Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Part 9

CHAPTER 7.

Han Solo was strongly of the opinion that s.p.a.ce battles, despite how much fan certain demented thrill-monkeys-say, any member of Rogue Squadron-liked to claim they can be, ranked somewhere below being kissed by a Traptoforian razor slug, and only a whisker above being dropped headfirst into a barrel of bantha p.o.o.p. He'd been in this one for less than five minutes, and so far it had done nothing to change his opinion.

It wasn't like he hadn't been expecting trouble. He'd been expecting trouble ever since he'd ditched those Mando negotiations. That expectation of trouble had become absolute certainty when he and Chewie had hit the jump point three light-years from Mindor and been yanked out of hypers.p.a.ce and ambushed by a couple dozen TIE Defenders, which hadn't been an actual problem because he was not, despite Leia's occasional insistence, an idiot. He'd preset the final leg in the Falcon's navicomputer, so they had been in and out of the jump point before those astonished Imps could so much as shout "Emperor's black bones!" or whatever stupid pretend curse they liked to shout when caught with their armored pants around their armored ankles.

If he hadn't been so worried about Luke, he might even have stuck around and taught a few of them the value of real cursing, Corellian-style-Corellian curses being a synergistic blend of vulgarity, obscenity, and outright blasphemy that were the only things really worth saying when one was in the middle of being blown to monatomic dust.

Also, the navicomputer preset should have dropped them out of hypers.p.a.ce about twenty light-minutes from Mindor, which would, in theory, have given him and Chewie plenty of time to get a solid read on the situation with the Falcon's medium-range sensors before deciding whether to go on in or head back out, because Han-recent military service notwithstanding-still tried, at least in spirit, to ad-here to the principles outlined in the Combat Litany of the Smuggler's Creed: Never fight when you can bluff.

Never bluff when you can run.

Never run when you can sneak.

If no one knows you're there, you win.

This was the theory, anyway. The distinction between theory and reality was announced by the ma.s.s-proximity Klaxon in the Falcon's c.o.c.kpit, which unleashed an ear-shattering blast that was underlined by the Falcon being unceremoniously dumped back into reals.p.a.ce in the middle of a battle between three Corellian frigates, half a dozen fighter wings, and a giant cloud of TIE Interceptors that was, unbelievably, taking place in the middle of an even-more-giant meteor storm.

The X-wing pilot and his wingman were lining up desperate deflection shots at an oncoming formation of six TIE Interceptors when an ancient, battered YT-1300 freighter suddenly arrived in the middle of their dogfight, blocking those last-ditch shots.

The wingman's demand to know what a saucer-shaped relic from Old Republic days was doing in the middle of a s.p.a.ce battle quickly turned into a gasp of awe as the battered hulk slewed into an astonis.h.i.+ngly precise skew-flip that turned its sublights into weapons to blast a pair of Interceptors enough off-course that they slammed into a nearby asteroid. At that point, the relic in question hurtled headlong at the remaining four of the TIE flight-who were boxed together by the maze of asteroids-barrel-rolling through a storm of laserfire while unleas.h.i.+ng a salvo of concussion missiles with either astonis.h.i.+ng accuracy or even more astonis.h.i.+ng luck, so that after a single pa.s.s the freighter streaked away, hurtling off through the maze of asteroids after having dusted six Interceptors in under five seconds.

Inside the freighter's c.o.c.kpit, Han didn't have a chance to celebrate his victory. Bleeding from a minor scalp wound he'd collected off the front viewport strut owing to not being fully strapped into his pilot's couch, he was busy yanking the control yoke this way and that, thumbing fire-control switches wholly at random, and ducking and throwing his weight as though he could bodily increase the s.h.i.+p's maneuverability to help dodge the meteors that kept denting his hull. All the while he kept screaming at the top of his lungs things like "Chewie, we need those deflectors! We really, really do!" and "Is that smoke! Why am I smelling smoke?" From the forward service access came half-panicked yowls of frustration and apology: in the haste of their sudden takeoff, the problem in the balky forward deflector-array control a.s.sembly had failed to get entirely repaired, which could be a seriously fatal problem in the middle of a couple of hundred enemy starfighters, a number of which were now apparently right on his tail. But he ignored Chewie's yowls, because on top of everything else he was dealing with, something was entirely screwed up with local s.p.a.ce: the Falcon's navicomputer couldn't make any kind of sense out of the trajectories of all the different rocks swirling around, and the s.h.i.+p was yawing and starting to tumble in a way he hadn't experienced since his legendary race through the Kessel Run, where tidal effects from the local black holes had..."Hey..." Han straightened up, his face suddenly clearing. It was like Kessel-exactly like Kessel! He checked a sensor; sure enough, the asteroids were cl.u.s.tered around a powerful ma.s.s well, almost certainly produced by a gravity mine or projector somewhere in the middle. "That's it! Chewie, forget the deflectors! Give me particle s.h.i.+elds forward! Now!"

Chewbacca replied with a series of growling snorts and hoots that translated, roughly, as You'd better not be thinking what I know you're thinking!

Han grinned, remembering a vaguely similar situation some years before. He gave the same answer now. "They'd be crazy to follow us, wouldn't they?"

Without waiting for the s.h.i.+elds or even an acknowledgment from Chewbacca, Han slewed the Falcon through a radically tightening arc that set it rocketing full-speed into the thickest part of the asteroid field. The particle s.h.i.+elds flared to spectacular life; radiation scatter from their disintegration of dust and the smaller rocks on the cloud made the Falcon look like it was flying within a sh.e.l.l of fire-works.

And he reflected, briefly, that those demented Rogue Squadron thrill-monkeys might actually be right. Once in a while.

To the pilots of the TIE Interceptors in pursuit of the Falcon, the s.h.i.+p simply vanished. The asteroid field was dense and unpredictable; so much of the pilot's attention had to be concentrated on staying out of the way of hurtling rocks that they were forced to rely more and more on their sensor locks as the Falcon pulled away, and so when the s.h.i.+p suddenly disappeared from their sensors, they a.s.sumed-correctly-that Han had pulled the old smuggler's trick of powering down his sublight engines and his weapons systems once he was deep within the cloud of metallic asteroids.

Which was a tricky place to go, as the gravity-well projector in the center had perturbed the entire cloud, sending asteroids in unpredictable directions. However, having their prey powered down and weaponless removed a great deal of the danger involved in hunting it. This prey would be in more danger from the asteroids than they were, being a bigger target and unable to maneuver without revealing its position-so a six-TIE flight spread out into a search matrix and began to methodically sweep the entire cloud.

Han, though, had learned as a cadet that even while flying through a large asteroid field crowded with pretty substantial rocks moving in more-or-less random directions, there were a couple of factors he could count on to keep his s.h.i.+p relatively sale. One was that a rock going in a particular direction would continue to go roughly in that same direction, unless it actually ran into something in was acted upon by an external force. Even collisions had a predictable result; postimpact trajectories of colliding objects could be reliably projected by any standard nav program, being a rough resultant of the vectors and respective kinetic energies of the objects in question. As for the TIE pilots, the only external force that concerned them was the grav projector, whose effect on the local rocks was also well within the capacities of their navicomputers to predict.

Which was why it came as a substantial surprise to the flight leader when an asteroid roughly the size of a speeder bike suddenly made a sharp forty-five-degree turn as though it had bounced off an invisible paatchi ball and slammed through his port engine, his hull, and his c.o.c.kpit before continuing out the other side, taking his head with it.

Another of the flight suffered a similar fate before the remaining TIE pilots made visual contact with the Millennium Falcon, which was zipping in rings around them without, apparently, using its drives at all. Meanwhile, asteroids seemed to actively avoid it, leaping aside from its path-and ending up, with improbable frequency, in new trajectories that proved catastrophic to the TIEs.

The last that was heard from any of these unfortunate pilots was a panicky final transmission: "It's some kind of b.l.o.o.d.y Jedi! I swear to you, he's throwing rocks at us! I don't know how-with his mind, or some..."

The transmission ended in a crash that sounded very like a ton or so of asteroid crus.h.i.+ng a t.i.tanium hull. Which, in fact, it was.

So long as it has sufficient ma.s.s against which to push, the repulsorlift is the most efficient transportation device ever devised: it uses virtually no energy, produces no emissions and virtually no radiation signature-not even waste heat-so it is detectable only by gravitic sensor. Repulsorlifts were so widespread that nearly every-one in the galaxy simply took them for granted, using them in everything from Star Destroyers to swoop boards. TIE Interceptors, though, were carrier-based craft, designed to operate in s.p.a.ce well beyond the kind of planetary ma.s.ses that made repulsorlifts work. TIEs had no need of repulsorlifts, and Imperial s.h.i.+p designers, with typically unimaginative thrift, simply left them out. For the same reason, the sensors aboard these fighters were calibrated to detect the field signatures of sublight engines and charged weapons arrays, not the gravitic-pulse output of repulsorlifts... which weren't really useful in starfighter combat anyway; they were just not powerful enough to provide the near-instantaneous accelerations necessary for modern dogfighting.

Republic starfighters, on the other hand, were designed to operate independently of capital s.h.i.+ps, and were regularly used for certain atmospheric applications where silent fuel efficiency was more important than raw speed. And one of the two relatively little-known features of the repulsorlifts was that the device functioned not only in planetary gravity wells, but in any gravity well-even the ma.s.s-shadows projected by gravity mines and interdiction s.h.i.+ps.

The other little-known feature of the repulsorlift was that it did operate with rea.s.suring respect for the laws of motion. It moved a s.h.i.+p because it was shoving against the gravitational field of the planet; the s.h.i.+p moved because the planet wouldn't. If, on the other hand, one directed one's repulsorlift toward a ma.s.s significantly smaller than that of one's s.h.i.+p-like, say, a metric ton of asteroid-it was the ma.s.s that moved. Often very, very swiftly indeed. Some pilots had come to refer to this maneuver as the Solo Slide.

Not because Han Solo invented it-the trick was far older than he was-but because no one in the galaxy had ever done it better.

As soon as his mastery of the Solo Slide had bought the Falcon a few seconds' breather, Han called to Chewie to join him in the c.o.c.kpit. The Wookiee slid smoothly into the copilot's chair, strapped himself in, and observed succinctly, "Baroough wonnngar row-oo-wargh."

"Couldn't have said it better myself." Han spun the dial on the comm unit. "Still jamming subs.p.a.ce; going to reals.p.a.ce. Republic frigates, this is the Millennium Falcon. Do you copy? Repeat: do you copy?" he said, louder, as though shouting might help.

The reply came through, crackling with static. "Millennium Falcon, this is the RDFS Lancer. We copy. Confirm receipt of following message.

Han shot a frown at Chewie, shrugged, and replied, "Go ahead."

"Message reads: Where's my eight thousand credits, you thieving pirate'?"

Han grinned. "Message confirmed. Reply: Regards to Captain Tirossk. How about I offer one dusted grav projector on account?"

Chewbacca gave him a look. "Hoowerghrff?"

Han shrugged. "Who else do I owe that much money to?"

"Freghrr. Khooherm. Flighwarr..."

"Yeah, yeah, all right, drop it."

The comm crackled. "Solo-Tirossk here. If we both get out of this alive, my friend, we'll call it even, yes?"

Han winced. No Bothan would make that kind of offer if he thought there was any chance it might actually happen. "Maybe you better fill me in."

The situation played out like an extended good-news-bad-news joke. The good news was that Shadowsp.a.w.n didn't have enough Interceptors to defend all his gravity-well projectors. The bad news was that this was because there were thousands of them, scattered throughout the system-wide debris field. Good news: the projectors, lacking the engines of capital s.h.i.+ps to power them, seemed to depend on asteroid-based generators and a system of capacitors that-in the best estimate the Lancer's computer could make-would be able to power them for only about four Standard days. The bad news: these thousands of new gravity wells had destabilized the entire system, sending vast clouds of asteroids spiraling inward to the star, with the first impacts to begin in less than two Standard days. The good news: most of the asteroids were small enough to simply burn up in the star's corona. The bad news: that was only most of them; some of the larger asteroids were capable, on impact, of triggering flare-like stellar eruptions that would put out enough hard radiation to sterilize the entire system, including every single s.h.i.+p-Republic, Imperial, and otherwise-and every single life-form of any variety on the surface of Mindor. More bad news: each gravity projector the task force managed to destroy would actually speed up the infall of the asteroids, because the outer gravity wells actually slowed the decay of the inner asteroids' orbits by partially balancing the star's gravitation. And to counter that bad news, there was no good news. None at all. Everyone was going to die.

Everyone.

"I don't buy it," Han said. "I don't buy it for a tenth of a Standard second. No Imp commander would throw away all these men and all this equipment just to take out a few Republic s.h.i.+ps. They can't afford to. There's a way out. There's gotta be a way out. We'll cut our way in and link up with the task force; once we get Luke's boys behind us..."

"There's more," Tirossk said. "The Justice broke up in orbit. General Skywalker tried to land part of what was left. There was... an explosion."

Han stopped listening after that, amid vivid visions of putting his DL-44 against the forehead of a certain septic-soaked warlord with a made-up darksider name.

Chewbacca threw one arm over his face, leaned his elbow against the overhead console, and moaned. Han swallowed the knot in his throat-which didn't make it go away, just added a few new ones in his stomach-and forced a smile onto his face. "Look on the bright side, Chewie."

"Browwergh."

"Sure there is," he said. "At least we managed to avoid dragging Leia down with us. She's safe. That's counts for something."

The Falcon's comm crackled. "You do know this is an open channel, don't you, Slick?"

Han gaped. Chewbacca moaned again.

"While General Solo spits out his foot," Leia went on, "will somebody kindly cover Rogue Squadron so we can take out that grav projector?"

"Leia-Leia, Luke is..." Han choked, and had to cough his voice clear. "Luke is..."

"Nonsense."

"You-you said he was in trouble..."

"And he still is." Even through the static on the comm, he could hear that her conviction was absolute. "Han, do you copy? He's still in trouble."

Han found himself grinning. "That's the best news I've heard all day.

One last rounding of a tunnel's curve, deep within the volcanic dome, brought to sight an archway that glowed with a pulsing red-tinged light. The stormtroopers prodded Luke onward, out onto a tiny arc of ledge high above a vast lake of molten lava.

Behind him in the mouth of the tunnel, the Moon Hat sank to her knees.

Lord Shadowsp.a.w.n's throne room had been cut from the living rock: an immense vault whose ceiling and walls vanished into a shroud of sulfurous gases. The vault's only light came from a river of white-hot lava that fell from the mists above into the lake of fire below, its killing heat restrained by force screens. From the ledge, a long, narrow rock bridge led to a platform of black granite cantilevered out above the lake. The uppermost point of the platform had been carved and polished into a gleaming black throne the size of an Imperial shuttle, positioned so that the long form of Lord Shadowsp.a.w.n, lounging within it, was shadowed by the lava fall behind and the pool below into a pall of scarlet gloom.

Luke stopped. This place could have been lifted intact from the climax of Han Solo and the Pirates of Kessel: it was so holothriller the-atrical that it was almost funny... but Luke didn't feel like laughing. In the Force, this place read like a bomb wrapped as a birthday present.

Like a Sith Lord disguised as a kid's party clown.

Was he supposed to be impressed? Or was he supposed to dismiss all this as some kind of demented practical joke? He shot a disbelieving glance over his shoulder at his stormtrooper escort.

They stood in a shallow arc, carbines leveled at him; the Moon Hat, still on her knees, had inclined her head, his lightsaber balanced on her outstretched palms like an offering.

Luke got it: this wasn't about him at all. This show was for them.

Looked like it was working, too.

What exactly was Blackhole up to? And was this really Blackhole at all? On Vorzyd V, Blackhole had appeared only as a holoprojection-but the figure of Lord Shadowsp.a.w.n on the Shadow Throne was no projection. Luke could feel, in the Force, a dark malice of wholly human origin-glittering malevolence and nastily sn.i.g.g.e.ring glee-and it came from the man before him.

The Force smoked with threat. Luke felt some danger here darker than mere death.

"Luke Skywalker." Lord Shadowsp.a.w.n's voice boomed through the cavern, probably using concealed speakers. "Tremble before me!"

"I think you have me confused with some other Luke Skywalker."

"Kneel, Skywalker! Pledge yourself to me, and I will spare your life, and the lives of your crew."

Luke said nothing. The shape of Lord Shadowsp.a.w.n s.h.i.+fted and lengthened, rising from the throne. That odd headgear of his seemed to glow with a light that cast no illumination on his expressionless face. His robes s.h.i.+mmered crimson as though drenched in blood, and he wore around his waist a broad belt from which hung a scabbarded sword. "Bring him to me!"

"Don't bother," Luke said. "I can manage on my own."

He walked out onto the long, narrow bridge of rock, using his slow progress to breathe himself deeply into Force awareness. He could feel the trap now.

As he neared the end of the bridge, Shadowsp.a.w.n raised a fist as though to hurl thunderbolts. "You are beaten, Skywalker.1"

"Don't bet your life on it."

Shadowsp.a.w.n's fist hung in the air as if he'd forgotten he'd raised it. "I have done what the vain, arrogant Emperor and his pathetic hound Vader never could! I have defeated Luke Skywalker!"

"Not yet," Luke said. "Or if it makes you feel better, I can say 'Do not underestimate my power.' "

"I hold your fleet in the palm of my hand-my gravity weapons will destroy this entire system. Not one s.h.i.+p will escape!"

"That's a problem," Luke admitted. "But that means none of your s.h.i.+ps will escape, either. Which is why I came to see you. Don't you think that together we might find some, well, less-lethal solution?"

"You came here," Shadowsp.a.w.n intoned, "to kill me."

I like spread his hands. "I told your troopers outside that I'm hoping to end the day with n.o.body else dying."

"In this..." Shadowsp.a.w.n finally lowered his fist and rested it on the hilt of his scabbarded sword. "...you are doomed to disappointment."

"You don't want to do that."

"Your Jedi tricks mean nothing to me!"

"No-no, I mean it." Luke frowned. "You really don't want to do that. 1 can feel that you don't."

He stepped closer and lowered his voice. "Blackhole-that is you, isn't it? What's going on? Why the playacting?" He glanced around-in the Force, he could feel eyes upon him, many eyes, more than the company of stormtroopers on the ledge behind him. "Are you recording this?"

"Fool!" Shadowsp.a.w.n thundered as he drew forth his sword. "Kneel, or die!"

The blade was huge, a hand wide and half again longer than Luke's lightsaber, and it appeared to have been cut from faceted crystal, like a single vast diamond. As Shadowsp.a.w.n pulled it free from the scabbard, it kindled with a scarlet glare, as though it had gathered to itself the light of the lava pool below. It was, Luke mused, the same color as Vader's. Was that why this all felt, well, staged?

But staged or not, there was a limit to how far Luke was willing to play along.

"Listen to me, Blackhole or Shadowsp.a.w.n or whoever you are," he said quietly. "I'm a Jedi, but I never had time for all the training some of the old Jedi were supposed to get. I've heard they tried to end conflicts without violence... but that's something I'm still learning. Do you understand? If you attack me, I will hurt you. If hurting you isn't enough, I will kill you."

"You think you can defeat me? Fool! This blade is the product of untold millennia ofSith alchemy! Against such power, your Jedi toy is but a broken reed!"

"Sith alchemy?" Luke squinted at him. "Are you kidding?"

"Come, Skywalker! Summon your blade and fight! Destroy me, and my men will instead serve you!"

Luke blinked. "What?"

"Legions of Shadow! Hear the word of your Lord!" Shadowsp.a.w.n lifted his blade above his head, and the cavern s.h.i.+vered with the power of his voice. "If this Jedi pup can defeat the Lord of the Shadow Throne, you will be his! Obey his every word as you would my own! Thus is the command of Shadowsp.a.w.n!"