by Tim Lebbon
Jakal holstered his weapon, then pulled another flimsy from his belt pouch and tossed it in the middle of the table.
And that was when Qizak said, “Coward.”
Scarn craned his neck to glare up at the Nargon. “Did you say something?” he demanded. “Did I tell you to say something?”
Qizak ignored the question and pointed to the unsigned transfer document, still lying in front of Leia. “The bosses need Kaeg’s share,” he said. “That is the plan they have.”
Kaeg’s eyes flashed in outrage. “Plan?”
Shaking his head in frustration, Han said, “Yeah, kid, plan. You were set up. I’ll explain later.” Hoping to keep the situation from erupting into a firefight, he turned back to Scarn. “Like you said, we’re done here. Go.”
Qizak pointed a scaly talon at the transfer document. “When Kaeg gives his share to the bosses.”
“No, now,” Scarn said, rising. “I give the orders. You—”
A green blur flashed past Han’s face, ending the rebuke with a wet crackle that sent Scarn sailing back with a caved-in face. The blur hung motionless long enough to identify it as a scaly green elbow, then shot forward again as Qizak grabbed Kaeg’s wrist.
Jakal cursed in Mandalorian and reached for his blaster again—then went down in a crash of metal and snapping bone as the Nargon’s huge tail smashed his knees. Han stared. How do we stop this thing?
By then, Qizak was dragging Kaeg’s hand toward the transfer document. Han checked the other Nargons and found them both in their corners, still watching the crowd rather than the trouble at the booth. Good. If they were worried about the other patrons getting involved, it would take them longer to react. That gave the Solos ten or twelve seconds to even the odds—maybe longer, if the miners really did jump into the fight.
Han pointed his blaster at Qizak’s head. “Hey, Finhead. Let—”
A green streak came sweeping toward Han’s arm. He pulled the trigger, and a single bolt ricocheted off Qizak’s temple. Then a scaly wrist cracked into Han’s elbow; his entire arm fell numb, and the blaster went flying.
From the other side of the booth came the snap-hiss of an igniting lightsaber. The acrid stench of burning scales filled the air. Qizak roared and whirled toward a spray of blue embers that made no sense, and then an amputated forearm dropped onto the table, trailing smoke and sparks.
Sparks?
Too desperate to wonder, Han launched himself at Qizak, burying his shoulder in the Nargon’s flank and pumping his legs, driving through like a smashball player making a perfect tackle.
Qizak barely teetered.
But the huge alien did look toward Han, and that gave Leia the half second she needed to jump onto the booth seat. Her lightsaber whined and crackled, and Qizak’s remaining arm dropped next to the first. Two arms, maybe three seconds. Not fast enough. Han drove harder, trying to push the Nargon off balance … or at least distract him.
Leia buried her lightsaber in Qizak’s side. The Nargon roared and pivoted away … but not to retreat. Remembering how the lizard had smashed Jakal’s knees, Han threw himself down on the huge tail, slowing it just enough to give Leia time to roll onto the table. The lightsaber fell silent for an instant, then sizzled back to life.
Qizak let out an anguished bellow, then its tail whipped back in the opposite direction. Han went tumbling and came to rest against a flailing heap of armor—Jakal, writhing with two broken legs. Han spun and reached for the Mandalorian’s blaster but discovered his numb hand lacked the strength to wrench the weapon from Jakal’s grasp.
Jakal pulled the blaster free and started to swing the nozzle toward Han.
“Are you crazy?” Han jerked his thumb toward Qizak. “He’s the one who smashed Scarn’s face!”
Jakal paused, and Han used his good hand to snatch the blaster away. So far, the fight had lasted six, maybe seven seconds. The other Nargons would arrive soon. A tremendous banging sounded from the booth, and suddenly Leia was trapped against the wall as the armless Qizak tried to kick the table aside to get at her. Kaeg stood next to her, pouring blaster fire into the lizard’s chest, but the bolts bounced away with little effect.
“What are those things?” Han gasped.
Jakal might have groaned something like scaled death, but Han was already attacking Qizak from behind, firing with his off-hand. The storm of ricochets was so thick, he did not realize he was caught in a crossfire until he stood and nearly lost his head to the bolts screeching in from two different directions.
Han dived and began to kick himself across the floor behind Qizak. The bolts had to be coming from the other Nargons, blasting on the run as they tried to push through the panicked crowd to help their companion. But who would do that, fire into a brawl when their buddy was right in the middle of it?
He continued to squeeze his own trigger, pushing himself toward Qizak’s flank and firing toward the smoking hole Leia had opened in the Nargon’s ribs. Finally, he saw a bolt disappear into the dark circle.
And that drew a reaction. Qizak spun as though hit by a blaster cannon, pupils diamond-shaped and wide open. Gray smoke began to billow from its chest, followed by blue spurting blood and something that looked like beads of molten metal. The Nargon lurched toward Han, its legs starting to shudder and spasm as it prepared to stomp its attacker into a greasy smear.
Leia came leaping over the tabletop, her lightsaber flashing and sizzling as she batted blaster bolts back toward the other Nargons. She pivoted in midair, bringing her bright blade around in a horizontal arc. Qizak’s head came off and went bouncing across the durasteel floor.
Han saw the body falling and tried to roll away, but he was too slow. The huge corpse crashed down atop him, and the air left his lungs.
In the next instant, the weight vanished. He saw Leia crouching at his feet, one arm outstretched as she used the Force to send Qizak’s body flying into a charging Nargon.
“You okay, Flyboy?” she asked.
“I’m …” Han had to stop. His chest hurt something fierce, and the breath had definitely been knocked out of him. Still, he managed to get his feet under him. “Fine. I think.”
Kaeg scrambled from beneath the table. A flurry of blaster bolts nearly took his head off. He cried out in surprise, then waved an arm toward a dark corner.
“Emergency exit!”
He scrambled away, staying low and not looking back.
Han did not follow immediately. Recalling the strange sparks that had sprayed from Qizak’s arm as Leia amputated it, he grabbed one of the limbs off the table—and was so surprised by its weight he nearly dropped it. He flipped the stump around and saw that instead of bone, the Nargon’s flesh was attached to a thick durasteel pipe with just room enough for a bundle of fiberoptic filaments.
“Han!”
Leia used the Force to send the last Nargon stumbling back toward the bar, then grabbed Han by the arm and raced down a short passage, past the refreshers, and out through an open iris hatch. It wasn’t until Kaeg sealed the hatch behind them and blasted the controls that she finally released his arm and took a good look at what he was carrying.
“Really, Han?” She rolled her eyes in disbelief. “Souvenirs?”
STAR WARS—The Expanded Universe
You saw the movies. You watched the cartoon series, or maybe played some of the video games. But did you know …
In The Empire Strikes Back, Princess Leia Organa said to Han Solo, “I love you.” Han said, “I know.” But did you know that they actually got married? And had three Jedi children: the twins, Jacen and Jaina, and a younger son, Anakin?
Luke Skywalker was trained as a Jedi by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. But did you know that, years later, he went on to revive the Jedi Order and its commitment to defending the galaxy from evil and injustice?
Obi-Wan said to Luke, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.” Did you kno
w that over those millennia, legendary Jedi and infamous Sith Lords were adding their names to the annals of Republic history?
Yoda explained that the dreaded Sith tend to come in twos: “Always two, there are. No more, no less. A Master, and an apprentice.” But did you know that the Sith didn’t always exist in pairs? That at one time in the ancient Republic there were as many Sith as Jedi, until a Sith Lord named Darth Bane was the lone survivor of a great Sith war and created the “Rule of Two”?
All this and much, much more is brought to life in the many novels and comics of the Star Wars expanded universe. You’ve seen the movies and watched the cartoon. Now venture out into the wider worlds of Star Wars!
Turn the page or jump to the timeline of Star Wars novels to learn more.
PRECIPICE
1
5,000 years BBY
“Lohjoy! Give me something!” Scrambling to his feet in the darkness, Captain Korsin craned his neck to find the hologram. “Thrusters, attitude control—I’ll even take parking jets!”
A starship is a weapon, but it’s the crew that makes it deadly. An old spacer’s line: trite, but weighty enough to lend a little authority. Korsin had used it himself on occasion. But not today. His ship was being deadly all on its own—and his crew was just along for the ride.
“We’ve got nothing, Captain!” The serpent-haired engineer Lohjoy flickered before him, off-kilter and out of focus. Korsin knew things belowdecks must be bad if his upright, uptight Ho’Din genius was off-balance. “Reactors are down! And we’ve got structural failures in the hull, both aft and—”
Lohjoy shrieked in agony, her tendrils bursting into a mane of fire that sent her reeling out of view. Korsin barely suppressed a startled laugh. In calmer times—half a standard hour ago—he’d joked that Ho’Din were half tree. But that was hardly appropriate when the whole engineering deck was going up. The hull had ruptured. Again.
The hologram expired—and all around the stocky captain warning lights danced, winked, and went out. Korsin plopped down again, clutching at the armrests. Well, the chair still works. “Anything? Anybody?”
Silence—and the remote grinding of metal.
“Just give me something to shoot at.” It was Gloyd, Korsin’s gunnery officer, teeth shining in the shadows. The half smirk was a memento from a Jedi lightsaber swipe years earlier that just missed taking the Houk’s head off. In response, Gloyd had cultivated the only wit aboard as acidic as the commander’s own—but the gunner wasn’t finding much funny today. Korsin read it in the brute’s tiny eyes: Death in combat’s one thing. But this is no way to go.
Korsin didn’t bother to look at the other side of the bridge. Icy glares there could be taken as a given. Even now, when Omen was crippled and out of control.
“Anybody?”
Even now. Korsin’s bushy eyebrows flared into a black V. What was wrong with them? The adage was right. A ship needed a crew united in purpose—only the purpose of being Sith was the exaltation of self. Every ensign an emperor. Every rival’s misstep, an opportunity. Well, here’s an opportunity, he thought. Solve this, someone, and you can flat-out have the blasted comfy chair.
Sith power games. They didn’t mean much now—not against the insistent gravity below. Korsin looked up again at the forward viewport. The vast azure orb visible earlier was gone, replaced by light, gas, and grit raining upward. The latter two, he knew, came from the guts of his own ship, losing the fight against the alien atmosphere. Whatever it was, the planet had Omen now. An uncontrolled descent from orbit took a long time, surprisingly long. More time to contemplate your destruction, his father had always said. But the way the ship was shaking, Korsin and his crew might be robbed even of that dubious privilege.
“Remember,” he yelled, looking at his entire bridge crew for the first time since it had started. “You wanted to be here!”
And they had wanted to be there—most of them, anyway. Omen had been the ship to get when the Sith mining flotilla gathered at Primus Goluud. The Massassi shock troops in the hold didn’t care where they went—who knew what the Massassi even thought half the time, presuming they did at all. But many sentients who had a choice in the matter picked Omen.
Saes, captain of the Harbinger, was a fallen Jedi: an unknown quantity. You couldn’t trust someone the Jedi couldn’t trust, and they would trust just about anyone. Yaru Korsin, the crew members knew. A Sith captain owning a smile was rare enough, and always suspect. But Korsin had been at it for twenty standard years, long enough for those who’d served under him to spread the word. A Korsin ship was an easy ride.
Just not today. Fully loaded with Lignan crystals, Harbinger and Omen had readied to leave Phaegon III for the front when a Jedi starfighter tested the mining fleet’s defenses. While his crescent-shaped Blade fighters tangled with the intruder, Korsin’s crew made preparations to jump to hyperspace. Protecting the cargo was paramount—and if they managed to make their delivery before the Jedi turncoat made his, well, that was just a bonus. The Blade pilots could hitch back on Harbinger.
Only something had gone wrong. A shock to the Harbinger, and then another. Sensor readings of the sister ship went nonsensical—and Harbinger yawed dangerously toward Omen. Before the collision warning could sound, Korsin’s navigator reflexively engaged the hyperdrive. It had been in the nick of time …
… or maybe not. Not the way Omen was giving up its vitals now. They did hit us, Korsin knew. The telemetry might have told them, had they had any. The ship had been knocked off-course by an astronomical hair—but it was enough.
Captain Korsin had never experienced an encounter with a gravity well in hyperspace, and neither had any of his crew. Stories required survivors. But it felt as though space itself had yawned open near the passing Omen, kneading at the ship’s alloyed superstructure like putty. It had lasted but a fraction of a second, if time even existed there. The escape was worse than the contact. A sickly snap, and shielding failed. Bulkheads gave. And then, the armory.
The armory had exploded. That was easy enough to know from the gaping hole in the underside of the ship. That it had exploded in hyperspace was a matter of inference: they were still alive. In normal space, all the grenades, bombs, and other pleasantries, the Massassi, were taking to Kirrek would have gone up in a flourish, taking the ship with it. But instead the armory had simply vanished—along with an impressive chunk of Omen’s quarterdeck. The physics in hyperspace were unpredictable by definition; instead of exploding outward, the breached deck simply left the ship in a seismic tug. Korsin could imagine the erupting munitions dropping out of hyperspace light-years behind the Omen, wherever it was. That would mean a bad day for someone!
Might as well share the pain.
Omen had shuddered into realspace, decelerating madly—and taking dead aim at a blister of blue hanging before a vibrant star. Was that the source of the mass shadow that had interrupted their trip? Who cared? It was about to end it. Captured, Omen had skipped and bounced across the crystal ocean of air until the descent began in earnest. It had claimed his engineer—probably all his engineers—but the command deck still held. Tapani craftsmanship, Korsin marveled. They were falling, but for the moment they were still alive.
“Why isn’t he dead?”
Half mesmerized by the streamers of fire erupting outside—at least the Omen was belly-down for this bounce—Korsin only vaguely grew aware of harsh words to his left. “You shouldn’t have made the jump!” stabbed the young voice. “Why isn’t he dead?”
Captain Korsin straightened and gave his half brother an incredulous stare. “I know you’re not talking to me.”
Devore Korsin jabbed a gloved finger past the commander to a frail man, still jabbing futilely at his control panel and looking very alone. “That navigator of yours! Why isn’t he dead?”
“Maybe he’s on the wrong deck?”
“Yaru!”
Jokes weren’t going to save Boyle Marcom today, the captain knew. Marcom had been guiding ships
through the weirdness of hyperspace since the middle of Marka Ragnos’s rule. Boyle hadn’t been at his best in years, but Yaru Korsin knew a former helmsman of his father’s was always worth having. Not today, though. Whatever had happened back there, it would rightfully be laid at the navigator’s feet.
But assigning blame in the middle of a firestorm? That was Devore all over.
“We’ll do this later,” the elder Korsin said from the command chair. “If there is a later.” Anger flashed in Devore’s eyes. Yaru couldn’t remember ever seeing anything else there. The pale and lanky Devore little resembled his own ruddy, squat frame—also the shape of their father. But those eyes, and that look? Those could have been a direct transplant.
Their father. He’d never had a day like this. The old spacer had never lost a ship for the Sith Lords. Learning at his side, the teenage Yaru had staked out his own future—until the day he became less enamored of his father’s footsteps. The day when Devore arrived. Half Yaru’s age, son to a mother from a port on another planet—and embraced by the old veteran without a second thought. Rather than find out how many more children his father had out there to vie for stations on the bridge, Cadet Korsin appealed to the Sith Lords for another assignment. That had not been a mistake. In five years, he made captain. In ten, he won command of the newly christened Omen over an accomplished rival many years his senior.
His father hadn’t liked that. He’d never lost a ship for the Sith Lords. But he’d lost one to his son.
But now losing the Omen was looking like a family tradition. The whole bridge crew—even the outsider Devore—exhaled audibly when rivulets of moisture replaced the flames outside the viewport. Omen had found the stratosphere without incinerating, and now the ship was in a lazy saucer spin through clouds heavy with rain. Korsin’s eyes narrowed. Water?
Is there even a ground?