Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [252]
The Sentinels
No. 1 The Devil’s Hand
No. 2 Dark Powers
No. 3 Death Dance
No. 4 World Killers
No. 5 Rubicon
The Black Hole Travel Agency
(Written with James Luceno under the shared pseudonym of Jack McKinney)
Event Horizon
Artifact of the System
Free Radicals
Hostile Takeover
Gamma L.A.W.
(Edited by James Luceno, and published posthumously)
Smoke on the Water
Screaming Across the Sky
The Broken Country
To Water’s End
Other Novels
Tron
A Tapestry of Magics
Kaduna Memories (written with James Luceno under the shared pseudonym of Jack McKinney)
STAR WARS—The Expanded Universe
You saw the movies. You watched the cartoon series, or maybe played some of the video games. But did you know …
In The Empire Strikes Back, Princess Leia Organa said to Han Solo, “I love you.” Han said, “I know.” But did you know that they actually got married? And had three Jedi children: the twins, Jacen and Jaina, and a younger son, Anakin?
Luke Skywalker was trained as a Jedi by Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda. But did you know that, years later, he went on to revive the Jedi Order and its commitment to defending the galaxy from evil and injustice?
Obi-Wan said to Luke, “For over a thousand generations, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace and justice in the Old Republic. Before the dark times. Before the Empire.” Did you know that over those millennia, legendary Jedi and infamous Sith Lords were adding their names to the annals of Republic history?
Yoda explained that the dreaded Sith tend to come in twos: “Always two, there are. No more, no less. A Master, and an apprentice.” But did you know that the Sith didn’t always exist in pairs? That at one time in the ancient Republic there were as many Sith as Jedi, until a Sith Lord named Darth Bane was the lone survivor of a great Sith war and created the “Rule of Two”?
All this and much, much more is brought to life in the many novels and comics of the Star Wars expanded universe. You’ve seen the movies and watched the cartoon. Now venture out into the wider worlds of Star Wars!
Turn the page or jump to the timeline of Star Wars novels to learn more.
PROLOGUE
“SABACC!”
It was unmercifully hot. Tossing his card-chips on the table, the young gambler halfheartedly collected what they’d earned him, an indifferent addition to his already indifferent profits for the evening. Something on the unspectacular order of five hundred credits.
Perhaps it was the heat. Or just his imagination.
This blasted asteroid, Oseon 2795, while closer to its sun than most, was as carefully life-supported and air-conditioned as any developed rock in the system. Still, one could almost feel the relentless solar flux hammering down upon its sere and withered surface, feel the radiation soaking through its iron-nickel substance, feel the unwanted energy reradiating from the walls in every room.
Especially this one.
Apparently the locals felt it, too. They’d stripped right down to shorts and shirt-sleeves after the second hand, two hours earlier, and looked fully as fatigued and grimy as the young gambler felt. He took a sip from his glass, the necessity for circumspection regarding what he drank blessedly absent for once. No nonsense here about comradely alcohol consumption. Most of them were having ice water and liking it.
Beads of moisture had Condensed into a solid sheet on the container’s outer surface and trickled down his wrist into his gold-braided uniform sleeve.
What a way to live! Oseon 2795 was a pocket of penury in a plutocrat’s paradise. The drab mining asteroid, thrust cruelly near the furnace of furnaces, orbited through a system of pleasure resorts and vacation homes for the galaxy’s superwealthy, like an itinerant junkman.
The gambler was wishing at the moment that he’d never heard of the place. That’s what came of taking advice from spaceport attendants. A trickle of moisture ran down his neck into the upright collar of his semiformal uniform. Who said hardrock miners were always rich?
He shuffled the oversized deck once, twice, three times,