Star Wars: Darksaber

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “What is it?” Kam Solusar said, breaking through the conversation. Kirana Ti stepped beside him, tall and imposing in her reptilian armor.

  “Where’s Master Skywalker?” Kyp said. His voice cracked, and the words came out in a cold, strained tone.

  “He and Callista left more than a week ago,” Tionne said. “It’s only us here. I’m directing a few training sessions while he’s gone but—”

  “The Jedi academy is in great danger!” Dorsk 81 blurted. “Admiral Daala has assembled a new Imperial fleet, and Yavin 4 is their target this time. The Star Destroyers could be here any moment.”

  “No,” Streen said, shaking his frizzy gray head and blinking red-rimmed eyes as he gazed up into the pale blue sky. “No. They’re already here.”

  As the old hermit said this, Dorsk 81 also felt a brooding oppressiveness far overhead, like a stain of starless darkness across the canvas of space.

  “Look,” one of the new trainees said, extending a clawed finger as her bright bluish frill rose up in alarm. A snakelike hiss came from her wide, scaly mouth.

  A shower of bright streaks danced through the upper atmosphere toward the jungles—lines traced in fire by sharp fingernails made of lava.

  “Landers and ground assault vehicles,” Kam Solusar said.

  “We must prepare to fight them,” Kirana Ti insisted.

  “But Master Skywalker isn’t here!” cried one of the new trainees.

  Kyp Durron drew himself up, though he was smaller in stature than many of those gathered at the ruined temple. “Master Skywalker will not always be here to help whenever we are in trouble. Dorsk 81 and I have already sounded the alarm, and New Republic forces should be on their way. For now, though, we must defend the academy ourselves.”

  “But there are so few of us,” a birdlike trainee squawked, his hard beak gaping open, then clacking together.

  “Yes,” Kyp said, “so they won’t expect much resistance. We’ll have to prove them wrong.”

  Dorsk 81 stood beside his friend. “We are Jedi Knights. Remember what Master Skywalker has taught you: There is no try.”

  The Imperial landers crunched into the jungle not far away, then dep oyed giant vehicles from drop shells.

  “Here comes the air strike,” Kyp said, just as a flurry of black dots in the air screamed closer with a roar of twin ion engines, a full wing of TIE fighters plus a strong complement of TIE bombers.

  “Take cover,” Kirana Ti shouted. With a forceful motion she pushed Streen toward two mammoth blocks of stone that had toppled from the front of the ancient temple.

  The TIE fighters swooped overhead as the Jedi trainees scrambled for shelter. Laser cannons shot from the Imperial ships, setting tall trees alight and blasting rubble from the old temple. The TIE fighters fanned out, uncertain of their target as they searched for the Jedi Knights hiding in the jungle.

  TIE bombers cruised low, dropping concussion missiles that exploded into pillars of fire and smoke above the thick jungle canopy, splintering Massassi trees that had lived for a thousand years. But once the first wave of TIE fighters spotted the trainees at the Temple of the Blueleaf Cluster, the forces concentrated their firepower on the far side of the river.

  “We don’t have any weapons,” Streen said as he covered his head.

  “We have the Force,” Dorsk 81 replied.

  Three TIE fighters roared in, laser cannons shooting continuously as they approached in a triangular formation. The warrior woman Kirana Ti stood out in the open near the piles of rubble the Jedi trainees had so meticulously removed from the ruins. The TIE fighters saw her and fired. Ignoring her own danger, she gestured with her hand and, using the Force as a sling, she snatched one of the squarish boulders cut by Massassi slaves thousands of years before—and hurled it with all her Jedi strength.

  The stone flew through the air and smashed one of the TIE fighter’s flat power arrays. It careened to one side, and the pilot could not regain control. The ship exploded in the trees on the far side of the temple.

  Kam Solusar stood on the other side of the clearing and, using the Force, he, too, began hurling rocks at the remaining two TIE fighters. The boulders battered the Imperial ships, smashing through the cockpits. All the Jedi trainees had the idea now, and a blast of sharp rock shards hammered the two fleeing ships out of the sky. Both exploded in midflight to the cheers of the embattled Jedi students.

  The second wave of four TIE fighters came immediately after. Streen, however, did not pick up rocks or other weapons with the Force. He used the air itself, moving molecules in the atmosphere to summon storm currents and scramble the air attack line with a wall of wind that achieved hurricane strength. The gusting currents buffeted the TIE fighters right and left, forcing the pilots to concentrate on simply flying and not allowing them to fire a single shot.

  Streen looked up into the sky, his eyes wide and bloodshot, his hair wafting about his head. He held his trembling fingers outstretched and then brought his hands together symbolically, slamming his hands of wind so that the heavy crosscurrents smashed the four TIE fighters together. They crashed into a single knot of molten wreckage that tumbled out of the air.

  A pair of TIE bombers came in low from behind, barely visible over the treetops but moving at full speed. Kyp shouted a warning. The first TIE bomber cruised over the temple and let three concussion missiles fall out of its bombing bay—but Kyp reached out, staring at the ship, and holding his palm flat and upright. He pushed upward with the Force, visualizing the three dropped concussion missiles, and nudged the explosives back up into the bomber’s bay … where they detonated.

  The second TIE bomber dropped a single missile and then, seeing the fate of his partner, shot off at top speed. Dorsk 81 used the Force to pick up a boulder, which he hurled with all his might. The flying rock closed the distance to the bomber, striking the second cockpit and damaging its altitude control. The TIE bomber spun through the air and landed roughly in the jungle underbrush on the far side of the river. Its lone concussion missile struck the ground nearby and detonated, sending a rumble through the jungle that shook the Temple of the Blueleaf Cluster. Loose stone blocks slid down the walls in a shower of dust, crashing around the Jedi trainees.

  “This old structure won’t last much longer,” Kyp shouted. “We’ve got to get back to the Great Temple. That’s more defensible.”

  Another wave of TIE fighters soared in with twice the numbers of the previous strike, and the Jedi trainees gave no argument as they sprinted away from the smaller temple and headed into the underbrush.

  Overhead, more lines of fire appeared as Pellaeon’s seventeen Star Destroyers launched another wave of ground assault machinery to finish mopping up.

  As they reached the giant pyramid that had once been fortified as a Rebel base, Dorsk 81 saw that the trainees’ desperate defense at the crumbling temple had served a secondary purpose he had not expected—a diversion, a decoy for the Imperial forces who now thought the Temple of the Blueleaf Cluster was the Jedi stronghold. The TIE fighters and bombers concentrated their forces there.

  Despite the fear that rattled through him, Dorsk 81 felt an exhilaration and a camaraderie with the other Jedi. He was fighting for something meaningful. All his life, as yet another duplicate on a world of clones, he had never felt he had a choice in his destiny. Everything had been preset for him until he climbed out of the rut that had been dug in the Dorsk bloodline. Now he was a Jedi Knight—his own choice. And he had just proved he could be good at it.

  The long horizontal door in front of the hangar levels of the Great Temple hung halfway open, a dark mouth with thin cool air breathing out from the shaded interior. The Jedi trainees ducked down and rushed inside, hoping that the millennia-old walls would shelter them from the brunt of the Imperial attack.

  Tionne rushed past Kyp Durron, who grabbed her arm and shouted, “Go to the communications center! Contact the New Republic and let them know we’re already under attack. The Imperials struck fast
er than we expected.” Tionne nodded, her pale porcelain face so brittle that it looked as if it might shatter.

  Across the river TIE fighters circled over the Temple of the Blueleaf Cluster, firing repeatedly with laser cannons. Black smoke etched the air.

  Kyp looked toward their stolen Imperial shuttle still on the grassy landing grid. He gestured toward it as Dorsk 81 headed for the relative safety of the deep hangar levels. “I’m going back to the ship,” he said. “We’ve got some weapons there. It’s all we have.”

  Dorsk 81 hesitated, then followed as Kyp sprinted across the clearing without looking behind him. Dorsk 81 paused when a clanking noise crashed through the outer rim of trees, and the trapezoidal head of an Imperial AT-ST scout walker shoved its way out of the forest. It thundered twice with its mechanical legs, finding support on the rough ground. The head swiveled, its laser cannons targeted, aiming at Kyp as he ran.

  Dorsk 81 froze for just an instant. He saw what was going to happen—but he couldn’t allow it. In an instinctive gesture, he released the Force; he did not restrain himself, did not channel or direct the flow, merely releasing his fear and his wish to get the scout walker away from his friend.

  A wall of invisible force slammed into the AT-ST, flattening its cockpit and crushing the walker backward into a tree.

  Kyp whirled to gawk at the smashed scout walker. Everything had happened in only a second. “Thanks,” he said.

  Dorsk 81 found himself trembling. “It just came automatically,” he said. “I didn’t even think about it.”

  “Then you’re a true Jedi,” Kyp said with gentle admiration, but wasted no more time as he ducked into the shuttle and emerged with a pitifully small assortment: five blaster pistols and one laser cutter. “Better than nothing,” he said.

  Dorsk 81 looked at them. “Not by much.”

  They glanced up at the continuing thunderous sound from the sky as wave after wave of ground assault landers spewed from the fleet of Star Destroyers in orbit.…

  Inside, deep in the war room on the second level of the pyramid, the Jedi Knights gathered, unable to shut out the echoing thumps of the constant attack.

  Tionne shook her silvery head. “The Imperials have a jamming net in place,” she said. “No communications can go out. We have to hope the New Republic heard your original warning, Kyp.”

  “They’ll be here,” Kirana Ti said with grim confidence. She held the deactivated lightsaber in her grip. This was the weapon that had been built by one of the other Jedi trainees, Gantoris, a year earlier … back when the trainees had encountered the dark spirit of Exar Kun. In fact, in this very war room the Jedi trainees—again without Luke Skywalker—had met to plan the defeat of Kun and free their Jedi Master.

  “But will the reinforcements be here soon enough?” Kam Solusar said skeptically.

  Kyp Durron paced the enclosed room. “The Star Destroyers in orbit are the primary threat,” he said, gesturing upward. “Though we’re being attacked by TIE fighters and ground assault machinery, we’re seeing only a fraction of the complement those Star Destroyers carry. Tionne, were you able to determine how many ships there are in orbit?”

  She looked at him with her quicksilver eyes. “Seventeen, I believe. Imperial-class.”

  Some of the newer trainees gasped, but Kyp stood straighter. He placed his hands on the tabletop, pressing down with his fingernails until his knuckles turned white. “Right now we feel strong because of all those ships we smashed over at the other temple—but no matter how good we are, no matter how many of their ground forces we successfully take out, those Star Destroyers will keep sending ship after ship. We can’t succeed if we fight them on such a limited scale.”

  “But how else can we fight a Star Destroyer from here?” Kirana Ti said.

  Kyp looked around hopefully. “I don’t suppose anybody has an idea?”

  Dorsk 81 sat in turmoil, rigid, his hands clasped on the table as thoughts whirled around him. He remembered how easy it had been to smash the AT-ST walker, how he had used the Force to shove it away. If only …

  “I have a suggestion,” Dorsk 81 said. His lips were a thin line; his olive green face was blotched as his emotions roiled beneath his skin.

  Kyp looked at his friend, and Dorsk 81 could feel the sudden upsurge of anticipation from the gathered students. He had to give them something to cling to. He swallowed. “We cannot succeed if we fight small battles individually,” Dorsk 81 said. “But together we are more powerful than the sum of our parts. We can join our abilities.”

  Kirana Ti and Kam Solusar looked at him, musing. He leaned over the table and gestured to the other trainees. “Some of you were there when we finally defeated Exar Kun. We pooled our strengths, we joined as one, as champions of the Force—and, united, we unlocked a greater reservoir of strength than any of us could have imagined.”

  “But what can we do?” the young reptilian trainee said, her voice thin and hissing from the back of her throat, her blue frill still raised.

  Dorsk 81 hesitated for a moment. The suggestion was preposterous … but right now the situation was so grim they would take even an impossible idea seriously. He kept his voice flat. “We can use the Force to … move the Star Destroyers away.”

  The collective gasp among the trainees was a mixture of disbelief and delight. “It’s too much,” Kam Solusar said. “There are too many. Seventeen Imperial-class Star Destroyers!”

  Dorsk 81 was not flustered. “Size matters not,” he said. “How many times has Master Skywalker told us that? At first many of us didn’t believe we could lift a pebble or a leaf. A little while ago we hurled giant boulders at ships flying high above our heads. Streen just knocked four TIE fighters together with nothing more than wind. All this was without planning, without preparation, and without help.

  “The Force is in all things,” Dorsk 81 continued. “There is no fundamental difference between a pebble and a Star Destroyer. Besides, the ships have no way to prepare against an attack such as this.”

  As others began to mutter, Kyp hammered his fist down. “Hey! Haven’t you listened to Master Skywalker’s teachings?” he said. “If it doesn’t work, we’ll have to find something else—but I think we should do this.”

  That stopped further discussion. Dorsk 81 rose to his feet. “These temples were built long ago by the Massassi. We have learned,” he nodded to Tionne, “that their original purpose was to serve as a focus for the energies that the Dark Lords of the Sith manipulated. We can use these temples for a similar purpose—but to serve the light side, to protect ourselves.

  “I will go to the top of this temple and be the focal point for all of your energies. We will join together, some thirty of us bound by the Force.”

  Dorsk 81 raised his voice. Inner power grew in him as he spoke. He had never before desired leadership of any kind, but now he no longer felt like a follower. He felt strong and driven.

  “Pool your resources, and I will draw from you, channel it through myself, and push out just as I did with that scout walker. I’ll shove them away, tumble them end over end, knock the Star Destroyers far from here.”

  He trembled as he said this, and Kyp stood beside him, clasping the cloned alien’s thin shoulder. “And after we get the battlecruisers away,” Kyp said, “then we can mop up the remnants of the attackers down here.” He smiled. “It might be all finished by the time the New Republic gets here.”

  “We must not wait,” Dorsk 81 said. “We are all together now, but the attack is intensifying. Even this Great Temple won’t be stable for long, unless we do something.”

  At the apex of the pyramid, Dorsk 81 stood barefoot on the sun-warmed flagstones that had been locked together to form an observation deck. The Jedi trainees frequently came up here to watch the rainbow-filled sunrise at the limb of the gas giant overhead.

  Tall fires in the jungles surrounding the temple complex crackled and rose into the sky. Below, squadrons of mechanical scout walkers and ground-chewing siege machinery
worked their way toward the Jedi stronghold.

  The Imperials had figured out that the Jedi Knights were no longer at the Temple of the Blueleaf Cluster; now that the trainees had gathered in the tallest temple, Pellaeon’s attackers would soon direct their strike at the ziggurat.

  Dorsk 81 tilted his smooth face up to the sky and held his hands at his sides, fingers spread. The stone felt strong beneath the soles of his feet, and he calmed himself, reaching within him for threads that he could spin together with the others.

  Kyp and Kirana Ti, Kam Solusar, and all the other Jedi trainees—some he knew well, others he had barely met—also focused their abilities. Dorsk 81 recalled how they had banded together to fight Exar Kun, and now he felt the same invisible whirlwind surrounding him.

  The new Jedi Knights joined together with invisible cords of light. The bonds were strong, reinforcing their skills from person to person. Dorsk 81 stood in the middle, the eye of the storm, where he could draw upon the Force, magnify it with a strength greater than he had ever conceived.

  In his mind an evil shadow of doubt flickered. He suddenly wondered if it wasn’t indeed impossible to move such a huge fleet. His doubt began to grow and he recalled again the face of his elder clone, Dorsk 80, scowling at him—You’ll never accomplish anything more important than what you could have done on Khomm.

  Why don’t you stay with us? the younger Dorsk 82 had pleaded. Everything will be fine, just the way it always was.

  But Dorsk 81 wanted more. His life had a greater purpose. He had sensed that from early on, but had ignored it for so long. Now he was a Jedi Knight. A Jedi Knight.

  His determination formed a crushing vise in his mind that obliterated the doubt—and before he could be distracted by other thoughts, Dorsk 81 reached out and grasped the threads of Force the other trainees offered to him. He felt as if he had tapped into a huge power source, an overload of energy that he channeled through himself without hesitation.