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“Not before I was born.” The woman stared at Luke’s image. “This little fella belongs to a Jedi. That’s who he’s waiting for. I’m thinking maybe we should wait with him—I’d really like to meet this Jedi, when he finally shows up. We could use his help.”

“What if whoever shows up turns out not to be a Jedi?”

She stood, and shook off that gentle expression like a bad dream. “Then we take their ship and leave ’em to the Melters.” She shrugged. “Saves having to kill them ourselves.”

THE GUNSHIP SET DOWN ON A BROAD LANDING FIELD IN the shadow of turbolaser towers. One of the black-armored stormtroopers gestured with his blaster rifle. “Out.”

Luke looked at the towers, at the hundreds of gunships in neatly ordered ranks, up at the mouths of caverns high above on the curve of the volcanic dome, in and out of which flew clouds of TIE fighters.

They sure didn’t seem worried about him getting a look at their defenses. No surprise there; he didn’t figure they had any plans to ever let him go.

A whole platoon of stormtroopers in gleaming black armor surrounded him, marching with weapons ready. The two behind him had blaster carbines aimed at the middle of his back, and fingers on their triggers. Their sergeant marched ahead. Behind them all, at a vantage that kept them all in view together, walked what Luke had come to assume was some kind of political officer.

Rather than armor, this individual wore dark, vaguely Vaderish clothing and a cape, and a curious hat, or headgear—a jet-black version of the odd half-moon hat that the putative Lord Shadowspawn had worn in the holoprojections. This individual had the pale, frozen face and jet-black eyes of Shadowspawn, as well—exactly, in fact. Luke might have assumed that this individual was in fact Shadowspawn himself, were it not that the drape of the jet-black cape clearly showed that the body beneath was female—and a short, fairly plump female at that.

She carried his lightsaber, and she stank of the dark side.

She’d been on the troop carrier that had brought him here from the caves. She never spoke, but her slightest gesture was enough to make a trooper snap to his duty with a will. Here in the installation, among the hundreds, maybe thousands of troopers, he had seen some dozens of these headgear types. They all had the same face—had to be some sort of holomask—and all of them seemed to get the same deference from the black stormtroopers. And there didn’t seem to be any Imperial regulars here at all, just the black stormtroopers and these dark-side Moon Hats.

And the Moon Hats all had this same dark-side stink: an aura of wrongness so palpable that Luke could close his eyes and target them by the revulsion they inspired.

The base’s defenses weren’t impressive, just five ion-turbo surface-to-orbit dual cannons and a double ring of turbolaser batteries that appeared to be calibrated for surface work—antiarmor and the like. Of course, those were only the fixed defenses; what sorts of mobile fighting craft the warlord might possess was impossible to guess, because the base itself appeared to have been hollowed out of the interior of a volcanic dome more than five kilometers across. Luke figured that with a little crowding, he could have fit most of the RRTF inside there and had room to spare—especially since there was no way to know how deep some of those vast steam-billowing caverns might prove to be.

And there was a single emplacement of some kind at the uppermost curve of the volcanic dome, in the middle of the ring of surface-to-orbit cannons. It appeared to be covered in some kind of heavily armored shell. He turned to one of the stormtroopers who marched at his side and pointed up at it. “Tell me what that is.”

He felt a pulse from the Force, and he looked over his shoulder in time to see the Moon Hat touch fingertips to her lips, then flatten her hand, palm down. One of the troopers behind him jabbed Luke in the kidney with the muzzle of his carbine. Hard. “You heard her.”

“I