Heir to the Jedi (34 page)

ALSO BY KEVIN HEARNE

Hounded
Hexed
Hammered
Tricked
Trapped
Hunted
Shattered

IRON DRUID CHRONICLES NOVELLAS

Two Ravens and One Crow
Grimoire of the Lamb

Read on for an excerpt from

LORDS OF THE SITH

By Paul S. Kemp

PUBLISHED BY DEL REY BOOKS

VADER COMPLETED HIS MEDITATION
and opened his eyes. His pale, flame-savaged face stared back at him from out of the reflective black surface of his pressurized meditation chamber. Without the neural connection to his armor, he was conscious of the stumps of his legs, the ruin of his arm, the perpetual pain in his flesh. He welcomed it. Pain fed his hate, and hate fed his strength. Once, as a Jedi, he had meditated to find peace. Now he meditated to sharpen the edges of his anger.

He stared at his reflection a long time. His injuries had deformed his body, left it a ruin, but they’d perfected his spirit, strengthening his connection to the Force. Suffering had birthed insight.

An automated metal arm held the armor’s helmet and faceplate over his head like a doom, and the eyes of the faceplate that intimidated so many were no peer to his unmasked eyes. From within a sea of scars, his gaze simmered with controlled,
harnessed fury. The secondary respirator, still attached to him,
always
attached to him, masked the ruins of his mouth, and the sound of his breathing echoed off the walls.

Drawing on the Force, he activated the automated arm, and it descended with the helmet and faceplate. They wrapped his head in metal and plasteel, the shell in which he existed. He welcomed the spikes of pain when the helmet’s neural needles stabbed into the flesh of his skull and the base of his spine, linking his body, mind, and armor to form one interconnected unit.

When man and machine were unified, he no longer felt the absence of his legs, his arm, or the pain of his flesh, but the hate remained, and the rage still burned. Those he never relinquished, and he never felt more connected to the Force than when his rage burned.

With an effort of will, he commanded the onboard computer to link the primary respirator to the secondary, and to seal the helmet at the neck, encasing him fully. He was home.

Once, he’d found the armor hateful, foreign, but now he knew better. He realized that he’d always been fated to wear it, just as the Jedi had always been fated to betray their principles. He’d always been fated to face Obi-Wan and fail on Mustafar—and, in failing, learn.

The armor separated him from the galaxy, from everyone, made him singular, freed him from the needs of the flesh, the concerns of the body that once had plagued him, and allowed him to focus solely on his relationship to the Force.

It terrified others, he knew, and that pleased him. Their terror was a tool he used to accomplish his ends. Yoda once had told him that fear led to hate and hate to suffering. But Yoda had been wrong. Fear was a tool used by the strong to cow the weak. Hate was the font of true strength. It was not suffering that resulted from the rule of the strong over the weak, but
order
. By its very existence, the Force mandated the rule of the strong over the weak; the Force mandated order. The Jedi had never seen
that, and so they’d misunderstood the Force and been destroyed. But Vader’s Master saw it. Vader saw it. And so they were strong. And so they ruled.

He stood, his breathing loud in his ears, loud in the room, his reflection huge and dark on the reflective wall.

A wave of his gauntleted hand and a mental command rendered the walls of his ovate meditation chamber transparent instead of reflective. The chamber sat in the center of his private quarters aboard the
Perilous
. He looked out and up through the large viewport that opened onto the galaxy and its numberless worlds and stars.

It was his duty to rule them all. He saw that now. It was the manifest will of the Force. Existence without proper rule was chaos, disorder, suboptimal. The Force—invisible but ubiquitous—bent toward order and was the tool through which order could and must be imposed, but not through harmony, not through peaceful coexistence. That had been the approach of the Jedi, a foolish approach, a failed approach that only fomented more disorder. Vader and his Master imposed order the only way it could be imposed, the way the Force required that it be imposed, through conquest, by forcing the disorder to submit to the order, by bending the weak to the will of the strong.

The history of Jedi influence in the galaxy was a history of one war after another. The history of the Empire would be one of enforced peace, of imposed order.

A pending transmission caused the intraship comm to chime. He activated it and a hologram of the aquiline-faced, gray-haired commander of the
Perilous
, Captain Luitt, formed before him.

“Lord Vader, there’s been an incident at the Yaga Minor shipyards.”

“What kind of incident, Captain?”

.  .  .

The lights from the bridge computers blinked or didn’t as dictated by the pulse of the ship and the gestures of the ragtag skeleton crew of freedom fighters who manned the stations. Cham stood behind the helmsman and looked alternately from the viewscreen to the scanner and mentally recited the words he’d long ago etched on the stone of his mind so that he could, as needed, read them and be reminded:
Not a terrorist, but a freedom fighter. Not a terrorist, but a freedom fighter
.

Cham had fought for his people and Ryloth for over a decade. He’d fought for a free Ryloth when the Republic had tried to annex it, and he fought now for a free Ryloth against the Empire that was trying to strip it bare.

A free Ryloth.

The phrase, the concept, was the pole star around which his existence would forever turn.

Because Ryloth was not free.

As Cham had feared back during the Clone Wars, one well-intentioned occupier of Ryloth had given way to another, less well-intentioned occupier, and a Republic had, through the alchemy of ambition, been transformed into an Empire.

An Imperial protectorate, they called Ryloth. On Imperial star charts Cham’s homeworld was listed as “free and independent,” but the words could only be used that way with irony, else meaning was turned on its head.

Because Ryloth was not free.

Yet Orn Free Taa, Ryloth’s obese representative to the lickspittle, ceremonial Imperial Senate, validated the otherwise absurd Imperial claims through his treasonous acquiescence to them. But then Ryloth had no shortage of Imperial collaborators, or those willing to lay supine before stormtroopers.

And so … Ryloth was not free.

But it would be one day. Cham would see to it. Over the years he’d recruited and trained hundreds of likeminded people, most of them Twi’leks, but not all. He’d cultivated friendly contacts
and informants all over the Outer Rim and the Core. Over the years he’d planned and executed raid after raid against the Imperials, cautious and precise raids, but effective. Dozens of dead Imperials gave mute testimony to the growing effectiveness of the Free Ryloth movement.

Not a terrorist, but a freedom fighter.

He put a reassuring hand on the shoulder of the helmsman, felt the tension in the clenched muscles of her shoulder. Like most of the crew, like Cham, she was a Twi’lek, and Cham doubted she’d ever flown anything larger than a little gorge hopper, certainly nothing like the armed freighter she steered now.

“Just hold her steady, Helm,” Cham said. “We won’t need anything fancy out of you.”

Standing behind Cham, Isval added, “We hope.”

The helmsman exhaled and nodded. Her lekku, the twin headtails that extended down from the back of her head to her shoulders, relaxed slightly to signify relief. “Aye, sir. Nothing fancy.”

Isval stepped beside Cham, her eyes on the viewscreen.

“Where are they?” she grumbled, the darkening blue of her skin and the agitated squirm of her lekku a reflection of her irritation. “It’s been days and no word.”

Isval always grumbled. She was perpetually restless, a wanderer trapped in a cage only she could see, pacing the confines over and over, forever testing the strength of the bars. Cham valued her need for constant motion, for constant action. They were the perfect counterpoints to each other: her rash, him deliberate; her practical, him principled.

“Peace, Isval,” he said softly.

He held his hands, sweaty with stress despite his calm tone, clasped behind his back. He eyed the bridge chrono. Almost time. “They’re not late, not yet. And if they’d failed, we’d have had word by now.”

Her retort came fast. “If they’d succeeded, we’d have had word by now, too. Wouldn’t we?”

Cham shook his head, his lekku swaying. “No, not necessarily. They’d run silent. Pok knows better than to risk comm chatter. He’d need to skim a gas giant to refuel, too. And he might have needed to shake pursuit. They had a lot of space to cover.”

“He would’ve sent word, though, something,” she insisted. “They could have blown up the ship during the hijack attempt. They could all be dead. Or worse.”

She said the words too loudly, and the heads of several of the crew came up from their work, looks of concern on their faces.

“They could, but they’re not.” He put his hand on her shoulder. “Peace, Isval. Peace.”

She grimaced and swallowed hard, as if trying to rid herself of a bad taste. She pulled away from him and started to pace anew. “Peace. There’s peace only for the dead.”

Cham smiled. “Then let’s stick with war for at least a bit longer, eh?”

His words stopped her in her pacing and elicited one of her half smiles, and a half smile was as close as Isval ever got to the real thing. He had only a vague sense of what had been done to her when she’d been enslaved, but he had a firm sense that it must have been awful. She’d come a long way.

“Back to it, people,” he ordered, and eyes returned to their places. “Stay sharp.”

Silence soon filled all the empty space on the bridge. Hope hung suspended in the quiet—fragile, brittle, ready to be shattered with the wrong word. The relentless gravity of waiting drew eyes constantly to the chrono. But still nothing.

Cham had hidden the freighter in the rings of one of the system’s gas giants. Metal ore in the rock chunks that made up the rings would hide the ship from any scans.

“Helm, take us above the plane of the rings,” Cham said.

Even in an off-the-chart system, it was a risk to put the freighter outside of the shelter of the planet’s rings. The ship’s credentials wouldn’t hold up to a full Imperial query, and Imperial probes and scouts were everywhere, as the Emperor tried to firm up his grip on the galaxy and quell any hotspots. If they were spotted, they’d have to run.

“Magnify screen when we’re clear.”

Even magnified the screen would show far less than long-range sensors, but Cham needed to see for himself, not stare at readouts.

Isval paced beside him.

The ship shifted up, out of the bands of ice and rock, and the magnified image on the screen showed the outer system. A single, distant planetoid of uninhabited rock orbited the system’s dim star at the edge of the system, and countless stars beyond blinked in the dark. A nebula light-years away to starboard painted a splash of space the color of blood.

Cham stared at the screen as if he could pull his comrades through hyperspace by sheer force of will. Assuming they’d even been able to jump. The whole operation had been a huge risk, but Cham had thought it worthwhile to secure more heavy weapons and force the Empire to divert some resources away from Ryloth. Too, he’d wanted to make a statement, send a message that at least some of the Twi’leks of Ryloth would not quietly accept Imperial rule. He’d wanted to be the spark that started a fire across the galaxy.

“Come on, Pok,” he whispered, the involuntary twitch of his lekku betraying his stress. He’d known Pok for years and called him friend.

Isval muttered under her breath, a steady flood of Twi’lek expletives.

Cham watched the chrono as the appointed time arrived and passed, taking the hopes of the crew with it. Heavy sighs and slack lekkus all around.

“Patience, people,” Cham said softly. “We wait. We keep waiting until we know.”

“We wait,” Isval affirmed with a nod. She paced the deck, staring at the viewscreen as if daring it to keep showing her something she didn’t want to see.

The moments stretched. The crew shifted in their seats, shared surreptitious looks of disappointment. Cham had to work to unclench his jaw.

The engineer on scan duty broke the spell.

“I’ve got something!” she said.

Cham and Isval fairly sprinted over to the scanner. All eyes watched them.

“It’s a ship,” the engineer said.

A satisfied, relieved rustle moved through the bridge crew. Cham could almost hear the smiles. He eyed the readout.

“That’s an Imperial transport,” he said.

“That’s
our
Imperial transport,” Isval said.

A few members of the bridge crew gave a muted cheer.

“Stay on station, people,” Cham said, but could not shake his grin.

“Coming through now,” the engineer said. “It’s them, sir. It’s them! They’re hailing us.”

“On speaker,” Cham said. “Meanwhile, alert the offload team. We’ll want to get those weapons aboard and destroy that ship as soon as—”

A crackle of static and then Pok’s strained voice. “Get clear of here right now! Just go!”

“Pok?” Cham said, as the crew’s elation shifted to concern. “Pok, what is it?”

“It’s Vader, Cham. Get out of here now! We thought we’d lost the pursuit. We’ve been jumping through systems to throw them off. I’d thought we’d lost them, but they’re still on us! Go, Cham!”

The engineer looked up at Cham, her lavender skin flushing
to dark blue at the cheeks. “There are more ships coming out of hyperspace, sir. More than a dozen, all small.” Her voice tightened as she said, “V-wings probably.”

Cham and Isval cursed as one.

“Get on station, people!” Cham ordered.

Vader’s personal Eta-2
Actis
-class interceptor led the starfighter squadron as the star-lined tunnel of hyperspace gave way to the black of ordinary space. A quick scan allowed him to locate the hijacked weapons transport, which they’d been pursuing through several systems as it tried to work its way out to the Rim.

The heavily armed transport showed slight blaster damage along the aft hull near the three engines, behind the bloated center of the cargo bay, behind the Imperial insignia.