Star Wars: The Jedi Academy Trilogy I: Jedi Search

by Kevin J. Anderson

  “Then let’s get out of here,” she said. “Time is running out.”

  • • •

  When they boarded the shuttle back down to Maw Installation, Han could ask no further questions. Surrounded by other stormtroopers rigidly minding their own business, neither he nor Kyp could speak with Qwi. Casual conversation seemed forbidden.

  Qwi fidgeted, looking at the shuttle walls, the narrow windows showing the deadly barrier of the Maw itself with its secret pathways—if they could escape.

  Han desperately wanted to see Leia and the twins again. They filled his thoughts more and more, preoccupying him at times when he should have fixed every iota of attention on the peril around him. He ached to hold Leia again—but thinking of her while he wore a stormtrooper uniform seemed to taint the emotion.

  Beside him sat Kyp, unreadable behind a stormtrooper mask. But the eyeholes of the helmet continued to turn toward Han, as if seeking reassurance. Han wished he had more to offer—but he did not know Qwi’s plan.

  Why were they returning to Maw Installation, rather than just stealing a ship and racing off into space? It would be a breakneck run, no matter when they started—and Admiral Daala’s attack preparations grew more complete with each hour.

  Han had to warn the New Republic of the disaster about to befall it. First, he had been concerned about the concentration of space power around Kessel—but the fleet of four Star Destroyers and the Maw Installation’s secret weapons looked infinitely worse than whatever Moruth Doole had pieced together from the scrap heap.

  Chewbacca wore mechanic’s overalls, looking like a worker assigned to perform maintenance on some piece of equipment down in one of the laboratories. He made grunting sounds to himself, content to be reunited with his friends but anxious for action.

  Qwi remained uncommunicative, keeping her thin bluish hands folded in her lap. Han wondered if he had gone too far in his accusations of her naïveté and the evil nature of her work. He wished he knew what she was thinking.

  When the shuttle landed in one of the Installation’s asteroids and the stormtroopers disembarked, Qwi led Han, Kyp, and Chewbacca away from the rocky hangar through a tunnel high enough to allow the movement of ships. “This way,” she said.

  Han did not recognize where she was taking them. “Aren’t we going back to your lab, Doc?”

  Qwi froze in midstep before turning to him. “No, never again.” Then she moved on.

  When they reached a tall metal doorway guarded by two stormtroopers standing at attention, Qwi took out her badge again, flashing the imprinted holograms in the light. The stormtroopers straightened to attention.

  “Open up for me,” Qwi said.

  “Yes, Dr. Xux,” the head guard said. “Your badge, please?”

  She handed him her badge with a barely controlled smile. Han began to grow uneasy. These guards recognized Qwi by sight, and she seemed more comfortable now than she had been during other parts of their escape. Was this some kind of treachery? But to what purpose? He and Kyp turned toward each other, but the stormtrooper helmets kept their expressions unreadable.

  “The Wookiee is here to do heavy maintenance on the engines—a complete coolant overhaul before tomorrow’s deployment of the fleet,” Qwi said. “These two guards are specially trained to prevent him from acting up. This Wookiee has caused some damage before, and we can’t afford delays.” Han tried not to cringe. Qwi was talking too quickly, letting her nervousness show through.

  “Just give me the proper authorizations,” the guard said. “You know the routine.” He slid her badge through a scanner to log Qwi in, then handed it back to her. The stormtrooper seemed unconcerned, as if glad to be posted here rather than in the middle of frantic preparations for deployment.

  Qwi went to the door’s data terminal and punched up a request, then she handed him the hardcopy printout of Admiral Daala’s permission again. Han wondered how many times she was going to use the same piece of paper!

  “There, you’ll see the approved work request for the Wookiee with a notation for special handlers. It’s been authorized by Tol Sivron himself.”

  The guard shrugged. “As usual. Let me scan the service numbers of these two troopers. Then you’re free to go in.” He entered Han’s and Kyp’s numbers, then worked the door controls.

  The great steelcrete doors ground to each side, revealing a hangar lit by levitating globes of light. Overhead, wide rectangular skylights let in the eerie glow of swirling gases around the Maw. Qwi stepped inside the chamber, and her whole demeanor changed, as if she had suddenly turned breathless. Han, Kyp, and Chewbacca followed.

  The guard worked his controls, and the doors slid closed, sealing them inside. Qwi visibly relaxed.

  Han stared up at a ship like none he had ever seen before. Smaller than the Millennium Falcon, this craft was oblong and faceted, like a long shard of crystal. Its own repulsorlifts kept it upright, with an actual ladder leading to the open hatch. Defensive lasers bristled from the corners of its facets.

  The armor plating was multicolored and shimmering, like a constantly changing pool of oil and molten metal. At the lower vertex hung the oddly fuzzy torus of an immensely powerful resonance-torpedo transmitter. Though not much larger than a fighter craft, the Sun Crusher hummed with deadly potential.

  “We’re going to steal that?” Han cried.

  “Of course,” Qwi Xux said. “It’s the greatest weapon ever devised, and I’ve spent eight years of my life designing it. You didn’t expect me to leave it here for Admiral Daala, did you?”

  26

  The Millennium Falcon’s subspace engines flared white hot as the ship blasted away from Kessel’s garrison moon. A swarm of fighters streamed after it, peppering space with multicolored blaster fire. Large capital ships began to nose into the Falcon’s flight-path like sleeping giants roused by stinging insects.

  Lando Calrissian did his best to dodge the concentrated blaster fire. “The sublight engines are still optimal. Either Han’s been maintaining her with a real mechanic for a change, or Doole reconditioned her for his fleet,” he said. “Let’s see how well the weapons systems work.”

  A pair of wasplike Z-95 Headhunters streaked after them, shooting fire-linked banks of triple blasters; close behind followed three battered Y-wing long-range fighters.

  Luke spun around and whistled in surprise. “Headhunters! I didn’t think anybody used those anymore!”

  “Doole couldn’t be choosy, I guess,” Lando said.

  The Falcon rocked with several direct blaster hits; the fresh and fully charged shields held, though, for the moment.

  Lando dropped the blaster cannon through its ventral hatch, then fired back at the pursuers. After five prolonged shots, Lando managed to hit the exhaust nacelle of a Y-wing, forcing it to break formation and peel off for repairs.

  “One down—only about a thousand more to go,” Lando said.

  The Z-95 Headhunters pummeled them with repeated blaster fire, as if to punish the Falcon.

  “Go down close to the planet and skim the atmosphere,” Luke said. “Let’s burn them up in the energy shield.”

  Lando set course for the lumpy world of Kessel as he voiced his complaints. “We can’t detect that energy shield either. How do you know we won’t get disintegrated ourselves?”

  “We’ve got better reactions than they do.”

  Lando didn’t seem convinced. “I’ve already almost flown into an energy shield once during our attack on the Death Star. I’m not anxious to repeat the process.”

  “Trust me,” Luke said.

  Kessel swelled in front of them, pockmarked and wreathed in a cottony halo of escaping air. “We’re getting close.”

  Luke held the back of the pilot chair, his eyes half-closed. He breathed regularly, reaching out, sensing the pulsing power generated as a protective blanket by the garrison moon.

  “Don’t fall asleep on me, Luke!”

  “Keep flying.”

  The Headhunters swoope
d after, flanked by the remaining pair of Y-wings.

  “The aft deflector shield is starting to feel the pounding,” Lando said. “If these guys get any closer, they’re going to fly up my exhaust ports!”

  “Get ready,” Luke said.

  Kessel filled their entire viewport now, boiling with its turbulent thin-air storms, tiny plumes from the numerous atmosphere factories tracing lines above the landscape.

  “I’m ready, I’m ready! Just say the word and I—”

  “Pull up, now!”

  Lando’s tension helped him react like a spring-loaded catapult. He hauled up on the controls, ripping the Falcon straight up in a tight cartwheel. Taken by surprise, all four of the attacking ships splattered into clouds of ignited fuel and ionized metal as they slammed into the invisible energy shield.

  “Missed it by a couple of meters at least,” Luke said. “Relax, Lando.”

  Artoo bleeped, and Luke answered him after looking at the expression on Lando’s face. “No, Artoo, I don’t think he’s interested in an exact measurement.”

  They soared just above the atmosphere on a tight orbit that took them around Kessel’s poles. The curtain of stars rolled out from the edge of the planet as the landscape sped beneath them; then they looped back into space in a mad dash to escape.

  They ran straight into the wave of fighters belching out of the garrison moon.

  Yelling in surprise, Lando launched a pair of Arkayd concussion missiles from the front tubes. The density of approaching ships was so great that even the wild shots scored twice, taking out a TIE fighter and a blast boat, while the hot debris cloud destroyed a heavily armed B-wing.

  “Let’s not get cocky because we took care of a couple of ships. I’ve got only six more missiles.”

  “We will not surrender now,” Luke said.

  “No, I just mean we’re running, not fighting. At least the engines are in tip-top condition,” Lando said. “The Falcon hasn’t been this pampered since I owned her.”

  “How fast can we get out of here?” Luke asked.

  Jacked next to the copilot’s chair, Artoo chittered and bleeped. Luke glanced down and saw rows of flickering red lights on the navigation panel. “Uh oh.”

  “What is he saying?” Lando said. He flicked his gaze from the ships swarming by the front viewport to the little astromech droid. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “The navicomp’s not working,” Luke said.

  “Well, fix it!”

  Luke had already dashed around the bend in the corridor to pry off the access panel to the Falcon’s navicomputer. He glanced at the boards, feeling his heart sink into a black hole as deep as the Maw. “They’ve pulled the coordinate module. It’s not here.”

  Lando groaned. “Now what are we going to do?”

  In response to Lando’s concussion missiles, the Kessel fighters formed into tighter battle groups, striking at the Falcon with a firestorm of blaster bolts. Luke had to shield his eyes from the blinding flashes of near misses and deflected hits.

  “I don’t know, but we’d better do it as fast as we can.”

  “They’re from the New Republic!” Moruth Doole fumed in his rage, stomping up and down. “They’ll go back and report everything!” He straightened his mussed yellow cravat to regain his composure, but it didn’t work. He wanted to squash the escapees like a pair of bugs to eat. Spies and traitors! They had led him along, lied to him, taunted him.

  “Send out every ship we have!” he screamed into the open channel that broadcast to his forces. He had managed to make it to the command center on the garrison moon. “Surround them, crush them, smash into them. I don’t care what it takes!”

  “Sending out every ship might not be a good strategy,” responded one of the captains. “The pilots don’t know the formations, and they’ll just get in each other’s way.”

  Doole’s mechanical eye lay in pieces scattered about the top of the console, and he could not see well enough to put it back together. With the blurry focus of his one half-blind eye, Doole could not identify the dissenting mercenary.

  “I don’t care! I don’t want to lose these like we lost Han Solo!” He pounded his soft fist on the console, jarring the pieces of his mechanical eye. The primary lens bounced, then slid off the edge to shatter on the floor.

  The Falcon ran straight toward the Maw, leaving Kessel behind.

  “We’ll be all right,” Luke said. “I can use the Force to guide us through on a safe path.”

  “If there is a safe path,” Lando muttered.

  Sweat stood out on Luke’s forehead. “What other choice do we have? We can’t hide anyplace else, we can’t outrun all those fighters, and we can’t go into hyperspace without a navicomp.”

  “What a great selection of options,” Lando said.

  Finally mobilized, the capital ships came after them, firing ion cannon blasts powerful enough to clear a path through an asteroid field. The two big Lancer frigates made a deadly web in front of the Falcon with their twenty quad-firing laser cannons; but the Lancers were sluggish, and the Falcon increased its lead.

  Somehow the other capital ships anticipated their run to the black hole cluster and converged ahead of them as Lando pushed the Falcon’s engines. “Come on, come on! Just squeeze a little more speed out.”

  Ten system patrol craft, originally designed for maximum speed to combat smugglers and pirates, surged past the Falcon and lined up in a blockade. But in the three-dimensional vastness of space, Lando managed to slip under their grasp. Laser blasts erupted all around them.

  “Our shields are edging the redlines,” Lando said.

  Three Carrack-class light cruisers—midway in size between the Lancer frigates and the larger Dreadnaughts such as the ones in Bel Iblis’s lost Dark Force—formed a triple-pronged pincer, right, left, and top.

  In hot pursuit behind the Falcon came the jagged ovoid of a Loronar strike cruiser, the largest ship in the Kessel fleet. As the chase plowed through the net of system patrol craft, the strike cruiser harmlessly took stray fire meant for the Falcon.

  Lando stared out the viewport windows at the horrifying spectacle of the Maw and the giant battleships moving to meet them. Artoo bleeped something that even Luke could not translate.

  “Only a complete idiot would go into a place like that,” Lando said. He squeezed his eyes shut.

  “Then let’s just hope they’re not idiots, too,” Luke said.

  27

  Admiral Daala stood in the bridge tower of the Star Destroyer Gorgon, looking out at her fleet and feeling the energy build inside her. The time was at hand! The Empire might have fallen, but with it went all the people who had squashed her. Now she could show her worth. Daala could fight her own battle.

  She gazed at the misty colors of the Maw and the clump of strung-together rocks that had spawned the weapons for her assault. In formation the Hydra, the Basilisk, and the Manticore powered up, waiting to spring out upon the galaxy with swift and deadly precision. The New Republic would fall to its knees.

  She had no interest in ruling the former Empire herself—Daala never had any such aspirations. Her main intent right now was just to cause them pain. She licked her lips, and her hair hung heavy down her back, serpentine like the demon for whom her flagship had been named. Grand Moff Tarkin would have been proud.

  Commander Kratas, the man who ran the subsystems of the Gorgon, spoke to her from a communication terminal. “Admiral Daala, I have a priority message from the detention level!”

  “Detention level? What is it?”

  “The prisoners Han Solo and Kyp Durron have escaped! One guard was found stunned in Solo’s detention chamber, and another is dead in Durron’s cell. Both were stripped of their armor. We are attempting to question the survivor now.”

  Daala felt a jolt of anger disrupt the eagerness singing through her veins. She drew herself up taller, raising her eyebrows and focusing intently on Kratas. “Track the service numbers of the stolen uniforms. Maybe they’
ve logged in somewhere.” Her orders came like staccato laser blasts.

  Kratas consulted his terminal, spoke into the comlink. Daala clasped her hands behind her back and paced, barking orders to the bridge personnel. “Put together a search party immediately. We’ll comb every deck of the Gorgon. They can’t have gotten off the ship. There’s no place else they could have gone.”

  “Admiral!” Commander Kratas said. “The surviving guard claims that one of the scientists from the Installation came to see Solo. Qwi Xux. The guard insists that Dr. Xux had an authorization directly from you.”

  Daala’s jaw dropped; then she clamped her lips together in a bloodless, iron line. “Check on the Wookiee! See what’s happened to him.”

  Kratas queried the database. “The keeper says that the new Wookiee prisoner has been requisitioned and taken to a higher-priority assignment.” He swallowed. “Qwi Xux was the one who requisitioned him. She used your authorization code again.”

  Daala’s nostrils flared, but then another thought struck her like a crashing asteroid. “Oh no!” she said. “They’re after the Sun Crusher!”

  Alone in the guarded hangar holding the Sun Crusher, Han clambered into the hatch. “Can’t remember the last time I had to use a ladder to get inside a ship! Pretty primitive for such a sophisticated weapon.”

  “It works.” Qwi hauled herself up the rungs behind him. “The sophistication is inside. All the rest is just window dressing.”

  Han sat down in the pilot’s chair in the cockpit and looked at the controls. “Everything seems to be labeled the way it should be, though the placement is a little odd. What’s this for? Wait a minute, I’ll figure it out.”

  Kyp reached the top of the ladder, paused, then pulled off his stormtrooper helmet. “Those mask filters stink!” he said, then with obvious pleasure tossed the skull-like helmet to the floor of the chamber. It clattered and bounced like a severed head. Kyp’s dark hair was curled with sweat and mussed from the confining helmet, but his face shone with a grin.