OSSUS
FLYING LOW OVER THE K’TUZIAN STRETCH
After running a search merger between his own instruments and those of the Imperial satellites above Ossus, Cazrael got a hit. He was positive it was a freighter’s drive signature, and it was so specific that he was pretty sure he knew the type: it was a YT model. Part of him dared to hope it was the Millenium Falcon itself, that legendary ship of the Rebel Alliance, but as he came down from the planet’s upper atmosphere, and began soaring above the canyons, expanding his scanners’ search parameters, he didn’t think it was the Falcon.
Then, far up ahead, so far as to be like a firefly on the horizon, he saw a flash of blue light. A drive trail. Its fading light came from around the corner of a tall basalt pillar that came stabbing up out of the main canyon of the K’tuzian Stretch. Caz thought about sending out a communiqué to the Emperor’s Might, or to his two wingmen, who he’d sent off on their own searches. But he feared doing that might alert his prey. If they were good enough to have evaded him this far, they were good enough to pick up his comms.
Killer Caz realized this was his fight for the moment, and his alone. He increased his forward thrust, and his TIE Defender went screeching over the canyon. He may hear me coming soon, but that comes with the territory. He pulled power from nonessential systems, and throttled up main weapons. He prepared his targeting computer. He sent out pulses from his onboard signals jammer.
It was time.
* * *
Kevv knew it was getting on that time. In darkness, he moved. He’d done a passive-sensor scan and all he got back was static. That meant an active signals jammer was somewhere in his vicinity. He picked up his visual scanning, looking at the screens showing the views from the Curse’s external cams. Someone was near, and they were on to him, he could feel it. Every pilot knew this sensation, and feared it. The noose slipping loosely around your neck, the slow tightening, all signs pointing towards the fact that you were now being hunted.
All of Kevv’s senses were now focused wholly on piloting, weaving his way around the basalt pillars, powering down to slow his speed to make the tighter turns, then juicing the engines to speed up once he had a clear enough path through the canyon. Up ahead, he knew, was a stretch where the canyon walls widened up to a kilometer apart, and went on for several dozen kilometers. Relatively speaking, that was still tight confines for a dogfight, but there were also a few freestanding basalt pillars for cover, and he felt it was better than pulling up out of the canyon and exposing himself to more fighters. He still didn’t know how many he was dealing with.
And if he needed to flee, he could simply pull up, detonate all thrusters, and accelerate towards space. He didn’t want to do that, for it would mean leaving his friends behind.
Friends…
Namyr was certainly more than just a colleague at this point, but Ageless…it was difficult for Kevv to define what the Zabrak meant to him. Certainly, they were on the same side right now, but that could easily change. But for the moment they were comrades in arms, their wills joined and fused in a single powerful purpose—undermine the fascistic Galactic Empire, and at all cost.
At all cost, he ruminated.
With this thought, Kevv refocused his efforts, sparing a moment only to cue up main guns. Lethal and energized he seemed again.
Without anyone to man the dorsal guns, he would be alone, and would have to line up any targets directly in front of him if he wanted to hit them with the ship’s forward lasers. But the missile compliment that Ageless Void had put on the YT could also be a boon, so he had to keep that in mind.
He checked his sensors, and again found them scrambled. He wanted to get one more burst signal out to R-3PO, but couldn’t in all this signal jamming. But there was an old trick to getting a transmission through signal jamming, one taught to him by an old mentor, one which he’d used once or twice on mission with his old squadmates. Kevv started broadcasting random messages on all channels, absolutely flooding the airwaves, and gave each random message its own intense encryption. In this way, he could confuse the signals jammers into chasing each of them, prioritizing those with encryption, only to find they were all encrypted.
It was a small chance, but one he needed to take.
Kevv heard the whine of a twin-ion engine. Just one, sounded like. But where there was one, more were sure to follow. If it was one of the new Defenders the Empire had rolled out, it would have shields. Not powerful ones, but shields nonetheless, and it would have far greater speed and mobility, and more powerful guns and the latest Arakyd missiles.
He felt the noose tightening all the more. In darkness he still moved, knowing that any moment could be his last. He maneuvered the Dathomirian Curse around to the side of an enormous pillar, hovering in air a moment, glancing out his cockpit viewport, eyes darting between his vidscreens, rotating the external cams in every direction.
Then, at long last, his enemy appeared. Behind him!
The TIE Defender materialized out of shear night, racing through a narrow split in the canyon’s east wall like a bullet in the void, a narrow gap so tiny that only a single TIE could have fit through it. It was a sneaky trick, and Kevv suddenly rolled away from the first spitting green laserfire, juicing his engines and angling his shields to aft. The green lasers splashed across the Curse’s shields, but some of their spare energy leaked through, impacting the hull and scorching it and causing the whole ship to quake.
This Imperial was clever, no doubt. A single TIE pilot with a mind made for this, he was sure. Kevv rolled away again, accelerating north across the gap, the TIE directly behind him and still hitting him with stutterfire attacks. Kevv’s shields were holding, and he pulled up to rocket towards the sky before snap-rolling, straining the Curse’s engines, redlining them until he could accelerate forward and plunge back down into the canyon’s gap.
The maneuver appeared to have surprised the TIE pilot, but already it was banking away so as not to end up in Kevv’s sights.
The Curse and the starfighter circled one another, moving around the canyon in wide arcs, each trying to get behind the other while avoiding collisions with the dozens of basalt pillars. Then the Imperial pulled a stunning maneuver, vanishing momentarily back inside another narrow gap in the cliff wall, vanishing off all scopes and cams for several moments, leaving Kevv’s guts in a twist, waiting.
Then suddenly his enemy materialized from a gap half a kilometer to Kevv’s starboard, and came racing towards him in a salvo so powerful and swift that Kevv had no time to re-angle his energy shields.
The green laserfire smashed into the Curse’s starboardside thruster and immediately alarms went off. Kevv’s hands raced across the control board, issuing commands to send out extinguisher fluids to put out the fires that had started in compartments four and six, while also trying to handle the ship’s flight controls.
Could really use an extra set of hands right about—
Then another attack came! The TIE pilot had maneuvered behind him, and with one of his thrusters temporarily offline, Kevv could hardly maneuver well enough out of the enemy’s line of sight. A loud chime warned him he was being targeted. He once again reinforced the aft shields to absorb all that he could, but already some of the stutterfire attacks had confused the Curse’s shields and a few bolts got through.
There were alarms of coolant leaks, fuel injectors exploding, and emergency injectors being slipped into place by the Curse’s automated interstitial repair systems. Kevv pulled a desperate move, spinning the Dathomirian Curse around in midair, performing an almost perfect 180-degree spin-around, detonating his thrusters to maximum and straining a ship that was already in agony. This brought him to an almost complete stop, but also surprised both the Curse’s artificial gravity generators and her inertial dampers, slamming him backwards into his seat so hard he momentarily saw stars.
But now the TIE was no longer behind him, but in front of him.
His enemy, caught by surprise at the ludicrous maneuver, banked hard away rather than collide head on. Kevv had time to fire a single shot, and he was pretty sure it bounced off the Defender’s shields.
No matter, it got the point across.
He accelerated to full flank, once again confusing his ship’s systems and slamming himself into his seat. He pulled up, gaining in altitude, escaping the canyon’s gap before rolling back around and plunging back down into it, coming up somewhat behind the TIE and to its port side. He accelerated towards it, all forward guns blazing, trying to hem it in. TIE fighters were small, nimble things, inexorable if you fought them in open space, but if you could keep them confined—
This Imperial is clever, Kevv thought, watching the TIE bank away once again, hiding behind another basalt pillar before rounding it, spinning behind another in a maneuver so daring it was almost stupid, for the Imperial’s portside wing glanced one of the pillars and lost some of its wing.
The TIE Defender came right at him.
Kevv tried targeting, but his computer was being heavily scrambled. So he eyeballed it, and fired two missiles without first securing a good targeting solution. The TIE banked away hard, spun around another pillar while Kevv did the same. They danced like this until they were once again screaming towards one another in a deadly game of blink-first.
Kevv angled his energy shields to defend forward, and watched as the green laserfire splashed across his cockpit viewport. He turned away from his enemy, zoomed around another pillar, came out somewhat to his enemy’s starboard. The TIE adjusted, started towards him again—
Then, a sound no fighter pilot wanted to hear. A mass proximity warning. Something on an approach vector. Despite his sensors being jammed, Kevv’s computers had somehow detected the multiple contacts. At least two of them, and they were on an approach vector. At first, he hoped at least one of them was Lady of Hope Ascendant, and that R-3PO and R4 had arrived as cavalry.
But the contacts were grouped together. That meant only one thing.
Support craft. His enemy had help coming.
Kevv’s heart sank, and he whispered, “Guys…I’m sorry.”
* * *
BENEATH MOUNT GUJAHHL
They had found the path their quarry had taken. A train down a long, underground rail system, put here by previous dig teams. It was Mara had detected the path through the Force, and sensed the direction their quarry had taken to reach the labyrinth. They took a few wrong turns, double-backed, then found a tunnel that led deeper, and deeper, and deeper still, until at last they came to a hole in the ground, one surrounded by the strange Koboh matter that some of the dig teams had been stymied by.
Mara peered down into the hole. Beside her, the Inquisitor stood patiently, apparently now relying solely on her gifts at psychometry to pick up the trail. It was clear, though, that there was only one way to go from here on. They both gazed down into the hole, and aimed the beams of their flashlights down into an enormous chamber.
She looked up at the Inquisitor. “He’s down there.”
“Are you sure?” said Ether.
“Yes. The Force has never led me astray when it comes to these things. Our man went down there.”
Ether looked down at the hole, and for a moment Mara thought she detected a note of uncertainty in him, like a gundark smelling a trap. What does he sense? What isn’t he telling me? He circled the hole in the floor, looking around at the Koboh matter that, impossibly, seemed to have been cut away or disintegrated. “How did he get through this Koboh matter when it seems not even the Empire’s smartest were able to figure out a way to cut through it? It’s my understanding that that’s why they’re bringing down the mantle saw from orbit.”
“That’s true,” Mara said. “But perhaps there’s some anomaly down here that makes the Koboh matter weaker, able to be blasted through.”
“Perhaps,” said the Inquisitor, but he seemed supremely unconvinced. For the first time, he took the lightsaber hilt from his belt, and gripped it. He didn’t yet ignite it, but he appeared ready to.
Mara did the same.
Ether looked at her. “Ladies first.”
Mara called upon the Force to help steel her nerves, then pulled out her ascension cable and fired its grapnel into the stone ceiling. After giving it a few testing tugs to make sure it was secure, she descended.
* * *
THE DEATH STAR
IN THE EMPEROR’S THRONE ROOM
ABOVE THE FOREST MOON OF ENDOR
Luke’s green saber slashed high, deflecting his father’s attacks briefly before he went low in a basic yet well-honed Makashi flourish, before going on the offensive. He came forward with a series of vicious, questing strikes, drawing out the same series of counterattacks from Vader as he’d experienced on Bespin. Luke had replayed their battle in Cloud City numerous times, too many times to count, and he’d meditated on it and trained with Vader’s aggressive style in mind. Luke moved forward, circling his father until the stairs were directly behind the Dark Lord, counting on the man to draw upon the Dark Side and become overly aggressive—
And when Luke saw his opening, and felt the Force pulling him towards it, he delivered a sidekick to Vader’s chest so powerful it sent the man falling down the stairs. Vader was able to control his fall, spinning in midair and landing softly on his backside.
Luke stared down at his father, lying on the floor. Felt the coldness of the throne room, the swirling power of the Force. Luke was sweating, feeling a surge of dark power within, only vaguely aware that he’d momentarily tapped into an aggressive power in order to attack Vader in this way. He’d momentarily drawn on his darkest feelings—
“Goooood!” the Emperor called, elated. His words echoed throughout the throne room. Luke was suddenly aware the old monster was cackling behind him. “Use your aggressive feelings, boy! Let the hate flow through you! Heh-heh-heh-heh-hehhh!”
Realizing what he’d done, almost ashamed of his loss of control, Luke quickly switched off his lightsaber.
Vader slowly climbed to his feet. “Obi-Wan,” he said slowly, thoughtfully, “has taught you well.”
Luke swallowed a lump in his throat. “I will not fight you, Father,” he practically whispered. An oath to himself more than anything.
Vader slowly climbed the stairs, his red lightsaber beam still ignited, his mechanical breathing steady. Luke could feel something then…a struggle within his father, brief as a flash of lightning, there and gone. Vader now stood before him, looming over Luke, that black mask gazing into him. “You are unwise to lower your defenses!” he suddenly cried, lunging at Luke, who just barely ignited his own lightsaber in time to deflect the next flurry of attacks.
They locked sabers, blades grinding against one another in an almost metallic, wrenching sound. Then Luke broke away, and vanished behind Vader, leaping up out of the way of an attack, landing behind a set of command computers before leaping once more, high, high up, flipping backwards onto a catwalk that looked down onto Vader and his Emperor.
Vader was panting slightly now.
Luke peered down at the dark visage. He tried a different tact, a desperate one, born of love and concern, and also pity. “Your thoughts betray you, Father. I feel the good in you. A conflict.”
“There is no conflict,” Vader replied resolutely.
Luke walked a few steps down the catwalk, and Vader followed him. “You couldn’t bring yourself to kill me before, and I don’t believe you’ll destroy me now.”
“You underestimate the power of the Dark Side.” Vader’s voice was suddenly cold and determined, not a shred of what Luke had sensed before was detectable now. “If you will not fight,” he said, lifting his lightsaber, “then you will meet your destiny!” Suddenly, Vader did something Luke did not expect. The Dark Lord flung his lightsaber in a dazzling spin. Luke ducked out of the way in time, but it seemed Vader’s true target had been the support beams for the catwalk Luke was standing on.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
The saber slashed the metal beams and the entire platform collapsed, sending Luke down into darkness, rolling out of the way and looking for cover.
He heard Vader’s slow, patient steps approaching.
And he heard the Emperor cackling somewhere. “Good,” the old Sith Lord said. “Good.”
Luke gripped his lightsaber, moving in the pitch-black darkness at the bottom of the throne room, searching for someplace to hide.
* * *
BENEATH MOUNT GUJAHHL
Slowly they moved into the tomb, each of them taking in the immense dust-ridden chamber, surrounded by the faces of downed gods. It seemed that wherever their flashlight beams hit, a dead Jedi monk stared back at them, or else some strange, partially eroded visage painted or sculpted into walls long forgotten. Mann glanced back up at the hole whence they came, then over at the Emperor’s Hand. The woman’s red-gold hair flashed in his flashlight’s beam, and her glimmering green eyes moved slowly over the darkness to study it.
Mann thought he felt some new terrible power in the air, as if a host of the Dark Side’s most unforgiving creations had died here long ago. Perhaps they had. Perhaps a few ancient Sith had actually made it down here just before the cataclysm that brought about the end of Ossus, the end of all the Jedi that had reigned here for hundreds of years. He walked down a stone path, which to him seemed like an ancient street. But if that were so, how had it come to be buried so deep? And why?
Someone pulled it down here. I do not know how, but someone buried this place, pulling it down from the surface.
Some part of the old Inquisitor sensed some inimical thing, and the part of him that craved knowledge of the Dark Side yearned for it, while the other, more human side of him was repulsed. Someone, or something, had brought down part of an entire building or city. He was standing in it, the innermost guts of the Great Jedi Library, somehow busted and broken away from the rest of the structure and buried underground at an impossible depth.
Mann understood this right away. He was an uninvited guest, and the power of the Jedi could still be felt, warding him off. He was sure of it now, and he sensed that the Emperor’s Hand knew it, also. Whoever the last Jedi had been that stood here, they had intended to keep this place secret, one way or another. Mann knew also that he had been led into a trap. He could not say why, but he knew it utterly.
He took a step back towards his ascension cable, which still dangled from the hole in the ceiling.
The Emperor’s Hand noticed this, and she said, “Where are you going?”
“Don’t you feel it?” he whispered. “We are not alone.”
“Well, of course,” she said. “Your target is down here, probably with his Rebel friends—”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Can’t you feel that?”
For a moment it seemed like the Emperor’s Hand didn’t understand, but then Mann saw it on her face, beyond any doubt: the shadow of fear. They both had command over their fear, surely, for their training would have ingrained such discipline, and yet it could not be denied that they both were in a place most unwelcome.
The Jedi were still here. Their spirits were still here. The energy and power of those that had died to defend and hide this place, it was all still very much alive and vibrant, even if it ensconced in shadow and stone.
Then, a humming. Like the sound of some small machine. It went buzzing high over them, but when they turned their flashlights up towards the ceiling, they caught only a glance of the machine. A disc droid, slicing through the dusty, dark air like a mynock in the night. And it was carrying something. Mann only had a moment to recognize the silvery sphere in its small pincers, the single red light blinking.
“Move!” he shouted.
And they both dove out of the way at the same time, in opposite directions, just as the thermal detonator dropped in the place where they’d been standing seconds before, and when it exploded it was loud and hot and violent, rending the air and sending out such a shockwave that it sucked the wind out of Mann’s chest and punched his eardrums, and it sent him spinning and spiraling down the stone stairs that led down towards an old dried-up fountain. His brain was dazed, his mind sent into a storm of disorientation.
Ears ringing, he fought to recover. When he landed on his back, he grunted, gasping for breath and rolling backwards over his shoulder, springing up and igniting his lightsaber, just as five or six red bolts came slicing out from the darkness. An ambush, well timed, well planned. The Inquisitor could not tell the precise origin of the blaster bolts, nor could he find his ally the Emperor’s Hand, and so he maneuvered behind the statue of a Wookiee Jedi and crouched there, listening. His ears were still ringing, but somewhere he thought he heard crackling…
And rumbling.
When he peered around the statue, Mann felt fury at the sight of a great stone column, damaged by the explosion, now crumbling in half. His flashlight was on the ground close by, and he used the Force to call it to his hand and looked around at all the destruction. A stalactite, which had descended from the ceiling over thousands of years to form the column, kept crackling, splintering in half, and now it came crashing down in a tumult of boulders and rocks that sounded like a giant falling to its death.
He turned and ran, deflecting two more blaster bolts as soon as he came out from behind cover, and all the while the ceiling partially collapsed behind him. Then more rocks fell from all over, a great boulder smashing into the thirty-meter-tall statue of a Twi’lek Jedi, which had already been leaning to one side, and now burst asunder and came crashing down.
Dust filled the great chamber, and all at once Mann was coughing, blinded despite his flashlight, and still could hardly hear for all the damned ringing in his ears—
He sensed something. A threat. It was moving towards him fast, and the Force had forewarned him. He stretched out with all his hatred to channel darkness, and with all his senses heightened he located the direction of the threat. Mann maneuvered behind a pillar, waiting in ambush.
He could not hear his enemy’s approaching footsteps, for his ears rang only louder, and the chamber was still collapsing thunderously, but when he sensed his enemy was close, he crouched low, preparing himself, and then leapt from cover and slashed out at Ageless Void—
—who ignited a blue lightsaber blade and somehow deflected Mann’s first attack!
Mann had little time to react to the surprising appearance of another lightsaber, and Ageless took advantage of his confusion, moving deftly off to the side, shoving Mann away and spinning to kick him in his stomach. Then Ageless whirled around, fury in his face, blue blade casting shadows against his snarling visage. Ageless held the lightsaber tip-down in strange fashion, while holding a blaster pistol in his other hand, and came at Mann both slashing and shooting.
Mann deflected what he could, sometimes using his armored gloves to absorb the blaster bolts, sometimes catching them with his lightsaber, sometimes moving his head just in time before Ageless could fire. Mann had never seen a saber style like this before—stunned as he was from the explosion, he was barely keeping ahead of Ageless.
Mann was cursing himself. He knew this Zabrak’s profile, he’d seen vids of his training back during the Nest days, he’d seen his reports from the Kingdom. He should’ve seen this kind of ambush coming. The Force shouldn’t have had to tell him—he should have expected this!
The Zabrak’s blade was fierce and flowing, his moves elegant, timed expertly with his footwork, which maneuvered him in and out of range. Ageless switched off his lightsaber, vanishing into darkness momentarily before rematerializing suddenly from behind, blaster pumping bolts into Mann’s armor a second before his lightsaber re-ignited and went on the attack.
Mann was on the defensive, still stunned, his armor and honed reflexes the only thing keeping him alive, trying to defend as well as he could, hoping Ageless’s blaster would soon run out of power in its cartridge. In all the years he had trained the saber with Lord Vader, he’d never been on the receiving end of such savage trickery and brutal efficiency. And just when he thought the former Kingdom operative might have the best of him, another lightsaber ignited from the dark, this one blood-red and slashing out.
The Emperor’s Hand came upon Ageless Void like a sandstorm upon the Dune Sea, and Ageless grunted as he shuffle-stepped to the side, leaving Mann for the moment, giving him time to recover.
Then Ageless suddenly cried out, “Now!”
And before Mann could even tell what was going on, something came slashing out of the darkness. The disc droid. It came from behind it and crashed purposefully into the side of Mann’s head, like a steel club to his skull, knocking him sideways. Growling in hatred, allowing his contempt for the dirty trick to fuel his power in the Dark Side, Mann spun swiftly and stuck out his hand, gripping the droid in midair and binding it with the Force. With a will, he crushed it—
And then he staggered. Mind reeling, brain tilted on edge, ears ringing, he turned to face his enemy. Ageless Void and the Emperor’s Hand were only visible now by the flashlights they’d dropped on the ground and by the clash of their lightsabers. Mann growled, summoning all his hate to push back the disorientation. He used the pain of his body to fuse his will to his muscles once again, ignoring the damage done to him. His senses returned in full focus, and as he ran towards his enemy, he roared and leapt with Force-enhanced speed, his blade crashing against Ageless Void’s own blue blade.
He and the Emperor’s Hand pushed him back. Ageless tried to line them up, maneuver so that only one of them could attack him at a time. He did this by backing up into narrower and narrower passages. His combination saber-and-blaster style kept them both on edge, having to revert to deflecting blaster bolts and never getting a chance to truly go on full offensive.
But once Mann and the Emperor’s Hand were fully joined in combat, and the Dark Side had fused their minds and their destinies as one, they came crashing down on Ageless Void with all vengeance, all hatred, all menace focused. By the combined light of their sabers, Mann could see the Zabrak sweating, even as he parried the woman’s blade and head-butted her and raked his horns down her face in bloody streaks.
Ageless was desperate and worried.
And yet.
Mann sensed in this former Imperial agent the same sort of warrior as all the other Kingdom agents had been, his mind solely focused on surviving, his iron will bent on accomplishing his mission. It only passingly occurred to Mann what that might be, and distantly he worried Ageless Void still had a plan.
So, he had to kill the bastard before he brought that plan to fruition.
* * *
FLYING LOW OVER THE K’TUZIAN STRETCH
The two incoming TIEs broke away as Kevv rushed towards them, surprising them with a quick burst of laserfire and a pair of homing missiles. Then he, too, banked away to the east, then snap-rolled and dived back down into the gap between the cliffs. The TIEs tried circling him at first. They would probably try coordinating on encrypted channels, but Kevv sent out a jamming signal of his own, for what little good it would do. These pilots were likely so in tune with one another that they had trained for anything, including comms-down fighting.
The two new TIEs were Defenders, also. That meant they had shields. They raced around the pillars and tried coming at him from the side. Likely, they had all figured out that he wasn’t using his turrets, which meant he had no one to man them, which mean the pilot of the Dathomirian Curse was all alone in the cockpit. So they attack him from both port and starboard, and he continually had to snap-roll away, performed a deadly maneuver scraping around the side of a basalt pillar, gain altitude and then dive back towards them.
Now all three TIEs came together, and race at him from underneath.
Kevv felt like the noose was almost cinched.
Suddenly, an idea sprang into his mind, whispering to him. He dived at the ground, surging towards the TIEs, racing at them head on, unleashing a salvo that splashed across their front shields. The sudden aggressive move startled the other pilots, and the squadron closed ranks, hoping to get maximum protection from their overlapping shields. Kevv watched closely, waiting for the obvious next move, and heard a chime from his display board as the TIEs shifted all shield power from the rear to double-front, which meant they had just shifted all strength from their aft shields.
Right on time, Kevv thought.
While setting the forward-facing guns to autofire, he quickly used the targeting computer to lock onto each of the TIEs, prepping a firing solution into all six of his remaining missiles—
Now he just had to survive six seconds. Six seconds of watching the laserfire splash across his forward shields—
One blast got through, smacked the Curse’s hull, and caused such a disruption that the transparisteel viewport cracked a little—
He continued forward, asking the Force or the gods or anyone for just one more second before—
The TIEs parted for him, banking away. At last!
Kevv shot past them. He throttled back, once again redlining all engines as he rotated just enough to fire all missiles in their direction. Then he pulled up, threw all power from shields and dumped it into thrust, and it sounded like the Curse exploded then, shooting towards the stars. He banked hard, keeping an eye on his camfeed. He saw a wink of light, as far below him one of the TIEs took a missile in its undefended backside. Another had to evade with such intensity that it zigged and zagged repeatedly, and while it escaped the two missiles chasing it, it inadvertently exposed its backside—
Which Kevv dived straight towards, locking on and firing wide open, overheating his guns until he managed to get a shot on its rear thruster. The TIE Defender spun away, injured but not exploding, tucking its tail between its legs and vanishing between one of the many crevices in the canyon wall.
“Yes! YES! Kevv, you old stick jockey! You did it!”
But the original TIE was gone. He didn’t see it anywhere on camfeed. His momentarily jubilation was stifled. Where did it—?
His answer came shortly, as the top of his ship was suddenly battered by a salvo like none before. The Curse shook. The remaining TIE had come from above somehow, and hit him where he was most vulnerable. And now fires were breaking out in other parts of the Curse, he smelled the smoke, he felt the Curse juddering and dying.
The TIE swooped around, about a kilometer back. It was homing, painting him with its targeting computer. He heard the chime that indicated he was locked in. His rear cams showed two missiles in the air, coming right for him.
Kevv looked ahead and to port. There was a narrow gap…Is it big enough for me to fly through? The entrance looked big enough, but what if the walls narrowed? He could easily crash into—
“Don’t think, Kevv. Just do it!”
He throttled up, and raced into the dark, jagged passage.
* * *
THE DEATH STAR
IN THE EMPEROR’S THRONE ROOM
ABOVE THE FOREST MOON OF ENDOR
“You cannot hide forever, Luke,” Vader said calmly.
“I will not fight you,” came the Jedi’s defiant response, from somewhere in the dark pits of the throne room.
Vader turned his head in the direction of Luke’s voice, and as he went stalking that way, he felt the swirl of the Dark Side eddies, small little pools of quaking power, there for the taking. “Give yourself to the Dark Side,” he went on. “It is the only way you can save your friends.”
All at once, Vader sensed Luke clenching up, withdrawing with a will.
“Yes,” Vader said deliciously. “Your thoughts betray you. Your feelings for them are strong. Especially for…” And he drew this next word out, delighting in its tantalizing meaning, “…sister. So, you have a twin sister.” Somewhere, he felt fear spike from spawn of Anakin Skywalker. “Your feelings have now betrayed her, too. Obi-Wan was wise to hide her from me. Now his failure is complete.” Vader’s voice was filled with relish, goading Luke, trying to lure the fledgling Jedi towards the Dark Side. “If you will not turn to the Dark Side…then perhaps she will.”
Suddenly, a green lightsaber ignited from the darkness, as if some long-dead god had awakened. Luke’s enraged face appeared from the shadows as he cried, “Never!” and launched himself at his doomed father, the man who abandoned him before he was born, the cloaked avatar of Death and Destruction that had caused every tragedy in his life, the man that had killed his Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, and doomed billions of people to death on the planet of Alderaan.
As Luke’s green saber clashed savagely with Vader’s red, the Dark Lord himself felt something…a resonance. A jolt of something long lost, some component to him he had not felt since…since…
Mustafar.
Padmé.
Those names leapt to his mind as his saber clashed with Luke’s. Driven back by Luke’s abrupt savagery, Vader ought to have felt victorious in this moment, having drawn out the anger and frustration that had been hinted at in their duel in Cloud City.
Yet some ghost spoke to him, a sound, a humming he had not heard in decades. He knew not whence it came, but it came on strong, and it was undeniable. A song of the midi-chlorians, perhaps, those in his blood harmonizing with those in the blood of Anakin Skywalker’s son, their shared connection to the Force summoning something deep within—
And suddenly, Vader felt something he hadn’t felt in an age: doubt.
Luke came at him roaring, touching the very fringes of the Dark Side, which now flirted with Luke, offering freely its power, as the young Jedi crashed upon Vader like waves against an ancient cliff, eroding his defenses. And Vader, for his part, felt weakened, as if some power had been stolen from him. It was Luke! He was siphoning off the Dark Side eddies, drawing the Dark Side towards him, to his will, rather than that of Vader’s.
And as he was driven across the throne room, across the tiny bridge that led to the turbolift, Vader felt himself shrink, his power sapped, and the ghost of Anakin Skywalker suddenly found that moment to seize him, to come clawing back up from where he’d been buried, tearing out of his grave via the midi-chlorians, but also via something more. Love. A thing he’d been condemned for, the very same sort of love that had forced him to be so easily tricked by Palpatine was now released again, this time more focused than ever, and that love swirled around Luke and drew power from it—
There was a sea of love, once directed towards a woman, and now laser-focused on the young man raging in front of him. And Vader felt guilt—something no Sith should ever feel. He felt guilt and shame and Anakin Skywalker reveled in it, choking him with it—
And then, all at once, Vader saw his defenses left open, and Luke seized upon this moment and lopped off his right hand, the wires in his wrist sparking and smoking. He fell, moaning, not in pain but in emotional torment. Something had seized at his throat. He had not only been defeated by Luke Skywalker, but by Anakin, as well. Not only the son, but the father. The father, long presumed dead, who had come back suddenly from an ocean of hate in a surprising moment and claimed vengeance against the Dark Side, that same Dark Side that stole his wife, his children, his life.
And then, after a moment, Vader felt the ghost of Anakin Skywalker abate. The Dark Side was working on healing him again. Luke stood over him, green blade aimed down at him. Luke’s face was a mask of torment and rage, and behind him the Emperor, Darth Sidious himself, came walking down the stairs, cackling and congratulating Luke.
“Good!” he laughed. “Your hate has made you powerful. Now, fulfill your destiny, and take your father’s place at my side!”
And so, there it was. Darth Sidious had continued the legacy of every Sith before him, up to and including his own master, Plagueis. He was continuing the self-fulfilling prophecy that was the Rule of Two: one Sith to embody the power, the other to crave it. As an instrument to the Emperor’s will, Vader had served his purpose, had offered Luke the chance to be his disciple, so that they both might overthrow the Emperor.
But he beat me. Just as the Skywalkers beat me…Luke…and Anakin…now the Emperor also defeats my designs.
Panting, smelling his own foul breath recycled back into his helmet, Vader looked through red lenses, up into the face of Luke Skywalker and saw the conflict there. Luke looked to his own artificial hand, and then he did something remarkable. “Never,” he whispered, switching off his saber and throwing it away.
He threw it away! Vader marveled. For it was a feat he’d never thought to do, he’d never been able to do, a feat Anakin Skywalker had not been strong or clever enough to achieve.
“I’ll never turn to the Dark Side,” Luke went on, approaching the Emperor proudly, defiantly, chest out. In an instant, the Dark Side was swatted away, as easily as a gnat might be, its black fingers peeled away from Luke by his own shear will. “You’ve failed, Your Highness. I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”
And in that crystalline moment, Luke Skywalker stood before Vader, fully realized, as something embodying a power most unimaginable.
Vader watched in disbelief. Luke had felt the Dark Side, it had called to him, it had given him the strength to defeat Vader, and yet now, facing a Sith Lord such as Sidious himself, the fledgling Jedi stood defiant and unafraid. Vader suddenly felt in awe, and somewhere inside him the ghost of the man he’d once been—the hero he’d been—came clawing back up to the surface before Vader had to forcibly suppress it.
He suddenly wanted to go to Luke. He wanted to hold him, to apologize for everything. An avalanche of guilt, suppressed by shame and hatred for decades, now came crashing down on him. But he couldn’t even stand. He couldn’t even—
“So be it,” the Emperor said at last, contemptuously and snarling. “Jedi.”