“There’s also another factor—the fact that I-Five had been carrying the bota around for two decades. True, it had been processed, and was much more stable than in its raw state, but still—I was betting that such a complex molecule was starting to fray a bit around the edges.” He shrugged. “Whether you opt for the mystical explanation or the practical one, Vader wasn’t expecting a bad trip.”
“You were betting our lives,” Laranth said. She didn’t smile, but there was amusement in her thoughts.
Jax marveled at their texture and nuance. “What choice did I have?” he asked. “He could have killed us all in a breath, using just the Force he has access to every day. I had to gamble that, at the very least, the bota would make him lose track of the ephemeral world and give us half a chance to escape.”
He didn’t mention the third factor: this was the first time he’d been this close to Vader, close enough to touch him. And though he hadn’t dared to try to probe the man, he’d noticed something about the patterns of Force that had swirled around the Dark Lord. Patterns that seemed strangely, unbelievably, familiar.
Master Piell had told him once that the moiré swirlings of the Force were as individual as a person’s DNA. He could not be sure—and likely he’d never know the truth—but, if Master Piell was right and those patterns were not to be duplicated … well, it had been enough to gamble on.
He had evidence through the Force that Anakin Skywalker was still alive. And the Anakin he knew, steeped though he had been in the Force, would not have had the self-knowledge to realize what the bota might mean for someone with his particular set of character flaws.
Yes, it was a mad thought, but it was a thought Jax dared to have because of something Darth Vader had said: And now, if you would return the pyronium …
“Do you think he’s finally dead?” Laranth asked, breaking into his thoughts.
Jax shook his head. “He’s harder to kill than that. But I think maybe the game has changed. And that could be good news … or bad.”
“But you’ll still stay.” It wasn’t a question.
He didn’t reply. What was there to say? Inquisitors or no, Vader or no, the Emperor or no, Jax couldn’t conceive of anyplace he’d rather be, any job he’d rather be doing. For better or worse, this was home.
They’d reached their new domicile while he’d been thinking, and when they entered, they found someone waiting in the front room, talking to Den and I-Five.
Den introduced the newcomer, who seemed to be a Mirialan, judging by his facial markings. “This is Chan Dash. He’s got a problem that we might be able to help with.”
Jax nodded. But as he was about to speak, he suddenly felt the Force surge within him, higher and stronger than he had ever felt it before. It was as if those threads which some believed vibrated throughout all of time and space, forming the fabric of reality itself, had suddenly seized him and lifted him, almost instantaneously, above—no, outside the world that he knew, and carried him to some metaphysical vantage point. For one timeless moment, Jax beheld the spectacular galactic whirlpool itself, which simultaneously being connected, somehow, to each and every being within it.
It lasted a millisecond; it lasted an eternity. Then, just as abruptly, he was back.
Was this what Barriss Offee had experienced when she had taken the bota? Had he been, for the length of a heartbeat, connected to the greater, unifying gestalt that the wisest of the Masters called the Cosmic Force? If so, how? Vader had used the last of the bota; there was nothing he could think of that could possibly have triggered this, except—
Except the Force itself.
Jax felt a sense of great contentment, of purpose. He didn’t know why the Force had elected to grant him that vision, but he suspected a reason. He suspected that it had been to show him without a doubt where, in the immensity of the galaxy, that Jax Pavan belonged.
Tell me something I don’t know, he thought.
He realized that Chan Dash, as well as his team, were beginning to regard him strangely. The silence was beginning to stretch.
Jax shook the Mirelian’s hand and gestured to a chair. “Sit down, please,” he said. “Tell me how I can help you.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Reaves received an Emmy Award for his work on the Batman television animated series. He has worked for DreamWorks, among other studios, and has written fantasy novels and supernatural thrillers. Reaves is the New York Times bestselling author of the Star Wars: Coruscant Nights novels Jedi Twilight and Street of Shadows, and Star Wars: Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter, as well as the co-writer (with Steve Perry) of Star Wars: Death Star and two Star Wars: MedStar novels: Battle Surgeons and Jedi Healer. He lives in the Los Angeles area.
By Michael Reaves
THE SHATTERED WORLD
THE BURNING REALM
DARKWORLD DETECTIVE
I—ALIEN
STREET MAGIC
NIGHT HUNTER
VOODOO CHILD
DRAGONWORLD (with Byron Preiss)
SWORD OF THE SAMURAI (with Steve Perry)
HELLSTAR (with Steve Perry)
DOME (with Steve Perry)
THE OMEGA CAGE (with Steve Perry)
THONG THE BARBARIAN MEETS THE CYCLE SLUTS OF SATURN (with Steve Perry)
HELL ON EARTH
MR. TWILIGHT (with Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff)
BATMAN: FEAR, ITSELF (with Steven-Elliot Altman)
STAR WARS: DARTH MAUL: SHADOW HUNTER
STAR WARS: MEDSTAR I: BATTLE SURGEONS (with Steve Perry)
STAR WARS: MEDSTAR II: JEDI HEALER (with Steve Perry)
STAR WARS: DEATH STAR (with Steve Perry)
STAR WARS: CORUSCANT NIGHTS I: JEDI TWILIGHT
STAR WARS: CORUSCANT NIGHTS II: STREET OF SHADOWS
STAR WARS: CORUSCANT NIGHTS III: PATTERNS OF FORCE
Anthologies
SHADOWS OVER BAKER STREET (co-edited with John Pelan)
Story Collection
THE NIGHT PEOPLE
STAR WARS—The Expanded Universe
You saw the movies. You watched the cartoon series, or maybe played some of the video games. But did you know …
In The Empire Strikes Back, Princess Leia Organa said to Han Solo, “I love you.” Han said, “I know.” But did you know that they actually got married? And had three Jedi children: the twins, Jacen and Jaina, and a younger son, Anakin?
Luke Skywalker was trained as a Jedi by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. But did you know that, years later, he went on to revive the Jedi Order and its commitment to defending the galaxy from evil and injustice?
Obi-Wan said to Luke, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.” Did you know that over those millennia, legendary Jedi and infamous Sith Lords were adding their names to the annals of Republic history?
Yoda explained that the dreaded Sith tend to come in twos: “Always two, there are. No more, no less. A Master, and an apprentice.” But did you know that the Sith didn’t always exist in pairs? That at one time in the ancient Republic there were as many Sith as Jedi, until a Sith Lord named Darth Bane was the lone survivor of a great Sith war and created the “Rule of Two”?
All this and much, much more is brought to life in the many novels and comics of the Star Wars expanded universe. You’ve seen the movies and watched the cartoon. Now venture out into the wider worlds of Star Wars!
Turn the page or jump to the timeline of Star Wars novels to learn more.
1
SCRAMBLE LINE ENCRYPTED
STAND BY STAND BY
GEONOSIS FORWARD CONTROL TO FLEET SUPPORT, ORD MANTELL.
PREPARE TO RECEIVE CASEVAC TRANSPORT. MED TRIAGE TEAM ESTIMATE SERIOUS INJURIES, TWELVE THOUSAND, REPEAT TWELVE THOUSAND. WALKING WOUNDED EIGHT THOUSAND, REPEAT EIGHT THOUSAND. ETA TEN HOURS. LOGISTICS PRIORITY FOR BACTA TANK SUPPORT TEAMS.
PREP FOR SEVENTY-TWO THOUSAND COMBAT-FIT TROOPS, REPEAT SEVENTY-TWO
THOUSAND, PENDING REDEPLOYMENT. PRIORITY WEAPONS SUPPORT FOR COMMANDO UNITS.
THAT IS ALL. OUT.
Republic assault ship Implacable: inbound for extraction from Geonosis. Stand by.
Republic Commando 1136 studied every face in line waiting to board the gunships.
Some were helmeted, and some were not, but—one way or another—they all had his face. And they were all strangers.
“Move it,” the loadmaster shouted, gesturing side-to-side with one outstretched arm. “Come on, shift it, people—fast as you can.” The gunships dropped down in clouds of dust and troopers embarked, some turning to pull comrades inboard so the ships could lift again quickly. There was no reason to scramble for it. They’d done it a thousand times in training; extraction from a real battle was what they’d prepared for. This wasn’t a retreat. They’d grabbed their first victory.
The gunships’ downdraft kicked the red Geonosian soil into the air. RC-1136—Darman—took off his helmet and ran his gauntlet carefully across the pale gray dome, wiping away the dust and noting a few scrapes and burn marks.
The loadmaster turned to him. He was one of the very, very few outsiders whom Darman had ever seen working with the Grand Army, a short, wrinkled Duros with a temper to match. “Are you embarking or what?”
Darman continued wiping his helmet. “I’m waiting for my mates,” he said.
“You shift your shiny silver backside now,” the loadmaster said irritably. “I got a schedule.”
Darman carefully brought up his knuckle plate just under the loadmasters’s chin, and held it there. He didn’t need to eject the vibroblade and he didn’t need to say a word. He’d made his point.
“Well, whenever you’re ready, sir,” the Duros said, stepping back to chivy clone troopers instead. It wasn’t a great idea to upset a commando, especially not one coming down from the adrenaline high of combat.
But there was still no sign of the rest of his squad. Darman knew that there was no point in waiting any longer. They hadn’t called in. Maybe they had comlink failures. Maybe they had made it onto another gunship.
It was the first time in his artificially short life that Darman hadn’t been able to reach out and touch the men he had been raised with.
He waited half a standard hour more anyway, until the gunships became less frequent and the lines of troopers became shorter. Eventually there was nobody standing on the desert plain but him, the Duros loadmaster, and half a dozen clone troopers. It was the last lift of the day.
“You better come now, sir,” the loadmaster said. “There’s nobody unaccounted for. Nobody alive, anyway.”
Darman looked around the horizon one last time, still feeling as if he were turning his back on someone reaching out to him.
“I’m coming,” he said, and brought up the rear of the line. As the gunship lifted, he watched the swirling dust, dwindling rock formations, and scattered shrinking patches of scrub until Geonosis became a blur of dull red.
He could still search the Implacable. It wasn’t over yet.
The gunship slipped into the Implacable’s giant docking bay, and Darman looked down into the cavern, onto a sea of white armor and orderly movement. The first thing that struck him when the gunship killed its thrusters and locked down on its pad was how quiet everyone seemed.
In the crowded bay full of troopers, the air stank of sweat and stale fear and the throat-rasping smell of discharged blaster rifles. But it was so silent that if Darman hadn’t seen the evidence of exhausted and injured men, he’d have believed that nothing significant had happened in the last thirty hours.
The deck vibrated under the soles of his boots. He was still staring down at them, studying the random patterns of Geonosian dust that clung to them, when an identical pair came into view.
“Number?” said a voice that was also his own. The commander swept him with a tally sensor: he didn’t need Darman to tell him his number, or anything else for that matter, because the sensors in the enhanced Katarn armor reported his status silently, electronically. No significant injury. The triage team on Geonosis had waved him past, concentrating on the injured, ignoring both those too badly hurt to help and those who could help themselves. “Are you listening to me? Come on. Talk to me, son.”
“I’m okay, sir,” he said. “Sir, RC-one-one-three-six. I’m not in shock. I’m fine.” He paused. Nobody else was going to call him by his squad nickname—Darman—again. They were all dead, he knew it. Jay, Vin, Taler. He just knew. “Sir, any news of RC-one-one-three-five—”
“No,” said the commander, who had obviously heard similar questions every time he stopped to check. He gestured with the small bar in his hand. “If they’re not in casevac or listed on this sweep, then they didn’t make it.”
It was stupid to ask. Darman should have known better. Clone troopers—and especially Republic commandos—just got on with the job. That was their sole purpose. And they were lucky, their training sergeant had told them; outside, in the ordinary world, every being from every species in the galaxy fretted about their purpose in life, searching for meaning. A clone didn’t need to. Clones knew. They had been perfected for their role, and doubt need never trouble them.
Darman had never known what doubt was until now. No amount of training had prepared him for this. He found a space against a bulkhead and sat down.
A clone trooper settled down next to him, squeezing into the gap and briefly clunking a shoulder plate against his. They glanced at each other. Darman rarely had any contact with the other clones: commandos trained apart from everyone, including ARC troopers. The trooper’s armor was white, lighter, less resistant; commandos enjoyed upgraded protection. And Darman displayed no rank colors.
But they both knew exactly who and what they were.
“Nice Deece,” the trooper said enviously. He was looking at the DC-17: troopers were issued the heavier, lower-spec rifle, the DC-15. “Ion pulse blaster, RPG anti-armor, and sniper?”
“Yeah.” Every item of his gear was manufactured to a higher spec. A trooper’s life was less valuable than a commando’s. It was the way things were, and Darman had never questioned it—not for long, anyway. “Full house.”
“Tidy.” The trooper nodded approval. “Job done, eh?”
“Yeah,” Darman said quietly. “Job done.”
The trooper didn’t say anything else. Maybe he was wary of conversation with commandos. Darman knew what troopers thought about him and his kind. They don’t train like us and they don’t fight like us. They don’t even talk like us. A bunch of prima donnas.
Darman didn’t think he was arrogant. It was just that he could do every job a soldier could be called upon to do, and then some: siege assault, counterinsurgency, hostage extraction, demolitions, assassination, surveillance, and every kind of infantry activity on any terrain and in any environment, at any time. He knew he could, because he’d done it. He’d done it in training, first with simunition and then with live rounds. He’d done it with his squad, the three brothers with whom he’d spent every moment of his conscious life. They’d competed against other squads, thousands just like them, but not like them, because they were squad brothers, and that was special.
He had never been taught how to live apart from the squad, though. Now he would learn the hardest way of all.
Darman had absolute confidence that he was one of the best special ops soldiers ever created. He was undistracted by the everyday concerns of raising a family and making a living, things that his instructors said he was lucky never to know.
But now he was alone. Very, very alone. It was very distracting indeed.
He considered this for a long time in silence. Surviving when the rest of your squad had been killed was no cause for pride. It felt instead like something his training sergeant had described as shame. That was what you felt when you lost a battle, apparently.
But they had won. It was their first battle, and they had won.
The landing ramp of the Implacable eased down, a
nd the bright sunlight of Ord Mantell streamed in. Darman replaced his helmet without thinking and stood in an orderly line, waiting to disembark and be reassigned. He was going to be chilled down, kept in suspended animation until duty called again.
So this was the aftermath of victory. He wondered how much worse defeat might feel.
Imbraani, Qiilura: 40 light-years from Ord Mantell, Tingel Arm
The field of barq flowed from silver to ruby as the wind from the southwest bent the ripening grain in waves. It could have been a perfect late-summer day; instead it was turning into one of the worst days of Etain Tur-Mukan’s life.
Etain had run and run and she had nothing left in her. She flung herself flat between the furrows, not caring where she fell. Etain held her breath as something stinking and wet squelched under her.
The pursuing Weequay couldn’t hear her above the wind, she knew, but she held her breath anyway.
“Hey girlie!” His boots crunched closer. He was panting. “Where you go? Don’t be shy.”
Don’t breathe.
“I got bottle of urrqal. You want to have party?” He had a remarkably large vocabulary for a Weequay, all of it centered on his baser needs. “I fun when you get to know me.”
I should have waited for it to get dark. I could influence his mind, try to make him leave.
But she hadn’t. And she couldn’t, try as she might to concentrate. She was too full of adrenaline and uncontrolled panic.
“Come on, you scrag-end, where are you? I find you …”
He sounded as if he was kicking his way through the crop, and getting closer. If she got up and ran for it, she was dead. If she stayed where she was, he’d find her—eventually. He wasn’t going to get bored, and he wasn’t going to give up.
“Girlie …”
The Weequay’s voice was close, to her right, about twenty meters away. She sipped a strangled breath and clamped her lips shut again, lungs aching, eyes streaming with the effort.
Star Wars: Coruscant Nights III: Patterns of Force Page 26
