Like a huge serpent he struck, and she raised her blade to defend, her mind open with the Force, feeling before he did so that he was going to switch to lateral again.

He did, and she was in under the blow and slashing a long, streaming, sidelong cut that went through the soft green body like burning wire. She flung herself past him, away from him, fast, for the huge bulk of him burst open, severed clean through, mammoth gouts of fluid and flesh and organs exploding soddenly forth.

She heard him bellow with rage, once-saw the hot smoke-colored blade of his lightsaber go whirling, end over end.

Then he was collapsing like a punctured balloon, like an empty sack, and Leia stood panting, covered in slime, her own blade burning in her hand, as Luke flung himself out from under the Headhunter and into its c.o.c.kpit.

Dripping with filth, she saluted him with the blade, and Luke saluted back, their eyes meeting for an instant before he slammed the c.o.c.kpit shut. Luke knew what it was that he saw.

Her first victory. The victory over the shadow of Vader. The victory of acceptance of herself.

And, he knew who had taught her that long characteristic side cut.

He hit the lifters, and the Headhunter slammed into life and rocketed like a falcon into the sky.

It rose faster than the Reliant, faster than most interceptors, for it had been designed to outmaneuver the gun stations, and had done so before. Course controls were adapted to the positions of each gun station, Liegeus's calculations, beautifully precise. He punched in the program, to hold the segment of sky guarded only by Bleak Point, knowing that had to be the way the Reliant was going as well. The flashes of light returned to his mind. Fighting, he thought. Fighting high above the surface of the planet, orbital battle. Someone must have come in to stop them.

Would they know to open fire on a ship rising from the planet's surface?.

Blue sky darkened around him. The pale stars brightened to burning jewels.

He saw the gray ship, rising far ahead, making for the flurry of explosions and lights. There was a Republic corsair, hanging in s.p.a.ce, far away to his left, being torn to pieces by tiny, darting CCIR Needles of black and bronze. The things the Empire wanted. The things Loronar was going to give them.

Beyond, at the farthest range of his vision, he saw the fleet.

Imperials. Two, three Republic vessels-Was that the Falcon?.

Dodging, twisting, like durkii maddened by parasitic kleex, trying to fire at the Imperial ships that were surrounding them. A thousand tiny flashes of fire as the Needles tore and swirled around them. He was out of signal range still, but coming into firing range on the square, awkward gray ship that contained Dzym and Ashgad, the monstrous life drinker and his pitiful p.a.w.n and the dark boxes of death that would consume the lives of all the galaxy, and relay that life back to him.

Only for that. Destruction, death, ruin stretching over planet after planet, only so that Dzym could drink of the lives of everything he touched, without fear.

Luke's thumb hit the firing b.u.t.ton. White light lanced forth.

The next second a terrible concussion ripped his ship, tossed it spinning. He glimpsed the Reliant still going its way untouched, glimpsed something small and fast and black pa.s.s over him.... Another shot, and his whole console went red. He scratched and twisted at the joystick, trying to drag the Headhunter to stability, but he was spinning out of control, falling into Nam Chorios's gravitational pull.

As the Z-95 rolled, he pulled her straight and got off a wing laser shot at the Reliant, saw yellow fire explode from her aft engines.

But she didn't go up. Only drifted, swinging off course, and his long-range pickups brought in the faint crackle of Seti Ashgad's voice, calling for an intercept.

As the Headhunter began its long fall, Luke saw a small carrack detach from the Imperial fleet, begin to make its way toward the drifting craft.

And before the Imperials knew what they had loosed, the Death Seed would grow across the stars.

Then he was falling.

Cabin gray was out. Against the sickening sensation of freefall, Luke worked to reroute switches, to shuttle power from the now-unneeded shields, trying to summon enough pickup to at least take him in alive.

The heat in the c.o.c.kpit was unbearable, suffocating, the ground a vast lake of molten reflection, rushing to smash him to powder. Hot spiky mountains, black shadow. The crystalline needles of the tsils. He felt the jolt and pull as one of the engines caught, dragged on the joystick, trying to even out into a long, sweeping curve. The retros fired, cutting his speed. He seemed to be descending in a column of fire, falling he knew' not where. A laser bolt hissed near him and he thought, Oh, thanks .. Presumably he had pa.s.sed into the range of some other gun station.

Or they'd got Bleak Point fixed.

Flatten the curve. Hold the retros. Cut in the antigravs.

Callista... he thought, wanting more than he had ever wanted anything that he had been able to speak to her again. Callista...

He was above a plain. An enormous sea bed, blinding with the fire of diamonds to the horizon. Snaking lines of tsils, marching away into the distance. The Ten Cousins. Other circles, other lines, pointing toward the great glittering outcrops of Spooks in the hills.

There was a pattern to them, visible only when coming in from above like this. A pattern that tugged at his consciousness, reminded him of half-forgotten dreams.

He pulled back on the joystick as hard as he could, threw his mind open to the Force because the ground was flashing by so fast he couldn't see anything of the terrain below-and brought her in.

Afterward he didn't remember getting out of the Headhunter before it exploded. He knew he'd probably used the Force to damp the physical reactions involved until he'd crawled to more-or-less safety. He had no idea where he was or how close might be his chances of rescue, and somehow that didn't matter.

If the Imperial Fleet picked up Dzym-Dzym with his enslaved front man Seti Ashgad, with his little dark boxes of crawling life, with his promises of controllable, invisible plague and limitless access to the crystals they needed for those tiny death dealers-there was going to be nothing left of the Republic, of the fragments of the Empire, of any s.p.a.ce-going civilization whatever.

Only Dzym, fat and sated and looking around for more.

Luke lay on the spines of the crystal, eyes shut, the smoke of the burning Headhunter in his nostrils, knowing he should get up and knowing that he could not.

Feeling them standing around him again.

Silent, unseen.

If-you're going to attack me, attack me, he thought, his mind slipping into a darkness and dreams of stormtroopers and Jawas again. If you're going to have me, go ahead.

And then, on the borderlands of consciousness, he remembered the pattern of the tsils, coming in from high above: remembered his dreams when they'd loomed in the background. remembered the voices that spoke to him in those dreams, like the Listeners said the rocks spoke to them.

You're alive, he said, enormously surprised-more surprised than he'd been about anything in his life.

a.s.sent flowed out over him, colors in his mind, as blue as the crystalline core of the tsils, the green of the Spook cl.u.s.ters high on the rocks. Alive alive alive alive... like an echo.

And his dream of the Jawas came back.

They'd only used, after all, the images they could find in his mind: the indigenous inhabitant, brain gutted and forced to work for the stormtroopers.

You've been alive all this time.

All this time, they agreed, a gentle vibration like music, rising from the crystals beneath him, from the tsils, from the mountains; rising up into his bones. From all time For all time. Thinking and dreaming] and speaking and singing. The sea formed us, and the sea went away.

The planet fed us, from the fires of her heart. Little people here and there but not important. Not until they took us. Took our .. and the word was impossible to translate in his mind, "brother/self" he thought-a part of their minds.

The deep tide of their anger flowed over him, anger for their kidnapped kin.

Taken and enslaved, zapped with the horrible electronic realignment, as the Jawas had been zapped in his dream, so that they became slaves.

Through the minds of the tsils Luke saw those enslaved ones, imprisoned both in the Needles and in the synthdroids; slaves but still kindred, still tsils in their hearts. He sensed the incomprehension of those slow timeless beings about what it was that they saw, but he himself understood.

The cabin of the Reliant. Two synthdroids lying dazed, eyes staring, on the floor, their flesh a rotting ma.s.s but their minds receiving impres sions, still and calm, without pain. Seti Ashgad sat at the controls, his face a welted, bleeding ma.s.s, gasping, fighting for breath. His hair, his clothing, his body crawled with drochs, freed of their fear of the crystal-imbued light of Nam Chorios; while Luke, through the eyes of the synthdroids, watched, he saw a thumb-size brown insect crawl into Ashgad's mouth.

And Dzym stood behind him. Dzym with his robe open to the waist, every pulsing orifice and squirming pendule moving, while Dzym himself stared at the Imperial carrack's approach in the main screen with hungry delight in his eyes.

"Reliant?" crackled a voice over the comm system. "Reliant, this is Grand Admiral Larm of the Antemeridian sector."

Luke was so startled, so dazzled by the vision, that he could barely gather his thoughts. Can you still talk to them?

Confusion, murmuring-a dim comprehension of the horror, the pain, of those enslaved and taken away. But no focus. No direction or guide.

They could see this, but could not understand, as Luke had not understood the dream that the tsils-the planet's Guardian inhabitants-had sent to him.

A second vision flashed in his mind, of the Reliant rising against the great glowing purple-white gem of the planet, seen from s.p.a.ce. Of the carrack drawing closer to it, and, weirdly, of the voices transmitted between them, picked up over the electronic consciousness of the Needles themselves and relayed back to their kindred tsils.

"This is Grand Admiral Larm, of the Antemeridian sector Imperial Fleet.

In the name of Moff Getelles, i am empowered to greet you personally."

With doubled vision he saw the square gray ship, the silvery carrack, and in the same consciousness saw the Reliant's bridge again. Seti Ashgad raised his head like a drunken man, barely conscious of what was being said.

Dzym threw back his head and laughed, his eyes sparking in the darkness with two flames of unholy triumph.

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 s.p.a.ce.

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 s.p.a.ce, 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 antic.i.p.ation, 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.

Given the circ.u.mstances 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 cl.u.s.ter.

See-Threepio, who accompanied them with Chewbacca, Artoo-Detoo, and a considerable number of Daala's comrades, 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-doc.u.mented 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 hypers.p.a.ce 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." Arms folded, booted feet apart, Daala glanced over her shoulder at Han, the growing glare of the planet below already so bright as to cast cold, queer shadows on her face. The forward lounge of a Seinar Sentinel landing shuttle included a curving sweep of viewport, as well as small amenities like a cold-cabinet containing wine and beer. Trails of condensation whipped and swirled up the transparisteel viewport, so that the Admiral seemed vreathed in misty light.

"Service. Order. The triumph over the forces of chaos..." She c.o.c.ked her head, as the soft throb of the engines altered with the transfer to repulsorlifts. A hard fold appeared at the corner of her mouth, the track of some bitter thought. "All of my life, and all that i could have had, I laid on the altar of the fleet, and I was satisfied. And now... this."

"Well," said Han softly, "I can understand. You're not the only one who's ever been betrayed."

She started to jeer something back at him, then stopped herself and averted her face. Beyond the shifting vapor trails and their reflected brilliance, the starry darkness was yielding to a deep cobalt noon.

"No," she said, her voice unwontedly quiet. "Perhaps not."

"Oh, look," exclaimed Threepio, from the other side of the lounge.

"The CCIRs all appear to have crash-landed. There, see?" A thread of smoke curled into the still air. "How remarkable that they would have maintained so tight a formation in the face of what was quite clearly a controller malfunction."

"Yeah, well, maybe we better pick up a couple of them and see what we can learn about getting them to malfunction again."

As if Threepio had not spoken, Daala said, "You know her policies, Solo."

Once she would never have acknowledged him as her equal, or spoken to him without scorn in her voice. "Will your Chief of State keep her hands off the Chorios systems, once their value is known to her?"

"I don't know what the Council's gonna say," said Han truthfully.

"But I do know Lei-Her Excellency-just went through one laser blast raking over because she refused to interfere in a planet that couldn't get a majority for interference. So as long as you folks keep the majority on Pedducis I'd say you're pretty safe."

He rose, and walked over to stand beside her and look at the world that to him had, up until this time, been only a name.

"What a rock! There're people living down there?"

Chewbacca yowled an observation.

"Oh, right. One crummy little block there and about four houses way over in the distance. I can see we're at a major population center of the sector."

Daala remarked drily, "At the moment, Captain Solo, I can think of few views more pleasant than that of an entire planet utterly devoid of human life."

The homing beacon from the surface brought them, not to the fortress of Seti Ashgad, but to the Bleak Point gun station sixteen kilometers away, where the plain of gla.s.s-bright crystal made a landing area for the shuttle. A light freighter already occupied the site-"As long as that station's out of commission," said a brisk little woman with long white hair, as the doors of the shuttle opened, "I'd be a fool not to take a cargo of majie offplanet and see what I can bring back. I'll get the cream of the market. Well, what do we got here?" she demanded, turning, as Han, Chewie, and the two droids descended the boarding ramp and looked around them at the glaring landscape.

Wreckage from the Force storm scattered the gravel for half a kilometer around the walls of the tower, snarls of wire, broken beams, weapons burst by the violence of Beldorion's uncontrolled will. Rationalists and Therans alike were gathering around the walls, and the plain was a parking lot of speeders, speeder bikes, and cu-pas warbling and wheezing and scratching themselves. A caravan of very dusty, very primitively dressed Therans cl.u.s.tered together, gazing in wonderment at the speeders; at Umolly Darm's freighter; and at the sleek, deadly shape of Daala's shuttle. From their midst two figures broke away, crossing to Han and Chewie at a run.

Battered, dusty, blotched with grime and smoke and blood, Han realized it was Luke and Leia. Leia cried, "Han!" and threw herself into his arms, crushed against him, face pressed to his shirt and leaving an enormous s.m.u.tch of slime-dried dust there. Looking down into her face, he realized that he himself was unshaven and s.m.u.tted with soot from that last burn-through of the defensive shielding that had almost accounted for the Falcon in the last moments before Daala and her fleet had made their appearance.

"Leia!" They were hugging like schoolkids, rocking in each other's arms-Han felt an idiotic urge to whirl her in his arms and dance.

"Admiral Larm..." she began.

"Is s.p.a.ce dust," finished Han. "His fleet went back to Antemeridian to give him a nice memorial service. I don't think they're gonna be back."

"You know what happened?"

"Pretty much. The plague's over three-quarters of the sector, there doesn't seem to be any way of stopping it. The boys at Med Central say it's like the Death Seed..."

"It is the Death Seed." Luke came over to them, limping heavily with a stick, wearing the same sort of padded jacket and loose, ragged robe that the Therans had on. "And the-the Guardian tsils have agreed to send some of their number off planet, to the sector medical facility, to be installed in apparatus that will destroy the drochs. Once we've got the sentient Spook crystals to channel light through, it shouldn't be hard to destroy the drochs wherever they are. All they ask in exchange is that we return every' Spook crystal that has ever been taken off and programmed."