The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  Permanent shutdown.

  Should he through some fluke survive that transit, he was reasonably certain—83.973 percent—that he would survive an additional two-point-three Standard hours.

  He was not distressed by the prospect of shutdown; he had spent several seconds calculating his overall chance of personal survival before he had judiciously overridden the Falcon’s trash-ejector system and had it bump him into space less than a second before the ship had blasted free of the disintegrating Shadow Base. That chance had been so tiny as to defy the description probability; he had, he calculated, roughly the same chance of remaining operational as he did of undergoing a quantum phase transition that would instantaneously transform him into a Lofquarian gooney bird.

  However: He had been instructed more than once, very firmly and in no uncertain terms by Princess Leia herself, to take good care of Luke Skywalker. Considerations of personal survival were irrelevant to his assigned task.

  He did not concern himself with survival. Every minute or so, however, he spent a millisecond or two accessing a few directories in his very, very extensive library of recordings of his adventures with the only droid in his long, long existence who he could truthfully label my friend: C-3PO. He did not anticipate that he would miss C-3PO; he did not anticipate that he would be capable of missing anyone or anything. He did, however, experience a peculiar sensation in his social-interaction subroutines every time he accessed these particular directories. It was a sensation both positive and negative, and it was largely impossible, to R2’s considerable puzzlement, to quantify.

  He supposed, after much computation, that he must be regretting that he would never see his friend again, while at the same time he was taking considerable comfort from the knowledge that his friend was, and would be for the foreseeable future, quite safe.

  Somehow that seemed to make him more able to focus on the task at hand.

  When the Falcon had departed without Luke on board, R2 had known exactly what to do, and he had done it. Once free of the trash ejector, he had tuned his sensor suite to register Master Luke’s personal chemical signature—his scent—and tracked Luke’s progress through the Shadow Base, right up until the trail had ended abruptly at a stone wall. Having no instructions or programming that appeared to offer him any useful alternative courses of action, he had settled in to wait.

  R2 had waited while the gravity stations depowered, and while the fleet departed. He had waited through the breakup of the Shadow Base, and through the explosion of the planet. And he was waiting still.

  He was entirely—one hundred percent—certain that Luke had been on the opposite side of that stone wall, which was now part of the surface of this tiny asteroid.

  Luke was inside this ball of rock, and though Luke’s own chance of personal survival was only fractionally greater than R2’s—which was to say, for all practical purposes, nonexistent—the astromech would continue to clamber along the asteroid’s dark side and keep himself functional until he could do so no longer, because there remained a very slight, but measurable, chance that he might still be able to somehow help.

  A peculiar motion among the starfield attracted his attention. One particular asteroid—one point of very bright radiation reflected from Taspan—moved somewhat more across the system’s plane of the ecliptic than along it. Further: This bright point’s motion was clearly retrograde; its heading was against the general direction of the asteroid field. Finally: This point of light did not travel with the consistent velocity that would be expected from a body whose motion was subject only to the laws of orbital mechanics; on the contrary, it accelerated, then slowed, then sped up again.

  There was only one probable explanation.

  Activating the telescopic zoom feature of his optical sensor, he was able to confirm his calculation: This object was indeed a ship.

  Specifically, a Lambda T-4a shuttle.

  R2-D2 opened the comm hatch in his dome and extended his parabolic antenna. He aimed it precisely—after calculating the lightspeed delay—at where the shuttle would be when his transmission would arrive, and began to broadcast a distress beacon code with all his considerable energy. Once he had established contact with the shuttle’s brain, he was able to explain the details of the situation and trust that the ship’s brain would be able to communicate the pertinent facts to its pilot.

  The shuttle’s vector shifted to an intercept course with gratifying alacrity. The shuttle swung around to the asteroid’s light side, extended a docking claw, and seized the asteroid, drawing them close enough together to enclose the asteroid in its hyperdrive envelope. Then it made the jump to lightspeed.

  R2-D2 spent the hyperspace transition reviewing his calculations, but they were impeccable.

  The designs of an evil but brilliant man had been thwarted. Luke would survive, Princess Leia and Han Solo had escaped, C-3PO was assuredly safe, and R2-D2—to the best of his self-diagnostic subroutine’s ability to determine—had not, in fact, undergone a quantum phase transition into a Lofquarian gooney bird.

  The odds against this outcome were literally incalculable.

  The universe, R2 decided, was an astonishing place.

  DEBRIEFING

  Geptun ran a finger under his uniform’s collar and grimaced at finding it damp. Really, Skywalker kept his quarters unpleasantly hot. He continued to pace the length of the sitting room, however, despite the undeniable fact that this was only causing him to sweat even more. He continued to pace because simply sitting, he’d discovered, was intolerable.

  How was it possible he could be so nervous? Imagine, at such an age, after such a long and varied life, to find oneself very nearly overcome with what could only be described as authorial vanity.

  He was entirely flabbergasted at how desperately he wanted—how badly he needed—Skywalker to like the story.

  The expression on Skywalker’s face when the young Jedi returned to the sitting room hinted rather broadly that in this, as in so many other things, Geptun was destined to be disappointed.

  Skywalker practically threw the holoreader at him. “What is this—this garbage?”

  “Ah.” Geptun lowered himself onto a settee with a long, slow sigh. “It’s not to your taste, then.”

  “My taste? My taste?” Skywalker flushed bright red; veins stood out on his forehead from the effort he expended in controlling what was clearly considerable anger. “It’s terrible. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever read!”

  “Ah.” Geptun leaned forward and slowly, a little sadly, retrieved the holoreader. “Well, then. I’m sorry you don’t care for it. I’ll just be, well, on my way, then.”

  “You will not.” Though not a large man, Skywalker seemed to tower over him. “I hired you to investigate. I hired you to write a report. An indictment. Instead you bring me this? It reads like one of those blasted holothrillers!”

  “Well … yes,” Geptun said. “There’s a reason for that.”

  This brought Skywalker to a full stop. “What?”

  “I have, well …” Geptun coughed. “I’ve already sold the holo rights.”

  Skywalker sank into a chair. The flush drained from his cheeks. “I don’t believe it.”

  Geptun’s initial disappointment had faded already, and he was constitutionally incapable of shame. “Did we not understand each other? Why do you think I agreed to do this in the first place?”

  “For money,” Skywalker practically spat. “But I’m not paying you for this.”

  “Suit yourself. The holothriller production company paid me ten times what you agreed to pay—and that was just for the production rights; I’m also getting points on the back end. They like it so much they’ve already optioned my next two Luke Skywalker Adventures.”

  “Next two—? Please tell me you’re joking.”

  “I have been known to joke,” Geptun said. “But rarely about business, and never about money.”

  “You were planning this,” Skywalker accused. “This was what you planned
to do from the beginning.”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, indeed.”

  All Skywalker’s anger had fled. Now he only looked tired. Very tired, and much older than his years. “Did you even bother to investigate?”

  “Of course,” Geptun said. “Verisimilitude is vital. I stand behind every word.”

  “Verisimilitude? I did not defeat Kar Vastor in single combat—I didn’t even fight him. He was terrified, and confused, and aside from one, well, bite, he just ran away. I didn’t cut off his arms with my lightsaber, and I don’t even know what a ‘vibroshield’ is.”

  “I did take some liberties,” Geptun said. “Call it artistic license.”

  “It’s—it’s just so …” Skywalker shook his head helplessly; for a moment Geptun feared he might start to cry. “You make me look like some kind of hero.” The word dripped loathing.

  “You are a hero, General. Trust me on this, if nothing else. In my lifetime, I’ve known exactly four actual heroes, and one of them is you.”

  “Don’t call me General.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I’ve resigned my commission. I’m no soldier. Not ever again.”

  “Ah. And what are you, then?”

  Skywalker’s eyes went hooded. “All those men … I killed them. All of them.”

  “You had no choice.”

  “There’s always a choice.”

  “If that is so,” Geptun said, “then you made the right one. That’s what this story is about. Don’t you understand? You are more than a man, now. You are a symbol of everything that is good in the galaxy. In this horrific civil war, don’t you see how much good that image of you can do? You give people hope. You set an example that they can aspire to live up to. Just by existing, you make people want to be better than they are.”

  “But it’s not me. It’s just some made-up guy using my name. A holothriller hero. A storybook prince.”

  “If you say so.”

  Skywalker lowered his face into his hands, and for a long moment he just sat there, silent, motionless. Finally he said, “You didn’t write anything about my good-byes with Nick.”

  “No. Too anticlimactic. The story needs to end with a nice, neat wrap-up. I like your little astromech droid. I think I’m going to end with him.”

  “On the shuttle, later, after I asked Nick about an investigator and he told me about you, just before Nick and Aeona took off … Nick reminded me that I’d never told him what my ‘best trick’ was. You know what I told him? I told him he’d just seen it.”

  Skywalker lifted his face from his hands, and his eyes were dark. Wounded. Haunted by shadows. “My best trick is to do one thing—to make one small move, even a simple choice—and kill thousands of people. Thousands.”

  Geptun nodded noncommittally. After a moment, he said, “One of those heroes I mentioned liked to occasionally say Jedi are not soldiers. We are keepers of the peace.”

  “Keepers of the peace,” Skywalker murmured. “Yes. Yes, I like that. I think that’s right. We are the light in the darkness.”

  “A poetic metaphor.”

  “I’m not surprised you like it; you made it up. But I think … I think it’s not just a metaphor. I think it’s the plain truth.”

  “And all I’m doing,” Geptun said, “is sharing that light with the whole galaxy. I would think you’d want to play along.”

  “I suppose …” Luke took a deep breath, sighed it out. “Maybe you’re right. How much harm can it do?”

  “Well …” Geptun shifted on the settee. He had an uncomfortable feeling that he was about to do something he abhorred: tell the truth.

  Something about Skywalker just seemed to bring that out of him.

  “Let them tell their stories,” Skywalker said. “Let them make holothrillers and whatever else. It doesn’t matter. None of the stories people tell about me can change who I really am.”

  “Yes,” Geptun said heavily. “But they can change who people think you are. And that, my young friend, can do considerable damage. Look at Luke Skywalker and the Jedi’s Revenge.”

  Luke nodded thoughtfully. “I guess … I guess if people are going to tell stories about me anyway, I should make sure they’re telling the right kind of stories.”

  “You’ll never have cause to complain of mine, at least. Just don’t start believing your own press.”

  “No fear of that,” Luke said. “I’m not much of a reader, and holothrillers bore me. But there are a couple of changes you need to make.”

  “Do I? My producers rather like it as is.”

  “And if I were to visit them and talk it over, they might change their minds. They might change their minds about making the production at all.”

  “Oh, please. After all the money they’ve sunk into it already?”

  “I can be,” Luke said mildly, “surprisingly persuasive.”

  “Ah, yes, I suppose you can.” Geptun sighed. “Very well. What changes?”

  “You made the deaths of the shadow troopers seem almost like an accident. Like I didn’t know it would happen. But I did. I knew what I was doing. The story has to say so.”

  “Well …”

  “That lightsaber versus ‘vibroshield’ fight? That goes too. It’s stupid. Besides, who wants to watch me cut up one more villain with my lightsaber? Don’t you think that’s getting pretty old?”

  “Perhaps,” Geptun allowed, “we can work a little bit of truth in there.”

  “And then there’s Aeona Cantor. She’s not my love interest—she’s Nick’s girlfriend, and that’s the whole story. Anyway, she’s not my type. Too abrasive. And I don’t like redheads.”

  “I’ll make a note of it. What did happen to Nick and Aeona? And to Kar?”

  Luke shrugged. “Nick thinks Blackhole is still alive.”

  “Really?”

  “That’s what he said. He and Kar figure they have a score there that needs settling. And if Blackhole really is still alive, having Nick and Kar and Aeona on his tail will keep him busy enough looking over his shoulder that he won’t have much time to stir up mischief. Now, look, in the story—some of these similes you use are … well, I’m not exactly a literary critic, but …”

  Geptun sighed and reluctantly reached for the holopad. He had a feeling this would be a long, hard process.

  Rewrites, he decided, sucked.

  MATTHEW STOVER is the New York Times bestselling author of the Star Wars novels Revenge of the Sith, Shatterpoint, and The New Jedi Order: Traitor, as well as Caine Black Knife, The Blade of Tyshalle, and Heroes Die. He is an expert in several martial arts. Stover lives outside Chicago.

  ALSO BY

  MATTHEW STOVER

  Iron Dawn

  Jericho Moon

  Heroes Die

  Blade of Tyshalle

  Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Traitor

  Star Wars: Shatterpoint

  Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

  Introduction to the NEW REPUBLIC Era

  (5–25 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)

  The destruction of the second Death Star and the death of Emperor Palpatine—the climactic conclusion of Return of the Jedi—has shaken the Empire to its core. While the remnant of the loyal Imperials settles in for a long, drawn-out last stand, the victorious Rebel Alliance and its supporters found a galactic governing authority they name the New Republic. Troops and warships are donated to the cause, as New Republic military leaders forge plans to seize Imperial fortress worlds, invade the Core Worlds, and retake Coruscant itself. Eventually, the Imperial Remnant is pushed back to a small part of the Outer Rim, and the New Republic is finally able to focus on restoring just and democratic government to the galaxy.

  At last the heroes of the Rebellion are free to pursue their own lives. Han and Leia marry … but before the birth of their twins, Jacen and Jaina, the galaxy is once again torn asunder by war, as the Imperial forces—under the control of military mastermind Grand Admiral Thrawn—step up their campaign o
f raids against the New Republic. Even after Thrawn is defeated, the Imperial forces forge on, harrying the New Republic and Luke’s nascent Jedi academy—the start of Luke’s dream to rebuild the Jedi Order from the ground up. Plagues, insurrections, and rogue warlords add to the chaos and push the New Republic back a step for every two steps it takes forward in its quest for peace and prosperity for all. Meanwhile, Leia becomes Chief of State of the New Republic, and the Solos’ third child, a boy they name Anakin, after his grandfather, is born; Luke has met Mara Jade, a secret dark side apprentice to the Emperor whom he helps bring into the light, and the two subsequently fall in love and marry.

  Finally, after a series of further setbacks and plots against the young galactic government and Luke’s Jedi, a peace treaty formally ends the long conflict between the New Republic and the remnants of the Empire. The events of these years are the answer to the question … “What happened after the movies?”

  If you’re a reader looking to dive into the New Republic era, here are three great starting points:

  • X-Wing: Rogue Squadron, by Michael A. Stackpole: A taste of life at the edge, Rogue Squadron and the subsequent X-Wing novels bring to life Wedge Antilles and his brave, sometimes rambunctious fellow pilots in fast-paced adventures that switch smoothly and easily between entertaining repartee and tense battlefield action.

  • Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn: The book that reintroduced a generation of fans to Star Wars is full of the elements that made the movies great—space battles, intriguing villains, and derring-do.

  • Before the Storm, by Michael P. Kube-McDowell: With a harder sci-fi edge to Star Wars, this novel features the classic heroes Han, Luke, and Leia, and explores everything from military forensics to the nature of the Force.