The Shadow Base was now breaking up in earnest; one of its damaged gravity drives had already ripped free, spinning away and taking with it a kilometer or so of the base’s rock. The remaining two gravity drives swung through opposing cycles of thrust-angle that were ripping what was left of the base in half. On the base’s surface, the Republic marines found that their docile prisoners were docile no longer. With no regard for their own lives, or for anyone else’s, they mobbed their captors, the troopers in front absorbing fire until the ones that followed could swarm over the dead and dying.

There was, in the whole of the Taspan system, only one faint reason for any hope at all.

Deep within the remains of the base, in the heart of the Election Center itself, Kar Vastor could find nowhere else to run.

Kar crouched, his bare back against an icy wall, in a stone chamber filled with the dead. Corpses in long robes littered the floor, and the room stank of corruption; the only light came from blue spark-chains that crackled across the ceiling. His heart hammered against his ribs, and his breath rasped in his throat. His teeth were bared in an involuntary snarl, and his fingers scrabbled against the stone at his back as if he could somehow dig his way through. All from fear of the small blond man.

The same small blond man who now stood on the far side of the piles of dead bodies, inoffensive and mild, his expression friendly, his hands, empty of weapons, spread wide in invitation.

Kar did not know where this place might be, or how he had come to be here; he had no memory of having been anywhere like this maze of stone peopled only by dead men. He knew only that he had never felt such terror.

Not as a child, lost and alone in the lethal jungles of his homeworld; not in the dock of the Galactic Court on Coruscant; not even in the infinite deadly dark of Kessel’s spice mines. He had come back to himself in the midst of battle, blind with rage, surrounded by armed men on a starship’s hull. He remembered seizing this little man in his unbreakable grip; he remembered sinking his needle teeth into the little man’s throat, biting down like a vine cat strangling an akk wolf.

And he remembered what the little man had done to him.

The hands that scrabbled against the wall at his back still sprouted the black crystal hairs. His mouth was full of these crystal hairs, stiff and sharp as needles; when he worked his jaw, they cut and slashed at his palate and punctured his gums. And he could feel them inside him, throughout his body, an infection of dead stone within his living flesh …

He snarled wordless animal sounds. What are you?

The small blond man started toward him. “I’m not your enemy, Kar.”

Stay back!

“I can’t. Too many lives depend on me.”

I’ll kill you! Kar gathered himself to spring. I will rip your head from your body. I will feast upon your guts!

“It’s all right to be afraid, Kar. This is a frightening place. Things have been done to you here that should never be done to anyone.”

It’s so … dead. Something broke inside him then; his rage and terror fled, and he sagged to his knees. Nothing but stone and corpses. Everything dead. Dead within. Dead without. Dead forever.

“Not everything.” Though the small blond man had to step over corpses to reach Kar’s side, his expression of sympathy and compassion never flickered. “You’re alive, Kar. I’m alive.”

That means nothing. Kar’s eyes burned as if he’d dipped his face in sand. We mean nothing.

“We’re the only meaning there is.” The small blond man extended a hand. “Trust me or kill me, Kar. In the end, it’ll come out the same. I will not harm you.”

What are you? His snarl had gone plaintive. What do you want from me?

“I’m a Jedi. My name is Luke Skywalker,” the small blond man said. “And I want you to take my hand.”


- Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Chapter 18