Star Wars: The Jedi Academy Trilogy II: Dark Apprentice

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Kyp could well imagine that anyone still on Carida might have an urgent message! He took his time answering just to make the comm officer squirm. “Yes, what is it?”

  “Kyp Durron, we have located your brother Zeth.”

  Kyp felt as if someone had thrust a lightsaber through his heart. “What? You said he was dead.”

  “We checked thoroughly and found him in our files after all. He is stationed here in the citadel, and he has not managed to find transport off Carida! I’ve summoned him to my comm station. He’ll be here in a moment.”

  “How can that be!” Kyp demanded. “You said he died in training! I have the files you sent me.”

  “Falsified information,” Lieutenant Dauren said bluntly.

  Kyp squeezed his eyes shut as hot tears sprang to fill his vision: sudden overwhelming joy at knowing Zeth was still alive, anger at having committed the most fundamental mistake of all—believing what the Imperials told him.

  He snapped a glance at the chronometer. Twenty-one minutes until the explosion. Kyp wrenched at the Sun Crusher’s controls and shot back toward the planet like a laser blast. He doubted he had enough time to rescue his brother, but he had to try.

  He stared at the time display ticking away. His vision burned, and he felt a jolt go through him every time a number ticked down.

  It took five minutes to get back to Carida. He orbited around the massive planet in a tight arc, crossing over the line from night into day. He set course for the small cluster of fortresses and buildings that made up the Imperial training center.

  Lieutenant Dauren appeared again in the small holographic field, dragging a white-armored stormtrooper into view. “Kyp Durron! Please respond.”

  “I’m here,” Kyp said. “I’m coming to get you.”

  The comm officer turned to the stormtrooper. “Twenty-one twelve, remove your helmet.”

  Hesitantly, as if he had not done so in a long time, the stormtrooper tugged off his helmet. He stood blinking in the unfiltered light as if he rarely looked at the world through his own eyes. Kyp saw a heartrending image that reminded him of the face he saw when he looked in a reflection plate.

  “State your name,” Dauren said.

  The stormtrooper blinked in confusion. Kyp wondered if he was drugged. “Twenty-one twelve,” he said.

  “Not your service number, your name!”

  The young man paused for a long time, as if pawing through rusty, unused memories until he came out with a word that sounded more like a question than an answer.

  “Zeth? Zeth Dur … Durron.”

  Kyp didn’t need to hear him speak his name, though. He remembered the tanned, wiry boy who swam in the lakes of Deyer, who could catch fish with a small hand net.

  “Zeth,” he whispered. “I’m coming.”

  The comm officer waved his hands. “You can’t make it in time,” he said. “You must stop the Sun Crusher torpedo. Reverse the chain reaction. That’s our only hope.”

  “I can’t stop it!” Kyp answered. “Nothing can stop it.”

  Dauren screamed, “If you don’t, we’re all going to die!”

  “Then you’re going to die,” Kyp said. “You all deserve it. Except for Zeth. I’m going to come for him.”

  He plowed like thunder through the high atmosphere of Carida. Heated air pearled off the sides of the superweapon as a shock front pushed a shield in front of him. Sonic booms rippled behind him.

  The planet surface approached with gut-wrenching speed. Kyp soared over a cracked, blasted wasteland with craggy red rocks and fractured canyons. Out in the flat desert he saw geometric shapes, tracks of precise roads laid down by the Imperial corps of engineers.

  The Sun Crusher shot like a meteor over a cluster of bunkers and metallic huts. Isolated stormtroopers marched about in drills, unaware that their sun was about to explode.

  On the chronometer seven minutes remained.

  Kyp called up a targeting screen and found the primary citadel. The air tugged at his ship, buffeting him with heavy winds, but Kyp did not care. Flames from the ignited atmosphere flickered off the quantum armor.

  “Give me your specific location,” Kyp said.

  The comm officer had begun sobbing.

  “I know you’re in the main citadel building!” Kyp cried. “Where exactly?”

  “In the upper levels of the southernmost turret,” Zeth answered precisely, responding in a military manner, slipping back into stormtrooper training.

  Kyp saw the jagged spires of the military academy rising from a cluttered plateau. Kyp’s scanners projected an enlarged image of the citadel, pinpointing the turret Zeth had mentioned.

  Five minutes remained.

  “Zeth, get ready, I’m coming in.”

  “To rescue us both!” Dauren said.

  Kyp felt a twinge inside. He wanted to leave the comm officer who had lied to him, who had made him despair and forced him into the decision to destroy Carida. He wanted to let the lieutenant die in a burst of incinerating solar flame—but that man could help him, for now.

  “Get yourselves into an open area. I’m going to be there in less than a minute. You can’t get up to the roof in time, so I’m going to blast it off.”

  Dauren nodded. Zeth finally overcame his own confusion and said, “Kyp? My brother? Kyp, is that you?”

  The Sun Crusher streaked over the jagged minarets and pinnacles of the Caridan citadel. A mammoth wall surrounded the entire fortress. Out in the courtyard hundreds of low-ranking refugees scrambled about in tiny fliers aiming up into the skies, though with no hyperdrive capability they could never outrun the fury of the supernova.

  Kyp decelerated abruptly until he hovered over the fortress. Suddenly the Sun Crusher lurched from side to side as automatic perimeter lasers targeted him and fired.

  “Shut down your defenses!” he screamed at the comm officer. He wasted time targeting and firing at the perimeter lasers. Two of the weapon emplacements blew up in roiling smoke, but the third, a blaster cannon, scored a direct hit against the Sun Crusher.

  The superweapon spun end over end, out of control until it smashed into one of the tall turret walls. Kyp managed to get control again and raised the vehicle up. No time to vent his anger. No time to do anything but get to the tower.

  Kyp watched the chronometer click down from four minutes to three.

  “Take shelter!” he said. “I’m going to blast open the roof.”

  He targeted with one of his weapons and fired—but he received an ERROR message. The laser turret had been damaged by his collision with the tower. Kyp swore and spun the ship around so he could target with a different laser.

  After a short controlled burst, the roof of the tower melted inward. Chunks of synrock and metal reinforcement girders sprayed into the air. Kyp flicked on his tractor beam to yank the debris away before it could collapse into the lower floors.

  He brought the Sun Crusher over the smoking crater that had been the rooftop. He pointed his scanners down and saw two people scramble out from under the desks where they had taken shelter.

  Two minutes.

  Kyp hovered over them. If he lowered his ship, they could reach the ladder to the hatch, where they could climb into the shielded Sun Crusher. He already had an escape route programmed in.

  As Kyp dropped toward them, Lieutenant Dauren stood up and battered Zeth on the back of the skull with a broken plasteel shard. Zeth fell to his knees, shaking his head and pulling out his blaster in reflex. The comm officer ran to the Sun Crusher’s ladder, but Kyp—furious at seeing what Dauren had done—raised the ship out of the man’s reach.

  Scrambling, waving his arms, the comm officer jumped up to reach the rungs of the ladder, but he missed and slapped his hands across the hull instead. The quantum armor was still smoking hot from Kyp’s fiery plunge through the atmosphere. Dauren screamed as it burned his hands.

  Falling back to the ground, Dauren turned just in time to see Zeth point the blaster at him. With precise stormtro
oper training Zeth targeted and fired. The comm officer flew backward, his chest a black hole. He collapsed among the debris.

  One minute.

  Kyp maneuvered the Sun Crusher back into position, lowered the ladder; but Zeth collapsed to his knees; blood streamed down the back of his head, streaking the white stormtrooper armor. Zeth could not move. He had been too badly injured by the comm officer.

  Thinking rapidly, Kyp locked on to his brother’s limp form with the tractor beam, yanking him up off the floor and drawing him toward the Sun Crusher. This would be it. Kyp left the controls and scrambled to the hatch. He would have to open the hatch, climb down the ladder, and haul his brother up inside. He reached for the locking mechanism that would open the Sun Crusher—

  And then Carida’s sun exploded.

  The shock wave roared through the atmosphere, bringing instant incinerating fire. The entire citadel turned into a storm of flames.

  The Sun Crusher tumbled end over end, and Kyp flew against the far wall of the cockpit, his face plastered against one of the external viewscreens. He saw the faint afterimage of Zeth’s body disintegrating into a fading silhouette as the stellar energy ripped across Carida.

  Kyp hauled himself into the pilot seat. In shock, he used his Jedi instincts to punch the sublight engines. The first wave from the supernova had been the prompt radiation, high-energy particles shot out with the explosion of the star. A minute or so later the heavier radiation would come.

  As rippling waves from the second hurricane of energy struck Carida and cracked the planet open, the Sun Crusher accelerated far beyond its red lines along the preprogrammed escape route.

  Kyp felt gravity stretching his face into a grimace. His eyelids squeezed closed, and anguished tears flowed backward across his temples with the pull of acceleration.

  The Sun Crusher blasted out of the atmosphere and entered hyperspace. As starlines formed around him and the supernova made one last grab with hands of flame, Kyp let out a long anguished cry of despair at what he had done.

  His scream vanished with him into hyperspace.

  THE OLD REPUBLIC

  (5,000–33 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)

  Long—long—ago in a galaxy far, far away … some twenty-five thousand years before Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars: A New Hope … a large number of star systems and species in the center of the galaxy came together to form the Galactic Republic, governed by a Chancellor and a Senate from the capital city-world of Coruscant. As the Republic expanded via the hyperspace lanes, it absorbed new member worlds from newly discovered star systems; it also expanded its military to deal with the hostile civilizations, slavers, pirates, and gangster-species such as the slug-like Hutts that were encountered in the outward exploration. But the most vital defenders of the Republic were the Jedi Knights. Originally a reclusive order dedicated to studying the mysteries of the life energy known as the Force, the Jedi became the Republic’s guardians, charged by the Senate with keeping the peace—with wise words if possible; with lightsabers if not.

  But the Jedi weren’t the only Force-users in the galaxy. An ancient civil war had pitted those Jedi who used the Force selflessly against those who allowed themselves to be ruled by their ambitions—which the Jedi warned led to the dark side of the Force. Defeated in that long-ago war, the dark siders fled beyond the galactic frontier, where they built a civilization of their own: the Sith Empire.

  The first great conflict between the Republic and the Sith Empire occurred when two hyperspace explorers stumbled on the Sith worlds, giving the Sith Lord Naga Sadow and his dark side warriors a direct invasion route into the Republic’s central worlds. This war resulted in the first destruction of the Sith Empire—but it was hardly the last. For the next four thousand years, skirmishes between the Republic and Sith grew into wars, with the scales always tilting toward one or the other, and peace never lasting. The galaxy was a place of almost constant strife: Sith armies against Republic armies; Force-using Sith Lords against Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights; and the dreaded nomadic mercenaries called Mandalorians bringing muscle and firepower wherever they stood to gain.

  Then, a thousand years before A New Hope and the Battle of Yavin, the Jedi defeated the Sith at the Battle of Ruusan, decimating the so-called Brotherhood of Darkness that was the heart of the Sith Empire—and most of its power.

  One Sith Lord survived—Darth Bane—and his vision for the Sith differed from that of his predecessors. He instituted a new doctrine: No longer would the followers of the dark side build empires or amass great armies of Force-users. There would be only two Sith at a time: a Master and an apprentice. From that time on, the Sith remained in hiding, biding their time and plotting their revenge, while the rest of the galaxy enjoyed an unprecedented era of peace, so long and strong that the Republic eventually dismantled its standing armies.

  But while the Republic seemed strong, its institutions had begun to rot. Greedy corporations sought profits above all else and a corrupt Senate did nothing to stop them, until the corporations reduced many planets to raw materials for factories and entire species became subjects for exploitation. Individual Jedi continued to defend the Republic’s citizens and obey the will of the Force, but the Jedi Order to which they answered grew increasingly out of touch. And a new Sith mastermind, Darth Sidious, at last saw a way to restore Sith domination over the galaxy and its inhabitants, and quietly worked to set in motion the revenge of the Sith …

  If you’re a reader new to the Old Republic era, here are three great starting points:

  • The Old Republic: Deceived, by Paul S. Kemp: Kemp tells the tale of the Republic’s betrayal by the Sith Empire, and features Darth Malgus, an intriguing, complicated villain.

  • Knight Errant, by John Jackson Miller: Alone in Sith territory, the headstrong Jedi Kerra Holt seeks to thwart the designs of an eccentric clan of fearsome, powerful, and bizarre Sith Lords.

  • Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, by Drew Karpyshyn: A portrait of one of the most famous Sith Lords, from his horrifying childhood to an adulthood spent in the implacable pursuit of vengeance.

  Read on for an excerpt from a Star Wars novel set in the Old Republic era.

  1

  Dessel was lost in the suffering of his job, barely even aware of his surroundings. His arms ached from the endless pounding of the hydraulic jack. Small bits of rock skipped off the cavern wall as he bored through, ricocheting off his protective goggles and stinging his exposed face and hands. Clouds of atomized dust filled the air, obscuring his vision, and the screeching whine of the jack filled the cavern, drowning out all other sounds as it burrowed centimeter by agonizing centimeter into the thick vein of cortosis woven into the rock before him.

  Impervious to both heat and energy, cortosis was prized in the construction of armor and shielding by both commercial and military interests, especially with the galaxy at war. Highly resistant to blaster bolts, cortosis alloys supposedly could withstand even the blade of a lightsaber. Unfortunately, the very properties that made it so valuable also made it extremely difficult to mine. Plasma torches were virtually useless; it would take days to burn away even a small section of cortosis-laced rock. The only effective way to mine it was through the brute force of hydraulic jacks pounding relentlessly away at a vein, chipping the cortosis free bit by bit.

  Cortosis was one of the hardest materials in the galaxy. The force of the pounding quickly wore down the head of a jack, blunting it until it became almost useless. The dust clogged the hydraulic pistons, making them jam. Mining cortosis was hard on the equipment … and even harder on the miners.

  Des had been hammering away for nearly six standard hours. The jack weighed more than thirty kilos, and the strain of keeping it raised and pressed against the rock face was taking its toll. His arms were trembling from the exertion. His lungs were gasping for air and choking on the clouds of fine mineral dust thrown up from the jack’s head. Even his teeth hurt: the
rattling vibration felt as if it were shaking them loose from his gums.

  But the miners on Apatros were paid based on how much cortosis they brought back. If he quit now, another miner would jump in and start working the vein, taking a share of the profits. Des didn’t like to share.

  The whine of the jack’s motor took on a higher pitch, becoming a keening wail Des was all too familiar with. At twenty thousand rpm, the motor sucked in dust like a thirsty bantha sucking up water after a long desert crossing. The only way to combat it was by regular cleaning and servicing, and the Outer Rim Oreworks Company preferred to buy cheap equipment and replace it, rather than sinking credits into maintenance. Des knew exactly what was going to happen next—and a second later, it did. The motor blew.

  The hydraulics seized with a horrible crunch, and a cloud of black smoke spit out the rear of the jack. Cursing ORO and its corporate policies, Des released his cramped finger from the trigger and tossed the spent piece of equipment to the floor.

  “Move aside, kid,” a voice said.

  Gerd, one of the other miners, stepped up and tried to shoulder Des out of the way so he could work the vein with his own jack. Gerd had been working the mines for nearly twenty standard years, and it had turned his body into a mass of hard, knotted muscle. But Des had been working the mines for ten years himself, ever since he was a teenager, and he was just as solid as the older man—and a little bigger. He didn’t budge.

  “I’m not done here,” he said. “Jack died, that’s all. Hand me yours and I’ll keep at it for a while.”

  “You know the rules, kid. You stop working and someone else is allowed to move in.”

  Technically, Gerd was right. But nobody ever jumped another miner’s claim over an equipment malfunction. Not unless he was trying to pick a fight.

  Des took a quick look around. The chamber was empty except for the two of them, standing less than half a meter apart. Not a surprise; Des usually chose caverns far off the main tunnel network. It had to be more than mere coincidence that Gerd was here.