Star Wars: The Jedi Academy Trilogy II: Dark Apprentice

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Mon Mothma is dying,” Leia said abruptly before she could change her mind. Cilghal sat up in the most sudden reaction Leia had yet seen from the calm ambassador.

  Ackbar heaved his weary eyes to look at her. He set the stew bowls down. “How can you be certain of this?”

  “It’s a wasting disease that’s tearing her apart,” Leia answered. “The medical droids and the experts can’t find anything wrong with her. She looks bad. You saw her before you left us. Mon Mothma was covering the worst with extensive makeup to hide how ill she really is.

  “We need you back, Admiral.” Leia used his rank on purpose. She leaned on Ackbar’s small table and stared at him, her dark eyes pleading.

  “I’m sorry, Leia,” Ackbar said, shaking his head. He indicated the newly refurbished workroom and his equipment. “I have important work to do here. My planet was badly damaged during the Imperial attacks, and there have been many tectonic disturbances. I’ve taken it upon myself to find out if our planet’s crust has become unstable. I need to gather more data. My people could be in danger. No more lives will be lost because of me.”

  Cilghal turned her head from side to side, watching the debate but saying nothing.

  “Admiral, you can’t just let the New Republic fall apart because of your guilty conscience,” Leia said. “Many lives across the galaxy are at stake.”

  But Ackbar moved about uneasily, as if trying to shut out Leia’s words. “There is so much work to do, I cannot delay another moment. I was just preparing to set some new seismic sensors.” He shuffled toward a shelf filled with packaged electronic equipment. “Please, leave me in peace.”

  Leia stood up quickly. “We’ll help you set out your sensors, Admiral.”

  Ackbar hesitated, as if lonely but afraid to have their company. He turned to meet Leia’s eyes, then Cilghal’s. “Yes, I would be honored to have your assistance. My submersible can carry the three of us.” He blinked his large, sad eyes. “I enjoy your company—even though your requests are most difficult.”

  Strapped into one of the seats in the cramped utility sub, Leia watched as water sloshed around the upper ports. The sea swallowed the craft, and they descended into the isolated seatree forest until the ocean around them looked like panels of dark-green smoked glass. Leia watched in awe as Ackbar picked a course through thick ropy strands and wide pillars.

  Underwater, the seaflowers blossomed in shimmering reds and blues to attract darting creatures that flitted in and out of the fronds. As one of the small fish came too close to a brilliant flower, the petals suddenly contracted like a fist, snatching its prey and swallowing it whole.

  “I have only begun deploying my seismic network,” Ackbar said, as if to divert the conversation. “I’ve set up the baseline grid beneath my dwelling, but I need to extend into the seatree forest to get higher-resolution soundings.”

  Cilghal said, “I am pleased with the important work you are doing for our planet, Admiral.” Leia was amused at how the ambassador continued—whether consciously or unconsciously—to use his military title.

  “It is necessary to do important things with your life,” Ackbar said, then said no more, walling himself off with silence. Behind them, stowed seismic equipment rattled beside the empty nets and sea-harvest baskets.

  Leia cleared her throat and spoke, keeping her voice gentle. “Ackbar … I understand how you must feel. I was there too, remember?”

  “You are kind, Leia. But you do not understand how I feel. Were you piloting the B-wing that crashed? Are you responsible for hundreds of deaths?” He shook his head sadly. “Do you hear their voices in your dreams each night, calling out to you?”

  Ackbar switched on the sub’s depth lights, and a bright cone-shaped beam sliced through the water. The funnel of illumination glanced off colorful fish and strips of seaweed.

  Leia spoke more from intuition than from knowledge. “You can’t hide on Calamari forever.”

  Ackbar still would not look at her. “I am not hiding. I have my work. Important work.”

  They drifted toward the silty ocean bottom near one of the gnarled seatree boles. Rounded hummocks of dark rock thrust out from the milky sand. A coating of algae smoothed every surface, making the sea floor appear soft and soothing. Ackbar hunched forward to stare through the murk, searching for a stable place to implant another seismic sensor.

  “Important work, perhaps,” Leia said, “but not your work. Many Calamarians would gladly help with that research, Admiral. Are you equipped to handle such a task by yourself? Remember that old proverb you used to quote when I complained about all those senseless Council meetings? ‘Many eyes see what one alone cannot.’ Wouldn’t it be best to share your concerns with a team of specialists?”

  Cilghal interrupted, leaning forward to indicate some curved half-buried sections of metal, like the ribbed shell of some sort of escape pod. “What’s that?”

  The edges had corroded, and tracings of algae grew in the protected crevices. “Perhaps a wrecked ship,” Ackbar said.

  Cilghal nodded. “We fought back when the Imperials tried to enslave us. Many of their ships lie beneath our waters.”

  Ackbar inserted his hands into the waldo control gloves for the automated metallic claws that extended from the front of the small sub. The sharp jerky motions reminded Leia of the vicious krakana monster near the mollusk knowledge bank.

  “If that wreckage has been stable here for years,” Ackbar said, “this is a good place to deploy another set of sensors.”

  Watching the external metal arms, Leia saw Ackbar remove a canister from the external storage bin on the submersible. Ackbar lowered the craft until plumes of pale sand drifted up from the disturbance like a slow-motion Tatooine dust storm. The nimble robotic claws positioned the cylinder upright in the soft silt.

  Reversing propellers, Ackbar lifted them away. Craning his neck so he could see better through the front viewport, Ackbar pushed the ACTIVATE button. With a vibrating thump that Leia could feel through the sub’s hull, the seismic canister detonated its tiny explosive. A long rod plunged deep into the ocean floor while spraying out a web of secondary detectors symmetrically around the core like a shooting star.

  “Now we’ll send a test signal,” Ackbar said. With a whirr he lifted the sub through the densely tangled seatree forest, moving slowly enough so the fronds could be nudged out of the way, slithering over the rounded hull.

  Leia fidgeted, swallowing numerous phrases that sounded flat to her. “Admiral, you know better than anyone on this world how important it is to have the right leadership, to have everyone working toward a common goal. You helped lead a band of Rebels from a hundred different planets, turned them into a united fleet that was able to defeat the Empire, and you guided them as they formed a new government.”

  Ackbar let the sub drift and turned to meet her gaze. She continued rapidly, hoping to cut off any arguments. “At least come with me to Coruscant and talk to Mon Mothma. We’ve been part of the same team for many years, you and I. You won’t stand by and watch the New Republic fall apart.”

  Ackbar sighed and gripped his controls. Seatree branches flapped against the viewing windows. “It seems you know me better than I had thought. I—”

  A pinging alarm beeped from the control panel. Ackbar reacted smoothly and swiftly, slowing the sub. He peered into his widely set stereoscopic sensor displays. “This is interesting,” he said.

  “What is it?” Leia said.

  “Another large metallic mass tangled in the weeds right above us.”

  “Maybe it’s part of that crashed ship,” Cilghal said.

  “If something fell into the seatree forest, it could have been swallowed up for eternity,” Ackbar said. He eased the sub ahead.

  As Leia saw the outline of a large multilegged thing wrapped with seatrees and overgrown with algae, she thought it was some kind of alien life-form. Then she recognized the squashed elliptical head, the segmented body core trailing jointed mechanical arms, it
s nonreflective black surface.

  She had seen something like this on the ice planet Hoth, when Han Solo and Chewbacca had stumbled upon the Imperial probe droid. “Admiral—” Leia said.

  “I see it. Arakyd Viper Series Probot. The Empire dispatched thousands to all corners of the galaxy to hunt down Rebel bases.”

  “It must have landed years ago on Calamari,” Cilghal said. “The wreckage we found below was its landing pod.”

  Ackbar nodded. “But when the probe droid tried to rise to the surface, it tangled in the seaweed. It must have shut down.” He nudged the sub closer, shining his depth light on the outer surface.

  But when the beam struck the probot’s rounded head, its entire bank of round eyes blinked to life.

  “It’s been activated!” Leia said. She could hear the high-pitched vibrating hum of powerful generators as the probe droid began to move again. The head swiveled and directed its own glowing beam at the sub.

  Ackbar pushed the propellers into reverse; but before the sub could move away, the probot launched out with its spiderlike claws. Mechanical arms latched on to one of the sub’s rounded fins. The head of the probe droid rotated slowly, trying to bring its built-in blaster cannons to bear, but the seatree fronds tangled its joints.

  Ackbar threw all the sub’s power into pulling away and succeeded only in yanking the probe droid along with him, tearing it free of ancient strands of weed.

  Ackbar dug his flippers into the wide gloves that controlled his sub’s articulated arms. He brought up two of the segmented mechanical tools, wrestling with the probe droid’s gripping black claws.

  Through the speakers of the comm unit, a sudden static-filled burst of subspace gibberish blasted out from the probe droid in some kind of powerful coded signal. The long chain of data shouted toward space even as the deadly probot wrestled with Ackbar’s sub.

  The black droid finally succeeded in rotating its head, bending its laser cannons toward the sub.

  Ackbar fired the lateral jets, wrenching them and the probe droid sideways as a volley of vicious laser blasts screamed past them, plowing a tunnel of sudden steam through the water. He tugged at the waldos and brought another of his equipment arms to bear, a small cutting laser.

  Its tip heated to incandescent red-white as he slashed through the probe droid’s gripping metal claw, severing the plasteel and breaking them free. Ackbar pulled the sub away and brought the cutting laser to bear again just as the probe droid turned to fire a second time.

  Leia knew it was hopeless. They couldn’t get away, and the cutting laser would do nothing against the far-superior weapons of the probot. And unlike Luke, she had not mastered Jedi skills enough to mount even a feeble defense. But Ackbar, still looking cool and in control, fired two blasts from the cutting laser at the head of the probe droid, attempting to blind its optical sensors. The feeble beams struck—

  The probot detonated in an unexpected explosion. Bright concentric waves of light hurled the sub back, tumbling it end over end. They were thrown backward; Leia felt the chair’s restraints automatically tighten around her. The shock wave rang against the hull, sending a sound like a gong through the enclosed sub. A fury of bubbles and drifting debris surged around them. Large splintered seatree trunks sank to the ocean bottom.

  “The probe self-destructed!” Cilghal said. “But we didn’t stand a chance against it.”

  Leia remembered Han’s conjecture on Hoth. “The probe droids have programming to destroy themselves rather than risk letting their data fall into enemy hands.”

  Ackbar finally managed to stabilize the spinning submersible. Four of the mechanical arms extending from the front of the sub had been snapped off, leaving only frayed edges of broken metal and dead circuitry.

  Ackbar blew one of the ballast tanks, and the sub rose toward the surface. Leia noticed three hairline cracks in the transparisteel windowport and realized how close they had come to being crushed by the shock wave.

  “But the probot already sent its signal,” Cilghal said. “We heard it before the self-destruct.”

  Leia felt a cold fist of fear close around her stomach, but Ackbar tried to dismiss the peril.

  “This probe droid has been here for ten years or more, and that would have been a very old code, almost certainly obsolete,” he said. “Even if the Imperials could still understand its message, who would be out there listening?”

  17

  With her three Imperial Star Destroyers safely hidden among the ionized islands of the Cauldron Nebula, Admiral Daala retired to her private quarters to review tactics.

  She sat stiffly in a slick lounge chair, refusing to relax into the warm contours. Too much comfort made Daala distinctly uncomfortable.

  The holographic image of Grand Moff Tarkin stood with her in the dim room, unchanged after all these years. The gaunt, hard man presented his recorded lectures, his communiqués. Daala had watched them dozens of times before.

  In the privacy of her chambers, she allowed herself to miss the one person in the Imperial Military Academy who had seen her talent. Tarkin had raised her rank to admiral—as far as she knew, the highest rank held by any female in the Imperial armed forces.

  During her years of exile in Maw Installation, Daala had often replayed Tarkin’s messages, but now she studied them intently. Her eyebrows knitted together, and her bright green eyes narrowed as she concentrated on every word he spoke, searching for some indispensable advice for her private war against the Rebellion.

  “Liquidating a dozen small threats is easier than rooting out one well-established center of defiance,” his image said, in a speech given on Carida explaining the “Tarkin Doctrine.” “Rule through the fear of force rather than through force itself. If we use our strength wisely, we shall intimidate thousands of worlds with the example of a select few.”

  Daala rewound the holotape to listen to his words again, thinking she had been on the verge of capturing a crucial insight. But the door chime interrupted her. She switched off the holoprojector. “Lights up.”

  Stocky Commander Kratas stood stiffly at her door, his uniform wrinkle free, his hands clasped behind his back. He was trying to mask a smug grin of satisfaction, but the expression displayed itself in a small facial tick and the slight upturn of his vanishingly thin lips.

  “Yes, Commander, what is it?” she said.

  “We have intercepted a signal,” Kratas said. “It appears to be from an Imperial probe droid transmitting covert data gathered on an important Rebel planet called Calamari, the site of one of their prime starship-building facilities. We can’t tell how recent the information is.”

  Daala raised her eyebrows and let her colorless lips form a smile. With both hands she swept her molten-metal hair behind her shoulders, feeling static electricity crackle through her fingertips, as if generated from the excitement building within her. “Are you certain this transmission is genuine? Where was it directed?”

  “It was a broad-spectrum signal, Admiral. My assumption is that these probe droids were deployed in a widely scattered pattern. They would not know the location of any particular Star Destroyer when they transmitted a report.”

  “Could it be a hoax sent by the Rebels? A trap?”

  “I don’t believe so. It was heavily encoded. We almost couldn’t crack it ourselves until we double-checked against one of the new codes Grand Moff Tarkin delivered on his last visit to Maw Installation.”

  “Excellent, Commander,” she said, brushing her palms down the smooth olive-gray of her uniform slacks. “We’ve been looking for a new target to strike, and if this is an important starship-construction facility, that sounds like a good candidate. As good as anything, I suppose. I want you and the captains of the other two ships to meet me in the war room. Prepare the Star Destroyers for immediate departure. Recharge all turbolaser batteries. Outfit all TIE fighters.

  “This time we will follow Grand Moff Tarkin’s strategy to the letter.” She punctuated the last phrase with an index fin
ger jabbing the air. “Have everyone review their tapes. I want no mistakes. A flawless attack.”

  She dimmed the lights as she stepped into the corridor. Her two stormtrooper bodyguards fell into ranks behind her. Their boot heels clicked on the floor in perfect echoing unison.

  “We are through practicing,” Daala said to Kratas. “After our strike the planet Calamari will be nothing more than a rubble heap.”

  Leia piloted Ackbar’s open-canopied wavespeeder as they rushed over the oceans of Calamari. The sky was still a congealed soup of dark clouds, but the previous day’s storm had run out of energy. The wind remained fresh and cool, tossing droplets of salty spray into their faces—but Leia could not stop smiling with relief just to know that Ackbar had agreed to come to Coruscant with her, if only to speak with Mon Mothma.

  She and Cilghal would take him back to Foamwander City, where he could turn over his seismic data to other Calamarian scientists. Sitting in the backseat of the wavespeeder, Ackbar seemed deeply troubled and unsure of himself.

  The lumpy hemisphere of the Calamarian city looked like a gunmetal-gray island. Other small seaskimmers drifted in and out, gathering up nets and dashing back to access openings.

  Ackbar sat up stiffly. “Listen!”

  Over the rushing noise of the wind and waves, Leia heard the sharp tones of an all-hands alarm. She grabbed the comm unit, punching buttons for Foamwander City control. “This is wavespeeder seventeen-oh-one/seven. What is the cause of the alarm?”

  Before Leia could receive an answer, a curtain of brilliant light sliced through the clouds, slashing the ocean surface near the floating city. Geysers of suddenly vaporized water plumed into the air with a whoop.

  “Those are turbolasers!” Leia said.

  Ackbar gripped the side of his seat. “We’re being fired on from orbit.”

  “Wave doors are closing,” said a maddeningly calm Calamarian voice through the speaker system. “All citizens take shelter immediately. Repeat, wave doors are closing.”