and the name and face of a hero…

  He yanked the Sunset Crown back into place upon his head and closed his eyes.

  He sucked in a breath as deep as his withered lungs could hold, then sighed it out as slowly as his hammering heart would permit. He did the same again, and again, until gradually his heart began to slow, and his head began to clear, and he could once again drive his will into the Dark.

  There he found, winking like glitterflies on a moonless night, the warm comfort of his Pawns, like little bits of himself scattered out into the Dark to point his way. He focused his mind and stabbed downward to a deeper level of concentration, where he could grasp every one of those little bits of himself and squeeze until he was wholly inside them. Then the slow cycle of breath… until each and every Pawn inhaled when he inhaled… sighed when he sighed… until their very hearts beat in synchrony with his own…

  All but one.

  Somebody had switched on the lights inside Nick’s head.

  He jerked awake, blinking. His eyes wouldn’t focus. “Man… I have been having the weirdest dream…”

  He
tried to rub his eyes, but his hands were tangled in something… what was this, sleeves? Since when did he wear pajamas? Especially pajamas made out of brocade so thick he could have used it as a survival tent on a Karthrexian glacier… And his head hurt, too, and his neck was stiff, because his head had gained a couple of dozen kilos—must have been some serious party, to leave him with this bad a hangover—and when he did finally free his hands and rub his eyes and massage his vision back into something resembling working order, he took in his surroundings… and blinked some more.

  He was standing in a stone chamber along with about forty other people who were all wearing funny hats and robes just like his, who all stood motionless and silent in a crowd around a big stone pedestal with heads lowered and hands folded inside their sleeves, and he said, “Oh, okay. That explains it.”

  It hadn’t been a dream.

  Okay, sure, a nightmare, maybe—but he was wide awake now and the nightmare was still going on, which meant it was as real as the deep ache in his feet, not to mention his back and his neck. How long had he been standing like this, anyway? Plus there was this knuckle-sized knot of a bruise over his right eye…

  Oh, he thought. Oh yeah, I remember.

  For a long, long moment, he didn’t move.

  He couldn’t guess exactly how long he’d have to make his moves from the first instant he attracted Blackhole’s attention, but he had a pretty good idea what the old ruskakk’s reaction was gonna be: the walls and floor and ceiling of this whole chamber were made of meltmassif.

  This was always the problem with Jedi, Nick decided. Whenever there were Jedi around, you ended up in some kind of trouble that nobody in the galaxy could possibly survive. Not even the Jedi himself. And this time, it wasn’t even about dying. It was about getting stuck as Blackhole’s sock puppet for the rest of his natural life. So what was he supposed to do?

  On the other hand, doing nothing sure wouldn’t make anything better. He could feel Blackhole inside his head—a cold slimy goo like the trail left behind by a Xerthian hound-slug on a damp autumn day—and he could feel, too, that Blackhole could snatch back control of Nick’s arms and legs and brain anytime he felt like it; the only reason Nick had any self-awareness at all was that Blackhole’s whole attention was focused on the kid inside the stone slab.

  Overall, it looked like both of them were pretty well fragged. But, y’know, he reminded himself, that kid is supposed to be a Skywalker. Nick had never been superstitious, but there was something about that name. It seemed to carry the promise, or at least the possibility, that the day might be saved in some incomprehensibly improbable fashion. Even if the situation was so clearly hopeless that only a lunatic would even try.

  And so he yanked off his Crown.

  It hurt. A lot. And it made this damp juicy ripping sound, very much how Nick imagined the sound of someone ripping his scalp in half like cheap broadcloth.

  “Okay: owww!” He threw the Crown on the floor. “That’s it,” he declared as blood began to trickle into his eyes. “Nobody’s putting that thing back on me, because that was the last time I want to take it off.”

  “No…” Cronal moaned in the darkness “It’s not possible… not now, not when I’m so close!”

  He stabbed savagely at the comm panel in front of his couch. “Klick! Are you in position?”

  “My lord Shadowspawn!” the group captain exclaimed. “We’re on our way!”

  Cronal ground out words between ragged yellow stumps of teeth. “When you get there, secure and seal the door. If anyone tries to come out, kill them.”

  He reached up to adjust the Sunset Crown upon his wrinkled scalp. As for the inside of the Election Center, he could handle that himself.

  Nick gave his robes a quick pat down, hoping he might find a liquefier belted to his waist or something—somebody around here must have one, to have softened the meltmassif to get Skywalker into it in the first place—but he came up blank, of course, because nothing was ever that easy. Not for him. Nick was absolutely certain that on the day of his birth the Force had looked down upon his life, smiled, and cheerfully made an obscene gesture. Or something.

  He scanned the room. Thirty-some mostly identical Pawns. Who had the liquefier? Was he supposed to search every single one of them? On the other hand, it occurred to him that the charge emitted by a liquefier was very similar to that of a blaster on stun…

  He gazed down thoughtfully at his Crown, suddenly reflecting that it might turn out to be useful after all. He picked it up and went to the door.

  “Guard!” he barked in his resonant Shadowspawn voice, lifting the Crown over his head. When one of the troopers outside opened the door, Nick hit him with it.

  Hard.

  The impact buckled the stormtrooper’s knees, and Nick—mindful both of the stormtrooper’s helmet and of his homeworld’s ancient adage that “anything worth hitting is worth hitting twice”—smacked him again, harder, which laid the stormtrooper facedown and twitching.

  The other door guard cursed and brought his carbine around to open fire with impressive speed—but a couple of kilos of carbonite made an even better shield than it did a club. Nick shoved the Crown right into the carbine’s muzzle and put his shoulder into it, which knocked the trooper backward off-balance; before the trooper could bring his carbine back in line, Nick had the first guard’s carbine in his own hands… and stormtrooper armor, it seemed, was not quite as sturdy as carbonite when it came to absorbing blaster bolts.

  Beyond the door, he found a long, down-sloping corridor that looked like it had been melted through shimmery black stone. He had time to mutter, “So on top of everything else, I don’t even know where I fraggin’ am,” before a door at the far end of the corridor opened to reveal a squad of stormtroopers, most likely wondering what all the shooting was about.

  “This just keeps getting better and better.” Nick dragged the unconscious trooper inside and blasted the door panel, which exploded in a shower of sparks. The door slid shut, and Nick could only hope it might slow the oncoming troopers for a few seconds. It would have to be enough.

  But when he looked up at the Pawns, all the Pawns were looking back at him.

  He thought, Oh, this can’t be good.

  The Pawns in front of him bunched together, blocking his shot at Skywalker’s pedestal tomb, while the others spread out and began to circle toward him, arms outstretched, without making a sound—and though Nick knew it was because most of them couldn’t actually talk, it was still excessively creepy. He bared his teeth and thumbed the carbine over to full auto.

  And hesitated.

  He had this instant, extraordinarily vivid vision of trying to explain to the sadly patient face of Luke Skywalker—the man who had spared Nick’s life a couple hours earlier based on nothing more than a pun and a vague intuition that he might be innocent—how I just blew away thirty-some innocent men and women so I could dig you out of there, because he had an overpowering intuition of his own: if Luke Skywalker thought he might save thirty innocent lives by sacrificing his own, he wouldn’t hesitate. Ten innocent lives.

  One.

  “Or, hell, one not-so-innocent life,” Nick muttered. “Like mine.”

  He flipped the carbine’s power setting to stun. “I hate Jedi. Hate ’em. Really, really, really. Hate.”

  He had no way to know how a stun blast would affect someone when channeled by the neural network of the Pawn Crowns directly into their unprotected brains, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t be good, and the only thing he was looking forward to less than explaining to Skywalker how he’d killed all these people because he was a bloodthirsty son of a ruskakk was explaining how he’d killed them all because he was too stupid to pour water out of a boot. Fortunately, he didn’t have to stun them to stop them.

  He only had to stun the floor.

  He opened fire on the ground in front of the feet of the oncoming Pawns, and around each shot, a meter or two of the meltmassif that layered the chamber’s floor
instantly liquefied to roughly the viscosity of warm toknut butter. Pawns went down in heaps. Nick turned his fire on the floor between himself and the Pawns blocking the pedestal tomb, and they slipped and fell into a pile of their own, struggling and pawing at each other helplessly.

  Not bad, he thought. Maybe not up there with slipping on a raballa peel, but still pretty funny. Now if he only had a real liquefier he could have rehardened the stone, which would have been even better. Loads of comic possibility. Though they were still struggling to rise and kind of climbing over each other, and if a few of them actually reached hard floor that would bring a sudden end to the chuckles. “And now, for my next trick…”

  He flipped open the downed trooper’s medpac and loaded an ampoule of vivatherin into the chromostring canister. Then with the chromo in one hand and the carbine in the other, he took a three-step running start, jumped over the gooey floor, and landed on the chest of the nearest downed Pawn. He skidded and slipped and almost went down as the Pawn gasped and clutched at his ankle, but he kicked his way free and lurched forward, stepping on stomachs and legs and probably a head or two until he could claw his way to the pedestal and clamber up on top. As the Pawns tried to pull themselves up after him, he aimed the carbine between his feet and held down the trigger.

  The pedestal collapsed into a spreading pile of slimy goo, and Nick found himself sitting on Luke Skywalker’s chest. Without pausing to consider how ridiculous they both must look, Nick triggered the chromostring canister against Luke’s neck. Given the chromostring’s ability to enhance systemic absorption of the vivatherin, Nick figured Skywalker would be jumping back to life any second now, which wouldn’t be a second too soon, because the pedestal’s collapse left Nick and Luke down on the floor with the goo-covered piles of Pawns, who were now climbing over each other to claw at Nick’s ankles and knees and pull him down and drag themselves up him like slashrats chewing down a turk-root trunk, ripping away his robes and gouging at his skin, and they were pushing him deeper and deeper into the muck, which was starting to flow up over his ears and into his eyes, and the more he struggled the more they piled onto him, until he heard what was, for a man in the midst of getting ripped to shreds by a pack of dark-sider-controlled zombies, the sweetest sound in the history of the galaxy: