Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [91]
I could have saved myself and Artoo the trouble if I remembered the first lesson about junior officers: if they know something neat, they can’t wait to share it. If they know nothing, they use ranks and regs to cover their ignorance. This Lieutenant Morrs was about as ignorant as a Hutt is ugly. Because of storms raging in the gas giant’s heart, he couldn’t be certain if the Sun Crusher was there, had been destroyed or had been taken away. His survey results were labeled inconclusive and seemed to have put the New Republic somewhat at ease concerning the Sun Crusher.
While I would have liked to have taken heart in the idea that the Sun Crusher might not have gone anywhere, another development, or lack of one actually, had me worried. Since Luke’s defeat, there had been no sign of the dark man. This scared me a great deal because his lack of activity was somewhat uncharacteristic and made me think we were just on the cusp of the disaster Master Skywalker had foreseen.
I still thought of the dark man as a sociopath, and nothing I’d learned about Exar Kun suggested he didn’t fit that mold perfectly. Sociopathic murderers tend to cycle—they commit their crimes on a schedule that makes sense for them. As their crimes become more and more horrific, the cycle tends to speed up until whatever little control they had over themselves erodes and they get sloppy enough to get captured. The havoc they wreak in that time is nothing short of devastating and brutally cruel.
Gantoris was on Yavin just over two weeks before his death, which could be seen as a cap to one cycle. Kyp arrived a week or so later and was here just over a week before he stole the Headhunter. Inside a week he came back and dropped Luke like a hot rock. By rights the dark man should have been back preying on us within days after Luke’s defeat, but he wasn’t, and this frightened me.
There were ample explanations for why he wasn’t causing us trouble. The first is that he wanted to give us time to despair over Luke’s condition. That would leave us more vulnerable to him. The second reason, and one that chilled me to the marrow, was that he was devoting his energies to controlling Kyp Durron and the Sun Crusher. If it was Exar Kun who had influenced Kyp, I didn’t know what target he’d pick for the Sun Crusher, but I’d hate to be on a world he decided to pay back after four thousand years.
The only vaguely positive explanation for Exar Kun’s dormancy that I could come up with was that his effort to draw the Sun Crusher from Yavin and to down Luke had tired him out. I had no way to determine how powerful Exar Kun could be, but it struck me as possible that he’d expended a lot of energy to defeat a Jedi Master. There was no telling how long it would take for him to recover, but with each passing day the apprentices grew in strength as well.
In blackest night, any light is welcome.
Tycho brought the medical team and my special supplies as quickly as possible. He told me the shuttle he had brought had a fully operational proton torpedo launching system and offered to take me on a strafing run of any Temple I wanted to destroy, but I held back. Proton torpedoes probably would have been the most effective way to deal with Exar Kun’s stronghold, but I still recalled how adamant Luke had been that neither I nor any of the other students travel there. If we weren’t strong enough to deal with the problem, I didn’t want to put Tycho in jeopardy.
“I’ll leave you the coordinates, Colonel.” I tossed him a salute as he boarded the shuttle to leave. “If things go very badly, talk Admiral Ackbar into a planetary bombardment that will raze it.”
“I copy.” He returned my salute. “May the Force be with you.”
The medical team he’d brought went over Luke from top to bottom, inside and out. His systems seemed to be functioning just fine, but there was no one in residence inside him. The doctors and med-techs and