Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens the Weapon of a Jedi: A Luke Skywalker Adventure (4 page)

The officer held up his hand for silence and thrust Luke’s identification
back at him.

“Carry on,” he said. “But remember, it’s the duty of every Imperial citizen to report suspicious activity. In any region.”

Luke nodded and the officer signaled to the stormtroopers, who marched away.

“Thank goodness,” Threepio said. “I’m not programmed to resist interrogation.”

“I wasn’t looking forward to it either,” Luke said as he and Threepio continued toward the
docking bay where Artoo was waiting.

Then Luke stopped at one of the windows overlooking Devaron, Threepio nearly plowing into him.

“Master Luke, what is it?”

Luke didn’t answer, continuing to stare at Devaron. Someone or something down there was calling to him.

“Sir? Are you quite all right?”

Luke shushed the droid and reached out with his mind in hopes of figuring out what
the Force was asking him to do. Was Devaron where he was supposed to go? Was it somehow connected with his
vision?

But he could sense nothing else. He turned away from the green-and-yellow planet with a frown.

“We need to get to our fighter if we’re to make the first rendezvous,” Luke said. “And we wouldn’t want to keep Artoo waiting, now would we?”

A
S HIS Y-WING FIGHTER climbed away from the refueling station, Luke glanced back down at Devaron, hoping for some new signal from the Force. He
was still staring at the jungles far below when Artoo beeped to get his attention.

“Sorry, Artoo,” Luke said. “Access the jump pattern for Whiforla.”

“Space travel used to be so much more civilized,” Threepio groused from where he sat in
the tail gunner’s bubble behind Luke. “One could simply travel from place to
place, rather than meandering about like a Purcassian river eel during spawning season.”

“Well, a more civilized galaxy is what we’re fighting for,” Luke said as the Y-wing rocketed into hyperspace.

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” Threepio said. “I for one will be much more comfortable when the Rebellion
wins, then.”

On this flight the churning infinity of faster-than-light travel brought Luke no comfort—his anxieties seemed to press in on him despite his attempts to empty his mind of them. What had
the Force been trying to tell him back there above Devaron? Should he have waited for the strange feeling to return?

Perhaps the Force was trying to tell him that he was supposed to be learning
to command its power instead of fetching communications logs. Learning the ways of the Force was what his father had
done with his life—and the legacy Ben Kenobi had preserved for two decades on Tatooine, passing it along with the lightsaber that Luke’s father had wanted him to have. And there he was
worrying about proper Whiforlan fluting.

What if the Force was trying to stop him from
making a mistake?

The rebel scatter program brought Luke’s Y-wing out of hyperspace in the Tertiary Usaita system, which was little more than a sparse collection of dust and rock around a
red dwarf, marked by a navigational beacon left there thousands of years before by a long-dead Republic survey team.

It was a lonely place—but not, as it turned out, an empty one.

“Unknown fighter,
this is the
Kreuge’s Revenge
,” a voice said in Luke’s cockpit. “This is a restricted system. Shut down all flight systems and prepare for
inspection.”

“Artoo, calculate the next jump and get us out of here!” Luke said.

Artoo whistled an acknowledgment, and Luke threw the control yoke hard right, grimacing at how sluggishly the Y-wing responded. His sensor scope lit up, and his eyes took
in the information:
three TIE fighters, backed up by a
Razor
-class frigate.

“Oh no!” squealed Threepio. “We’re in danger! Artoo, do something!”

“Hang on, Threepio,” Luke said sternly.

He turned to the navigational heading Artoo gave him and opened up the Y-wing’s throttle, trying to coax every bit of speed out of the heavy fighter. But moments later brilliant flashes of
light erupted
around them and the Y-wing shuddered.

The three TIEs raced overhead, and Luke squeezed the trigger, peppering them with laser fire as they wheeled around for another pass.

“How long, Artoo?” he asked.

Artoo whistled and hooted.

“A
minute
?” Threepio shrieked. “What do you mean you’re triangulating our position? This isn’t the time for stargazing, you miserable lump of
circuits!”

Luke rolled the Y-wing to port, eyes jumping from his long-range scanners to the TIEs angling in on him. He tried to summon the Force, to let it guide his hands. But Threepio’s chatter and
the flashes of laser fire kept throwing off his concentration. The Y-wing’s starboard shields flared as the TIEs’ lasers struck home, and alarms began to blare.

“Artoo, divert the power,” Luke said,
hammering at the Imperial fighters with the Y-wing’s turret guns. The more maneuverable Imperials were wheeling in all directions now,
swooping in on their slower target.

Focus,
Luke told himself.
Use the Force
.

He rolled the Y-wing over to starboard, trying to protect the vulnerable shield, and mashed down on the triggers. One of the TIEs vanished in a cloud of flames. But almost immediately,
another
fighter streaked up from beneath him, its laser cannons raking the Y-wing’s hull. The starboard shield flickered and died—and with it, Luke felt his connection to the Force
slipping.

The frigate was peppering them with blasts now, too, bouncing the fighter up and down. Luke squeezed off a flurry of shots at one of the remaining fighters, forcing its pilot to abandon his
attack
run. But his wingman took advantage of Luke’s distraction to drop behind the Y-wing. Green flashes lit up space as the TIE fighter’s blasts ripped through the starboard engine.
Red lights blinked frantically on Luke’s control panel.

“Try to increase the power!” he yelled, firing desperately at the two fighters hunting him, and weaving left and right in an effort to throw off the Imperials’
aim.

The starboard engine’s power levels climbed, then plummeted. Laser fire knocked the fighter sideways. The TIE that had hit them streaked away from the Y-wing, cut right, then turned and
raced back toward them, aiming at the battered fighter’s defenseless starboard side.

“This is the end,” Threepio moaned.

Luke fired at the TIE, but the Imperial pilot refused to deviate from
his course. He kept coming, waiting to line up the shot that would destroy the engine and leave the Y-wing helpless in
space. Luke tried to turn away, but the fighter was barely responding.

I’m sorry, Ben,
he thought.
I’m sorry, Father. I tried my best
.

He braced for impact—

—and was shoved back into his chair as the Y-wing shot into the safety of hyperspace.

Artoo beeped, perhaps
a bit smugly.

“Well, you certainly took your time about it,” Threepio grumbled.

As the two droids continued their long-running argument, Luke exhaled in mingled gratitude and disbelief. But there was no time to waste. The Y-wing was barely flying—they’d been
saved by the tough old fighter’s ability to soak up damage, but they needed to find a spaceport in which to make repairs. And they
needed to do it quickly.

Luke rejected Artoo’s first choice for a starport, then the next three. All were either too far away or tightly controlled by the Empire.

“That’s enough, Artoo,” he said. “We’re going back to Devaron.”

Artoo whistled an objection.

“But, Master Luke, our mission—” Threepio began.

“Send an encrypted message to the fleet,” he said. “Tell them I’ll resume
the retrieval mission after we repair our fighter.”

Artoo started to hoot at him, but Luke shook his head.

“No, my mind’s made up—take us to Devaron.”

That’s where the Force was telling me to go,
Luke thought.
This time I’m going to listen
.

T
HE Y-WING FLEW LOW over the thick jungles of Devaron, a ribbon of smoke trailing from its damaged engine. Luke had shushed the droids and sought
to clear his mind of doubts and questions, letting the Force direct the fighter’s flight. It had guided him into the atmosphere on the far side of the planet from the capital and its Imperial
garrison, then across the outback. Below him, the
jungle was broken by outcroppings of stone that rose high above the surrounding trees, crowned with enormous vines and creepers. The light of the
late-afternoon sun turned the rivers into threads of brilliant orange and pink.

Luke turned the Y-wing to starboard. Ahead was another pair of rocky pillars.…No, that wasn’t correct, Luke saw now. This was something different. The rocky pillars
were artificial
structures—towers made by intelligent hands.

Luke eased up on the throttle, and something began banging inside the battered engine. The tops of the towers were jagged, stabbing into the sky, and their sides were pocked with craters.

That’s blast damage,
Luke thought.
From heavy weapons. They really took a beating
.

“Artoo, look for a place to set down near those towers,”
Luke said. “This is where we’re supposed to go. I know it is.”

Artoo hooted urgently. Luke glanced at the screen and frowned.

“I understand you can barely keep the fighter in the air,” he said. “But this is important.”

“Master Luke, are you sure that’s the wisest choice?” Threepio asked. “Artoo says he can land our ship, but doubts he can get it airborne again. We must find a place
for
repairs.”

Luke sighed. Threepio had a point. Surely the Force wasn’t telling him to maroon himself in the middle of the jungle.

“You’re right—it will have to wait,” he said. “Scan the area for signs of settlement—and listen for activity on Imperial communications channels.”

The town was little more than a cluster of buildings atop a plateau in the jungle, with a landing
field whose single beacon winked in the gloom of dusk. A massive spire of bare
gray stone rose a hundred meters into the air on one side of the town, crowning a steep, forested slope. On the other side of the plateau the trees had been cleared and the hill carved into
terraced farmers’ fields.

Luke flew low over the town—his fighter’s data file said it was called Tikaroo—and peered down
at the landing field.

“I mostly see atmosphere fliers down there,” he said. “No sign of any Imperial ships. But there are a couple of star yachts parked off to the side. That one looks like a
SoroSuub 3000. That’s a pretty fancy ship to find near a farm town in the middle of nowhere.”

“Perhaps the last harvest was particularly rewarding,” said Threepio.

Luke shook his head.

“Farmers don’t spend their credits on star yachts,” he said. “They save their money so they don’t starve when they have a bad year.”

Artoo hooted.

“Oh, switch off,” Threepio said. “Like you know anything about agriculture, you oversize screwdriver.”

Luke decided that solving this particular mystery would have to wait—his choice was to set down in Tikaroo or crash in the jungle. He activated
the retrorockets and set the Y-wing down
with a jolt, followed by a hiss of coolant venting from some punctured reservoir.

The air was wet and ripe with vegetation. Light spilled from the open doorway of a squat building at the end of the landing field. Luke descended from the cockpit and patted the Y-wing’s
hull gratefully, then strolled across the landing field as the droids extricated
themselves from the fighter.

A Devaronian male met him at the door, wiping his hands on a rag. Behind him, a teenage Devaronian girl looked up from a cluttered workbench, scowling beneath her polarized goggles.

“Name’s Korl Marcus,” Luke said after a tense moment in which he couldn’t remember what it said on his false identification. “I’m a hyperspace scout. My
droids and I ran into
a little pirate trouble a couple of systems over, and we need some repairs.”

“I’m Kivas,” the Devaronian said. “That’s my daughter, Farnay. Let me get a light and we’ll take a look at your problem.”