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Luke took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. It crossed his mind, very briefly, to wonder what this was going to do to his own mind, his own brain, but through the tsils, through the great white crystals in the ground, the green crystals in the high cliffs, he was aware of the pain of those that had been taken away, and he knew he could not let them remain in that agony. Through me, he said. Focus through me.

He felt their awareness converge on his. The Force in them, the Force that had been growing slowly, strangely, from their utterly alien life, twining with the Force within his bones and flesh and mind.

Tell them to destroy Ashgad’s ship, he said, reaching out his mind to those hovering, darting consciousnesses out in the black gulfs of space. Understanding what they were now, and how to reach them. Do this for me and I swear to you, wherever they are, whoever has bought them throughout the galaxy, I swear to you they will be brought back here.

He felt the consultation of them, like an endless green wave spreading out across the plain, through the mountains, over the planet. A deep vibration, like the ripple on a still pond. And then it came back, Force and more Force—shining oceanic currents of it, streaming through his body, unbearably bright. Tearing him apart. He cried out in pain, kneeling upright in the diamond wastes, focusing his mind; calling the Force to his flesh. Reaching out toward the darkness of space, where the Imperial carrack was docking against the Reliant.

He saw Seti Ashgad trying to get to his feet from the main console, stumbling and falling among the dead synthdroids that littered the floor. Saw Dzym draw in a breath of ecstasy, of anticipation, of world-devouring delight.

Luke’s eyes were closed, so he didn’t see, far, far above in the hard blue unchanging sky, the tiny brightness of an explosion.

Then he fainted, and lay unconscious, alone beside the slow rising pillar of oily smoke in the midst of the wasteland of light.

22

Given the circumstances under which they had last parted, the eventual journey down to the surface of Nam Chorios could not be other than awkward for both Han Solo and Admiral Daala, once in charge of the security of the Imperial Weapons Installation in the Maw cluster.

See-Threepio, who accompanied them with Chewbacca, Artoo-Detoo, and a considerable number of Daala’s co-émigrés, did his best to ease the tension by filling Solo in on the events leading up to Leia’s kidnapping, on the state of the Meridian sector as observed by himself and Artoo-Detoo on their travels, and on Yarbolk Yemm’s well-documented contention that the whole thing was a ploy originated by Gnifmak Dymurra, CEO of Loronar Corporation, as a means of obtaining hypercomplex polarized crystals from their only known source on Nam Chorios, for the manufacture of both synthdroids and CCIR Needles.

He was at a loss to account for the fact that those supposedly programmable Needles had unexpectedly left off attacking the small Republic fleet and had descended on the square gray ship rising from the planet’s surface, blasting it and the Imperial carrack that had gone out to tow it to the safety of the Imperial fleet into sparkling fragments of eternity. A prima facie observation of the attack, even without the wildly furious and speculative jabber intercepted from Admiral Larm aboard the carrack, made clear beyond a doubt that this was not what Admiral Larm had had in mind.

Even as the debris cloud of the Reliant and its escort was dispersing, the entire squadron of Needles had turned with the precision of a dance troupe and had swirled down into the atmosphere, heading for the surface of the planet.

It was a moot point whether Admiral Larm’s successor would have continued his attack—his forces still outnumbered the Republic ships almost three to one, and Solo’s little fleet had been badly mauled—had not Admiral Daala’s ships come out of hyperspace at that point, and descended on the Imperial vessels like black, avenging night.

“From the time I was sixteen, the fleet has been my life.