Star Wars Adventure Journal Nr. 15 Firestorm by Kevin J. Anderson
The world of Ossus had once been the greatest center of Jedi Naming—a magnificent library that contained knowledge of the Force and the history of a thousand generations of defenders of the Old Republic. Scrolls and dataplaques contained their legends and songs, their triumphs and tragedies. Ossus had been filled with fountains and statues, beautiful pavilions of embroidered fabric, fluted columns of milk-stone, courtyards with mosaics of flag-stones and tile, wind chimes of crystal and gold....
Now, though, it was merely a tomb, a blasted dark scar, its glory obliterated by fiery violence.
Tionne climbed down the ramp of her ship, the Lore Seeker—an obsolete, quirky craft almost as old as the ruins themselves—and just stood still as she absorbed all the echoing memories around her. Her mother-of-pearl eyes widened, and her silvery hair blew about in the dead wind. She let her imagination swirl with stories that might have been told by ghosts, epic ballads the Jedi would have sung—if Ossus had not been incinerated when ten stars exploded in the Cron Drift four thousand years before, during the height of the Sith War.
Overhead, filling the sky like a brilliant stain, was the incandescent gas of the Cron Drift, now a funeral pyre for this once-magnificent information center.
Venturing away from her vessel, Tionne saw glassy, hardened puddles around the remains of cyclopean statues and pillars slumped from the raging Shockwave that had struck this world. Her silvery hair blew about her elfin face in the dead wind. She could smell the burnt aftereffects that still clung to the breeze like shadows.
As she walked, the broken stones and rubble crunched under her small feet. The sight overwhelmed her and a tear at the magnitude of the loss hovered on the edge of her quicksilver eyes. She stumbled ahead, not knowing where to start.
A few fast-moving, lizard-like creatures skittered to shelter. So, Ossus wasn't entirely dead. Small lifeforms often managed to survive, no matter how great the devastation. Four millennia has passed, and the radiation levels had dropped to below immediately lethal amounts, although Tionne might still suffer illness if she stayed here long. She certainly couldn't remain long enough to uncover all the secrets hidden in the rubble.
Her glittering eyes scanned the debris, and she walked to where two pillars held up a reinforced, ornate arch that had miraculously survived the holocaust. She wondered how many long-lost answers might be buried here, how much more information about Jedi history she could find beneath the broken stones. Learning everything about the great Jedi Knights had been Tionne's driving quest all of her life, and Ossus was a huge treasure trove.
The Empire had frowned on remembering Jedi legends, on idolizing the great defenders of the Old Republic... on keeping the flame alive. Before she was born, the Jedi had been slaughtered, all but wiped out. Tionne had lived on a drab Imperial world, Rindao, a training station and outpost near the Outer Rim. Though her people did not support the Empire, they had not resisted outright when the stormtroopers came to take over, and thus their civilization had not been punished.
In Tionne's uninteresting childhood she had sought refuge in the ancient stones. Her old grandmother had an archaic two-sided stringed instrument, and she would sing legends of the Jedi, heroic stories about Nomi Sunrider, her daughter Vima, and other champions of the Force who had fought and perhaps perished during the Great Sith War.
But one night the Imperial commander had found the old woman telling such stories. The stormtroopers had hauled Tionne's grandmother out into the town square and executed her with their blaster rifles, cutting her down for implying that the olden-days were more heroic than the Empire's current glory.
Young Tionne had been devastated. Before the stormtroopers could ransack her grandmother's house, she broke in through a back window and took away the stringed musical instrument, the only memento she wanted.
Quietly, as she wandered the spacelanes on her quest, Tionne had taught her fingers the mysteries of the strings, stretching her voice with the secret songs the old woman had played for her. Now, though, the Emperor was dead, and his New Order had fallen more than six years ago. With the Empire and its repressive restrictions gone, Tionne had let herself be swallowed by her search for Jedi knowledge and lore.
The New Republic had occupied Coruscant, and Tionne had just heard the wonderful news that Luke Skywalker—perhaps the sole remaining Jedi Knight—had taken it upon himself to train the Jedi again, to bring about a new brotherhood of protectors.
Bending down to the scorched rubble, Tionne moved aside a fallen cluster of flagstones and found in the shadows beneath a small statue of what must have once been a Jedi Master. The figure was a short, unimposing alien with a sloping, rounded head and exposed teeth. She wondered if it couid have been the renowned scholar Jedi Master Odan-Urr, who had fought even earlier, in the Great Hyperspace War against the original Sith Empire, and had then lived for a thousand years as the keeper of the library on Ossus.
Smiling, feeling her heart swell with pride, Tionne cradled the small statue, saw its carbonized and glassy surface layers where the heat of an exploding star had crisped it. She took the figure, astonished to be actually touching a piece of Jedi history,
No doubt if she spent the rest of her life combing through the debris on Ossus, Tionne could find more clues, more information, more vital tidbits of history. The Empire had declared Ossus off-limits, fearing other seekers might discover too much knowledge of the Jedi—but now, perhaps, the New Republic could devote its time to a real excavation, with crews of scientists and historians who wanted to recreate the golden age of the Jedi Knights.
Tionne turned back toward her battered and creaking ship. She had found the statue of Odan-Urr; that would be enough for now. But she would continue her quest until she knew all there was to know about the Jedi Knights.
* * *
Yavin 4 was an emerald moon orbiting a huge, pastel gas giant— the site of one of the galaxy's greatest battles, home of a former Rebel base. Soon, it would become a training center for new Jedi.
As he fought his way through the tangled foliage, Luke Skywalker thought that the sheer tenacity of the primeval jungle would prove an even more difficult foe than the Empire itself. Beside htm, Artoo-Detoo followed the path Luke chose, grinding his tractor wheels through the underbrush.
Finally, Luke stood at the ruins of the Great Massassi Temple, its stone steps ravaged by time and the forces of nature... as well as Imperial bombardment after the destruction of the first Death Star. If this moon had been good enough to shelter Princess Leia and her freedom fighters, he thought, it would be good enough for a place of Jedi learning.
Luke had already found two candidates in his Jedi search, and they had accompanied him here to Yavin 4. Streen, the eccentric old hermit who had lived on Bespin, was a gas prospector who searched the skies for valuable upwellings of tibanna gas. Streen had an affinity for the winds, an ability to sense when a storm might happen. Luke had tested him and found an untapped potential for using the Force—Streen would be an ideal Jedi candidate, though the old man had been reluctant to leave his peaceful and quiet life. After arriving on the uninhabited jungle moon, he seemed much more content that he could find solitude again.
Luke's other new trainee, Gantoris, had wild black hair and a beard, accentuating his fiery eyes and grim temperament. His personality had been forged by living on the hellish colony world of Eol Sha, where a close moon caused tidal chaos, seismic upheavals and volcanic eruptions. With his untrained echoes of the Force, Gantoris had experienced nightmares about a powerful, dark man who meant to lead him down a road to destruction. Gantoris had thought Luke fit that premonition and had tried to kill him. But Luke had survived. Eventually, Gantoris had come with the Jedi Master in order to be trained in the Force.
Clearing away the overwhelming jungle and repairing the crumbling temple ruins seemed an insurmountable task, Luke smiled as the thought came to him. Yoda could probably have done it all single-handedly. Luke and two hard-working trainees could accomplish it well enough.
The three men began the hard work of stripping out regrown weeds. Luke ignited his lightsaber and began hacking away at the underbrush while Gantoris and Streen cleared fallen rocks and swept away dirt. Artoo helped where he could, extending his tiny cutting saw and attacking fibrous creepers.
"Glamorous work for a Jedi Knight," Gantoris muttered, tossing a dusty load of stones aside. "I could get a better job as a maintenance worker,"
"You're not a Jedi Knight," Streen said, "You're just a Jedi trainee."
Luke stacked the torn underbrush in a clearing outside the main pyramid, while Artoo buzzed along, dragging a sledge filled with other forest debris. In the middle of the clearing, Luke used his igniter to set the mound of dead foliage on fire. The heaped pile of burning brands reminded him of his father's funeral pyre on Endor, how Luke had set the fearsome black uniform ablaze.
For months, he had been keeping himself busy with the menial tasks of setting up his Jedi academy—because it troubled him too much to deal with the larger issues. Luke Skywalker didn't know how to train Jedi Knights; he didn't have enough knowledge about the ancient warriors, what they had studied, who they had been. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda had begun his instruction, but that had been cut tragically short. Luke now had to discover his own way, and he also needed to find other students.
He did have the Jedi Holocron, which Leia had taken from the resurrected Emperor a year earlier, and he had the library from the Chuunthor, the wrecked Jedi ship he had found in the wilds on Dathomir. It would be enough. Luke vowed to work as hard as he could, to gain knowledge every chance he could so that he might enhance his own training.
The Jedi Knights would be reborn, but it would be a long and hard struggle.
Tionne went from spaceport bar to trading station to backwater outpost, living by her wits and her skills. She secured jobs in cantinas where she could use the stringed musical instrument she had taken from her grandmother on Rindao. She could sing Jedi ballads and disseminate her passion for the drama of history— folktales of how Gav and Jori Daragon had sparked the Hyperspace War, or the early training of Vodo Siosk-Baas, or how the Twi'lek Jedi Tott Doneeta had been horribly burned while single-handedly fighting a heat storm to defend a small cliff city on Ryloth,
She was paid little in credits, but plenty in food and lodging, so she could continue her search. Her main goal in hanging out at such rough establishments was to ask her questions, ply the traders and smugglers into giving her clues about lost Jedi history.
Whenever she had completed her repertoire of Jedi ballads, Tionne would ask if any members of her audience had other stories to tell. Many times this simply encouraged some of the drunken male customers to try to lure her to the private chambers in their starships, but Tionne could sense when they were telling the truth, when to signal for the bar bouncers to get them away from her.
One night, after her show in an all-species restaurant near one of Ord Mantell's many spaceports, she received a message from a rodent-like alien named Fonterrat, a down-on-his-luck scavenger. Normally Tionne would have been suspicious: creatures of all different species had attempted to take advantage of her. She sensed though, that Fonterrat simply wished to make a deal, and as she sat down across the table from him, she noticed he was eating the cheapest item on the menu and did not offer to buy her a drink,
"This information about the old Jedi Knights—" Fonterrat said in a squeaking voice. He had large ears and a pointed face, and close-set eyes like black beads under a furry brow ridge, "How much is it worth?"
Tionne regarded him calmly, her pale skin flushing slightly. "I don't know. How much is it worth?" she said. "1 have some credits, but not enough to make you rich." With one gesture of her delicate, pale hands, she indicated the seedy restaurant, "Would I be work-ing here if I had that kind of money?"
Fonterrat fiddled with his hands, fast-moving fingers playing with a napkin wipe. He sniffled, "I'm a scavenger," he said. "I need to make money for the things I find. Someday, I'll stumble across something that'll make me rich and famous... but right now I'm just tryig to get by."
Tionne could sense his sincerity, could see that he wasn't trying to scam her. "Tell me what you found," she said. "I'll be fair. I'll pay you what I can."
"It's an ancient city in space," he said. "Exis Station. It's been abandoned for centuries."
"Exis Station!" Tionne leaned forward, widening her mother-of-pearl eyes with sudden interest. "That was the site of one of the greatest Jedi convocations in history! NomiSunrider herself called together the Jedi Knights a decade after the Great Sith War."
Fonterrat did not appear interested in the details. "So .,. is that worth something to you? I could tell you its location. You can search the wreck yourself for any artifacts, though bear in mind that it's been empty for a long time. Damaged by solar flares."
"Yes, I'll pay." She scanned her own accounts, determining just how much she could give to this man and still buy enough fuel to get the Lore Seeker to Exis Station. The amount she came up with was distressingly low.
"But it might be better if you don't go there," Fonterrat said, twitching his nose.
She sat up, alarmed. "You give me the location, then tell me not to go? Why?"
"Because Exis Station is at an unstable star," he said. "Teedio. It's entered an active phase, with increasing flares. Over centuries the drag from solar wind has pulled the city closer and closer to the flares. Radiation levels on board have been lethal for some time now. You'll risk your own life if you go there. All of Exis Station is going to plunge into the sun before long."
"I don't care," she said, "i'm still going."
She reached out her credit pad and punched up a number, "That's all I have," she said. "Give me the location."
Fonterrat looked at it in dismay, but he didn't seem to have any choice either. "All right—I need the credits, even as few as these." He gave her a chip with navicomputer coordinates embedded in it. "Good luck. 1 thought the information was worth more that that." He stood up, hanging his head.
Tionne said, "Wait. If you go to the New Republic government and give this information to Luke Skywalker, he may also be interested. He'll pay you much more than I can. He's trying to found a new order of Jedi Knights."
"New Republic!" Fonterrat squawked. "I'm a smuggler. I have a thousand arrest warrants from different systems. I don't dare set foot near the law."
Tionne crossed her thin arms over her chest. "You're a scavenger and a smuggler—you must have some connections that you could use to get this information to him. Trust me, Luke Skywalker will make sure you get paid. From what I've heard of his exploits, he's a man of his word,"
Fonterrat groaned, but already she could see his dark little eyes flicking back and forth, racing through possibilities of how he could use his smuggler's knowledge to surreptitiously send the message to Skywalker.
He left. Tionne quickly gathered her belongings and raced off to her ship. If Fonterrat was right, and the solar flare storm was growing worse each day, she didn't have much time to search Exis Station.
The bonfire in the clearing had burned out, leaving only a broad swath of ash in front of the Great Temple. It made a nice landing area, and the Millennium Falcon set down with a hiss of repulsorjets and a cloud of crunched charcoal.
Luke hurried outside the ancient pyramid with Streen and Gantoris at his side, Han Solo extended the landing ramp of his modified light freighter, and Chewbacca roared loudly as he strode down onto the blackened clearing, Han stepped into the blackened cinders and kicked them roughly with his boot.
"Good to see you, Han!" Luke waved. "We need some extra muscle for our work here."
Cnewie groaned and looked down at his own hairy arms. Han laughed and shook his head, tugging down his dark vest. "Not me, buddy. I just brought you some supplies. Your sister wants me to make sure you get all the equipment you need." Han looked around and sniffed the burnt air. "This is like a wilderness outing."
Luke shrugged. "A Jedi Knight knows how to cope," Artoo rolled up beside him and whistled.
With a laugh, Han clapped Luke on the shoulder. "Sure, kid. But if you're trying to convince new recruits to stay here, you should roll out the red-carpet treatment, not warn them about how much they'll have to suffer."
"I'll find the new recruits, somehow," Luke said.
Han pursed his lips. "You know, you should test that kid Kyp Durron—the one I rescued from the spice mines of Kessel. He's so talented I'm sure he's using the Force somehow, but he doesn't know what he's doing."
Luke laughed. "Sure, Han. I'll test him anytime you want to bring him here. I need new candidates. In fact, I've also got to go back to Dathomir where I can talk to Teneniel Djo and some of the other Force-wielding witches there. Somebody might be willing to come here—red carpet or no red carpet."
Han opened the Falcon's cargo bays. He and Chewie worked with Luke, Cantoris and Streen to remove new power generators, air circulation systems, and food-preparation units.
"Leia doesn't know this, but I've got them programmed for some good, greasy Corellian sausages," Han said, cracking open a crate to flash the control panel on a food-prep unit. "But if you'd prefer something more bland, you can program in plenty of other dishes using raw materials from the jungles right here."
Luke smiled calmly. "We'll get by, Han."
Han brushed a hand across his forehead to smear perspiration aside. "Don't you even sweat anymore, kid?"
"Not unless I have to."
When they were finished unloading and setting up, Chewie went back to checking out the preflight systems on the Falcon, while Artoo downloaded a summary of all the Holonet reports that had backlogged since their arrival here. "Duty calls," Han said, "Back to Coruscant."
But instead of heading back for his ship, Han Solo hunkered next to Luke on the second level of the Massassi pyramid. He found a reasonably comfortable spot on one of the moss-covered stone blocks and dangled his boots over the side, rapping his heels against the time-smoothed stone.
"I got a strange message from another smuggler," he said. "A scavenger named Fonterrat. Strictly small-time, thinks he's in more trouble than he really is, keeps a low profile. But he passed along a message that you might be interested in some information he has. An ancient space city called Exis Station. He says a great Jedi convention or something took place there."
"A convocation," Luke said. "Yes. Exis Station. I've heard of it, but I don't know much about the place."
"Well, he gave me the coordinates, warned that the station itself was in danger. He's heard you're a fair man and hopes you'll pay him for the information." Han raised his eyebrows. "Me, I think it's a scam."
Luke shook his head. "No, it's real, if the coordinates are correct. Pay him what it's worth. Take it out of my credit accounts."
Han seemed alarmed. "Luke, you can't just go trusting people like that. There are more con artists and—"
"Pay him," Luke said. "If it really is Exis Station, I need to go there. Maybe it can help me with my quest."
"If you say so, kid," Han said, disbelieving. Chewie signalled on the comlink and roared that the Falcon was ready for departure, Han swung himself down off the mossy block and climbed down the crumbling stairs toward the Falcon.
"If you need anything, just call me," Han said,
"I will, Han."
Luke watched the disc-like shape of the Millennium Falcon take off from the burned landing clearing, then disappear into the sky. After a moment of concentration, he hurried to his newly established quarters inside the dank pyramid. There, among his personal belongings, he kept the pearly white cube of the glowing Jedi Holocron, an artifact filled with untapped knowledge of the old Jedi Knights.
He took out the ancient object and held it in front of him, caressing its sides. This had once belonged to the Emperor Palpa-tine, but Luke had retrieved it after he had saved Leia.
In his final confrontation with the resurrected Emperor, Luke had almost become lost to the dark side. But that terrible ordeal had finally cast him through so much anguish and mental fire that it had tempered him, taught him to ascend beyond a mere Jedi Knight to the point where others called him a Master.
But Luke still felt so small, so untrained. Even here, alone in the ancient Massassi temples, he felt intimidated at his self-appointed task of bringing back the Jedi Knights. Who was he to do such a thing? It would take him a lifetime even to begin learning how to train others, but he knew it had to be done.
As a young Rebel pilot, he had come earlier to these empty temples. At the time he'd been barely touched by Obi-Wan Kenobi, just started in his path along the Force. He had known little then, understood nothing about how the Force affected all things. Young farmboy Luke had sensed nothing back then... but now that he had more years of practice, more training, and more pain, he felt the ancient Massassi ruins somewhat oppressive, mysterious. They seemed to hold secrets, a dark presence buried deep in the cores of the stones. A coldness he could not explain.
But he could not run from it. Yavin 4 was a place that would foster the rebirth of the Jedi.
Luke looked down at the Holocron, touched its side, and called forth the holographic gatekeeper. The image of Bodo Baas, a small shrunken alien, arose before him, wispy, shimmering. Luke said, "Show me Exis Station. Tell me what I need to know."
The Holocron grew brighter and the image of a giant city in space filled the air in front of him. Luke looked with awe upon the great abandoned metropolis, its sprawling turrets and modules, its starports, its domes, its cargo holds.
And he knew he had to go there.
When Tionne arrived at Exis Station, the sight took her breath away.
She trimmed the solar sails on her Lore Seeker and cruised closer to the sprawling city in space, orbiting high and looking down on the plane of the metal-walled settlement. The station had once been a metropolis, a bustling spaceport, a rendezvous point for traders, diplomats and Jedi Knights.
As the system's sun Teedio became unstable, Exis Station had taken advantage of what could have been viewed as a disaster: ion miners and solar-flare skimmers operated in a boom-town during the time when Teedio provided fast energy resources that ambitious risk-takers in the Old Republic could exploit. But when conditions grew too dangerous, the entire city had been abandoned—left to hang empty in space for centuries.
But Tionne hoped it wasn't entirely empty.
As she looped above the north pole of the flattened central hub, she studied the numerous other pods and modules extending like the spokes of a wheel. The modules were of varying sizes and shapes, tacked on as the station grew asymmetrically. The structure had kind of a beautiful chaos, sizes and shapes and materials all spread out in a glistening array.
But Exis Station hung canted on its axis, knocked off kilter by centuries of pummeling by heated flares. Uneven temperature shifts had gradually worked their damage upon the station.
The sun itself looked like an angry red eye, its surface roiling and bubbling. Flares swept out like tida! waves, prominences gushing upward in geysers of plasma. Sunspots stood out like open sores on the stellar surface. Teedio's heavy radiation bathed Exis Station, pounding through its shielding, blistering its hull plates. Obviously, the place wouldn't last long.
She had her work cut out for her.
During the evacuation of Ossus, the Jedi had had enough forewarning of the supernova Shockwave that they whisked away a few of the greatest artifacts, the most precious history texts. They were taken to Exis Station to form a temporary library, a place where they would be safe. It was also here that Nomi Sunrider had declared her legendary convocation, where the surviving Jedi from the Sith War had discussed the reshaping of the Republic.
Tionne could not ignore the potential of such a place. She had to see it, had to set foot on board and walkthe corridors that had once been a precious Jedi library—before solar flares engulfed the city in space and obliterated it for all time.
In the Lore Seeker, she transmitted a signal, hoping that the automated systems onboard the station hadn't been shorted out by the blasting radiation or the effects of time. She was pleased to receive an archaic recognition signal that operated one of the main docking ports currently on the shadow side of the rotating station.
Tionne folded several of her solar sails to prevent them from damage in the blasting force of the nearby solar wind. She drifted her ship around into the station's shadow. The docking bay doors creaked open automatically, as if glad to welcome one of their first visitors in a thousand years.
Of course, Tionne realized, the scavenger Fonterrat had come here. but she hoped he hadn't known what to look for. The information was what she valued, not jewels or mundane treasures.
The Lore Seeker drifted into Exis Station and landed as the doors sealed behind her. As a precaution, she ingested a dose of radiation-protection drug and wore shielded clothing. That would give her a little extra time to explore.
Jumping down from her ship, Tionne set off in a hurry. Exis Station had very little time left.
With Artoo-Detoo loaded into his X-wing socket, Luke Sky-walker took off from the jungle moon of Yavin 4, soaring above the treetops and leaving the stark temple ruins behind. He maneuvered away from the orange gas giant into interplanetary space, heading toward his insertion point into hyperspace. He had an important place to see. "Set course for the Teedio system, Artoo," Luke said. "We're on our way to Exis Station."
Later, when they emerged from a numbingly long flight through hyperspace, Luke squinted through the cockpit windows as the star system snapped into view around him.
At high speed, they headed straight into a river of stellar fire.
Even as Luke reacted with Jedi reflexes, Artoo squealed in mechanical alarm, Luke banked and rolled, roaring the X-wing away from the giant solar flare that slapped across their path like the licking tongue of a krayt dragon. The g-forces smashed him to the right, but he did not relent until the X-wing had followed asharp hyperbola path to safety.
Luke felt a strange, twisting agony in his gut as anot...
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