• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He knelt in darkness, and from that darkness came a long, slow growl that the Force allowed him to understand as words. Jedi Luke Skywalker. Is it done?

By reaching into the Force, he could feel the surviving Republic ships jump away as the artificial mass-shadows of the destroyed gravity stations shrank and vanished. He felt the final breakup of the Shadow Base, and the final destruction of Mindor under the killing radiation of Taspan’s flares.

All gone, now. Everything was gone.

No more shadows.

“Yes,” Luke said. “Yes, it is done.”

Is this where we die?

“I don’t know,” Luke said. “Probably.”

How long?

Luke sighed. “I don’t know that either. I sealed the chamber when I came in, so we’ll have air. For a while. But I don’t know how thick the stone around us might be, now that the mountain’s broken up. I don’t know how much radiation it can block. We could be cooking right now.”

And there is no one who can come for us.

“Their ships can’t protect them. Not from radiation like this.”

Then this will be where our lives end.

“Probably.”

I do not like this place. I do not know how I came to be here, but I know I did not choose this.

“None of us did.”

This is a bad place to die.

“Yes.”

Granted a choice, I would not die beside a Jedi.

“I’m sorry,” Luke said. And meant it.

I have known Jedi. Many, many years ago. That knowing was not a gladness for me. I believed I would never know another, and I rejoiced in that belief.

But it is a gladness for me to be proven wrong.

I am happy to have known you, Jedi Luke Skywalker. You are more than they were.

“That’s—” Luke shook his head blankly, blinking against the darkness. “I mean, thanks, but I barely know anything.”

So you believe. But I say to you: you are greater than the Jedi of former days.

Luke could only frown, and shake his head again. “What makes you say that?”

Because unlike the Knights of old, Jedi Luke Skywalker …

You are not afraid of the dark.

R2-D2 CLUNG TO THE SURFACE OF A TINY ASTEROID AS it rolled along its slow spiral descent toward the stellar sphere of Taspan.

The asteroid was roughly spherical, its diameter perhaps half that of the Millennium Falcon, and it had a very slow rotation, slow enough that the little astromech could drag himself along the asteroid’s dark side by clutching the rock with his manipulator arms. In this way, R2-D2 kept the asteroid between himself and the radiation bursts from Taspan’s stellar flares—bursts that could permanently fry his circuitry in less than a second.

In this way, R2 calculated that he could maintain operational capacity for an additional seven-point-three Standard hours, after which time his asteroid would pass between Taspan and a particularly dense cloud of other asteroids, which would reflect enough hard radiation onto his asteroid’s dark side that he would—he estimated with 89.756 percent certainty—experience sudden catastrophic system failure.

Permanent shutdown.

Should he through some fluke survive that transit, he was reasonably certain—83.973 percent—that he would survive an additional two-point-three Standard hours.

He was not distressed by the prospect of shutdown; he had spent several seconds calculating his overall chance of personal survival before he had judiciously overridden the Falcon’s trash-ejector system and had it bump him into space less than a second before the ship had blasted free of the disintegrating Shadow Base. That chance had been so tiny as to defy the description probability; he had, he calculated, roughly the same chance of remaining operational as he did of undergoing a quantum phase transition that would instantaneously transform him into a Lofquarian gooney bird.

However: He had been instructed more than once, very firmly and in no uncertain terms by Princess Leia herself, to take good care of Luke Skywalker. Considerations of personal survival were irrelevant to his assigned task.

He did not concern himself with survival. Every minute or so, however, he spent a millisecond or two accessing a few directories in his very,