Star Wars: The Adventures of Lando Calrissia (68 page)

But that wasn’t quite the way things had turned out. Instead, nearly three years after Iolu had shown him the color of his own innards, Nick Rostu found himself a member of a nascent group of revolutionaries dedicated to resisting the new regime.

Back on Haruun Kal, the people of Nick’s ghôsh had a saying:
Don’t mess with the akk dog
. It was good advice, especially in those troubled times. He’d been planetside on the capital world when the coup went down, and overnight, it seemed, everything had changed—even the planet’s name, from Coruscant to Imperial Center, although no one Nick knew called it that. Suddenly there was a new oligarchy in town, with Palpatine at its apex. Suddenly the Army of the Republic was the Army of the Empire, and it was obvious that it would go hard indeed on anyone who didn’t know which way to salute. Suddenly Major Rostu was given a choice: swear allegiance to the new regime, or face a blasting squad.

He was offered this ultimatum on the same day that he’d learned the fate of Mace Windu. Supposedly the Jedi Master—his adviser, his benefactor, his friend—had attempted to assassinate the Chancellor, and had been killed during the traitorous action. Nick had a problem believing that. Knowing Mace as he had, and judging by Emperor Palpatine’s ruthless pogrom against the Jedi, Nick was pretty sure there’d been nothing traitorous about it, at least as far as Mace had seen it.

He liked to think that he would have made the right choice anyway. There was no denying, however, that the news of Mace’s death made the decision considerably easier. He’d faced the Empire’s representative, flanked by two stormtroopers armed with blasters, and told him—respectfully, of course, the man had been a superior officer under the previous regime, after all—to go frip himself. Then he’d grabbed one of the blasters, shot both troopers and the representative, blown a hole through the big transparisteel window of the conference chamber, and leapt through it as the rest of the troopers in the room unleashed a barrage in his direction.

They missed—probably because they were momentarily immobilized by the shock of seeing a man voluntarily leap from a 210th-story window. Nick wasn’t crazy about the idea, either, but he didn’t see a lot of alternatives, other than being fried like a mulch fritter. Fortunately he had an ace in the field.

He could touch the Force.

This was something he had in common with all that hailed from Haruun Kal. Why, no one was sure; one theory was that the Korunnai were all descended from the Jedi crew of a downed spaceship that had crashed there, millennia ago. Whatever the reason, it came in handy at times, like when it had told Nick that a sky lorry loaded with nerf pelts was passing by only ten meters below the window.

Eventually he’d made his way downlevel, below the omnipresent inversion layer, and into the dim netherworld of the surface streets. He’d nearly been killed his first night there by a gang with the unlikely name of the Purple Zombies, had spent most of the only credits he’d had with him on a bedslot teeming with blister fleas, and dined alfresco the next day on grilled armored rat from a street vendor.

Talk about your downward mobility …

Six weeks later, three kilos lighter, and a whole lot meaner, he’d saved the life of a Kitonak merchant. To accomplish this, he’d had to go one-on-one with a Trandoshan antenna-breaker, who’d been sent to extort collection credits for a local gangster. In retrospect, this action turned out to be about as bright as a circus sword swallower upgrading his act to a lightsaber, but it had seemed to Nick a good idea at the time. The Trandoshan’s nickname was Crusher—or maybe Cruncher; his accent was too thick for Nick to tell for sure. Either way, it seemed to fit. The scaly thug, annoyed at Nick’s request that he leave the pudgy little humanoid merchant alone, had backhanded Nick across the narrow street and nearly through a break in the wall surrounding one of the gigantic, noisome garbage pits that dotted Coruscant’s slums and industrial areas.

Crusher (or Cruncher) wasn’t tall, but he was massive—at least 150 kilos, maybe more. All of which was charging straight toward Nick, shouting a battle cry in a phlegm-choked voice. Nick had barely enough time and wits to dodge and let the big oaf blunder past him and fall, screaming, into the silage below. His long wail was abruptly cut short, and, judging by the moist
chomp!
that quickly followed, Nick assumed Crusher/Cruncher had made a tasty mouthful for a dianoga, one of the huge, constricting garbage worms that infested the pits. He was just as happy not to know for sure.

The Kitonak turned out to be a member of a newly formed subversive movement called the Whiplash. She’d loudly sung his praises and made much of his bravery to her comrades in arms, and so he’d been asked to join them in their struggle against the new regime. No pay, little rest, and much danger—Nick couldn’t see a lot of difference between this and the resistance movement back on Haruun Kal.

But he’d agreed. He was a military deserter and a killer, after all, subject to being shot on sight, and there was safety—or at least a spurious sense of it—in numbers. What other choice was there? He was a soldier; it was all he knew, all he had ever known. Call it the Upland Liberation Front or the Army of the Republic, it really made no difference. The uniforms were different, but the job was the same.

It wasn’t that he enjoyed fighting this war, or any war—he hadn’t been shortchanged in the fear category, like all the clones had been. And thank whoever was ultimately in charge for that. Nick had once watched a phalanx of clones on Muunilinst fearlessly attack a hill against the blasterfire of three times as many droidekas. None of the clones so much as faltered, even though the droidekas’ lasers, plasma rays, and particle beams had torn through the majority of them as if they’d been flimsiplast cutout dolls. Three-quarters of the phalanx had been shredded in that charge.

But they’d taken the hill.

Yet, despite the dangers of war, there had been a certain odd security, almost comfort, in the rules and regs of the military life. Nick was by no means one of those snap-click officers with little to no field experience, just time in simulation holos and heads-up trainers. Even when commander of his own unit, he’d had to follow the asinine orders of a few desktop generals, and he’d nearly gotten his head shot off more than once as a result. A rather large proportion of those pressed-and-polished newbie warriors tended to not come back from their first or second campaign in top working order, if they came back at all.

He’d looked forward, like many others, to a lasting peace after Dooku, Grievous, and the others had been disposed of properly. A time in which he could at last lay down his arms and relax a bit. A time to heal.

Instead here he was, couched behind the rusting fender of an abandoned construction crawler, along with six others, waiting tensely as a quintet of stormtroopers hurried by. From the snatches of conversation Nick heard as they passed, it didn’t take a Tatooine brain spider to figure out that they were hot in pursuit of a Jedi. Whether it was a Padawan, Jedi Knight, or Master wasn’t clear.

During his service, and because of his acquaintance with Mace Windu, Nick had come to know a number of Jedi quite well, including a few members of the Council—all of whom, as far as he knew, were now dead. Or, as the Jedi themselves often put it, “Returned to the Force.” Whatever. Nick had little patience with any and all theories and philosophies that included speculation on an afterlife. The life he was living now was more than enough work; the thought of doing it all over again just made him tired.

He glanced back at his group, signaling with a head jerk that they were following the pack. There was no hesitation among his team as they fell in behind him.

Keeping the troopers in sight, Nick moved stealthily through the deserted streets. There was never much foot traffic down here at this time, and what little there was had prudently relocated when the armed stormtroopers had come marching down the thoroughfare. Before too long they stopped before a half-open panel in a long-abandoned building. Nick could barely hear them discussing whether their quarry had gone to ground there. The decision to investigate was quickly reached when one of the troopers pointed out that the panel had been opened quite recently, judging by the disturbed dust and grime. A single kick from another trooper was enough to open it the rest of the way. The stormtroopers disappeared inside, weapons ready.

“Let’s go,” Nick whispered. “Could be they’ve got a Jedi trapped in there.”

“Could be we’ll be in the same fix, if we don’t do some recon before we rush in,” Kars Korthos pointed out. He was a small, compact man, full of nervous energy that always seemed on the verge of bursting like a solar flare, and his instincts were seldom wrong.

Nick considered. Kars had a point; they should at least scope the building for other possible ways in or out before they—

From deep within the forbidding interior came the sound of a blaster being fired.

“We’re going in,” Nick said, pulling his blaster and stepping quickly through.

“Looks like,” Kars agreed as he and the rest followed.

This is the period of the classic
Star Wars
movie trilogy—
A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back
, and
Return of the Jedi
—in which a ragtag band of Rebels battles the Empire, and Luke Skywalker learns the ways of the Force and must avoid his father’s fate.

During this time, the Empire controls nearly the entire settled galaxy. Out in the Rim worlds, Imperial stormtroopers suppress uprisings with brutal efficiency, many alien species have been enslaved, and entire star systems are brutally exploited by the Empire’s war machine. In the central systems, however, most citizens support the Empire, weighing misgivings about its harsh methods against the memories of the horror and chaos of the Clone Wars. Few dare to openly oppose Emperor Palpatine’s rule.

But the Rebel Alliance is growing. Rebel cells strike in secret from hidden bases scattered among the stars, encouraging some of the braver Senators to speak out against the Empire. When the Rebels learn that the Empire is building the Death Star, a space station with enough firepower to destroy entire planets, Princess Leia Organa, who represents her homeworld, Alderaan, in the Senate and is secretly a high-ranking member of the Rebel Alliance, receives the plans for the battle station and flees in search of the exiled Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Thus begin the events that lead her to meet the smuggler and soon-to-be hero Han Solo, to discover her long-lost brother, Luke Skywalker, and to help the Rebellion take down the Emperor and restore democracy to the galaxy: the events of the three films
A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back
, and
Return of the Jedi
.

If you’re a reader looking for places to jump in and explore the Rebellion-era novels, here are five great places to start:

Read on for an excerpt from a
Star Wars
novel set in the Rebellion era.

T
HE
C
ORELLIAN
Q
UEEN
WAS A LEGEND: THE GREATEST
luxury liner ever to ply the spaceways, an interstellar pleasure palace forever beyond the grasp of all but the galaxy’s super-elite—beings whose wealth transcended description. Rumor had it that for the price of a single cocktail in one of the Queen’s least-exclusive dining clubs, one might buy a starship; for the price of a meal, one could buy not only the starship, but the port in which it docked, and the factory that had built it. A being could not simply
pay for
a berth on the
Corellian Queen;
mere wealth would never suffice. To embark upon the ultimate journey into hedonistic excess, one first had to demonstrate that one’s breeding and manners were as exquisite as would be the pain of paying one’s bar bill. All of which made the
Corellian Queen
one of the most irresistible terrorist targets ever: who better to terrorize than the elite of the Elite, the Powers among the powerful, the greatest of the Great?