Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [77]
All but one.
SOMEBODY HAD SWITCHED ON THE LIGHTS INSIDE Nick’s head.
He jerked awake, blinking. His eyes wouldn’t focus. “Man … I have been having the weirdest dream …”
He tried to rub his eyes, but his hands were tangled in something … what was this, sleeves? Since when did he wear pajamas? Especially pajamas made out of brocade so thick he could have used it as a survival tent on a Karthrexian glacier … And his head hurt, too, and his neck was stiff, because his head had gained a couple of dozen kilos—must have been some serious party, to leave him with this bad a hangover—and when he did finally free his hands and rub his eyes and massage his vision back into something resembling working order, he took in his surroundings … and blinked some more.
He was standing in a stone chamber along with about forty other people who were all wearing funny hats and robes just like his, who all stood motionless and silent in a crowd around a big stone pedestal with heads lowered and hands folded inside their sleeves, and he said, “Oh, okay. That explains it.”
It hadn’t been a dream.
Okay, sure, a nightmare, maybe—but he was wide awake now and the nightmare was still going on, which meant it was as real as the deep ache in his feet, not to mention his back and his neck. How long had he been standing like this, anyway? Plus there was this knuckle-sized knot of a bruise over his right eye …
Oh, he thought. Oh yeah, I remember.
For a long, long moment, he didn’t move.
He couldn’t guess exactly how long he’d have to make his moves from the first instant he attracted Blackhole’s attention, but he had a pretty good idea what the old ruskakk’s reaction was gonna be: the walls and floor and ceiling of this whole chamber were made of meltmassif.
This was always the problem with Jedi, Nick decided. Whenever there were Jedi around, you ended up in some kind of trouble that nobody in the galaxy could possibly survive. Not even the Jedi himself. And this time, it wasn’t even about dying. It was about getting stuck as Blackhole’s sock puppet for the rest of his natural life. So what was he supposed to do?
On the other hand, doing nothing sure wouldn’t make anything better. He could feel Blackhole inside his head—a cold slimy goo like the trail left behind by a Xerthian hound-slug on a damp autumn day—and he could feel, too, that Blackhole could snatch back control of Nick’s arms and legs and brain anytime he felt like it; the only reason Nick had any self-awareness at all was that Blackhole’s whole attention was focused on the kid inside the stone slab.
Overall, it looked like both of them were pretty well fragged. But, y’know, he reminded himself, that kid is supposed to be a Skywalker. Nick had never been superstitious, but there was something about that name. It seemed to carry the promise, or at least the possibility, that the day might be saved in some incomprehensibly improbable fashion. Even if the situation was so clearly hopeless that only a lunatic would even try.
And so he yanked off his Crown.
It hurt. A lot. And it made this damp juicy ripping sound, very much how Nick imagined the sound of someone ripping his scalp in half like cheap broadcloth.
“Okay: owww!” He threw the Crown on the floor. “That’s it,” he declared as blood began to trickle into his eyes. “Nobody’s putting that thing back on me, because that was the last time I want to take it off.”
“NO …” CRONAL MOANED IN THE DARKNESS. “IT’S NOT possible … not now, not when I’m so close!”
He stabbed savagely at the comm panel in front of his couch. “Klick! Are you in position?”
“My lord Shadowspawn!” the group captain exclaimed. “We’re on our way!”
Cronal ground out words between ragged yellow stumps of teeth. “When you get there, secure and seal the door. If anyone tries to come out, kill them.”
He reached up to adjust the Sunset Crown upon his wrinkled scalp. As for the inside of the Election Center, he could handle that himself.
NICK GAVE HIS ROBES A QUICK