Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime (53 page)

The Bothan shook his head. “You’re telling us that they used rocks to kill a Star Destroyer?”

“Yes.”

Pwoe glanced down at his desk, then looked up with a malevolent glint in his black eyes. “Leia, as one who has looked up to you in the past, I beg you, please, stop now. You cannot know how pathetic you appear to be. You chose to leave public life. For you to come here now, with this story, in such a bald attempt to take back control from our hands, is a pitiful thing.”

“What?” Leia blinked her astonishment away. “You think I came here to make a power grab?”

“I am given nothing else to think.” Pwoe opened his hands and took in the whole of the chamber. “You want to protect your brother, your children, for they are all Jedi, and I can understand that. It is also clear you do not think we are capable of surviving any catastrophe without you, but the plain fact is that things have gone well since the resolution of the Bothan situation. We all understand the human lust for power, and we have admired you for suppressing it for so long, but now, this—”

“No, no, that’s not my intention at all.” Leia looked aghast at the senators. “What I am telling you is true, it’s real. We may have thrown back a vanguard, but they’re coming.”

The Sullustan senator covered his ears with his hands. “Please, Leia, no more, no more. Your loyalty to the Jedi is laudable, but this attempt to make us think they might be useful because of some nebulous threat—it is beneath you!”

“But very
human
of her,” the Baragwin sniffed.

An invisible fist seemed to close around Leia’s heart and squeeze hard. Her elbows bent and she rested her forearms on the podium. “You
must
listen to me!”

“Leia, please, do what Mon Mothma has done.” Pwoe’s voice filled with pity. “Fade away quietly. The government is ours now. Let us remember you fondly, as someone who transcended her humanity.”

Leia looked out at the senators and wished age had dulled enough of her vision so she couldn’t see the looks of contempt being directed at her.
They won’t see because they can’t allow themselves to see. They need to be in control so badly they will ignore danger instead of admitting there is a crisis. They will lose everything just because they want to prove they are in control
. Their willful ignorance left her drained and speechless, with the weight of their pity and contempt crushing her down.

This can’t be happening. Everything we have gained to be thrown away so foolishly
. Leia’s grip on the podium slackened as she began to back away from it.
To lose everything …

A strong, sharp voice cut through the low murmuring in the senate chamber. “How dare you? How dare any of you speak to her this way?” In the middle of the room, a golden-furred alien, long and lean, with purple striping rising up and back from the corners of his eyes, rose to his full height. “If not for this woman and the sacrifices of her family, none of us would be here, and most of us would be dead.”

Elegos A’Kla opened his three-fingered hands. “Your blatant ingratitude lends credence to the Imperial vision of our being mere beasts!”

The Rodian senator stabbed a sucker-tipped finger at the Caamasi. “Don’t forget, she was one of them!”

Elegos’s eyes narrowed, and Leia felt a wave of pain wash off him. “Can you say that without realizing how feebleminded it makes you sound? To lump her with Imperials is pure prejudice—prejudice of the sort that the Imperials flaunted when they oppressed us.”

Niuk Niuv waved away the Caamasi’s comments with a flip of his hand. “Your criticism would bear more weight, Senator A’Kla, were you not known to have collaborated with Jedi before. Your sympathies for them run deep. Was not your uncle one of them?”

Elegos drew his head back, emphasizing his height and slender form. “My loyalties to friends and relatives who were Jedi do not blind me to what Leia has tried to say here. You may choose to see the Jedi as a threat—and even I would acknowledge that the activities of some leave me cold—but she is reporting a new threat, perhaps a greater one, to the New Republic. To willfully ignore it so you may pursue your own glory is the height of irresponsibility.”

Pwoe’s tentacles curled up in anger. “This is well and good for you to say, A’Kla, but your people and their survival owes much to Leia and her family. Many of you died on Alderaan, and it has been human guilt and charity that has protected you for decades. Your rising to her defense is not surprising, akin to a nek battle dog licking the hand of the trainer that beats it.”

Leia felt that comment sink home and returned to the podium. Her voice remained low and placid, despite the anger spiking inside of her. Though she resented calling upon a Jedi calming technique, she did, allowing her to focus. Her expression sharpened and her gaze swept out over the assembled senators.

“You will choose to project on me all manner of sinister motives. This is your right. I can even understand old resentments being transferred to me, though I would have thought my history would have shown you where my heart is. Now I don’t even expect you to listen to me, I guess. You see the New Republic as your own, and I applaud your rising to take responsibility for it. Despite what you might think or want to believe, you make me very proud.

“Where you disappoint me is in turning on yourselves. The New Republic’s strength has always come from its union of diverse peoples.” She shrugged, then straightened up. “I will leave for you all that we have learned about these invaders. I hope you will find the information useful when you find a time to employ it.”

Borsk Fey’lya regarded her closely as she stepped back from the podium. “What will you do now, Leia?”

She huffed quietly and stared at him for a moment.
Afraid I will stage a coup to get my way, Borsk? Do you think I have that much power?
“I’ll do what I need to. The New Republic may have abandoned me, but I’ve not abandoned it. This threat must be stopped.”

The fur on the back of the Bothan’s neck rose slowly. “You have no official standing. You can’t just commandeer equipment, issue orders, and the like.”

She slowly shook her head, then smiled as Elegos appeared at her side. “I know the rules, Chief Fey’lya, both those publicly codified and those by which the game is truly played. I have no desire to pit myself against you, so don’t make it necessary.”

Elegos rested a hand on Leia’s shoulder.
“This
senator wishes to learn more about the threat. I trust, Chief Fey’lya, there will be no interference with my investigation.”

“Interference, no …” The Bothan’s violet eyes became slits. “Be careful, however. Curiosity will be permitted, but treason will be punished. Do you understand?”

Elegos nodded and Leia joined him. “Your message is received, Chief Fey’lya. Senator A’Kla and I will be very careful, and so should you be. A judgment of treason in a time like this could haunt you through history,
if
the invaders leave anyone alive to care.”

Long—
long
—ago in a galaxy far, far away … some twenty-five thousand years before Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin in
Star Wars: A New Hope
 … a large number of star systems and species in the center of the galaxy came together to form the Galactic Republic, governed by a Chancellor and a Senate from the capital city-world of Coruscant. As the Republic expanded via the hyperspace lanes, it absorbed new member worlds from newly discovered star systems; it also expanded its military to deal with the hostile civilizations, slavers, pirates, and gangster-species such as the slug-like Hutts that were encountered in the outward exploration. But the most vital defenders of the Republic were the Jedi Knights. Originally a reclusive order dedicated to studying the mysteries of the life energy known as the Force, the Jedi became the Republic’s guardians, charged by the Senate with keeping the peace—with wise words if possible; with lightsabers if not.

But the Jedi weren’t the only Force-users in the galaxy. An ancient civil war had pitted those Jedi who used the Force selflessly against those who allowed themselves to be ruled by their ambitions—which the Jedi warned led to the dark side of the Force. Defeated in that long-ago war, the dark siders fled beyond the galactic frontier, where they built a civilization of their own: the Sith Empire.

The first great conflict between the Republic and the Sith Empire occurred when two hyperspace explorers stumbled on the Sith worlds, giving the Sith Lord Naga Sadow and his dark side warriors a direct invasion route into the Republic’s central worlds. This war resulted in the first destruction of the Sith Empire—but it was hardly the last. For the next four thousand years, skirmishes between the Republic and Sith grew into wars, with the scales always tilting toward one or the other, and peace never lasting. The galaxy was a place of almost constant strife: Sith armies against Republic armies; Force-using Sith Lords against Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights; and the dreaded nomadic mercenaries called Mandalorians bringing muscle and firepower wherever they stood to gain.

Then, a thousand years before
A New Hope
and the Battle of Yavin, the Jedi defeated the Sith at the Battle of Ruusan, decimating the so-called Brotherhood of Darkness that was the heart of the Sith Empire—and most of its power.

One Sith Lord survived—Darth Bane—and his vision for the Sith differed from that of his predecessors. He instituted a new doctrine: No longer would the followers of the dark side build empires or amass great armies of Force-users. There would be only two Sith at a time: a Master and an apprentice. From that time on, the Sith remained in hiding, biding their time and plotting their revenge, while the rest of the galaxy enjoyed an unprecedented era of peace, so long and strong that the Republic eventually dismantled its standing armies.

But while the Republic seemed strong, its institutions had begun to rot. Greedy corporations sought profits above all else and a corrupt Senate did nothing to stop them, until the corporations reduced many planets to raw materials for factories and entire species became subjects for exploitation. Individual Jedi continued to defend the Republic’s citizens and obey the will of the Force, but the Jedi Order to which they answered grew increasingly out of touch. And a new Sith mastermind, Darth Sidious, at last saw a way to restore Sith domination over the galaxy and its inhabitants, and quietly worked to set in motion the revenge of the Sith …

If you’re a reader new to the Old Republic era, here are three great starting points:

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

D
essel was lost in the suffering of his job, barely even aware of his surroundings. His arms ached from the endless pounding of the hydraulic jack. Small bits of rock skipped off the cavern wall as he bored through, ricocheting off his protective goggles and stinging his exposed face and hands. Clouds of atomized dust filled the air, obscuring his vision, and the screeching whine of the jack filled the cavern, drowning out all other sounds as it burrowed centimeter by agonizing centimeter into the thick vein of cortosis woven into the rock before him.

Impervious to both heat and energy, cortosis was prized in the construction of armor and shielding by both commercial and military interests, especially with the galaxy at war. Highly resistant to blaster bolts, cortosis alloys supposedly could withstand even the blade of a lightsaber. Unfortunately, the very properties that made it so valuable also made it extremely difficult to mine. Plasma torches were virtually useless; it would take days to burn away even a small section of cortosis-laced rock. The only effective way to mine it was through the brute force of hydraulic jacks pounding relentlessly away at a vein, chipping the cortosis free bit by bit.

Cortosis was one of the hardest materials in the galaxy. The force of the pounding quickly wore down the head of a jack, blunting it until it became almost useless. The dust clogged the hydraulic pistons, making them jam. Mining cortosis was hard on the equipment … and even harder on the miners.

Des had been hammering away for nearly six standard hours. The jack weighed more than thirty kilos, and the strain of keeping it raised and pressed against the rock face was taking its toll. His arms were trembling from the exertion. His lungs were gasping for air and choking on the clouds of fine mineral dust thrown up from the jack’s head. Even his teeth hurt: the rattling vibration felt as if it were shaking them loose from his gums.