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

by Kevin J. Anderson

  The thin metal hull gleamed bright, splotched in places by electrostatic discharges from when the cylinder had been launched at high speed from the Sun Crusher.

  “That’s one heavy message,” Lando said as they lugged the canister to a flat spot on the floor and set it down with a metallic thump on the deck plates.

  Little more than a meter long and less than half a meter wide, the message pod was used by the captain of a doomed ship to launch his last log entries and to dump his computer cores and navigation records for later investigations.

  Han remembered Kyp telling him that when the Coruscant scientists had stumbled upon the message canisters inside the Sun Crusher, they had panicked, thinking they had uncovered the dangerous supernova torpedoes—even though the cylinder was standard Imperial issue, and any smuggler or starfighter pilot should have recognized it immediately.

  On his rampages in the Cauldron Nebula and the Carida system, Kyp had left message cylinders to explain what he had done and why, so that no one would construe his actions as simple astronomical accidents.

  Han felt stunned and lethargic with sadness. His friend had been right, but only to a point. Kyp Durron’s agenda to destroy the Empire had used tactics as vicious as those of the Emperor’s.

  Luke Skywalker had claimed the young man would redeem himself fully, but now Kyp’s potential as a great Jedi had been extinguished.

  Han could not question Kyp’s sacrifice, though. Kyp had eliminated both the Death Star prototype and the Sun Crusher. He had bought the galaxy’s freedom from terror at the cost of his life … one life for potentially billions.

  That made sense, didn’t it?

  Didn’t it?

  Mara Jade knelt beside the message cylinder, running her slender hands over its hull. She popped open the access plate. “Well, it’s not encrypted,” she said. “Either Kyp didn’t have time, or he knew we’d be the ones to pick it up. He left the homing beacon off.”

  “Just open it,” Han said roughly. He’d had enough of this grim waiting. What had Kyp thought to say in his last moments?

  Mara punched in the standard sequence. The lights blinked red, then amber, then flashed green. With a hiss of escaping air, a formerly invisible seam appeared down the center of the pod. The long black line widened as the two halves split, opening up.

  Inside, looking waxen and emotionless as a statue, lay Kyp Durron. His eyes were closed, his face drawn into an expression of intense—yet surprisingly peaceful—concentration.

  “Kyp,” Han shouted. His voice cracked with astonished joy, yet he tried to hold back his hope. “Kyp!”

  Somehow Kyp had crammed himself inside the small volume of the message cylinder, a vessel barely large enough to hold a child. But Kyp had managed to crush his legs, fold his arms until the bones snapped, pressed down on his rib cage until ribs cracked, compacting himself.

  Han leaned closer to the ashen face. “Is he alive? He’s in some kind of Jedi trance.” In his final desperation Kyp had somehow found the strength to use his Jedi pain-blocking techniques, his determination, and all the knowledge Luke had taught him … to do this to himself, as his only chance for survival.

  “He’s slowed his functions almost to the point of suspended animation,” Mara said. “He’s in so deep that he might as well be dead.”

  The message canister was airtight but had no life-support systems, no air other than the small amount that had fit around his own broken body.

  “That’s impossible,” Lando said.

  “Let’s get him out,” Han said. “Careful.”

  Han gently, meticulously pried the young man free of the tiny cylinder. As Lando and Mara helped him carry Kyp to one of the narrow bunks, the young man’s body sagged and flopped from grievously smashed bones, as if someone had crumpled him into a ball and then tossed him aside.

  “Oh, Kyp,” Han said. As he set Kyp on the bunk and straightened his arms, Han could feel the shattered wrists like jelly under his skin. “We have to get him to a medical center,” he said. “I’ve got first aid here, but not nearly enough for something like this.”

  Kyp’s black eyes fluttered open, glazed and unfocused with incredible pain; but he drove it back. “Han,” he said in a voice as faint as beating wings. “You came to get me.”

  “Of course, kid,” Han said, bending down. “What did you expect?”

  “The Death Star?” Kyp asked.

  “Sucked down into the black hole … along with the Sun Crusher. They’re both gone.”

  Kyp’s entire body shuddered with relief. “Good.”

  He looked as if he were about to collapse back into unconsciousness, but then his eyes blinked again, brightening with a new confidence. “I’ll be all right, you know.”

  “I know you will be,” Han answered.

  Only then did Kyp succumb to the pain and allow himself to sink back into his Jedi trance.

  “Good to have you back, kid,” Han whispered, then looked up to Mara and Lando. “Let’s get him back to Coruscant.”

  A Wookiee bellow split from the intercom system, and Han stood up straight, rushing back to the cockpit to see a battered Imperial gamma assault shuttle hanging in space in front of the Falcon, its engines white-hot and ready to go.

  “Chewie!” Han shouted into the voice pickups, and the Wookiee responded with a roar.

  “What Chewbacca is saying,” Threepio’s voice translated unnecessarily, “is that if you would like to follow us out of the Maw, we have the appropriate course programmed into our navicomputer. I believe we are all anxious to go home.”

  Han looked at Lando and Mara and smiled. “You’re sure right about that, Threepio.”

  41

  Inside the dining hall of the Great Temple, Cilghal stood silent and firm, studiously showing no reaction to Ackbar’s insistence.

  Clad once again in his white admiral’s uniform, Ackbar leaned closer to Cilghal. He placed his splayed hands firmly on the shoulders of her watery-blue robe. She could feel the heavy musculature in his hands as he pressed down. She flinched, afraid of what he would demand of her.

  “You cannot surrender so easily, Ambassador,” Ackbar said. “I will not accept that this task is impossible until you prove to me it is impossible.”

  Cilghal felt small under the probing gaze of his large eyes. No human would recognize it, but she could see the effects of long-fought stress on his face, in the mottling of his dark-orange color. Ackbar’s skin looked dry, and his lobes had sunk deeply into the sides of his head. The small tendrils around his mouth looked frayed and cracked.

  Since the terrible crash on the planet Vortex and his resulting disgrace, Ackbar had lived with an enormous weight on his conscience. But now he had come back to himself, returning to serve his people and the New Republic with greater determination—and coming to speak with her on Yavin 4.

  “There have been no Jedi healers since the great purges,” Cilghal said. “Master Skywalker believes I possess some aptitude in this area, but I have had no appropriate training. I would be swimming in murky waters, uncertain of my course. I don’t dare—”

  “Nevertheless,” Ackbar interrupted sharply. He released her shoulders and stepped back so that his clean white uniform dazzled her eyes in the dimness of the Massassi temple’s dining hall.

  Dorsk 81 stepped into the chamber, looking surreptitiously at Ackbar. His eyes widened as he recognized the commander of the New Republic Fleet. The cloned alien muttered his apologies and backed out, flustered.

  But Ackbar’s gaze did not waver from Cilghal. She raised her head to meet his stare but waited for him to speak.

  “Please,” Ackbar said. “I beg you. Mon Mothma will die within days if you do nothing.”

  “I made oaths to myself, both when I became an ambassador and when I arrived here to train as a Jedi,” Cilghal said, bowing her head with a sigh, “that I would do everything in my power to serve and to strengthen the New Republic.”

  She looked down at her spatulate hands. �
��If Master Skywalker has faith in me, who am I to question his judgment?” she said. “Take me to your ship, Admiral. Let us go to Coruscant.”

  In the former Imperial Palace, Cilghal reviewed the situation with growing dread.

  Mon Mothma no longer remained conscious. The infestation of nano-destroyers filled her body, tearing her cells apart one by one. Without the life-support systems that kept her lungs filling, her heart beating, her blood filtered—the human woman would have died days earlier.

  Some Council members had begun advising that she be allowed to die, that forcibly keeping Mon Mothma alive in such a state was a lingering torture. But upon hearing that one of Master Skywalker’s new Jedi would come from Yavin 4 to attempt healing her, Chief of State Leia Organa Solo had insisted that they wait for this last chance, this slim hope.

  Arriving in Imperial City, Cilghal was flanked by Ackbar and Leia as they ushered her down corridors to the medical chambers where Mon Mothma lay surrounded by the growing stench of death.

  Leia’s dark gaze flicked from Mon Mothma to Cilghal. Her human eyes glittered with gathering tears, and Cilghal could sense her hope like a palpable substance.

  The smells of medicines, sterilization chemicals, and throbbing machines made her amphibious skin feel irritated and rubbery. She wanted to swim in the soothing waters of Calamari, to wash the disturbing thoughts and poisons from her body—but Mon Mothma needed that purging even more than Cilghal did.

  She stepped to Mon Mothma’s bedside, leaving Leia and Ackbar behind her. “You must realize that I know nothing specific about the healing powers of the Jedi,” she said, as if offering an excuse. “I know even less about this living poison that is destroying her.”

  She drew a deep breath of the tainted air. “Leave me alone with her. Mon Mothma and I will fight this together.” She swallowed. “If we can.”

  Murmuring warm wishes and reassurances, Ackbar and Leia faded into the background. Cilghal paid little attention to them as they departed.

  Her shimmering blue ambassadorial robes flowed around her like ethereal waves. She knelt to stare at Mon Mothma’s motionless form. Reaching out with the Force, but at a loss for what exactly she was supposed to do, she tried to assess the scope of damage inside Mon Mothma’s body.

  As she began to see deeper, the extent of the poison’s ravages astounded her. She could not comprehend how Mon Mothma had managed to stay alive for so long. Uncertainty fluttered in Cilghal’s mind like gathering shadows.

  How could she possibly combat such a disease? She did not understand how working with the Force could heal living things, how it could strengthen the life of someone as devastated as Mon Mothma. The best available medical droids had not been able to remove the malicious poison. No medicines had been able to cure her.

  Cilghal knew only what Master Skywalker had taught her—how to sense with the Force, how to feel living things, how to move objects. She touched Mon Mothma with glowing currents of the Force, searching for some kind of answer, or at least an idea.

  Could she use her Jedi skills but in a different manner that might strengthen Mon Mothma? Help her body to heal? Find some method to remove the poison?

  Cilghal hesitated as a possibility struck like a meteor. The magnitude of the effort stunned her, and she wanted to dismiss the thought automatically—but she forced herself to study the idea.

  Master Skywalker had explained Yoda’s teachings, his insistence that “size matters not.” Yoda had claimed that lifting Luke’s entire X-wing fighter was no different from lifting a pebble.

  But could Cilghal turn it the other way around? Could she use her precise control of the Force to move something so small?

  She blinked her round Calamarian eyes. Millions of the tiny nano-destroyers saturated Mon Mothma’s body.

  Size matters not.

  But if Cilghal could remove the destructive poison molecules, if she could somehow keep Mon Mothma from toppling over the abyss into death—then her body could restore itself, in time.

  Cilghal refused to let her thoughts overwhelm her with visions of the sheer number of poison molecules. She would have to move them one by one, tugging each nano-destroyer through cell walls and out of the dying leader’s body.

  Cilghal placed her broad fins on Mon Mothma’s bare skin. She picked up the leader’s left hand and raised it over the side of the bed frame, letting the woman’s fingertips rest in a small crystal dish that had once been used to dispense medications. Even this gentle touch was enough to cause red bruises to bloom on the woman’s fragile skin.

  Cilghal opened her mental doors, freeing her thoughts, allowing currents of the Force to flow into Mon Mothma’s form. She let the nictitating membranes slide over her Calamarian eyes as she began to see with an inner vision, traveling through the cellular pathways of Mon Mothma’s body.

  She found herself in a strange universe of rushing blood cells, electrically firing neurons, contracting muscle fibers, laboring organs that could no longer perform their functions. Cilghal couldn’t exactly comprehend what she saw, but somehow she understood instinctively which parts were healthy, which molecules were sustaining Mon Mothma, and which were the black scourge.

  With the Force, Cilghal could touch with fingers infinitely small, infinitely precise, to grasp one of the nano-destroyers and send it careening out of the dying body.

  Cilghal found other microscopic destroyers and nudged them, pushed them, herding the poison away from healthy cells, preventing further damage.

  The task was incomprehensibly large. The poison had spread and replicated, scattering itself through the billions and billions of cells in Mon Mothma’s body. Cilghal would have to search and remove every one of them.

  After succeeding with the first one, Cilghal sought out another.

  And another.

  And another.

  And another.

  “Has there been any change?” Leia whispered at the doorway. She had just returned from a meeting where General Wedge Antilles, Doctor Qwi Xux, and Han Solo had given a detailed debriefing on the entire Maw assault.

  Leia had listened with fascination, making eyes at her husband Han—whom she had seen too little of in the past several days. But always in the back of her mind was a pressing concern for Mon Mothma.

  “No change,” Ackbar said in a tired voice. “I wish we understood what Cilghal is attempting to do.”

  The female Calamarian had not moved in nine hours, kneeling beside Mon Mothma’s bedside, flippered hands resting on the dying woman’s skin, deep in a trance. The medical droids had not expected Mon Mothma to live for this long, so the mere fact that she still had not succumbed to death meant something.

  From outside the door Leia peeked in to see that nothing had changed. The leader’s hand lay in a crystal dish as droplets of an oily grayish liquid emerged from the tip of her index finger. The process was too slow to watch, but over the course of half an hour a small droplet would gather at the tip of her finger, dangling, until gradually gravity pulled it off into the dish.

  Terpfen walked slowly down the tiled corridors dressed in a dark-green close-fitting uniform that bore no insignia. Even after his full pardon Terpfen had refused to accept his rank again. He had sequestered himself in his rooms for much of the time since returning from Anoth.

  The scarred Calamarian stopped several meters away from them, reluctant to go closer to the room that held Mon Mothma. Leia knew that Terpfen still blamed himself for the dying woman’s condition, and he refused to let the guilt be assuaged. Though she understood his misery, she was getting impatient with his withdrawal and hoped he climbed back to his feet soon.

  Terpfen bowed ponderously, displaying the network of scars on his disfigured head. “Admiral, I have reached a decision.” He drew a deep breath. “I wish to return to Calamari and continue your work—if our people will have me. I wish to assist in rebuilding Reef Home. I fear …” He looked up to stare at the intricate mosaics on the walls of the Imperial Palace. “I fear
that I will never be comfortable on Coruscant again.”

  “Believe me, Terpfen,” Ackbar answered, “I know exactly how you feel. I would not try to talk you out of your decision. It is a fair compromise between your need for healing and your desire to make amends.”

  Terpfen straightened, as if some measure of self-esteem had been returned to him. “I would like to depart as soon as possible,” he said.

  “I will arrange a ship,” Ackbar replied.

  Terpfen bowed again. “If I have your leave, Chief of State?”

  “Yes, Terpfen,” Leia answered. She turned once again to watch the motionless tableau inside the medical chamber.

  At a forgotten hour in the depths of Coruscant’s night, Cilghal emerged from the medical chambers. She staggered, cradling in her right hand a shallow crystal bowl half-filled with the deadly poison from the drink that Ambassador Furgan had thrown in Mon Mothma’s face.

  The two New Republic guards stationed at the door snapped to attention and rushed to help Cilghal. She was so exhausted she could hardly place one foot in front of another. She leaned against the stone doorway, drawing strength from the solidity of the rock.

  Her arm trembled as she extended the crystal dish to one of the guards. Cilghal barely had enough strength remaining to lift the small poison-filled container, but she did not dare drop it. She felt a deep, bone-melting relief when the guard took it from her.

  “Be careful,” she said in a husky, utterly exhausted voice. “Take this … and incinerate it.”

  The second guard scrambled to the intercom system and signaled for all Council members to come immediately.

  “Do you have news of Mon Mothma?” the first guard asked her.

  “She has been cleansed and she will heal.” The lids dropped over Cilghal’s glassy eyes. “But for now she must rest.” Her flowing robes whispered against the tiled walls as she slid down to collapse on the floor.

  “As must I,” she said, falling immediately into a Jedi recovery trance.