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Kar Vastor crouched like a sabercat coiled to spring. One of his enormous hands rested on a blob of meltmassif. His lips had peeled back to reveal teeth long and curving and sharp as stilettos. Luke blinked, and blinked again. Each of his biceps is bigger than my head …

And around him in the Force swirled a storm of darkness unlike any Luke had experienced since the Emperor’s death: darkness that could snuff his own paltry light like a candle.

But fear could have power over him only if he let it. He breathed deeply, slowly, and with each exhale he opened himself so that all his fear, all his tension and apprehension, his every care and concern drained out of him and flowed away.

How would Ben handle this?

That thought steadied him. He imagined Ben at his side, and held the old Jedi’s kindly smile of warm knowing firmly in his mind. “Blackhole,” he said, and the calm solidity he heard in his own voice reassured him even more. “You have one chance to do this the easy way.”

Blackhole’s response was a low snarl that somehow, in Luke’s brain, translated itself into words. The easy way, he growled, would be to swap. Give yourself to be my body, and I’ll let your sister go.

Luke shook his head and hefted his lightsaber. “If you fight me, you will be destroyed.”

Blackhole’s snarl took on a mocking edge. You think you can take me, boy?

“I’ve killed too many people already today.”

Then how will you destroy me?

“You remember Nick, don’t you? Your puppet Shadowspawn? And his girlfriend. Her name’s Aeona. See, Nick knows all about you.”

Bring him out so he can watch you die.

“Oh, he’s not with me. We dropped off Nick and Aeona on the way here. They’re in that custom shuttle of yours.”

What?

“I told you: Nick knows all about you. Did you think I was lying? He and Aeona are on their way already. On their way to your real body.”

Vastor went very, very still.

“I bet if you close your eyes and concentrate, you can feel where he is. I’m pretty sure you can. Because he can feel where you are. Go ahead, give it a try.”

The eyes of the Vastor body went vacant. Luke, calm now, serene and centered in the Force, could also feel Nick’s location humming in the meltmassif that shadowed his nerves: far, far off, hurtling through space, dodging asteroids and looping around a wide arc that would bring it into an orbital intercept with one particular asteroid—one particular chunk of rock left over from the Big Crush, one chunk that was not like the others, despite its absolutely ordinary appearance. No eye could have picked it out among the countless others that swarmed it on all sides; no instrument could have detected the slightest anomaly.

But Nick didn’t need instruments, and he didn’t need to see it to know where it was.

This chunk of rock—of pure meltmassif, in fact—was very far indeed from ordinary. Within its hollowed core were hidden engines, and a powerful hyperdrive, and the life-support chamber of a very old, very frail man, who from his perfectly concealed position had used a device forged of Sith alchemy not only to control this system, but also to terrorize the galaxy.

“Do you understand now?” Luke asked. “In a few minutes, a very, very angry man will arrive at your life-support capsule. This man does not share my reservations about killing you. I’m pretty sure he’s already trying to decide whether he should blast you to atoms or cut his way in and beat you to death with his bare fists.

“So this is what I mean about the easy way. Walk away. Withdraw from the Vastor body and return to your own. Your gravity stations are powered down. You still have time to jump out of the system before Nick gets to you. But you don’t have very much time. So I’ll tell you again: If you fight me, you will be destroyed.”

The Vastor growl lowered to a threatening rumble. I still have the girl.

He reached up to the shapeless mass of meltmassif; he laid his hand upon it and it slumped to liquid, and then that enormous hand lifted Leia by