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Luke smiled, a little sadly. “No one calls me kid anymore.”

“Hey, sorry …”

Luke nodded. “Me, too.”

Nick wheezed, “Get up … on the throne.”

“What?”

“Do it! Right now!”

Luke put his hand on the arm of the Shadow Throne. It was smooth and cool as polished glass. “Why?”

“The throne’s … obsidian. This other rock, it’s all meltmassif. Like the bridge.”

“So what?”

“So that.” Where he pointed—just ahead of the approaching stormtroopers—the rock bridge had suddenly and inexplicably thinned, as though it were putty or soft clay, pinched by the fingers of an invisible giant. The stormtroopers hesitated … and the rock bridge parted, its ends recoiling from each other like severed strands of wander-kelp, and the far side, where the stormtroopers now stood uncertainly, literally yanked itself out from under them. They clutched desperately at the retreating stone; one fell, flailing helplessly in the smoky red-washed gloom, until he vanished in a splash of sudden flame at the surface of the lake of fire below. The other found a grip and clung, dangling over the molten lava, but only for an instant: a blue-sparking energy discharge of some sort flicked across the surface of the stone and the trooper’s hands sprang open.

This one didn’t flail as he fell. He just dropped, already unconscious or dead.

The rest of the troopers and the Moon Hat woman on the ledge at the tunnel’s mouth also collapsed as if shot by a bank of stunners … and the ledge sagged beneath them, spreading like hot khaddi-nut butter until their unconscious bodies slid off and tumbled the fifty meters down to fiery death.

Then the stone that had been ledge flowed back upward until it had sealed off the tunnel’s mouth.

“So much for the witnesses …” Nick said.

Luke felt a sudden surge of danger sense that gave him half a second’s warning; he tangled a fist in “Shadowspawn” ’s robe and let the Force lend wings to his heels and might to his arm as he leapt upward from the rock onto the polished obsidian throne just as that same electric crackle played over the stone on which he’d just been standing. “Okay, we’re up. Now what?”

“Can you use the Force to get us out of here somehow?”

“I don’t think so,” Luke said grimly. “But if he wants us dead, all he has to do is turn off the repulsorlift that’s holding up this throne. Or drop the heat screens.”

“He won’t. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Nick said. “He doesn’t want to kill you. He wants to be you.”

Before Luke could ask him what that was supposed to mean, the rock into which the throne had been set suddenly shifted and flowed and stretched into a vast hand holding them in its palm. Huge fingers of stone, each three times as long as Luke was tall, closed over them. Luke brought up his lightsaber instinctively and slashed one finger off at the knuckle … but the rock-finger simply fell beside him and melted and flowed around his feet, instantly hardening to lock him in place.

The cavern boomed with mocking laughter from those concealed speakers.

“I believe the appropriate word here,” said the amplified fake-Vader voice, “is CUT!”

Then a burst of blue energy blasted up Luke’s legs and ripped away his consciousness.

CHAPTER 9

HAN’S MENTAL CATALOGUE OF PREFERENCES WAS AS agile as any other part of him; a couple of squadrons of TIE fighters coming straight at his nose transformed, in the blink of an eye, the top of his list from “At least I’ll roast before I starve” to “I don’t want to die on an empty stomach!”

He whirled and sprinted aft. “Chewie! Go go go GO!” he shouted, heedless of the fact that the Wookiee had already scrambled to the rim and thrown himself off the hull.

Han sprinted headlong as laser blasts splashed around him. Splatters of molten titanium that once had been the Falcon’s armor burned holes in his pants and shirt, and even as he tripped over an EVA grip and belly flopped headfirst off the hull, some coolly disconnected part of his brain filed the datum that the laser bolts looked about ten times