Star Wars - X-Wing 02 - Wedge's Gamble

by Michael A. Stackpole

  CHILDREN OF THE JEDI

  by Barbara Hambly

  Setting: Eight years after Return of the Jedi

  The Star Wars characters face a menace from the glory days of the Empire when a thirty-year-old automated Imperial Dread-naught comes to life and begins its grim mission: to gather forces and annihilate a long-forgotten stronghold of Jedi chil­dren. When Luke is whisked onboard, he begins to communicate with the brave Jedi Knight who paralyzed the ship decades ago, and gave her life in the process. Now she is part of the vessel, existing in its artificial intelligence core, and guiding Luke through one of the most unusual adventures he has ever had.

  In this scene, Luke discovers that an evil presence is gath­ering, one that will force him to join the battle:

  Like See-Threepio, Nichos Marr sat in the outer room of the suite to which Cray had been assigned, in the power-down mode that was the droid equivalent of rest. Like Threepio, at the sound of Luke's almost noiseless tread he turned his head, aware of his presence.

  "Luke?" Cray had equipped him with the most sensitive vo­cal modulators, and the word was calibrated to a whisper no louder than the rustle of the blueleaves massed outside the win­dows. He rose, and crossed to where Luke stood, the dull silver of his arms and shoulders a phantom gleam in the stray flickers of light. "What is it?"

  "I don't know." They retreated to the small dining area where Luke had earlier probed his mind, and Luke stretched up to pin back a corner of the lamp-sheath, letting a slim triangle of butter-colored light fall on the purple of the vulwood tabletop. "A dream. A premonition, maybe." It was on his lips to ask, Do you dream? but he remembered the ghastly, imageless darkness in Nichos's mind, and didn't. He wasn't sure if his pupil was aware of the difference from his human perception and knowl­edge, aware of just exactly what he'd lost when his conscious­ness, his self, had been transferred.

  In the morning Luke excused himself from the expedition Tomla El had organized with Nichos and Cray to the Falls of Dessiar, one of the places on Ithor most renowned for its beauty and peace. When they left he sought out Umwaw Moolis, and the tall herd leader listened gravely to his less than logical re­quest and promised to put matters in train to fulfill it. Then Luke descended to the House of the Healers, where Drub McKumb lay, sedated far beyond pain but with all the perceptions of agony and nightmare still howling in his mind.

  "Kill you!" He heaved himself at the restraints, blue eyes glaring furiously as he groped and scrabbled at Luke with his clawed hands. "It's all poison! I see you! I see the dark light all around you! You're him! You're him!" His back bent like a bow; the sound of his shrieking was like something being ground out of him by an infernal mangle.

  Luke had been through the darkest places of the universe and of his own mind, had done and experienced greater evil than perhaps any man had known on the road the Force had dragged him ... Still, it was hard not to turn away.

  "We even tried yarrock on him last night," explained the

  Healer in charge, a slightly built Ithorian beautifully tabby-striped green and yellow under her simple tabard of purple linen. "But apparently the earlier doses that brought him enough lucidi­ty to reach here from his point of origin oversensitized his sys­tem. We'll try again in four or five days."

  Luke gazed down into the contorted, grimacing face.

  "As you can see," the Healer said, "the internal perception of pain and fear is slowly lessening. It's down to ninety-three percent of what it was when he was first brought in. Not much, I know, but something."

  "Him! Him! HIM!" Foam spattered the old man's stained gray beard.

  Who?

  "I wouldn't advise attempting any kind of mindlink until it's at least down to fifty percent, Master Skywalker."

  "No," said Luke softly.

  Kill you all. And, They are gathering . . .

  "Do you have recordings of everything he's said?"

  "Oh, yes." The big coppery eyes blinked assent. "The tran­script is available through the monitor cubicle down the hall. We could make nothing of them. Perhaps they will mean something to you."

  They didn't. Luke listened to them all, the incoherent groans and screams, the chewed fragments of words that could be only guessed at, and now and again the clear disjointed cries: "Solo! Solo! Can you hear me? Children ... Evil... Gathering here ... Kill you all!"

  DARKSABER

  by Kevin J. Anderson

  Setting: Immediately thereafter

  Not long after Children of the Jedi, Luke and Han learn that evil Hutts are building a reconstruction of the original Death Star— and that the Empire is still alive, in the form of Daala, who has joined forces with Pellaeon, former second in command to the feared Grand Admiral Thrown. In this early scene, Luke has re­turned to the home of Obi-Wan Kenobi on Tatooine to try and consult a long-gone mentor:

  He stood anxious and alone, feeling like a prodigal son out­side the ramshackle, collapsed hut that had once been the home of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

  Luke swallowed and stepped forward, his footsteps crunch­ing in the silence. He had not been here in many years. The door

  had fallen off its hinges; part of the clay front wall had fallen in. Boulders and crumbled adobe jammed the entrance. A pair of small, screeching desert rodents snapped at him and fled for cover; Luke ignored them.

  Gingerly, he ducked low and stepped into the home of his first mentor.

  Luke stood in the middle of the room breathing deeply, turn­ing around, trying to sense the presence he desperately needed to see. This was the place where Obi-Wan Kenobi had told Luke of the Force. Here, the old man had first given Luke his lightsaber and hinted at the truth about his father, "from a certain point of view," dispelling the diversionary story that Uncle Owen had told, at the same time planting seeds of his own deceptions.

  "Ben," he said and closed his eyes, calling out with his mind as well as his voice. He tried to penetrate the invisible walls of the Force and reach to the luminous being of Obi-Wan Kenobi who had visited him numerous times, before saying he could never speak with Luke again.

  "Ben, I need you," Luke said. Circumstances had changed. He could think of no other way past the obstacles he faced. Obi-Wan had to answer. It wouldn't take long, but it could give him the key he needed with all his heart.

  Luke paused and listened and sensed—

  But felt nothing. If he could not summon Obi-Wan's spirit here in the empty dwelling where the old man had lived in exile for so many years, Luke didn't believe he could find his former teacher ever again.

  He echoed the words Leia had used more than a decade earlier, beseeching him, "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi," Luke whispered, "you're my only hope."

  THE CRYSTAL STAR

  by Vonda N. Mclntyre

  Setting: Ten years after Return of the Jedi

  Leia's three children have been kidnapped. That horrible fact is made worse by Leia's realization that she can no longer sense her children through the Force! While she, Artoo-Detoo, and Chewbacca trail the kidnappers, Luke and Han discover a planet that is suffering strange quantum effects from a nearby star. Slowly freezing into a perfect crystal and disrupting the Force, the star is blunting Luke's power and crippling the Millennium Falcon. These strands converge in an apocalyptic threat not only to the fate of the New Republic, but to the universe itself.

  The Black Fleet Crisis

  BEFORE THE STORM

  by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

  Setting: Twelve years after Return of the Jedi

  Long after setting up the hard-won New Republic, yesterday's Rebels have become today's administrators and diplomats. But the peace is not to last for long. A restless Luke must journey to his mother's homeworld in a desperate quest to find her people; Lando seizes a mysterious spacecraft with unimaginable weap­ons of destruction; and waiting in the wings is an horrific battle fleet under the control of a ruthless leader bent on a genocidal war.

  Here is an opening scene from Before the Storm:

  In the pristine
silence of space, the Fifth Battle Group of the New Republic Defense Fleet blossomed over the planet Bessimir like a beautiful, deadly flower.

  The formation of capital ships sprang into view with star­tling suddenness, trailing fire-white wakes of twisted space and bristling with weapons. Angular Star Destroyers guarded fat-hulled fleet carriers, while the assault cruisers, their mirror fin­ishes gleaming, took the point.

  A halo of smaller ships appeared at the same time. The fighters among them quickly deployed in a spherical defensive screen. As the Star Destroyers firmed up their formation, their flight decks quickly spawned scores of additional fighters.

  At the same time, the carriers and cruisers began to disgorge the bombers, transports, and gunboats they had ferried to the battle. There was no reason to risk the loss of one fully loaded—a lesson the Republic had learned in pain. At Orinda, the commander of the fleet carrier Endurance had kept his pilots waiting in the launch bays, to protect the smaller craft from Im­perial fire as long as possible. They were still there when Endur­ance took the brunt of a Super Star Destroyer attack and vanished in a ball of metal fire.

  Before long more than two hundred warships, large and small, were bearing down on Bessimir and its twin moons. But the terrible, restless power of the armada could be heard and felt only by the ships' crews. The silence of the approach was broken only on the fleet comm channels, which had crackled to life in the first moments with encoded bursts of noise and cryptic ship-to-ship chatter.

  At the center of the formation of great vessels was the flag-

  ship of the Fifth Battle Group, the fleet carrier Intrepid. She was so new from the yards at Hakassi that her corridors still reeked of sealing compound and cleaning solvent. Her huge realspace thruster engines still sang with the high-pitched squeal that the engine crews called "the baby's cry."

  It would take more than a year for the mingled scents of the crew to displace the chemical smells from the first impressions of visitors. But after a hundred more hours under way, her en­gines' vibrations would drop two octaves, to the reassuring thrum of a seasoned thruster bank.

  On Intredpid's bridge, a tall Dornean in general's uniform paced along an arc of command stations equipped with large monitors. His eye-folds were swollen and fanned by an uncon­scious Dornean defensive reflex, and his leathery face was flushed purple by concern. Before the deployment was even a minute old, Etahn A'baht's first command had been bloodied.

  The fleet tender Ahazi had overshot its jump, coming out of hyperspace too close to Bessimir and too late for its crew to recover from the error. Etahn A'baht watched the bright flare of light in the upper atmosphere from Intrepid's forward view-station, knowing that it meant six young men were dead.

  The Corellian Trilogy:

  AMBUSH AT CORELLIA

  ASSAULT AT SELONIA

  SHOWDOWN AT CENTERPOINT

  by Roger MacBride Allen

  Setting: Fourteen years after Return of the Jedi

  This trilogy takes us to Corellia, Han Solo's homeworld, which Han has not visited in quite some time. A trade summit brings Han, Leia, and the children—now developing their own clear personalities and instinctively learning more about their innate skills in the Force—into the middle of a situation that most closely resembles a burning fuse. The Corellian system is on the brink of civil war, there are New Republic intelligence agents on a mysterious mission which even Han does not understand, and worst of all, a fanatical rebel leader has his hands on a superweapon of unimaginable power—and just wait until you find out who that leader is!

  Here is an early scene from Ambush that gives you a won­derful look at the growing Solo children (the twins are Jacen and Jaina, and their little brother is Anakin):

  Anakin plugged the board into the innards of the droid and pressed a button. The droid's black, boxy body shuddered awake, it drew in its wheels to stand up a bit taller, its status lights lit, and it made a sort of triple beep. "That's good," he said, and pushed the button again. The droid's status lights went out, and its body slumped down again. Anakin picked up the next piece, a motivation actuator. He frowned at it as he turned it over in his hands. He shook his head. "That's not good," he announced.

  "What's not good?" Jaina asked.

  "This thing," Anakin said, handing her the actuator. "Can't you tell? The insides part is all melty."

  Jaina and Jacen exchanged a look. "The outside looks okay," Jaina said, giving the part to her brother. "How can he tell what the inside of it looks like? It's sealed shut when they make it."

  Anakin, still sitting on the floor, took the device from his brother and frowned at it again. He turned it over and over in his hands, and then held it over his head and looked at it as if he were holding it up to the light. "There," he said, pointing a chubby finger at one point on the unmarked surface. "In there is the bad part." He rearranged himself to sit cross-legged, put the actuator in his lap, and put his right index finger over the "bad" part. "Fix," he said. "Fix." The dark brown outer case of the ac­tuator seemed to glow for a second with an odd blue-red light, but then the glow sputtered out and Anakin pulled his finger away quickly and stuck it in his mouth, as if he had burned it on something.

  "Better now?" Jaina asked.

  "Some better," Anakin said, pulling his finger out of his mouth. "Not all better." He took the actuator in his hand and stood up. He opened the access panel on the broken droid and plugged in the actuator. He closed the door and looked expect­antly at his older brother and sister.

  "Done?" Jaina asked.

  "Done," Anakin agreed. "But I'm not going to push the but­ton." He backed well away from the droid, sat down on the floor, and folded his arms.

  Jacen looked at his sister.

  "Not me," she said. 'This was your idea."

  Jacen stepped forward to the droid, reached out to push the power button from as far away as he could, and then stepped hurriedly back.

  Once again, the droid shuddered awake, rattling a bit this time as it did so. It pulled its wheels in, lit its panel lights, and made the same triple beep. But then its holocam eye viewlens

  wobbled back and forth, and its panel lights dimmed and flared. It rolled backward just a bit, and then recovered itself.

  "Good morning, young mistress and masters," it said. "How may I surge you?"

  Well, one word wrong, but so what? Jacen grinned and clapped his hands and rubbed them together eagerly. "Good day, droid," he said. They had done it! But what to ask for first? "First tidy up this room," he said. A simple task, and one that ought to serve as a good test of what this droid could do.

  Suddenly the droid's overhead access door blew off and there was a flash of light from its interior. A thin plume of smoke drifted out of the droid. Its panel lights flared again, and then the work arm sagged downward. The droid's body, softened by heat, sagged in on itself and drooped to the floor. The floor and walls and ceilings of the playroom were supposed to be fire­proof, but nonetheless the floor under the droid darkened a bit, and the ceiling turned black. The ventilators kicked on high automatically, and drew the smoke out of the room. After a mo­ment they shut themselves off, and the room was silent.

  The three children stood, every bit as frozen to the spot as the droid was, absolutely stunned. It was Anakin who recovered first. He walked cautiously toward the droid and looked at it carefully, being sure not to get too close or touch it. "Really melty now," he announced, and then wandered off to the other side of the room to play with his blocks.

  The twins looked at the droid, arid then at each other.

  "We're dead," Jacen announced, surveying the wreckage.

 

 

 
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