Hero's Trial: Agents of Chaos I

by James Luceno

  Before his fall, however, Anakin spends many years being trained as a Jedi by Obi-Wan Kenobi. When the Clone Wars break out, pitting the Republic against the secessionist Trade Federation, Anakin becomes a war hero and one of the galaxy’s greatest Jedi Knights. But his love for the Naboo Queen and Senator Padmé Amidala, and his friendship with Supreme Chancellor Palpatine—secretly known as the Sith Lord Darth Sidious—will be his undoing …

  If you’re a reader looking to jump into the Rise of the Empire era, here are five great starting points:

  • Labyrinth of Evil, by James Luceno: Luceno’s tale of the last days of the Clone Wars is equal parts compelling detective story and breakneck adventure, leading directly into the beginning of Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith.

  • Revenge of the Sith, by Matthew Stover: This masterfully written novelization fleshes out the on-screen action of Episode III, delving deeply into everything from Anakin’s internal struggle and the politics of the dying Republic to the intricacies of lightsaber combat.

  • Republic Commando: Hard Contact, by Karen Traviss: The first of the Republic Commando books introduces us to a band of clone soldiers, their trainers, and the Jedi generals who lead them, mixing incisive character studies with a deep understanding of the lives of soldiers at war.

  • Death Troopers, by Joe Schreiber: A story of horror aboard a Star Destroyer that you’ll need to read with the lights on. Supporting roles by Han Solo and his Wookiee sidekick, Chewbacca, are just icing on the cake.

  • The Han Solo Adventures, by Brian Daley: Han and Chewie come to glorious life in these three swashbuckling tales of smuggling, romance, and danger in the early days before they meet Luke and Leia.

  Read on for an excerpt from a Star Wars novel set in the Rise of the Empire era.

  FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WINDU

  In my dreams, I always do it right.

  In my dreams, I’m on the arena balcony. Geonosis. Orange glare slices shadow from my eyes. Below on the sand: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Senator Padmé Amidala. On the rough-shaped stone within reach of my arm: Nute Gunray. Within reach of my blade: Jango Fett.

  And Master Dooku.

  No. Master no more. Count Dooku.

  I may never get used to calling him that. Even in dreams.

  Jango Fett bristles with weapons. An instinctive killer: the deadliest man in the galaxy. Jango can kill me in less than a second. I know it. Even if I had never seen Kenobi’s report from Kamino, I can feel the violence Jango radiates: in the Force, a pulsar of death.

  But I do it right.

  My blade doesn’t light the underside of Fett’s square jaw. I don’t waste time with words. I don’t hesitate.

  I believe.

  In my dreams, the purple flare of my blade sizzles the gray hairs of Dooku’s beard, and in the critical semisecond it takes Jango Fett to aim and fire, I twitch that blade and take Dooku with me into death.

  And save the galaxy from civil war.

  I could have done it.

  I could have done it.

  Because I knew. I could feel it.

  In the swirl of the Force around me, I could feel the connections Dooku had forged among Jango and the Trade Federation, the Geonosians, the whole Separatist movement: connections of greed and fear, of deception and bald intimidation. I did not know what they were—I did not know how Dooku had forged them, or why—but I felt their power: the power of what I now know is a web of treason he had woven to catch the galaxy.

  I could feel that without him to maintain its weave, to repair its flaws and double its thinning strands, the web would rot, would shrivel and decay until a mere breath would shred it and scatter its strings into the infinite stellar winds.

  Dooku was the shatterpoint.

  I knew it.

  That is my gift.

  Imagine a Corusca gem: a mineral whose interlocking crystalline structure makes it harder than durasteel. You can strike one with a five-kilo hammer and do no more than dent the hammer’s face. Yet the same crystalline structure that gives the Corusca strength also gives it shatterpoints: spots where a precise application of carefully measured force—no more than a gentle tap—will break it into pieces. But to find these shatterpoints, to use them to shape the Corusca gem into beauty and utility, requires years of study, an intimate understanding of crystal structure, and rigorous practice to train the hand in the perfect combination of strength and precision to produce the desired cut.

  Unless you have a talent like mine.

  I can see shatterpoints.

  The sense is not sight, but see is the closest word Basic has for it: it is a perception, a feel of how what I look upon fits into the Force, and how the Force binds it to itself and to everything else. I was six or seven standard years old—well into my training in the Jedi Temple—before I realized that other students, full-grown Jedi Knights, even wise Masters, could sense such connections only with difficulty, and only with concentration and practice. The Force shows me strengths and weaknesses, hidden flaws and unexpected uses. It shows me vectors of stress that squeeze or stretch, torque or shear; it shows me how patterns of these vectors intersect to form the matrix of reality.

  Put simply: when I look at you through the Force, I can see where you break.

  I looked at Jango Fett on the sand in the Geonosian arena. A perfect combination of weapons, skills, and the will to use them: an interlocking crystal of killer. The Force hinted a shatterpoint, and I left a headless corpse on the sand. The deadliest man in the galaxy.

  Now: just dead.

  Situations have shatterpoints, like gems. But those of situations are fluid, ephemeral, appearing for a bare instant, vanishing again to leave no trace of their existence. They are always a function of timing.

  There is no such thing as a second chance.

  If—when—I next encounter Dooku, he will be the war’s shatterpoint no longer. I can’t stop this war with a single death.

  But on that day in the Geonosian arena, I could have.

  Some days after the battle, Master Yoda had found me in a meditation chamber at the Temple. “Your friend he was,” the ancient Master had said, even as he limped through the door. It is a peculiar gift of Yoda’s that he always seems to know what I’m thinking. “Respect you owed him. Even affection. Cut him down you could not—not for merely a feeling.”

  But I could have.

  I should have.

  Our Order prohibits personal attachments for precisely this reason. Had I not honored him so—even loved him—the galaxy might be at peace right now. Merely a feeling, Yoda said.

  I am a Jedi.

  I have been trained since birth to trust my feelings.

  But which feelings should I trust?

  When I faced the choice to kill a former Jedi Master, or to save Kenobi and young Skywalker and the Senator … I let the Force choose for me. I followed my instincts.

  I made the Jedi choice.

  And so: Dooku escaped. And so: the galaxy is at war. And so: many of my friends have been slaughtered.

  There is no such thing as a second chance.

  Strange: Jedi I am, yet I drown in regret for having spared a life.

  Many survivors of Geonosis suffer from nightmares. I have heard tale after tale from the Jedi healers who have counseled them. Nightmares are inevitable; there has not been such a slaughter of Jedi since the Sith War, four thousand years ago. None of them could have imagined how it would feel to stand in that arena, surrounded by the corpses of their friends, in the blazing orange noon and the stench and the blood-soaked sand. I may be the only veteran of Geonosis who doesn’t have nightmares of that place.

  Because in my dreams, I always do it right.

  My nightmare is what I find when I wake up.

  Jedi have shatterpoints, too.

  Mace Windu stopped in the doorway and tried to recover his calm. An arc of sweat darkened the cowl of his robe, and his tunic clung to his skin: he’d come straight from a trainin
g bout at the Temple without taking time to shower. And the brisk pace—almost a jog—he’d maintained through the labyrinth of the Galactic Senate had offered no chance for him to cool off.

  Palpatine’s private office, in the Supreme Chancellor’s suite beneath the Senate’s Great Rotunda, opened before him, vast and stark. An expanse of polished ebonite floor; a few simple, soft chairs; a flat trestle desk, also ebonite. No pictures, paintings, or decorations other than two lone statues; only floor-to-ceiling holographic repeaters showing real-time images of Galactic City as seen from the pinnacle of the Senate Dome. Outside, the orbital mirrors would soon turn their faces from Coruscant’s sun, bringing twilight to the capital.

  Within was only Yoda. Alone. Perched solemnly on his hoverchair, hands folded around the head of his stick. “On time you are,” the ancient Master observed, “but barely. Take a chair; composed we must be. Serious, I fear this is.”

  “I wasn’t expecting a party.” Mace’s boot heels clacked on the polished floor. He pulled one of the soft, plain chairs closer to Yoda and sat beside him, facing the desk. Tension made his jaw ache. “The courier said this is about the operation on Haruun Kal.”

  The fact that of all the members of the Jedi Council and the Republic High Command, only the two senior members of the Council had been summoned by the Chancellor, implied that the news was not good.

  These two senior members could hardly have appeared more different. Yoda was barely two-thirds of a meter tall, with skin green as Chadian wander-kelp and great bulging eyes that could sometimes seem almost to take on a light of their own; Mace was tall for a human, less than a hand’s breadth short of two meters, with shoulders broad and powerful, heavy arms, dark eyes, and a grim set to his jaw. Where Yoda had let his sparse remnants of hair straggle at random, Mace’s skull was smooth-shaven, the color of polished lammas.

  But their greatest difference perhaps lay in the feel of the two Jedi Masters. Yoda emanated a sense of mellow wisdom, combined with the impish sense of humor characteristic of the true sage; but his great age and vast experience sometimes made him seem a bit removed, even detached. Nearing nine hundred years of age led him to naturally take the long view. Mace, in contrast, had been elevated to the Jedi Council before his thirtieth birthday. His demeanor was exactly opposite. Lean. Driven. Intense. He radiated incisive intellect and unconquerable will.

  As of the Battle of Geonosis, which had opened the Clone Wars, Mace had been on the Council for more than twenty standard years. It had been ten since anyone had last seen him smile.

  He sometimes wondered privately if he would ever smile again.

  “But it is not the planet Haruun Kal that brings you in a sweat to this office,” Yoda said now. His tone was light and understanding, but his gaze was sharp. “Concerned for Depa, you are.”

  Mace lowered his head. “I know: the Force will bring what it will. But Republic Intelligence has reported that the Separatists have pulled back; their base outside Pelek Baw is abandoned—”

  “Yet return she has not.”

  Mace knotted his fingers together. A breath brought his voice back to its customary deep, flat dispassion. “Haruun Kal is still nominally a Separatist planet. And she’s a wanted woman. It won’t be easy for her to get offworld. Or even to signal for extraction—the local militia use all kinds of signal jamming, and whatever they don’t jam they triangulate; whole partisan bands have been wiped out by one incautious transmission—”

  “Your friend she is.” Yoda used his stick to poke Mace on the arm. “Care for her, you do.”

  Mace didn’t meet his eyes. His feelings for Depa Billaba ran deep.

  She had been onworld for four standard months. She couldn’t communicate regularly; Mace had tracked her activities by sporadic Republic Intelligence reports of sabotage at the Separatist starfighter base, and the fruitless expeditions of the Balawai militias trying—and failing—to wipe out Depa’s guerrillas, or even contain them. More than a month ago, Republic Intelligence had sent word that the Separatists had pulled back to the Gevarno Cluster, because they could no longer maintain and defend their base. Her success could not have been more brilliant.

  But he feared to learn at what cost.

  “But it can’t simply be that she’s missing, or …,” he murmured. A dark flush spread over his bare dome of skull when he realized he’d spoken his thoughts aloud. He felt Yoda’s eyes on him still, and gave half an apologetic shrug. “I was only thinking: if she’d been captured or—or killed—there would be no need for such secrecy …”

  The creases on Yoda’s face deepened around his mouth, and he made that tchk sound of mild disapproval that any Jedi would instantly recognize. “Frivolous, speculation is, when patience will reveal all.”

  Mace nodded silently. One did not argue with Master Yoda; in the Jedi Temple, this was learned in infancy. No Jedi ever forgot it. “It’s … maddening, Master. If only … I mean, ten years ago, we could have simply reached out—”

  “Cling to the past, a Jedi cannot,” Yoda interrupted sternly. His green stare reminded Mace not to speak of the shadow that had darkened Jedi perception of the Force. This was not discussed outside the Temple. Not even here. “Member of the Jedi Council, she is. Powerful Jedi. Brilliant warrior—”

  “She’d better be.” Mace tried to smile. “I trained her.”

  “But worry you do. Too much. Not only for Depa, but for all the Jedi. Ever since Geonosis.”

  The smile wasn’t working. He stopped trying. “I don’t want to talk about Geonosis.”

  “Known this for months, I have.” Yoda poked him again, and Mace looked up. The ancient Master leaned toward him, ears curled forward, and his huge green eyes glimmered softly. “But when, finally, to talk you want … listen, I will.”

  Mace accepted this with a silent inclination of his head. He’d never doubted it. But still, he preferred to discuss something else.

  Anything else.

  “Look at this place,” he murmured, nodding at the expanse of the Supreme Chancellor’s office. “Even after ten years, the difference between Palpatine and Valorum … How this office was, in those days—”

  Yoda lifted his head in that reverse nod of his. “Remember Finis Valorum well, I do. Last of a great line, he was.” Some vast distance drifted through his gaze: he might have been looking back along his nine hundred years as a Jedi.

  It was unsettling to contemplate that the Republic, seemingly eternal in its millennium-long reign, was not much older than Yoda himself. Sometimes, in the tales Yoda told of his long-vanished younger days, a Jedi might have heard the youth of the Republic itself: brash, confident, bursting with vitality as it expanded across the galaxy, bringing peace and justice to cluster after cluster, system after system, world after world.

  For Mace, it was even more unsettling to contemplate the contrast Yoda was seeing.

  “Connected with the past, Valorum was. Rooted deep in tradition’s soil.” In the wave of his hand, Yoda seemed to summon Finis Valorum’s dazzling array of antique furniture gleaming with exotic oils, his artworks and sculptures and treasures from a thousand worlds. Legacies of thirty generations of House Valorum had once filled this office. “Perhaps too deep: a man of history, was Valorum. Palpatine …” Yoda’s eyes drifted closed. “A man of today, Palpatine is.”

  “You say that as though it pains you.”

  “Perhaps it does. Or perhaps: my pain is only of this day, not its man.”

  “I prefer the office like this.” Mace half nodded around the sweep of open floor. Austere. Unpretentious and uncompromising. To Mace, it was a window into Palpatine’s character: the Supreme Chancellor lived entirely for the Republic. Simple in dress. Direct in speech. Unconcerned with ornamentation or physical comfort. “A shame he can’t touch the Force. He might have made a fine Jedi.”

  “But then, another Supreme Chancellor would we need.” Yoda smiled gently. “Better this way, perhaps it is.”

  Mace acknowledged the point with
a slight bow.

  “Admire him, you do.”

  Mace frowned. He’d never thought about it. His adult life had been spent at the orders of the Supreme Chancellor … but he served the office, not the man. What did he think of the Supreme Chancellor as a person? What difference could that make?

  “I suppose I do.” Mace vividly recalled what the Force had shown him while he watched Palpatine sworn in as Supreme Chancellor, ten years before: Palpatine was himself a shatterpoint on which the future of the Republic—perhaps even the whole galaxy—depended. “The only other person I can imagine leading the Republic through this dark hour is … well—” He opened a hand. “—you, Master Yoda.”

  Yoda rocked back on his hoverchair and made the rustling snuffle that served him for a laugh. “No politician am I, foolish one.”

  He still occasionally spoke as though Mace were a student. Mace didn’t mind. It made him feel young. Everything else these days made him feel old.

  Yoda’s laughter faded. “And no fit leader for this Republic would I be.” He lowered his voice even further, to barely above a whisper. “Clouded by darkness are my eyes; the Force shows me only suffering, and destruction, and the rise of a long, long night. Better off without the Force, leaders perhaps are; able to see well enough, young Palpatine seems.”

  “Young” Palpatine—who had at least ten years on Mace, and looked twice that—chose that moment to enter the room, accompanied by another man. Yoda stepped down from his hoverchair. Mace rose in respect. The Jedi Masters bowed, greeting the Supreme Chancellor with their customary formality. He waved the courtesies aside. Palpatine looked tired: flesh seemed to be dissolving beneath his sagging skin, deepening his already hollowed cheeks.