by Greg Keyes
Emissary of the Void
August 29, 2002
Best-selling novelist Greg Keyes (author of the Edge of Victory duology) writes an original serialized epic of The New Jedi Order. Originally found in the pages of Star Wars Gamer magazine, starwars.com presents the first three chapters of Emissary of the Void here to online readers. The story starts here and will continue online in the coming weeks, and then move to the Star Wars Insider, starting with issue #62 (due out on newsstands in October). To subscribe to the Star Wars Insider, the official publication of the Star Wars Fan Club, click here.
EMISSARY OF THE VOID
Greg Keyes
BONADAN BOOKS
SRENGSENG
Star Wars Insider and starwars.com Present
EMISSARY OF THE VOID
CHAPTER I:
Battle on Bonadan
WELL, THAT’S INTERESTING, Uldir Lochett thought, as a pair of feminine legs in black tights came hurtling over his left shoulder. Above the tights he was vaguely aware of a dark yellow skirt and, even farther up, a young, determined face framed in short dark hair. But it was the feet that held his attention as they hit square in the center of the table at which he and his companions sat, shocking their drinks into brief suborbits. Then the feet were gone, propelling legs, yellow skirt, and all an estimated two meters up and one out toward the balcony above them. Searing flashes of weapon fire hissed by, and Uldir found his hand groping at an empty holster.
“Stop her!” Someone behind Uldir shouted.
Two of his three companions, Uldir saw, were also reaching for weapons that weren’t there. The third, a human woman with startling platinum hair, brushed a fleck of Corellian whisky from the long scar beneath her left eye.
“I need a new drink,” she noted, as another volley of yellow streamers seared by, striking the synthewood balcony the girl had managed to grab. The patrons of the In the Red cantina were diving away from the newly declared war-zone, but the music from the band continued to blare cheerfully over the sound of weapon fire.
“I hate locals,” Leaft growled, thumping the curled fist of his foot on the table and scowling as only a Dug can scowl.
A glance over his shoulder confirmed what Uldir already suspected: The girl’s pursuers were Corporate Sector Authority law enforcement, the only people on Bonadan allowed to carry weapons. From the color and intensity of their beams, he figured they were using a stun setting, and in any event their target was definitely the girl, who was now significantly above them, putting Uldir and his companions well out of the line of fire. He relaxed a little, settling his amber gaze on the girl as she heaved herself up, wondering what she had done to provoke such a strong reaction from the local constabulary.
“Very impolite,” Vook said, apparently agreeing with the Dug. His flat, noseless Duro face was unreadable, but his tone, as usual, was melancholy, as if even this put him in mind of his lost homeworld.
“I hate vacations,” Leaft said, thumping the table again.
It wasn’t exactly a vacation. A close scrape with a Yuuzhan Vong interdictor on the Hydian Way had left the transport the unlikely quartet shared with a sputtering hyperdrive and no shields at all. They had managed to limp to the Corporate Sector, a rimward territory still essentially neutral in the conflict between what remained of the free New Republic and the fierce extragalactic Yuuzhan Vong, who were gobbling it up system by system in their religious crusade of conquest. Left with nothing to do while repairs were effected, Uldir figured they could all use a little time off, and consequently the four soon found themselves on the galasol strip, a colorful collection of overpriced cantinas and casinos near the spaceport.
The fleeing girl was dressed like the attendants Uldir had seen earlier that evening at the Blue-Shift Luck casino, but if she was really a game-girl, she was a nimble one. As he watched, she flipped over the balcony, twisting deftly between the several lines of fire directed at her, and crouched behind a now abandoned table. The CSA lawmen clustered below the balcony, firing up.
“That’s probably a mistake,” remarked Vega Sepen, the platinum-crowned woman.
“Tactically unsound,” Vook agreed, gravely.
“One unarmed short human against four corp-clowns,” Leaft sneered. “Not worth the price of admission.”
“She’s not that short,” Uldir corrected, crossing his arms and lifting the square tip of his chin toward the balcony. “She’s a girl.”
“Uh, oh,” Vega murmured.
“Don’t discuss human gender,” the Dug growled. “The whole idea sickens me. Urr . . . Captain.” He added that last a little sullenly, probably remembering one of the many formal reprimands he’d gotten lately from superiors.
About that time, the table the girl was hiding behind suddenly came over the balcony rail. It hit three of the security men squarely and nicked the fourth. With a fierce grin, the girl turned and ran off across the upper level toward an exit.
“She’s getting away,” Vook noticed.
“Yeah,” Uldir said. “Maybe not.”
Vega must have seen the expression on Uldir’s face.
“Not our fight,” she cautioned. “We’re rescue fliers, not bounty hunters.”
“Well, we can’t fly without a ship, and I’m bored,” Uldir said. “Anyway, she owes me for these drinks.” With that, he pushed back his chair, closed up his flight jacket, and leaped onto the table.
“This won’t turn out well,” he heard Vook mournfully predict.
Uldir followed the girl’s example, launching himself from the table. He caught the balcony, swiftly pulled himself up and over and ran toward the exit through which she had vanished.
The exit led to an upper story, open-air courtyard. There, beneath a rusty evening sky, he found a trail of angry and confused patrons cursing after his quarry as she clambered up the output cable of the ion shield that filtered Bonadan’s polluted air into something approaching pleasant. Uldir’s opinion of the young woman’s athletic prowess rose another notch, offset by the growing suspicion that she was probably some sort of burglar or spy. Maybe she had stolen something from the casino, or had been attempting to. Whatever it was, he was determined to find out.
He skipped to his right to avoid tripping over a fallen Rodian, but that brought him face-to-face with an immense Barabel male gnashing a set of very sharp teeth some half a meter above his own meter-and-a-half frame.
“Sorry,” Uldir grunted at the scaled tower.
The Barabel’s black reptilian face contorted. “You insult me?” He flexed his claws, and it occurred to Uldir that the Bonadan police couldn’t confiscate natural weapons.
The Barabel had teeth, claws, and sixty kilos on him. Uldir had his fists and the best unarmed combat training the Search and Rescue Corps could provide.
So he ran, dodging behind a stumbling-drunk Togorian as the Barabel took a swipe at him. The big lizard tried to correct for Uldir’s sudden movement and instead hit the white-furred humanoid, who yowled and lurched to face her antagonist. Uldir thought he wouldn’t mind seeing how that turned out, under ordinary circumstances, but once again he’d lost sight of the thief.
He went up the cable hand-over-hand, pulling himself onto the rooftop. From here he couldn’t see the galasol strip, but he could hear it in a blare of music -- Uldir and his companions had arrived during a sort of local festival thrown by one of the new execs of the corporate sector. They’d had to push their way through a parade dominated by floaters bearing likenesses of the various leaders of the CSA, distributing free gambling chits for adults and trinkets for the kids. His vantage now overlooked the uglier side of Bo
nadan, the warehouse district that lay behind the flashy facade of the strip.
“How in the . . . ?” Uldir began, then realized he was talking to himself, something he considered a bad sign. But how had she made that jump? It was four meters to the air lane the barges traveled in if it was a centimeter.
She was running toward the next barge up, which was separated from its companion by only a meter or so, and the line of barges went on as far as the eye could see.
“Carbon flush,” he swore. If he could not make the jump, he’d lost her, but it sure wasn’t worth seeing if he could make the jump, so that was that.
He heard a hiss behind him and turned to see the Barabel coming up fast and decided it was worth finding out after all. He took ten paces and leaped with all of his might. At the last instant, he had the sudden sinking feeling he wouldn’t make it, followed swiftly by the sinking feeling of gravity having a joke on him. He’d jumped long enough, but not high enough. He wouldn’t even scrape the side of the barge going down.
He almost didn’t see the multi-sensor cable dangling in front of him, but at he last instant he did, and he wrapped his hands around it, wincing at the friction burn he produced killing his momentum. Swearing a silent thanks to whatever fates protected fools and starpilots, he started pulling himself up, ignoring the sibilant string of unintelligible curses the Barabel was howling after him.
On top, he took a moment to catch his breath, and for an instant he stood awestruck by the evening. Bonadan’s primary was a giant red egg yolk smeared against a stark ebony horizon of eroding hills and slag heaps. In the melting glare of that light, the plexisteel towers of the spaceport appeared to be molded of living lava. Plumes of black smoke drifted up from distant refineries, pancaking into clouds made luminous by the dying light of the sun, stretching shadow fingers toward the horizon of night. In the deep of the sky the actinic flares of ion drives winked here and there as ships arrived and departed. The ore train he stood on stretched far away, like some sort of magical path above the barren landscape.
There was nothing admirable about the ecological mess the Corporate Sector Authority had made of a once-lush planet, but there was beauty in everything, even devastation. The Force was present even in a wasteland.
The barges were strictly planetary, their anteriors open to the air. He didn’t recognize the ore -- he hoped it wasn’t radioactive -- but it certainly made for bad footing, so as he started after the girl, he ran along the raised metal lip of the barge. The narrowness of it didn’t bother him -- as a boy the spaceports on Coruscant and pretty much everywhere else in the galaxy had been his playgrounds, and he’d spent many an hour doing far more foolish things on far more precarious surfaces.
To his satisfaction, his quarry didn’t seem to have noticed him yet. She was taking her time, certain she’d lost her pursuers. He jumped the meter to the next barge, and then the next, closing all the while, confidant that the steady hum of repulsorlifts would mask his approach. Besides, the girl had stopped now, lifting up her dress to reveal something taped to her leg. She began working at the adhesive, tearing it off in strips.
Ah-hah, he thought. Now we’ll see what you’ve stolen.
When he came within five meters, however, the girl stopped what she was doing and spun on her heels to face him.
“Stay there!” she shouted over the thrum of the barges. “I will defend myself.”
“Oh, I’m sure of that,” Uldir said. “I saw what you did to law enforcement back in the cantina.”
She lifted her chin, and he suddenly realized she was kind of pretty, with her dark eyes and short brown bangs. And young -- maybe younger than he. She certainly did not look like the glamorous ideal of a galasol game-girl -- more like someone’s kid sister playing dress-up.
“What business is that of yours?” she demanded, looking him over. “That’s not a CSA uniform.”
“You owe me four drinks,” he said. “Besides, I just have this odd feeling you’re up to no good.”
“You’re wrong there,” the girl replied. “You have no idea how wrong.”
“Explain my error, then. I’ll be happy to listen.”
She smiled faintly. “You don’t need an explanation,” she said.
It occurred to Uldir that he really didn’t. Now that he had met her, she seemed an honest sort. Whatever problem she had with the CSA was probably a misunderstanding. He shrugged and was starting to walk away when he got it.
“Hey!” he said, turning.
A lump of ore thudded into his shoulder with enough force to knock him down. He bounced back up, fast, but she was already there. Now that he knew what she was, he wasn’t surprised.
Nor did he get a chance for more conversation. She was in midair, aiming a kick at his solar plexus.
Training took over. Flying kicks were good for taking opponents off of speeders, or maybe if they were paralyzed, but they stunk against someone standing with balance and a little presence of mind. He spun aside and chopped at the back of her neck as she hurled past -- except she didn’t hurl past. Instead, she touched down and pivoted, turning the kick into a wheel that caught him on the same target he’d been aiming for on her. He rolled with it, tumbling roughly over the ore, coming up to find her already on top of him. In her haste she had gotten sloppy, however, and he blocked her next kick and drove stiffened fingers into her midriff. She wheezed and fell back roughly onto the ore.
“Listen -- “ he began, but before he could get more out, she gestured with her left hand, and another chunk of rock leapt up from about a meter away and popped him in the forehead. He sat down, hard.
“Ow,” he said, rubbing his head. “You didn’t have to do that. I’m -- “
He noticed it before she did, maybe because she was stunned from his punch and maybe because she was concentrating on him. He dove toward her. She jerked her hands up defensively, but he caught them and hauled her to her feet just as several white-hot flashes melted pits through the ore she’d been lying on.
“Fliers!” he shouted.
Sure enough, five atmospheric security fliers were descending toward them, spraying blaster fire. Uldir suddenly found himself face-to-face with the girl, still holding both of her hands. She seemed to study him for about a nanosecond, then broke free and began running again. Uldir followed, blaster fire warming his heels.
The girl ran to the edge of the barge, followed it for a few seconds, and then leaped out into space.
“Wait!” Uldir shouted. Too late. He came skidding to a halt, peering over, hoping she’d dropped onto some tall building, but there was nothing but a sixty-meter plummet to the drab, one-story duraplast outskirts of the spaceport.
A bolt came near enough to curl his eyebrows, and he gathered that he had become a substitute target. Several more shots spanged around the barge’s edge, and with a wordless curse he jerked back into motion, dropping back into the barge so he could use the raised lip as limited cover. His hand itched for his blaster, but that was still on his ship.
The pilots were smart. Four stayed back, laying down a sort of perimeter of fire that kept him boxed on the barge. The fifth zoomed in lower, focusing on hitting him. He tried to clear his mind, feel the shots coming before they did, but his Jedi training had been mostly wasted -- he had no natural talent for the Force. Still, now and then, his luck was unusual enough to suggest that Master Skywalker’s academy had left him with something.
This time, he didn’t think he would be as lucky as usual. When a sixth flier rose up from below the barge, scarcely two meters to his right, he was sure of it. He winced as blasters fired.
But the bolts seared over his head and struck the flier harassing him at close range, and his focus suddenly changed, centering on the yellow-and-black-clad figure at the controls of the newly arrived vessel. The figure was gesturing impatiently.
“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Uldir muttered. Still dodging the more distant fire, he ran toward the flier and jumped in. The instant he was on bo
ard, the girl punched the throttle, weaving through a net of white bolts.
“Thanks,” Uldir said.
“If this is a trick, you’ll regret it,” the girl snapped. “Why were you chasing me?”
“I didn’t know you were Jedi.”
The girl banked crazily and dropped low toward the landscape.
“I think you really want altitude, here,” he added.
“Yeah? You want to fly?”
“Um -- okay.”
“Great.” She let go of the controls, leaving Uldir to dive for them before the flier smacked into a transmission tower. Meanwhile, she went back to work on whatever was strapped to her leg.
“Didn’t know I was Jedi? That’s why everyone else is after me.”
“I thought you were a thief,” Uldir explained, nosing up in time to avoid a serious insult from coherent light and charged particles. “Why are they after you?”
“Because I’m Jedi. Are you stim-pickled? Don’t you know every planet in the galaxy is scrambling to turn us over to the Yuuzhan Vong?”
“I’m aware of that,” Uldir said, dryly. “I nearly got turned in myself.”
She laughed. “You’re no Jedi.”
That stung more than Uldir cared to admit. “Hey, be nice to me. I saved your skinny . . . er, your skin.”
“And I returned the favor,” she reminded him. “We’re even now. So. Why would anyone try to turn you in?”
Uldir flipped a lock of his chestnut hair away from his eyes. “I’m a rescue flier,” he said. “An ex-partner of mine turned out to be Peace Brigade, and he found out I once attended the Jedi academy. He arranged an ambush I was lucky to get out of. That was right after the Yuuzhan Vong warmaster announced that if all the Jedi were turned over to him, he’d stop conquering the galaxy.” He shook his head. “As if anyone could really believe that.”
“You attended Master Skywalker’s academy?” The girl asked, skeptically.
