Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [118]
Once that maw closed around her, she would be lost to the Dark forever.
All right, he thought. I guess I’ll have to do this the old-fashioned way.
He opened his eyes. Han was crouched at his side, his face dark with fear. “Hey, buddy—you all right?”
Luke said, “No.”
Han’s mouth drew into a flat line. “And Leia?”
“She’s alive.”
“And?”
Luke let the shadow in his heart show in his eyes. That was all the answer Han needed. “Okay, then,” he said with a grim nod. “What now?”
Luke stood. “Nick,” he said.
Near one of the Falcon’s landing skids, Nick gave a guilty start. “Uh, yeah?”
“Who is Kar, and what is it you don’t want me to know about him?”
Nick’s jaw dropped. “You—how did you—I mean, what?”
Luke’s expression never flickered. He waited.
“Oh.” Nick lifted a hand to the band of scar around his temples. “I get it,” he sighed. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything you can tell me in five minutes or less,” Luke said, “because that’s about all the time we have to win this fight.”
WITHIN A SECOND AFTER CRONAL HAD GIVEN THE ORDER to engage, the stormtrooper who had received that order triggered a relay that initiated a preprogrammed series of instructions to the crews tending an array of gravity stations buried deep below the surface of Mindor. No one beyond the troopers actually posted to them even knew these gravity stations existed. Arranged in a broad ring around the Shadow Base, they were substantially different from those out among the asteroids—both in technology and function. Rather than the fairly standard gravity wells projected by the stations out in the system, these buried stations generated a phenomenon much more along the lines of the gravity slice that had destroyed the Justice; the technology involved, like that of the gravity slice, was the product of the Imperial weapons-development facility on Mindor’s sister planet, the one that had been destroyed in the Big Crush.
In fact, the phenomenon produced by these buried stations was precisely what had caused the Big Crush.
The stations powered up. Planes of invisible energy spidered through the rock between them, beneath the vast volcanic dome of the Shadow Base; where these planes intersected, they produced lines of gravitational gradient on the order of small black holes, instantly consuming the rock they touched and producing a titanic blast of extremely hard radiation that flashed the surrounding rock into superheated plasma. This released more radiation to vaporize more rock, in a growing cascade that soon sliced through the surface of the planet above in a ring around the base.
To the troopers who crewed the ring of ground-defense turbolaser towers, this was instantly lethal; the radiation flarewall came out of the ground at a shallow angle that touched the towers and vaporized them in a fraction of a second. The Republic marines and trooper infantry, dug in and fighting on the surface around the ion-turbo STOEs on the dome itself, had a second or two to look up into the blinding white that surrounded them before it melted their armor and burned every exposed soldier to fine black ash, while the empty crater left by the dome’s departure filled almost instantly with molten lava that boiled over and spread over the ground on all sides, consuming everything that had survived the initial blast.
The only effects felt by Fenn Shysa and the Mandalorian mercenaries, grimly fighting room-to-room through the gravity-gun emplacement, was the sudden loss of comm channels and a deep rumbling vibration like a distant groundquake, followed by a subtle increase in perceived weight, as though every man had instantly gained a kilo or two.
To the pilots of Rogue Squadron, dogfighting over the base, it looked like the entire volcanic dome had been cupped in a huge bowl of impossibly bright light that swiftly darkened as the ionizing