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“You would have my pilots withdraw from the battle?”

“It’s not a battle, it’s a mistake,” Luke said. “A misunderstanding.”

“My lord?”

“Never mind. Round up all slaves. Protect them. As soon as you have them organized and secure, turn them and yourselves over to the Republic—what you call Rebel—forces. You will cooperate in every way with the Republic military, up to and including assisting them in battle.”

“My lord Emperor?” The group captain looked appalled. “You would have us give aid and comfort to the enemy?”

“No,” Luke said. “They’re not your enemy. Not anymore. Do you understand? From this point forward, you and your men are to consider yourselves part of the Republic military. Do not fail me, Group Captain.”

“My lord Emperor!” The group captain’s eyes glazed, but the discipline of obedience was absolute. “My lord, we will not fail!”

“Very well,” Luke said. “You have your orders.”

The group captain saluted again and executed a precise about-face before replacing his helmet. He strode off, barking orders punctuated by crisp hand gestures, and his men snapped to without hesitation.

Luke just stood and watched. He couldn’t think of a reason to move.

“Okay, sure, Skywalker, I get it,” Nick said. “But what now?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? What’s the matter with you?”

Luke shook his head numbly. “It’s like … it’s like I’m still inside the stone, Nick. Except the stone’s inside me.”

“Oh, that makes sense.”

“Sense has nothing to do with it. It just is.”

“This is what you were talking about, right? What did that ruskakk do to you?”

“He infected me,” Luke said listlessly.

“Infected—? With some kind of disease or something? A parasite? What?”

“Worse,” Luke said. “He infected me with the truth.”

“Huh?”

“That it’s all a joke. Not even a funny one. A pointless, stupid waste. A spark of suffering extinguished to eternal nothingness.”

He could see that Nick didn’t understand. That really, he couldn’t understand. How could he? And how could Luke explain? What words could he use to share the Dark? What words could illustrate the hideous illusions that came from being raised by loving parents who seemed to really believe in the ideals of the Old Republic, who’d acted like they’d honestly thought that the Jedi had been real heroes, instead of hidebound, ruthless enforcers of the will of the Republic’s rulers. How could he explain the pointless cruelty of the universe—where you had to just stand with your arms restrained by stormtroopers and watch as the Death Star destroyed your homeworld for no real reason at all …

Wait, Luke thought. His breath went short. “Oh, no,” he said out loud. “Oh, no, no, no … this can’t be happening!”

That flash he’d just had wasn’t a memory.

It was a vision. Of the future.

“What?” Nick said. “Skywalker, talk to me!”

Luke shook himself as if throwing off a dream. “It’s not me inside the stone,” he said. “It’s not me hanging in the Dark at the end of the Universe. It’s her. It’s going to be her.”

“Her who?”

“Leia,” Luke said. “My sister.”

“You have a sister?”

Luke nodded. “And Blackhole’s found her.”

R2-D2 FELL THROUGH DARKNESS.

Fell was not entirely the right word for what had transpired since the stone beneath his treads had suddenly melted away and dropped him and Chewbacca through the tunnel’s floor. It was more akin to some sort of bizarre carnival ride, with sudden stops and sideways slippages and all manner of other contortions of downward progress that R2’s internal vocabulation data simply did not have words for.

For that matter, darkness wasn’t entirely accurate either. While a human eye would see nothing but featureless black, for R2, it wasn’t dark at all; his internal sensors could register a substantial span of the electromagnetic spectrum, several hundred thousand times wider than the tiny human range they referred to as “visual light.” The entire downward fall/slide/lurch/bump/twist/jolt process was alive with all manner of electromagnetic