• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Kyp’s propulsion systems were obviously damaged. The Sun Crusher struggled along on a tangential course, attempting to pull away from the event horizon. But it was too close, and gravity was too strong. It spiraled in a tight orbit, sinking deeper and deeper.

The Death Star pilot couldn’t resist making the final kill, and the prototype loomed closer. The Sun Crusher and the giant skeletal sphere orbited the black hole like the ends of a baton, speeding up.

Only then did the Death Star pilot seem to realize his peril, and all equatorial thrusters kicked on at once, attempting to pull the prototype away. But the giant vessel had already crossed the edge of the black hole.

The Sun Crusher could not achieve sufficient velocity to escape its tightening orbit either. It spiraled in the wake of the Death Star, with no hope of getting away.

Han felt as if his chest were being torn apart by the tidal forces. “Kyp!” he cried.

A final streak of light shot away from the Sun Crusher, and then it was too late for the tiny superweapon.

The Death Star prototype plunged into the thickening cascades of superhot gases that shrieked down into nothingness. The spherical prototype elongated like a great egg under the uneven gravitational stresses. The curved girders ripped apart, then were crushed into a cone that stretched into the black hole’s funnel.

With a wink of brilliance the tiny Sun Crusher followed its nemesis down into the black hole.

Lando and Mara remained utterly silent. Han hung his head and squeezed his eyes shut. “Goodbye, Kyp.”

“It’s a message cylinder,” Mara said, identifying the small streak shot out by the Sun Crusher. “We’d better get it quick, because it’s falling toward the black hole, too.”

“Message cylinder?” Han sat up, trying to find his enthusiasm. “Okay, let’s snag it before it’s too late.”

The Falcon raced toward the event horizon. Lando and Mara worked together, wrestling to navigate the ship in the buckling jaws of gravity. They detected the metallic container, and Lando swooped in, latching on to it with the tractor beam moments before the small message pod could fall over the brink of the gravitational pit.

“Got it,” Lando said.

“All right, pull it inside, and let’s get out of here,” Han said in a bleak voice. “At least I can hear the last words Kyp had to say.”

40

Han and Lando both pulled on stiff gloves before they wrestled the Sun Crusher’s message canister into the Falcon’s common area. Deep cold had penetrated the canister, and as they brought it into the enclosed atmosphere, tendrils of frost grew like lacy ferns across its surface.

The thin metal hull gleamed bright, splotched in places by electrostatic discharges from when the cylinder had been launched at high speed from the Sun Crusher.

“That’s one heavy message,” Lando said as they lugged the canister to a flat spot on the floor and set it down with a metallic thump on the deck plates.

Little more than a meter long and less than half a meter wide, the message pod was used by the captain of a doomed ship to launch his last log entries and to dump his computer cores and navigation records for later investigations.

Han remembered Kyp telling him that when the Coruscant scientists had stumbled upon the message canisters inside the Sun Crusher, they had panicked, thinking they had uncovered the dangerous supernova torpedoes—even though the cylinder was standard Imperial issue, and any smuggler or starfighter pilot should have recognized it immediately.

On his rampages in the Cauldron Nebula and the Carida system, Kyp had left message cylinders to explain what he had done and why, so that no one would construe his actions as simple astronomical accidents.

Han felt stunned and lethargic with sadness. His friend had been right, but only to a point. Kyp Durron’s agenda to destroy the Empire had used tactics as vicious as those of the Emperor’s.

Luke Skywalker had claimed the young man would redeem himself fully, but now Kyp’s potential as a great Jedi had been extinguished.

Han could not question