Exile

by Aaron Allston

  “Good-bye, Mom,” he said. “Good-bye, Dad.”

  acknowledgments

  Thanks go to my editor, Shelly Shapiro; to Keith Clayton of Del Rey; to Sue Rostoni and Leland Chee of Lucas Licensing, for tieing off loose ends and untieing knotted plot problems; to my agent, Russell Galen; and to my Eagle-Eyes (Chris Cassidy, Kelly Frieders, Helen Keier, Bob Quinlan, Roxanne Quinlan, and Luray Richmond).

  About the Author

  AARON ALLSTON was the New York Times bestselling author of thirteen Star Wars novels, as well as the Doc Sidhe novels, which mix 1930s-style hero-pulps with Celtic myth. In addition to being a writer, he was a longtime game designer, and in 2006 was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design (AAGAD) Hall of Fame. Aaron Allston died in 2014.

  Books by Aaron Allston

  Galatea in 2-D

  Bard’s Tale Series (with Holly Lisle)

  Thunder of the Captains

  Wrath of the Princes

  Car Warriors Series

  Double Jeopardy

  Doc Sidhe Series

  Doc Sidhe

  Sidhe-Devil

  Star Wars: X-Wing series

  Wraith Squadron

  Iron Fist

  Solo Command

  Starfighters of Adumar

  Star Wars: New Jedi Order series

  Rebel Dream

  Rebel Stand

  Star Wars: Legacy of the Force series

  Betrayal

  Exile

  Fury

  Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi series

  Outcast

  Backlash

  Conviction

  Terminator 3 Series

  Terminator Dream

  Terminator Hunt

  STAR WARS—LEGENDS

  What is a legend? According to the Random House Dictionary, a legend is “a nonhistorical or unverifiable story handed down by tradition from earlier times and popularly accepted as historical.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “a story from the past that is believed by many people but cannot be proved to be true.” And Wikipedia says, “Legends are tales that, because of the tie to a historical event or location, are believable, though not necessarily believed.” Because of this inherent believability, legends tend to live on in a culture, told and retold even though they are generally regarded as fiction.

  Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a legend was born: The story of Luke Skywalker and his fellow heroes, Princess Leia and Han Solo. Three blockbuster movies introduced these characters and their stories to millions of people who embraced these tales and began to build upon them, as is done with myths everywhere. And thus novels, short stories, and comic books were published, expanding the Star Wars universe introduced in the original trilogy and later enhanced by the prequel movies and the animated TV series The Clone Wars. The enormous body of work that grew around the films and The Clone Wars came to be known as The Expanded Universe.

  Now, as new movies, television shows, and books move into the realm of the official canon, The Expanded Universe must take its place firmly in the realm of legends. But, like all great legends, the fact that we can’t prove the veracity of every detail doesn’t make the stories any less entertaining or worthy of being read. These legends remain true to the spirit of Star Wars and in that way are another avenue through which we can get to know and understand our beloved heroes in that galaxy far, far away.

  —Del Rey Books, May 2014

  Turn the page or jump to the timeline of Star Wars Legends novels to learn more.

  chapter one

  He will choose the fate of the weak.

  He will win and break his chains.

  He will choose how he will be loved.

  He will strengthen himself through sacrifice.

  He will make a pet.

  He will strengthen himself through pain.

  He will balance between peace and conflict.

  He will know brotherhood.

  He will remake himself.

  He will immortalize his love.

  —“Common Themes in Prophecies Recorded in the Symbology of Knotted Tassels;” by Dr. Heilan Rotham, University of Pangalactic Cultural Studies. Call for papers: the university invites submissions from khipulogists and fiber-record analysts on the subject of the remaining untranslated tassels from the Lorrd Artifact. Symposium dates may change, subject to current security situation.

  SITH MEDITATION SPHERE,

  HEADING, CORUSCANT—ESTIMATED

  It was odd having to trust a ship.

  Ben Skywalker was alone in the vessel he’d found on Ziost, trusting it to understand that he wanted it to take him home. No navigation array, no controls, no pilot’s seat … nothing. Through the bulkheads he could see stars as smeared points of light, but he’d stopped finding the ship’s transparency unsettling. The hull was there. He could both see it and not see it. He felt he was in the heart of a hollowed red gem making its sedate way back to the Core.

  And there was no yoke or physical control panel, so he had to think his command. The strange ship, more like a ball of rough red stone than a vessel made in a shipyard, responded to the Force.

  Can’t you go faster? I’ll be an old man by the time I get back.

  The ship felt instantly annoyed. Ben listened. In his mind, the ship spoke in a male voice that had no sound or real form, but it spoke: and it wasn’t amused by his impatience. It showed him streaked white lights streaming from a central point in a black void, a pilot’s view of hyperspace, and then an explosion.

  “Okay, so you’re going as fast as you can …” Ben felt the ship’s brief satisfaction that its idiot pilot had understood. He wondered who’d made it. It was hard not to think of it as alive, like the Yuuzhan Vong ships, but he settled for seeing it as a droid, an artifact with a personality and—yes, emotions. Like Shaker.

  Sorry, Shaker. Sorry to leave you to sort it all out.

  The astromech droid would be fine, he knew it. Ben had dropped him off on Drewwa. That was where Shaker came from, like Kiara, and so they were both home now. Astromechs were good, reliable, sensible units, and Shaker would hand her over to someone to take care of her, poor kid …

  Her dad’s dead and her whole life’s upended. They were just used to lure me to Ziost so someone could try to kill me. Why? Have I made that many enemies already?

  The ship felt irritated again, leaving Ben with the impression that he was being whiny, but he said nothing. Ben didn’t enjoy having his thoughts examined. He made a conscious effort to control his wandering mind. The ship knew his will, spoken or unspoken, and he still wasn’t sure what the consequences of that might be. Right then, it made him feel invaded, and the relief at finding the ancient ship and managing to escape Ziost in it had given way to worry, anger, and resentment.

  And impatience. He had a comlink, but he didn’t want to advertise his presence in case there were other ships pursuing him. He’d destroyed one. That didn’t mean there weren’t others.

  The Amulet wasn’t that important, so why am I a target now?

  The ship wouldn’t have gone any faster if he’d had a seat and a yoke to occupy himself, but he wouldn’t have felt so lost. He could almost hear Jacen reminding him that physical activity was frequently displacement, and that he needed to develop better mental discipline to rise above fidgeting restlessness. An unquiet mind wasn’t receptive, he said.

  Ben straightened his legs to rub a sore knee, then settled again cross-legged to try meditating. It was going to be a long journey.

  The bulkheads and deck were amber pumice, and from time to time, the surfaces seemed to burn with a fire embedded in the material. Whoever had made it had had a thing about flames. Ben tried not to think flame, in case the ship interpreted it as a command.

  But it wasn’t that stupid. It could almost think for him.

  He reached inside his tunic and felt the Amulet, the stupid worthless thing that didn’t seem to be an instrument of great Sith power after all, just a fancy bauble that Kiara’s dad
had been sent to deliver. Now the man was dead, all because of Ben, and the worst thing was that Ben didn’t know why.

  I need to find Jacen.

  Jacen wasn’t stupid, either, and it was hard to believe he’d been duped about the Amulet. Maybe it was part of some plan; if it was, Ben hoped it was worth Faskus’s life and Kiara’s misery.

  That’s my mission: put the Amulet of Kalara in Jacen’s hands. Nothing more, nothing less.

  Jacen could be anywhere now: in his offices on Coruscant, on the front line of some battle, hunting subversives. Maybe this weird Force-controlled ship could tap in and locate him. He’d be on the holonews. He always was: Colonel Jacen Solo, head of the Galactic Alliance Guard, all-around public hero holding back the threats of a galaxy. Okay, I’m feeling sorry for myself. Stop it. He couldn’t land this ship on a Coruscant strip and stroll away from it as if it were just a TIE fighter he’d salvaged. People would ask awkward questions. He wasn’t even sure what it was. And that meant it was one for Jacen to sort out.

  “Okay,” Ben said aloud. “Can you find Jacen Solo? Have you got a way of scanning comlinks? Can you find him in the Force?”

  The ship suggested he ought to be able to do that himself. Ben concentrated on Jacen’s face in his mind, and then tried to visualize the Anakin Solo, which was harder than he thought.

  The sphere ship seemed to be ignoring him. He couldn’t feel its voice; even when it wasn’t addressing him or reacting to him, there was a faint background noise in his mind that gave him the feeling the vessel was humming to itself, like someone occupied with a repetitive task.

  “Can you do it?” If it can’t, I’ll try to land inside the GAG compound and hope for the best. “You don’t want Galactic Alliance engineers crawling all over you with hydrospanners, I bet.”

  The ship told him to be patient, and that it had nothing a hydrospanner could grip anyway.

  Ben occupied himself with trying to pinpoint Jacen before the ship could. But Jacen’s trick of hiding in the Force had become permanent; Ben found he was impossible to track unless he wanted to be found, and right then there was nothing of him, not a whisper or an echo. Ben thought he might have more luck persuading the ship to seek holonews channels—or maybe it was so old that it didn’t have the technology to find those frequencies.

  Hey, come on. If it managed to destroy a freighter on the power of my thoughts alone, it can find a holonews signal.

  Ah, said the ship.

  Ben’s mind was suffused with a real sense of discovery. The ship dropped out of hyperspace for a moment and seemed to cast around, and then it felt as if it had found something. The starfield—visible somehow, even though the fiery, rocky bulkheads were still there—skewed as the ship changed course and jumped back into hyperspace. It radiated a sense of happy satisfaction, seeming almost … excited.

  “Found him?”

  The ship said it had found what it was seeking. Ben decided not to engage it in a discussion of how it could find a shutdown Jacen hiding in the Force.

  “Well, let me know when we get within ten thousand klicks,” Ben said. “I can risk using the comlink then.”

  The ship didn’t answer. It hummed happily to itself, silent but filling Ben’s head with ancient harmonies of a kind he’d never imagined sounds could create.

  COLONEL JACEN SOLO’S CABIN, STAR

  DESTROYER ANAKIN SOLO, EXTENDED

  COURSE, HEADING 000—CORUSCANT, VIA

  THE CONTRUUM SYSTEM

  None of the crew of the Anakin Solo seemed to find it odd that the ship was taking an extraordinarily circuitous course back to Coruscant.

  Jacen sensed the general resigned patience. It was what they expected from the head of the Galactic Alliance Guard, and they asked no questions. He also sensed Ben Skywalker, and it was taking every scrap of his concentration to focus on his apprentice and locate him.

  He’s okay. I know it. But something didn’t go as planned.

  Jacen homed in on a point of blue light on the bridge repeater set in the bulkhead. He felt Ben at the back of his mind the way he might smell a familiar but elusive scent, the kind that was so distinctive as to be unmistakable. Unharmed, alive, well—but something wasn’t right. The disturbance in the Force—a faint prickling sharpness at the back of his throat that he’d never felt before—made Jacen anxious; these days he didn’t like what he didn’t know. It was a stark contrast with the days when he had wandered the galaxy in search of the esoteric and the mysterious for the sake of new Force knowledge. Of late, he wanted certainty. He wanted order, and order of his own making.

  I wasn’t ridding the galaxy of chaos then. Times have changed. I’m responsible for worlds now, not just myself.

  Ben’s mission would have taken him … where, exactly? Ziost. Pinpointing a fourteen-year-old boy—not even a ship, just fifty-five kilos of humanity—in a broad corridor coiling around the Perlemian Trade Route was a tall order even with help from the Force.

  He’s got a secure comlink. But he won’t use it. I taught him to keep transmissions to a minimum. But Ben, if you’re in trouble, you have to break silence …

  Jacen waited, staring through the shifting displays and readouts that mirrored those on the operations consoles at the heart of the ship. He’d started to lose the habit of waiting for the Force to reveal things to him. It was easy to do after taking so much into his own hands and forcing destiny in the last few months.

  Somewhere in the Anakin Solo, he felt Lumiya as a swirling eddy eating away at a riverbank. He let go and magnified his presence in the Force.

  Ben … I’m here, Ben …

  The more Jacen relaxed and let the Force sweep him up—and it was now hard to let go and be swept, much harder than harnessing its power—the more he had a sense of Ben being accompanied. Then … then he had a sense of Ben seeking him out, groping to find him.

  He has something with him. Can’t be the Amulet, of course. He’ll be angry I sent him on an exercise in the middle of a war. I’ll have to explain that very, very carefully …

  It had just been a feint to get him free of Luke and Mara for a while, to give him some space to be himself. Ben wasn’t the Skywalkers’ little boy any longer. He would take on Jacen’s mantle one day, and that wasn’t a task for an overprotected child who’d never been allowed to test himself far from the overwhelmingly long shadow of his Jedi Grand Master father.

  You’re a lot tougher than they think. Aren’t you, Ben?

  Jacen felt the faint echo of Ben turn back on him and become an insistent pressure at the back of his throat. He took a breath. Now they both knew they were looking for each other. He snapped out of his meditation and headed for the bridge.

  “All stop.” The bridge was in semi-darkness, lit by the haze of soft green and blue light spilling from status displays that drained the color from the faces of the hand-picked, totally loyal crew. Jacen walked up to the main viewport and stared out at the stars as if he might see something. “Hold this station. We’re waiting for … a ship, I believe.”

  Lieutenant Tebut, current officer of the watch, glanced up from the console without actually raising her head. It gave her an air of disapproval, but it was purely a habit. “If you could narrow that down, sir …”

  “I don’t know what kind of ship,” Jacen said, “but I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “Right you are, sir.”

  They waited. Jacen was conscious of Ben, much more focused and intense now, a general mood of business-as-usual in the ship, and the undercurrent of Lumiya’s restlessness. Closing his eyes, he felt Ben’s presence more strongly than ever.

  Tebut put her fingertip to her ear as if she’d heard something in her bead-sized earpiece. “Unidentified vessel on intercept course. Range ten thousand kilometers off the port beam.”

  A pinpoint of yellow light moved against a constellation of colored markers on the holomonitor. The trace was small, perhaps the size of a starfighter, but it was a ship, closing in at speed.

&
nbsp; “I don’t know exactly what it is, sir.” The officer sounded nervous. Jacen was briefly troubled to think he now inspired fear for no apparent reason. “It doesn’t match any heat signature or drive profile we have. No indication if it’s armed. No transponder signal, either.”

  It was one small vessel, and this was a Star Destroyer. It was a curiosity rather than a threat. But Jacen took nothing for granted; there were always traps. This didn’t feel like one, but he still couldn’t identify that otherness he sensed. “It’s decelerating, sir.”

  “Let me know when you have a visual.” Jacen could almost taste where it was and considered bringing the Anakin Solo about so he could watch the craft become a point of the reflected light of Contruum’s star, then expand into a recognizable shape. But he didn’t need to; the tracking screen gave him a better view. “Ready cannons and don’t open fire except on my order.”

  In Jacen’s throat, on a line level with the base of his skull, there was the faint tingling of someone’s anxiety. Ben knew the Anakin Solo was getting a firing solution on him.

  Easy, Ben …

  “Contact in visual range, sir.” Tebut sounded relieved. The screen refreshed, changing from a schematic to a real image that only she and Jacen could see. She tapped her finger on the transparisteel. “Good grief, is that Yuuzhan Vong?”

  It was a disembodied eye with double—well, wings on each side. There was no other word to describe them. Membranes stretched between jointed fingers of vanes like webbing. The dull amber surface seemed covered in a tracery of blood vessels. For a brief moment, Jacen thought it was precisely that, an organic ship—a living vessel and ecosystem in its own right, of the kind that only the hated Yuuzhan Vong invaders had created. But it was somehow too regular, too constructed. Clustered spires of spiked projections rose from the hull like a compass rose, giving it a stylized cross-like appearance.