Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [93]
“I’ll show you.”
They rounded another curve and ahead, the tunnel ended in a narrow ledge. Above the ledge was night, and stars, and streaks of X-wings hurtling down for strafing runs. Below the ledge was a long, long drop down the inner bowl of a huge, ancient caldera that was studded with impact craters and lit by the burning remains of crashed starfighters from both sides. The far rim had crumbled, and much of it still glowed dully with residual heat from the explosions that had shattered it; through the gaps Nick could see, far down the curve of the volcanic dome, turbolaser towers swiveling and pumping gouts of disintegrating energy into the sky.
“Uh,” he said, hanging back from the edge. “Maybe I’ll just wait up here.”
“Maybe you won’t.”
“Have I mentioned that I’ve got, y’know, a minor issue about heights?”
“I’m sorry about that,” Luke said seriously. “But you’re coming along. I have a feeling I’ll need you.”
“But listen—you’re going after your sister, right? Who’s going after Cronal? Somebody’s gonna have to take him out.”
“And you’re volunteering to play assassin?”
Nick cocked his head. “The crystals in my head … I can feel him, sort of. I can find him. I can take him out.”
“I believe you. But no. That’s final.”
“It may be the only way to save your sister. Not to mention you.”
Luke sighed. “And what happens if he gets to her before you get to him? What happens if she doesn’t have somebody like you around to break her out of the treatment, the way you saved me?”
“Then we’ll just have to—” The look on Luke’s face stopped Nick cold. “Uh. Yeah, I can see your problem with that. I guess I’d better be extra fast.”
“I guess you’d better do what you’re told.”
“Hey, news flash, General Skywalker—I’m not one of your soldiers.”
“Hey, news flash, Lord Shadowspawn,” Luke said, a faint smile on his lips but only bleak darkness in his eyes. “You’re a prisoner of war.”
“Aw—aw, c’mon, you’re not serious—”
“You said you knew Jedi,” Luke said. “Ever win an argument with one?”
Nick sighed. “Where to?”
“There.” Luke pointed down into the caldera. “Right there.”
Nick squinted. It looked like featureless rock scattered with wreckage. “What’s the big deal about right there?”
“That,” Luke said with quiet certainty, “is where the Millennium Falcon is about to crash.”
“What? The Millennium Falcon? Like in Han Solo in the Lair of the Space Slugs?”
“Sort of.”
“You’re not kidding? I thought—y’know, I thought that Han Solo was, y’know, a fictional character. That those stories are just, well, stories.”
Luke closed his eyes and extended a hand. His voice took on a distant, distinctly hollow tone. “They are just stories. But Han’s real, and as for the Falcon—look up.”
Nick did. A rising shriek of something large and not so aerodynamic flying very, very fast gave him a half second’s warning before a huge dark shape roared way too close overhead—an oblate disk with the forward cargo mandibles of a Corellian light freighter—that wasn’t really flying so much as it was, well, hurtling, flipping end over end through the air like a deformed coin tossed by a hand the size of this mountain. On fire and out of control, it tumbled toward the crater’s floor and certain destruction.
“Oh,” Nick said. “Awwww—I would have liked to meet him—I love that show …”
“Shh.” Luke’s forehead squeezed into a frown of concentration, and the fingers on his extended hand spread as his breathing deepened. “This isn’t my best trick.”
His fingers twitched as if he were tripping an invisible switch—and out on the dark spinning disk of the freighter, automated attitude thrusters blasted to life, dorsal on the mandibles, ventral to aft above the engines, slowing the ship’s tumble. Nick heard the sudden shriek of overpowered repulsorlifts, and the forward attitude jets swiveled to add their thrust, and the freighter slammed