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!”


- Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Chapter 15