Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [0]
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
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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