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

by Kevin J. Anderson

  A stormtrooper’s voice cut through the alarm chatter on the intercom. “Rebel troops have entered the base! Rebel troops have entered the—” The words ended in a squawk of dead static.

  “Sound the evacuation order,” Sivron said, beleaguered. He stared out the sweeping viewing window with his close-set, beady eyes. Rebel battleships pummeled the Installation. Then a glinting metal framework rose into view, an armillary sphere the size of a small moon.

  “Just go and take care of the reactors, Wermyn,” Tol Sivron said. “We’ll fall back and evacuate to the Death Star prototype. We can swing by and pick you up, then make our escape. We’ll abandon the Rebels to their deaths and take our precious knowledge back to the Empire.”

  Three transports bearing New Republic strike teams landed on the Installation’s central asteroid, blasting through the closed bay doors with their forward laser cannons. As the transports opened egress doors like mechanical wings, the teams flooded out of the passenger compartments and fanned into defensive phalanxes. Crouched low, heads ducked behind blaster-resistant armor, they held high-energy rifles in front of them.

  Chewbacca let out a Wookiee bellow as he thumped down the ramp, holding his bowcaster in front of him. He squeezed a hairy paw around the stock and pointed the crossbow-shaped weapon. His fur bristled. He smelled smoke, oil, and coolant fumes. Chewbacca scooped the air with his hairy paw, gesturing for the elite team of Page’s Commandos to follow.

  Blaster shots rang out as four stormtroopers fired from ambush. A member of one of the other strike teams went down, then forty blaster bolts converged on the Imperial soldiers.

  Chewbacca remembered being a prisoner in the Maw Installation, when he had been forced to perform maintenance on Admiral Daala’s ships. He had been tempted to sabotage one of their gamma-class assault shuttles, but knew that it would only get him killed while causing no irreparable harm to the Imperial forces.

  Now, though, Chewbacca kept thinking of the other Wookiee slaves. He remembered their bowed heads and patchy fur, their gaunt frames. The fire in their eyes had gone out after years of hard and hopeless labor.

  With a barely contained snarl he also remembered the sadistic lump of a man who served as the Wookiee “Keeper,” watching over the slave detail no matter where they were assigned. His blazing eyes, broken-glass voice, and deadly force whip had kept the Wookiees in line through intimidation.

  Alarms shrieked through the intercoms, pumping Chewbacca’s adrenaline and anger. He growled for the teams to hurry. He thought about See-Threepio still onboard the flagship Yavaris and was glad the protocol droid would not be in all the cross fire now. Chewbacca didn’t want to have to put Threepio back together all over again.

  He approached a vast rock-walled workroom, where he remembered performing endless hours of heavy labor. The doors stood sealed by heavy blast shields with rivets the size of Chewbacca’s knuckles.

  He hammered on the metal door with his flat palm. Behind him Page’s Commandos rummaged in their packs. Two members rushed forward with thermal detonators in each hand. They placed the detonators at critical junctures on the blast door and flicked the timer switches. Amber lights winked on and off, counting down.

  “Back away!” one yelled.

  Chewbacca loped after the team as they ran around the corner just in time to hear a muffled explosion. An instant later a much louder sound reverberated as the heavy blast door clanged to the floor.

  “Move out,” the strike-team leader said.

  Chewbacca charged forward through the smoke as he pushed into the sealed bay. He heard thin hissing sounds, like lightning strikes mixed with outraged bellows of pain. The captive Wookiees were in such a frenzied state that they had forgotten their own language.

  As the smoke cleared, Chewbacca was disappointed to find the battle already over—but he was elated that the Wookiees had finally taken a stand upon hearing the alarms and sensing that the tide of their misery had turned.

  Nine Wookiees had converged on the Keeper, who now stood backed against a half-disassembled Lambda-class Imperial shuttle. The Keeper was barrel-shaped with oily skin enhanced by a sheen of terrified sweat. His lips pulled back in a snarl of defiance, and he kept lashing out with serpent strikes of his force whip. The Wookiees growled, trying to come close enough to rip him apart with their claws.

  Chewbacca let out his own roar of challenge. Some of the Wookiees glanced up at the rescue force, but other hairy giants were so transfixed by their chance to get the Keeper that they paid no heed.

  “Drop your weapon,” the commando-team leader said to the Keeper. All of the blaster rifles were directed toward him. It amused Chewbacca to see the cruel man glance at the New Republic force with an expression of relief.

  The Wookiees continued to snarl. They looked worse now than they had appeared only months earlier. No doubt without the protection of Admiral Daala’s fleet, the Keeper had forced the slaves to work even harder to arrange other defenses for Maw Installation.

  “Drop your weapon, I said!” the strike-team commander insisted.

  The Keeper flicked his force whip once more, driving the Wookiee mob back. Chewbacca saw the three largest males in front, their fur streaked and patchy, burned from lashes of the whip and shiny with waxlike welts from old scars. The oldest gray-furred Wookiee, whom Chewbacca remembered as Nawruun, crouched by the edge of the shuttle, hiding under the sharp panels of the ship’s upfolded wings. The old Wookiee’s bones seemed twisted and crushed from years of labor, but the anger in his eyes was brighter than a star.

  The Keeper raised his force whip, stared at the Wookiees, then at Page’s Commandos. The human team leader fired a warning shot, which spanged off the chamber walls. The Keeper raised his other hand in surrender, then let the handle of his force whip fall to the ground. It clinked on the smooth deck plates.

  “All right, now, back away,” the team leader said.

  Chewbacca offered his own words in the Wookiee language. The astonished prisoners stood tense for a moment. The Keeper looked ready to collapse in terror, when suddenly old Nawruun dived to the floor, lunging with a hairy paw to snatch the handle of the whip. He fumbled the activation switches.

  The Keeper shrieked and backed against the wall, looking for someplace to hide. Chewbacca yowled for the Wookiees to stop, but they didn’t hear him as they all surged forward, claws extended, ready to shred the Keeper into bloody pieces.

  Nawruun sprang upon the man’s barrellike form. Though he was misshapen and old, the hunched Wookiee gripped the force whip like a club and tackled the Keeper to the floor. The burly man screamed and flailed.

  The other Wookiees fell upon him. Nawruun jammed the handle of the force whip into the Keeper’s face and switched on the weapon at full power.

  The lance of lashing energy drilled into the Keeper’s head, skirling fireworks inside his brainpan. Sparks came out of his eye sockets, until the Keeper’s skull shattered, showering the hysterical Wookiee prisoners with gore.

  Silence thundered down upon the chamber.

  Chewbacca walked carefully forward as the surviving Wookiees withered. Without any stamina or fury, they backed away from the corpse of their tormentor. Old Nawruun stood again and stared blankly down at the force whip in his hand. He let it drop.

  It struck the floor with a hollow sound, and Nawruun crumpled beside it. His body shuddered, and he made hollow sounds as he wept.

  Tol Sivron tried to find a comfortable place to sit back and relax in the pilot compartment of the Death Star, but the prototype had not been designed for niceties.

  Racks of equipment stood surrounded by bare wires and clumsy welds. Girders and reinforced framework blocked his view of most of the embattled Installation, but he could see that the Rebel forces had overrun the facility.

  At the outer perimeter of the clustered planetoids, the tangled cooling towers and radiation vanes of the power reactor suddenly glowed bright and began to collapse.

  Wermyn’s gruff voice came
over the radio. “Director Sivron, our explosives have destroyed the coolant systems. The power reactor will soon go supercritical. I don’t think the attackers can stop it. Maw Installation is doomed.”

  “Very well, Werrnyn,” Sivron said, dismayed at the loss of capital equipment—but what could he do, after all? His Imperial guardians had deserted him. He and his division leaders had done quite a creditable job of putting up a fight. Without any military help they couldn’t be expected to succeed against a well-armed strike force, could they? Besides, they were following established procedure. No one could fault them for that.

  Sivron looked at the stormtrooper captain and at the other three division leaders. The rest of the Maw scientists and stormtrooper contingents had taken refuge inside the prototype’s supply and control rooms.

  “I have not had a chance to read the complete technical readouts of this battle-station prototype.” Tol Sivron looked around. “Does anyone know how to fly this vessel?”

  Golanda looked at Doxin, who in turn looked at Yemm.

  The stormtrooper captain said, “I have had some experience flying attack vehicles, sir. Perhaps I can interpret the controls.”

  “Good, Captain,” Tol Sivron said. “Ummm …” He stood up from his command chair. “Do you need to sit here?”

  “No need, sir. I can handle it from the pilot station.” The captain went over to a bolted-together row of controls.

  “They must have detected Wermyn’s explosions,” Doxin said, watching the Rebel attack ships clustered around the reactor planetoid. Two more shuttles descended as teams were deployed down to the power station. The combined Rebel firepower would block all rescue attempts.

  “Now, how are we supposed to get Wermyn?” Sivron said.

  Yemm began to flip through the Emergency Procedures manual again. “I don’t think we addressed that contingency either.”

  Tol Sivron’s head-tails thrashed in extreme annoyance. “That’s not very good, is it?” He scowled, trying to figure out how he could adapt on the spot. Twi’leks were good at adapting. Sivron had managed to adapt when he left his home planet of Ryloth; he had adapted when Moff Tarkin had assigned him as director of the think tank. Now he would adapt his plans again to make the best of a situation that was growing worse by the minute.

  “All right, so there’s no time to rescue Wermyn. Change of plans. Our duty is to the Empire. We must take this Death Star prototype and make a rapid retreat.”

  Wermyn himself had seen the Rebel strike teams coming down to retake the reactor planetoid, and he contacted Tol Sivron again with a more frantic tenor in his voice. “Director, what can I do to assist you? How are you planning to rescue us?”

  Tol Sivron opened the channel and said in his gravest, most sincere voice, “Wermyn, I just want you to know how much I admire and respect you for your years of service. I regret that your retirement cannot be as long and as happy as I had hoped it would be. Once again, accept my appreciation. Thank you.”

  He signed off, then turned to the stormtrooper captain. “We need to get out of here now.”

  When the heaviest fighting began to die away, Qwi Xux shuttled down to the Installation with Wedge Antilles. Qwi saw the planetoids growing larger as they approached. She had spent most of her life down there, but she remembered little of it.

  Other than the destruction of the first corvette, the New Republic fleet had suffered minimal losses. The Maw scientists had put up even less resistance than Wedge had feared. Qwi looked forward now to going through her old labs, eager to find her own files in hopes of answering some of her questions … but afraid to learn the answers.

  Wedge reached over to hold her hand. “It’ll be fine. You’ll be a great help. Wait and see.”

  She looked longingly at him with her large eyes. “I’ll do my best.” But something caught her attention, and she pointed quickly. “Look, Wedge! We’ve got to stop it.”

  The Death Star prototype rose away from Maw Installation under its own power, glistening in the reflected light of the gas cloud.

  “According to my own records, Maw Installation had a fully functional prototype,” Qwi said. “If they take that Death Star into New Republic space—”

  Before she could complete her sentence, the gigantic sphere of the Death Star shot away toward the edge of the black hole cluster and vanished into the masking clouds of superhot gas.

  9

  Terpfen stood in the looming shadow of the Great Temple as Yavin’s early daylight increased, warming the jungles until mists rose in the air.

  Paralyzed with fear in front of the towering, ancient ziggurat, Terpfen swiveled his circular eyes to look back to the landing area where his stolen B-wing fighter rested, humming and ticking as it cooled among the cropped weeds. He saw discolored smears on its hull from where the pursuing X-wing fighters on Coruscant had scored direct hits.

  Looking up, he spotted several of the Jedi candidates, tiny figures atop the temple. As the jungle moon orbited around the gas giant, the configuration of the system set up an unusual phenomenon that had filled the Rebels with wonder when they first established the small moon as a secret base.

  Bright sunlight streaming through the upper layers of the Yavin primary refracted in many different colors, then struck the moon’s atmosphere, filtered through the rising mists to let loose a shower of rainbows that lasted only minutes with each dawn. The Jedi trainees, gathered to watch the rainbow storm high above, had seen his ship land. They were coming.

  In a slick fighter jumpsuit that bore no insignia, Terpfen felt his heart pounding, his mind whirling. Confessing his traitorous acts frightened him the most—but Terpfen had to face it. He tried to rehearse his words, but decided that it would not help. There was no good way to share the terrible news.

  He felt dizzy, ready to faint, and grasped the cool, moss-covered blocks of the temple with one flippered hand. He feared that Carida had somehow found him again, that Furgan was sinking his clutches into the organic components that had been substituted for parts of Terpfen’s brain.

  No! It was his mind now! He had not felt the tug from his Imperial controllers for over a day now. He’d forgotten what it was like to think his own thoughts, and he had tested the new freedom with growing wonder. He fantasized about overthrowing the Empire, about throttling bug-eyed Ambassador Furgan.

  And during these thoughts no shadowy presence squashed his mind. He felt so … free!

  He realized the faintness was just his numbing fright. The feeling passed, and Terpfen stood straight again as he heard footsteps approach.

  The first to emerge into the bright daylight was Minister of State Leia Organa Solo herself. She must have run to the turbolift, expecting that the B-wing fighter carried some emergency message from Coruscant. Her hair looked mussed and windblown, and shadows haunted her eyes. Her face wore a concerned frown, as if something else already troubled her.

  Terpfen felt the cold despair increase within him. She would be even more agonized after he told her that the Imperials knew the location of her son Anakin.

  Leia stopped and looked gravely at him, sizing him up. Her brows drew together in thought, and then she said his name. “I know you. Terpfen, right? Why have you come here?”

  Terpfen knew that his battered bulbous head and the lumpy mappings of scars made him recognizable even to humans. Behind Leia came several Jedi students Terpfen did not recognize, until he saw Ambassador Cilghal. The female Calamarian’s large round eyes seemed to bore into his soul.

  “Minister Organa Solo …,” Terpfen said in a quavering voice. Then he collapsed to his knees, partly in abject misery and partly because his legs refused to support him any longer. “Your son Anakin is in grave danger!”

  He hung his scarred head. Before she could fire off laser-sharp questions, Terpfen confessed everything.

  Leia stared down at Terpfen’s scarred head and felt as if she were being strangled. Luke and Ackbar’s intricate security and secrecy about Anoth had been breached!
The Empire knew where to find her baby son.

  Leia understood little about the defenses on the sheltered, hellish world. Now her servant and friend Winter was the only protection baby Anakin had.

  “Please, Minister Organa Solo—we must go to Anoth at once,” Terpfen said. “We must send them a message, evacuate your child before an Imperial strike squad can reach him. While I was under Furgan’s influence, I transmitted Anoth’s coordinates to Carida, but I did not keep a copy of them. I destroyed that information. You must take us there yourself. I will do whatever I can to help, but we must move quickly.”

  Leia made ready to leap into action, ready to do anything necessary to save her son. But a paralyzing realization brought her up short. “I can’t contact Anoth. Even I don’t know where the planet is!”

  Terpfen stared at her, but she couldn’t read expressions on his angular, aquatic face. She continued. “It was kept secret from me, too. The only ones who knew were Winter—and she’s on Anoth—and Ackbar, who is now hiding on Calamari, and Luke, who’s in a coma. I don’t know how to get there!”

  She steadied herself, trying to recall how fast-thinking she had been in her younger days. On the first Death Star she had taken charge during Han and Luke’s ill-planned rescue. She had known what to do then. She had acted quickly and without hesitation.

  But now she had three children to care for, and her new priorities seemed to scramble her single-mindedness. Han had already departed to search for Kyp Durron and the Sun Crusher. She’d been left here with the twins, supposedly to keep them safe. She couldn’t just leave now.

  Ambassador Cilghal seemed to sense her thoughts. “You must go, Leia. Go save your son. Your twin children will be safe here. The Jedi students will protect them.”

  As if suddenly freed of something she hadn’t known was binding her, Leia felt plans plunge into her conscious mind. Relaxing, she became cool and decisive. “All right, Terpfen, you’re coming with me. We’ll go to Calamari as fast as we can. We’ll find Ackbar, and he can take us to Winter and Anakin.” She looked at the traitor with a complex mixture of anger and hope, pity and sorrow.