The Bacta War (48 page)

The X-wing’s laser fire missed wide to the right as the TIE cut to the left. Corran kicked his speed up to full and broke with the TIE. He let the X-wing rise above the plane of the break, then put the fighter through a twisting roll that ate up enough time to bring him again into the TIE’s rear. The TIE snapped to the right and Corran looped out left.

He watched the tracking display as the distance between them grew to be a kilometer and a half, then slowed.
Fine, you want to go nose to nose? I’ve got shields and you don’t
. If Commander Antilles wanted to commit virtual suicide, Corran was happy to oblige him. He tugged
the stick back to his sternum and rolled out in an inversion loop.
Coming at you!

The two starfighters closed swiftly. Corran centered his foe in the crosshairs and waited for a dead shot. Without shields the TIE fighter would die with one burst, and Corran wanted the kill to be clean. His HUD flicked green as the TIE juked in and out of the center, then locked green as they closed.

The TIE started firing at maximum range and scored hits. At that distance the lasers did no real damage against the shields, prompting Corran to wonder why Wedge was wasting the energy. Then, as the HUD’s green color started to flicker, realization dawned.
The bright bursts on the shields are a distraction to my targeting! I better kill him
now!

Corran tightened down on the trigger button, sending red laser needles stabbing out at the closing TIE fighter. He couldn’t tell if he had hit anything. Lights flashed in the cockpit and Whistler started screeching furiously. Corran’s main monitor went black, his shields were down, and his weapons controls were dead.

The pilot looked left and right. “Where is he, Whistler?”

The monitor in front of him flickered to life and a diagnostic report began to scroll by. Bloodred bordered the damage reports. “Scanners, out; lasers, out; shields, out; engine, out! I’m a wallowing Hutt just hanging here in space.”

THE COURTSHIP OF PRINCESS LEIA
by Dave Wolverton
Setting: Four years after
Return of the Jedi

One of the most interesting developments in Bantam
’s Star Wars
novels is that in their storyline, Han Solo and Princess Leia start a family. This tale reveals how the couple originally got together. Wishing to strengthen the fledgling New Republic by bringing in powerful allies, Leia opens talks with the Hapes consortium of more than sixty worlds. But the consortium is ruled by the Queen Mother, who, to Han’s dismay, wants Leia to marry her son, Prince Isolder. Before this action-packed story is over, Luke will join forces with Isolder against a group of Force-trained “witches” and face a deadly foe
.

HEIR TO THE EMPIRE
DARK FORCE RISING
THE LAST COMMAND
by Timothy Zahn
Setting: Five years after
Return of the Jedi

This
#1
bestselling trilogy introduces two legendary forces of evil into the
Star Wars
literary pantheon. Grand Admiral Thrawn has taken control of the Imperial fleet in the years since the destruction of the Death Star, and the mysterious Joruus C’baoth is a fearsome Jedi Master who has been seduced by the dark side. Han and Leia have now been married for about a year, and as the story begins, she is pregnant with twins. Thrawn’s plan is to crush the Rebellion and resurrect the Empire’s New Order with C’baoth’s help—and in return, the Dark Master will get Han and Leia’s Jedi children to mold as he wishes. For as readers of this magnificent trilogy will see, Luke Skywalker is not the last of the old Jedi. He is the first of the new
.

The Jedi Academy Trilogy:
JEDI SEARCH
DARK APPRENTICE
CHAMPIONS OF THE FORCE
by Kevin J. Anderson
Setting: Seven years after
Return of the Jedi

In order to assure the continuation of the Jedi Knights, Luke Skywalker has decided to start a training facility: a Jedi Academy. He will gather Force-sensitive students who show potential as prospective Jedi and serve as their mentor, as Jedi Masters Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda did for him. Han and Leia’s twins are now toddlers, and there is a third Jedi child: the infant Anakin, named after Luke and Leia’s father. In this trilogy, we discover the existence of a powerful Imperial doomsday weapon, the horrifying Sun Crusher—which will soon become the centerpiece of a titanic struggle between Luke Skywalker and his most brilliant Jedi Academy student, who is delving dangerously into the dark side
.

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 Dreadnaught 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 Thrawn. 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. McIntyre
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
SHIELD OF LIES
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.