Chapter 21: Excavation
A/N: Thanks be continuously to the reviewers, and also the ESPS. For optimum effect read this whilst listening to the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack--that's how I wrote it.
Gently the Millennium Falcon settled within a white haze of snow, and its cooling jets sprayed thin streams of steam like geysers of the overhanging whiteness.
A dozen small figures emerged from the ship dressed in makeshift layers of protection against the chilling atmosphere. Luke walked first, with firm and confidant step though no apparent destination, and next Han folded his arms around himself and muttered angry curses against the planet they had descended onto. Kit's green skin stood out against the white, and snow already matted the fur of Chewbacca and the lead Bothan, a political rebel named Raylsk Nay'sro.
To Luke, the snow and cold skimmed about a layer of discipline shielding his body. Stinging points of ice were not noticed on his face as he scanned the cliffs around them, and nearly imperceptible points like target reticules aligned behind his eyes.
here...
A blank wall rose before them. Somewhere behind the Falcon other transports were landing. Han scowled up at a shard of ebon rock showing through the snow, possibly the bedrock of a cave structure. Blue eyes connected with black for a moment.
"Stand back." Luke said quietly, and the Rebels moved. Kit Fisto folded his hands into his robes and followed the Jedi's stare upward, where a tiny yellow sun peaked the cliffs.
Luke dug his feet into the snow and turned his gaze upward, spread his arms to encompass the great caves before them--just under the snow there--and found the Force. A slight hesitancy, then from the Nautolan Jedi energy poured in, and Luke's eyes closed as he saw timelines overlap like sheets of glacier.
Rock crumbled from an invisible periphery within the cliff. Familiar melodies personified the Force for an instant within timelessness, and something opened, a rift, a whiteness-
Luke saw what the others saw, though his eyes were slitted and unseeing of the physical realms. Rock skittered from widening gaps as if a slow change were beginning beneath, and then in a shift, a change, a ripple there was an opening in that cliff and light lancing into caves beyond to refind and smooth nonexistent past corridors, and something that had been wrong was right, but the wrong was so much more terrible for the comparison.
Luke felt himself collapse, but did not embrace the cold now ringing his body until the last shift was complete, and he fell into the Force.
When Luke awoke, he found himself lying on the retractable bunk out of the Falcon, taken from the ship and set on the floor of Echo Base's maintenance level. He sat up, gingerly checking his physical condition. Nothing was wrong, though the cold seemed as pervasive here as it had been outside. He ignored it and sat up.
The cavernous room was more barren then he remembered, with only a thin layer of snow on the floor. One X-wing sat on the wide lift to the main hanger, and it was markedly silent.
He rode the turbolift up to the hanger. Han was there, and his ship and more X-wings, even a few snow speeders. Han dropped down from a strut of the Falcon and messily saluted. "Welcome back. Nice place you got here, though it could use a little more heat."
Luke looked around. This space too was bare, almost simplified from the old memories' completeness. "Where'd those ships come from?"
"Kit pulled them up."
"Pulled them up?"
"Outta thin air. Like you did." A Wookiee roar split the air and echoed, and the two men turned to its source, Chewbacca's furry head bent behind a speeder's beat-up chassis. "Some of them even work."
Luke laughed softly. The place felt different to him; though he set a hand against the near wall and it was solid and very cold there was something intangibly...intangible about it. Something thin, that showed itself out of the back of his mind and the corners of his eyes.
A few hours later, once Luke was rested, a meeting was called in one of the holoproj rooms. Kit and a company of recruits had been scouting outside, and returned looking hale and cold, reporting that there was no sign of intelligent life, nor of any of the Rebel's cannon or generators.
"We've got two hangers, a mess hall-no food mind you-, a couple barracks and this." Han was saying to the Bothan Raylsk. "But what are we doing here really. Waiting for somebody to figure out a military base just sprouted on this miserable planet?"
"No." Luke came up beside them and clapped a hand on the smuggler's shoulder. "We've got something good here."
"Was this all you Rebels had?"
"Oh no, there was much more." His gaze tended toward the north as his hand dropped to his side again. "Much more, but I can't do that yet. It's there, it's in my mind."
"Right." Han said.
Luke wearily smiled and moved past them and down into the center of the room. Again he wore the simple black uniform in which he had arrived. Though it was cold in the caves, cold enough that Han had three layers on and his thick jacket drawn up to his chin, no knowledge of it seemed to touch Luke's thin form.
Han sat beside Chewbacca and the other expectant Rebels around the holoproj on its table. Master Fisto slipped into the center beside Luke and the two Jedi spoke quietly for a moment, then Luke came to the center and Kit returned to the ranks. Luke spread his hands against the table and looked around at them all, and when he spoke there was a tone of command in his voice Han had never heard.
"We have here a great advantage, one that will continue to grow. The Rebellion will not die again. We will not let it. We are the last of the Jedi, the last of the Rebels, the last of the free people of the galaxy! Are we going to let the last just fall into oblivion?"
He stared around at the little group, and there was vivid fire in his eyes.
Raylsk started clapping, and then it was all around them, and even Han was smiling sheepishly and going along with it. Luke's response was to slowly smile. "All right, there's food in the mess hall," He said then, when his face was lit and it seemed he glowed in the light of his supporters.
The food was from the Millennium Falcon and various other ships, and so most of it was Corellian, preprogrammed, or Kel Dor, a wide variety of fare. People walked about or sat with the determination that their revolutionary cause had jumped from anonymity to defiance, and that in a simple display from the Jedi their resources had doubled and could be doubled again.
These are naive Rebels. Luke thought. How many of them have seen real death?
He came into the mess hall from an independent tour of the base. It was, as Han had said, incomplete. It had taken a mass of energy to create this the familiar or oft visited 'front' of the complex of caves, and he hoped to be able to do more in a few days, with Kit's help.
He saw Han among this group, talking to the Bothan leader. The smuggler had seen death...but was not a real supporter of the cause. I can not think of him as General Solo! What was keeping him here was probably not wanting to lose Luke's friendship again--and the fact that he was being actively hunted by the Empire. Better to not take the blame on your shoulders when it could be off-loaded onto those of vague groups like the Rebellion or the Jedi. But neither were so vague any more...
"Thanks for staying around, Han." Luke eventually said.
Han shrugged. "I've got nothing else to do."
Luke smiled fleetingly and moved on, spying Kit Fisto by the small table of food. The two Jedi had not spoken much after the revival of the base. Their friendship was strong but impersonal, an alliance between the last Jedi who, in another situation, would be unknown to each other completely.
"Would you tell me how you made those ships out there?" Luke quietly asked the alien.
Kit evenly said, "See I could sense how you had done what you did. So I could just almost feel those speeders. Like the Force was imprinted with them."
"The worlds overlap." Luke muttered, not sure where exactly the wording had come from. "The Force is strong in this place."
"I want to fight for the Rebels." Kit said suddenly. "Really fight. I'm not going to get home am I."
Luke wasn't sure what had prompted that last phrase and said nothing. A human moved between them and picked a sandwich from the table. Kit seemed to brighten then. Luke's own thoughts had been edging toward the impossibility of his own journey home.
Kit shook his tentacle-bedecked head and smiled to his black eyes. "Might as well have fun while I'm here." He said, and he turned away to get something to eat.
While I am alive, the words seemed to change in Luke's mind for a moment.
Luke turned to watch the gathered beings again, unable to be so lighthearted. The Force flowed strange--his own Force-'memories' given to Kit!--and the only way to get the 'real world' back was, common sense or some vestigial desperate logic said, was to change this to that, by defeating the Empire. So Luke's victory would be the Rebel's--but that victory seemed a sure defeat.