Battle scars, p.1
Battle Scars, page 1
Star Wars Jedi: Battle Scars is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2023 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Worlds, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House is a registered trademark, and Random House Worlds and colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Hardback ISBN 9780593598603
International ISBN 9780593722671
Ebook ISBN 9780593598610
randomhousebooks.com
Book design by Elizabeth A. D. Eno, adapted for ebook
Cover art: Anthrox Studios
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
The Star Wars Novels Timeline
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
Chapter 19
Dedication
Acknowledgments
By Sam Maggs
About the Author
_142845113_
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….
Today was going to be a good day for the Jedi.
Jedi Knight Cal Kestis was going to make certain of that.
Sure, it was possible that he was one of maybe only two Jedi left.
But those Jedi? They were going to have a good day.
“Hey, buddy, things looking clear?” Cal asked, his voice reverberating in his ears inside his helmet. From his back, Cal heard two little taps from his droid, BD-1’s way of communicating with him while on a stealth mission. Cal could hear BD-1’s trills via comms, but sound was risky while sneaking and the droid often preferred to communicate by a more rapid and tactile method, knowing the rest of the crew couldn’t understand him anyway. “Thanks, Beedee. Have I told you lately you’re the best?”
A pause. Then:
Tap.
Cal laughed. “Well, this is me telling you. I won’t slack off on it again.”
Tap tap.
A damn good day.
Which wasn’t usually the case, when a guy was crouched on a small, fast-moving space rock hurtling around a large asteroid in the middle of deep space, but Cal’s life wasn’t usual, and he preferred it that way. Kitted out in a full space suit, Cal took stock of his surroundings, breathing in recycled air slowly and steadily so as not to waste it. The orbital debris field circling the asteroid was dense; Cal had to make his way, leaping shard by rocky shard, each one a step closer to the main asteroid at its center, a massive excavated rock, home to a Haxion Brood base Cal and his crew were currently attempting to infiltrate. Ironic, considering the last time Cal had been around a Brood base he’d been trying to break out of it. That time, on Ordo Eris, he’d been captured. This time, the better move was to get someone on the rock first in order to disable the security systems so that nothing would pick up the Stinger Mantis, Cal’s ship, entering from orbit.
And the best way to do that was for someone to hop, from tiny rock to tiny rock, all the way down to the surface of the big rock. From one moving asteroid to the next, flying through space without a tether.
No problem.
Taking a deep breath, squinting his eyes in concentration, Cal bent his knees before pushing off from the craggy rock beneath his boots.
It didn’t take much out here. One jump, and Cal was—airborne wasn’t the right word, without atmosphere or air to be found. It was more like floating. Different from flying, entirely; when Cal pushed himself into the air with the Force, he always felt that swoop in his stomach, the familiar lurch of his still-very-human body alerting him to the fact that he was far, far too high above land for good sense. But out here in space, this felt more like swimming, forward propulsion, his body with no concept of up or down, right or wrong, too high or too low. Forward, floating, only.
He missed the little swoop.
Cal aimed himself toward the next fragment asteroid, soaring straight for it with purpose. Slowly but surely.
The first time his master, Jaro Tapal, had taken Cal out into space, he’d told his Padawan: Once you set something to motion in space, it will continue to move in exactly that way—the same direction, and at the same speed—unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
Today, for whatever it meant, Cal was that unbalanced force.
Arms straight out in front of him, Cal’s hands scrabbled for purchase the second they made contact with the next floating fragment. Cal’s impact sent the little asteroid, and him, spinning. He hung on for dear life until, after what felt like ten minutes but was surely just a few seconds, BD engaged Cal’s gription boots and, magnetically driven, they came slamming forward into the rock, stabilizing the Jedi.
Cal had—in polite company, he would say “rescued”—these boots off a Haxion Brood bounty hunter, part of a kit the hunter would no longer be needing after Cal and Merrin had dealt with him. The boots were one of the best salvages Cal and his crew had made to date.
Shakily, Cal let go of the rock and slowly returned to a standing position. He was glad this was his second-to-last jump. He was used to swinging around from handhold to handhold, making giant leaps of faith first as he worked as a scrapper back on Bracca and then as he infiltrated one shady Imperial facility or another over the years, but for some contrarian reason, the pull of gravity was a comfort to Cal. Did it mean, if he missed a jump or his climbing claws failed him, that he’d go plummeting to the ground in almost certain death? Sure. A little bit, probably. But it also meant that he wouldn’t be condemned to die floating away alone in the void until he became a dried-out but freakishly well-preserved Jedicicle.
That was way, way worse.
“Did you live?” Merrin’s voice crackled to life over Cal’s comms. Her accent and often wry way of speaking made the question come off glib, like she didn’t really care about the answer one way or another.
“Did you hear something, Beedee?” Cal asked his droid rhetorically, knowing Merrin well enough to know that the sound of his voice over comms would be enough of an answer to satisfy Merrin’s sarcastic but still genuine query. “Sounded almost like…someone who was worried about us?” he added in a sing-songy voice.
“Must have been your imagination,” Merrin responded contemplatively. There was a beat of silence as though she were deep in thought. “Yes, next time we’re hard up for credits we’ll just drop you in a cantina. You’ll survive.”
“Hey,” a voice interrupted—Greez. “If anybody’s gonna be makin’ tips for their looks around here, it’s me. You bipeds don’t appreciate what a catch I am to those with real taste out there.”
A flurry of taps was the response from Cal’s back. He made sure to momentarily turn off his comms before he let out his laughter.
“If we’re done, crew”—Cere’s more cere-ious (Cal’s favorite way of thinking of his mentor and Jedi Master) voice commanded attention, even over the comms—“Cal, how long until you make landfall and can grant us access?”
Back to business, then. Always.
Now on the precipice of entering the Brood base, Cal took another moment to survey the situation in front of him. This wasn’t a typical mission; none of the Mantis crew’s exploits were, he supposed. But even for them, this was a bit of a reach.
He stood on a small, spinning rock in the middle of open space, surrounded by the debris of a ruined planet. What was once, Cal had been told, a verdant, bright home to millions had been chewed up and spit out at the hands of one Empire or corporation or another; it was hard to keep track, after a point. What remained were only the fragments of what once was, shards and dust and islands in the void, orbiting the former planet’s solid-iron core.
It was the core Cal set his sights on now, directly above him—the core, and the Haxion Brood base dug directly into it, surrounded by a hastily assembled outer ring with an assortment of hastily assembled shacks and market stalls, and covered by a vacuum-proof bubble of shielding, with sensors to detect ships of any size.
But not, conveniently, to detect anything human-sized that happened to be equipped with a jetpack.
Or in Cal’s case, equipped with enough foolhardy bravery to float in without one.
Greez had explained the mechanics of the base’s sensor system during a pre-mission briefing. The shield’s sensor field swept the asteroid just fast enough to detect anything bigger than a person, but just slow enough to allow bounty hunters individual access to their base without being monitored.
But the Mantis crew were the best at what they did. And they were doing it right now.
And that’s why Cal was having such a damn good day.
“Eyes on the landing pad,” Cal responded to Cere. “Launching in three—two—”
For the—blessedly—last time today, after what had felt like hours of leaping from rock to rock across the asteroid belt, Cal felt BD disengage his boots and he pushed off from the final rock, launching himself straight up. He experienced a brief moment of disorientation approaching the base headfirst: Up was down and down was up and did anything really matter in space? This was why Cal preferred gravity.
“Greez, you better be right about this,” Cal muttered, mostly to himself, but without turning off his comms, as his head approached the magnetic shield at a rapid pace.
He felt his helmet make contact with the shield bubble and, for just a second, he felt resistance—like when you pushed on Greez’s infamous Gelatin Surprise (the surprise was that it was full of salt) and it kind of, weirdly, pushed back. But it was only for a moment, and then Cal was through.
And suddenly there was his old friend, gravity, to meet him.
Cal took back everything he’d just thought about missing gravity. He would actually have preferred to be back in the void, thank you very much, because now he was plummeting headfirst toward the ground, which was approaching his face very rapidly, and—
Focus.
He heard the voices in his head—not voices, really, but more of a feeling, and a memory, and a ghost, all at once.
And himself.
Cal had no idea if the Force felt the same to everyone; he’d read and heard all sorts of descriptions since he was a kid. From his first teacher, Jaro Tapal. From his most recent master, Cere. From the other younglings he’d trained with, before—
Before.
But for Cal, it was always the same. It was like a deep pool, blackest in its deepest fathoms, swallowing him whole as he dived down, down into it, emerging into a void where color and sound became muted, distant. It was an expansion of his consciousness; a brief direct connection to the source of all things. Like stretching his arms forward into meditation, settling into and moving through the void that connected every living being, his ripples spreading out concentrically like interlocking circles affecting the world around him. This had been harder, once; he’d had to suppress his abilities for so long that the void had felt stagnant, empty. But now years later, with great practice and focus and peace with the present…
Now Cal reached out to the Force, and the Force reached back.
With speed and balance most beings wouldn’t—shouldn’t—normally have access to, Cal managed to land arms-first, tucking and rolling flawlessly. A move that would, under other circumstances, have snapped his neck.
He jumped back to his feet before he could consider it much further.
“Landfall,” Cal reported quietly over his comms. He tucked himself into the shadows at the corner of the closest building.
He’d made it past the Haxion sensors, taking advantage of the Brood’s built-in weaknesses: its members’ impatience for reentry with their zippy little jetpacks and their reluctance to admit they could be found, even all the way out here, far from any populated systems.
The Brood sure did love their broken-up space rocks for bases. But, Cal supposed, they killed people for credits, so.
There really was no accounting for taste.
Cal had managed to land close to his ideal infiltration point. The Brood base here on the central asteroid was set up like a bull’s-eye; the outer ring, where Cal had landed, was a makeshift way station that had popped up to facilitate trade and sleep for bounty hunters on their way to and from assignments. In the center of the bull’s-eye was the Brood base itself—though base was really giving the thing too much credit. It was more like a glorified cantina on stilts, a way station offering a Bespin Fizz and a bed or charging port for the night to the worst kinds of people in the galaxy. A place to refuel and, Cal assumed, exchange stories about how much they loved their amazing bounty hunter leader, Sorc Tormo, blurrgstain extraordinaire and perpetual pain in Cal’s ass.
Or whatever.
And in between the outer ring and the bull’s-eye, directly in front of Cal: a void, nearly clear through to the other side of the asteroid, meant to be crossed only by those confident enough with a jetpack to hit the landing pad on the other side without falling to their death.
Unfortunately for the Brood, not falling to his death in situations where he probably (absolutely, even) should was Cal’s specialty.
In a rush, Cal popped off his helmet and began to free himself from his constricting space suit. BD-1 hopped down from his back and shook himself out for a second, readjusting to gravity and solid ground. BD bounced from foot to foot watching Cal remove the rest of the space suit. Cal smiled at his friend, and then BD-1 took off around the corner toward the location where the sensor jammer needed to be installed, executing the next part of the plan without having to be reminded. He was such a good little droid.
Tucking the suit and helmet behind a crate, Cal tugged his tunic into place, patting his pockets and belt to make sure he had everything he needed—lightsaber, comlink, credits—before sidling around the corner to catch up with his droid. BD was halfway down the cliff face that made up one side of the chasm between the outer ring and inner ring in the middle of a slice, humming away to himself as he jammed his little scomp link into what appeared to be sheer cliff—but Cal knew it was actually just clever disguising via rock formation of the massive amounts of tech necessary to keep this place safe and running. The entire hollow ring housed the generators for the shield, the life-support systems—even the distillery buried in the rock under the cantina.
A Brood member they’d run into earlier that month—the one whose boots Cal was currently wearing—had divulged both the location of this base and the way that it functioned. It had been so kind of him to open up like that. And all it had taken was Merrin being particularly convincing with her equally scary and impressive space-witch magick for a moment or two.
He and Merrin made a damn good team.
The Brood had been relentless in pursuit of Cal and his crew for years. It was, if Cal was being completely honest with himself, a little annoying; they had bigger burra fish to fry than a mob of cybernetically enhanced Outer Rim gangsters. But Greez had owed them money, Cal had attempted to, uh, deter them, and he’d ended up escaping from their crime lord leader Sorc Tormo and his prisoner-fight pit plus gambling ring. Ever since then, the Brood had really had it out for Cal (and the rest of his crew by default, sadly). There had been a bounty on his head for years and he couldn’t imagine the kind of credits he was worth, at this point.
It was kind of an ego boost.
BD-1 bee-beeped, signaling the completion of his slice, and Cal knelt down to meet the droid as he climbed back up the ledge and resituated himself on Cal’s back. (It always felt like little claws on his back when BD was scrambling up there, but Cal didn’t mind. The droid was too good a friend.)
And then the semi-opaque shield dome overhead flickered off for a moment, signaling the dropping of the base’s sensors, just as they planned.
It was on again just as quickly, and Cal hoped desperately that no one but someone who knew to look for the disruption would have noticed, but they could never be too sure.
He would be prepared, either way.
“That’s a go, Mantis—”
“All over it, kid,” Greez interrupted before Cal got the words out. “Meet us at the drop.”
BD was small, but he was a mighty little droid. The speed of the shield’s sensor sweeps was typically set to be just slow enough for something small to burst through—like Cal himself. But thanks to all the technological wisdom stored in his tiny little processor, BD had managed to turn it off just long enough to allow for something much, much bigger to get through without notice.
Something as big as, say, an S-161 XL luxury yacht like the Mantis.
