Free Rebel Dream: Enemy Lines I by Aaron Allston Page B

had confronted a vision of Darth Vader—of himself in Vader’s distinctive dress. Now, there was no Yoda to warn him against taking weapons into this place of evil and confrontation, and Luke felt sad that this vision would not give him even the momentary pleasure of seeing his old Master again in the one context where his presence was appropriate.
    Luke found he was dressed in black. His lightsaber hung at his waist. He removed it, depositing it in the crook of a tree branch, and entered the cave.
    Within, he found only darkness and silence. But he knew something was there, a few steps from him, a deeper darkness. He could neither see nor hear it, but could feel it within the Force. He stepped toward it and felt it move to the side, circling him.
    Then it brushed past him, a contact that sickened him, reawakened in him every great hatred of his life—for Darth Vader, for the Emperor, for himself when he had stumbled too far down the path of the dark side—and left the cave. Luke followed.
    He emerged into brighter light than he’d seen outside a moment ago, and now he was surrounded by soaring buildings, construction so high that the sky was visible only as a faint sliver of light. All around him, duracrete surfaces, crashed landspeeders, and giant blocks of unrecognizable debris were coated with green algae and waving grasses in a more pallid green hue. At his feet, a human body was covered with the same stuff.
    The darkness he’d pursued was ahead of him, farther down the narrow aperture between skyscrapers, still invisible to the naked eye, still nauseatingly tangible within the Force.
    It roiled and spun like a tornado. It increased in size until it brushed against the buildings to either side. The algae and grasses there changed when it touched them, suddenly bearing large, malformed fruits as black and slick as old oil. Then every surface in sight was covered with the fruits, and as he watched they began to drop from their stems. They struck the ground and then struggled to newly developed feet, walking in every direction with the awkwardness of babies.
    And each of them was filled with misery and dark side longing for ruin.
    One opened its mouth and let out a piercing wail. Then another did, and a third. Suddenly the air was full of their cries.
    A hand gripped Luke’s shoulder. He opened his eyes. Mara was shaking him; her face was pale. The air was still filled with cries, but they were Ben’s, and Mara held the baby away, as if to protect him from Luke. “What is it?” she asked.
    “A vision.” Luke brought his breathing under control and found that one part of his vision still lingered; dark side energy and malice still surrounded him. Ben, as sensitive to the Force as only the child of two eminent Jedi could be, wailed in protest. “There’s evil on Coruscant. Tremendous dark side evil.”
Borleias Occupation, Day 5
    The hologram showed a familiar sight: the daytime skyline of some portion of Coruscant. The enormous, soaring buildings and the mottled orange clouds in the sky were distinctive to that world, though there were so countless many different planetary vistas like this that no one present could precisely identify the portion of Coruscant being displayed.
    Things were different, though. The more distant skyscrapers seemed to be a uniform shade of green, and the reason why was evident on the nearer buildings: they were coated in a material that looked like algae. From the algae protruded things that looked like grasses, tree branches, umbrella-topped fungi. Up close, their colors were different; only in the distance did they blur together into a single hue.
    Luke found the hologram unsettling. The algae and grasses were identical to those of his vision.
    In the darkened conference chamber, a man stepped up next to the holoprojection. In the light cast by the projection of Coruscant, his face was luminous, the green from the algae lending color to his pale skin, white hair, mustache, and beard,