Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [75]
The cavern was filled with Moon Hats.
Each and every one among them stood motionless with head lowered, hands folded invisibly within the drape of their sleeves. Each and every one among them faced a large stone pedestal that stood empty in the center of the room. The pedestal was of a single piece with the floor, but not as though it had been carved from it; it looked as if it had grown there, like a tumor. It was about a meter and a half high, and its flat top was roughly the same size and shape as a comfortable single bed. From time to time, with a kind of regularized increase of frequency like the tide coming in, the electric discharge from the walls and ceiling would pause, and shiver in place as though captured between electrodes; then with a painfully bright flash, they would converge upon the stone pedestal and vanish into its surface.
Luke understood. That’s me, he thought. That’s where I am. Buried alive in solid rock.
This didn’t particularly bother him; after spending eternity at the end of the universe, mere death didn’t mean much at all. Death was better than what Blackhole was trying to do to him. With him.
As him.
He didn’t know if he could save himself, but he might be able to help these people. That would have to be enough.
Luke reached out through the crystals with the Force … and found nothing beyond this one lone brain to grasp. Though he could feel them clearly, though he could listen to the whisper of the crystals in their heads, he could find no surface on those crystals that his will could grasp. Exactly like his dream: these were the pebbles of featureless graphite. Nothing there but the Dark.
This one alone had that fissure of light …
In the distant reaches of his memory, he found a lesson of Yoda’s, from one long solstice night, deep in the jungle near Dagobah’s equator. When to the Force you truly give yourself, all you do expresses the truth of who you are, Yoda had said, leaning forward so that the knattik-root campfire painted blue shadows within the deep creases of his ancient face. Then through you the Force will flow, and guide your hand it will, until the greatest good might come of your smallest gesture.
He’d never really understood that lesson. He’d only tried to live according to the principle … but now there was an image slowly breaching the surface of his consciousness. An image of his own hand, delivering a punch.
Just to the right of center, on the forehead of “Lord Shadowspawn.” Which had been precisely the impact required to crack the crystalline matrix inside his brain.
A simple act of mercy, born of no other desire than to end a conflict without taking a life, now had become his own lifeline, by which he could draw himself back from the eternal nothing at the end of the universe.
He could feel his connection now, could sense the control he might exert through this connection; a simple twist of will would seize this body and make it act at his command—he could even, he sensed, send his power with the Force through this body to serve his desire. He could make this man his puppet, and forge his own escape.
Or …
He could abandon his fear, and express the truth of who he was.
For Luke Skywalker, this was not even a choice. Instead of a command, he sent through the link a friendly suggestion.
Hey, Nick, he sent. Why don’t you wake up?
THE FIRST INKLING CRONAL GOT THAT SOMETHING WAS going terribly wrong came in the form of an alarm Klaxon blaring inside his life-support chamber. The Klaxon shattered his concentration and jerked him back into his own body; for a long moment that seemed to stretch on toward forever, his desiccated flesh could only