[Black Fleet Crisis(12)

“That, ” said Han, “is the difference between a friend and a sister. “

“I suppose, ” Leia said, sighing. “Speaking of sisters-did anything else happen today? “

“Well, let’s see, ” Han said, crossing his arms over his chest and gazing at the ceiling. “After lunch, Jaina got tired of being ignored by Jacen again and started sabotaging his practice. They ended up in a fight that went on so long it made them both sick to their stomachs … “

As soon as Luke shut down the engines, he could hear the wind howling outside. It rocked the E-wing on its skids and pelted its surface with freezing salt spray ripped from the crests of the waves breaking near the beach.

“Keep the stabilizers on, ” Luke told R7-T1 as he unbuckled his harness.

The astromech droid chirped in response, and the words RECOMMEND WING DE-ICERS ON flashed on the cockpit monitor.

“Fine, keep the wing de-icers on, too. “

R7-T1 purred. PLEASE CONFIRM NEGATIVE RESPONSE TO CORUSCANT TRAFFIC CONTROL.

“Yes, I’m sure I don’t want you to notify traffic control of our arrival. Not a peep out of you-not even so much as a time synchronization check. ” He reached forward and released the cockpit latch, and the seamless bubble tilted up on concealed hinges. Damp, bitterly cold air poured in with the sound of the surf. “I’ll be back when I’ve found the hangar. “

The beach was barely thirty

meters wide, squeezed between

an angry-looking greenish sea and a rocky cliff half again that high. Just beyond the breakers, sculpted spires of the same reddish-black rock jutted up from the water. Smaller chunks of rock were scattered through the surf and all along the beach, half buried in the coarse brown sand. Overhead, a thick gray mat of clouds churned as the wind drove it briskly along.

Oblivious to the cold and the wind, Luke walked slowly south along the rocky beach. He held one hand out in front of him, palm down, sweeping it methodically back and forth through the air, looking almost like a blind man feeling his way through an unfamiliar room.

Luke had not gone far when he stopped and looked up at the top of the cliff for a long moment, then out at the twin spires of rock. Dropping his chin to his chest and closing his eyes, he turned through two full circles, then looked back up at the cliff edge.

“Yes, ” he said, the wind stealing the word from his lips. “Yes, it is here. “

He sat down on the sand, cross-legged and straight-backed, and brought his hands together in his lap, fingertip to fingertip. Concentrating on a picture in his mind, Luke dipped his awareness deeply into the flow of the Force beneath him. With eyes that looked inward, he found what he was seeking, like flaws in a near-perfect crystal. He extended his will.

The sand around him stirred. The rocks shuddered, shifted, then began to rise from the sea and the sand as though sifted from them by an invisible screen.

Swirling through the air as they sought their place, the stones took shape as broken wall and shattered foundation, as arch and gate and dome-the ruins of Darth Vader’s fortress retreat. It hung in the air around and above Luke as it had once stood atop the cliff, a dark-faced and forbidding edifice.

There was no record in Imperial City’s files to say whether his father had ever occupied the fortress, though it had clearly been built for him in accord with his instructions. It had been empty when it was destroyed by a B-wing’s blasters, in the days after the New Republic reclaimed Coruscant.

Was this where Vader plotted his conquests in the Emperor’s service?

Was this where he had come to rejuvenate after a battle? Had there been celebrations here, self-indulgent pleasures or cruelties? Luke listened for the echoes of the old evils, and could not be certain.

But that did not matter to his plans. As he had redeemed and reclaimed his father, he would redeem and reclaim his father’s house.

Now the stones swirled again in the air, joined by others plucked from the sea and stripped from the face of the cliff. Now broken edge fused against broken edge, and the dark faces of the rock lightened as their mineral structure was reshuffled. Now heavy rock walls and floors thinned to an airy elegance as if they were clay in a potter’s press.

Now a tower stretched skyward until it rose above the edge of the cliff.

When it was done, the. last gap closed, the last rock transformed, the structure securely perched just above the sand on pillars of stone extending down to the bedrock, Luke brought the E-wing down the beach and nestled it in the chamber he had made for it. It was not a door that closed over the opening, though, but a solid wall that closed out not only the wind and the cold, but the world.

“Shut down all systems, ” Luke told R7-T1. “Then place yourself in standby mode, I won’t be needing you for a while. “