Let's go ahead and start with the cover of this book. The most obvious thing you'll notice is Admiral Daala looming in the sky over a crashed Millenium Falcon. The obvious assumption there is that she made it crash. Spoilers: she didn't. This book is Daala's introduction, and she's just as useless here as she'll be in Darksaber. Possibly more so. Luke (whose lipstick is just as pretty as Daala's) is staring entranced at his lightsaber, and the artist couldn't be arsed to try to give him any hint of arms, so it's just sort of floating there. Lando is on the spine (you can just barely see his shoulder on the bottom-left), and above him is a wireframe Death Star. He mostly looks bored. Han and Leia are thrown in on the top right because the artist had some empty space. A bunch of elements just sort of sloppily thrown together on the pretext that they're all sort of in the book.
And worst of those elements is the author's name...Kevin J. Anderson. Some might better know him as the man raping Frank Herbert's corpse while his son watches. Following the theatrical release of The Force Awakens some people called the character Rey a Mary-Sue who could do no wrong. Friends, until you've read a Kevin J. Anderson novel, you don't know what a fucking Mary-Sue even is.
Oh, and I should note that this book occurs relatively soon after the Dark Empire trilogy, With all that implies.
The book opens with a teaser battle scene of Chewbacca and Han getting the Falcon shot up by something called a "Hornet" above Kessel....and, uh....no. Just no.
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| If this thing gets added to the X-Wing Miniatures Game...I'll probably buy it, because I am a sucker. |
Anyway, some TIE fighters come up from Kessel, and Han sends them notice that he's got a diplomatic vessel and then immediately warms up the lasers. The TIEs manage to start shooting before he does (and not only in the Special Edition, either), and Han shoots them both up in an exciting space battle before a bunch of other ships sneak up behind them, and an X-Wing shoots the Falcon from behind.
Incidentally, I'm having a very hard time not calling every noun a "space-noun" because this line is in the book:
Another hit rocked them, and Han's chest smacked up against the control panel. "There goes the main drive unit. We're space-meat in the next barrage[...]"
Ten pages in, the book introduces that space-hornet thing from the teaser section and it shoots them down and they crash-land on Kessel, giving us the scene from the cover (sans Giga-Daala). At least the book doesn't leave me in suspense about when that would happen.
Anyway, Luke just waltzes into the Galactic Senate when Mon Mothma, the current leader, and asks for them to let him make a new Jedi Order. Some of the Senators point out that Dark Side users tend to give the good guys a horrible time of it and suggests that it might be wiser to not give potential Sith training, but Luke says "nuh-uh", so they all vote for him to find some Force-sensitive people and then train them. And then give him thunderous applause. For some reason. This scene probably makes more sense if you imagine that Luke uses the Jedi mind trick on all of them.
With a quick cut to Leia, it's her turn to think about stupid stuff for a while. She, too, wishes for a return to the good old days before she had children, when she risked her life in a doomed, impossible quest to save the galaxy from an onerous tyrant. She also recalls that her twin children are going to be coming back shortly. ...From where? Screw explaining that. After some pages of this, Luke shows up and frowns at her for not practicing her Jedi powers enough, but apparently she's good enough that the twins won't be in danger of osmosing some Dark Side particles any more or something.
Too much time with one character! We cut to Wedge Antilles, General of the New Republic, war hero and conqueror of Coruscant. He's doing construction work. Really. At least he doesn't waste time moaning about the good old days. Even in this book, he's better than that. He's part of a team following a construction droid around as it builds up blown up parts of the city. The droid tries to knock down one building and fails to do so, so Wedge stops it so they can take a look at this mysteriously tough building. He pokes his head in. A monster attacks him. Nameless incidental characters kill it in less than two paragraphs. Stepping over its corpse, we find that this building is an interrogation center. It might reveal some secret information!
We go back to Leia and Luke now, since this book has as much focus as a kid with ADHD on caffeine. They practice levitating a statue for a while, then when Leia throws a hissy fit and stops playing along, Luke tries some telepathy for a while. He accidentally finds a secret place that, when telepathically touched, makes the victim instinctively Force push the attacker away if they're Force sensitive.
We haven't introduced a new point of view in pages! Now let's ride on Admiral Ackbar's shoulder. There was no reason to change the PoV, since he's flying Luke and Leia out to see Wedge, so that's three options in the area we've used in the last twenty pages. After mucking around for a while on useless stuff (like the even more pointless mate of that monster, who we find out was introduced and killed offscreen), they find some funny little paddles that can detect Force sensitivity.
What a coincidence that our heroes would find two novel methods of identifying potential Jedi within six hours of deciding to recreate the Jedi Order. This coincidence is never once brought up.
Wait, we actually had an exciting plot line going on, didn't we? Let's go back to Han, who just crashlanded after his exciting space battle, where he narrowly avoided being turned into space-meat. His control panel is covered in blood, and he coughs up more blood, and his leg sounds just as bad. He didn't have time to strap himself in. He glances over to Chewie, hoping the Wookiee fared better, but Chewie is
matted with discolored blood oozing from wounds hidden by his shaggy fur.
Someone blows open the hatch to the Falcon with an explosive charge, and all their air escapes. Kessel, if you didn't know or tried to forget, is basically airless and has big generators for air on the surface, and how breathable it actually is even with that can vary from author to author. It would seem that KJA has it fairly thin, since the boarders have oxygen masks to breathe. Han recognizes the leader of the boarders! It's Skynxnex! Wait, who? And how the fuck is that supposed to be pronounced?
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| And what the fuck is going on with his head? |
Han and Chewie awake in a jail cell. A sadist medical droid fixed Han up before they threw him in here. It talked about how much things will hurt and is probably supposed to be comic relief, but it isn't funny. So they're in a cell.
Finally, Han took a deep whiff of the air inside the chamber. "What died in here?" He suddenly realized that wasn't just a joking comment.
Chewbacca answered by pointing to the hulking form that occupied a third of the space in the cell. Han blinked again to be sure his vision was adjusting properly.
It's a dead rancor, incidentally. Also not a funny scene. Next, we have a page of mumbling useless flashbacks to stuff that happened in the last fifty pages (some just four pages ago), since otherwise we can't make pagecount. Finally, we get some new information: Skynxnex is a thief/assassin, and the right-hand man of the guy who runs Kessel, Moruth Doole. Han and Skynxnex trade very embarassing "witty" banter for a bit, then Skynxnex takes Han to see Doole.
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| Really? |
Doole has a mechanical eye, and is an alien known as a "Rybet". Since KJA is lazy and not funny, he is exactly as frog-like as you would expect with that name. We find out that he lost his eye the same time that Han got in trouble with Jabba. The Hutt went ahead and blamed Doole, too, and burnt out his eye. That's why Han was shot down, "diplomacy" or no: bad blood with the leader, who had been the leader for decades, and known to be the leader. Holy shit this was a bad idea. Leia has to have been behind it. Doole eats some of the space-drugs they make here on Kessel, called glitterstim.
This gives him psychic powers, so he rumages through Han's mind, wondering when the New Republic is going to send a fleet to attack him. He finds that that's not coming, and that Han really is here on a diplomatic mission and the calculated, serious insult of having Han lead the expedition was completely unintentional. Even if Han is having yet another crisis of identity and feeling inferior to his wife, you'd think Chewie might have thought about this long enough to suggest that he and Han not handle it... but this is a KJA book. No character outside of the major named ones is allowed to even attempt to be relevant or useful.
Doole and Skynxnex flip out over the revelation that the guy flying in on a diplomatic flag are actually here to be diplomats, and try to decide what to do. Han suggests actually having a diplomatic meeting, as he tries desperately to remember how Leia would handle this sort of thing. Since he's using Leia as a template, and he already shot down and killed two of Kessel's defenders, naturally Doole sentences him to an awful fate in the mines of Kessel. Mining spice. Because spice is totally something that comes out of mines. Anyway, Skynxnex also goes to wipe out records of the battle.
So in the first sixty pages, we've had no less than five distinct points of view, one horribly named villain, at least one horribly ugly villain (depending on how ugly you find Skynxnex), and already lots of plot holes and stupidity. It won't get better on any of those fronts.
The narrator this minute is C-3P0. R2-D2 is working, and Threepio is bitching uselessly at him. Finally, Threep's litany of complaints is temporarily halted because Luke drops by to check up on them. It turns out that R2-D2 is singlehandedly shifting all the data in the galaxy to find evidence of people being Force-sensitive. Geeze. You'd think the New Republic could at least spare a couple extra droids. Anyway, Luke tells the droids he's going to be off to check up on a few early leads. Since Threepio is less than useless here, he forces Artoo to stop his search so he can look up one of the planets that Luke is going to. There's lava there. Since this is Star Wars, the whole planet is full of lava and earthquakes. Every square inch.
We cut over to Luke, just now landing on Horrible Doom Lava World, to check up on a local named Gantoris who somehow keeps surviving everything, which Luke suspects is unconscious Force use. But first, he takes a long sidebar to tell us the gripping and relevant history of the world (idiots invested their whole fortune into mining the nearby nebula without stopping to even check if there was anything there worth scooping up), which actually is boring and irrelevant, then lands on a geyser field just outside of town.
Really.
Anyway, it doesn't quite get him, so he tightens his belt and keeps walking. Luke treats the village like an RPG town, asking the two locals where Gantoris is. They say that he's off saving a pair of children who managed to get into peril at just the right time for Luke to stop by. Anyway, Luke wanders off to the next plot trigger. It's an avalanche, and one person (obviously Gantoris) works twice as hard as everyone else digging them out.
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| Ok, I can't be the only one seeing him as a late-Eighties action figure, am I? |
Luke uses his Force power to hurl all the boulders away. One of the kids turns out to have been dead before Luke ever landed, but thanks to him, the other is saved from horrible death by having a mountainside fall on her. Gantoris is so thankful that he immediately accuses Luke of being a demon.
Hey, let's cut back to Leia. I'm sure she's doing something exciting. Actually, some random alien shows up for two pages to admit that while the New Republic is currently the major Galactic power, he doesn't trust that that will continue, so he's only coming to pay homage to the Emperor's monument, and he calls the New Republic "upstart, illegitimate terrorists", and says that they're going to collapse soon. Leia bends over backwards to try to accomodate him as he heaps insults on her and doesn't even pretend like he's willing to deal, much less actually offer anything. That... isn't how diplomacy works, Leia. If anything, I'm subduing how bad this is in the book by not quoting the whole thing.
With that pointless interlude over, it's time for another. R2-D2 has found something. C-3P0 scoffs at the idea and demands to double-check the data. He doesn't see what R2 found until R2 explains it to him very slowly: a TYMMO seems to always win at certain types of bets. It could be the Force! Or he could be cheating. Place your bets on this one, folks!
Back to Leia. She's having breakfast now, and scowls at it, wishing her husband would have called. He hasn't, since, as you may remember, he's been press-ganged on Kessel.
Then LANDO CALRISSIAN walks in! He's not going to save the book, any more than Wedge "Construction Foreman" Antilles did, incidentally, but it's nice to see him. Leia whines about Han, then shifts gears and offers to give Lando a job throwing dinner parties. ...Why?
Before Lando can jump on the chance to throw parties for a living, the droids burst in, and Lando tries not to strangle them, since that wouldn't do anything to a droid. Luckily, they redeem themselves: it seems Tymmo bets on blob races, and Leia changes her mind and instead offers Lando a job going down to the racetrack and betting on the horses blobs and maybe checking out a guy who can game the system at the same time.
Let's cut to another PoV. Doole does creepy frog things for a bit, then we find out that his techs have stripped the Falcon of all identifying characteristics and Kessel has a shield now.
Hey, didn't we have an interesting plotline that hasn't shown in a whie? Let's check up on Han. He and Skynxnex trade terrible quips for a bit, then they get to the mining foreman, who mentions that the miners are still short-handed--something unknown is taking them.
They're taken into the mines now. It's totally dark, since any light will set off the spice and make it useless. A random other prisoner straight-up uses Jedi Mind Trick to get seated next to Han. It's... Kyp Durron! And oh dear god, you're going to grow to hate this Mary Sue. He begs for basically all the news in the whole EU to this point, and then KJA takes us through a bunch of supposedly creepy little things to get down to the spice veins (ugh).
Han starts mining spice. The method is "blow up a wall, then have the prisoners blindly grope through the rubble for stringy stuff". Sheesh. Anyway, they're distracted by a giant glowing bug that flies through the tunnels and ruins all the glitterstim. Everyone is weirded out, since there isn't supposed to be anything like that on Kessel, but now that the spice is ruined, the shift is over and they go back. When they get into the light again, Han realizes... Kyp is just a kid! A super-powerful mysterious Jedi kid who was lost until our heroes stumbled across him.
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| This sounds familiar for some reason. |
Back to Luke and Gantoris. To continue the JRPG theme, Gantoris has decided to believe Luke if Luke passes three trials. Well, fine, only two trials, but I think KJA could only think of two. This first one is pulling edible moss out of a geyser.
It isn't told very well, but long story short is that Gantoris leaves Luke down there during an eruption, so Luke has to use a Force-powered jump to get out before he's scalded.
So Gantoris takes Luke to a literal magma pool, and says that if Luke walks across it then he'll believe him. Because demons aren't associated with fire or anything. And this proves his intentions more than his fireproofness. And... screw it. It's time for a boss battle! Luke finds there's some footholds, and he gets about halfway across the lava before a freaking lava dragon yanks itself out of the magma to attack Luke. And the book seriously calls it a lava dragon.
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| I remember this level in Ocarina of Time, and seriously, fuck that thing. |
Anyway, Luke hits the thing with his lightsaber, cracks one scale, and then when it ducks under the lava, the lava seeps in through that crack and it dies. Its death throes get rid of half of his handholds, so Luke yells something about "the Force" and walks across the lava while glowing blue. Gantoris decides to trust this potential demon now that he's killed a dragon.
You know who we haven't had as a viewpoint character yet? Lando. Let's use him. He's going to a planet called Umgul, which has one distinguishing characteristic: it runs blob races.
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| "Excitement Is No Stretch"? Don't shit on my head and call it a hat. |
Artoo and Threepio are with Lando today. The three of them find their way to the so-called "blobstacle course". Ugh. I thought I had a taste for awful puns.
Anyway, Threepio exposits on the blobs' breeding and nature for a minute (they're Dragon Quest Slimes that people treat and use as dogs), but thankfully we're going to jump right to the action with a minimum of that silliness.
Essentially: a blob race is a dog race, but with obstacles added by a sadist. We start with 14 blobs.
I wasn't even slightly kidding about this being horrible animal abuse. It starts fairly benign, though; one blob, Blob 11, takes a huge initial lead. The first obstacle is essentially a screen door that they have to pour through. After that, they go up what's basically a set of monkeybars and go down a slide at the end. Sound benign? We-e-e-lllll, let's see what happens when two of the blobs reach the slide at the same time.
The second and third blobs reached the top of the ratlines simultaneously, and both leaped onto the lubricated slide, squirting down at an alarming rate. Many of the spectators jumped out of their seats and screamed with excitement.
The two blobs tumbled next to each other, grappling with pseudopods and rolling. The steep, banked curve rose up in front of them like a wall.
"Oh, I can't watch!" Threepio said. "They're going to crash!"
The two blobs both struck the corner at the same instant and splattered into each other, forming one giant ball. The crowd roared with absolute delight.
"Total fusion!" the announcer cried.
The spectators continued to cheer. The two blobs had combined into one much larger mass, and they seemed to be working at cross purposes, trying to lumber over to the side of the track and out of the way of other oncoming blobs.
So those two die as Lando cheers. Another two of them die of dehydration (it's described as "terminal"; there's no wiggle room here on them surviving) while trying to cross a field of desiccant as Lando remembers he's got a plot thread he's supposed to be following and goes to see Tymmo, the guy who's always scary-lucky at these games (he bet on Blob 11, of course). Why are bets like this a matter of public record, anyhow?
The book off-handedly describes a couple of only mildly lethal traps before describing them flowing across a field of painful spikes and a bed of nails. Then the next "blobstacle" is introduced: a giant fuck-off blade trap. It splits Blob 11 into several pieces as it goes across, which isn't fatal for a blob, only painful. Finally, Blob 11 comes to rest in the winner's circle, two or so "blobstacles" ahead of any other contenders.
We're not given an actual count of how many survive, but out of 14, at least 4 die in the first 4 "blobstacles", and there's at least 5 others mentioned. So even conservatively, at least half of these blobs die horribly every race. While Lando cheers.
Whatever. They stalk Tymmo until the guy goes to pick up his winnings, and while he's getting the money, Lando walks up behind him and uses the convenient Jedi detector (which is now built into Artoo) to scan him for Jedi potential. He bolts, but not before it turns up a negative result. So he must be cheating! Lando reminds us that on Umgal, cheating is a death penalty offense. So Threepio talks him into chasing down Tymmo and running him through the detector again.
Anyway, Lando has a nice hotel room and dinner on the taxpayers' dime before Artoo locates Tymmo. He's just showed up at the blob pens, dressed as a wrangler (which he isn't). Since we already know he's a fraud and this is extra-damning, Lando decides to go confront him to sort it out. So to sneak around animal pens, he pulls on a nice cape before heading out. I'm sure that'll keep from getting dirty, Lando.
Fashion police aside, they get there just as Tymmo is implanting something in a blob, so while they're secretly watching him, Threepio yells that he's just implanted something in a blob. Unsurprisingly, this alerts Tymmo that they're there, and he pulls a blaster on Lando. They get into a bit of a shooting battle, but before it gets serious, Threepio gets eaten by a blob (really, but it doesn't actually hurt him) and the actual owner of the corral shows up. This owner has the most polite way of swearing ever:
"What in the bleeping miasma is going on here!" a deep voice roared.
He challenges Lando to identify himself, and Lando, illegally entering this corral and rolling around in the blob dung while wearing a cape, tells him that he's a general of the New Republic here to investigate the other intruder as part of an important secret mission. Hard to believe, maybe, but definitedly a novel excuse to try.
Tymmo, on the other hand, freaks out about not going back to an unidentified "her". Threepio is finally helped out of the blob and says that what Tymmo inserted into the blob is a micro-motivator. As if its life wasn't already bad enough, Tymmo essentialy drugged up the blob to win by forcing itself so hard it almost dies of fear.
Well, no one cares about animal rights, so we cut back to Tymmo, who finally says that his "her" that he's so scared of is the Duchess Mistral of Dargul. Basically, the Duchess advertised for a perfect mate, and Tymmo figured that marrying nobility would be an easy life, so he hacked her applicant system to say he was perfect for her. Then, somehow, she gets clingy when her computer-determined perfect soulmate marries her, so Tymmo (who I guess has commitment issues) runs away and comes to Umgal. Instead of being executed, he's going to face the far stiffer sentence of going back to her and the corral owner gets a million-credit reward from all this.
So Lando flies off, his whole big scene having been completely pointless. This seems to be a running theme in KJA's subplots, doesn't it?
Anyway, Leia's being a backseat driver standing in Coruscant's air-traffic control tower. She's just been hanging out there to tell the people working there to give high priority to something unexpected that came out of hyperspace. Did she need to do that in person? She couldn't have sent, like, a memo or something? She is the President of the galaxy and all. This is actually sort of forgivable, though, since it's her children coming back. What isn't forgivable is why they're gone, as they're coming back from where Winter, Leia's personal servant, has been raising them in secret. Really. They're so scared of darksiders getting their hands on the kids that they took the three of them to a secret place with only a nanny and a bunch of droids for company. Because when you're a kid, having no sort of friends your own age and no parental involvement is acceptable, if you're raised by droids instead. It makes you at least normal, and probably super-awesome with Jedi parents and grandparents and sort of a family lineage of having both Light Side and Dark Side ancestors.
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| Yeah, this doesn't sound familiar at all. |
Anyway, Winter lands with the kids, and Jacen and Jaina look suspiciously at Leia and then wonder where Han is. Leia immediately gets angry, since that's a healthy thing to do with your kids when you haven't seen them in months/years.
The kids are immediately put to bed, with Threepio watching over them while Leia and Winter have girl talk. Threepio decides to sing them to sleep, which immediately makes the kids start screaming their head off. Y'know, very little of the EU seems to have noticed that Threepio is portrayed as very effective at his job in the movies; he just is often thrust into bad situations for him. He's not completely inept.
Anyway, Winter tells Leia that she should be worried about Han, since he wouldn't forget about his kids or go without communicating for over a week unless something was wrong. Leia resists this at first, because... no idea. Actually, it seems really dumb to send him off to go play ambassador to a planet that the New Republic doesn't want and actually has serious reason to dislike (glitterstim is Star War's meth/heroin/whatever) right before his kids come home, without any sort of support staff or qualifications. I know I mentioned it before, but the idea of this being the "Han's Midlife Crisis" trilogy will pop up more later.
Winter finally convinces Leia to stop being such mad at Han without reason and to actually check if she has a reason to be mad. They phone up Moruth Doole, who acts ridiculously guilty about the whole affair, with stupid qualifications like how he has "no record" of the Millenium Falcon visiting his planet (it was wiped out), and always having a very pat answer ready immediately. Feeling embarassed for the idiot, Leia and Winter cut the connection and point out that something's wrong here. Probably for the best; if they'd talked to him for about two more minutes, Doole probably would have yelled something like "Even if Han Solo and Chewbacca did show up here, I wouldn't shoot them down, take them prisoner, and force them to work in my spice mines. For example."
Speaking of Han, let's go check up on him. He's punching someone. Expecting Han to make a big, dramatic escape just because I promised that last time? Tough. I lied. He's actually in the middle of a very small prison riot, which is quelled by the expedient of tasering stunning everyone. Did Han have some amazing plan that this was just the first step of? No, he just remembered that his kids were coming home and threw a fit. Seems Leia isn't the only one who forgot how to be an action hero since the movies ended.
Let's cut over to Doole, since after a long Lando segment and a long Leia segment, the author is getting antsy and needs to change our viewpoint character several times fast to make up for it. He's in a factory or something of his that helps finish up glitterstim production. It's staffed by his children. They're grubs. They're working in complete darkness doing dangerous work. When they get big enough, he kills them before they really properly reach adulthood. It's all very disturbing and all, except it isn't.
Okay, back to Han. He and Chewbacca and Kyp Durron (who the author thinks is totally awesome) and someone who's going to die soon so I'm going to call him Redshirt are volunteered to go mine spice in a deep, rich, new vein where previous work crews have disappeared. Han isn't actually too upset about this, since he figures that maybe the work crews get into light somewhere (guards on Kessel keep the prisoners in check by having the only infra-red goggles, incidentally) and then the prisoners overwhelm them. I would like to make it extremely clear that Had does not think that they were, for example, eaten by a giant invisible spider who produces space-spice in the same way that sandworms make space-spice in the Dune series. That would be stupid.
So they go down there and spice readings are off the scale. One of the guards with them is giddy with glee about this. Anyway, something in the darkness grabs Redshirt, who screams as he dies. So Han finally does something badass and punches out one of the guards and takes his see-in-the-dark goggles and Han and Chewie and Kyp Durron all escape back as Han sees
to his horror, the silhouette of a long spindly leg reaching in front of the guard's waist
And yeah, everyone else is eaten by a giant invisible spider that works to Star Wars' space-spice just like sandworms do in Dune. Suddenly, KJA ending up writing knock-off Dune books makes sense.
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| However the name of Han Solo is not a killing word. |
Well, that's way too much excitement for a while. It's time to go check up on Luke who, as you may recall, has finally convinced Gantoris that even if he is a demon, Gantoris might as well come along for a lark. They go to Bespin, since KJA hasn't filled his quota of movie locations yet. Luke's identified someone living here named Streen that he thinks might be a Jedi. They find Streen with zero difficulty. We find out that Streen is living all by himself because he hates to be around people. So, naturally, Luke asks him to come along and join a bunch of other people at his new Jedi Academy. Streen agrees. That sure didn't take long. Turns out that Streen's Force sensitivity manifests as hearing everyone's thoughts all the time, and he promises to come along if Luke teaches him now to not be a disgusting voyeur at all times.
Well, two successes for Luke!
I just want to recap something: we discovered that the people who have been mining Kessel for centuries never once spent an afternoon checking out the planet's caves to find out where the spice came from, what it was, or if there was anything else on the planet of interest. Today, we get Skynxnex as a viewpoint character.
He's talking to Moruth Doole. Doole's finally decided to kill Solo, so Skynxnxex is going down there to personally shoot him with his modified super-blaster. Little does he know that Han Solo has already escaped! And he wouldn't be dumb enough to come right back to the prison after overpowering his captors and stealing a see-in-the-dark goggle set, right?
In the next scene, Han comes staggering out of the spice tunnels into the prison, croaking about a monster down there.
Skkynxnxnex is there and ready to shoot him. Han closes the door instead, and they all jump back into the hover-minecarts. Han, Kyp, and Chewie take one set, and Skykynxnxnex's crew jump on a bunch of other ones. And they all roar after the heroes to try to shoot at them with a weapon that's carefully described as being inaccurate:
Skynxnex pulled out his modified double-blaster, powered it on, and aimed. When he fired, the two barrels sent their beams out at slight intersecting angles to each other. A short distance beyond the muzzle, the two beams coalesced and phased, forming a staccato series of bursts, each one containing a brief impulse of power ten times that of a single blaster beam. Though the weapon looked impressive, it was almost impossible to aim, and most users--even hardened criminals--had dropped them in favor of more reliable weapons.
So anyway, he plugs Han first shot and hahaha. I can't even pretend that now, can I? He barely hits the ceiling while they're in a tunnel. We pretend there's some drama when Kyp (of course it's fucking Kyp) notices that they're running the mine carts on default... which means right back to the invisible spider. Anyway, an eldritch glow that is apparently another Kessel creature comes roaring along the tunnel for the benefit of the audience, so we can see. Surprise, the creature gets caught in... a web! Glitterstim is actually a web to catch these things. And no one ever noticed before. ...Do I really need to go into why it's dumb that no one noticed this before?
Skykynxnxnexx flies in after Han, and the spider grabs him and kills him. I was very threatened by him the whole of two or three scenes he appeared in, him and his never-even-touched-on background where he knows and hates Han, and his gun that can't shoot straight. Naturally, his boss will prove even dumber without him around. Anyway, Kyp (Kyp took the controls when they took it off automatic) then immediately finds their way to the surface of Kessel via a smuggler access shaft. Incidentally, and I should preface this by saying it's entirely true, the first time I read this book, I messed up my page numbers between reading sessions and skipped this last bit. I went from Han steals minecarts straight to Han gets on Kessel's surface. It made more sense. But then Kyp wouldn't have gotten to save the day by flying blind through the tunnels.
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| I fucking hate this kid. |
Anyway, our heroes all fly over to the atmosphere factory that just so happens to be five minutes away. Wait... smugglers performed heavy mining within earshot of an official atmosphere factory for who knows how long, and at least lasted long enough to open up this shaft? Why? Whatever. They need to steal a spaceship, so there's a spaceport handy at this atmosphere factory.
Quick cut to Luke. He's back on Coruscant to say hi to his niece and nephew. He talks to Leia when they go to bed, explaining that now that he has two students, he wants to get started teaching, but he can't do it on Coruscant because both of them are basket cases: Gantoris still thinks Luke's a demon and Streen flips out around people. So he brought them to the biggest city in the galaxy. This is a decision made of good things.
He's not going to get them off it anytime soon, either--Lando runs into the room from wherever he's been since his stupid subplot and yells that Han is missing. This is new information to Luke, so he and Lando decide to drop everything and run to Kessel after him. Leia agrees to watch over the two mentally unstable Force users while Luke is gone, in addition to her own kids... who she's been so paranoid about having around other Force users that they were raised off planet by droids. Er.
Let's go back to Han. The first line of this chapter is "They managed to steal the second shuttle". Well, that was an exciting prison break. Kyp off-handedly mentions guards as the book waxes on explaining that first line in greater detail, but that really sums up the important stuff, since the guards don't see or try to stop them.
As you may remember, Kessel has a ramshackle fleet, so a bunch of cobbled-together junkheaps fly after Han. His shuttle is unarmed, so he can't even fight back. Is he doomed? Not while Kyp Durron is on the case! Han, the expert pilot who's lived by his skill for decades now, relinquishes the controls to this barely-familiar prisoner he picked up yesterday, so that Kyp can try to fly them through the black hole cluster (yes, black hole cluster) that just so happens to be about thirty seconds away by sublight speeds. Kyp finally mentions off-handedly that a Jedi showed him how to use the Force a while ago, but if you haven't figured this out by now, you haven't been reading the book.
Which Jedi? Why, it's
GAAAAAAAAAH!!! WHO THE FUCK LET YOU BACK OUT?!
They all fly into the black hole cluster, intent on weaving past the black holes, and we end the chapter.
Next chapter opens with Leia. There's some pointless stuff, and then we cut to Winter leaving. She's flying back to her secret droid-planet where Anakin is now completely alone save for droids--and he's just a baby at this point in the timeline, recall. Leia's twins start crying, though, since, well, the only living human they've ever really known is flying off and leaving their pre-school asses on a planet unfamiliar to them, with a woman they barely know. Christ. The rest of the chapter is Leia dealing with Jedi children and Jedi man-children. Streen puts up a fuss... since he was promised that he'd be told how to not listen in to everyone's thoughts, and was instead dumped on the most densely populated planet in the galaxy and his teacher left. Leia's kids keep crying, too. What a dumb plot thread.
Let's cut back to Han in hopes of something that's both exciting and non-stupid happens sometime (it won't). Kyp easily flies them through the Maw, landing in a gravitationally stable island in the middle of a cluster of black holes. Because that's totally what black holes do. Anyway, there's someone already here--four Imperial Star Destroyers show up to take Han and company captive!
They launch hundreds of TIEs to greet this one unarmed (and mostly destroyed from earlier) shuttle, just in case it turns out to be hostile, but they welcome them and ask for a code. Han tries his Return of the Jedi password, but that doesn't fly. Someone on the Star Destroyers says that this proves that they have not been sent by Grand Moff Tarkin and they're going to be captured and interrogated.
Han wondered if he should bother to acknowledge, then decided against it. He was puzzled by the mention of Grand Moff Tarkin, the brutal governor who had built the first Death Star. Tarkin has been destroyed along with his doomsday weapon ten years before. Could these people have been out of touch for that long?
Yes. Their leader is that dumb. One guess as to who it could be. I won't keep you in suspense: the end of the chapter reveals that it's Admiral Daala. Well. This is her first introduction, but that should tell you just how little danger Han and the gang actually are in.
We open the next chapter with Luke twiddling his thumbs. Lando is piloting the ship, so naturally we take the viewpoint of the passenger. Wouldn't want to be too close to the action; I'm not sure that my heart could handle it. Lando is taking them to Kessel. In order to check and see if anything has happened to Han, they're here posing as potential investors to get a chance to look around authorized. Since Lando and Luke are totally no-names and no one in the galaxy would recognize them on sight.
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| Then again, it didn't take that long for the Force and Jedi to become a myth. Twice. |
Lando, wanting to remind us all of his hatred of animals, tells Kessel that he recently scored big at the Umgallian blob races, and gives his name as Tymmo.
Doole greets them when they come down, and acts pathetically eager to please Landymmo. Without any difficulty whatsoever, Lando convinces Doole to let them examine the recent accident site. The giant unexpected spider is here, since apparently Skynxnex managed to bring down the ceiling on top of it and squash it as he died, and Doole drones on about this for a while, including bringing significant notice to the fact that this is the first fucking time they've ever even the species, and potentially they might be able to extract pure glitterstim from its web sacs. Finally, Lando pulls out the important data: some prisoners, including a Wookiee, are missing! So that means that Luke and Lando are only one set of peril behind Han.
Speaking of Han, let's cut to Admiral Daala as a viewpoint character. She re-watches a recording of Han's interrogation... because getting a direct view of what happened there instead of a later flashback would have been far too exciting. Han tells her about the death of the Emperor, and Darth Vader, and of both Death Stars, and of Grand Moff Tarkin's death, and a bunch of other stuff that shocks her, but since it's the damn original movie series, it's hard to feel for her.
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| I find the idea of Daala standing in front of a Force ghost of Peter Cushing hysterical for some reason. |
We very, very briefly go over how bored her troops are. They have, after all, been on station without any contact apart from four Star Destroyers and a little research station for eleven fucking years. It's kind of hard to imagine Daala keeping her troops from mutinying at some point in the last decade, but whatever. Then Daala goes over her fleet and its awesome power in her head. This is somewhat blunted by the fact that her "fleet" is only four star destroyers. Even the lame-ass Yevetha are still around at this point in the series, and they have three ships each individually more powerful than her entire armada, not to mention far more supporting craft. Plus there's hundreds of star destroyers under command of various warlords in the Deep Core. Daala tries to pretend to herself that she's still relevant, and fails completely.
She goes down to the research station I mentioned. This is what her fleet was protecting. Before Lucas ret-conned this away (I wonder why he felt like he needed to?), this was where the Death Star was created. Then, eleven years ago, Tarkin's last message to them was to make something that surpassed even the Death Star. We'll get to what that was when Daala inevitably horribly bungles. For now, though, she goes to the head researcher and tells him that his Death Star was destroyed. Ten years ago. He immediately tries to assign a team to study this flaw, but Daala tells him how dumb that is. Daala had to tell him how dumb he was.
Daala inexplicably decides to give us her backstory right now. The basic idea is that she made a false persona on the Academy's networks, and Tarkin realized she was a hot woman, so he slept with her and when he got bored he gave her a fleet as hush money, and he then put it in the least accessible spot in the galaxy and told her not to leave for any reason. She doesn't quite make the connection, though; she's still convinced she's brilliant.
Now that she finally puzzled through why her last supply run was eleven years late, Daala decides it's time to wipe out the New Republic. Since her star destroyers, put together, amount to a joke even in the hands of a good admiral, she decides they're going to have to employ a ludicrous superweapon: the Sun Crusher!
Wait, that's getting too exciting. Let's cut over to Leia being bad at her job. She meets an ambassador from Carida, a stormtrooper training planet that we'll see up close later in the trilogy. This is a fairly large excerpt, I realize, but, really, I need to emphasize that this is all in the book:
After two more stormtrooper officials followed the ambassador down, Furgan drew a deep breath, looking into the distance and ignoring Leia. "Ah, the air of Imperial Center." He turned toward the waiting reception committee, beetling his thick brows. "Smells a bit sour now, though. The taint of rebellion."
Leia disregarded the comment. "Welcome to Coruscant, Ambassador Furgan. I am Minister of State Leia Organa Solo."
"Yes, yes," Furgan said impatiently. "After Mon Mothma's words about the extreme important of Carida, I expected her to send more than a mere minor official to greet me. A slap in the face."
Leia had to fall back on some of Luke's temper-controlling exercises, a Jedi mind-blanking technique that allowed her to quell the surge of anger. "I see you have not taken the time to familiarize yourself with the structure of our government, Ambassador. Though Mon Mothma is the New Republic's Chief of State, the Cabinet is the actual governing body, of which the Minister of State and my subordinate diplomatic corps comprise perhaps the most important arm."
So... yeah, she has no spine and can't recognize deliberate insults. The Ambassador proceeds to tell Leia that his bodyguards will be checking over his quarters and food very carefully to avoid sneaky Rebel spying/poisoning, and in the meantime, Leia will take him on a tour of the Imperial Palace. Leia immediately caves in to this demand, without so much as timorously mentioning possible concessions on his end. KJA literally does not understand how politics work.
Eventually Leia takes the Ambassador to see Mon Mothma. She shows a holo of the galaxy, and how little of it is under Imperial control. First the Ambassador accuses them of faking the map, and then of bribing other ambassadors into lying about where their actual loyalties lie, and then he tells them that if those are they facts, the facts will have to be changed. Christ, girls, get a clue. He's not here to negotiate, and you're letting him shit all over you for no possible gain.
To drive this home, they host a reception for Furgan. Furgan's troops ostentatiously scan everyone coming in to make sure that they're not assassins. This includes Leia, C-3P0, and Leia's preschool kids. Argh. This is painful. The Ambassador comes up to Leia, makes not-at-all subtle threats towards her three children, insults the Jedi, says that the Emperor is entitled to his own magic powers, and so in return, Leia casually gives away important strategic information: the New Republic will soon have a new Jedi Order to call on.
Let's use Threepio as a viewpoint again. The kids manage to wander into the dangerous area of the plants on exhibit, but since they're special, the plants don't hurt them at all. This isn't a useful scene or anything. We'd just stuck with Leia for too long.
Okay, back to Leia. The Ambassador is getting sick of the New Republic's leaders not recognizing an insult:
He raised his voice and his glass. "To Mon Mothma, who calls herself leader of the New Republic--" With a vicious sneer he hurled his drink into her face. The honey-green liquid splashed on her cheeks, her hair, her chest. She staggered back, appalled. Jan Dodonna caught her shoulders, steadying her; his mouth gaped open in astonishment.The New Republic guards at the door immediately drew their weapons but somehow refrained from firing."--we denounce your foul rebellion of lawbreakers and murderers. You have tried to impress me with the number of other weak-minded systems that have joined your Alliance, but no amount of rabble can erase your crimes against the Empire."He smashed his empty glass against the floor and ground the shards under his boot heel. "Carida will never surrender to your so-called New Republic."
And then he storms out.
Okay, back to Han. He's still worn out after the interrogation, so when a hot (but clueless) female scientist comes by to talk to him, the stormtroopers lash him to a column. She immediately asks Han for his impressions of the Death Star, since she has a bit of workman's pride in it. Within two minutes, Han has realized she's hopelessly naive.
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| And has hedgehog hair. |
She's so naive that Han uses her to get an update on where Kyp Durron and Chewie. Chewie has been put on manual labour, and Kyp is in a maximum security cell. Since he's so awesome that he could easily escape from anything else.
Let's cut over to Kyp, now that he's been name-dropped. He's thinking about how to use his Force powers to escape, but he hasn't figured out exactly how to yet. He gives us his backstory, too, in a scene that's supposed to feel raw and emotional but doesn't. Basically, his parents were anti-Empire politicians, and because of that they got shot in front of his eyes and he was taken to Kessel. I think a lot of this is supposed to be a deliberate Batman-like backstory, honestly.
We go back to Han, and he starts questioning Qwi Xux. She talks about the peaceful uses that her Death Stars and World Devastators must have been put to, and she doesn't believe Han when he tells her that these ominously-named devices were used as weapons of war.
Since she's terribly, terribly dumb, she immediately changes the subject to what she's working on now: the Sun Crusher! It's a completely indestructible shuttle-sized ship that can blow up stars. So that they don't impede navigation, see.
And...uh...how do I put this? It's shaped like a fucking ice cream cone.
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| The death of star systems, folks. |
Remember what Luke and Lando were up to at the beginning of this update? No? Well, they were busy making an idiot of Moruth Doole on Kessel, trying to find Han. Lando uses the word "solo" in a sentence, and they watch Doole flinch, since he has no poker face at all. Then Lando talks about possible invasion and wants to see the fleet, so they go up to Kessel's moon, and see the Millennium Falcon as part of the fleet. Lando demands a "random inspection" of just that ship, and since Doole is moronic, he still hasn't caught up that Lando isn't on the level and is specifically looking for Han, so he agrees to this.
When they get inside, Lando yells "gotcha!", and demands Doole tell them where Han and Chewie are. Doole pulls a blaster, so Luke throws him out of the ship. Before Kessel's military can react, Luke and Lando fly away on the Falcon.
Let's bring our viewpoint characters for this book up to an even dozen by peeking in on Qwi Xux. Qwi Xux's boss drops in on her to ask if the Sun Crusher is ready. Well, yes, it was ready years ago. They just refused to come out of the basement to try out their superweapon.
Qwi spends a bit thinking about how information wants to be free, and fuck the man, man, before launching into her own backstory. Basically, someone suggested her species might be pretty decent thinkers under some circumstances, so the cartoonishly evil Empire kidnapped a bunch of kids from her homeworld and put them through super-advanced courses. When the kids cracked up (proving that they were only geniuses instead of super-geniuses), their hometowns were lasered to death from orbit while the other students watched.
One more viewpoint! It's the home stretch! Chewie has been coerced into manual labor; Daala's fleet is getting ready to move out! Oh, dear. Whatever will we do. Since we already were told what Chewie was up to, I'm not sure why we needed this little sidebar at all.
Back to Qwi. Daala summons her, and Qwi sulks that Daala should come to her. Good to see that Daala commands the respect of even the civilians she protects, thanks to working with and alongside them for just over a decade. Qwi is forced at gunpoint to come along. Daala asks her if the Sun Crusher is ready, then tells her that if it isn't, she has 24 hours to get it wrapped up. They need the Sun Crusher, since the Death Star Prototype (if it's been mentioned before, it was mostly off-handed, but it's hanging around for now) isn't hyperspace capable. Instead, they shall use the Sun Crusher to wipe out the entire New Republic! And... live where? They're talking about a scorched earth policy of over half the galaxy. Qwi fails to grasp this particular failure of logic, because she's too stunned to find out that her military superweapons are being used as weapons in a military struggle, just like Han told her.
Let's cut over to Leia doing paperwork. That sounds like a good follow-up to the threat of wide-spread galactic genocide. She's looking for a planet for the new Jedi Academy to be based on, and nothing really comes to mind for the planet. It has to be from the movies, not blown up, and fairly uninhabited by natives. She can't figure it out, and people keep calling her up to ask for her opinion on things like... what meal to serve at diplomatic functions. The best civil servants of the New Republic, folks. Finally, Mon Mothma shows up to take pity on Leia and tells her to use Yavin IV. Leia finally goes "oh", and agrees that this is a good plan, then yells at some random functionary, just like the ones earlier in this scene, who tries to bully her into putting him first. ...Why is he the only one she doesn't kowtow to?
Han is in his cell. He's getting ready for a daring escape... no, my bad, I must have misread that; he's complaining about the bed being uncomfortable. Next thing you know, he's going to be grousing about kids on his lawn and his lower back pain. Qwi Xux pops by and tells his guard that she's taking him for another interrogation, then tells Han that she's decided to betray the Empire and help him and Kyp and Chewie steal the Sun Crusher and escape from the Maw Installation because she's had a complete reversal of all her life's priorities in the last three hours. Sure, okay.
We cut over to Kyp, who's sitting in his cell thinking about how he can use the Force. Eventually, he hears people arguing in front of his cell, since KJA is allergic to directly covering action, and finally the guard gets shot and Han and Qwi pop in to pick him up, since Han would totally put saving him above Chewie, since Kyp has made that much of an impression. Sure, okay.
Next scene, they pick up Chewie, this time without shooting anyone. The guard in charge of the Wookiees tries to say that's a bad idea, since Chewie isn't housebroken, but Qwi insists on specifically him. Since the guard isn't smart enough to think about how suspicious that sounds, they get him out of there without trouble. With Han and Kyp dressed as stormtroopers, ostensibly to keep Chewie from getting unruly, she takes them to the Sun Crusher, intent on having them fly out of their on it, since it's a) the only ship she's qualified to have access to, and b) it's the most powerful weapon ever created and absolutely perfect for escape. Sure... hey, that actually makes sense!
Okay, back to Luke and Lando, who, as you may recall, just stole the Falcon back from Moruth Doole and are fleeing from the rest of this "fleet". After some hand-waving and the two of them finally taking down one, sole fighter on the opposing side, they decide to fly into the Maw. Why? Luke just insists on flying into the Maw because he's a Jedi, damn it, and he's going to show off!
Daala stands around on the command deck of her star destroyer, feeling totally cool, until someone comes up and tells her of the prisoner escape and she manages to suss out that they're going to be after the Sun Crusher, the single fighter-sized craft on which her entire campaign strategy stands or falls.
Han and the gang steal the Sun Crusher. Han whines about the controls being laid out funny, but they take off in it.
Daala looks at the Sun Crusher flying around in her airspace, being all totally invulnerable to all weaponry as she's known for years. So she orders all TIE squadrons to go shoot at it.
Then she orders her star destroyers to get in its way. She doesn't, however, have any sort of override code or try anything tricky involving tractor beams, which might work. Just tells everyone to go get in the Sun Crusher's way in hopes that it will stop. Han doesn't stop. He just flies right at the closest star destroyer... and tears right through its bridge, crippling it. Because he's in a goddamn 100% invulnerable superweapon. Just like we and Daala already knew full well. Anyway, Daala loses a quarter of her fleet trying to get back this superweapon, because she deployed her forces in the least sensible method possible. "Let them go" would have been smarter.
We cut over to Daala looking horrified at her failure. Any guess as to her next orders?
"After them!" Daala snapped. "Full pursuit."Failure crashed down on her like an anvil.
So, yeah, she hasn't learned yet, but she's feeling sorry for herself for losing.
Back to Han; Kyp is using the Force to fly them back out through the Maw, and Han is sitting there, staring at him in rapt attention and--dare I say it?--awe. To the surprise of no one, Kyp repeats his feat in getting them to the Maw in reverse, helping them escape. They come out next to Luke and Lando in the Falcon, with the Kessel fleet behind them. The Falcon and the Sun Crusher crews regard each other suspiciously, then Daala comes out behind the Sun Crusher, and sees the Kessel fleet behind them. She immediately jumps to the wrong conclusion: a Rebel fleet setting a trap for her! Because she's important enough that they'd bother.
Anyway, the villains start to shoot at each other as Luke's party and Han's party recognize each other and escape together. Basically end of book. Everything else is just giving us a bit of resolution before we go on to the next book in the trilogy.
Back on Coruscant, Leia melts in Han's arms, she's so glad to see him, and KJA steals from the movies again:
"I missed you!" she said, kissing him."I know," he said with a roguish smile.
Then Han goes over to Jacen and Jaina and asks if they remember who he is. After a lot of thought, they both hesitantly nod. ...Gee, I wonder if this sort of thing is why in the books they grow up to be Sith Lords and bug-lovers; Han's so much of a dead-beat dad.
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| In hindsight, this shouldn't have surprised anyone. |
Hey, as long as we're on the subject of stomach-turning "happy endings", let's go see Lando! Someone shows up to give him a million credits. He's getting the full reward from turning in Tymmo, because the Duchess, his wife, was so very pleased that she gave him the money... and invested in a new, shinier blobstacle course for the much-abused blobs.
Wedge shows up for a minute to pick up the survivors from Gantoris' homeworld. Remember Gantoris? The guy who said Luke was a demon? Him. Wedge Antilles is apparently done being a construction foreman and is now reduced to being a taxi driver. By the end of the third book, he's going to be an ice-cream salesman, just watch.
Luke meets Kyp and tests him for Force power, then gushes all over him, about how amazingly awesome his Force potential is. Everyone who meets him has to love Kyp.
Then we cut to an unspecified amount of time later, with Luke on top of the Great Temple on Yavin IV, thinking about all the trainees he's gathered together for his lessons. He wonders what he'll do if even one of them falls to the Dark Side, and if he'll have the strength to save them. Spoilers: he won't. That's next book.
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