Star Wars - Lando Calrissian and the StarCave of ThonBoka

by L. Neil Smith

  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.

  During his service, and because of his acquaintance with Mace Windu, Nick had come to know a number of Jedi quite well, including a few members of the Council—all of whom, as far as he knew, were now dead. Or, as the Jedi themselves often put it, “Returned to the Force.” Whatever. Nick had little patience with any and all theories and philosophies that included speculation on an afterlife. The life he was living now was more than enough work; the thought of doing it all over again just made him tired.

  He glanced back at his group, signaling with a head jerk that they were following the pack. There was no hesitation among his team as they fell in behind him.

  Keeping the troopers in sight, Nick moved stealthily through the deserted streets. There was never much foot traffic down here at this time, and what little there was had prudently relocated when the armed stormtroopers had come marching down the thoroughfare. Before too long they stopped before a half-open panel in a long-abandoned building. Nick could barely hear them discussing whether their quarry had gone to ground there. The decision to investigate was quickly reached when one of the troopers pointed out that the panel had been opened quite recently, judging by the disturbed dust and grime. A single kick from another trooper was enough to open it the rest of the way. The stormtroopers disappeared inside, weapons ready.

  “Let’s go,” Nick whispered. “Could be they’ve got a Jedi trapped in there.”

  “Could be we’ll be in the same fix, if we don’t do some recon before we rush in,” Kars Korthos pointed out. He was a small, compact man, full of nervous energy that always seemed on the verge of bursting like a solar flare, and his instincts were seldom wrong.

  Nick considered. Kars had a point; they should at least scope the building for other possible ways in or out before they—

  From deep within the forbidding interior came the sound of a blaster being fired.

  “We’re going in,” Nick said, pulling his blaster and stepping quickly through.

  “Looks like,” Kars agreed as he and the rest followed.

  REBELLION

  (0–5 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)

  This is the period of the classic Star Wars movie trilogy—A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi—in which a ragtag band of Rebels battles the Empire, and Luke Skywalker learns the ways of the Force and must avoid his father’s fate.

  During this time, the Empire controls nearly the entire settled galaxy. Out in the Rim worlds, Imperial stormtroopers suppress uprisings with brutal efficiency, many alien species have been enslaved, and entire star systems are brutally exploited by the Empire’s war machine. In the central systems, however, most citizens support the Empire, weighing misgivings about its harsh methods against the memories of the horror and chaos of the Clone Wars. Few dare to openly oppose Emperor Palpatine’s rule.

  But the Rebel Alliance is growing. Rebel cells strike in secret from hidden bases scattered among the stars, encouraging some of the braver Senators to speak out against the Empire. When the Rebels learn that the Empire is building the Death Star, a space station with enough firepower to destroy entire planets, Princess Leia Organa, who represents her homeworld, Alderaan, in the Senate and is secretly a high-ranking member of the Rebel Alliance, receives the plans for the battle station and flees in search of the exiled Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi.

  Thus begin the events that lead her to meet the smuggler and soon-to-be hero Han Solo, to discover her long-lost brother, Luke Skywalker, and to help the Rebellion take down the Emperor and restore democracy to the galaxy: the events of the three films A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

  If you’re a reader looking for places to jump in and explore the Rebellion-era novels, here are five great places to start:

  • Death Star, by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry: The story of the construction of the massive battle station, touching on the lives of the builders, planners, soldiers, and support staff who populate the monstrous vessel, as well as the masterminds behind the design and those who intend to make use of it: the Emperor and Darth Vader.

  • The Mandalorian Armor, by K. W. Jeter: The famous bounty hunter Boba Fett stars in a twisty tale of betrayal within the galactic underworld, highlighted by a riveting confrontation between bounty hunters and a band of Hutts.

  • Shadows of the Empire, by Steve Perry: A tale of the shadowy parts of the Empire and an underworld criminal mastermind who is out to kill Luke Skywalker, while our other heroes try to figure out how to rescue Han Solo, who has been frozen in carbonite for delivery to Jabba the Hutt.

  • Tales of the Bounty Hunters, edited by Kevin J. Anderson: The bounty hunters summoned by Darth Vader to capture the Millennium Falcon tell their stories in this anthology of short tales, culminating with Daniel Keys Moran’s elegiac “The Last One Standing.”

  • Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, by Matthew Stover: A tale set shortly after the events of Return of the Jedi, in which L
uke must defeat the flamboyant dark sider known as Lord Shadowspawn while the pilots of Rogue Squadron duel his servants amid tumbling asteroids.

  Read on for an excerpt from a Star Wars novel set in the Rebellion era.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE CORELLIAN QUEEN WAS A LEGEND: THE GREATEST luxury liner ever to ply the spaceways, an interstellar pleasure palace forever beyond the grasp of all but the galaxy’s super-elite—beings whose wealth transcended description. Rumor had it that for the price of a single cocktail in one of the Queen’s least-exclusive dining clubs, one might buy a starship; for the price of a meal, one could buy not only the starship, but the port in which it docked, and the factory that had built it. A being could not simply pay for a berth on the Corellian Queen; mere wealth would never suffice. To embark upon the ultimate journey into hedonistic excess, one first had to demonstrate that one’s breeding and manners were as exquisite as would be the pain of paying one’s bar bill. All of which made the Corellian Queen one of the most irresistible terrorist targets ever: who better to terrorize than the elite of the Elite, the Powers among the powerful, the greatest of the Great?

  And so when some presumably unscrupulous routing clerk in the vast midreaches of the Nebula Line corporation quietly offered for sale, to select parties from Kindlabethia to Nar Shaddaa, a hint as to the route of the Corellian Queen’s upcoming cruise, it attracted considerable interest.

  Two pertinent facts remained concealed, however, from the winning bidder. The first pertinent fact was that this presumably unscrupulous routing clerk was neither unscrupulous nor, in fact, a routing clerk, but was a skilled and resourceful agent of the intelligence service of the New Republic. The second pertinent fact was that the Corellian Queen was not cruising at all that season, having been replaced by a breakaway disposable shell built to conceal a substantial fraction of a starfighter wing, led by—as was customary in such operations—the crack pilots of Rogue Squadron.

  It was approximately the moment that R4-G7 squalled a proximity alarm through his X-wing’s sensor panel and his HUD lit up with image codes for six TIE Defenders on his tail that Lieutenant Derek “Hobbie” Klivian, late of the Alliance to Restore Freedom to the Galaxy, currently of the New Republic, began to suspect that Commander Antilles’s brilliant ambush had never been brilliant at all, not even a little, and he said so. In no uncertain terms. Stripped of its blistering profanity, his comment was “Wedge? This plan was stupid. You hear me? Stupid, stupid, stuYOW—!”

  The yow was a product of multiple cannon hits that disintegrated his right dorsal cannon and most of the extended wing it had been attached to. This kicked his fighter into a tumble that he fought with both hands on the yoke and both feet kicking attitude jets and almost had under control until the pair of the Defenders closest on his tail blossomed into expanding spheres of flame and debris fragments. The twin shock fronts overtook him at exactly the wrong instant and sent him flipping end-over-end straight at another Defender formation streaking toward him head-on. Then tail-on, then head-on again, and so forth.

  His ship’s comlink crackled as Wedge Antilles’s fighter flashed past him close enough that he could see the grin on the commander’s face. “That’s ‘stupid plan, sir,’ Lieutenant.”

  “I suppose you think that’s funny.”

  “Well, if he doesn’t,” put in Hobbie’s wingman, “I sure do.”

  “When I want your opinion, Janson, I’ll dust your ship and scan for it in the wreckage.” The skewed whirl of stars around his cockpit gave his stomach a yank that threatened to make the slab of smoked terrafin loin he’d had for breakfast violently reemerge. Struggling grimly with the controls, he managed to angle his ship’s whirl just a hair, which let him twitch his ship’s nose toward the four pursuing marauders as he spun. Red fire lashed from his three surviving cannons, and the Defenders’ formation split open like an overripe snekfruit.

  Hobbie only dusted one with the cannons, but the pair of proximity-fused flechette torpedoes he had thoughtfully triggered at the same time flared in diverging arcs to intercept the enemy fighters; these torpedo arcs terminated in spectacular explosions that cracked the three remaining Defenders like rotten snuffle eggs.

  “Now, that was satisfying,” he said, still fighting his controls to stabilize the crippled X-wing. “Eyeball soufflé!”

  “Better watch it, Hobbie—keep that up, and somebody might start to think you can fly that thing.”

  “Are you in this fight, Janson? Or are you just gonna hang back and smirk while I do all the heavy lifting?”

  “Haven’t decided yet.” Wes Janson’s X-wing came out of nowhere, streaking in a tight bank across Hobbie’s subjective vertical. “Maybe I can lend a hand. Or, say, a couple torps.”

  Two brilliant blue stars leapt from Janson’s torpedo tubes and streaked for the oncoming TIEs.

  “Uh, Wes?” Hobbie said, flinching. “Those weren’t the flechette torps, were they?”

  “Sure. What else?”

  “Have you noticed that I’m currently having just a little trouble maneuvering?”

  “What do you mean?” Janson asked as though honestly puzzled. Then, after a second spent watching Hobbie’s ship tumbling helplessly directly toward his torpedoes’ targets, he said, “Oh. Uh … sorry?”

  The flechette torpedoes carried by Rogue Squadron had been designed and built specifically for this operation, and they had one primary purpose: to take out TIE Defenders.

  The TIE Defender was the Empire’s premier space-superiority fighter. It was faster and more maneuverable than the Incom T-65 (better known as the X-wing); faster even than the heavily modified and updated 65Bs of Rogue Squadron. The Defender was also more heavily armed, packing twin ion cannons to supplement its lasers, as well as dual-use launch tubes that could fire either proton torpedoes or concussion missiles. The shields generated by its twin Novaldex deflector generators were nearly as powerful as those found on capital ships. However, the Defenders were not equipped with particle shields, depending instead on their titanium-reinforced hull to absorb the impact of material objects.

  Each proton torpedo shell had been loaded with thousands of tiny jagged bits of durasteel, packed around a core of conventional explosive. On detonation, these tiny bits of durasteel became an expanding sphere of shrapnel; though traveling with respectable velocity of their own, they were most effective when set off in the path of oncoming Defenders, because impact energy, after all, is determined by relative velocity. At starfighter combat speeds, flying into a cloud of durasteel pellets could transform one’s ship from a starfighter into a very, very expensive cheese grater.

  The four medial fighters of the oncoming Defender formation hit the flechette cloud and just … shredded. The lateral wingers managed to bank off an instant before they would have been overtaken by two sequential detonations, as the explosion of one Defender’s power core triggered the other three’s cores an eyeblink later, so that the unfortunate Lieutenant Klivian was now tumbling directly toward a miniature plasma nebula that blazed with enough hard radiation to cook him like a bantha steak on an obsidian fry-rock at double noon on Tatooine.

  “You’re not gonna make it, Hobbie,” Janson called. “Punch out.”

  “Oh, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Hobbie snarled under his breath, still struggling grimly with the X-wing’s controls. The fighter’s tumble began to slow. “I’ve got it, Wes!”

  “No, you don’t! Punch out, Hobbie—PUNCH OUT!”

  “I’ve got it—I’m gonna make it! I’m gonna—” He was interrupted by the final flip of his X-wing, which brought his nose into line with the sight of the leading edge of the spherical debris field expanding toward him at a respectable fraction of lightspeed, and Hobbie Klivian, acknowledged master of both profanity and obscenity, human and otherwise, not to mention casual vulgarities from a dozen species and hundreds of star systems, found that he had nothing to say except, “Aw, nuts.”

  He stood the X-wing on its tail, sublights blasti
ng for a tangent, but he had learned long ago that of all the Rogues, he was the one who should know better than to trust his luck. He reached for the eject trigger.

  Just as his hand found the trigger, the ship jounced and clanged as if he had his head trapped inside a Wookiee dinner gong at nightmeal. The metaphorical Wookiee cook must have been hungry, too, because the clanging went on and on and kept getting louder, and the eject still, mysteriously, didn’t seem to be working at all. This mystery was solved, however, by the brief shriek of atmosphere through a ragged fist-sized hole in the X-wing’s canopy. This hole was ragged because, Hobbie discovered, the fragment that had made this opening had been slowed by punching through the X-wing’s titanium-alloy ventral armor. Not to mention the X-wing’s control panel, where it had not only ripped away the entire eject trigger assembly, but had vaporized Hobbie’s left hand.

  He glared at his vacant wrist with more annoyance than shock or panic; instead of blood or cauterized flesh, his wrist jetted only sparks and smoke from overheated servomotors. He hadn’t had a real left arm since sometime before Yavin.

  Of more concern was the continuing shriek of escaping atmosphere, because he discovered that it was coming from his environment suit’s nitroxy generator.