Tempest: Star Wars (Legacy of the Force) (Star Wars: Legacy of the Force) Read online

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

  A Del Rey Books Mass Market Original

  Copyright © 2006 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® orTM where indicated.

  All Rights Reserved. Used under authorization.

  Excerpt from Star Wars®: Legacy of the Force: Exile copyright © 2006 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® orTM 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.

  This book contains an excerpt from Star Wars®: Legacy of the Force: Exile by Aaron Allston. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the published book.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-51050-1

  www.starwars.com

  www.legacyoftheforce.com

  www.delreybooks.com

  v3.1

  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 Eixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Introduction to the Star Wars Expanded Universe

  Excerpt from Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Exile

  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: Dark Nest I: The Joiner King

  Excerpt from Star Wars: Crosscurrent

  Timeline

  dramatis personae

  Allana; Chume’da, heir to the Hapan Throne (human female)

  Alema Rar; Jedi Knight (Twi’lek female)

  Ben Skywalker; junior GAG member (human male) C-3PO; protocol droid

  Dur Gejjen; Five Worlds Prime Minister and Corellian Chief of State (human male)

  Han Solo; captain, Millennium Falcon (human male)

  Jacen Solo; Jedi Knight (human male)

  Jagged Fel; bounty hunter (human male)

  Jaina Solo; Jedi Knight (human female)

  Lady Galney; chamberlain (human female)

  Lalu Morwan; former flight surgeon (human female)

  Leia Organa Solo; Jedi Knight (human female)

  Luke Skywalker; Jedi Grand Master (human male)

  Lumiya; Dark Lady of the Sith (human female)

  Mara Jade Skywalker; Jedi Master (human female)

  Nashtah; assassin (female; human/unknown)

  Nek Bwua’tu; Galactic Alliance admiral (male Bothan)

  R2-D2; astromech droid

  Tenel Ka; Hapan Queen Mother (human female)

  Zekk; Jedi Knight (human male)

  prologue

  The object of her desire was walking down the opposite side of the skylane, moving along a pedwalk so choked with vines and yorik coral that even the zap gangs traveled single-file. He was two levels below and ten meters ahead, and he kept stopping to study door membranes and peer into the windows of coral-crusted buildings. Then he would just stand there in the gloom, alone and empty-handed, as though no Jedi need fear the dangers of the undercity … as though he ruled the twilight depths down where Coruscant changed to Yuuzhan’tar.

  Jacen Solo was as arrogant as ever—and this time, it would be his undoing.

  The angle was perfect, almost too perfect. If she struck now, he would be dead almost as soon as he hit the pedwalk. Even if corpse robbers did not drop the body into the skylane, the only hint of what had killed him would be a tiny barb in his neck and a trace of venom in his nervous system. Nobody would know that his death had been an execution … not even Jacen.

  But Alema Rar needed them to know. She needed to see the shock of recognition in Jacen’s eyes when he collapsed, to feel his fear burning in the Force as his heart cramped into an unbeating knot. She needed to hold him dying in her arms and suck the last breath from his lips, to hear his father roaring curses and watch his mother wailing in grief.

  That last part, Alema needed more than anything.

  She had spent years pondering what she could take from Leia Solo that would be the equal of everything Leia had taken from her. An instep and five toes? That would be a fair trade for the half-of-a-foot Leia had cut off on Tenupe. And the Princess’s eyes and ears would do for the lekku she had severed aboard the Admiral Ackbar. But what of the giant spidersloth to which Leia had fed her in the Tenupian jungle? How was Alema to match that?

  Because this was not about revenge, not about cruelty. It was about Balance. The spidersloth had nearly killed her, had bitten her almost in half and left her slender dancer’s body roped with white scars, an ugly lopsided thing that only a Rodian would desire. Now Alema had to take something equal from Leia, something that would shatter her to the core … because that’s what Jedi did. They served the Balance.

  And the first thing Alema wanted to take was Jacen, who was moving along the pedwalk toward the corner of an intersecting skylane. She had wanted to take him for a long time, since the day he had returned so mysterious and powerful from his five-year sojourn to study the Force. And now she would have him—perhaps not in the way she had once desired, but she would have him.

  Eager to keep her prey in sight, Alema hurried back toward the nearest pedestrian bridge. It was fifty meters away, but she could not risk Force-leaping across the skylane after Jacen rounded the corner. This region was teeming with Ferals, the half-wild survivors of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion who continued to live a primitive existence deep in the undercity. If they saw Alema do something that remarkable, Jacen would sense their shock.

  As Alema drew near the bridge, a faint nettling came to the stump of her amputated lekku. She stopped and slipped as far into the shadows as the coral would allow, then stood motionless, listening to the Ferals murmur behind their door membranes. When no danger appeared, she extended her Force-awareness a few meters and felt a pair of nervous presences behind her.

  Alema turned to find the sunken-eyed faces of two young humans smirking up from the floor. They were hiding along the back of the pedwalk, in a shadowy sta
irwell so ringed with yorik coral that she had not noticed it. When they realized she was looking at them, the boys snickered and started to slip back down the stairwell.

  Alema caught them in the Force. They cried out in shock and grabbed at the wall, cutting their hands on the yorik coral as they tried to keep from being pulled back into view. With thin brows and small, round-ended noses, they were clearly brothers. She raised her lip in a twisted half smile, enjoying the sense of power that rushed through her veins as their shock changed to fear.

  “And what did you two have planned for us?” Alema always referred to herself in the plural. It was a habit she had acquired when she became a Killik Joiner, and one that she had no interest in losing. Using the singular would mean admitting that her nest was gone—that Jacen and Luke and the rest of the Jedi had destroyed Gorog—and that was not true, not while Alema still lived. “Robbery? Murder? Ravagery?”

  The brothers shook their heads and started to open their mouths, but were clearly too repulsed by her deformities to speak.

  “You’re staring.” Alema Force-pinned them against the wall. “That’s rude.”

  “Put us down!” the larger ordered. With a lean face and a shadowy line of mustache fuzz on his upper lip, he was probably a year or two into human adolescence. “We didn’t mean nothing. It’s just …”

  His gaze slid from Alema’s face toward the lekku stump hanging behind her shoulder, then quickly began to drop. Alema had traded her provocative attire for more traditional Jedi garb, but even those shape-concealing robes were not enough to hide her disfigurements—the lopsided twist of her body, and the way one atrophied arm hung at her side. As the boy’s gaze fell, she sensed in the Force his growing revulsion—actually experienced the disgust he felt when he looked at her.

  “It’s just what?” Alema demanded. In her anger, she was pressing both boys against the wall so hard they began to wheeze. “Go ahead. Tell us.”

  It was the younger brother who answered. “It’s just …” He nodded at the lightsaber hanging from her belt. “You’re a Jedi!”

  Alema smiled coldly. “Aren’t you clever? Pretending you’ve never seen a Jedi Knight before.” She glanced ten meters down the pedwalk, to where a knobby-scaled radank had backed a screeching Falleen into a tangle of slashvines, then looked back to the boy. “But we have the Force. We know what you were looking at.”

  Allowing the older brother to fall free, she pointed down the pedwalk and Force-hurled his younger sibling into the slashvines next to the Falleen. The startled radank reared back on its hind legs, front feet raised and claws unsheathed, then extended its thin proboscis and began to sniff the new prey. The boy whimpered and called for help.

  Alema looked back to the older one, who was already trying to inch his way toward his brother, and waved him on.

  “Go.” She gave a cruel little laugh. “After the radank is finished with you, you’ll know how we feel.”

  The boy’s eyes flashed with fear, but he pulled a shiv of sharpened durasteel from his sleeve and raced down the pedwalk to help his brother. Alema turned toward the bridge and, as the snarl and shriek of combat erupted behind her, allowed herself a small smile of satisfaction. The boys had mocked her disfigurement, and now they would be disfigured themselves. The Balance had been preserved.

  She continued up the pedwalk, then started across the bridge. Her stump began to nettle again, and she wondered if someone was watching her. Jacen had seemed to be alone when he left his apartment, but—as commander of the Galactic Alliance Guard—he would know to expect assassins. Maybe his young apprentice, Ben Skywalker, had followed a few moments later to watch his back.

  Alema gently extended her Force-awareness into the shadows behind her, searching for that flicker of pure bright power that always betrayed the Force presence of earnest young Jedi Knights. She felt nothing and decided that maybe the cause of her uneasiness was a raucous zap gang ahead. They had claimed the middle of the bridge for their own and were taking turns trying to push a frightened Gamorrean female over the safety rail. As Alema approached, they spread across the bridge and leered at her twisted form. They were all young human males, all wearing white tabards over various pieces of plastoid armor.

  “What do you think you are?” the leader asked, eyeing Alema’s black robes. He was a large youth with a threeday growth of beard and a badly swollen cheek. “Some kind of Jedi?”

  “We have no time for your games,” Alema replied coolly. “Go back and play with your Gamorrean.” She made a shooing motion with the backs of her fingers, at the same time touching his mind through the Force. “You might have more fun if you let her do the pushing.”

  Swollen Cheek frowned, then turned to his companions. “She doesn’t have time for us.” He started after the Gamorrean, who was lumbering toward the far end of the bridge as fast as her thick legs could take her. “Get her! We’ll try something new this time!”

  The zap gang spun as one and raced away. Alema followed, catching up as they surrounded the Gamorrean and began to argue about who would be shoved into the safety rail first. Alema slipped past and smiled to herself. Balance.

  At the other end of the bridge, Jacen was nowhere to be seen. He had either rounded the corner of the building or entered a doorway while Alema was dealing with the city’s riffraff. She drew her lightsaber and advanced up the pedwalk, half expecting to feel the emitter nozzle of a lightsaber pressing into her ribs just before Jacen activated the blade.

  The most dangerous thing Alema met was a foraging skrat pack, which skittered away into a tangle of slashvines almost as soon as she saw it. The only other oddity was the sporadic stream of Ferals disappearing through a door membrane near the corner of the building. They were of many species—Bith, Bothan, Ho’Din—and they were all bearing the carcasses of dead animals, including hawk-bats, granite slugs, a few slimy yanskacs. Once, there was even a Chevin clutching what looked like a dead Ewok in its huge claw. They were probably just Ferals returning home with the day’s hunt, but as Alema passed in front of the doorway, she kept her lightsaber at the ready.

  No one leapt out to attack her, but she sensed a trio of Force presences on the other side of the membrane. Alema did not bother to investigate; had it been Jacen lurking behind the door, she would have sensed nothing at all. Instead, she exchanged her lightsaber for a short blowgun and armed it with a small cone-dart from a sealed container in her utility belt. She had eight more such darts—one for each of the Solos and the Skywalkers, plus two extras—all fashioned from the stinger and venom sac of a deadly Tenupian wasber.

  The poison was fairly quick—at least on human-sized creatures—but more important, it was certain. It co-opted the white blood cells sent to fight infection, turning them into tiny toxin-producing factories. Within moments of being struck, all of the victim’s organs would fall under attack, and within moments of that, his vital systems would start to fail. Jacen would live just long enough for Alema to reveal herself; he would probably die even before he realized that his Jedi poison-neutralizing techniques could not save him.

  Alema raised the blowgun to her lips and stepped around the corner, her body already purring with the sweet tingle of murder.

  But Jacen seemed determined to disappoint her. The pedwalk was empty and dark, and there was not a sentient soul in sight. Thinking he had lured her into a trap after all, Alema whirled back around the corner, her lungs filled with the air that would send the lethal dart shooting into her ambusher.

  There was no ambush. That pedwalk was empty as well, and the only danger Alema sensed was the same faint tingle she had been feeling since before crossing the bridge. Could Jacen Solo be hiding from her?

  Alema’s anger welled up inside. It was those boys. They had made her hurt them, and Jacen had always been so sensitive to such things. She cursed the brothers for making her lose control. Her plan had just grown more complicated, and that meant the pair would have to pay—but later. Right now she needed to go after Jacen. The p
oison on her dart would lose its effectiveness in less than an hour.

  Alema returned to the door she had just passed, the one all the Ferals had been entering with their carcasses. Dark and ringed by a thick crust of yorik coral, it looked more like a cavern mouth than a doorway. She pressed a nerve bundle on the doorjamb, and the membrane pulled aside. Standing opposite her was a brawny Nikto with a scaly green face and a ring of small horns encircling his eyes. He kept one hand in the pocket of his soiled jerkin, obviously holding a blaster, and Alema could sense two more guards beside him, hiding on either side of the door.

  He studied her for an instant, then rasped, “Wrrrong doorrr, lady. Nothing inside to interest you.”

  Alema started to reach for the guard in the Force, but stopped when her danger sense grew so strong that her remaining lekku began to tingle as well. She pointed her blowgun at the Nikto’s feet and—using a Force suggestion to ensure he would obey—commanded, “Wait.”

  The expression in the Nikto’s eyes changed from threatening to surprised to obedient, and Alema extended her Force-awareness in all directions.

  To her astonishment, she brushed a cold presence—something dark and bitter—back up the pedwalk near the bridge. But when she turned to look in that direction, all she saw was the zap gang cheering on the Gamorrean as she belly-bounced their leader into the safety railing.

  And the presence did not belong to any of the zappers. It was much too strong in the Force, too focused … then the darkness vanished, and the danger tingle in her lekku subsided as quickly as it had come.

  Alema continued to study the pedwalk for a few moments, trying to digest what she had felt. Someone was definitely stalking her, but it could hardly be Jacen. Even had he been careless enough to let her detect him—and he wouldn’t have been—the Jacen she remembered was anything but bitter: solemn and brooding, certainly, but also devoted and sincere.

  So who was stalking her? Not Ben. He was too young to be so bitter. And not Jaina. Her temperament was too fiery to feel so cold. Besides, the presence had felt dark … and it made no sense for a dark-sider to be watching Jacen’s back. It had to be something else.