by James Luceno
And he had fled. That fateful night, while destruction dropped from the skies and stormtroopers patrolled the streets, Even Piell and the others—the very few others—still alive had escaped the massacre.
For now.
Even moved cautiously and stealthily through puddles of stuttering neon light. Used subtly, the Force allowed him to slip through crowds of various species—Bothans, Niktos, Twi’leks, and humans—with few noticing him. And even those few forgot him almost immediately. For the moment, he was safe—but not even the Force could protect him forever.
His pursuers were closing in.
He did not know their ID numbers, nor would it matter if he did. They were stormtroopers, cloned soldiers created in the vats of Tipoca City on the water world Kamino and elsewhere, warriors bred to fight fearlessly for the glory of the Republic, and to obey without question the commands of the Jedi.
That, however, was before Order Sixty-six.
He could sense them through the Force, their malignant auras like ice water along his nerves. They were getting closer; he estimated the distance at little more than a kilometer now.
He ducked into a recessed doorway. The entrance was locked, but a gesture of his hand, and an answering ripple in the Force, caused the door panel to slide back reluctantly, with a rasping screech. It jammed partway, but there was enough room for him to squeeze past.
The Lannik hurried through what had once been a spice den, by the looks of it; formcast cribs and niches in the wall showed where various body shapes had lain long ago, their minds disengaged and floating in soporific bliss. Though it may have been as much as five centuries since it had last been used, it seemed to Even that he could still smell the ghostly scent of glitterstim that had once clouded both the air and the occupants’ minds.
At first Even had wondered how the stormtroopers tracking him had found him so quickly. He had been circumspect in his use of the Force, had kept as low a profile as possible for the past two standard months. He’d stayed off the grid, dealing for sustenance and shelter strictly with credit chips and bills. While it was true that Lannik were not all that common, even on Coruscant, how the troopers had come across him was still baffling. It didn’t really matter, though. Perhaps someone had recognized his image as one of the Council, and reported him. All that mattered was that they were closing in, with but one purpose in mind—to kill Jedi.
To kill him.
He still carried his lightsaber, concealed in his jacket’s inside pocket. He resisted the urge to seize the weapon. Its cool grip would feel most comforting in his hand right now.
But this wasn’t yet the time, although from all indications that time would be upon him very shortly. The final battle—he had little doubt it would be anything less than that—could not take place where innocents might be caught in the crossfire. The agents of the Emperor didn’t care about collateral damage, but Jedi could not be so cavalier.
That alone was reason enough to flee rather than fight. But there was another reason as well: the quest he was on. It was not merely his own life he risked by facing his pursuers. For the sake of many others’ lives, he had to delay the inevitable as long as possible.
The spice den opened, by way of a half-concealed entrance, into a dimly lit, cavernous chamber that had long ago been a casino. It was huge, with a high, vaulted ceiling that rose easily three stories. Even made his way to a turbolift tube, pushing his way past furniture and gambling tables so ancient that some of them crumbled to dust when he brushed by. How many abandoned, desolated places like this were there in the sublevels? Millions, no doubt, hidden and silent at the bases of the glittering, fresh towers, like rot growing silently in a tooth. The capital of the galaxy had grown from a vast necropolis, as flowers sprout from funerary dirt …
Even Piell shook his head to clear his thoughts. Now was definitely not the time to be dwelling on the past. Total concentration was required if he was to survive this night.
As if to confirm his thoughts, he heard, very faintly, the crisp voices of his pursuers from outside the building. He reached the lift—a clear transparisteel tube—and stepped in. Nothing happened; he hadn’t expected anything to. The charge in the repulsor plates had depleted over the centuries. Fortunately, he wasn’t dependent on technology to make the turbolift work.
Everyone experienced the Force in different ways, it was said. For some it was like a storm in which they were the cynosure, secure in its calm eye while commanding its tempests. For others it was a fog, a mist, the vaporous tendrils of which could be manipulated, or incandescence with which to illuminate or inflame. These were inadequate approximations, feeble attempts to describe, in terms of the five ordinary senses, that which was indescribable. Even the full-blown synesthesia of one of the more hallucinogenic forms of spice was a faint and colorless experience next to being one with the Force.
For Even, the closest thing to which he could liken calling on the Force was sinking into warm water. It soothed him, calmed him, even as it lent energy to his tired muscles and sharpened his senses.
He made a slight, uplifting gesture. The Force became a geyser, raising him up through the length of the tube.
Before he reached the ceiling through which the tube extruded, he heard the sound of the door he had just come through being kicked open. Five stormtroopers in full body armor came through. They were holding blasters and slugthrowers. One of them pointed upward at Even. “There!” he shouted. “In the tube!”
The others followed his gaze. One—a sergeant, judging by the green markings on his armor—raised his blaster. It was a BlasTech SE-14, a pistol that packed the highly concentrated beam power of an energy rifle into a weapon half the size. Even knew that the crystasteel tubing couldn’t stop the burst of charged subatomic particles. He accelerated his ascent. Just before he reached the ceiling, the leading trooper fired—but not at Even.
Above him.
Too late, Even realized the other’s tactic. The blast struck the tube at the juncture between the ceiling and the lift, melting and fusing it together into an impassable mass. Even barely managed to stop his ascent in time. A second later the trooper fired again, this time turning the tube’s base below the Jedi’s feet into molten slag.
He could move neither up nor down, Even realized. He was trapped, like a bug in a bottle.
But this bug could sting.
Even Piell reached into his jacket’s pocket and seized his lightsaber. Before the stormtrooper, who was carefully lining up his shot, could fire again, he activated the blade.
With a fierce electronic growl, the energy shaft surged forth, as if eager to be free after all this time. Even swung the blade once, then reversed the stroke, slashing and melting a hole in the tube. He let the Force wash him through it, an invisible cascade that carried him out of the lift and in a long arc toward the floor. The five troopers fired repeatedly, bolts of red lambent energy that Even, guided by the Force, batted away with his own weapon. None came close.
Despite his momentary victory, he knew this battle was far from won. The stormtroopers blocked the exit. Normally even five-to-one odds would pose little challenge for a Jedi Master immersed in the Force. But Even had been on the run for weeks; he’d had little rest and even less food. Despite the energizing effects of the Force, he was still far from his peak fighting form. He had no compunctions about running if possible; the Jedi teachings stressed practicality over bravery. But to flee into the darkness of the ancient chamber in his condition would be futile. The troopers would cut him down like a ripe yahi’i stalk if he turned his back. No, there was only one way out—through them.
The stormtroopers were almost upon him. Even Piell took a fighting stance, raised his lightsaber, and gave himself fully to the Force.
two
Nick Rostu was living on borrowed time.
He knew it; had known it for almost three standard years, ever since that night in the command bunker on Haruun Kal, when Iolu’s vibroshield had opened him up like an ov
ercooked Balawai meatpie. He had held his viscera in, his interlocked fingers the only barrier keeping them from spilling onto the duracrete floor, as he lay in a crumpled heap, only dimly aware of the final battle taking place a couple of meters away between Mace Windu and Kar Vastor. Then even that faint spark of consciousness had faded; Nick had felt the planet crack open beneath him, and he had fallen through it and tumbled toward the stars.
He hadn’t minded, really. As a Korunnai, all he had ever known was war, as far back as he could remember. He was more than ready for some peace.
But peace wasn’t in the cards just yet.
Nick had awakened two days later, on board a MedStar frigate bound for the Core Worlds. He was told that only his connection with the Force had kept him alive long enough to respond to medical aid. He’d asked that the scar across his belly be left unrevised—he wanted a reminder of what it meant to let his guard down, even for a split second.
He’d completed his convalescence at Coruscant Medical, under the best care available—the Jedi Council had seen to that. And Mace made it a point to visit him; often, at first, but as the days went by and the Clone Wars escalated, the Jedi Master appeared less and less. Nick understood why, of course. Things were really heating up. The last couple of times he’d seen Mace, the latter’s face had been creased with worry.
Mace had recommended him for a Silver Medal of Valor, the second highest award given for conspicuous bravery under fire. The ceremony took place after Nick was released from the medcenter. His rank of brevet major in the Grand Army of the Republic was also confirmed, and for the next two years Major Nick Rostu commanded the 44th Division, a unit composed of clone troopers and several other species, also known as Rostu’s Renegades. The 44th saw action on Bassadro, Ando, Atraken, and several other planets, distinguishing itself on each world front. At least, that’s how the HoloNet press releases played it. After all, the loyalists of the galaxy wanted reassurance that the war was indeed going well for the Republic. They needed all the heroes they could get, and so Rostu’s Renegades were twirled as can-do fighters, full of élan and verve, barely finishing one campaign before eagerly leaping back into the white-hot fray again.
Nick remembered it somewhat differently; he remembered days and nights of screaming chaos, repeated times when only the intervention of more troops, or blind luck, had yanked their jiffies from the smelter at the last minute. But then, that was as good a definition of warring as any he’d come across. And they’d performed the same service for other divisions, so it all seemed to level out.
Even so, even despite the deprivation, the hardship, the extreme conditions, and the general bowel-loosening fear that was war, Nick considered himself fortunate. He’d been one of the youngest commissioned officers in the Republic, and he knew that, if he survived the various conflicts, he could look forward to a career of peacetime military service—followed, in all probability, by a comfortable retirement pension, a family and a conapt, perhaps in the Arak Dunes district or a similar upscale locale, and eventually fat grandchildren to bounce on his knee. He was good with that. Maybe it wasn’t the most illustrious or distinctive life in the galaxy, but it was light-years better than what he’d have gotten back on Haruun Kal, which, if he’d been very lucky, would have been a marked grave instead of an anonymous mound of dirt.
But that wasn’t quite the way things had turned out. Instead, nearly three years after Iolu had shown him the color of his own innards, Nick Rostu found himself a member of a nascent group of revolutionaries dedicated to resisting the new regime.
Back on Haruun Kal, the people of Nick’s ghôsh had a saying: Don’t mess with the akk dog. It was good advice, especially in those troubled times. He’d been planetside on the capital world when the coup went down, and overnight, it seemed, everything had changed—even the planet’s name, from Coruscant to Imperial Center, although no one Nick knew called it that. Suddenly there was a new oligarchy in town, with Palpatine at its apex. Suddenly the Army of the Republic was the Army of the Empire, and it was obvious that it would go hard indeed on anyone who didn’t know which way to salute. Suddenly Major Rostu was given a choice: swear allegiance to the new regime, or face a blasting squad.
He was offered this ultimatum on the same day that he’d learned the fate of Mace Windu. Supposedly the Jedi Master—his adviser, his benefactor, his friend—had attempted to assassinate the Chancellor, and had been killed during the traitorous action. Nick had a problem believing that. Knowing Mace as he had, and judging by Emperor Palpatine’s ruthless pogrom against the Jedi, Nick was pretty sure there’d been nothing traitorous about it, at least as far as Mace had seen it.
He liked to think that he would have made the right choice anyway. There was no denying, however, that the news of Mace’s death made the decision considerably easier. He’d faced the Empire’s representative, flanked by two stormtroopers armed with blasters, and told him—respectfully, of course, the man had been a superior officer under the previous regime, after all—to go frip himself. Then he’d grabbed one of the blasters, shot both troopers and the representative, blown a hole through the big transparisteel window of the conference chamber, and leapt through it as the rest of the troopers in the room unleashed a barrage in his direction.
They missed—probably because they were momentarily immobilized by the shock of seeing a man voluntarily leap from a 210th-story window. Nick wasn’t crazy about the idea, either, but he didn’t see a lot of alternatives, other than being fried like a mulch fritter. Fortunately he had an ace in the field.
He could touch the Force.
This was something he had in common with all that hailed from Haruun Kal. Why, no one was sure; one theory was that the Korunnai were all descended from the Jedi crew of a downed spaceship that had crashed there, millennia ago. Whatever the reason, it came in handy at times, like when it had told Nick that a sky lorry loaded with nerf pelts was passing by only ten meters below the window.
Eventually he’d made his way downlevel, below the omnipresent inversion layer, and into the dim netherworld of the surface streets. He’d nearly been killed his first night there by a gang with the unlikely name of the Purple Zombies, had spent most of the only credits he’d had with him on a bedslot teeming with blister fleas, and dined alfresco the next day on grilled armored rat from a street vendor.
Talk about your downward mobility …
Six weeks later, three kilos lighter, and a whole lot meaner, he’d saved the life of a Kitonak merchant. To accomplish this, he’d had to go one-on-one with a Trandoshan antenna-breaker, who’d been sent to extort collection credits for a local gangster. In retrospect, this action turned out to be about as bright as a circus sword swallower upgrading his act to a lightsaber, but it had seemed to Nick a good idea at the time. The Trandoshan’s nickname was Crusher—or maybe Cruncher; his accent was too thick for Nick to tell for sure. Either way, it seemed to fit. The scaly thug, annoyed at Nick’s request that he leave the pudgy little humanoid merchant alone, had backhanded Nick across the narrow street and nearly through a break in the wall surrounding one of the gigantic, noisome garbage pits that dotted Coruscant’s slums and industrial areas.
Crusher (or Cruncher) wasn’t tall, but he was massive—at least 150 kilos, maybe more. All of which was charging straight toward Nick, shouting a battle cry in a phlegm-choked voice. Nick had barely enough time and wits to dodge and let the big oaf blunder past him and fall, screaming, into the silage below. His long wail was abruptly cut short, and, judging by the moist chomp! that quickly followed, Nick assumed Crusher/Cruncher had made a tasty mouthful for a dianoga, one of the huge, constricting garbage worms that infested the pits. He was just as happy not to know for sure.
The Kitonak turned out to be a member of a newly formed subversive movement called the Whiplash. She’d loudly sung his praises and made much of his bravery to her comrades in arms, and so he’d been asked to join them in their struggle against the new regime. No pay, little rest, and much danger
—Nick couldn’t see a lot of difference between this and the resistance movement back on Haruun Kal.
But he’d agreed. He was a military deserter and a killer, after all, subject to being shot on sight, and there was safety—or at least a spurious sense of it—in numbers. What other choice was there? He was a soldier; it was all he knew, all he had ever known. Call it the Upland Liberation Front or the Army of the Republic, it really made no difference. The uniforms were different, but the job was the same.
It wasn’t that he enjoyed fighting this war, or any war—he hadn’t been shortchanged in the fear category, like all the clones had been. And thank whoever was ultimately in charge for that. Nick had once watched a phalanx of clones on Muunilinst fearlessly attack a hill against the blasterfire of three times as many droidekas. None of the clones so much as faltered, even though the droidekas’ lasers, plasma rays, and particle beams had torn through the majority of them as if they’d been flimsiplast cutout dolls. Three-quarters of the phalanx had been shredded in that charge.
But they’d taken the hill.
Yet, despite the dangers of war, there had been a certain odd security, almost comfort, in the rules and regs of the military life. Nick was by no means one of those snap-click officers with little to no field experience, just time in simulation holos and heads-up trainers. Even when commander of his own unit, he’d had to follow the asinine orders of a few desktop generals, and he’d nearly gotten his head shot off more than once as a result. A rather large proportion of those pressed-and-polished newbie warriors tended to not come back from their first or second campaign in top working order, if they came back at all.
He’d looked forward, like many others, to a lasting peace after Dooku, Grievous, and the others had been disposed of properly. A time in which he could at last lay down his arms and relax a bit. A time to heal.
Instead here he was, couched behind the rusting fender of an abandoned construction crawler, along with six others, waiting tensely as a quintet of stormtroopers hurried by. From the snatches of conversation Nick heard as they passed, it didn’t take a Tatooine brain spider to figure out that they were hot in pursuit of a Jedi. Whether it was a Padawan, Jedi Knight, or Master wasn’t clear.
