• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“First time to Kashyyyk?” Cudgel said.

“Yes,” Starstone answered for everyone. “Hopefully not our last.”

“Welcome, then.” Forcing a smile, he eyed the transport. “This is an L two hundred, isn’t it?”

“Military surplus,” Filli said quickly.

Cudgel cocked a flaring eyebrow. “Already? I was under the impression there wasn’t any surplus.” Before Filli could respond, he continued: “Can’t be carrying much in the way of trade goods. Are you off a freighter up top?”

“We’re not here to trade, exactly,” Filli said. “More in the way of a fact-finding mission.”

“We’re in the market for an Oevvaor catamaran,” Starstone explained.

Cudgel blinked in surprise. “Then your ship had better be filled with aurodium credits.”

“Our client is prepared to pay a fair price,” Starstone said.

Cudgel stroked his chest-length beard. “Not a question of price. More of availability.”

“How bad were things here?” Forte asked abruptly. “The battle, I mean?”

Cudgel followed the Jedi’s gaze to the tree-city. “Bad enough. The Wookiees are still cleaning up.”

“Many killed?” Nam asked.

“Even one’s too many.”

“Were any Jedi involved?”

Jambe’s question seemed to stop Cudgel cold. “Why do you ask?”

“We just came from Saleucami,” Starstone said, hoping to put Cudgel at ease. “We heard that several Jedi were killed by clone troopers during the battle.”

Cudgel appraised her. “I wouldn’t know about that. I was in Rwookrrorro during most of it.” He pointed. “Other side of the escarpment.”

A short silence fell over everyone.

“Well, let’s see if I can’t find someone who knows catamarans,” Cudgel said at last.

Starstone kept quiet until the hirsute middleman had moved off. “I don’t think that went so well,” she said to Forte and the others.

“Shouldn’t matter,” Iwo Kulka said. “Kashyyyk isn’t Saleucami or Felucia. We’re in Jedi-friendly territory.”

“That’s what you said on Boz Pity—” Starstone started to say when Filli cut her off.

“Cudgel’s back.”

With four rangy Wookiees in tow, Starstone saw.

“These are the folk I told you about,” Cudgel was telling the Wookiees, in Basic.

Before Starstone could open her mouth to speak, the Wookiees bared their fangs and brandished the most bizarre-looking hand blasters she had ever seen.

The Star Destroyer Exactor and its older sibling, Executrix, drifted side by side, bow-to-stern, forming a parallelogram of armor and armament.

Vader’s black shuttle navigated the short distance between them.

He sat in the passenger hold’s forward row of seats, his cadre of stormtroopers behind him, and his thoughts focused on what awaited him on Kashyyyk, rather than on the imminent meeting, which he suspected was little more than a formality.

His last conversation with Sidious, weeks earlier but as if only yesterday, had made it clear that his Master was manipulating him now as much as he had before he had turned. Before and during the war Sidious’s intention had been to entice him into joining the Sith; since, the goal was to transform him into a Sith. That was, to impress upon Vader that the power of the dark side did not flow from understanding but from appetite, rivalry, avarice, and malice. The very qualities the Jedi considered base and corrupt.

As a means of keeping their plucked pupils from exploring the deeper sides of their nature; as a means of reining them, lest they discovered for themselves the real power of the Force.

Anger leads to fear; fear to hatred; hatred to the dark side …

Precisely, Vader thought.

At Sidious’s insistence, he had spent the recent weeks sharpening his ability to summon and make use of his rage, and felt poised at the edge of a significant increase in his abilities.

Deep space was appropriate to such feelings, he told himself as he gazed out the cabin’s viewport. Space was more appropriate for the Sith than for the Jedi. The invisible enslavement to gravity, the contained power of the stars, the utter insignificance of life … Hyperspace, by contrast, was more suitable