Kenobi

by John Jackson Miller

  “Frankly,” Mace said, “I was surprised she was ever chosen to be a Padawan.”

  The tip of Yoda’s cane swirled slowly over the chamber floor, as if he were stirring the depths of a pond visible only to him. “To the Agricultural Corps she should be sent, think you?”

  “Actually, yes, I do.” A note of sympathy entered Mace Windu’s voice. “There is no dishonor in that. When you see how hard she has to fight just to keep up with children years younger than she is … Perhaps it would be kinder to let her work at her own level.”

  Yoda cocked his head and looked curiously at him. “See her struggle do I, as well. But if you make her stop, tell you it is ‘kind,’ she will not!”

  “Maybe not,” Jai Maruk said grimly. “But children do not always want what is best for them.”

  “Nor do Jedi Masters,” Yoda said dryly.

  The burned Jedi forged on. “Let’s be honest. Not every pairing of Jedi Knight and Padawan will be Obi-Wan and Anakin, granted, but the truth is we are at war. To send a Jedi into battle with a Padawan who cannot be trusted to hold her own is to needlessly risk two lives—lives the Republic cannot afford to throw away.”

  “The Force is not as strong in Scout as it should be,” Ilena agreed. “But I’ve had her in my classes for years. Her technique is good. She is smart and she is loyal. She tries.”

  “There is no try,” Master Maruk said, unconsciously letting his voice slip into the Yoda imitation for which, a lifetime ago, he had been famous among the young boys of the Jedi Temple. “There is only do.”

  The other three Jedi in the room glanced guiltily at Yoda. He snorted, but laugh lines crinkled around his eyes. “Mm. Thinking of students, I am. Best then I should go to battle with him in whom the Force is strongest, hmm? With young Skywalker, think you?”

  “He’s not polished,” Ilena said.

  “And too impulsive,” Mace added.

  “Hm.” Yoda stirred again with his stick. “Then best of all would be the strongest student, yes? Wisest? Most learned in the ways of the Force?” He nodded. “Best of all, Dooku would be!” His eyes found the other Jedi, one by one: and one by one, they looked away. “Our great student!” Yoda’s ears flexed, then drooped. “Our great failure.”

  The ancient Master hobbled over to the tray and poured himself a glass of water. “Enough. The rest of your story, tell us, Master Maruk.”

  “Ventress found me,” Jai said. “We fought. I lost.” His burned hand was shaking again. “She took my lightsaber. I composed myself for the killing blow, but instead she took me prisoner. She blindfolded me and bundled me into a speeder for a short ride, no more than an hour. Count Dooku was waiting at the end of it.”

  “Ah!” Mace Windu leaned forward. “So Dooku is on Vjun!”

  “You escaped from Dooku and Ventress alive!” Ilena said.

  A mirthless smile tugged on Jai Maruk’s burned cheek. “Make no mistake, I am here because Dooku wanted me here. Ventress would have killed me if she could, she made that very plain, but Dooku wanted a messenger. One he could trust,” the Jedi said, his voice heavy with irony. “One who would report here first, and not to the Senate. He was very particular about that—I was to deliver my message to Master Yoda, and only in the Temple, far from other ears.”

  “And what was this urgent message?” Mace Windu said.

  “He says he wants peace.”

  Jai Maruk looked at the disbelieving faces of the Jedi and shrugged.

  “Peace!” Master Xan spat out. “Bioweapons slaughter innocents by the millions on Honoghr and he wants peace! The Republic is falling like burned logs into the fire and he wants peace! I can imagine exactly the kind of peace he means.”

  “Dooku anticipated we might be, ah, wary.” Jai Maruk reached for a pocket under his cloak. “He would send me back, he said, with an offering and a question for Master Yoda. The offering was my life. But the question was this …” He drew his hand from his pocket and opened it. There on his shaking palm was a shell—a single, quite ordinary shell, such as a child might find on the seashore of a hundred worlds.

  The Jedi looked at it in confusion, but Yoda, for once, was not so serene. He drew a sharp inward breath, and his brow furrowed.

  “Master?” Jai Maruk looked away from the shell in his shaking hand. “I have carried this thing across half the galaxy. But what does it mean?”

  Sixty-three standard years earlier. It is evening, and the sky is dark blue above the sprawling compound of the Jedi Temple. In the Temple’s walled gardens, the twilight sky is reflected in the ornamental pond. Yoda’s most accomplished student is sitting on a rock by the pond’s edge, looking into the water. In one hand he holds a shell, running his thumb again and again over its bone-smooth surface. Before him, water-skeeters dance on the surface of the water, light-footed.

  The apprentice’s attention moves with them, dancing, too, on the surface of silence; skating on the endless deepness of the Force. He has always been light-footed; the Force dimples underneath his attention, but holds him up, effortlessly. Only tonight, for some reason, he feels sad and strangely heavy. As if realizing for the first time how easy it would be to see his foot fall through, into that deep power—to sink into dark depths there, and drown.

  Tick, tick, tchak. Tick, tick, tchack. Footsteps coming nearer, one, two, and then the thunk of a cane stubbed into the white-pebbled path. A glow light approaches, coming from the direction of the Masters’ quarters, a blur of light moving through the garden’s tangle of leaves and vines. The presence is a familiar one, and the student can feel Yoda, his old mind warm and bright as that glow light, long before the old one’s silhouette rounds the last bend, and the great Master of the Jedi Order hobbles slowly up to join him.

  The student smiles and dips his head. How many times Yoda has told him, in endless hours of meditation or lightsaber training, that while the outer form of a figure or an attack need not be displayed, one must feel its intention in every cell. So that little dip of the head, so casual, carries a lifetime of gratitude and respect. And fear, too. And guilt.

  The Grand Master of the Jedi Order puts down his light and clambers awkwardly onto a rock, scrabbling for purchase and then hauling himself up to sit snuffling beside his student like some unfortunate garden gnome. The student’s grin broadens, but he knows better than to offer to help.

  Yoda settles himself on the stone in a series of grunts and shifts, adjusting the skirts of his worn Jedi robes, and letting his feet hang just over the surface of the pond. The water-skeeters zip under his ancient green toes, oblivious to the slightly hairy greatness dangling over them. “Pensive, are you, Dooku?”

  The student doesn’t attempt to deny it.

  “No fear about this mission have you, surely?”

  “No, Master.” The student corrects himself. “Not about the mission, anyway.”

  “Confident, you should be. Ready you are.”

  “I know.”

  Yoda seems to want the light he has left on the ground. He turns his cane around and tries to hook the glow light’s handle with it. Grimacing, he fishes once, twice, but the light slips off. He grunts, exasperated.

  With the barest flick of his attention, the student picks up the lantern with the Force and sends it floating to his teacher. “Why not do it the easy way, Master?” he asks—and knows what’s coming as soon as he shuts his mouth.

  “Because it is easy,” Yoda grunts. In the young man’s experience, students get a lot of answers like this from Yoda. He didn’t send the light away, though, Dooku thinks.

  They sit together in the garden. Somewhere out of sight, a fish breaks the surface, then settles back into the water.

  Yoda gives the student a companionable prod with the end of his stick. “So ready to leave, yesterday you were!”

  “And last month, and last year, and the year before that.” A rueful smile from Dooku lights and dies slowly away. “But now that it’s really going to happen …” He looks around. “I can’t remem
ber a time I didn’t want to leave—to go out, to travel the stars, to see the world. And yet I have loved it here. This place has been my home. You have been my home.”

  “And will be still.” Yoda gazes at the sweet-scented darkness of the gardens approvingly. “Always be here, we will. Home, yes … they say on Alderaan, Home it is, where when you come to the door, they have to let you in!” He snuffs the evening air, laughing a little. “Hm. Always will there be a place for you here.”

  “I suppose so. I hope so.” The student looks down at the shell in his hand. “I found this on the bank. Abandoned by a freshwater hermit crab. They don’t have homes of their own, you know. They keep outgrowing them. I was thinking about that, how the Jedi found me on Serenno. With my mother and father, I suppose. I can’t remember them now. Do you ever stop to think how strange that is? Every Jedi is a child his parents decided they could live without.” Yoda stirs, but does not speak. “I wonder, sometimes, if that is what drives us, that first abandonment. We have a lot to prove.”

  A glow-fly comes flickering out of the tangled vines to zip over the surface of the pond, like a spark shot from a fire. The student watches it make its dizzy pattern over the quiet water.

  Yoda has a question he likes to ask: What are we, think you, Dooku? Every time the student tries a different answer: We are a knot tied in the Force or We are the agency of Fate or We are each cells in the body of History … but tonight, watching the glow-fly hiss and flicker in the night, a truer answer comes to him. In the end, what we are is: alone.

  With a faint pop, like a bubble bursting, a fish rises from the dark water and snaps. The glow-fly’s light goes out and is gone, leaving no trace but one weak ripple that spreads slowly across the surface of the pond.

  “I guess even then I was like that hermit crab,” the student says. “Too big for my parents’ house. So you brought me here, and it’s been years, now, that even the Temple has seemed a tight fit for me. I guess …” The young man pauses, turning, so the light falling against the edge of his hooded robe throws a shadow across his face. “I worry that once I am out in the big world, I will never be able to fit inside here again.”

  Yoda nods, speaking almost to himself. “Proud, are you. Not without reason.”

  “I know.”

  “Not without danger, either.”

  “I know that, too.”

  The student rubs again at the hermit crab shell, and then drops it into the pond. Startled water-skeeters skitter madly from the splash, trying to stay afloat.

  “Bigger than the Jedi, bigger than the Force, you cannot be,” Yoda says.

  “But the Force is bigger than the Jedi, Master. The Force is not just these walls and teachings. It runs through all life, high and low, great and small, light—” Awkwardly the student stops.

  “—and dark,” Yoda says. “Oh, yes, young one. Think you I have never felt the touch of the dark? Know you what a soul so great as Yoda can make, in eight hundred years?”

  “Master?”

  “Many mistakes!” Wheezing with laughter, the old teacher reaches out with his cane and pokes his student in the ribs. “To bed with you, thinker of deep thoughts!” Poke, poke. “Your Master, Thame Cerulian, says the most gifted Padawan he ever saw, you are. Trust in yourself, you need not. I, Yoda, great and powerful Jedi Master, will trust for you! Is it enough?”

  The apprentice wants to laugh along, but cannot. “It is too much, Master. I am afraid …”

  “Good!” Yoda snorts. “Fear the dark side, you should. In the mighty is it mightiest. But not yet Thame’s equal are you; not yet a Jedi Knight; not yet a member of the Council. Many shells have we left for you, Dooku—as long as you can fit inside this one,” he says, rapping his student’s skin. “Tomorrow, go you must, into the darkness between the stars. But home always will this place be. If ever lost you are, look back into this garden.” Yoda hefts his glow light, so shadows like water-skeeters dart away from them. “A candle will I light, for you to find your way home.”

  Introduction to the REBELLION Era

  (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 Luke 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 te
rrorize 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 Kind-labethia 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.