Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [15]
This was not from fear of Shadowspawn’s anger; the Lord of the Shadow Throne was no lunatic like the assassin Vader, to slaughter a loyal subordinate in a fit of pique. What held Klick in place was nothing more nor less than a passionate desire to be worthy of the trust Shadowspawn had placed in him. If doing so would help advance the Great Cause, Klick would stand at attention until he starved to death.
Group Captain Klick had been Squadron Leader Klick nearly a year before, on that black day when Lord Vader’s treason, and his cowardly murder of Palpatine the Great, had allowed the Rebel Alliance to escape the trap at the moons of Endor. The destruction of the second Death Star had been nothing compared with the shattering dislocation Imperial forces had suffered at the loss of their beloved Emperor. Without the leadership of the great man, the Imperial military had splintered into competing factions squabbling over whatever scraps of territory could be secured by local Moffs or regional Admiralty commanders. Conflicts had smoldered, and even some skirmishes had flared, Imperial against Imperial.
Then had come Shadowspawn.
No one knew his real name. No one knew from whence he’d come. But it was clear to all who so much as heard his voice that this was no mere Moff, no general or admiral with delusions of Imperial grandeur. To be received into Shadowspawn’s presence was as awe-inspiring as standing before the Emperor himself.
When rumor had begun to spark throughout the Imperial regions of a new leader, a man of mystery with the cunning and charisma of a second coming of Palpatine, Klick had been promoted to wing commander in the service of Admiral Kraven, the self-styled warlord of a Mid Rim stellar cluster, and sent with his squadrons to destroy this upstart. But the upstart in question had received Klick’s fighter wing with welcome instead of combat … and greeted him with an array of authentic command codes, even Palpatine’s own secret codes that had been buried in the deep core programming Klick had received in the crèche on Kamino. Shadowspawn claimed to have been handpicked by Palpatine to be his steward, to hold the throne in trust for Palpatine’s chosen heir; Palpatine had given these codes to him so that every loyal clone would know Shadowspawn for the galaxy’s rightful, if temporary, ruler.
It had been Shadowspawn who had revealed to Klick the tale of Vader’s treason, the monster’s cowardly murder of his longtime friend and benefactor, a tale so dark and gruesome that even now, Klick shuddered to think of it. Why, Vader would have died years ago, without the caring and generosity of the great man he would eventually assassinate; it was well known among the clones that Darth Vader had been a charity case, his life saved free of any charge at one of Palpatine’s great legacies, the Emperor Palpatine Surgical Reconstruction Center on Coruscant. Palpatine’s caring and generosity had not only saved Vader’s life, but had gifted him with mechanical arms and legs, remaking a helpless cripple into perhaps the most feared and powerful man the galaxy had ever known.
It was all just a small part of the greatest holothriller Klick had ever seen, the one Shadowspawn himself had created and was now circulating among the systems still loyal to the Imperial Dream: Luke Skywalker and the Jedi’s Revenge.
The holothriller had shown in vivid detail how Vader’s madness had grown with his unholy ambition, how the Dark Lord had pretended to play along with Palpatine’s quest to rescue the last remaining child of the Jedi hero, Anakin Skywalker, from the evil web of lies in which the Rebels had snared him. How on the day when Luke Skywalker had finally stood before Palpatine on the bridge of the second Death Star, when the Emperor had declared his great love for Skywalker’s father—who, as all honest clones knew, had been the Emperor