Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor Read online

  Star Wars: Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  2010 Del Rey Mass Market Edition

  Copyright © 2008 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, 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.

  Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2008.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79585-4

  www.starwars.com

  www.delreybooks.com

  v3.1

  The author respectfully dedicates this novel to the legendary

  Alan Dean Foster, and to the memory of the late, great Brian

  Daley, for showing us what it looks like

  when this stuff is done right.

  Thank you, gentlemen. We are in your debt.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author wishes to gratefully acknowledge the following people, without whom this novel would not exist in its current form:

  Mike Kogge, for suggesting that I look at the end of Luke’s military career; Karen Traviss, for an opportune bit of translation; Sue Rostoni, Leland Chee, and all the folks at Lucasfilm for unflagging support and expert assistance; Shelly Shapiro, my editor at Del Rey, for leap-tall-buildings-in-a-single-bound encouragement, more-powerful-than-a-locomotive patience, and faster-than-a-speeding-bullet skill to shepherd this story from idea to hardcover; and Robyn, my beloved wife and periodic Star Wars widow, who accomplished the most heroic task of all: living with me while I slowly ground my way through this story.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Briefing

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Debriefing

  About the Author

  Also by this Author

  Introduction to the Star Wars Expanded Universe

  Excerpt from Star Wars: Shatterpoint

  Introduction to the Old Republic Era

  Introduction to the Rise of the Empire Era

  Introduction to the Rebellion Era

  Introduction to the New Republic Era

  Introduction to the New Jedi Order Era

  Introduction to the Legacy Era

  Star Wars Novels Timeline

  A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.…

  BRIEFING

  LORZ GEPTUN STOOD OUTSIDE THE COMMAND CABIN door and tried to swallow. Really, this was too much: to be summoned before Luke Skywalker, of all people. A Jedi. Not only a Jedi, but the son of Anakin Skywalker. And now Geptun had to meet him. Face-to-face!

  He tugged at the collar of his dress-blue uniform tunic, slid a finger behind it to try to stretch the fabric just a hair more. He grimaced at how difficult he found this simple task to be; surely his tailor had miscalculated—again—because he couldn’t possibly have put on so much weight since he’d had this made. Could he? In, what had it been, three Standard months? A man of his admittedly advanced age—he would never see seventy again—should have settled on a size, and left it at that.

  Geptun was not much in favor of dress uniforms, anyway. He’d left his own behind on his homeworld decades before, at the beginning of the Clone Wars, trading it in for mufti; in those days, Republic Intelligence had been a largely covert service, and had had no use for uniforms. He’d left Republic Intelligence not long after it had become Imperial Intelligence; his investigation of the so-called Jedi Rebellion had uncovered entirely too much of certain truths that the Imperial Executive had preferred to conceal, and for a number of years he’d been forced to make a living as a freelance broker of information while doing his best to avoid attracting any official Imperial attention.

  Eventually, he’d offered his services to the Rebel Alliance. Though he had little interest in politics—his primary political conviction was a profound interest in his own safety and comfort—he’d recognized that the prospective government the Rebels planned to install would, owing to its youthful amateurish untidiness, afford him a great deal more opportunity for the freedom to make his own way in his own way. Which was another way of saying: to live and work in the lucrative shadows outside official scrutiny.

  Which made his current situation all the more ironic.

  He sighed. Nothing ever works out how we wish, yes? Doesn’t mean one can’t turn it to one’s advantage. He sighed again and raised a finger to trigger the cabin’s door chime … but before he could, the door slid open, and a voice that sounded a great deal older and wearier than Geptun had expected said, “Inspector Geptun. Please come in.”

  Geptun grimaced again. He’d become accustomed, this twenty-plus years past, to a galaxy without Jedi. He wasn’t at all sure he was looking forward to their return.

  He took a deep breath and waddled through the door. “General Skywalker,” he said with a slight bow—no salute, as the Judicial Service was outside the military chain of command—and a pleasant smile. “How may I be of service?”

  The young general sat on the edge of his desk, head lowered and hands clasped before him. He wore close-fitting civilian clothing of a somber black, very much in the style his celebrated father had made famous. Geptun reflected with a flash of annoyance that if he’d known Skywalker would be out of uniform, he would have come to this meeting in a comfortable blazer instead of this bloody jookley suit.

  Skywalker lifted his head as though he had felt Geptun’s annoyance—and he might very well have, Geptun reminded himself. Bloody Jedi. “Inspector Lorz Geptun,” Skywalker said slowly. “I know a little about you, Inspector. You were a military governor and director of planetary intelligence for the CIS during the Clone Wars.”

  Geptun’s too-tight collar suddenly seemed to tighten further. “Briefly. At the beginning of the—”

  “Then you were a Republic spy.”

  “Well—”

  “And after that, you made your living tracking targets for bounty hunters.”

  “Not specifically for—”

  “And now you’re a JS investigator. Through all this, there’s a running theme. You have a talent.”

  Geptun said carefully, “Do I?”

  “You seem to be pretty good at finding the truth.”

  Geptun relaxed. “Oh, well, thank you for—”

  “And at making money off it.”

  “Erm.” He cleared his throat, but found he had nothing to say.

  Skywalker pushed himself to his feet. His face was drawn, and far more deeply lined than Geptun had expected from a lad of twenty-four. He looked like he hadn’t been sleeping for some few days now. His movements were slightly unsteady, and the shadows under his eyes were shading toward purple—but they were nothing compared
to the shadows within his eyes. “That’s what I know about you. What do you know about me?”

  Geptun blinked. “General?”

  “Come on, Inspector.” Skywalker sounded even more tired than he looked. “Everybody knows stuff about me. What do you know?”

  “Oh, well, you know, the usual—Tatooine, Yavin, Endor, Bakura, Death Star One and Two—” Geptun realized he was babbling and shut up.

  Skywalker nodded. “The usual. The stories. The press releases. The problem is that those stories and press releases aren’t really about me at all. They’re about the guy everybody wants me to be, understand?”

  Geptun eyed him warily; he sensed that he’d been maneuvered onto dangerous ground. “I’m afraid,” he said slowly, “that I don’t understand.”

  Skywalker nodded with a slow, tired sigh. “That’s because you don’t know that less than a month ago, I murdered about fifty thousand innocent beings.”

  Geptun goggled at him, then blinked and cleared his throat again as he figured out what the young Jedi was talking about. “You mean Mindor?”

  Skywalker’s eyes drifted shut; he winced as though he were looking at something painful on the inside of his eyelids. “Yeah. Mindor. I say about fifty thousand because I don’t know the real number. Nobody does. The records were destroyed along with the system.”

  “From what I’ve heard, your victory at the Battle of Mindor would hardly constitute murder—”

  “From what you’ve heard. More stories.”

  “Well, I had heard—I, ah …” Geptun coughed delicately. “What is it, exactly, that you want me to do?”

  “You’re an investigator. I want you to investigate.”

  “Investigate what?”

  “Mindor.” Skywalker’s face twisted. “Me.”

  He looked like something hurt. Or like everything hurt.

  “Well, I, ah … erm.” Geptun could think of several dozen ways to earn a tidy sum from such a project. “If you don’t mind, may I inquire as to how my name came up for this?”

  Skywalker looked away. “You were recommended by an old friend.”

  “Was I? And how did your old friend come to—”

  “Not my old friend,” Skywalker said. “Yours. His name was Nick.”

  “Nick?” Geptun frowned. “I don’t know any—”

  “He said to give you this.” Skywalker held out a hook-shaped, curved, metallic-looking object. “Careful. It’s sharp.”

  Geptun accepted the object gingerly … and as soon as it touched his palm, his mind was flooded with images of a dark-skinned man with tight-cropped hair, a cocky grin, and startling blue eyes. “Nick Rostu?” he breathed. “I haven’t thought of Nick Rostu in … years. Decades. I thought he was dead.”

  Skywalker shrugged. “He probably is.”

  “I don’t understand.” But he did understand, at least a little. The object in his hand was from his—and Nick Rostu’s—homeworld.

  It was a brassvine thorn.

  “So he was right about that, anyway.” Skywalker nodded at the thorn. “He said you can read objects. That you can touch them and sense things about their owners.”

  Geptun shrugged. Why trouble to deny it? “It’s a minor talent—but useful in an intelligence analyst.”

  “Or an investigator.”

  Geptun’s nod was noncommittal. “What else did Rostu tell you about me?”

  “He said you’re vicious, venal, and corrupt. That you don’t have a shred of decency, and about as much human feeling as a glacier lizard.”

  Geptun nodded abstractedly. “That does sound like Rostu …”

  “He also said that you’ve got plenty of guts, that you’re the smartest guy he ever met, and that once you get started on something, you never, ever quit. You don’t like Jedi, and you don’t much care who rules the galaxy as long as you can make a decent living. All of which makes you exactly the man for this job.”

  “And what job, if you don’t mind saying, is this?”

  “I want you to build a case. Talk to people. Everyone who survived Mindor. Get the facts, and make sense of them, and make a case.”

  “What sort of case?”

  “War crimes,” Skywalker said grimly. “Crimes against civilization, dereliction of duty, desertion. That kind of thing. Anything you can find out.”

  Geptun angled his head. “About whom? Who is the war criminal you wish to indict?”

  “I thought that was obvious.” The shadows in Skywalker’s eyes swelled as though they might swallow his whole life. “It’s me.”

  Geptun said, “I’ll do it.”

  None of the stories people tell about me

  can change who I really am.

  —Luke Skywalker

  Six months after the destruction of the second Death Star and the downfall of the evil Emperor Palpatine, Luke Skywalker and the victorious Rebel Alliance still struggle against surviving Imperial forces, who remain as determined as ever to crush all that is good in the galaxy.

  Black-armored stormtroopers under the command of the mysterious warlord Shadowspawn now raid the infant New Republic, taking up piracy, pillage, and destruction in the wake of the Empire’s collapse. Attacking at will, they have shaken galactic confidence in the Republic’s ability to maintain order and security.

  In deep space along the Corellian Run, the Alliance’s premier fighter squadron springs a trap on Shadowspawn’s marauders …

  CHAPTER 1

  THE CORELLIAN QUEEN 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?

  And so when some presumably unscrupulous routing clerk in the vast midreaches of the Nebula Line corporation quietly offered for sale, to select parties from Kindlabethia to Nar Shaddaa, a hint as to the route of the Corellian Queen’s upcoming cruise, it attracted considerable interest.

  Two pertinent facts remained concealed, however, from the winning bidder. The first pertinent fact was that this presumably unscrupulous routing clerk was neither unscrupulous nor, in fact, a routing clerk, but was a skilled and resourceful agent of the intelligence service of the New Republic. The second pertinent fact was that the Corellian Queen was not cruising at all that season, having been replaced by a breakaway disposable shell built to conceal a substantial fraction of a starfighter wing, led by—as was customary in such operations—the crack pilots of Rogue Squadron.

  IT WAS APPROXIMATELY THE MOMENT THAT R4-G7 squalled a proximity alarm through his X-wing’s sensor panel and his HUD lit up with image codes for six TIE defenders on his tail that Lieutenant Derek “Hobbie” Klivian, late of the Alliance to Restore Freedom to the Galaxy, currently of the New Republic, began to suspect that Commander Antilles’s brilliant ambush had never been brilliant at all, not even a little, and he said so. In no uncertain terms. Stripped of its blistering profanity, his comment was “Wedge? This plan was stupid. You hear me? Stupid, stupid, stuYOW—!”

  The yow was a product of multiple cannon hits that disintegrated his right dorsal cannon and most of the extended wing it had been attached to. This kicked his fighter into a tumble that he fought with both hands on the yoke and both feet kicking attitude jets and almost had under control until the pair of the defenders closest
on his tail blossomed into expanding spheres of flame and debris fragments. The twin shock fronts overtook him at exactly the wrong instant and sent him flipping end-over-end straight at another defender formation streaking toward him head-on. Then tail-on, then head-on again, and so forth.

  His ship’s comlink crackled as Wedge Antilles’s fighter flashed past him close enough that he could see the grin on the commander’s face. “That’s ‘stupid plan, sir,’ Lieutenant.”

  “I suppose you think that’s funny.”

  “Well, if he doesn’t,” put in Hobbie’s wingman, “I sure do.”

  “When I want your opinion, Janson, I’ll dust your ship and scan for it in the wreckage.” The skewed whirl of stars around his cockpit gave his stomach a yank that threatened to make the slab of smoked terrafin loin he’d had for breakfast violently reemerge. Struggling grimly with the controls, he managed to angle his ship’s whirl just a hair, which let him twitch his ship’s nose toward the four pursuing marauders as he spun. Red fire lashed from his three surviving cannons, and the defenders’ formation split open like an overripe snekfruit.

  Hobbie only dusted one with the cannons, but the pair of proximity-fused flechette torpedoes he had thoughtfully triggered at the same time flared in diverging arcs to intercept the enemy fighters; these torpedo arcs terminated in spectacular explosions that cracked the three remaining defenders like rotten snuffle eggs.

  “Now, that was satisfying,” he said, still fighting his controls to stabilize the crippled X-wing. “Eyeball soufflé!”

  “Better watch it, Hobbie—keep that up, and somebody might start to think you can fly that thing.”

  “Are you in this fight, Janson? Or are you just gonna hang back and smirk while I do all the heavy lifting?”

  “Haven’t decided yet.” Wes Janson’s X-wing came out of nowhere, streaking in a tight bank across Hobbie’s subjective vertical. “Maybe I can lend a hand. Or, say, a couple torps.”