Star Wars: Knight Errant
Page 1
ABOUT THE BOOK
An original adventure featuring Jedi Kerra Holt -- star of the hot new Dark Horse Knight Errant comic series
A thousand years before Luke Skywalker, a generation before Darth Bane, in a galaxy far, far away ...
The Republic is in crisis. The Sith roam unchecked, vying with one another to dominate the galaxy. But one lone Jedi, Kerra Holt, is determined to take down the Dark Lords. Her enemies are strange and many: Lord Daiman, who imagines himself the creator of the universe; Lord Odion, who intends to be its destroyer; the curious siblings Quillan and Dromika; the enigmatic Arkadia. So many warring Sith weaving a patchwork of brutality -- with only Kerra Holt to defend the innocents caught underfoot.
Sensing a sinister pattern in the chaos, Kerra embarks on a journey that will take her into fierce battles against even fiercer enemies. With one against so many, her only chance of success lies with forging alliances among those who serve her enemies -- including a mysterious Sith spy and a clever mercenary general. But will they be her adversaries or her salvation?
Includes a special, full-colour excerpt from the Dark Horse Star Wars: Knight Errant!
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title
Copyright
Dedication
By John Jackson Miller
Acknowledgements
Prologue
Part One: The Daimanate
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Part Two: The Dyarchy
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Part Three: The Arkadianate
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Plates
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781446457047
www.randomhouse.co.uk
Published in the United Kingdom by Arrow Books in 2011
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Copyright © Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™ 2011
All rights reserved. Used under authorisation.
Excerpt from Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived copyright © 2011 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™ where indicated. All rights reserved. Used under authorisation.
This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived by Paul S. Kemp. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.
John Jackson Miller has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work
This novel is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
Century
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The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780099562450
To Meredith,
intrepid and wise
BY JOHN JACKSON MILLER
Star Wars: Lost Tribe of the Sith*
Precipice
Skyborn
Paragon
Savior
Purgatory
*ebook only
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Knight Errant began life when Dark Horse Comics editor Randy Stradley suggested I develop a comic-book series following a lone Jedi Knight in Sith space during the Dark Ages of the Republic a thousand years before The Phantom Menace. At the same time I was developing Kerra Holt and her world, Lucasfilm fiction editor, Sue Rostoni, approached Del Rey editor Shelly Shapiro with the idea of my creating an original novel using the same character and milieu. The resulting comics and prose novel developed in parallel; while this original novel follows the events of the first comics story line, both works stand alone.
In addition to Randy and Shelly my appreciation goes to my comics editor, David Marshall, who helped hone the original concept, and artists Federico Dallocchio and Michael Atiyeh who influenced the design of many characters. At Lucasfilm, the advice of Sue Rostoni, Leland Chee, and Pablo Hidalgo proved invaluable; my appreciation also goes to Jason Fry and Daniel Wallace, for their cartographic assistance. Finally, I owe special thanks to my wife, Meredith Miller, and assistant, T. M. Haley, for their proofreading (and patience).
If you are interested in more of Kerra Holt’s adventures, check out the Knight Errant comics and collected editions available from Dark Horse.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …
PROLOGUE
With each stroke of his pen, the old Sullustan discovered the creator of the universe.
Lord Daiman was relatively young, as humans went. And yet Gub Tengo found his liege again and again as he worked through the stack of crumpled flimsiplast cels. Shipping invoices. Engineering schematics. Restaurant receipts. Gub couldn’t read the words, but he could sometimes tell what they were about from the pictures. All were dated long before—sometimes centuries before—Daiman came to power on Darkknell. Yet all, somehow, presaged His Lordship’s rise.
It was an amazing thing, Gub thought, riffling the thin sheets of acrylic, stuck together from age. Documents on such mundane matters—and yet they all were part of creation: Daiman’s creation. Gub shook the glow lamp he had been allotted and brought it nearer to the text. Yes, the prophetic symbols were there again, hiding. It was Gub’s job to make them apparent to all.
He quietly thanked Daiman for that. At sixty, Gub was lucky to be of any service—especially after losing the use of his legs in a vat collapse during Lord Chagras’s reign. That should have been the end of his usefulness. But years earlier, Gub had worked in a bioweapons factory, injecting spores with poison. It had been a short step from that meticulous work to using a chemical stylus—and such a skill was always handy on Daiman’s capital world.
On taking power, Daiman had ordered the Aurebesh letters that spelled his name altered to
reflect his mark on existence. Two flag-like strokes would be added to the characters not just when they were written in the future, but also everywhere they had previously appeared. And altered wasn’t the right word, because—as Daiman had put it—the “new” characters had always existed. Mere organics simply couldn’t see them. Making them visible now wasn’t alteration—it was revelation.
The change was instantaneous for the vast majority of written words in Daiman’s domain, all electronically stored. But manual attention was required for signs and labels—as well as for the relatively few physical documents the culture had generated. Thus, Gub and thousands of craftsbeings like him on Darkknell and elsewhere had been tasked with “revealing” the letters that had always been there.
It might have been easier simply to destroy the earlier materials; most flimsiplasts dissolved eagerly in water. But Gub knew that wasn’t the point. If, as Daiman’s Sith adepts said, the universe had been created twenty-five years before, when Daiman was born, all “older” matter must have been created by him, as well—including this advertisement. If a ragged sheet depicting pictures of shoes held within it the marks of Daiman, then it was not an advertisement, but a holy artifact. Destroying it would be sacrilege worthy of the Great Enemy.
Daiman’s signature was everywhere in the galaxy—even in the sky above. The pages from the past were just another piece of that ubiquity. They had to look the part.
Zeroing in on the circular, Gub found one of the letters he was seeking in the caption for a gray boot. Another aurek. Gub sighed and rubbed the electrostatic pen against his knee to charge it. He knew the importance of his job, but he still tired of seeing the pesky vowels. The added flags—his supervisor called them kerns—that created the holy letter aurek-da flew to the left of the character, almost always butting up against the adjacent figure. But if Daiman didn’t intend for the characters to run together, then Gub must do his best to see that the transformed, revealed characters didn’t, either.
In matters of creation, neatness counted.
And so, the old Sullustan sat in his tiny apartment in the Iridium Quarter, his day a slurry of dorn-das and enth-das that often stretched far into night, as it had to-night. Gub seldom wondered what happened to the reams of completed flimsiplast he’d returned over the years. He assumed the documents went right back to where they’d been found, although he could tell from the stains and smell that some of them had been in landfills, waiting for expulsion into the nearest star. Who kept track of what needed to be returned where? What kind of a job must that be? Gub couldn’t imagine.
It didn’t matter, so long as he’d done his part for divine revelation. His work concerns were only in meeting his quota and pleasing a passive-aggressive inspector. His real worries he saved for his dwindling food ration, forced to serve three, and for his orphaned granddaughter Tan, sleeping in the other room, her future unknown.
And increasingly, he worried over the caregiver he’d recently hired for the two of them. Unreasonable, brash—and, unbeknownst to him, at that moment across town working toward the ultimate destruction of Lord Daiman, forger of alphabets and creator of the universe.
Part One
THE
DAIMANATE
CHAPTER ONE
In Sith space, everyone is a slave. It was a funny thing about a bunch whose credo included a line about their “chains being broken,” Narsk thought. They were always careful to leave plenty of chains intact for everyone else.
Still, some people were more enslaved than others. It paid to be special, to be good at something. Life was less unpleasant then. And for the really special? One had one’s choice of masters—not that the options were that appealing.
Narsk Ka’hane’s own specialty had brought him to Darkknell, seat of power for Daiman, self-declared Sith Lord and would-be godling. Narsk had first used a stealth bodysuit to harvest rimebats from caverns on Verdanth, and what he was doing now wasn’t much different. True, the Bothan couldn’t imagine anyone back home clinging upside down to a rope in a high-security tower’s ventilation system—but then, not everyone could be special.
What was different now was the stealth suit. The Sith warring in the region hadn’t focused much on advancing stealth technology over the last few decades; they were only after bigger explosions. That was fine with Narsk. The bodysuit he wore was the top of a Republic line never seen in the Grumani sector. He didn’t know how his supplier had acquired a Cyricept Personal Concealment System, Mark VI—or even whether the previous five versions were any good. Narsk just knew he’d never gotten so far on an assignment so easily.
Almost a shame, given all the preparation he’d put in. He’d arrived in Xakrea, Darkknell’s administrative capital, weeks earlier to establish his cover identity. Locating the target was simple enough; the lopsided pyramid known colloquially as the Black Fang was visible from most of town. He’d carefully studied traffic patterns around the obsidian edifice and noted the shift changes of the sentries guarding the few openings. Within a month, he’d located every route into and out of the colossal house of secrets.
And then he had walked right in.
The Mark VI could do for tradecraft what hyperdrive did for space travel, Narsk thought. Electronic baffles worked into the suit’s skin at a molecular level warped and bent electromagnetic waves around the wearer. Sound, light, comms—the Mark VI dodged them all. And Cyricept had thought of everything. A breath filter matched exhalations to room temperature and humidity. Special goggles permitted Narsk to see out, despite the fact that no light was reaching his eyes. They’d even supplied a similarly cloaked pouch for carry-along items. If Narsk wasn’t exactly invisible, he took an attentive eye to spot, especially in the dark.
But attentiveness, Narsk had found, was not a gift that “Lord Daiman, creator of all,” had seen fit to bestow on his sentries. As elsewhere, the peculiar Lord’s adepts had rounded up menacing-looking characters and proceeded to overdress them. There wasn’t a bruiser so tough he couldn’t be made to look silly when strapped into gilded armor and wrapped in a burgundy skirt. One poor Gamorrean—his squat, lumbering green body particularly at odds with his finery—across town had looked ready to cry.
So while Narsk had brought his needler and extra rounds on every trip to the research center, he’d never needed them. The Mark VI had gotten him to the door, but the sentries had actually opened it for him, allowing him inside when they entered themselves. “When your job’s to make sure nothing ever happens,” he’d once heard, “you begin to see nothing happening even when something’s going on.” By now, his thirteenth and final trip inside, Narsk believed it. Many of the secrets of the Black Fang—officially, the Daimanate Dynamic Testing Facility (Darkknell)—rested comfortably in the memory of the datapad in his pouch.
Lord Odion would be pleased.
That wasn’t always a good thing, Narsk knew: Daiman’s older brother got most of his thrills from death and destruction. The whole sorry war smacked of a psychological study. Daiman was the spoiled kid who thought he was the only person in the universe who mattered; Odion was the jealous sibling, reacting to his loss of uniqueness by trashing the playpen. If Daiman thought he created everything, Odion believed it was his destiny to destroy everything. Half of Odion’s adepts were part of a death cult, flitting around his evil light hoping to cash out in his service. Ralltiiri glowmites were less suicidal.
Fortunately, Narsk didn’t have to adopt their ways to take their assignments. Not many of them, anyway.
Reaching a juncture in the ventilation system, Narsk felt the whole building wheeze around him. Frigid air chuffed past, cooling the facility for today’s big test. The Mark VI responded, matching the surrounding temperature while somehow keeping frost from accumulating on the suit’s surface. The Republic designers were good, Narsk thought. Too bad they can’t fight. Or won’t.
Cutting the cable, Narsk settled gently onto the vent cover. The main testing center below was the only important room he hadn’
t entered, if only because his quarry hadn’t been moved here yet. But there it was, its metallic bulk just visible through the icy slats at his feet.
Convergence.
In Daiman’s conflict with Odion, the great capital ships that once dominated Sith battles with the Republic had sat largely out of play. Neither had a clear idea how many great ships his brother had, and while Odion would have happily taken his chances in a huge engagement, Daiman was unwilling to oblige. The result had been a series of strokes and counterstrokes, where the winning factor wasn’t the amount of firepower as often as it was the ability to project different kinds of strength quickly. The field of battle changed constantly.
The Convergence Tactical Assault Vehicle had chucked thousands of years of military science in favor of Daiman’s idea of the moment: one-ship-fits-all. Like Narsk’s stealth suit, Convergence was intended to do everything. Twice the size of a starfighter, the craft served as a small troop transport, capable of delivering eight to ten warriors through hyperspace. It also sported weapons systems allowing it to play the role of fighter or bomber depending on the situation. Daiman foresaw a time when millions of the vessels would propel him to his rightful place, ruling the galaxy.
Daiman’s engineers, meanwhile, had foreseen only a never-ending nightmare. And their prediction, spoken only to themselves, had thus far come closest to reality. Peering down into the chamber, Narsk could see why. Mounted onto a colossal testing arm was the ugliest contraption he’d ever seen. Convergence was a hundred-ton expression of one man’s moods, changeable and conflicting.