by Brian Daley
“Hasn’t everybody?” Lando answered neutrally. He extracted a cigarillo from his uniform pocket and lit it. Treasure, eh? Maybe there was something to be learned here, after all.
“Not quite everybody. Speaking for myself,” the scientist intoned, beginning at last to shuffle the thick seventy-eight-card deck, “my interest is purely scientific. What use have I for worldly wealth? One for you, one for you, one for you, one for you, and one for me. One for you, one for you, one for you …”
“Well, you surely came to the right place, then!” Vett Fori guffawed, picking up her cards. “No worldly wealth to get in your way at all! What are you doing here, anyway? We didn’t hire any anthropologists.”
Lighting another cigarette, Constable Phuna spoke bitterly. “Seeing how the other half lives, that’s what! I saw his entry papers. He’s studying life among the poor people of a rich system—on a fat Imperial grant, speaking of worldly wealth. We’re specimens, and he—”
“Please, please, my dear fellow, do not be offended. I aspire only to increase our understanding of the universe. And who knows, perhaps what I learn here can make things better in the future, not just for you, but for others, as—”
Vett Fori, Arun Feb, and T. Lund Phuna spoke almost simultaneously: “Don’t do us any favors!”
“Do me one,” Lando suggested in the embarrassed silence that followed, “tell me about this treasure business. And kindly deal me a card while you’re about it, will you?”
Bets were placed again and additional cards dealt out. Lando, having actually lost interest in the increasingly slim pickings the game afforded, watched absently as the card-chips in his hand transmuted themselves from one suit and value to another. He paid a good deal more attention to what the anthropologist had to say.
“The Toka are primitive natives of the Rafa System. As Assistant Supervisor Feb has so cogently pointed out, they and the present colonial establishment co-exist among the ruins of the ancient Sharu, enormous buildings which very nearly occupy every square kilometer of the habitable planets. I’ll see that, and raise a hundred credits.”
Arun Feb shook his head, but tossed in a pair of fifty-credit tokens from a dwindling stake. Vett Fori folded, a look of disgust on her face. She placed her still unlighted cigar back on the table’s edge.
Phuna raised another fifty. “Yeah, but the really important thing about the Rafa is the life-crystals they grow there.” He fingered a tiny jewel suspended in its setting from a slim chain around his sweaty neck.
Whett nodded. “Important to you, perhaps, good Constable. It is true, the life-orchards and the crystals harvested there are the chief export product of the colony, but my interest—and what I was paid to be professionally interested in—were the Toka legends, especially those bearing upon the Mindharp.”
Glancing at his cards, Lando saw he had a Mistress of Coins, a Three of Staves, and a Four of Sabres. He dropped the requisite number of tokens into the pot just as the Three turned into a Five of Flasks: twenty-three, but it didn’t really matter; Fives were wild anyway.
“Sabacc!”
He gathered in the largest pot of the evening thus far. “Mindharp?” the gambler asked. “What in the name of the Core is that?”
Ottdefa Whett wrinkled his nose, passing the rest of the deck to Lando. “Oh, just a ridiculous native superstition. There is supposed to be a lost magical artifact designed to call the Sharu—with whom the Toka identify in some strange fashion—to call the Sharu back when the Toka need them. Silly, as the Toka could not possibly ever have been contemporary with a civilization millions of years in the past, any more than human beings and dinosaurs—”
“I’ve seen dinosaurs,” Arun Feb interrupted. “On Trammis III.” The gigantic reptiloids of Trammis III were famous the galaxy over, and a chuckle circulated around the table.
“I take it, however,” Lando said as he shuffled and dealt the cards, then watched the bets pile up again, “that you have your own theories.” Somehow the talk of treasure seemed to have loosened up the pursestrings a bit, except perhaps for Vett Fori and her assistant. The gambler took a puff of his cigarillo. “Would you mind talking about them?”
The anthropologist looked as if he wouldn’t mind at all, even if requested to discourse standing barefoot on a large cake of ice while his ample gray hair were set on fire.
“Well, sir, the ruins, for all that they are ubiquitous, are impenetrable, closed completely on all sides without a sign of entryway. I daresay that all the collected treasures of a million years of advanced alien culture await the first adventurer to gain admittance. I don’t mind confessing to you all that I attempted it myself on several occasions. But the ruins are not only impenetrable, they are absolutely obdurate. No known tool or energy yields so much as a smudge upon their surfaces. I’ll see that, and raise five hundred. Constable?”
Grudgingly, the policeman threw in five hundred credits’ worth of tokens. Lando saw the bet with mild amazement and raised it a hundred credits himself.
“Sabacc!”
Hmmm. Things were looking up a little. He was now ahead two thousand credits. He dealt the cards a third time, wondering what prospects for a gambler might be met in the Rafa. The idea was tempting: only a handful of straight-line lightyears to navigate across, and, if he recalled correctly, a major spaceport with good technical facilities—which to him meant landing assistance from Ground Control. The Millennium Falcon was completely new to him. He’d be playing cards in the Dela System this very moment if he weren’t such an abysmally amateurish astrogator and ship-handler. He’d balked at the long, complicated voyage and reputedly tricky approach to a mountaintop landing field, despite well-founded rumors of rich pickings in an atmosphere friendly to his profession.
But the Rafa …
He won the third hand and a fourth, was now ahead some fifty-five hundred credits. The prospects of action seemed to be encouraging him, and he wasn’t noticing the heat as much anymore.
“Oh, I say, Captain Calrissian …” It was Whett again. As the stakes mounted, the anthropologist seemed the only one whose interest in desultory conversation hadn’t lagged.
“Yes?” Lando answered, shuffling and dealing the cards.
“Well, sir, I … that is, I find myself somewhat embarrassed financially at this moment. You see, I have exceeded the amount of cash I allowed myself for the evening’s entertainment, and I—”
Lando sat back disappointed, drew on his cigarillo. It was too much, he reflected, to have expected to get rich off this emaciated college professor. “I move around too much to extend credit, Ottdefa.”
“I appreciate that fully, sir, and wish to … well, how much would you consider allowing on a Class Two multi-phasic robot, if one may ask?”
“Once may indeed ask,” the gambler replied evenly. “Thirty-seven microcredits and a used shuttle pass. I’m not in the hardware business, my dear Ottdefa.” There was an idea, however: he could rent a pilot droid to get the ship from here to the Rafa—or wherever else he decided to go. He reconsidered. A Class Two was worth a good deal, perhaps half again the value of his spaceship. In these circumstances …
“All right, then, a kilocred—not a micro more. Take it or leave it.”
The Professor looked displeased, opened his mouth to bargain Lando up, examined the determined expression on the gambler’s face, and nodded. “A kilo, then. I haven’t any use for the thing in any event, it was attempting to help me break into the Sharu ruins, and I—’ ”
“Will you have a card, Supervisor Fori?” Lando interrupted.
“I’m out; this game’s gotten too rich for me, and I’m on shift in fifteen minutes.” Much the same was true for Arun Feb. They sat through the hand, enjoying watching somebody else lose for once.
Osuno Whett, however, bet heavily with his borrowed thousand, perhaps in an attempt to tap the gambler out. He was assisted in this by Constable Phuna. The money on the table grew and grew as Lando met their every raise, increasing th
e stakes himself. He wanted the game over with, one way or the other.
He’d dealt himself a Two of Sabres and a Four of Coins, taking an additional card after his two opponents had accepted them. Abruptly, the Four became a Three of Flasks, and his extra, which had been a Nine of Staves, transformed itself into the Idiot.
“Sabacc!” Lando cried in double triumph. To judge from the money on the table before him, and the lack of it in front of Whett and Phuna, that was the game. “Where can I pick up that droid, Ottdefa? I’m going to put it to work immediately as a naviga—”
“On Rafa IV, Captain. I left it in the custody of a storage-locker company, intending to sell it there or send for it—now, please don’t get angry! I have here the title and an official tax assessment indicating its true value. You may take these with you, or use them to get a fair price for the robot here!”
Lando had risen, violence flitting briefly—very briefly— through his mind. That he had been gulled like any amateur was his first coherent thought. That he had a small but powerful pistol secreted beneath his decorative cummerbund was his second. That he could wind up dead, or in jail, on this sweltering fistful of slag was his third.
There wasn’t time for a fourth.
“Hold on there, son!” the Constable said, seizing Lando’s arm. “No need for any uproar. We’re all friends here.” He pointed with his free hand to the papers Whett had preferred. “The Ottdefa here can post bond to you in the full amount of—say, what’s this?”
Lando felt something small, round, and cool thrust up beneath his embroidered sleeve. He glanced down just as Phuna was pretending to remove it, and groaned. It was a flat, smooth-cornered disk a centimeter thick, perhaps four centimeters in diameter. He knew precisely what it was, although he’d never owned one in his life.
“A cheater!” the indignant Constable exclaimed. “He had a cheater all the time! He could change the faces of the cards to suit him any time he wanted! No wonder—”
With a feral snarl, Osuna Whett took advantage of the asteriod’s minimal gravity, launching himself across the table at Lando. Just as his skinny frame was halfway to its target, a dirty denym jacket flopped over his head, followed by a knobbly set of knuckles belonging to Arun Feb’s right hand. There was a dull thump of contact and a muffled squeak from the anthropologist.
“Get out of here, kid!” Feb shouted. “I saw Phuna plant the cheater on you!”
The lawman whirled on Feb, fist upraised. Apparently Vett Fori trusted her assistant’s judgment—and knew how to maneuver in the absence of gravitic pull. She snatched up the nearest solid object—which happened to be the anthropologist’s already battered head—and dashed it sideways against the startled cranium of the police officer. Eyes crossed, he collapsed, drifting slowly to the floor. Still holding Whett by the occipital region, Fori pried the wad of official-looking papers from the unconscious scientist’s fingers.
“Take these and get your ship out of the Oseon, Lando. I’ll talk sense with Phuna when he comes around. He’s crooked, but he isn’t crazy. Besides, in theory, he works for me.”
It wasn’t the first rapid exit Lando had made in his brief but eventful career. However, it was passing rare for those whose money he had taken to assist him at it. With a pang of gratitude—and the feeling he’d regret it later—he made to toss his winnings back on the table beside the insensate Ottdefa.
“Don’t you dare!” Vett Fori growled. “You want us to think you didn’t win it fair and square?” Behind her, Arun Feb tapped Phuna on the pate again with a stainless steel water carafe, tunk! He looked up from the pleasant occupation and nodded confirmation.
Lando grinned, waved a wordless farewell on his way out the door. Twenty minutes later, he was aboard the Millennium Falcon, bolting down a very hastily rented pilot droid. Ten minutes after that, he was above the plane of the ecliptic, blasting out of the Oseon System and headed for the Rafa. It was the last place Whett would look for him.
He told himself.
THE OLD REPUBLIC
(5,000–33 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)
Long—long—ago in a galaxy far, far away … some twenty-five thousand years before Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars: A New Hope … a large number of star systems and species in the center of the galaxy came together to form the Galactic Republic, governed by a Chancellor and a Senate from the capital city-world of Coruscant. As the Republic expanded via the hyperspace lanes, it absorbed new member worlds from newly discovered star systems; it also expanded its military to deal with the hostile civilizations, slavers, pirates, and gangster-species such as the slug-like Hutts that were encountered in the outward exploration. But the most vital defenders of the Republic were the Jedi Knights. Originally a reclusive order dedicated to studying the mysteries of the life energy known as the Force, the Jedi became the Republic’s guardians, charged by the Senate with keeping the peace—with wise words if possible; with lightsabers if not.
But the Jedi weren’t the only Force-users in the galaxy. An ancient civil war had pitted those Jedi who used the Force selflessly against those who allowed themselves to be ruled by their ambitions—which the Jedi warned led to the dark side of the Force. Defeated in that long-ago war, the dark siders fled beyond the galactic frontier, where they built a civilization of their own: the Sith Empire.
The first great conflict between the Republic and the Sith Empire occurred when two hyperspace explorers stumbled on the Sith worlds, giving the Sith Lord Naga Sadow and his dark side warriors a direct invasion route into the Republic’s central worlds. This war resulted in the first destruction of the Sith Empire—but it was hardly the last. For the next four thousand years, skirmishes between the Republic and Sith grew into wars, with the scales always tilting toward one or the other, and peace never lasting. The galaxy was a place of almost constant strife: Sith armies against Republic armies; Force-using Sith Lords against Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights; and the dreaded nomadic mercenaries called Mandalorians bringing muscle and firepower wherever they stood to gain.
Then, a thousand years before A New Hope and the Battle of Yavin, the Jedi defeated the Sith at the Battle of Ruusan, decimating the so-called Brotherhood of Darkness that was the heart of the Sith Empire—and most of its power.
One Sith Lord survived—Darth Bane—and his vision for the Sith differed from that of his predecessors. He instituted a new doctrine: No longer would the followers of the dark side build empires or amass great armies of Force-users. There would be only two Sith at a time: a Master and an apprentice. From that time on, the Sith remained in hiding, biding their time and plotting their revenge, while the rest of the galaxy enjoyed an unprecedented era of peace, so long and strong that the Republic eventually dismantled its standing armies.
But while the Republic seemed strong, its institutions had begun to rot. Greedy corporations sought profits above all else and a corrupt Senate did nothing to stop them, until the corporations reduced many planets to raw materials for factories and entire species became subjects for exploitation. Individual Jedi continued to defend the Republic’s citizens and obey the will of the Force, but the Jedi Order to which they answered grew increasingly out of touch. And a new Sith mastermind, Darth Sidious, at last saw a way to restore Sith domination over the galaxy and its inhabitants, and quietly worked to set in motion the revenge of the Sith …
If you’re a reader new to the Old Republic era, here are three great starting points:
• The Old Republic: Deceived, by Paul S. Kemp: Kemp tells the tale of the Republic’s betrayal by the Sith Empire, and features Darth Malgus, an intriguing, complicated villain.
• Knight Errant, by John Jackson Miller: Alone in Sith territory, the headstrong Jedi Kerra Holt seeks to thwart the designs of an eccentric clan of fearsome, powerful, and bizarre Sith Lords.
• Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, by Drew Karpyshyn: A portrait of one of the most famous Sith Lords, from his horrifying child
hood to an adulthood spent in the implacable pursuit of vengeance.
Read on for an excerpt from a Star Wars novel set in the Old Republic era.
CHAPTER 1
SHIGAR KONSHI FOLLOWED the sound of blasterfire through Coruscant’s old districts. He never stumbled, never slipped, never lost his way, even through lanes that were narrow and crowded with years of detritus that had settled slowly from the levels above. Cables and signs swayed overhead, hanging so low in places that Shigar was forced to duck beneath them. Tall and slender, with one blue chevron on each cheek, the Jedi apprentice moved with grace and surety surprising for his eighteen years.
At the core of his being, however, he seethed. Master Nikil Nobil’s decision had cut no less deeply for being delivered by hologram from the other side of the galaxy.
“The High Council finds Shigar Konshi unready for Jedi trials.”
The decision had shocked him, but Shigar knew better than to speak. The last thing he wanted to do was convey the shame and resentment he felt in front of the Council.
“Tell him why,” said Grand Master Satele Shan, standing at his side with hands folded firmly before her. She was a full head shorter than Shigar but radiated an indomitable sense of self. Even via holoprojector, she made Master Nobil, an immense Thisspiasian with full ceremonial beard, shift uncomfortably on his tail.
“We—that is, the Council—regard your Padawan’s training as incomplete.”
Shigar flushed. “In what way, Master Nobil?”
His Master silenced him with a gentle but irresistible telepathic nudge. “He is close to attaining full mastery,” she assured the Council. “I am certain that it is only a matter of time.”
