• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The engines of the Lightning Rod began to smoke. More alarms blared from the control panels. Behind them Norys's TIE fighter continued to fire mercilessly, pounding their hull, trying to crack open the battered cargo ship.

Jacen stared at the comm unit, but didn't think it would do any good to send out another distress signal.

The jungle treetops rushed by beneath them. Jacen looked wildly from side to side.

"I don't suppose it would be a good time to tell a joke," he said.

Peckhum shook his head. "Don't feel much like laughing right now."

THE THICK BRANCHES of the damp and shadowy jungle closed around him, pressing in. It reminded Zekk of the murky lower levels of Coruscant. It felt almost like home.

He and his troops of Dark Jedi had fallen from the skies, buoyed by repulsorpacks.

After coming to rest in the upper branches, they'd worked their way down to ground level and spread out to surround the fleeing Jedi trainees Master Skywalker had brainwashed into supporting Rebel philosophies.

Zekk knew little about politics. He understood only who his friends and supporters were-and who had betrayed him. Like Jacen and Jaina...

especially Jaina. He had thought she was his friend, a close companion.

Only later, after Brakiss had explained it, did Zekk understand what Jaina really thought of him, how easily she dismissed his Jedi potential and the possibility that he might be an equal to her and her high-born twin brother. But Zekk did have the potential, and he had proved it.

In spite of this, he hoped Jacen and Jaina would not fight him, because then he would have to demonstrate his power-and his loyalty to the Second Imperium. He remembered his first test against Tamith Kai's prize student Vilas, and Vilas had paid with his life.

In the upper branches of a tree overhead, one Dark Jedi fighter had become tangled.

Zekk watched as the bright arc of a lightsaber blade slashed boughs out of the way, clearing a path for the fighter to descend to the lower levels.

Overhead a wing of TIE fighters roared across the skies, firing into the forest. The Dark Jedi spread out, looking for potential victims on their own. Zekk gathered three of the nearest fighters to his side and they marched along, crashing through the underbrush.

They reached the edge of the wide river, whose brown-green currents lapped quietly through the jungle, stirring overhanging fronds. Farther downstream, closer to the tall Massassi temple ruins, he saw Tamith Kai's hovering battle platform.

Zekk stood beside his Dark Jedi companions on the riverbank. The other fighters exchanged glances and pointed skyward.

Zekk nodded, knowing what they wished to do. "Yes," he said. "Let us conjure a storm, a great wind to knock the jungle flat and send these Jedi cowards scurrying."

He looked up into the clear blue skies and reached deep within his heart, finding a shadow of anger, the pain he had felt in his life. He knew how to use anger as a tool, a weapon. Zekk gathered the winds. Beside him, he felt the other dark-side warriors doing the same, drawing thunderheads until lumpy black clouds rolled in from the horizon.

The wind picked up and grew colder, charged with static electricity. ZeWs scarlet lined cape rippled around him. Stray strands of his dark hair whipped around his face as the wind snatched them free of his ponytail.

Flashing bolts of lightning skittered from one thunderhead to another.

The rumble of noise drowned out even the sound of TIE fighters crisscrossing overhead.

Zekk smiled. Yes, a storm was coming, a victorious storm.

But as the clouds continued to swell, releasing a powerful weather energy, he heard sounds of repeated laser cannon fire and glanced to the sky, where another battle was taking place: a one-sided dogfight. A smoking ship careened overhead, pursued by a lone TIE fighter that shot its energy bolts again and again, mercilessly pummeling its prey.

Astonished, Zekk recognized the clunky patchwork form of the Lightning Rod, the cargo