Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Part 25

"Sorry?" Han flushed. "Sorry?"

"Hey, what do you want from me? He said apologize. I'm apologizing."

"Aeona," Luke said quietly. "Tell him why you did it."

"Huh? What does that have to do with anything?"

"It might make a difference. To him."

She sighed. "I needed your s.h.i.+p, Solo. My-uh, there's this guy, and we're kind of together..."

Han's eyes narrowed, and his lips compressed. "You're in love with this guy, and he's in trouble."

"Actually, he's in your quad turret." Han waved this off. "But you're in love with him." She looked away. "I figured this a.s.sault would be my only chance to get him back alive. I couldn't even make a try without a s.h.i.+p, and I just didn't have time to play nice about it, okay?"

"You could have asked," Han growled.

"And if you said no, we'd still have had to fight you-and fight you without having the drop on you. Which, from what I've heard about you, isn't exactly a good idea." Han's flush deepened. "Well..."

"Easier to get forgiveness than permission, right? Isn't that how you do it when someone you love is in danger? I seem to recall a couple stories..."

"All right, all right," he said. "Drop it."

"I'm not asking you two to like each other," Luke said. "But you have to at least tolerate each other. Any problems between you will have to wait until we all live through this. Understood?"

"Wow," I Ian said. "Who put yon in charge?"

Aeona snorted. "I asked him the same thing."

"Let me put it another way," Luke said patiently. "Every second I have to waste worrying if you two will shoot each other is another second we're not using to rescue Leia and get us all off this planet and out of this system before the whole thing burns."

He jumped down to the lift platform. "Aeona, muster your Mindorese and start helping the survivors. Han, you look after Chewie. Make sure he doesn't kill anybody when he wakes up, huh?"

"Yeah, he's grumpy in the morning," Han said. "What are you gonna do now?"

"Me?"

Luke stared down at his left hand, the flesh one. He flexed it into a fist and straightened it again, feeling the unfamiliar energy that trickled through the crystalline shadow web that mirrored his nerves. He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed himself into a deeper, more intimate connection with the Force; with the Force to guide him, he touched the shadow web with his mind and bent it to his will. When he opened his eyes again, his hand had sprouted a thin thatch of glistening black crystal threads, finer than human hair. Han flinched and made a face. "What is that?" Luke moved off the freight lift and knelt, lowering his palm to the floor. "That," he said, "is how I'm going to talk with the Melters."

Making contact with the Melters wasn't the hard part. Luke simply laid his left hand on the s.h.i.+mmering black stone of the crypt wall. His hand's sprouted thatch of shadow web melded instantly with the stone's crystalline structure...

And they were there. He could feel them.

It was an unfamiliar sensation, vaguely a.n.a.logous to sight-he sensed them in the stone the way one human might see another from a distance.

Getting their attention wasn't hard, either. They became aware of him in the same instant that he perceived them-and they knew he perceived them. He sensed their instant curiosity and puzzlement, and felt the interchange of lightning-last pulses of energy between them like a conversation in a language he could not understand.

The hard part was actually talking to them.

They sent tentative, questing pulses toward him in what could have been a cautious h.e.l.lo, and he felt his own shadow web respond, but not like an answer. More like an echo, or a harmonic overtone-as though the dark mirror of his nervous system was warping into some kind of resonance with their signal. To communicate with them, he would have to send his mind fully into the shadow web alongside his nerves, into his internal void that swallowed even the memory of light. He'd have to join them in the dark.

In the Dark.

To bring his consciousness into resonance with the Melters would require that he not only stare into that abyss, but dive into it head-first. To drown himself in the void. To let the dark close over his face and seep into his ears and eyes and down his throat and entomb him in the empty, meaningless end of all things.

But-The Melters were at the core of this. Everything came back to them somehow. Meltma.s.sif was their body, or bodies, or the medium in which they lived; meltma.s.sif was the active ingredient in the p.a.w.n Crowns. It was the control crystals and the deadly interlock inside each p.a.w.n'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 Shadowsp.a.w.n 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. Kind-hearted, 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 cl.u.s.ter, vast and dim; those alien modulations of energy became distant stars.

Though every true star is functionally the same-a fusion furnace in s.p.a.ce-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 ent.i.ty 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 planet 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 meltma.s.sif 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 meltma.s.sif 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 originally had 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 meltma.s.sif 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 meltma.s.sif, 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 cl.u.s.ter of which he was the center was itself moving, rolling through the Dark as though in orbit around some vastly more ma.s.sive gravity source, something so huge and dark that it could be seen only by its effect on the stars of the Melters in his cl.u.s.ter. One by one they were peeled from his cl.u.s.ter, 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.