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He actually found himself getting a bit giddy. He cackled softly as he indulged a fleeting fantasy of allowing Skywalker to awaken in the Election Center, so that Cronal could spend his last moments in this decaying body gloating, and boasting, and explaining to Skywalker every last detail of his fiendish plan.

That would be in character, wouldn’t it?

It’s what “Shadowspawn” would do, at any rate … but, sadly, it was not to be. However amusing it might have been, the risk was too great. Darksight, however powerful, was not perfect.

There was, after all, that slight issue about his puppet Shadowspawn surviving the climax of Cronal’s little holothriller. That punch to the forehead … it was all wrong. The final blow should have been delivered with the blade of Skywalker’s lightsaber. That was how Cronal had planned it. How he had seen it.

The lesson was clear: something could still go wrong. No more time would he waste in rehearsal. He must finish this. Now.

He closed his eyes and drove his mind into the Dark.

First he set his will upon the hairline web of meltmassif he’d grown within his own body: an ultrafine network that replicated his nervous system like a shadow cast in mineral crystals. Then he reached forth his hand in the darkness of his life-support shell and stroked the control that would lower the Sunset Crown from its compartment behind his headrest. Once the Sunset Crown was in place upon his head, he no longer had need of controls. He had no need of hands, or mouth, or eyes.

The Sunset Crown was his great achievement, the device that had been the object of his long quest into the depths of Sith alchemy; it was a transmitter, a transformer, that worked via the Force instead of electromagnetism. It converted his disciplined will into a signal that could interact directly with the unique electrochemical structure of meltmassif … and with the alien beings who used meltmassif as an anchor, a physical form to localize their energy-based consciousness, even as a human nervous system anchored and localized the energy-based consciousness called the human mind.

He had used this device to create the Pawns, those mind-locked technozombies who had become Cronal’s eyes and mouths and hands; the Pawns were not only a conduit for his orders, but a necessary stepping-stone on his path toward self-transformation. Each Pawn had been chosen because he or she could touch the Dark—what the ignorant Jedi and the deluded Sith called being “Force-sensitive”—and because their wills could be utterly controlled by his own, through the Sunset Crown’s influence over the crystals of meltmassif seeded within their skulls. On his command, their wills would align with his own and provide the added boost to his own Dark-touch necessary to make the transfer of his consciousness permanent.

When his mind awakened the power of the Sunset Crown, it sent his consciousness outward, an expanding sphere of will. When it touched the crystals in the meltmassif that lined every tunnel, every chamber, every nook and cranny of his entire vast base, the crystals resonated with the frequency of his desire, like a sounding board the size of the surrounding volcanic dome. He became the base, and the base became him; all within the base registered in the part of his brain that had once only registered his kinesthetic sense of his body position.

Throughout the base, his thirty-nine most Force-powerful Pawns instantly dropped what they were doing and converged on the Election Center, where Luke Skywalker already lay embedded in the hardened stone of the primary Pawning Table, his lightsaber buried in the rock beside him.

The fortieth, and most powerful, Pawn was already there: his puppet Shadowspawn, having unexpectedly survived the climax of Cronal’s little holothriller, had been delivered to the same chamber. When this was all over, Cronal intended to discover exactly why the deadman interlock in “Shadowspawn” ’s Crown had failed to activate, but until then, there was no reason to simply discard him; he