by Cavan Scott
© & TM 2016 Lucasfilm Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published by Disney • Lucasfilm Press, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Disney • Lucasfilm Press, 1101 Flower Street, Glendale, California 91201.
ISBN 978-1-368-00447-3
Cover art by Lucy Ruth Cummins
Interior art by David M. Buisán
Visit the official Star Wars website at: www.starwars.com.
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1: Marsh Fields
Chapter 2: Snared
Chapter 3: The Empire
Chapter 4: Betrayed
Chapter 5: The Whisper Bird
Chapter 6: Tunnel Flight
Preview of Star Wars: Adventures in Wild Space: Book One: The Snare
“MILO? CAN YOU HEAR ME? Come in, please?”
Lina Graf’s landspeeder kicked up marsh water as it sped across the swamp. Skim-snakes the color of rainbows burst from the heavy canopy above, spooked by the engine. Through gaps in the branches, Lina could see that the sky was darkening, the emerging stars obscured by thick clouds.
“Mistress Lina,” came a clipped voice beside her. “Your parents won’t be happy if you and your brother are still out after nightfall.”
“I know,” Lina snapped back, trying not to take her frustration out on CR-8R, the family’s droid. She thumbed the comlink on the landspeeder’s steering column. “Milo, where are you?”
There was no response. Lina threw the landspeeder around a vine-covered tree, nearly sending CR-8R tumbling from the ramshackle craft.
“Careful, Mistress Lina!”
“I’ve told you a hundred times, Crater. Lose the ‘mistress.’ It’s just Lina.”
“Yes, Mistress Lina.”
There was no point arguing with CR-8R, especially when she had a missing brother to find.
Beep-beep-beep.
A tiny red light blinked on the dashboard’s locator screen. A smile spread across Lina’s face. “There you are.”
It was a homing beacon, transmitting from Milo’s speeder bike. He’d complained when their mom fitted it, but she’d insisted for good reason. Nine-year-old Milo was always running off. It wasn’t that he was particularly rebellious, but he had definitely inherited their parents’ natural curiosity.
Auric and Rhyssa Graf were interplanetary explorers, cartographers who’d spent the past fifteen years producing maps of Wild Space, an unknown cluster of star systems on the very edge of the Galactic Rim. It was the only life Lina and Milo had ever known. They had been born on the Grafs’ starship, the Whisper Bird, and had been growing up exploring strange worlds ever since. Lina wouldn’t have it any other way, but could do without having to search for her younger brother every five minutes. It was always the same. They’d make planetfall and Milo would be off, hoping to discover a new species and become famous. His expeditions usually ended up with sprained limbs and a lecture from Dad—although they knew he was secretly proud of his kids’ misadventures.
But this trip was different. They’d brought the Whisper Bird down to this seemingly insignificant planetoid and set up camp in the middle of a vast rock-lined plain.
“You two, stay close to camp,” Auric Graf had said. “There’s a storm brewing and I don’t want to have to chase after you when it hits.”
Milo had disappeared almost immediately, and Lina received an urgent holo-message just a few hours later:
“Need your help. Come to the swamp, now!”
But where in the swamp? According to the Bird’s first sensor sweep, the marsh fields were huge, covering at least two-thirds of the planet’s surface. This was typical of Milo—to get so excited that he forgot to give basic information, like where he was!
“Mistress Lina, the signal….”
“I see it, Crater,” Lina replied, watching the red dot trace across the screen. “Almost there.”
Ahead, the landspeeder’s floodlight glinted off metal. Lina slowed, bringing the craft to a halt.
Milo’s speeder bike lay on its side in shallow water.
“Well, that’s not going to help the paintwork,” CR-8R scolded as Lina leapt from her seat and splashed over to the abandoned speeder. She tried the bike’s controls. They were dead, no power at all. What had happened here? Had Milo crashed?
“Master Milo,” CR-8R called out. “Where are you?”
“Crater, shhh!” Lina hissed. “This place could be crawling with razor-boars.”
“Well, excuse me for trying to locate your wayward brother,” CR-8R replied haughtily. “I just assumed that’s why you dragged me out into this abominable swamp. For all we know, Master Milo is up to his neck in a sink-bog.”
“And if we’re lucky we’ll lose you in one, too,” Lina muttered under her breath.
She didn’t mean it, of course. CR-8R had been around Lina’s entire life. He was one of her mom’s pet projects, a crazy mash-up of a droid constructed from a dozen different models. His base had been a probe droid, and it still had four manipulator arms that twitched as CR-8R hovered out of the landspeeder. His upper body was made up of a medical droid’s waist welded to the torso of an astromech.
Not even his arms matched. The left was taken from an obsolete DUM-series, while the right was the shining silver limb of a protocol droid, but with interchangeable tool attachments instead of a hand.
Lina had no idea where Mom had found CR-8R’s mournful chrome head but knew that it was packed with information—most of it useless. For a brain, Rhyssa had used a protocol droid’s processor unit, meaning that CR-8R had a tendency to be prim, proper, and more than a little irritable at times. The patchwork droid had their best interests at heart. That didn’t make him any less annoying though.
Lina righted the speeder bike. “He can’t have gone far.” She reached into the tool belt she kept slung around her waist and found a small cylindrical comlink.
“Milo,” she said into the device. “We’ve found your speeder, but where are you?”
The only answer was a scream from beyond the trees.
“Milo!” Lina yelled, running through the dense foliage. Filthy water splashed up her legs, reeking like rotten rikknit eggs. She didn’t care. Her brother was in trouble. Her brother was….
Laughing?
In the clearing in front of her, Milo was wallowing around in a huge sludgy puddle, covered from head to toe in dark crimson mud.
“Milo?” she asked, feeling her temper flare. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Milo looked over at her, his muck-covered face splitting into a toothy grin.
“I almost had it, Sis!”
Lina’s heart sank. “Had what?”
Milo grabbed his long wooden staff and struggled to his feet. His face was the picture of excitement. “It was like a Sullustan ash-rabbit, but huge, with a ridge of spines—”
“Your message said you needed help,” Lina interrupted icily.
“I do,” he replied, looking confused. “To catch the ash-rabbit.”
“I thought you were in trouble!”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because, 99.998 percent of the time, you are!” CR-8R said, hovering into the clearing.
“Oh, no,” moaned Milo, “why did y
ou have to bring Crater? He’ll definitely tell Mom and Dad.”
“Engaging lecture mode,” announced CR-8R, drawing another groan from Lina’s brother. “Master Milo, your parents specifically requested—”
Before CR-8R could finish, a small creature landed on top of his polished head. It had floppy ears and gangly arms that wrapped around the droid’s face. CR-8R cried out in alarm while both Lina and Milo snorted with laughter.
“I knew I would hate this place,” the droid complained, swatting at the creature with his manipulator arms. “What is it? A sludge salamander? A horned billipede?”
“There’s no need to get your processors in a twist.” Lina giggled, then tried to pull a serious face. “Morq, leave Crater alone. You know he hates when you jump on him.”
The creature looked at the children with small orange eyes and cackled with glee. Morq was the family pet, a mischievous Kowakian monkey-lizard and the bane of CR-8R’s existence.
“It’s that no-good animal of yours?” CR-8R spluttered. “I should have known from the stench!”
“You don’t have any smell receptors,” Lina said as Morq danced a jig on the droid’s head.
“Which shows just how bad the thing reeks!” CR-8R insisted, firing a sudden spark from the electroshock prod attached to one of his many manipulator arms. The discharge hit Morq in the rear and, with a wail, the monkey-lizard bounded off CR-8R’s head to scurry back up a tree.
Lina sighed. “Good going, Crater. Now we’ll never get him down again.”
“Serves the beast right,” CR-8R murmured.
Lina shook her head, trying not to grin. Someone had to behave like a responsible adult.
“Okay, let’s get Milo’s bike onto the back of the landspeeder—”
“There it is!” shouted Milo, running from the clearing before Lina could stop him.
“Milo, come back!”
“It’s the ash-rabbit, Lina,” he called over his shoulder. “Come on!”
Rolling her eyes, Lina raced after her brother. “Just once, he’ll do what I say. Just once.”
But this was not going to be that day. She found Milo crouched behind a moss-covered rock. On the other side sat a small purple creature eating a marsh-fruit.
“That’s the ash-rabbit?” Lina said, dropping down beside her brother. “I thought you said it was huge?”
“Well, huge-ish,” admitted Milo, “and you’ll scare it away if you crash around like a happabore.”
Milo raised his arm toward the rabbit, and Lina saw that he was wearing their dad’s wrist-mounted net launcher. Auric Graf sometimes used the net gun to snare alien creatures. Like most of Dad’s field equipment, Milo wasn’t supposed to touch it, let alone take it from the camp.
“You’re trying to catch it?” she asked.
“Of course I am. How else are we going to study the thing?”
“Holographs? Bioscans? Like a normal person!”
“Nah,” said Milo, preparing to fire. “Nothing like getting up close and personal with nature.”
Lina watched as her brother lined up the shot but never saw him fire the net. Something snagged the back of her tunic and she was dragged into the air.
SURPRISED BY HIS sister’s sudden cry, Milo’s shot went wide, and the net wrapped uselessly around a tree.
“Lina! It got away!” he moaned as the ash-rabbit leapt back into the undergrowth.
“Like I care!” came Lina’s voice from above.
Milo looked up to see Lina hanging upside down, wrapped in barbed vines.
“What are you doing up there?”
“Getting up close and personal with nature!”
CR-8R crashed through the trees. “Mistress Lina, you appear to have been snared by creepervines!”
“I had noticed, thanks.”
“They’re fascinating,” CR-8R added. “Why, just three years ago, your father recorded an incident where they skeletonized a bantha in only—”
“Not helpful,” snapped Lina, looking up into the canopy. The creepers stretched down from a fleshy body with a wide, snarling mouth. She had to get free, but the vines were too strong.
“Where’s my fusioncutter?” she said, feeling for her tool belt.
“You mean this?” Milo shouted up from the ground. He was holding a long tubelike device in his hand. It must have fallen out of her belt when the creepers grabbed her.
“Throw it up to me.”
Her brother tried, but it dropped uselessly back down. She was too high, and getting higher by the second.
“Crater, you try!”
“Gladly,” CR-8R said, snatching up the tool. “Of course, the interesting thing about creepervines is that they largely hunt by sound. Stay quiet and they may lose interest.”
Lina looked up at the open mouth that was getting closer with every passing moment.
“Not going to happen, Crater. Just throw it!”
Spinning a manipulator arm like a propeller, CR-8R sent the fusioncutter soaring up to Lina. She stretched out, but the tool flew straight past her.
“Oops,” said CR-8R, “I may have miscalculated the required distance.”
Lina watched as the cutter arced up into the canopy, only to be plucked from the air by a small bony hand.
“Morq!” Lina shouted in joy, as the rust-colored monkey-lizard jumped down and landed on her legs. Nimbly avoiding a grabbing vine, Morq scampered down her body to press the fusioncutter into her hand.
Lina pulled herself up, fighting the pressure of her ever-tightening restraints, and fired the tool. She sliced through the creepers at her feet and felt the vines loosen, but there was no time to celebrate. With a cry, Lina and Morq plunged into a huge puddle.
“You okay?” Milo asked.
“No thanks to you,” Lina shot back, wincing as she tried to push herself up.
CR-8R whirred over to examine her throbbing shoulder. “Mild bruising, that’s all.”
“Doesn’t feel mild,” Lina complained.
Pulling her tunic’s collar aside, the droid gave the offending shoulder a quick blast with his bacta-spray. “That should reduce the swelling until we get back to your parents.”
Lina looked down at herself. Her clothes were in tatters and she was drenched from head to foot. “Mom’s going to lose it!”
“Not if she doesn’t know,” Milo said. “We can get changed before she even notices.”
Lina gave her brother a withering look. “And what about Crater? You gonna wipe his memory?”
The droid looked appalled. “He most certainly is not!”
“Which is exactly why you should have left him behind!” Milo said, storming through the trees with Morq perched on his shoulder. “No, in fact—you should have stayed there yourself. At least then you wouldn’t have made me lose the rabbit.”
Lina splashed after him. “I made you miss it? Lo-Bro, you couldn’t hit a sleeping rancor with a net gun!”
“Don’t call me that!” Milo hated when she used the nickname she’d given him when he was little.
“Now, that’s enough,” cut in CR-8R. “Arguing isn’t going to fix Master Milo’s speeder bike or—”
The droid froze, both midair and midsentence.
“Crater?” Lina said, concerned. “You okay?”
“Receiving data,” the droid reported, his voice more stilted than usual. “Processing.”
“Data? Where from?”
“Mistress Rhyssa.”
“From Mom?” Milo groaned. “She’s mad, isn’t she?”
CR-8R didn’t respond but shook his head as if trying to wake himself up.
“Crater, do you need to reboot?”
“No,” the droid replied. “All my systems are working perfectly, thank you very much.”
“So, what’s the data?” asked Lina.
“I’m not sure. It’s heavily encrypted.”
“Decode it then!”
“What do you think I’m doing? The binary language your mother has used is positively archaic. No one has spoken it in centuries.”
“Well, if you’re not up to the job,” teased Milo.
“I am more than capable, thank you. It will just take time.”
“Time that we don’t have,” said Lina, glancing up at the sky. “We better take a look at your speeder.”
Milo’s shoulders dropped when he saw his bike lying in the water. “Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. I may have flooded the intake a little.”
“And the rest,” said Lina, pushing past him to flip open the bike’s access hatch. “Look at it. There’s marshweed all around the steering vanes, and as for the calibrators—”
“I get it, Sis,” Milo said, his cheeks blazing red. “I messed up. Again. Let’s just get it onto the back of the landspeeder. Mom will be able to fix it.”
“I’ll fix it for you,” she said. “That way Mom might not find out exactly how much trouble you got into. Dad’s bound to have a spare repulsor array back at camp. Just help me get it onto the landspeeder.”
Milo gave his sister a hand with lifting the malfunctioning bike onto the larger vehicle. The landspeeder dipped worryingly and Lina hoped that its stabilizers would hold up to the extra weight. She had been pestering her dad to replace the flying junk heap for months now, but, as always, he’d ruffled her hair and said that she could keep it in the air. “My little chief engineer.”
Of course she could—Lina had played in the Whisper Bird’s workshop ever since she could hold a hydrospanner—but that wasn’t the point. Why did all of the Grafs’ stuff have to fall apart before they finally replaced it? It wasn’t like they couldn’t afford new equipment, with all the credits they’d made over the past year or so. Since the end of the Clone Wars, people had started to travel farther into Wild Space again, and travelers needed maps.
After making sure that the speeder bike was safely secured, Lina jumped behind the controls. Her brother was already hunkered down low in the passenger seat, still sulking that his expedition had gone so wrong. Morq was perched on Milo’s shoulder, happily chewing a fleshy pink fruit, much to the disgust of CR-8R, who was getting sprayed with pulp. Morq was a notoriously messy eater.
