Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [132]
It was his shadow nerves, that’s where he felt it, in his internal crystalline network of …
He couldn’t breathe.
The ceramic base of that black armor, its fundamental structure, was not ceramic at all.
He could only stand and blink, and mouth a single word: meltmassif.
As if in confirmation, Vastor collapsed, just crumpled, folding to the deck like a dead man.
“Han …?” Luke said uncertainly. “Han, I think we need to go.”
“Luke!” his comlink crackled. “There’s something wrong with Leia—she’s, I don’t know, she’s having some kind of seizure or something. Luke, what do I do?”
“I don’t know,” Luke said as he watched Vastor’s body do the same: writhe in slow, twisting convulsions like a Riddellian bloodworm baking on a hot fry-rock. There came a clatter from above: blaster rifles slipping from stormtrooper hands to bounce on the stone of the ring ledge. The stormtroopers, each and every one, began to buckle at the knees. They twisted and jerked, bucking in slow motion, clutching at their helmets with gauntleted fingers as though to claw out their own eyes.
“Han,” Luke said. “Go. Go now.”
He reached out with the Force and slammed shut the Falcon’s hatch just as the Vastor body lurched to its feet and reached Luke in one lightning bound. Impossibly powerful hands seized Luke’s shoulders as Vastor lifted him like a doll, and shook him and roared rage and bloodlust into his face, and there was nothing human left in Vastor’s eyes. He sank his teeth into Luke’s throat, and bit down.
And on the ring ledge above, the stormtoopers started to scream.
CHAPTER 18
AIR MARSHAL KLICK COULD NOT IDENTIFY THE SOUND. Even through his consuming agony, pain so intense that he could no longer stand, he was quite certain that he’d never heard this particular sound before, and right now he couldn’t guess what it might be. The agony, however, he understood very well.
The inside of his armor had turned into needles.
Big needles.
They stabbed every centimeter of him from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. And they didn’t stop once they had pierced his skin. Instead, they grew, lancing deeper into his flesh; they seemed to enter his bloodstream and splinter off, tearing at him from the inside. They went up his nose and in behind his eye sockets, drilling right through the bone of his skull and slicing into his brain. Inside his brain they didn’t hurt—no pain nerves—but he could feel them by what they cut away.
They cut away his honor, and his discipline. They cut away his devotion to the emperor, and his pride in his men. They cut away his memory, and his dreams, his hopes, and his fears. The needles in his brain destroyed everything he had ever been, but they didn’t leave mere emptiness behind …
Each of those empty parts of him boiled with savage unreasoning rage.
His final thought as a conscious being was Ah, that’s what the sound is. It’s me.
Screaming.
The sound of his own screams was all he took with him into the dark. Then there was only rage, and a burning need to kill someone.
Anyone.
THE COUCH NICK WAS STRAPPED ONTO WAS BARELY EVEN a couch at all; it was more like a padded shelf in a slight widening of the crawlspace tube that extended back from the shuttle’s lone pilot’s chair. Nick lay with his eyes closed, watching the dark star in his head.
Watching was not exactly what he was doing. The sense he used was not sight, though the dark star appeared to his vision as a patch of deeper night in the infinite black between the stars. Nor did he touch it, though he could feel how cold it was, how it was a bottomless abyss