Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Part 31

"I don't care."

"Are you kidding?"

She shrugged, and gave him a smile that even now, even here, minutes from their deaths, made his heart race and his breath go short. "We'll make it a picnic," she said. "We'll have a picnic and watch the sun rise. One last time."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, that sounds good."

He stripped some ration packs off dead troopers, and they sat together, shoulder to shoulder, eating in silence as the horizon began to blaze as though the planet were on fire.

"Well, one thing's for sure." Han pushed an echo of his old half grin onto his face. "This is one meal we'll never forget as long as we live, huh?"

Leia smiled, though her eyes sparkled with tears. "Always the joker. Even now. Even here."

Han nodded. "Well, y'know, we always get romantic when we're about to die. It was getting repet.i.tive."

The ground beneath them spasmed once, then again, and Leia said, "I think we should respect the tradition."

"You do?"

"Kiss me, Han. One last time." She lifted a hand to his cheek. Her touch was warm and dry, and impossibly precious to him. "Once for all the kisses we'll never get."

He gathered her into his arms and lowered his face to hers-and then a great Wookiee yelp of joy that echoed all the way from the c.o.c.kpit yanked his head up and popped open his eyes. "What? Chewie, you're sure?"

Chewbacca pounded on the c.o.c.kpit's transparisteel and waved both his arms, frantically beckoning. Han sprang to his feet and lifted Leia as though she weighed nothing at all. "Han-what is it?" she gasped. "What did he say?"

"All those other kisses you were talking about?" His eyes alight, he pulled her toward the Falcon's freight lift. "He said if we move fast, we might get every one of 'em after all!"

One by one, inside his head, Luke felt the stars wink out.

Linked through Kar to Cronal, through Cronal to the Shadow Crown, and through the Crown's ancient powers of Sith alchemy to every Melter mind in every sc.r.a.p of meltma.s.sif in the galaxy, Luke had shone upon them with the light of the Force. This light had drawn them as moonlight draws a shadowmoth, and they found that its inexhaustible flood could fill them to overflowing. Never again would they feed upon light; there would never be the need. They would forever s.h.i.+ne with light of their own.

And so they came out from every place the Dark had put them.

Luke felt them go.

He felt them leave the gravity stations. He felt them leave the Shadow Crown, and Cronal's body, and Leia's and Kar's and his own.

And he felt the stormtroopers, in all their thousands throughout the system. He felt every single man who wore Cronal's black armor. He felt the uncontrollable rage and bloodl.u.s.t, the almost-mindless battle frenzy that the crystals in their brains had triggered and now sustained. He felt the damage that had been done by the brutal force of the crystals' growth.

He felt what the crystals' exit would do.

He did not look away. He did not withdraw his perception. He owed these men that much. Enemies they might be, but still they were men.

None of them had wanted this. None had volunteered for this. None had even cooperated. This had been done to them with casual disregard for their humanity; Luke could not allow its undoing to be the same.

So he stayed with them as the meltma.s.sif in their bodies and their brains liquefied. He stayed with them as it poured forth from their every pore. He stayed with them as the exit of the meltma.s.sif triggered their deadman interlocks.

He stayed with them while every stormtrooper in the entire system, all at once in all their thousands, sagged and shuddered.

And died.

Luke felt every death.

It was all he could do for them.

When he finally withdrew his mind from the Dark, Luke found himself in darkness of the wholly ordinary sort. The flicker of the energy discharge had fled from the chamber that had once been the Election Center.

He knelt in darkness, and from that darkness came a long, slow growl that the Force allowed him to understand as words. Jedi Luke Skywalker. Is it done?

By reaching into the Force, he could feel the surviving Republic s.h.i.+ps jump away as the artificial ma.s.s-shadows of the destroyed gravity stations shrank and vanished. He felt the final breakup of the Shadow Base, and the final destruction of Mindor under the killing radiation of Taspan's flares.

All gone, now. Everything was gone.

No more shadows.

"Yes," Luke said. "Yes, it is done."

Is this where we die?

"I don't know," Luke said. "Probably."

How long?

Luke sighed. "I don't know that either. I sealed the chamber when I came in, so we'll have air. For a while. But I don't know how thick the stone around us might be, now that the mountain's broken up. I don't know how much radiation it can block. We could be cooking right now."

And there is no one who can come for us.

"Their s.h.i.+ps can't protect them. Not from radiation like this."

Then this will be where our lives end.

"Probably."

I do not like this place. I do not know how I came to be here, but I know I did not choose this "None of us did."

This is a bad place to die.

"Yes."

Granted a choice, I would not die beside a Jedi.

"I'm sorry," Luke said. And meant it.

I have known Jedi. Many, many years ago. That knowing was not a gladness for me. I believed I would never know another, and I rejoiced in that belief.

But it is a gladness for me to be proven wrong.

I am happy to have known you, Jedi Luke Skywalker. You are more than they were.

"That's-' Luke shook his head blankly, blinking against the darkness. "I mean, thanks, but I barely know anything"

So you believe. But I say to you: you are greater than the Jedi of former days.

Luke could only frown, and shake his head again. "What makes you say that?"

Because unlike the Knights of old, Jedi Luke Skywalker...

You are not afraid of the dark.

R2-D2 clung to the surface of a tiny asteroid as it rolled along its slow spiral descent toward the stellar sphere of Taspan.

The asteroid was roughly spherical, its diameter perhaps half that of the Millennium Falcon, and it had a very slow rotation, slow enough that the little astromech could drag himself along the asteroid's dark side by clutching the rock with his manipulator arms. In this way, R2-D2 kept the asteroid between himself and the radiation bursts from Taspan's stellar flares-bursts that could permanently fry his circuitry in less than a second.

In this way, R2 calculated that he could maintain operational capacity for an additional seven-point-three Standard hours, after which time his asteroid would pa.s.s between Taspan and a particularly dense cloud of other asteroids, which would reflect enough hard radiation onto his asteroid's dark side that he would-he estimated witJh 89.756 percent certainty-experience sudden catastrophic system failure.

Permanent shutdown.

Should he through some fluke survive that transit, he was reasonably certain-83.973 percent-that he would survive an additional two-point-three Standard hours.

He was not distressed by the prospect of shutdown; he had spent several seconds calculating his overall chance of personal survival before he had judiciously overridden the Falcon's trash-ejector system and had it b.u.mp him into s.p.a.ce less than a second before the s.h.i.+p had blasted free of the disintegrating Shadow Base. That chance had been so tiny as to defy the description probability; he had, he calculated, roughly the same chance of remaining operational as he did of undergoing a quantum phase transition that would instantaneously transform him into a Lofquarian gooney bird.

However: He had been instructed more than once, very firmly and in no uncertain terms by Princess Leia herself, to take good care of Luke Skywalker. Considerations of personal survival were irrelevant to his a.s.signed task.

He did not concern himself with survival. Every minute or so, however, he spent a millisecond or two accessing a few directories in his very, very extensive library of recordings of his adventures with the only droid in his long, long existence who he could truthfully label my friend: C-3P0. He did not antic.i.p.ate that he would miss C-3P0; he did not antic.i.p.ate that he would be capable of missing anyone or anything. He did, however, experience a peculiar sensation in his social-interaction subroutines every time he accessed these particular directories. It was a sensation both positive and negative, and it was largely impossible, to R2's considerable puzzlement, to quantify.

He supposed, after much computation, that he must be regretting that he would never see his friend again, while at the same time he was taking considerable comfort from the knowledge that his friend was, and would be for the foreseeable future, quite safe.

Somehow that seemed to make him more able to focus on the task at hand.

When the Falcon had departed without Luke on board, R2 had known exactly what to do, and he had done it. Once free of the trash ejector, he had tuned his sensor suite to register Master Luke's personal chemical signature-his scent-and tracked Luke's progress through the Shadow Base, right up until the trail had ended abruptly at a stone wall. Having no instructions or programming that appeared to offer him any useful alternative courses of action, he had settled in to wait.

R2 had waited while the gravity stations depowered, and while the fleet departed. He had waited through the breakup of the Shadow Base, and through the explosion of the planet. And he was waiting still.

He was entirely-one hundred percent-certain that Luke had been on the opposite side of that stone wall, which was now part of the surface of this tiny asteroid.

Luke was inside this hall of rock, and though Luke's own chance of personal survival was only fractionally greater than R2's-which was to say, for all practical purposes, nonexistent-the astromech would continue to clamber along the asteroid's dark side and keep himself functional until he could do so no longer, because there remained a very slight, but measurable, chance that he might still he able to somehow help.

A peculiar motion among the starfield attracted his attention. One particular asteroid-one point of very bright radiation reflected from Taspan-moved somewhat more across the system's plane of the ecliptic than along it. Further: This bright point's motion was clearly retrograde; its heading was against the general direction of the asteroid field. Finally: This point of light did not travel with the consistent velocity that would be expected from a body whose motion was subject only to the laws of orbital mechanics; on the contrary, it accelerated, then slowed, then sped up again.

There was only one probable explanation.

Activating the telescopic zoom feature of his optical sensor, he was able to confirm his calculation: This object was indeed a s.h.i.+p.

Specifically, a Lambda T-4a shuttle.

R2-D2 opened the comm hatch in his dome and extended his parabolic antenna. He aimed it precisely-after calculating the light-speed delay-at where the shuttle would be when his transmission would arrive, and began to broadcast a distress beacon code with all his considerable energy. Once he had established contact with the shuttle's brain, he was able to explain the details of the situation and trust that the s.h.i.+p's brain would be able to communicate the pertinent facts to its pilot.

The shuttle's vector s.h.i.+fted to an intercept course with gratifying alacrity. The shuttle swung around to the asteroid's light side, extended a docking claw, and seized the asteroid, drawing them close enough together to enclose the asteroid in its hyperdrive envelope. Then it made the jump to lightspeed.

R2-D2 spent the hypers.p.a.ce transition reviewing his calculations, but they were impeccable.

The designs of an evil but brilliant man had been thwarted. Luke would survive, Princess Leia and Han Solo had escaped, C-3P0 was a.s.suredly safe, and R2-D2-to the best of his self-diagnostic subroutine's ability to determine-had not, in fact, undergone a quantum phase transition into a Lofquarian gooney bird.

The odds against this outcome were literally incalculable.

The universe, R2 decided, was an astonis.h.i.+ng place.

DEBRIEFING.

Geptun ran a finger under his uniform's collar and grimaced at finding it damp. Really, Skywalker kept his quarters unpleasantly hot. He continued to pace the length of the sitting room, however, despite the undeniable fact that this was only causing him to sweat even more. He continued to pace because simply sitting, he'd discovered, was intolerable.

How was it possible he could be so nervous? Imagine, at such an age, after such a long and varied life, to find oneself very nearly overcome with what could only be described as authorial vanity.

He was entirely flabbergasted at how desperately he wanted-how badly he needed-Skywalker to like the story.

The expression on Skywalker's face when the young Jedi returned to the sitting room hinted rather broadly that in this, as in so many other things, Geptun was destined to be disappointed.

Skywalker practically threw the holoreader at him. "What is this-this garbage?"

"Ah." Geptun lowered himself onto a settee with a long, slow sigh. "It's not to your taste, then."

"My taste? My taste?" Skywalker flushed bright red; veins stood out on his forehead from the effort he expended in controlling what was clearly considerable anger. "It's terrible. It's the worst thing I've ever read!"

"Ah." Geptun leaned forward and slowly, a little sadly, retrieved the holoreader. "Well, then. I'm sorry you don't care for it. I'll just be, well, on my way, then."

"You will not." Though not a large man, Skywalker seemed to tower over him. "I hired you to investigate. I hired you to write a report. An indictment. Instead you bring me this? It reads like one of those blasted holothrillers!"

"Well... yes," Geptun said. "There's a reason for that."

This brought Skywalker to a full stop. "What?"

"I have, well..." Geptun coughed. "I've already sold the holo rights."

Skywalker sank into a chair. The flush drained from his cheeks. "I don't believe it."

Geptun's initial disappointment had faded already, and he was const.i.tutionally incapable of shame. "Did we not understand each other? Why do you think I agreed to do this in the first place?"

"For money," Skywalker practically spat. "But I'm not paying you for this."

"Suit yourself. The holo thriller production company paid me ten times what you agreed to pay-and that was just for the production rights; I'm also getting points on the back end. They like it so much they've already optioned my next two Luke Skywalker Adventures."

"Next two-? Please tell me you're joking."