The huge dark man spread his hands wide and welcoming. He wasn’t so much growling now as making a kind of whirring sound, like a cloud of flying insects.

“He says Here’s your light. What now? Will you shoot me with your empty blaster?”

Han said, “You mean this empty blaster?” and shot him.

The stun blast burst across the huge man’s chest, and he swayed but didn’t fall, so Han shot him again. And once more for good measure, because it was his last shot and he didn’t have anything better to do with it.

“Guess you never heard of the Smuggler’s Click, huh?” Han smiled at him. “Sure did sound like I was trying to fire an empty blaster, didn’t it?”

Han stopped smiling when he realized the huge man was smiling back.

The stun blasts didn’t seem to have affected him at all—though Han discovered to his astonishment that the man was standing ankle-deep in a puddle of liquefied stone.

Before Han could make sense of what he saw, the man had leapt across the floor and seized Han by the throat with one enormous hand and lifted him effortlessly into the air. Han smacked him across the face with his empty blaster hard enough to lay open one cheek to the bone, but the huge man didn’t seem to notice; he only cupped Han’s chin with his other hand and began to push his head back, and back, while pulling with the hand that wrapped Han’s neck and growling.

Cartilage crackled and something popped in his cervical vertebrae, and the only sound Han could make was a thin gargling rasp. He was starting to seriously wonder if maybe Leia’d had the right idea with her don’t antagonize him thing, until she shouted something that sounded, blurred and vague through the roaring in his ears, like Stop! If he dies so do I!, which Han thought was a pretty darn silly threat to make, since both of them dying appeared to be the point of this whole exercise—but to his foggily half-conscious astonishment, the pressure on his neck slackened and the roar in his ears faded as blood began to circulate again.

“Let him go.” Leia stood with the empty hold-out’s emitter jammed up under her own chin and her finger on the trigger. “I mean it.”

The huge hand opened, and Han sagged to the floor, gasping. The man stood with hands once again open and spread. Leia said, “Now back away from him. Slowly.”

The huge man took a step back, but only one.

“Keep going.”

The man dropped to one knee and slowly lowered his right hand to the floor, and in the instant his palm touched the luminescent lichen, the entire cavern went dark.

Han felt an inhumanly swift rush pass by him; he kicked blindly in the darkness but missed. All he could do was croak, “Leia, look out!”

“Han—” Whatever she’d hoped to say was smothered to snorts and gasping; then there were only muffled sounds of struggle. Han scrambled to his feet in the darkness and lunged toward the noise. Something hit him across the legs and he fell—

And the floor he fell on splashed.

This can’t be good, he thought. He managed to make it to his hands and knees … and the gooey floor hardened again, becoming stone that clamped solid around feet, calves, knees, and hands, and over his wrists to halfway up his forearms. “Let me go! Let me go, you freak! Don’t touch her. Don’t you dare touch her! Leia!”

The darkness gave back only empty echoes.

He knelt there, panting in pain and desperation. He tried to yank his hands free. He tried until his elbows creaked and his arms cramped. He couldn’t even wiggle his fingers. His toes he could wiggle—inside his boots—but his legs were entombed even more securely than his hands.

There was nothing he could do. Nothing at all.

And Leia was in the hands of the giant. Who was he? Han couldn’t guess. He couldn’t make any of this make sense.

And he was probably going to die without ever figuring it out.

Trust in the Force, she’d said. Well, if the Force had any plans to give him the occasional hand, he couldn’t think of a better time than right now.

“So?” he said out loud. “You there? Can you spare a little luck for your last Jedi’s best friend?”

From his vest pocket came a burst of static, and then a voice. “Han? Han, do you read? Han, come in! It’s Luke!”

Which would have been a real stroke of luck, practically an outright miracle, the kind of thing that would have made him a believer forever … if it weren’t for the fact that both his hands were encased in stone, so there was no way to fish the comlink out of his pocket and respond.

Han decided that the Force, if it actually did exist and work the way Luke and Leia always claimed it did, had a really, really nasty sense of humor.


- Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Chapter 15