All he got in reply was more howling, so he went up another rung on the gangway and peered around. The wreckage of the Falcon’s dorsal quad turret made him wince; all that was left was a flattened mass of crumpled transparisteel under great big gleaming chunks of what looked like obsidian. He made a mental note to bill the repairs to Lando.

Another couple of steps up the gangway raised his angle of vision enough that he could see the crown of the big man’s shaved head over the wreckage and rubble. One step more showed him Luke’s limp, unresisting form hanging from the big man’s grip while that son of a Pervickian dung camel chewed on Luke’s neck—!

Han cleared the hatch in a single leap, and by the time his feet touched the hull his blaster was in his hand. “Hey, monkey-breath! Chew on this!”

But he couldn’t just fire from the hip; Luke was in the way and Han knew stun blasts were useless against the Vastor body. In the fraction of a second that it took him to bring the DL-44 up to eye level to align the sights, the big man’s right hand came free of Luke’s shoulder with a weird ripping sound. Luke’s shoulder, where that hand had been, showed black and glistening like the handful of crystal hairs back in the Melter crypt, and Vastor’s hand was full of the same—and while Han was trying to make sense of that, some invisible force snatched his blaster away.

I have got to learn to hang on to that thing with both hands! Han bounded forward, swept up a jagged hunk of obsidian the size of his doubled fists, and charged, cranking the black glass rock back over his shoulder as if he was going to hurl it overhand—but he hurled himself instead, leaping up onto the rubble, then down again in a headlong dive with the chunk raised high until a scarlet blaster bolt slashed past his face and blew the hunk of obsidian right out of his hand.

He almost went face-first into the hull armor but managed to turn his crash into a clumsy somersault that left him flat on his back, dazed and gasping and staring up at the business end of his blaster. Which was in Luke’s hand.

Luke said, “Didn’t I tell you to go?”

While Han was still blankly mumbling, “Yow. Nice shooting. I think,” the enormous Vastor-thing moaned like someone in terrible pain or fear or both. One huge hand slammed against Luke’s chest, and for all Han could tell, it was like Vastor was the one in trouble and trying desperately to escape. An instant later, Vastor ripped his mouth free of Luke’s neck—and his mouth was full of those black crystal hairs. The wound in Luke’s neck wasn’t bleeding, it was sprouting a thatch of that same blackly glistening fur that was writhing and twisting and growing like it was alive. Vastor gasped like a drowning man and yanked his other hand off Luke’s arm, and before Han could manage even a faint guess as to what was actually going on, Vastor whirled, took four or five running steps for momentum, and made a great big flying leap right off the ship.

Han had no idea if Vastor had fallen to his death, or if he’d caught a grip on the wall, or had maybe even started flapping his arms and flew into orbit. He could only stare up at his young friend and murmur plaintively, “Luke, what the hell?”

“You would have killed him,” Luke said distantly.

“Oh, you think? We kill bad guys. It’s what we do.”

“I don’t,” Luke said. “Not if I can help it. Not anymore.” He looked down at Han with a faint start, as though he’d been lost in a daydream and only now realized where they both were. Wearing a faintly bemused half smile, he flipped the DL-44 end-for-end and offered its grip to Han. “Here. You’ll need this.”

“For what?” Han asked, just as he was starting to realize that the shaft around the Falcon had suddenly gone quiet.

The stormtroopers had stopped screaming.

“Uh-oh.”

He snatched his pistol out of Luke’s hand and popped to his feet as blasters opened up on all sides to rain plasma upon them in a roaring flood. Luke’s lightsaber flared to life and lashed out in invisibly fast arcs that sent bolts out and away in a fan, blasting into the rock of the shaft walls. Choking red-black smoke billowed out from the points of impact, shrouding them in gloom so dense that the Falcon’s exterior floodlights only gave off a yellow-brown glow.

“Stick close.” Luke’s voice was tight with concentration. “I’m not used to having to cover somebody else.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice.” Han squeezed himself into a substantially less-than-Han-sized space at Luke’s back and had barely time to wish that he knew a Jedi who was just a little taller before the Falcon bucked as if it had been kicked. The ship bounced off the shaft wall hard enough that Han had to grab Luke’s shoulder to stay upright. “Chewie, dammit!”

“Not his fault,” Luke said tightly, still carving smoke with his blade to catch stray blaster bolts. “The ship didn’t move. The shaft did. The mountain’s breaking up.”

“Oh, great! Any more good news?”

“Yes,” Luke said. “We’re being boarded.”

[...]

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.


- Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, Chapter 18