Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Part 26

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 ma.s.s 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, bang 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+ne 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, pinp.r.i.c.k 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 vanis.h.i.+ngly 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 sc.r.a.p 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-fas.h.i.+oned 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 hand of scar around his temples. "1 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."

Within 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.

In fact, the phenomenon produced by these buried stations was precisely what had caused the Big Crush.

The stations powered up. Planes of invisible energy spidered through the rock between them, beneath the vast volcanic dome of the Shadow Base; where these planes intersected, they produced lines of gravitational gradient on the order of small black holes, instantly consuming the rock they touched and producing a t.i.tanic-blast of extremely hard radiation that flashed the surrounding rock into superheated plasma. This released more radiation to vaporize more rock, in a growing cascade that soon sliced through the surface of the planet above in a ring around the base.

To the troopers who crewed the ring of ground-defense turbolaser towers, this was instantly lethal; the radiation flarewall came out of the ground at a shallow angle that touched the towers and vaporized them in a fraction of a second. The Republic marines and trooper infantry, dug in and fighting on the surface around the ion-turbo STOEs on the dome itsell, had a second or two to look up into the blinding white that surrounded them before it melted their armor and burned every exposed soldier to fine black ash, while the empty crater left by the dome's departure filled almost instantly with molten lava that boiled over and spread over the ground on all sides, consuming everything that had survived the initial blast.

The only effects felt by Fenn Shysa and the Mandalorian mercenaries, grimly fighting room-to-room through the gravity-gun emplacement, was the sudden loss of comm channels and a deep rumbling vibration like a distant groundquake, followed by a subtle increase in perceived weight, as though every man had instantly gained a kilo or two.

To the pilots of Rogue Squadron, dogfighting over the base, it looked like the entire volcanic dome had been cupped in a huge bowl of impossibly bright light that swiftly darkened as the ionizing radiation ignited the atmosphere in a firestorm that sucked sand and dust and rock upward to mask its glare. The next thing they noticed was the shrieking of c.o.c.kpit radiation alarms-and that the radiation seemed to have cooked their positional sensors: Though the sensors insisted that their starfighters were still high above the planet, their eyes told them they were falling swiftly toward the dome.

It was Wes Janson who first shouted the truth over the comm. "Wait, I get it! We're not falling toward the base-it's coming up at us!"

Characteristically, the most comprehensive grasp of the situation, as well as its most succinct a.n.a.lysis, belonged to Lando Calrissian. From the bridge of the Remember Alderaan, hovering with the rest of the task force in a sea of vast impact craters below the horizon, he watched the radiation flare and the mushroom clouds... and then watched the entire volcanic dome rise from the mushroom cloud and accelerate toward s.p.a.ce.

He understood instinctively what was happening. The volcano itself was a solid ma.s.s of radiation-resistant stone; the base would be entirely impervious even to the gargantuan power of the stellar flares. All the bad guys would have to do was cruise away, beyond the perimeter of the gravity wells; then they could use the volcano itself as a radiation s.h.i.+eld, to shelter whatever smaller craft they might want to use to flash away into hypers.p.a.ce.

Using skills fine-tuned by a lifetime of living by his ability to instantly a.s.sess odds and opportunities, he reflected with part of his mind that it was actually a pretty nifty idea. He filed it away for future consideration; after all, there were a number of systems where intense stellar radiation made conventional s.h.i.+ps too dangerous to use. But a flying s.h.i.+eld, to provide cover for s.h.i.+ps moving in and out? There were some definite possibilities here. Then another part of his brain-the part that ignored odds and opportunities to focus directly on threats to life and limb-reminded him that none of these "definite possibilities" would ever come to pa.s.s if his s.h.i.+p was destroyed along with the rest of the Rapid Response Task Force, which was an increasing likelihood, because the ion-turbo emplacements and that insanely dangerous gravity gun were on the upper curve of the dome, which meant they had just lifted off along with the rest of the base. Which meant that once the base achieved orbit, a simple half-barrel roll would aim those weapons back down at the surface of Mindor.

At anywhere on the planet's surface. Including the craters where the Remember Alderaan and the rest of the Rapid Response Task Force were currently hiding. A hiding place they could not leave, because to swing around to the sunside of the planet would expose the s.h.i.+ps to the stellar flares and destroy them just as conclusively.

Lando's comprehensive and succinct a.n.a.lysis of the situation required only four words.

"This," he said, "is a problem."

CHAPTER 16.

Watching the flying volcano slowly rotate as it rose into Mindor's night sky p.r.i.c.ked beads of sweat across Lando's brow. The lieutenant at TacOps reported an estimated eighty seconds to the firing window for the nearside ion-turbo cannons, and only twenty seconds more for the full array, including the gravity gun. "Fenn," he muttered into his personal comlink, "give me some good news. I mean it."

When this request reached Fenn Shysa, the Protector commandant was lying flat behind the remnants of a blast-shattered wall within the gravity gun's infantry bunker, along with the mercenary commander and six commandos, all shrouded in smoke and covered in rock dust and all doing their best to impersonate several hundred bloodthirsty Mandalorians. This was for the benefit of two full companies of stormtrooper heavy infantry who were holding a pair of redoubts to either side of a blast door that looked like it could withstand a good-sized fusion bomb. The purpose of this impersonation was to distract the stormtroopers from the actual several hundred bloodthirsty Mandalorians, who were about to cut through a wall on the redoubt's flank. Any second now.

Or perhaps any minute now.

He hoped.

"There's nothing good to tell, Lando!" Fenn had to shout to hear himself over the whine of blasterfire and the rolling crashes of thermal dets and heavy weapons. He stuck his rifle up over the rubble and sprayed fire blindly into the smoke. "This place is armored like a Hutt's treasure vault-our breaching charges barely even leave scorch marks! Maybe your marines have something heavier?"

On the Remember Alderaan's bridge, Lando rubbed his eyes; from what he'd seen, he didn't figure any marines had survived except the ones already fighting within the ion-turbo emplacements. He took a deep breath. "All right, Plan B."

He snapped out a series of orders that had his entire bridge crew staring at him blankly, mouths agape. "You heard me," he said. "Do it!"

The bridge officers jerked back to their panels. Lando turned to C-3P0. "What are you waiting for?"

"Me?" The droid pressed a hand to his chest. "What am I supposed to do?"

"This s.h.i.+p has Mon Cal systems. The interdiction s.h.i.+ps are Corellian," Lando explained as patiently as he could manage. "They don't talk the same language."

"Well, of course they don't." C-3P0 gave a burst of static that sounded suspiciously like a contemptuous sniff. "I've never met a Corellian system that had any manners at all, whereas Remember Alderaan-despite her somewhat coa.r.s.e sense of humor-is a system of exceptional refinement. Even elegance..."

"Yes, fine, whatever," Lando said. "Those Corellian s.h.i.+ps also don't have the calculating power to pull this off-we need to give them access to Alderaan's processor array."

"My goodness! That would require the services of..."

"The most capable and sophisticated protocol droid ever constructed," Lando finished for him, with an encouraging smile. "Get to work."

C-3P0 gasped. "General! Me? What a lovely thing to say! Really, I am most gratified..."

"Be gratified while you work." Lando turned away and again triggered his personal comlink. "Fenn, I need you to fall back."

There was silence for a second or two, then a grim, "How far?"

"All the way. When that gravity gun opens up, we'll hit back. Ma.s.sively."

"Have you seen the armor on this place? It'll take you hours to pound through!"

"If we shoot the armor."

Another pause, then: "I scan. Lando, don't wait for us."

"Fenn..."

"We'll never make it. Do what you have to. Save the fleet."

"You don't understand what's about to happen..."

"We're Mandalorian. This is what we live for. This is how we die."

"Stop it! I hate that garbage!" Lando chewed the inside of his lower lip for a second or two, then took a deep breath to keep a grip on his courage. "TacOps: Are Lancer, Paleo, and Unsung reaching position?"

"Scan reports affirmative."

"When the Slash-Es. .h.i.t their marks, execute at will."

The transponder alert in Wedge Antilles's c.o.c.kpit blared a warning: he was in the kill zone of friendly fire. A quick check of his short-range scan showed three converted Corellian freighters on approach through Mindor's shadow toward the flying volcano. Not far behind them, the four surviving Slash-Es were strung out in a curiously slanting sort of line. He couldn't guess what they were up to, and he didn't have time to figure it out; all three of the converted freighters were already swinging broadside and going into slow barrel rolls: an old navy trick to deliver maximum suppressing fire. Their main cannons had fire rates restricted by their ability to shed waste heat and recharge their capacitors; the barrel roll let them continuously bring fresh guns to bear while the recendy fired guns were repowering.

Wedge triggered his general comm as he yanked his X-wing through a slewing arc that shot him away from the flying volcano. "Republic fighters: Break off and fall back! This is hot s.p.a.ce. Repeat: We are in hot s.p.a.ce!"

Starfighters scattered like roachrats surprised by sunlight. The Lancer, the Paleo, and the Unsung opened up with synchronized fire, blasting broadsides in precise sequence to maintain a near-constant rain of supercharged plasma on the ion-turbo cannons and the gravity gun. This was done less to inflict actual damage than to act as a particularly violent counterscan measure; radiation scatter from the ongoing barrage prevented the emplacements' targeting scanners from locking on.

Two of the ion-turbos had been successfully spiked by Republic-marines; the other three opened up full-bore with counterbattery fire back along the vectors of the incoming blasts. Silent explosions lit up the flanks of the three Corellian s.h.i.+ps; soon they were firing through clouds of their own vaporized hull armor. Then the central dome, over the gravity gun, dilated like the pupil of a vast, pale eye. "Everybody hang on to something!" Captain Tirossk shouted over the comm, rather unnecessarily. "Here it comes!" The gravity gun opened fire.

A sharp-eyed observer, looking in precisely the right place at precisely the right time, would have been able to actually see the flight of the gravity bombs. As they hurtled through the plasma storm created by the synchronized turbolaser blasts, their tiny event horizons swallowed all manner of highly charged particles that released a continuous stream of hard radiation as they fell out of the universe forever. That radiation in turn charged the plasma around it, creating instant blue-white flash-streaks straight as a laser.

The gravity gun unleashed such a blast every three seconds, spraying them all through a narrowly spiraling arc without any attempt to target specific s.h.i.+ps. It didn't have to: even a near-miss could literally tear a s.h.i.+p apart.

Which was exactly what the spray of gravity bombs did to the Unsung.

The bridge crews of the Lancer and the Paleo could only watch helplessly as the Unsung was twisted and wrenched and finally ripped apart; though hundreds of kilometers separated each of these s.h.i.+ps, the other two were also jolted by wave alter wave of gravity shocks. The breakup of the Unsung left a brief gap in the suppression fire. Alarms screamed as hostile target locks acquired the two remaining s.h.i.+ps. "Prepare to increase fire rate fifty percent," Tirossk rasped. "Resynchronize with Paleo." When the fire-control coordinator protested that this risked burning out the turbolasers, Tirossk only shrugged. "They'll be burned out for sure when the s.h.i.+p blows up. Execute."

The spray of gravity bombs streaked on, and more came in their wake. They hurtled toward the cl.u.s.ter of capital s.h.i.+ps still huddled helplessly in Mindor's shadow: s.h.i.+ps without s.h.i.+elds, with no armor or weapon that could protect them.

s.h.i.+ps whose only defense was the ingenuity of General Lando Calrissian.

The lead s.h.i.+p in the array of Slash-Es was the Wait a Minute, under the command of Captain Jav Patrell, a grizzled veteran who had been serving on, later commanding, interdiction s.h.i.+ps for thirty-five Standard years. When his navigation officer announced detection of the first oncoming gravity wave, Patrell didn't hesitate. "All s.h.i.+ps," he said. "Execute."

As his bridge crew turned crisply to their tasks, Patrell's XO leaned close and half whispered, "You really think this can work?"

"Of course it'll work!" Patrell snapped, which was an impressive display of confidence, given that he was, at that precise moment, entirely certain that there was no way in any Corellian h.e.l.l that anyone could actually pull this off. His certainty was the product of long experience; in all his years of service aboard Corellian-made inderdictors, he'd never seen any indication that the artificial gravity wells they projected could be tuned or timed with the precision this sort of stunt required.

However, none of his thirty-five years' experience included an operation controlled by the main processor array of a Mon Calamari battle cruiser.

As the first of the stream of gravity bombs pa.s.sed Lancer and Paleo, the gravity-well projectors of Wait a Minute began to pulse. The interaction of the two powerful gravity sources dragged each bomb a few degrees off course, at which point the next Slash-E pulsed its own projector in a similar sequence, further diverting the bombs' trajectories so that they would not only miss the task force, hut avoid the planet altogether. The final two Slash-E's, however, were stationed on the opposite side of the gravity bombs' path; the firsts task was to direct the bombs back toward the planet. Not at the planet, but along a tangential parabola that would allow the final Slash-E to drag them into a trajectory that had been precisely plotted by the t.i.tanic processor array that was the brain of Remember Alderaan.

All of Captain Patrell's training had insisted that the gravity-well projectors of interdiction s.h.i.+ps were never to be activated any time the s.h.i.+ps were deep within a natural gravity well, such as that of a planet, because the projectors themselves created much too powerful a gravity field of their own. For Mindor, it was equivalent to having four medium-sized moons suddenly pop into existence entirely too close to the planet's surface.

The first groundquakes began only seconds after Wait a Minuie initiated the sequence, as whole sections of the planetary crust were sequentially lifted and dropped and twisted and wrenched. These quakes were exacerbated by the close pa.s.sage of the stream of gravity bombs as their altered trajectory became a slingshot maneuver described by General Calrissian as "Right back atcha, sc.u.mball; see haw you like it."

In roughly eight and a half minutes, the first of the slingshot gravity bombs would reach the near vicinity of the flying volcano and begin to rip it to pieces.

Unfortunately, the movement of the gravity gun and the physics of gravity waves meant that all the calculations included a small measure of uncertainty.

It was that uncertainty that caused the second in the crooked line of the Slash-Es, the Hold'Em-instead of diverting one particular gravity bomb farther from Mindor and the task force-to divert the bomb toward Hold 'Em's own hull, just forward of the portside projector array. Hold 'Em's captain had just enough time to understand the sensor readings and remark "Whoops..." before the gravity bomb's impact.

The point ma.s.s of the gravity bomb lanced through Hold 'Em almost without resistance, but the effect of its pa.s.sage was very much like that of the gravity slice that had cut free the (lying volcano: an instantaneous burst of high-energy radiation powerful enough to vaporize a hole so big that a fair pilot could have flown an X-wing in one side of the s.h.i.+p and out the other. The shock wave blew the s.h.i.+p in half and sent the remnants tumbling away from each other.

Even before the radiation flare from Hold 'Em had died, Captain Patrell was on comm. "General Calrissian," he said calmly. "We have a problem."

"So I see." Lando was already watching the laser-straight streak of blue-white radiation that marked the path of the first of the gravity bombs to enter Mindor's atmosphere. The impact lit up the distant planetary horizon like a fusion bomb. "I'm taking the rest of the task force back up into orbit; it's our best chance to survive. Except..."

Except that Remember Alderaan's ultrasophisticated sensors had already detected a widening gravitic anomaly, spreading through the planet's crust from the huge crater left by the volcano's departure, and the s.h.i.+p's brain had already calculated that in approximately two Standard hours, the planet would no longer be a planet. It would be an expanding spheroid of newly formed asteroids... and every impact of every gravity bomb would shave that hour ever thinner.