Star Wars: The Jedi Academy Trilogy III: Champions of the Force

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Streen sat up, and Kam Solusar ran over to help Kirana Ti hold him. The old hermit began to weep. Kam Solusar gnashed his teeth and looked as if he wanted to kill the old hermit then and there, but Kirana Ti stopped him.

  “Don’t hurt him,” she said. “He doesn’t know what he was doing.”

  “A nightmare,” Streen said, “the Dark Man talking to me. Whispering to me. He never lets go. I was fighting him in my dream.” Streen looked around for sympathy or encouragement.

  “I was going to kill him and save us all, but you woke me.” At last Streen realized where he was. He looked around the grand audience chamber until his gaze fell upon Leia holding Luke.

  “He tricked you, Streen,” Kirana Ti said in a hard voice. “You weren’t fighting the Dark Man. He was manipulating you. You were his tool. If we hadn’t stopped you, you would have destroyed Master Skywalker.”

  Streen began sobbing.

  On the raised platform Tionne helped Leia lift Luke back onto the stone table. “He doesn’t seem injured,” Leia said.

  “By sheer luck,” Tionne said. She wondered aloud, “Did the ancient Jedi Knights have to deal with challenges like this?”

  “If they did,” Leia said, “I hope you manage to find the old stories. We need to learn what those Jedi did to defeat their enemies.”

  Streen stood, shaking himself free of the gripping hands of Kirana Ti and Kam Solusar. The old man’s face was filled with outrage. “We must destroy the Dark Man,” Streen said, “before he kills all of us.”

  Leia felt a grip of unbearable cold in her heart, knowing that Streen was right.

  8

  Being Chief Administrator of Maw Installation was a great enough burden under normal circumstances, but Tol Sivron had never counted on doing it without Imperial assistance. Standing inside the empty conference room, Sivron stroked his sensitive Twi’lek head-tails and stared out the viewport into the empty space around the secret facility.

  He had never liked Admiral Daala and her overbearing manner. In the years they had been stranded in the Maw, Sivron had never felt as though she understood his mission to create new weapons of mass destruction for Grand Moff Tarkin—to whom they both owed enormous favors.

  Daala’s four Star Destroyers had been assigned to protect Sivron and the precious weapons scientists, but Daala had refused to accept her subordinate position in the scheme of things. She had let a few Rebel prisoners steal the Sun Crusher and kidnap one of Sivron’s best weapons designers, Qwi Xux. Then Daala had abandoned her post to chase after the spies, leaving him alone and unprotected!

  Sivron paced the conference room, puffed with pride and saddled with disappointment. He shook his head, and his two wormlike head appendages slid across his tunic with a tingle of sensory perceptions. He gripped one of the head-tails and wrapped it heavily around his shoulders.

  The handful of stormtroopers Daala had left behind served little purpose. Tol Sivron had compiled a full tally of the soldiers: 123. He’d filled out official reports, gathered their service records, compiled information that might someday be useful. It wasn’t clear to him exactly how this information would be useful, but Sivron had based his career on compiling reports and gathering information. Someone, somewhere, would find it worthwhile.

  The stormtroopers obeyed his orders—that was what stormtroopers did, after all—but he was no military commander. He didn’t know how to deploy the soldiers if Maw Installation was ever attacked by Rebel invaders.

  During the last month he had kept the Maw scientists working harder to come up with better prototypes and functional defenses, writing contingency plans and emergency procedures, outlining scenarios and prescribed responses to every situation. Being prepared is our best weapon, he thought. Tol Sivron would never stop being prepared.

  He had requested frequent progress reports from his researchers, insisting that he be kept completely up-to-date. The storage room adjacent to his office was piled high with hardcopy documents and demonstration models of various concepts. He didn’t have time to review them all, of course, but it comforted him just to know they were there.

  He heard footsteps approach and saw his four primary division leaders escorted to the morning briefing by their designated stormtrooper bodyguards.

  Tol Sivron did not turn to greet them, staring with a thrill of pride at the huge spherical skeleton of the Death Star prototype rising over the cluster of rocks like a framework moon. The Death Star was the Installation’s greatest success. Grand Moff Tarkin had taken one look at the prototype and given him a medal on the spot, along with Bevel Lemelisk, its main designer, and Qwi Xux, his primary assistant.

  The four division leaders took their seats around the briefing table, each bringing a hot beverage, each munching on a reconstituted morning pastry. Each carried a hardcopy printout of the morning’s agenda.

  Sivron decided he would keep the meeting brief and to the point—no longer than two, possibly three, hours. They didn’t have much to discuss anyway. As the Death Star orbited out of sight overhead, he turned to face his four top managers.

  Doxin was a man wider than he was tall, completely bald except for very dark, very narrow eyebrows that looked like thin wires burned into his forehead. His lips were thick enough that he could have balanced a stylus on them when he smiled. Doxin was in charge of high-energy concepts and implementations.

  Next to him sat Golanda. Tall and hawkish with an angular face, pointed chin, and aquiline nose that gave her face the general shape of a Star Destroyer, she was about as beautiful as a gundark. Golanda led the artillery innovations and tactical-deployments section. In ten years she had not stopped complaining about how foolish it was to do artillery research in the middle of a black hole cluster where the fluctuating gravity ruined her calculations and made every test a pointless exercise.

  The third division leader, Yemm, was a demonic-looking Devaronian who excelled in saying the right thing at the right time. He supervised documentation and legal counsel.

  Last of all, seated at the far corner of the table, was Wermyn, a tall, one-armed brute. His skin had a purplish-green cast that left his origin in question. Werrnyn was in charge of plant operations and keeping Maw Installation up and running.

  “Good morning, everyone,” Tol Sivron said, seating himself at the head of the table and tapping his needle claws on the tabletop. “I see you’ve all brought your agendas with you. Excellent.” He scowled at the four stormtroopers standing outside the door. “Captain, please step outside and close the door. This is a private, high-level meeting.”

  The stormtrooper made no answer as he ushered his companions outside and sealed the door with a hiss of compressed gases.

  “There,” Tol Sivron said, shuffling papers in front of him. “I’d like you each to report on recent activities in your division. After we’ve discussed the possible implications of anything new, we can then brainstorm strategies. I take it our revised Emergency Plans have been distributed to all members of this facility?” Sivron looked at Yemm, the paperwork person.

  The Devaronian smiled pleasantly and nodded. The horns on his head bobbed up and down. “Yes, Director. Everyone has received a copy of the full three-hundred-sixty-five-page hard-copy document with instructions to read it diligently.”

  “Good,” Sivron said, checking off the first item on his agenda. “We’ll leave time at the end of the meeting for new business, but I’d like to move right along. I still have a lot of reports to review. Werrnyn, would you like to begin?”

  The one-armed plant operations division leader rumbled through a detailed report on their supplies, their power consumption rates, the expected duration of fuel cells in the power reactor. Wermyn’s only concern was that they were running low on spare parts, and he doubted they would ever receive another shipment from the outside.

  Tol Sivron duly noted that fact in his log pad.

  Next, Doxin slurped his hot beverage and gave a report of a new weapon his scientists had been testing. “
It’s a metal-crystal phase shifter,” Doxin said. “MCPS for short.”

  “Hmmmra,” Tol Sivron said, tapping his chin with a long claw. “We’ll have to think of a catchier name before we present it to the Imperials.”

  “It’s just a working acronym,” Doxin said, embarrassed. “We’ve constructed a functioning model, though our results have been inconsistent. The tests have given us reason to hope for a successful larger-scale implementation.”

  “And what exactly does it do?” Tol Sivron asked.

  Doxin scowled at him. “Director, I’ve filed several reports over the past seven weeks. Haven’t you read them?”

  Sivron flinched his head-tails instinctively. “I’m a busy man, and I can’t recall everything I read,” he said. “Especially about a project with such an uninspired name. Refresh my memory, please.”

  Doxin grew animated as he spoke. “The MCPS field alters the crystalline structure of metals—e.g., those in starship hulls. The MCPS can penetrate conventional shielding and turn hull plates into powder. The actual physics is more complicated, of course; this is just an executive summary.”

  “Yes, yes,” Tol Sivron said. “That sounds very good. What were these problems you encountered?”

  “Well, the MCPS worked effectively over only about one percent of the surface area on our test plate.”

  “So it might not be terribly useful?” Tol Sivron said.

  Doxin rubbed his fingers across the polished table surface, making a squeaking sound. “Not exactly true, Director. The one percent effectiveness was distributed over a wide area, leaving pinhole failures over the entire surface. Such a loss of integrity would be enough to destroy any ship.”

  Sivron grinned. “Ah, very good! Continue your studies and continue filing those excellent reports.”

  Golanda, the hatchet-faced woman in charge of artillery deployment and tactical innovations, talked about cluster-resonance shells based in part upon preliminary theoretical work for the Sun Crusher.

  Yemm interrupted Golanda’s summary by standing up and crying out. Sivron frowned at him. “It’s not time for new business, Yemm.”

  “But, Director!” Yemm said, gesturing madly toward the viewport. The other division leaders stood in an uproar.

  Tol Sivron finally whirled to see silhouettes against the gaseous backdrop of the Maw. His Twi’lek head-tails uncurled and stood out straight behind him.

  A fleet of Rebel warships appeared inside the Maw. The invasion force he had dreaded for so long had finally arrived.

  With two Corellian corvettes at point and two at his flanks, General Wedge Antilles brought the escort frigate Yavaris toward the mismatched cluster of rocks that formed Maw Installation.

  Qwi Xux stood pale blue and beautiful at the observation station beside him, looking tense yet eager to ransack her old quarters for clues to her lost memories.

  “Maw Installation,” Wedge said into the comm channel. “This is General Antilles, Commander of the New Republic occupation fleet. Please respond to discuss terms of your surrender.”

  He felt arrogant as he said it, but he knew they had no way of fighting off his fleet. Hidden in the midst of the black holes, without Admiral Daala’s Star Destroyers to defend it, the Installation depended on inaccessibility rather than firepower for protection.

  As his ships approached the cluster of rocks, Wedge received no response. But when the open metal framework of the Death Star prototype orbited up from behind the planetoids, he felt a stab of terror.

  “Shields up!” he said instinctively.

  But the Death Star did not fire, gracefully orbiting back out of view again.

  As Wedge brought his fleet in closer, a tracery of laser fire shot toward them from small buildings and habitation modules on the misshapen asteroids. Only a few of the beams managed to strike, reflecting harmlessly off the ships’ shields.

  “All right,” Wedge said. “Two corvettes. Surgical strikes only. We want to remove those defenses, but don’t damage the Installation itself.” He shot a glance at Qwi. “That place holds too much important data to risk losing it.”

  Wedge watched the enormous banks of engines behind the foremost two corvettes as they rained destructive blasts upon the asteroids. Bright-red spears lanced down to pulverize the rocks.

  “This is too easy,” Wedge said.

  A desperate signal came from one of the corvette captains. His image flickered as he beamed a transmission on the emergency channel. “Something’s happening to our hull! Shields aren’t effective. Some new kind of weapon. Hull walls are weakening. Can’t pinpoint where—”

  The transmission cut off as the corvette became a ball of fire and shrapnel.

  “Back off!” Wedge shouted into the open channel, but the second corvette plunged forward, choosing instead to use his full complement of dual turbolaser cannons as well as a pair of proton torpedoes that had been specially installed for the occupation mission. “Captain Ortola! Back off!”

  The captain of the second corvette blasted the nearest planetoid. Proton torpedoes sizzled with uncontained energy. Turbolaser blasts ignited volatile gases and flammables, reducing the small planetoid to incandescent dust.

  “That won’t be a problem anymore, sir,” Captain Ortola said. “You may deploy the strike forces at your leisure.”

  Howling warnings shrieked through the Maw Installation’s intercom so monotonously that Tol Sivron found it difficult to plan his speech.

  “Your attention, please,” he said into the intercom. “Remember to follow your emergency procedures.”

  Outside, stormtroopers hustled up and down the white-tiled corridors. The stormtrooper captain was yelling and directing his troops to set up defensive positions at vital intersections. No one bothered to refer to the carefully written and tested contingency scenarios Tol Sivron and his managers had spent so much time developing.

  Gritting his pointed teeth in annoyance, Sivron raised his voice into the intercom. “If you need another copy of your emergency procedures, or if you have difficulty finding one, contact your respective division leader immediately. We will see to it that you receive one.”

  Hanging above Maw Installation, the Rebel ships looked like nightmarish constructions, brushing aside the Installation’s defensive lasers as if they were mere insect bites.

  Doxin sat by an interlaboratory communication station and cheered as he saw one of the Rebel corvettes crumble, disintegrating into a cloud of pulverized metal plate and escaping fuel and coolant gases.

  “It worked!” Doxin said. “The MCPS worked!” He tapped the receiving jack in his ear, listened, and frowned with his enormous lips. When Doxin wrinkled the brow on his bald head, the ridges rippled all the way up to his crown like rugged-terrain treads.

  “Unfortunately, we won’t get a second shot, Director. The MCPS seems to have malfunctioned,” Doxin said. “But I do believe the original success against an actual target has proved the system worthy of additional development.”

  “Indeed,” Tol Sivron agreed, looking admiringly at the expanding cloud of debris from the corvette. “We must have a follow-up meeting.”

  “The system is presently off-line,” Doxin said.

  The second Rebel corvette came in with all weapons blazing, and the asteroid housing the offices and labs of the high-energy concepts incinerated under the barrage.

  “It appears to be unquestionably out of commission,” Sivron said.

  Doxin was deeply disappointed. “Now we’ll never conduct a post-shot analysis,” he said with a sigh. “It’s going to be hard to compile a full report without actual data.”

  A loud whump reverberated through the facility. Tol Sivron peered out into the hall as his division leaders crowded to get a view. White-and-gray smoke curled down the corridors, clogging the ventilation systems.

  The screens on the computer monitors inside the conference room went blank. As Sivron stood up to demand an explanation, the lights in all the offices winked out, replaced by a pal
e-green glow of emergency systems.

  The stormtrooper captain rushed up with a clatter of boots on the tiled floor.

  “Captain, what’s going on?” Tol Sivron said. “Report.”

  “We have just successfully destroyed the main computer core, sir,” he said.

  “You did what?” Sivron asked.

  The captain continued in his staccato voice. “We need your personal codes to access the backup files, Director. We will irradiate them to erase the classified information.”

  “Is that in the emergency procedures?” Tol Sivron looked from right to left for an answer from his division leaders. He picked up the hardcopy of the Emergency Procedures manual. “Captain, which page did you find that on?”

  “Sir, we cannot allow our vital data to fall into Rebel hands. The computer backups must be destroyed before the invaders take possession of this facility.”

  “I’m not sure we addressed that contingency when we wrote the manual,” Golanda said with a shrug, flipping pages as well.

  “Perhaps we’ll have to put that in an addendum?” Yemm suggested.

  Standing, Wermyn shuffled through the papers with his one meaty hand. “Director, I see here in Section 5.4, ‘In the Event of Rebel Invasion,’ Paragraph (C). If such an invasion appears likely to succeed in gaining possession of the Installation, I am to lead my team in a mission to the power-reactor asteroid and destroy the cooling towers so that the system will go supercritical and wipe out both this base and the invaders as well.”

  “Good, good!” Tol Sivron said, finding the right page and verifying the words for himself. “Get to it.”

  Wermyn stood up. His swarthy greenish-purple skin flushed darker. “All these procedures have been approved, Director, but I don’t quite follow our next step. How is my team going to get to safety? In fact, how are any of us going to get to safety once I’ve set up the chain reaction?”