Invincible

  Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Invincible is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2008 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated.

  All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of

  The Random House Publishing Group, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is

  a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-51056-3

  www.starwars.com

  www.delreybooks.com

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Introduction to the Star Wars Expanded Universe

  Excerpt from Star Wars: Millennium Falcon

  Introduction to the Old Republic Era

  Excerpt from Star Wars: Darth Bane: Path of Destruction

  Introduction to the Rise of the Empire Era

  Excerpt from Star Wars: Republic Commando: Hard Contact

  Introduction to the Rebellion Era

  Excerpt from Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor

  Introduction to the New Republic Era

  Excerpt from Star Wars: X-Wing: Rogue Squadron

  Introduction to the New Jedi Order Era

  Excerpt from Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime

  Introduction to the Legacy Era

  Excerpt from Star Wars: The Dark Nest I: The Joiner King

  Excerpt from Star Wars: Crosscurrent

  Star Wars Legends Novels Timeline

  Ben Skywalker; Jedi Knight (human male)

  Boba Fett; Mandalorian bounty hunter, Mand’alor (human male)

  Darth Caedus (formerly Jacen Solo); Sith Lord (human male)

  Han Solo; captain, Millennium Falcon (human male)

  Jagged Fel; Jedi support pilot (human male)

  Jaina Solo; Jedi Knight (human female)

  Leia Organa Solo; Jedi Knight (human female)

  Lon Shevu; captain, Galactic Alliance Guard (human male)

  Luke Skywalker; Jedi Grand Master (human male)

  Mirta Gev; Mandalorian bounty hunter (human female)

  Prince Isolder; father to the Hapan Queen Mother (human male)

  Saba Sebatyne; Jedi Master (Barabel female)

  Tahiri Veila; Sith apprentice (human female)

  Taryn Zel; Hapan Security operative (human female)

  Tenel Ka; Hapan Queen Mother (human female)

  Trista Zel; Hapan Security operative (human female)

  Zekk; Jedi Knight (human male)

  A LONG TIME AGO …

  Jaina Solo sits alone in the cold, Her knees drawn tight to her chest and her arms wrapped around her legs to conserve body heat. She is fourteen, and she hasn’t slept in days because her captors flood her cell with harsh bright light at odd intervals. She has never been so hungry, and her body aches from the daily beatings her tormentors call “training.” She knows what they are trying to take from her, and she refuses to surrender it. But she is alone and frightened and in more pain than she has ever before endured, and her will is a strand of spider silk holding a crystal chandelier. One more beating, one more sleepless rest period, one more hour spent shivering on a bare durasteel bunk, and she may drop that chandelier. And that scares her more than dying, because it means submitting to her fear, embracing her anger … because it means turning to the dark side.

  Then the place in her heart that belongs to her brother begins to warm, and she knows Jacen is thinking of her. She pictures him sitting in his own cell in another spoke of the space station, his brown hair wavy and tousled, his jaw clenched with earnest resolve, and the warm place in her heart starts to grow. She stops shivering, her hunger fades, and her fear turns to resolve.

  This is the gift of their twin bond: that neither Jaina nor Jacen is ever truly alone. They share a connection through the Force that will always sustain them. When one grows weak, the other strengthens. When one hurts, the other soothes. It is a bond that cannot be broken by any power in the galaxy, as much a part of them as the Force itself.

  So Jaina puts aside her despair and turns her thoughts to escape, because when she and Jacen work together, nothing is impossible. They are on a space station, so they are going to have to steal a spacecraft. They will have to find a way to deactivate the hangar’s containment field, perhaps through sabotage or by forging a launch authorization. And that means they are going to need some time before the guards realize they’re gone—especially since they have to free their friend Lowbacca before fleeing.

  The only way to tell time in the cell is to count heartbeats, and Jaina is too busy planning to do that. So when Jacen’s place in her heart begins to grow larger and more full, she has no idea how much time has passed. But she has felt the sensation thousands of times before, and she knows what it means: her brother is coming.

  Jaina’s pulse begins to pound with excitement, and soon she can feel Jacen’s pulse pounding to the same rhythm. He is very close now, coming down the corridor outside her cell—and she cannot sense any other presences accompanying him. She doesn’t want him to know how frightened she has been—or how close she has come to breaking—so she begins a Jedi breathing exercise to calm herself.

  Then she feels him stop two cells away.

  Not there, dummy, Jaina thinks. Keep coming.

  There is a flutter in Jaina’s heart as Jacen grows confused, and she worries that her brother is about to open the wrong cell and ruin their escape. She reaches out to him in the Force, trying to physically pull him toward her, and soon the control pad outside her cell door begins to click.

  Jaina breathes a sigh of relief, then folds her arms across her chest and leans back against the wall. She knows this is going to take awhile, because Jacen is really bad with machinery.

  Somehow, though, he deactivates the alarm before he unlocks the cell, then manages to unlock the cell without activating the intercom to the control center. Finally, the door hisses open, and Jaina sees her twin brother standing outside, smirking at her with a replica of their father’s famous lopsided grin.

  “Hi, Jaina,” he says. “I don’t suppose you’d like to—”

  “What took you so long?” Jaina demands, interrupting her brother’s fun. He is always making jokes and wisecracks, and they are always lame. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

  She slips off her bunk and steps through the door past him, then looks down the corridor in both directions, searching for guards or other signs of trouble. Jacen isn’t much better at planning than fixing machinery, so—however he managed to get this far—there is a good chance that the guards are on to him by now.

  But the famous Solo luck seems to be with him today, and Jaina sees nothing but the closed doors of other cells. She would like to free the other captive
s, but she knows better than to try. Their wills have already been broken, and one of them would be sure to alert the guards. So Jaina simply closes her own door and leans closer to Jacen.

  “What now?” she asks. “Have you figured out where Lowbacca is?”

  Jacen flushes, then drops his gaze to the floor. “Not yet,” he admits. “I was sort of hoping you might have a plan.”

  Jaina smiles. “Of course I do,” she says. “Didn’t I say I’ve been waiting?”

  What do you call the person who brings dinner to a rancor? The appetizer!

  —Jacen Solo, age 14, Jedi academy on Yavin 4

  The tunnel descending into Nickel One’s Transportation warrens was typically Verpine: square, straight, and lined with so many tubes, ducts, and conduits that it was impossible to see native rock. It was also crazy-clean in that maybe-the-hive-mother-has-a-problem kind of way, with a spotless smoke-blue floor and gleaming aquamarine pipe—work which made it virtually identical to the rest of the passages Jaina had seen while touring of the asteroid’s defenses. Even with her Force abilities, she found it impossible to tell exactly where she and Boba Fett were inside the insect colony … and whether they had any chance of rejoining the Mandalorian garrison commandos before stormtroopers began landing.

  It was three weeks after the battle of Fondor, and—following a series of threats and overtures from all sides of the Galactic Civil War—the Verpine had invited the Mandalorians to establish a base on Nickel One to deter anyone who might think of forcing the issue. Obviously, the deterrant hadn’t worked. Just a standard hour earlier, Jana and Fett had been inspecting the asteroid’s defenses when an Imperial Remnant flotilla had unexpectedly arrived from hyperspace and made a feint toward the primary loading docks. Half an hour later, a full planetary invasion fleet had arrived and pounded Nickel One’s surface defenses into slag and dust. Soon the actual troop-drop would begin, and even the Verpine entertained no hopes of repelling it. The only question was where the Imperials would land first.

  An urgent drone rose ahead, and the bitter taint of Verpine alarm pheromones grew thick in the tunnel’s muggy air. The guide—a thick-limbed insect with the spiked carahide and heavy mandibles of the soldier caste—started to walk faster, and Jaina began to worry that a swarm of frenzied warriors would mistake her and Fett for the enemy. When Fett’s hand drifted toward his holstered blaster, she knew she wasn’t the only one concerned.

  Still, she didn’t dare suggest that their guide comm ahead to remind his fellow Verpine that she and Fett were on the hive’s side. She knew how Fett would view such an obvious precaution—and maybe he was right. Maybe any appearance of weakness was a weakness.

  Jaina had been training with the legendary bounty hunter for just a little more than a standard month, but she had come to know him well. At times, she could almost read his mind. When the Remnant flotilla had feinted toward the loading docks, she had predicted that he would pretend to fall for the ruse … and watched him send a wing of Bes’uliike out to “drive off” the enemy. When the actual invasion fleet had arrived, she had guessed that Fett would counterpunch hard. In fact, he had convinced Nickel One’s High Coordinator to hurl her entire starfighter force at the Remnant’s flagship, the Dominion, and the Super Star Destroyer had quickly become a flaming hulk.

  Now, with the asteroid’s capture a virtual certainty, Jaina knew Fett would not meet the invaders on the surface. He would opt for a far bloodier strategy, attacking them in the narrow access tunnels that led down from the air locks, making them pay in lives for every meter they advanced.

  And Jaina knew that her training had just come to an end, because Boba Fett would not risk her—the tool of his vengeance against his daughter’s killer—in a battle he could not win. As soon as they passed a hangar with a serviceable starfighter still inside, he would cut Jaina loose and tell her to go hunt down her twin brother.

  What Jaina did not know was whether she was ready. She could fight any three men in Keldabe and be the only one left standing. She could splat a dyeball on Fett’s armor anywhere she wanted. She could outfly Mandalore’s best pilots in any vessel they chose, and shoot down an entire squadron in elite combat simulations.

  None of that meant she was good enough to bring down a Sith Lord.

  And she had to be. If Mara had been frightened enough of her brother’s transformation to attempt killing him, then it was up to Jaina to finish the job. Jacen—or Darth Caedus, as he called himself now—had to be stopped—for Mara and Ben and Luke, for her parents and Tenel Ka and Allana, for Kashyyyk and Fondor and the rest of the galaxy.

  But was she ready?

  After a few moments of descent, the alarm pheromones grew so thick that Jaina’s eyes started to burn, and the Force sizzled with the excitement and outrage of thousands of insectoids. The drone ahead blossomed into a dull roar, and then the tunnel opened into the worst pedjam she had ever seen. Swarms of thick-limbed Verpine with spiked carahide and ryyk-sized mandibles were pouring into the main transportation depot, climbing over one another or using their shatter rifles like plow blades as they crowded into the cavern from a dozen different directions.

  Jaina and Fett’s escort pushed into the writhing mass and was immediately shoved first one way, then the other. Soon he became almost indistinguishable from the rest of the Verpine mass—even to Jaina, who, as a former Killik Joiner, could tell the insects apart far better than most humans. She grabbed hold of the guide’s ammunition belt and held tight, using the Force to shoulder aside any warrior who tried to slip between them.

  When they had made no appreciable progress after fifteen seconds, Fett butted his way to the guide’s side. “At this rate, the Imperials are going to be inside before I can post my men. Is there another way to the command bunker?”

  The guide rocked his tubular head, thinking, then blinked his bulbous eyes. “We might be able to cross the surface—”

  “Forget it,” Fett said.

  There was no need to explain his reluctance—not to Jaina. With an invasion fleet bombarding Nickel One and an armada of assault shuttles about to descend on the surface, trying to cross fifty kilometers of asteroid in a dustcrawler was a long shot—and Fett always played the odds, especially when it came to risking his life.

  “You’ve got clearance from the High Coordinator,” Fett said. “Tell ’em to make a hole.”

  “I am,” the guide replied. His voice was surprisingly thin and reedy for a being nearly the size of a Wookiee, most likely because it was so seldom used. Verpine usually “talked” using biologically generated radio waves, resorting to sound only when speaking to other species. “But the enemy has launched its first swarm of assault shuttles, and a thousand other combat directors and several battle coordinators are also demanding the right-of-way. We all have priority one clearance from Her Maternellence.”

  “I thought your kind was supposed to be organized,” Fett growled. He pointed across the vault toward a loading area that Jaina could barely see through the swarm of huge insects ahead. “That our tube?”

  “Yes—DownYellow Express FiftySeat,” the guide said. “But they are running low on passenger capsules, so we may need to switch—”

  “So we need to get there first,” Fett growled.

  He squared his shoulders and started to shove ahead, but Jaina had anticipated his impatience and was already using the Force to hold him back. “Ladies first,” she said, gliding past. “Now that you’re a Head of State, you might want to learn some manners.”

  She began to use the Force to clear a path, her hand moving back and forth ever so slightly as she sent Verpine warriors tottering aside or stumbling to sudden halts. Fett grunted and followed close on her heels, with their guide—Osos Niskooen—peering over both their shoulders in astonishment.

  A couple of rib-battering minutes later, they emerged from the swarm onto a yellow loading platform and found themselves teetering above a two-meter drop into a transportation tube. At the bottom, Jaina could see tran
slucent waves of energy sweeping along a raised repulsor rail, carrying a steady stream of dust, stone, and refuse at speeds in excess of two hundred kilometers an hour.

  The Verpine behind them continued to press forward, and now Jaina found herself holding the swarm back with the Force as a long durasteel capsule shot out of the adjacent tunnel and whooshed to a stop in front of the loading area. The capsule opened along its full length, the entire upper quarter sliding upward. Jaina got a brief glimpse of two rows of inward-facing seats before Verpine soldiers began to literally spill into the capsule.

  “Come on, Jedi.”

  Fett grabbed her and jumped into the writhing mass, elbowing and kicking alongside the rest of the passengers as he fought for a place. Jaina used the Force to keep a small area around them clear until a loud hiss sounded above their heads and the door slid closed. An instant later the capsule shot down the transport tube and the entire mass of occupants was thrown toward the rear of the passenger compartment.

  As the capsule reached full speed, the Verpine quickly began to untangle themselves. Despite the loading chaos, everyone seemed to have a seat. Jaina and Fett sat across from a soldier she thought she recognized as their guide.

  “Niskooen?” she asked.

  “Correct,” the insect replied. “Most humans have as much trouble distinguishing our scents as we do yours.”

  “She’s had practice,” Fett said, turning his helmet toward Niskooen. “So what’s the situation topside?”

  Niskooen fell silent for a moment as he consulted with his fellow Verpine, then said, “Our surface batteries have taken a heavy toll, and the enemy’s first assault shuttles are starting to land. Their whiteshells are beginning to debark.”

  “I could guess that much,” Fett grumbled. “I mean where? Which air locks?”

  Niskooen was quiet for a moment, then reported, “No air locks. The initial mass is swarming HighGround RockyPlain TwentyKilometer Left.”

  Fett turned to Jaina. “The next time I do a base inspection, remind me to bring my own communications officer—or better yet, not to get caught in a surprise attack at all.”