Published by Del Rey Books

The rainforest air was so dense, so moist that even roaring through it at speeder- bike velocity didn’t bring Luke Skywalker any physical relief. His speed just caused the air to move across him faster, like a greasy scrub- rag wielded by an overzealous nanny- droid,

drenching all the exposed surfaces of his body.

Not that he cared. He couldn’t see her, but he could sense his quarry, not far ahead: the individual whose home he’d crossed so many light- years to find.

He could sense much more than that. The forest teemed with life, life that poured its energy into the Force, too much to catalogue as he roared past. He could feel ancient trees and new vines, creeping predators and alert prey. He could feel his son Ben as the teenager drew up abreast of him on his own speeder-bike, eyes shadowed under his helmet but a competitive grin on his lips, and then Ben was a few meters ahead of him, dodging leftward to avoid hitting a split- forked tree, the recklessness of youth giving him a momentary speed advantage over Luke’s superior piloting ability.

Then there was more life, biglife, close ahead, with malicious intent—

From a thick nest of magenta- flowered underbrush twice the height of a man, just to the right of Luke’s mill_9780345519405_1p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 12/1/09 3:5

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path ahead, emerged an arm, striking with great speed and accuracy. It was humanlike, gnarly, gigantic, long enough to reach from the flowers to swat the forward tip of Luke’s speeder bike as he passed.

Disaster takes only a fraction of a second. One instant Luke was racing along, intent on his distant prey and enjoying moments of competition; the next, he was headed straight for a tree whose trunk, four meters across, would bring a sudden stop to his travels and his life.

He came free of the speeder- bike as it rotated beneath him from the giant creature’s blow. He was still headed for the tree trunk. He gave himself an adrenaline-boosted shove in the Force and drifted another couple of meters to the left, allowing him to flash past the trunk instead of into it; he could feel its bark rip at the right shoulder of his tunic. A centimeter closer, and the contact would have given him a serious friction burn.

He rolled into a ball and let senses other than sight guide him. A Force shove to the right kept him from smacking into a much thinner tree, one barely sturdy enough to break his spine and any bones that hit it. He needed no Force effort to shoot between the forks of a third tree. Contact with a veil of vines slowed him; they tore beneath the impact of his body but dropped his rate of speed painlessly. He went crashing through a mass of tendrils ending in big- petaled yellow flowers, some of which reflexively snapped at him as he plowed through them.

Then he was bouncing across the ground, a dense layer of decaying leaves and other materials he really didn’t want to speculate about.

Finally he rolled to a halt. He stretched out, momen-tarily stunned but unbroken, and stared up through the trees. He could see a single shaft of sunlight penetrating the forest canopy not far behind him; it illuminated a mill_9780345519405_1p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 12/1/09 3:5

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swirl of pollen from the stand of yellow flowers he’d just crashed through. In the distance, he could hear the roar of Ben’s speeder bike, hear its engine whine as the boy put it in a hard maneuver, trying to get back to Luke.

Closer, there were footsteps. Heavy, ponderous footsteps.

A moment later, their origin, the owner of that huge arm, loomed over Luke. It was a rancor, humanoid and bent.

The rancors of this world had evolved to be smarter than those elsewhere. This one had clearly been trained as a guard and taught to tolerate protective gear. It wore a helmet, a

rust- streaked cup of metal large

enough to serve as a backwoods bathtub, with leather straps meeting under its chin. Strapped to its left fore-arm was a thick durasteel round shield that looked ridiculously tiny compared to the creature’s enormous proportions but was probably thick enough to stop one or two salvos from a military laser battery.

The creature stared down at Luke. Its mouth opened and it offered a challenging growl.

Luke glared at it. “Do you really want to make me angry right now? I don’t recommend it.”

It reached for him.

S E V E R A L D A Y S E A R L I E R

E m p t y S p a c e N e a r K e s s e l It was darkness surrounded by stars—one of them, the unlovely sun of Kessel, closer than the rest, but barely close enough to be a ball of illumination rather than a dot—and then it was occupied, suddenly inhabited by a space yacht of flowing, graceful lines and peeling paint. That was how it would have looked, a vessel mill_9780345519405_1p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 12/1/09 3:5

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dropping out of hyperspace, to those in the arrival zone, had there been any witnesses: nothing there, then something, an instantaneous transition.

In the bridge sat the ancient yacht’s sole occupant, a teenage girl wearing a battered combat vac suit. She looked from sensor to sensor, uncertain and slow because of her unfamiliarity with this model of space-craft. Too, there was something like shock in her eyes.

Finally satisfied that no other ship had dropped out of hyperspace nearby, or was likely to creep up on her in this remote location, she sat back in her pilot’s seat and tried to get her thoughts in order.

Her name was Vestara Khai, and she was a Sith of the Lost Tribe. She was a proud Sith, not one to hide under false identities and concealing robes until some decades- long grandiose plan neared completion, and now she had even more reason than usual to swell with pride. Mere hours before, she and her Sith Master, Lady Rhea, had confronted Jedi Grand Master Luke Skywalker. Lady Rhea and Vestara had fought the galaxy’s most experienced, most famous Jedi to a standstill. Vestara had even cuthim, a graze to the cheek and chin that had spattered her with blood—blood she had later tasted, blood she wished she could take a sample of and keep forever as a sou-venir.

But then Skywalker had shown why he carried that reputation. A moment’s distraction, and suddenly Lady Rhea was in four pieces, each drifting in a separate direction, and Vestara was hopelessly outmatched. She had saluted and fled.

Now, having taken a space yacht that had doubtless been old when her

great- great- great-grandsires were

newborn, but which, to her everlasting gratitude, held in its still- functioning computer the navigational secrets of the mass of black holes that was the Maw, she was mill_9780345519405_1p_all_r1.qxp:8p insert template 12/1/09 3:5

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free. And the impossible weight of her reality and her responsibility were settling upon her.

Lady Rhea was dead. Vestara was alone, and her pride at Lady Rhea’s accomplishment, at her own near success in the duel with the Jedi, was not enough to wash away the sense of loss.

Then there was the question of what to do next, of where to go. She needed to be able to communicate with her people, to report on the incidents in the Maw.

But this creaking, slowly deteriorating SoroSuub StarTracker space yacht did not carry a hypercomm unit. She’d have to put in to some civilized planet to make contact. That meant arriving unseen, or arriving and departing so swiftly that the Jedi could not detect her in time to catch her. It also meant acquiring suffi-cient credits to fund a secret, no- way- to- trace- it hypercomm message. All of these plans would take time to bring to reality.

Vestara knew, deep in her heart, and within the warning currents of the Force, that Luke Skywalker intended to track her to her homeworld of Kesh. How he planned to do it, she didn’t know, but her sense of paranoia, trained at the hands of Lady Rhea, burned within her as though her blood itself were acid. She had to find some way to outwit a Force user several times her age, renowned for his skills.