Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Part 27

When the planet broke up, there would be no more shadow to s.h.i.+eld the Republic s.h.i.+ps from Taspan's ever-increasing flares.

As the task force left the atmosphere, Lando could only stare back down at the impact flares. It didn't seem possible. Luke was down there somewhere. And Han, and Leia. And Lando had just helped blow up the planet.

His only consolation was that he wouldn't live to regret it. None of them would. He turned his gaze on the flying volcano and thought about the slingshot stream of gravity bombs, eight or ten of them on their way, and his lips peeled back off his teeth. "And you won't live long enough to celebrate."

He snapped out another string of orders, and the surviving s.h.i.+ps of the task force swung into formation for full a.s.sault. Remember Alderaan soared into orbit, with four battle cruisers fanning out to its flanks. Two hundred starfighters spread through the formation, then kicked wide to come at the flying volcano in a tightening noose that kept their guns toward the enemy and themselves clear of the capital s.h.i.+ps' field of fire. The three remaining Slash-Es split the difference, tugging gravity bombs as far from any s.h.i.+ps as they could manage.

"Let's not give them a chance to even guess we're about to feed them their own weapons," Lando said. He turned to his XO. "Fire." The entire task force rained destruction upon the flying volcano. With no s.h.i.+elds of its own, without even armor, great chunks of the volcano flash-burned into clouds of supercharged plasma-a vast glowing shroud that swallowed turbolaser blasts and detonated pro ton torpedoes. But that was all right, Lando decided, because all that really mattered now was the flight of eight or ten gravity bombs heading right back where they came from.

Before the planet broke up and Taspan's star storm consumed the task force, he would have the satisfaction of watching the flying volcano pulverized by its own weapon. He didn't antic.i.p.ate being especially comforted by that, but it was all he had left to look forward to. All any of them had left.

This is a lousy place to die, he thought. It's a lousy place for the Republic to lose Luke and Han and Leia and Chewie. And the Rogues. And me. At least we're taking the bad guys with us.

He found himself contemplating, with a kind of awe, all the stories that would end here, in this little backwater system six jumps off the Hydian Way... He wondered briefly how the holothriller producers would tell this story. He had a feeling they'd try to make it into something grand and glorious-some legendary Last Stand of the Last Jedi, with a dash of the Romance of Doomed Lovers and a splash of Reformed Gambler Goes Out as a Hero... instead of what it really was.

We just got beat, he thought. They outplanned us. Suckered us in. And we went for it headfirst because we thought we were invincible. We thought the good guys always win.

Of all of them, Luke was the only one who had never suffered under that delusion. Well: not never. Han had told him once that something in Luke had changed after Bespin. Somehow Luke understood-in a way that Lando never had, that Han and Leia and Chewbacca had simply never grasped-just how dark a place the universe really was.

Lando guessed that was where Luke got his humility. His kindness. His gentle faith that people could change for the better. That must have been why he rarely smiled, and almost never made jokes. Because that goodness was all he really had. It was his lifeline. The rope to which he clung, dangling above the abyss.

And we all clung to him, Lando thought. He was our hope. As long as Luke Sky walker was alive, we always figured somehow everything would turn out okay.

That's what the Republic was losing today.

Hope.

Given what was going on dirtside, Luke was probably already dead. And even if by some miracle he was still alive, what could he possibly do? Had there ever been a good reason to burden one man with the hope of the whole galaxy?

Though this question was both rhetorical and silent, he got an answer nonetheless, as the lieutenant at ComOps said, in a voice hushed and hoa.r.s.e, "General Calrissian, I'm picking up a signal... a s.h.i.+p on intercept course... General! Transponder signature confirmed-it's the Millennium Falcon!"

Lando felt as if the universe had s.h.i.+fted a couple of degrees to the right. "What?"

Was it possible?

"They're broadcasting, sir. On all bands."

"Put it on speaker."

"... Skywalker. All Republic s.h.i.+ps, disengage and withdraw. All Imperial forces: Group Captain CC-1000 is hereby promoted to air marshal. Air Marshal GC-1000: You are now in command of all Imperial forces in the Taspan system. You will order deactivation of subs.p.a.ce jamming, power down all gravity stations, and execute unconditional surrender with all available speed. When surrender is complete, you will a.s.sist in the evacuation of noncombatants.

"Repeating: This is Luke Skywalker. All Republic s.h.i.+ps..."

"Cut it off." For what seemed like a long, long moment, Lando could only stand and stare into s.p.a.ce. Had he really heard this? Did Luke actually believe he could simply order Imperial stormtroopers to surrender?

That was beyond preposterous. It was completely b.l.o.o.d.y insane.

"Sir?" TacOps said. "TIE fighters are withdrawing."

Lando said, "What?"

ComOps looked over his shoulder. "Wait a Minute reports that the gravity gun has ceased fire." He blinked. "Subs.p.a.ce comm is operational."

"What?"

NavOps could only shake his head. "Ma.s.s-shadows diminis.h.i.+ng-the gravity stations are shutting down, sir! Jump window projected to open in twelve minutes."

And Lando found, to his astonishment, that his feet were striding forward and taking the rest of his body along with them, and his hands were gesturing, and his mouth was snapping off orders about jump coordinates and rendezvous points and search-and-rescue priorities, while his mind was still, for the most part, doing nothing except saying, What?

Fenn Shysa pressed his back against the bulkhead and scowled down at the red-blinking charge meter on his blaster rifle. Ten shots. One grenade. Maybe just enough to last until Lando's counterstrike vaporized them all.

He exchanged a grim look with the mercenary commander who stood in an identical posture on the other side of the blown-open hatch between them. The mercenary commander was at his side because in the proudest Mandalorian tradition, he would cover his men's retreat or die in the attempt. Fenn Shysa, though, wasn't there because he was a commander. Or even because he was commandant of the Mandalorian Protectors, or because he was Lord Mandalore. He was there because he was Fenn Shysa.

He'd discarded his helmet at some point-a glancing hit had disabled his heads-up display, and the malfunction had triggered the autopolarizer to black out his visor altogether-and now he had a fresh burn streak along his temple where a near-miss had set his hair on fire. The haze in the bunker flickered and flashed with scarlet streaks of blasterfire, and it smelled like smoke, roast meat, and lightning.

The blasterfire through the doorway paused for just an instant, only long enough for a pair of thermal dets to tumble in and skid across the floor. On the dets' first bounce, Fenn swung through the hatch and went right, launching his anti-armor grenade on the run. As blasterfire out of the smoke tracked him, the mercenary commander slipped in and went left a millisecond before the blast of fire from the paired thermal dets roared through the hatch behind them.

Fenn located the focal point of the blasterfire. He ran in a tight arc, holding down his rifle's trigger, not aiming, putting fire on their position to keep their heads down and spoil their shooting as he threw aside his empty rifle and turned his tight arc into a straight-line charge, just wide of the line of fire pouring at the stormtrooper position from the mercenary commander. He charged partly because he still had his gauntlet blades, and if he could get into hand-to-hand he could rearm himself with the blasters of dead enemies-but mostly he charged because he was Fenn Shysa, and if today should bring his death, he would fall with his teeth in the throat of the man who killed him.

But before he could get there a new source of blasterfire erupted from a different angle and lanced through the smoke. Fenn clenched his jaw and kept running, because he could take a hit or two and still bring down a few men before he fell-but the blasterfire didn't strike him; it didn't seem to even be aimed at him. The bolts flashed high, directly over the helmets of the stormtroopers toward whom he charged, and were accompanied by authoritative shouts to surrender; but he was ready to die, so he ignored the shouts and put his head down and didn't even slow until he reached the first of the stormtroopers ahead and hooked his left hand's fingers under the jawpiece of the nearest and drew back his right fist to plunge his blade into the trooper's throat-And stopped.

The trooper wasn't fighting back. He wasn't struggling at all. He simply stood with his empty hands raised and waited to see if Fenn would slaughter him like a fattened grundill.

Fenn blinked, unable to believe what he was seeing. He was even less able to believe what he saw next, which was a black-armored storm trooper stepping through the hatchway from which had come the surprise attack. He tensed and gathered himself, but the stormtrooper lifted an armored gauntlet, empty, palm forward.

"Ni dinu ner gaan naakyc, jorcu ni nu copaani kyr'amur ner vod," the stormtrooper said.

Fenn Shysa could only stare in disbelief.

The guy's inflections were kind of weird-he had a definite Coruscanti accent-but his meaning was absolutely clear, and his use of Mando'a was flawless.

Honor my offer of truce, for I would not willingly shed my brother's blood.

"What?"

"Lord Mandalore. Emperor Skywalker sends his regards," the stormtrooper said in Basic. He wore the rank flash of a group captain. "The situation has changed."

Fenn's mouth fell open. "Emperor... Skywalker?"

The situation has changed appeared to be the understatement of the decade.

"We have secured the surface-to-orbit emplacements," the group captain said. "General Calrissian requests that you help us evacuate the civilians. Several thousand civilians, whom we were ordered by Emperor Skywalker to protect."

And in the end, Fenn Shysa could only blink some more and wonder if maybe he'd taken a couple of shots to the head and just hadn't noticed. Or something. But nonetheless he and the mercenary commander followed the group captain back through chamber after chamber choked with rubble and stinking of ozone and charred flesh, back to the scene of the battle at the twin redoubts that guarded the ma.s.sive blast doors. The group captain clicked a brief code into the door panel, and the enormous slabs of durasteel began to grind open.

In the interior control room of the gravity gun, several dozen stormtroopers stood in ranks as orderly as if they were presenting for inspection, their hands clasped on top of their heads. Their rifles had been stacked with millimetric precision in the center of the room; on the deck beside them, their sidearms were arranged in a perfectly s.p.a.ced grid. Behind the weapons stood a pyramid of gleaming black stormtrooper helmets, which reminded Fenn an pleasantly of the stacks of severed heads built by the Jaltiri tribals of Toskhowwl VI.

"I can't-this is incredible" he said. "We couldn't even get close-we were tryin' to cut through the walls and gettin' nowhere..."

"That's because you didn't have the override codes for the blast doors," the group captain said reasonably. "And they just surrendered?"

"At my order." The group captain sounded as though this sort of thing happened every day. "I am their superior officer. No stormtrooper would dream of disobedience."

"If they had?"

"This might well have presented some difficulty, as I and my men have been instructed by Emperor Skywalker to minimize further bloodshed. I'm grateful that I didn't have to make the decision."

"Group Captain..."

"Air Marshal," the stormtrooper corrected him with firm but quiet pride. "I have been honored with a battlefield promotion from the emperor himself."

"Emperor Skywalker,'''' Fenn said slowly, struggling to beat this conversation into something resembling sense.

"The chosen heir of Palpatine the Great," the fresh-minted air marshal said primly. "Haven't you seen Luke Skywalker and the Jedi's Revenge?"

"Urn..."

"It's a dramatization, of course."

"Of course."

"But it's based on actual events."

"Uh-huh."

"It's very powerful. A masterpiece," the air marshal told him. "It changed my life."

Fenn still couldn't get his mind around it. "When a fella says a holodrama changed his life," he said, "he's usually just exaggeratin'."

"I'm not exaggerating."

"I'm startin' to believe you."

"Now, if you would summon your men and follow me," the air marshal said as he turned and walked briskly away. "Though General Calrissian's forces are doing their best to delay or prevent it, catastrophic destruction of this facility may commence as soon as six minutes from now."

He had barely gotten the words out when the floor seemed to drop half a meter, then spring back up to slam them all off their feet. At the same time a terrific roar came up from the floor and out from the walls and battered them like invisible mallets crus.h.i.+ng the breath from their chests. The echoes of the roar shook the dome until its armor shrieked and twisted and started to tear, and chunks of permacrete ripped loose from the walls and fell from the ceiling...

When the roar finally subsided to a mere grinding rumble, Fenn managed to sit up, coughing permacrete dust from his throat. "A bit optimistic about that six minutes, weren't you?"

CHAPTER 17.

The first of the gravity bombs was a direct hit: its impact blasted seven or eight hundred meters of the leading edge of the flying volcano into a bunch of high-velocity asteroids streaking through a cloud of expanding plasma. Two entire banks of the ma.s.sive gravity-drive thrusters that the flying volcano depended upon for maneuvering were destroyed, and the central coordinating nexus was damaged, which destabilized the remaining three banks. These three banks of gravity-drive thrusters began to swing and blast in random directions as their autocompensators tried and failed to discover a configuration that would continue to guide the base along its programmed trajectory.

The resulting stresses began to rip the Shadow Base apart.

This process substantially accelerated with the arrival, in brisk succession, of the rest of the gravity bombs. The three remaining Slash-Es raced in at a steep deflection, overdriving their gravity projectors in a vain hope of dragging them far enough off course that the mountain had a chance to survive, but the bombs came in a great deal faster than they had gone out, having picked up considerable velocity in their slingshot around the planet.

Which meant that some 3,426 civilians-citizens of the Republic who had been violently kidnapped and forced into slavery, who were currently crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in what had once been the Sorting Center-had roughly four minutes to live.

In slightly less than those four minutes, the breakup of the Shadow Base would rupture the pressure seal around the Sorting Center and expose them all to hard vacuum. Further, the only landers available to shuttle evacuees away were not only far too few to hold more than a tenth of their number, but were also currently moored on the exterior of the flying volcano. To reach them, the evacuees would have to cross hundreds of meters of that selfsame hard vacuum-without the benefit of environment suits.

Han stared through the c.o.c.kpit's transparisteel, his face bleak as empty s.p.a.ce. "They don't have a chance."

"They do have a chance," Nick insisted from the seat behind Chewie's seat. "The same chance you had. They've got a Skywalker on their side."

"You think that's enough?"

"It was for you," Nick pointed out. "Skywalker's got a plan. He's always got a plan." He turned to Luke and lowered his voice. "Uh, you do have a plan, don't you?"

"As a matter of fact," Luke said, "I do."

Luke had, before he had ever a.s.sumed command, familiarized himself with every detail of every s.h.i.+p that would form any part of the RRTF. So he knew that three Corellian frigates attached to the task force had been converted from heavy freighters. He also knew that some of their original equipment had been preserved in its original configuration, to avoid a ridiculously expensive refit.

One piece of this original equipment was a conveyor bridge, intended to transfer cargo to or from another s.h.i.+p out of atmosphere. It was essentially a framework supporting a moving belt some six meters wide and a hundred meters long, enclosed in a force tunnel to maintain atmosphere, and carrying multiple small artificial gravity generators, insuring not only that the cargo being transferred would stay in contact with the belt, but also (hat any transfers would take place "downhill."

Lancer and Paleo were equipped with conveyor bridges; they were also the closest to the flying volcano. Lancer, in fact, was able to match trajectories and deploy its conveyor bridge with pinpoint accuracy in less than two minutes.

At the coordinates Luke had given, Lancer discovered only a broad, flat plain of solid rock. Captain Tirossk was understandably reluctant to risk his crew by bringing his s.h.i.+p so close to a flying mountain in the process of shaking itself to pieces simply to deploy a conveyor bridge that n.o.body could possibly use. He growled over the comm, "Once I anchor the bridge and pump in atmo, what then? Will the rock just magically open up and let people out?''''

And because the Captain of Lancer occasionally indulged a guilty pleasure by viewing holothrillers such as Luke Skywalker and the Dragons of Tatooine, when Luke replied simply, "Yes. It will." Tirossk discovered, against all his better instincts, that he believed it would.

Han Solo didn't share that faith. He didn't have any faith to spare. He hunched over the Falcon's controls, glaring out through the c.o.c.kpit's transparisteel at the Shadow Base as it swelled entirely too slowly, his knuckles white on the yoke, his teeth clenched as though he could make the s.h.i.+p go faster by pure force of will. Now he twisted to look at Luke, who crouched behind Chewbacca's seat. "What, your new Melter friends? How do you figure to pull that off when we're a good two minutes out from you getting that hand on the rock?"

Luke said, "Artoo, I need a signal boost."

The astromech, socketed behind Han's seat, extended a datajack toward Luke like a trusting child offering a hand; in the same moment, the comm port on his dome slid open and his parabolic antenna popped up. Luke gripped the extended datajack, and Han watched a thatch of those glossy black crystals grow out of Luke's hand and thread themselves into the datajack's ports.

Han grimaced. "No offense, Luke, but that really creeps me out."

"Imagine it from my side."

"I'd rather not."

Luke didn't quite smile. "Now I need a second or two to concentrate."

The Lancer swung into position, and its conveyor bridge extended like a tongue going for a taste of the rock. An instant after the bluish s.h.i.+mmer of the force tunnel flickered into existence around it, the rock dimpled and began to melt away, retreating like a time-lapse image of a glacier in high summer. Light sprang upward from the hole, which shaped itself perfectly to the force tunnel. The conveyor bridge extended farther down into the hole, all the way down to the civilians and stormtroopers and Mandalorians waiting there.

First onto the bridge came a pair of Mandalorian mercenaries. They leapt up and grabbed the moving belt, flipping their bodies expertly through the ninety-degree gravity s.h.i.+ft; for them, the artificial gravity's orientation made the bridge seem entirely level, the Lancer now appearing to cruise serenely alongside the volcano instead of hovering above it. They strode briskly in the opposite direction of the belt's motion so that they could stay in place and a.s.sist others through the transition.

A dozen pairs of Mando commandos s.p.a.ced themselves along the conveyor bridge, while the balance of them helped organize the civilians on the cavern floor. Solicitous stormtroopers a.s.sisted any who were too incapacitated through age, injury, or disease to make their own way. Mandos along the bridge reminded everyone to "keep walking. Do not run. If you fall and can't get up, move to the side and someone will a.s.sist you." In this fas.h.i.+on the Sorting Center began to swiftly empty, despite the pitching and jouncing of the cavern's floor from the ongoing destruction of the Shadow Base.