Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [27]
Only the Lancer, yanked unexpectedly from hyperspace by the Imperial gravity mines half a light-hour out from Mindor, had the chance to catch the actual landing, such as it was.
Lieutenant Devalo, at ComOps, went ashen as he picked up the broadcast from the signal buoy; when he reported it to Captain Tirossk, the captain’s response was to instantly aim the Lancer’s most powerful optical scope at the day-night terminator of the distant planet. The aged ship’s sensor suite had just barely managed to focus on an image of a long, long smoke trail, and was tracking it down through the atmosphere when it picked up the fringes of a brilliant white flash, followed by a vast expanding ball of smoke-laced flame.
“Oh,” Tirossk said numbly. There was no thought of obscenity now; how he felt could not be expressed in words.
“Was that—” Devalo had to swallow before he could go on. “Was that the Justice?”
“I’m afraid it must have been.” Tirossk sank into his command chair. “I’m afraid …”
“General Skywalker’s ship?”
“No one could have survived that,” Tirossk said. “We’re half a light-hour out. What we just saw, it happened thirty minutes ago.”
Devalo couldn’t even ask the question, but he didn’t have to.
“He died half an hour ago.” Tirossk shook his head, blankly astonished at the bleak weight that settled onto him. “Luke Skywalker is dead.”
CHAPTER 5
HAN SOLO STRETCHED BACK FAR ENOUGH IN THE CONFERENCE room chair that when he laced his fingers together behind his head, he had to jam one knee up under the table to keep from toppling over. He stared at the ceiling and wondered, for the three or four hundredth time that day, if it was possible to die of boredom.
He decided, as he had all the other times, that if such a thing were possible he would have bumped off at least two days ago. If there was anything in the galaxy he hated more than sitting around in a room for hours on end with nothing to do but listen to people yap, it had to be sitting around in a room for hours with nothing to do except listen to Mandalorians yap.
Man, he hated those guys!
Han was no bigot; despite some unfortunate experiences with a certain Mando bounty hunter—who, if the Force believed in justice, was still to this very day screaming as he slowly dissolved in a sarlacc’s digestive juices—he didn’t hate Mandalorians in general. He’d just never met a single one of these stuck-up more-studly-than-thou self-proclaimed MESFACs (Masters of Every Single Flippin’ Aspect of Combat) who could even so much as say “Good morning” without making it sound like he was really saying It better be a good morning, because if you pull anything, I will without hesitation jariler your weak peace-lovin’ Corellian butt till you don’t even know what galaxy you’re in.
He didn’t hate Mandos in general; he only hated the ones he’d actually met.
Further, some screwed-up sense of honor or ethnic pride or something had somehow made these particular Mandalorians unwilling to speak Basic during these talks. Which didn’t stop them from yapping, of course. They just yapped in Mando’a, a language that, to Han’s more-than-somewhat biased ear, made them sound like a pride of sand panthers trying to cough up hairballs bigger than his head. And this hairball-hacking then had to be dutifully translated into Basic for the convenience of the chief New Republic negotiator by the chief negotiator’s high-strung, hypersensitive, relentlessly neurotic protocol droid, who somehow among his six million flippin’ forms of communication had never managed to lose that snooty Core Worlds accent that, after hearing it nonstop for a couple of days cooped up in this room with nothing better to do, made Han want to whop him so hard he’d land somewhere back on Tatooine.
The main consideration that stopped him from engaging in catastrophic droid-remodeling was the presence beside him of the New Republic’s chief negotiator, who was so breathtakingly beautiful that Han couldn’t even glance her way without feeling