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

by Kevin J. Anderson

  The shadow hovered, as if waiting to do battle with him, waiting for Kyp to make the first move. It lifted its nebulous arms, blacker than anything Kyp had seen before. Kyp raised Gantoris’s lightsaber to strike, proud of what he was about to do. He would use a Jedi weapon instead—a weapon of light to strike the darkness.

  He made ready to swing. The shadow hung poised, as if stunned—and Kyp halted again.

  He could not strike out, not even with a lightsaber. If he attacked Exar Kun, he would still succumb to the temptation and ease of violence, regardless of the weapon he chose.

  The lightsaber handle felt cold in his grip, but Kyp switched the power off and clipped the handle to his belt. He stood alone, face-to-face with the shadow that now seemed his own size, merely the black outline of a human wearing a shroud.

  “I will not fight you,” Kyp said.

  “I am glad,” said the voice, which became clearer now, more maddeningly familiar. Not Exar Kun at all. It never had been.

  The shadowy arms reached up to pull back the cowl, exposing a luminous face that clearly belonged to Kyp’s brother, Zeth.

  “I am dead,” the image of Zeth said, “but only you can keep my memory strong. Thank you for freeing me, brother.”

  The image of Zeth embraced Kyp with a brief, tingling rustle of warmth that melted the ice in Kyp’s spine. Then the spirit vanished, and Kyp found himself alone again in a musty, empty temple that no longer held any power over him.

  Kyp stepped into the warm sunlight again, free of the shadows. On the opposite shore he saw Master Skywalker stand up and look at him. Luke’s face wore a broad grin, and he opened his arms in a celebratory gesture.

  “Come back and join us, Kyp,” Master Skywalker called. His voice echoed across the flat surface of the still water. “Welcome home, Jedi Knight.”

  28

  The immense barricade doors of the Imperial Correction Facility did not budge, nor did they open when Han knocked. Naturally.

  He stood with Lando and Mara Jade outside on the scoured landscape of Kessel, dressed in an insulated jumpsuit taken from the Lady Luck’s stores. Mara leaned closer to Han, her shout muffled through the breath mask covering her mouth.

  “We could bring down a full-scale assault team from the moon,” she said. “We have enough firepower.”

  “No!” Lando shouted. His dark eyes shone with excitement and anxiety. “There must be a way to get in without damaging my facility!”

  The cold, dry wind stung Han’s eyes, and he turned his head to protect them from the breeze. He remembered gasping for air when Skynxnex, Moruth Doole’s henchman, had dragged him and Chewbacca into the spice mines without giving them breathing apparatus. Right now Han wanted nothing more than to kick the toadlike Doole out of the prison so that his frog eyes could blink and his fat lips pump together as he tried to fill his lungs.

  Doole, an administrator of the Correction Facility, had dealt in black-market glitterstim, making deals with Han and other smugglers to deliver the precious cargo to gangsters such as Jabba the Hutt. But Doole had a habit of delivering his partners into Imperial hands whenever it proved convenient. Doole had ratted on Han long ago, forcing him to dump his cargo—which had made Jabba very angry.…

  Han did not want to be back on Kessel. He wanted to be back home with his wife and children. He wanted to have his companion Chewbacca back. He wanted to take a nice, relaxing vacation. For once.

  “I’ve got a better idea,” Mara said, interrupting Han’s thoughts. She craned her neck to look up at the murky sky. “Up on the garrison moon I brought along Ghent, our slicer. You might remember him. He used to be one of Talon Karrde’s top aides. He can crack into anything.”

  Han remembered the brash young slicer: an enthusiastic kid who knew electronics and computer systems intimately, but didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. Han shrugged. They didn’t need social skills now; they needed someone who could crack through the defenses.

  “Okay, bring him down along with the Falcon,” Han said. “I’ve got a few gadgets inside my ship that might help us out, too. The sooner we can get in, the sooner I can get going.”

  Lando agreed. “Yes, any way to enter without doing too much damage …”

  Mara pursed her lips. “I’m also going to bring in a team of fighters. I’ve got four Mistryl guards and a handful of other smugglers who are getting fidgety with our new alliance. Some of them have been complaining that it’s been too long since they had a good, satisfying fistfight.”

  An hour later, cold and uncomfortable even in the insulated suit, Han sat on the Lady Luck’s thruster pod. He saw the faltering plumes from two distant atmosphere-factory stacks, but the rest of the world stood lifeless. He knew from experience, though, that deep within the spice mines lurked hideous energy spiders, waiting to strike any creature they found.

  Han heard a sonic boom reverberate through the thin atmosphere, a high-pitched sound mixed with the thunder of sublight engines. He scanned the sky until he saw the pronged disk of the Millennium Falcon.

  The ship landed in a powdery white clearing beside the Lady Luck. The ramp slid out, and five smugglers emerged: two tall, well-muscled women—Mistryl guards—a hairy, tusk-faced Whiphid, and a reptilian Trandoshan; each wore a uniform with the crosshatched insignia of the new Smugglers’ Alliance. The smugglers bristled with weapons; their bulging belts contained enough recharge packs for an entire assault.

  Last down the ramp, still fumbling to adjust a breath mask over his face, came Ghent the slicer, with tousled hair and rapidly blinking, alert eyes. He nodded cursorily at Mara, then fixed his entire attention on the barricade gates. Slung over his shoulder was a satchel crammed with tools, diagnostic apparatus, splitters, rerouting circuits, and security-cracking equipment. “Should be a piece of cake,” Ghent said.

  Mara Jade and Lando sat next to Han and watched Ghent fall to work with total concentration, not the least distracted by the miserable environment of Kessel.

  Han said, “I certainly never dreamed I’d be trying so hard to break into the Kessel prison.”

  Cowering behind a locked door in the lower levels of the Imperial Correction Facility, Moruth Doole longed for the good old days. Compared to the constant paranoia he had endured for the past several months, even life under the Imperial yoke had been paradise.

  After he had taken over the prison years ago, Doole had moved into the warden’s office, where he could spend much time staring out at the landscape, observing the desolate purity of the alkali wastelands. He had fed upon tender flying insects. Whenever the whim struck him, he had mated with one of his captive female Rybets in his personal harem.

  Now, though, since Daala’s attack, he had moved into one of the high-security prison cells for protection. He had tried to make preparations, establish defenses, because he knew someone was going to come after him, sooner or later.

  The cell walls were thick and blast proof. The lights shone down, burning shapes into his blurry vision. He tapped the mechanical eye that helped him to focus. The device had broken during the space battle around Kessel. Doole had tinkered with the mechanical components, putting its gears and lenses back together; it no longer worked quite properly, though, and his vision winked out from time to time.

  Doole paced the cold stone floor of his cell. Everything had fallen apart. The planet Kessel had been abandoned, leaving only smoking rubble on the surface and destroyed hulks of ships strewn across the system all the way to the black hole cluster. Doole couldn’t even get a ship of his own to escape. He didn’t want to stay here—but what choice did he have?

  Even the blind larvae—the large-eyed creatures whom Doole had locked inside pitch-black rooms to process the mind-enhancing spice, glitterstim—were growing restless. He had cared for them, given them food (a meager amount, to keep their growth down, but enough for survival), but now they had begun to struggle.

  Doole snorted, making a squeaking sound with his bloated lips. The larvae were his own u
ngrateful children, immature Rybets who had not yet undergone their final metamorphosis. Blind and wormlike, almost as large as Doole himself, the larvae were perfect workers to wrap the spice fibers in opaque sheaths, since even brief exposure to light would spoil the product. His children could work in the blackness, and be happy. And what sort of gratitude did they show him?

  A few larvae had gotten loose, fleeing blindly through the winding prison passages, hiding in shadowy cells, waiting in darkened wings to ambush Doole if he came looking for them. But he was not going to look. He had more important things to do.

  To make things worse, one of the largest male larvae had freed all of Doole’s specially picked females! The females had fled into the labyrinth of the prison, so that during this time of greatest terror, Doole couldn’t even relieve his tension with an occasional visit to the harem.

  He had no choice but to remain locked inside his office cell, pace the floor, and be alternately bored out of his mind and scared out of his wits. When he did make his way to the storerooms, he emerged heavily armed, waddled quickly down the corridors, and came back with as much food as he could carry.

  He had an escape tunnel, of course. He had blasted a channel into the spice mines directly under the prison. Doole could lose himself for a long time in that network, but he still couldn’t get off-planet. And lately the tunnels had become a far more dangerous place.

  After Daala’s attack most of the spice miners had fled. Without guards and construction and loud machinery, the spiders had surged upward to lay down their glitterstim webs along the walls. Looking with specially adapted kinetic energy detectors, Doole had spotted swarms of the monsters in the deepest shafts, migrating closer to the surface.

  In despair Doole sat on his bunk and smelled the dank air of the dungeon. At another time he might have found it comforting and cool, but now he just rested his sucker-tipped fingers against damp jowls and stared at the monitors.

  He was astonished to see a ship land outside. And even though all humans generally looked alike to him, Doole was certain he recognized one of the three intruders pummeling his armored door: Han Solo, the man he hated most in the entire universe, the man who had caused all this misery!

  At the ominous prison gates Han watched as Ghent the slicer worked diligently on the problem. He jacked in all manner of equipment, components stolen out of other systems, barely functional combinations that somehow found loopholes around defense systems.

  Ghent raised a triumphant fist into the grainy sunlight. The reinforced latticework of the defensive portcullis rode up on invisible tracks. With a hollow clunking sound the shipping and receiving gates split apart, squealing and creaking as they lumbered into the thick walls. A gust of higher-pressure air bled out of the prison.

  The four large smugglers shouldered their weapons and plodded forward, crouched over and ready to fight. The two Mistryl guards took the lead, sliding along the walls. The burly Whiphid and scaly Trandoshan strode brashly down the middle of the hall.

  No attack came from the dark passageway. “Let’s go find Moruth Doole,” Han said.

  None of his options looked good, but Doole had to make choices. He had watched Han Solo and his group of commandos force their way in—and Kessel was supposed to be the toughest prison in the galaxy. Hah!

  Doole didn’t know how to use the built-in defense systems, the external laser cannons, the disintegrator fields. He was helpless without his right-hand man, Skynxnex, but the scarecrowish fool had gotten himself killed chasing Solo through the spice tunnels, devoured by one of those energy spiders.

  As a desperate measure Doole had come to the conclusion that he must trust his own children, the blind larvae he kept in blackness since the moment they writhed out of the gelatinous egg mass in the harem wing’s breeding pools.

  Doole rushed down the corridors, gathering weapons from the prison’s armory. He carried two satchels of blaster pistols over his shoulder as he opened the protective vaults. Suddenly exposed to the light, the larvae reared back like caterpillars, blind eyes bulging as they attempted to sense the identity of the intruder.

  “It’s only me, only me,” Doole said. Bright light stabbed at them, illuminating their pale skin. Damp vestigial hands reached up, small fingers and arms short and weak, not completely formed. Wormlike tendrils quivered below their mouths as the larvae made soft burbling noises.

  Doole herded the oldest and strongest of the larvae along ramps to the lower levels. He would station them as guardians inside his cell. Being blind, they probably couldn’t hit anything with the blasters, but he hoped they would at least fire with enthusiasm once he gave them the orders. Given enough cross fire, Doole could hide behind a blast-proof screen and hope the firelight would kill Solo’s team.

  As Doole ushered them toward his cell, he smelled the musky wetness of their fear and uncertainty. The immature Rybets did not like change, preferring a rigid daily routine until eventually they molted and became adults, gaining intelligence and self-awareness.

  Distracted by trying to think of what other defenses he might bring to bear, he was startled by a high-pitched scream echoing from three of the nearby chambers. Several of the freed female Rybets sprang out, wailing and throwing sharp objects at them.

  Doole ducked as broken shards of transparisteel, sharpened knives, and heavy paperweights flew at him. Doole tried to grab a blaster from one of the two satchels on his back, but a drinking mug struck him on the soft side of his head. He dropped one of the satchels and ran wildly down the corridor, waving his sucker-tipped hands.

  Most of the larvae followed him, but a few split off to stay with their mothers. Doole ran, wanting only to get back to the safety of his cell. Finally slamming the thick door behind him, he emptied his remaining satchel and placed fully charged blasters in the hands of six potential defenders.

  “Just point it toward whatever noise you hear,” he said. “When they break in, it’s up to you to shoot. This is the firing button.”

  The smooth-skinned creatures shivered and ran their sensitive mouth tendrils over the barrels of the weapons.

  “You point it, and it makes a blast.” Doole repositioned the pistols in their vestigial hands, pointing them toward the door.

  Without warning the vision in his mechanical eye flickered again, and Doole couldn’t see a thing. He moaned in terror. The escape tunnel was sounding better and better.

  With a growing dread in the pit of his stomach, Han Solo hurried down the prison corridors. The entire place was full of cold shadows, echoing with emptiness.

  Over the comm link Mara Jade said, “We’ve found him, Solo. He’s barricaded in one of the dungeons. We tapped into the surveillance cameras. He’s got some creatures standing with him, and they appear to be armed.”

  “On my way,” Han said.

  When he reached the lower corridors, Han saw heavy barricades thrown in place across a sealed door. Mara watched the operation as the two female Mistryl guards placed concussion detonators around the door seal.

  Lando paced nervously. “Don’t do any more damage than you have to,” he said. “I’ve got enough repairs to make here on Kessel as it is.”

  The two women ignored him as they sprinted out of the way. They ducked their heads and covered their ears as a rapid thud thud thud echoed from the concussion detonators.

  They heard a volley of sudden blaster fire from inside the sealed chamber, a high-pitched shriek of energetic beams striking and ricocheting off the walls.

  “No, no! Not yet!” came a howling voice that Han recognized as Moruth Doole’s.

  With a final thump the last concussion detonator blew the bottom off the door. The hairy Whiphid rushed forward to elbow the heavy plates aside.

  “Look out,” Mara called.

  The Whiphid ducked and rolled as the soft larvae flailed, pointing their blasters and firing in every direction. Their huge glassy eyes spun around without seeing anything.

  “Get them!” Doole yelled. The larvae w
hirled at the sound of his voice and fired their blasters toward Doole himself. But he had already ducked behind a thick piece of wall plating. “Not at me!”

  Hissing, the reptilian Trandoshan shot inside, cutting down two of the blind larvae. He lumbered into the chamber, but before the other smugglers could rush in, another explosion came from the ceiling. Han, Mara, and the Mistryl guards used the distraction to muscle their way forward, ducking down and firing again. Han took out another of the larvae just as the ceiling collapsed in flaming chunks.

  Wailing for revenge, swarms of female Rybets dropped through the ceiling into Doole’s private cell. Each bore a blaster of her own and fired repeatedly at the metal shield Doole hid behind until its center glowed a cherry-red.

  The blind larvae targeted on the new noise—but then as if suddenly they understood, as if they could communicate with their own mothers, the larvae turned and directed their fire toward Doole as well.

  “Stop, stop!” Doole cried.

  Han crept in beside Lando, not wanting to draw fire in the midst of this civil war. Doole yelped and dropped the superheated protective shield. His mechanical eye popped off and broke into a thousand bouncing and rattling components on the floor. His long squishy fingers punched a hidden control button, and a trapdoor opened beneath him. With a mindless squeal Doole leaped through an access hatch into an escape tunnel, down into the cold black mines.

  “Hurry, before he gets away!” Lando said. “I don’t want him running around in my spice mines.”

  The surviving larvae flowed forward as if they wanted to plunge into the tunnels after Moruth Doole, either to follow him or to chase him. But the amphibious females grasped the larvae and held them back with gentle cooing sounds. Their wide eyes looked on the invading smugglers with apprehension.

  Han rushed toward the trapdoor and dropped to his knees, pushing his face into the darkness. He heard Doole’s splatting footsteps diminishing as he ran on webbed feet deeper into the catacombs.