Chapter 15: Surrender vs. Foresight

Luke’s Surrender:

        I hope this is the right thing to do.

        It has to be the right thing.  If I don’t give myself up, then I’ll become a beacon to Vader, saying ‘Here’s the Rebel scum; come get them!’  I can’t do that to the team.  If I did, and Han ever found out, and then found out that I knew about it, he would never forgive me.  I would never forgive myself.  So this has to be the right thing.

        Wow, there are a lot of trees around here.  It’s a wonder that those Ewok creatures don’t ever get lost.  Then again, I suppose if I lived on Endor all my life, I’d be good at finding my way in all these trees, too.

        Forget about not getting lost; I’d be too busy looking at all this greenery to bother with ever knowing my location.

        (Sigh.)  It’s too bad I’m going to meet Vader and the Emperor; I’d like to spend some more time seeing all these trees in the daylight before die.  I do have a good chance of dying, after all.

Well, that’s all right.  I’m not afraid to die.  At least the new Death Star isn’t orbiting a desert planet full of sand.  I saw enough sand on Tatooine to fill ten lifetimes.  If I die, I wouldn’t mind being buried on Endor.  I could get used to all this greenery.

The Emperor’s Foresight:

(evil maniacal laughter) Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

Luke’s Surrender:

        The bunker for the shield generator has to be in this general direction.  Look at all those lights!  It’s like the Empire’s scared of the dark.  With all those lights, they can’t miss seeing something coming, no matter what time it is.

        Which means that they can’t possibly miss me.  Good thing I’m surrendering; I would be captured anyway.

        Or maybe I wouldn’t be captured.  I could walk right up and pretend to surrender, and then once they took me captive, I could let loose and use the Force to really do some damage.  I bet I can do a lot of damage if I just set my mind to it.  One Jedi versus…. oh, about two hundred stormtroopers?  I could probably take out… let’s say, about fifty troopers before they figured out that I’m only one person.  But then I’d be in trouble.  Then I’d get captured for sure.

        But even if I get captured, at least I wouldn’t be endangering the team and the mission anymore.  Of course, Leia might get upset when she hears about it.  And Han wouldn’t like it very much.

And you can bet that I’d be used against the Rebellion after that.  The Emperor would never let me just rot in one of his prison cells for long.  He’d turn me to the Dark Side first chance he got, and then unleash me on all my Rebel friends.

        Nope, surrendering is my best option.

The Emperor’s Foresight:

(evil maniacal laughter) Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

Luke’s Surrender:

Besides, I’m losing sight of what I’m really trying to do, which is turn Father back to the Good Side.  He’s my focus, not how much damage I can do before I get captured.  I know there’s still good in him.  I’ve felt it.

        At least, I think I’ve felt it.

There has to be good in him.  He didn’t kill me when he had the chance in Cloud City.  I wished he did at the time, but he didn’t.  That says a lot when you consider that he’s a Sith Lord.  He won’t turn me over to his Emperor now.  He wants to keep me for himself so that we can rule the galaxy together.

Like I really want to rule the galaxy!  What would I do with a galaxy, anyway?  Blow it up one planet at a time?  A lot of good that would do.  Look what it did to Leia.  She actually saw her home planet get blown up, and all it really did was make her fight the Empire that much harder.

Yet, she had to be rescued first in order to do it.

Which brings me right back to where I started with the whole ‘getting captured’ thing.

I can’t get captured.  I’d have Darth Vader to contend with if I get captured, not to mention the Emperor.  I’ll have to contend with them if I surrender, of course, but at least this way, it’s on my terms.  But if I get captured instead of surrendering, you can bet that the Rebellion will try to rescue me.  A lot of Rebels will lose their lives doing it, too.  I couldn’t stand how guilty I’d feel if that happened.  Now I know how Han felt when I showed up at Jabba’s Palace to rescue him.  I didn’t think of that.

Surrender is definitely my best option.  Father didn’t kill me before, and he’ll not turn me over to the Emperor now.

Sure, Luke.  Say that to yourself often enough, and you might even start to believe it.

The Emperor’s Foresight:

(evil maniacal laughter) Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

Luke’s Surrender

        I can feel Vader.  If I can feel him, that means he knows I’m coming and is waiting for me.

        Maybe I should…

        That was when Luke practically tripped over an Imperial speeder bike left hidden behind a gigantic fern.  He had just untangled his foot from the bike’s front guidance rifle when a trooper spotted him.

“Hey you!  Stop right there!”  Several armoured stormtroopers rushed to surround Luke the moment he straightened.  “Freeze!’

Luke froze.  “I’m a Rebel, and I surrender,” he immediately said, raising his hands above his head, his lightsaber clutched in his gloved fist.

“What is this, some kind of joke?” barked a nervous trooper, getting right up into Luke’s face.  “Rebels never surrender!  They’d die first.”

“I’m not just any Rebel,” Luke calmly replied.

The nervous trooper grabbed at Luke’s upraised arms, yanking them down in order to rip the lightsaber from his grasp.  Luke let him, but kept on eye on where his lightsaber was at any given time in case he suddenly needed to call it back.

However, the trooper’s next move ended any idea of fighting the Imperials with his lightsaber.  The trooper roughly pulled Luke’s hands together so that he could shackle them as tightly as possible.  “Try getting out of that, Rebel scum!”  The stormtrooper then grabbed one of his arms, pulling hard enough to yank him off his feet, but Luke refused to move.

Why are we always called ‘Rebel scum?’ thought Luke as the trooper yanked on him a second time.

Luke refused to move again.

The ugly helmet with the familiar intimidating frown whipped to face him.  “Move, you scum, or I’ll--”

“There’s no need for violence,” Luke placidly insisted.  “I said that I surrender, and I do.  That doesn’t mean that I’ll let you mistreat me in any way you see fit.”

“Any way I see fit, huh?”  The trooper hefted his heavy Imperial rifle up in obvious threat.  “What are you gonna do about it, Rebel?”

“This.”  Luke lifted his bound hands to use the Force to fling the trooper twenty feet away from him.  The trooper landed hard on the ground, his white armour making a great clanking sound that no one could possibly miss even in all those trees.  As the downed stormtrooper staggered to his feet, Luke calmly eyed the surrounding soldiers.  “Anybody else?”

As one, the troopers lowered their rifles to simply stare at Luke with the same respect they habitually showed Lord Vader.

Luke serenely turned forward once more.   “Then let’s go; we have a Dark Lord to see.”

As one, the twenty troopers led Luke toward a waiting ATAT that someone had had the foresight to call. Once there, they would inform their commanding officer that they had a Rebel prisoner.  But as they went, each one of them wondered exactly which one of them was the prisoner, and which one, the captive?

The Emperor’s Foresight:

(evil maniacal laughter) Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

The End