What can favorably be said of Darksaber? Well, it's not Jedi Prince. It's got some genuinely funny moments when you're a teenager. What can be said against it? Well, it's the most pointless story in the whole EU. Seriously. We'll get to that at the end.
The book opens with one page of a typical Star Wars crawl giving the time and its place in the story. The only thing we care about is that Luke is angsting over Callista. Who's Callista? Go read the Children of the Jedi article. So we have that to look forward to. Goody.
For some reason, Luke and Han are sneaking around on Tatooine, disguised as Sand People, to get close to Jabba's palace. Why the subterfuge? The book doesn't even give a throwaway explanation. I guess Luke just wants to play around, since they're surviving among the Sand People by him clouding their mind. The only real purpose of this chapter is to reiterate Sand People culture. Which was also covered in KJA's other Star Wars book written the same year as this one, The Illustrated Guide to the Star Wars Universe. So once we're past the copy/paste job, the chapter's over.
Luke and Han get into Jabba's Palace. For about half a second, the Sand People that they had been traveling with menace outside the palace, so they close the door and the action scene doesn't materialize. Then a disembodied brain in a jar wearing spider legs comes up and tells Luke and Han that various Hutts have been back through the Palace lately, since Jabba for some reason had a lot of secret Imperial codes. The brainjar guy will never show up again.
Nothing else in this chapter will matter, except the foreshadowing that the Hutts got some secret codes that can be used on Coruscant from Jabba. This Chekhov's Gun will doubtlessly be important when we're least expecting it. Haha. No, it's pointless by page 50. Sure am glad we took the first 25 pages to mention just that.
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| Which is disappointing because I always loved these guys. Read Tales from Jabba's Palace for more of 'em. |
Nothing else in this chapter will matter, except the foreshadowing that the Hutts got some secret codes that can be used on Coruscant from Jabba. This Chekhov's Gun will doubtlessly be important when we're least expecting it. Haha. No, it's pointless by page 50. Sure am glad we took the first 25 pages to mention just that.
After Luke and Han quickly get a landspeeder that was conveniently around just because they needed it, Luke angsts about Callista not having access to the Force anymore.. He goes to Obi-Wan's house to try to talk to Obi-Wan, since Obi-Wan isn't talking to him elsewhere. Obi-Wan still doesn't answer. There's nothing else here, and none of this is useful. We're three chapters in, and Jabba's codes are the only thing that will at all be mentioned ever again after this, and even then only up until chapter 6. This was all just to help pad the book out to 400+ pages, I guess.
Elsewhere, we're introduced to our first set of villains. They're using automated construction machines, basically World Devastator-lites, to mine the Hoth Asteroid Belt, but unfortunately they're all completely incompetent. First is Durga, a Hutt who is ugly because he's got a birthmark (I'd think it would be an improvement, honestly...) and bankrolls the operation.
Then there's General Sulamar, a dumb but over-decorated former Imperial General. They watch their automated construction machines rip each other apart, because they forgot to make them exempt each other as mining targets. Durga is so mad he uses a Doctor Evil-esque electrified chair to zap a random minion to death. I would like to take a moment to spoil the fact that this is the competent group. We'll meet the B-string villain later.
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| I take it back. It's not an improvement, just kinda dumb. |
The last of this set of villains is introduced now. Bevel Lemelisk is the guy who designed those dumb machines last chapter, as well as the Death Star before Lucas and Gareth Edwards retconned that away. He's a ridiculously absent-minded scientist who forgets to sleep, shave, and eat a lot. Durga yells at him for a moment, then Bevel gets reminded of how the Emperor used to treat him: every time Bevel screwed up (a lot), the Emperor would have him killed horribly, clone him a new body, and use the Dark Side to transfer Bevel's mind into the clone. We'll see this device a few times. This time he's reminded of the first time this happened, when he was eaten by beetles native to Yavin IV. It's kind of disturbing, but I think it was supposed to be funny. Durga finally calms down and tells Bevel he's going to get the plans for him. What plans could those be?
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| Out of morbid curiosity, did the Emperor also clone him a new robot eye each time? |
This is such an important chapter it's going to get more paragraphs. Durga and his retinue enter the meeting room, and he's covered in scores of four-armed monkeys called the Taurill, who I am sure are in no way concentrated nightmare fuel.
For once, the characters have about the same reaction that you're currently having. The monkeys start rampaging all over the room like a mass of puppies on caffeine, but with arms and the ability to climb. Leia calls Durga a crime lord, and he gets miffed. Before Leia can finish making a complete idiot of herself--Durga is actually fairly reasonable here--two of the Taurill swarm one of the New Republic guards, and one of them looks down the barrel while the other one yanks on the trigger. All the not-dead Taurill freak out when the one gets shot, and flee through the halls, vents, doggie doors or whatever. Leia's lucky they didn't play with her blaster, or Durga would have the biggest PR coup ever to show up the Republic.
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| I TAKE IT BACK! I TAKE IT BACK!!! |
For once, the characters have about the same reaction that you're currently having. The monkeys start rampaging all over the room like a mass of puppies on caffeine, but with arms and the ability to climb. Leia calls Durga a crime lord, and he gets miffed. Before Leia can finish making a complete idiot of herself--Durga is actually fairly reasonable here--two of the Taurill swarm one of the New Republic guards, and one of them looks down the barrel while the other one yanks on the trigger. All the not-dead Taurill freak out when the one gets shot, and flee through the halls, vents, doggie doors or whatever. Leia's lucky they didn't play with her blaster, or Durga would have the biggest PR coup ever to show up the Republic.
It turns out that the Taurill have some sort of hive mind thing going on, and they're actually sort-of intelligent. Actually, the more of them in a group, the more intelligent they are. It's actually not a bad idea for a species all things considered...but we'll see how KJA fucks it up. Three of them find a computer and use Jabba's codes here (this is page 50 now, as promised) and save something to a memory stick. Durga uses a whistle and all the Taurill who hadn't already been captured again calmly come back to him. Leia is laughing at herself. Durga says they're done now and invites the New Republic to visit him in return. This is actually a decent piece of foreshadowing, and Han ends the chapter with an appropriately snarky comment about how pleasant Hutts are. It doesn't salvage the chapter, but it is worth a smile.
Over on Yavin IV, Tionne, who you may remember from the Jedi Academy trilogy (but I'll understand if you don't), tells Callista, that she's not the first Jedi to lose her powers, by recapping the surprisingly well written comic story of Ulic Qel-Droma, who fell to the Dark Side and as punishment had the Force taken away from him by Nomi Sunrider. If you have a Marvel Unlimited account, check out the Tales of the Jedi books. If only because Ulic becomes buddies with Exar Kun and they damn near rule the galaxy together. Why did I call it surprisingly well written? Because it was written by KJA and Tom Veitch...the author of the Dark Empire trilogy. Broken clocks, twice a day, yadda yadda yadda.
Luke gives several of his students the title of Jedi Knight here. Among them is Kyp Durron, the mass-murderer with crazy Force strength and someone called Dorsk 81, who is fantastically generic--he's a clone (the 81st one, obviously) who ironically if unintentionally wants to break out and be his own man but has no personality. Just remember, Luke just made the Destroyer of Worlds a freakin' Jedi Knight. Hoo. Boy.
We finally meet our secondary villain: Admiral Daala. Yep, she's back. According to KJA, Daala is the Empire's first woman Admiral because of how stunningly brilliant she is at tactical games. In actuality, she's lucky if she can turn a ten-to-one advantage on her side into a draw instead of a straight loss. More on this later. Anyway, she's currently trying to convince the throwaway Imperial Warlord ...and I'm swearing I'm not making up this name... Blitzer Harrsk
that all the warlords who succeeded the Empire need to join together to face down the New Republic, but they're too busy fighting each other to do that, and in fact one of the other nameless warlords drops by for some target practice. Since Daala is such a stunning tactician, she is press-ganged to take command of one of Harrsk's Star Destroyers.
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| God, I thought this was the dumbest name in fiction. Well played, Darksaber. |
that all the warlords who succeeded the Empire need to join together to face down the New Republic, but they're too busy fighting each other to do that, and in fact one of the other nameless warlords drops by for some target practice. Since Daala is such a stunning tactician, she is press-ganged to take command of one of Harrsk's Star Destroyers.
Daala starts out angsting about how Imperials are fighting Imperials, and she manages to fall victim to a trap that instantly wipes out three of her Star Destroyers with no losses on the other side. Which, let's face it, is pretty much par for the course with Daala.. Anyway, she finally decides to mutiny and shoots up Harrsk's ship, then manages to get all the other forces on the battlefield to agree to stop shooting.
Then we get a surprise. Honestly, I was actually surprised when this happened. Admiral Pellaeon, Grand Admiral Thrawn's second in command, turns out to be on the other side, and he takes a moment to admire Daala's audacity and remind us of her scary reputation. But he's a good character and he won't show up much, so we'll ignore him. He is interested in listening to her whole "stop shooting each other and kill the Rebels" scheme. Credit where credit's due, KJA doesn't fuck up his character. It's pretty true to Timothy Zahn's original take on Pellaeon, and kind of a breath of fresh air.
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| No funny comment, the man's awesome. |
As soon as Mara Jade leaves, though, it's back to the Callista channel. Luke flies to Coruscant to meet Leia (leader of the New Republic right now, if you've forgotten) so he can ask for a week off. I'm... not sure why he needed to tell her that, unless his sister plans his schedule for him. Coincidentally, as they're leaving, they come across C-3P0, Chewbacca, and Leia's twin children. Callista stares wistfully at them, and then Luke goes into eugenics mode, remembering how Callista told him that he needs to marry someone who will give him strongly Force-sensitive children... and she's not part of the Force right now! Yeah. All that mooning over each other in Children of the Jedi, and now she's concerned that if Luke doesn't have Force Sensitive kids, he's throwing away the future of the Jedi.
Then Threepio comes by to save the day. No, really. He's trying to track down some troubling computer glitches, and while he got most of the way there without help, he enlists Artoo to finish finding it all out, and the chapter ends with us finally finding out what Durga's four-armed monkeys were up to: the plans to the Death Star have been stolen! Why the heck was the New Republic holding onto superweapon plans, anyway? Did someone forget to empty the Recycle Bin on the computer? It's not like they don't know the weaknesses of Death Stars by now... or that anyone who isn't the New Republic has the industrial base to make one... and why wasn't there gigantic alarms going off just because this data was accessed? None of these questions will be answered, so hold tight: we're only a quarter of the way through the book! This roller coaster only gets crazier!
Then Threepio comes by to save the day. No, really. He's trying to track down some troubling computer glitches, and while he got most of the way there without help, he enlists Artoo to finish finding it all out, and the chapter ends with us finally finding out what Durga's four-armed monkeys were up to: the plans to the Death Star have been stolen! Why the heck was the New Republic holding onto superweapon plans, anyway? Did someone forget to empty the Recycle Bin on the computer? It's not like they don't know the weaknesses of Death Stars by now... or that anyone who isn't the New Republic has the industrial base to make one... and why wasn't there gigantic alarms going off just because this data was accessed? None of these questions will be answered, so hold tight: we're only a quarter of the way through the book! This roller coaster only gets crazier!
It's back the Hoth Asteroid Belt for us. Lemelisk is busy drooling over the Death Star plans as Sulamar says useless things that usurp Durga's useless things quota. Lemelisk questions why General Sulamar is even here, and Sulamar says that, basically, he's there because he looks good. Let's hear it in his own words:
Sulamar straightened his shoulders like a spined puffer bird and turned to Durga. "I bring Imperial prestige to your project. I will use my connections to obtain some of the items you need, the security codes you must possess. And when you begin your Hutt reign of terror across the galaxy"--he grinned--"think of how much more effective you will be if you're accompanied by the famed and feared General Sulamar, the Scourge of Celdaru, the man who successfully carried out the Massacre of Mendicat without losing a single stormtrooper. I held a hundred worlds in my fist--and I squeezed. The entire galaxy learned to tremble at my name.
Lemelisk has somehow never heard of Sulamar, but he brushes it off, thinking that he did spend the last decade cut off from the rest of the galaxy.
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| Incidentally, this is the only known image of General Sulamar. |
Lemelisk gets to work, starting by deleting most of the plans that aren't the actual superlaser, and has another flashback. This one name-drops Ackbar as a slave pilot who's completely lost his will to fight back. Uh... is it the same one as in Return of the Jedi? According to Wookieepedia, yes. Small galaxy. Mentioning him was the only real point to this flashback, as by the time we finish it, Lemelisk is done with his revised superweapon plans. It's basically just the superlaser in a big ol' cylinder, without the big meeting-lasers-to-make-the-big-one crater that the first two had. No, this one looks like a lightsaber when in use. And with that it is christened... the Darksaber! Whoo. That isn't the worst joke name of a ship in the book. We'll get to Daala's version later, since she's strictly less competent than these guys. So what's the plan? To use the Darksaber to ransom planets.
They're building a superweapon...to run a protection racket. I can't decide if that's fucking stupid or fucking awesome.
We cut away to Luke and Callista, en route to somewhere unsaid. They both say they love each other, but since Callista has lost the Force, they're trying to regain that. They fight with lightsabers as the one Jedi-ish thing Callista can do even without the Force. She loves it. This chapter is literally four pages long. I'm not cutting out a lot, there's just not much to say.
Luke and Callista land at the "Mulako Corporation Primordial Water Quarry", a comet that they mine for water that no one else has ever drank before, since rich snobs are willing to pay more for that snobbiness. Luke even goes out of his way to tell us it's chemically indistinguishable from other water. Apparently when it gets close enough to its star to start melting, Mulako turns it into a temporary resort, too. That's why they're here: it's so water-focused and Callista came from a water world herself, some place named Chad. Wait. So you brought her to a giant space iceberg...when you could have just visited her homeworld?? Luke suggests that they play around with the low gravity on the comet, but Callista suggests some... alone time instead.
Luke agrees this sounds good, but then Callista starts angsting about Chad. At least it's a change of pace from angsting about losing the Force. Later, while sipping water (emphasis is put on this) Callista asks about Luke's childhood, and he tells her about Tatooine, his Uncle and Aunt dying, and Biggs dying. He literally bores Callista to sleep with this.
Dorsk 81 and Kyp Durron are going back to Dorsk's homeworld, where he was cloned, so that Dorsk 81 can be its Jedi protector. They meet Kaell 116, the current leader of the city now that his last clone, 115, is dead, and he welcomes them back. Incidentally, these aren't "Emperor Reborn" clones that all share the same mind or anything. This planet just hates to change, so as people die, they're replaced by a clone of themselves, instead of by children. Yeah. Dorsk 81 is the one pattern-breaker, since he left to become a Jedi, but he's still dull. Dorsk 81 introduces Kyp to Dorsk 80 and Dorsk 82, and Kyp, being a master of tact, asks if any of them have wives, and they all scowl and point out that they don't need wives now that they clone themselves instead. I'm not sure that's the only possible use in having a spouse, but whatever. Finally, Kyp asks a relevant question to Dorsk 81: this planet has been unchanged for somewhere between 82 and 116 (I guess) generations, so why the heck do they need a Jedi guardian now? Dorsk 81 panics when he realizes this slight flaw in his master plan. They go to sleep staring at the Core Worlds burning so brightly in the night sky. The Core Worlds where Daala and the Imperial warlords are.
The next day, Dorsk 82 shows Dorsk 81 around, and how everything is just the same as when he left! Y'know, unless this place has no natural disasters, technical breakdowns, technological advancements, or non-renewable resource usage, I'm not sure that I can believe it's as stable as they claim. Dorsk 80 yells at Dorsk 81 about how he's messing everything up by not keeping to the same routine everyone else is, and Dorsk 81 tells him "no, you shut the fuck up, dad", and decides to leave with Kyp Durron to explore those Core Worlds. Again, some damn fine relateable human drama going on. Who here hasn't been a clone of his father who used a younger clone of you to try to blackmail you into re-entering the family business instead of being a magical space ninja?
Let's get back to Daala. When we last left her, I guess she still had the self-destruct countdown going on with her Star Destroyer. I guess I kinda glazed over too much of this, so in review, here's what happened: Harrsk forced Daala to lead his fleet, she lost a major chunk of it until Pellaeon showed up, and then when he was close enough she decided to end the fight by shooting ion cannons at Harrsk's ship to incapacitate it, then hover real close and set a self-destruct on her own so that his side as a whole would stop shooting, for fear of also hurting Harrsk and hope that the other side (Teradoc's fleet, led by Pellaeon) would also cease fire. They did.
Now Pellaeon is coming over to meet with Daala, even as the self-destruct countdown continues. As it turns out, this is about the best choice he could have made. My current Daala theory is that her competence level is directly linked to her proximity to Pellaeon. As if to prove this, as soon as Pellaeon gets on the bridge with Daala, Harrsk decides her self-destruct sequence wasn't a bluff and capitulates, so Daala stops the self-destruct sequence (she literally has a button to do this) and she, Pellaeon, and two of his Victory-class Star Destroyers accompany them--he gets two escorts because they're smaller than her Imperial-class Star Destroyers--go off to talk without Harrsk and Teradoc.
It's Daala's turn to angst, as she tells Pellaeon of the shameful way she had to claw her way up through the ranks--despite her stunning tactical ability, she gets put in charge of things like... cooking. Because she's a woman. Yes, really. Once she breaks out of that and gets Tarkin's attention, one random kid who was overheard muttering that she only got the position because she was sleeping with Tarkin was given a grisly end. And then no one else said that. But, of course, Tarkin was doing the Daala Trench Run, so that guy was right and Daala doesn't really get the moral high ground. Pellaeon, being far more intelligent, doesn't say anything about all this. She and Pellaeon determine that they're going to try to get all these treacherous, paranoid warlords in the Deep Core together for a meeting in hopes they'll work it out. If they don't, well, Daala gives Pellaeon a gas mask. Foreshadowing!
Apparently the warlords aren't paranoid enough, because almost all of them come. Maybe it's not that Pellaeon's proximity makes Daala bright; maybe it makes everyone else dumb. It takes two days (and one paragraph) for Daala to convince the warlords to leave their fleets behind and just come to her purpose-built meeting space station by themselves, but they do so. How many there are isn't really clear. It could be anywhere from seven on up. Anyway, she tries to get them to talk their differences away, and they all refuse to capitulate to each other, so Daala... locks the doors. She says that they're locked in there for three hours and so they might as well finish figuring out who's in charge, then sits back and waits for them to come to an agreement.
Since these warlords are apparently eight years old, sometime near the end of those three hours, Teradoc and Harrsk give up on diplomacy and start trying to throttle each other. This makes Daala give up and resort to her final option: she puts on her gas mask and fills the room with poison. Pellaeon also gets his mask on in time, and everyone else dies. The two of them leave the room as the time lock expires, anxious to pull together all the fleets of all the people she just murdered. However, no second-in-command or other ambitious officer is about to gainsay them now, or pull out to form his own fleet, or denounce them for treachery at a diplomatic meeting, or...
You get the picture. Daala and Pellaeon are standing shoulder to shoulder; she can't lose right now. All the fleets fall in line offscreen.
Daala is checking over one of the warlords from last chapter's home bases. Which one honestly doesn't merit mention, because that one chapter was the only face time he ever gets in any book. Apparently, he was lavishly spending money on some military project that Daala doesn't see any evidence of. Colonel Cronus was second-in-command here, though, and is now first. He greets Daala warmly.
He takes her by shuttle to the outskirts of the system, where Daala is shocked to see a gigantic Super Star Destroyer just entering service. She oohs and ahhs over it, thinking of how stunning it is. Pellaeon, in a rare moment of incompetence, is shocked at it--only Executor was that big, and it nearly bankrupted the Empire!
What, really? The Executor nearly bankrupted the empire, where hundreds of Star Destroyers didn't? Where two Death Stars didn't? Where various other superweapons didn't? Where the Emperor Reborn's even larger Star Destroyers and other superweapons and... oh, forget it. Kevin J. Anderson has no sense of scale. And there's at least half a dozen other Super Star Destroyers wandering around in other EU books, too, just to put the lie to this.
Anyway, this Super Star Destroyer is named Night Hammer, and Daala declares it to be her flagship. As I said, she's going to have to come up with a worse ship name than Darksaber, so she's going to rename this later on.
Back to moderately written competence: Leia and her family are having lunch together. This scene is actually cute and well-written, with Threepio being appropriately goofy and the twins behaving like cute but young and energetic children would. It's an enjoyable... three pages. This is another of those miniature chapters. Its purpose is for Leia to decide that since the Hutts are up to something, it's time to take Durga up on his offer of a reciprocal diplomatic visit. Leia is going to go in with a fleet and some diplomatic nonsense while the Falcon is used to poke around on Nar Shadda, the moon of the Hutts' world, and get some under-the-radar information at the same time.
Now I present the best opening of any chapter so far:
Apparently the warlords aren't paranoid enough, because almost all of them come. Maybe it's not that Pellaeon's proximity makes Daala bright; maybe it makes everyone else dumb. It takes two days (and one paragraph) for Daala to convince the warlords to leave their fleets behind and just come to her purpose-built meeting space station by themselves, but they do so. How many there are isn't really clear. It could be anywhere from seven on up. Anyway, she tries to get them to talk their differences away, and they all refuse to capitulate to each other, so Daala... locks the doors. She says that they're locked in there for three hours and so they might as well finish figuring out who's in charge, then sits back and waits for them to come to an agreement.
Since these warlords are apparently eight years old, sometime near the end of those three hours, Teradoc and Harrsk give up on diplomacy and start trying to throttle each other. This makes Daala give up and resort to her final option: she puts on her gas mask and fills the room with poison. Pellaeon also gets his mask on in time, and everyone else dies. The two of them leave the room as the time lock expires, anxious to pull together all the fleets of all the people she just murdered. However, no second-in-command or other ambitious officer is about to gainsay them now, or pull out to form his own fleet, or denounce them for treachery at a diplomatic meeting, or...
You get the picture. Daala and Pellaeon are standing shoulder to shoulder; she can't lose right now. All the fleets fall in line offscreen.
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| Apparently someone out there not only felt the need to illustrate the scene, they decided to have Pellaeon look horrified and to get the most basic of details wrong considering the conference was on a planet and not out in space. |
Daala is checking over one of the warlords from last chapter's home bases. Which one honestly doesn't merit mention, because that one chapter was the only face time he ever gets in any book. Apparently, he was lavishly spending money on some military project that Daala doesn't see any evidence of. Colonel Cronus was second-in-command here, though, and is now first. He greets Daala warmly.
He takes her by shuttle to the outskirts of the system, where Daala is shocked to see a gigantic Super Star Destroyer just entering service. She oohs and ahhs over it, thinking of how stunning it is. Pellaeon, in a rare moment of incompetence, is shocked at it--only Executor was that big, and it nearly bankrupted the Empire!
What, really? The Executor nearly bankrupted the empire, where hundreds of Star Destroyers didn't? Where two Death Stars didn't? Where various other superweapons didn't? Where the Emperor Reborn's even larger Star Destroyers and other superweapons and... oh, forget it. Kevin J. Anderson has no sense of scale. And there's at least half a dozen other Super Star Destroyers wandering around in other EU books, too, just to put the lie to this.
Anyway, this Super Star Destroyer is named Night Hammer, and Daala declares it to be her flagship. As I said, she's going to have to come up with a worse ship name than Darksaber, so she's going to rename this later on.
Back to moderately written competence: Leia and her family are having lunch together. This scene is actually cute and well-written, with Threepio being appropriately goofy and the twins behaving like cute but young and energetic children would. It's an enjoyable... three pages. This is another of those miniature chapters. Its purpose is for Leia to decide that since the Hutts are up to something, it's time to take Durga up on his offer of a reciprocal diplomatic visit. Leia is going to go in with a fleet and some diplomatic nonsense while the Falcon is used to poke around on Nar Shadda, the moon of the Hutts' world, and get some under-the-radar information at the same time.
Now I present the best opening of any chapter so far:
On the bridge of the Escort Frigate Yavaris General Wedge Antilles felt the old excitement of space combat.
Wedge! But, no, he's not here to do anything impressive. He's barely here at all. He and Admiral Ackbar are just having "war games" above Nal Hutta. Nal Hutta, you may remember, is literally a foreign power ruled by a government that is not friendly with the New Republic. So she sent two fleets into their space to shoot at each other.
Anyway, Wedge sets a trap for Ackbar (I'll hold off on the obvious), and Ackbar falls for it until it's too late, and Wedge wins the first round of their war game. Meanwhile, General Crix Madine, famous for 30 seconds of screen time in Return of the Jedi, is on-board Ackbar's flagship, prepping a commando team to drop on the Hutt planet.
Meanwhile, Leia starts out the diplomatic portion of her mission by badgering some poor, put-upon Hutt to get down to the surface. It's a good thing that the whole diplomatic thing is a sham, because Leia's not done a single thing right as far as actual diplomacy goes, even back when it was her being theoretically properly a diplomat. Han and Threepio go with her.
Nal Hutta looks like the fevered nightmares of an ecologist.
As they take a sailbarge over it, Han teases Threepio by telling the protocol droid that he's going to be a gift for Durga, and Threepio (apparently having forgotten all of Return of the Jedi) freaks out, before Leia makes Han admit it's a joke. Decent scene, really.
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| I could probably have Al Gore narrate over this image, and you would believe this is what Earth'll look like under Trump's environmental policies. |
As they get to Durga's palace, the world's fittest, or perhaps just thinnest, Hutt greets them in Durga's name to entertain them until Durga gets there. Korrda, as he's named, explains that no one holds a grudge about Jabba any more since he's dead, and they don't respect losers. Furthermore, as a show of good faith, the Hutts have dropped their bounties on Han and Leia, who you will recall is the Chief of State of the largest power in the galaxy.
Korrda is actually pretty cool; he's played up as being ambitious and slimy and quite inhuman. He offers to show them the dungeons, or dining with live food and handy carrion birds (as napkins, I guess), which Leia accepts as the best alternative they have. Even the Huttlings, their children, scoff at Korrda and pick on him. It turns out that Durga has put the scrawny Korrda in charge of the palace just to make fun of him; a thin Hutt is their equivalent to disabled, and so with a high position his failing is thrown into sharp relief to rub salt on it. Oh, KJA, if the whole book were like this chapter, I wouldn't be writing this.
Finally, they meet Durga in the bathhouse. Durga uses mud, but Han and Leia are "forced" to use the species-segregated merely pure water section. Leia says all the right things about profit, and as a gesture of "good faith", Durga pulls up some (currently unsaid) information on the Imperials.
So in this chapter, we saw some inhuman creatures written coherently but not-as-human, and Durga uses the B-string villain to throw the good guys off his own scent. I like this chapter.
Elsewhere, General Crix Madine spends a four-page chapter personally putting a tracer on Durga's spaceship so they can track him. Apparently "commando team" is code for "I'll do it myself".
Back on the weird comet resort thing, Callista whines that she can't do anything in this fancy resort because it isn't personal, so she wants to go to where Luke learned to use the Force. Off to Dagobah!
Even here, Callista whines about not being able to feel the Force, despite the huge amount of living creatures present. She whines that Luke needs to give up on her and focus more on reviving the Jedi tradition by having Force-sensitive kids. They're attacked by some sort of bat, and she whines about that, too. Finally, she stops whining long enough to push the bats away... with the Force! Specifically, with the Dark Side! So she can only use the Dark Side now. She whines about this, too.
What did Luke see in this girl, again?
Back to the Darksaber construction yard. Without Durga here, General Sulamar struts around even more, and Lemelisk ignores him, because Sulamar isn't an engineering problem. Sulamar has promised to get some military-grade computers for the Darksaber, which, if he managed it, would be the first useful thing he's done this book.
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| All that hot, sexy, RAM. |
The construction is done by those same four-armed hive mind monkey Taurills who stole the plans to begin with. Lemelisk is happy to have dedicated workers for once, and he flashes back to a disturbing scene of taking Wookiee prisoners to work on the Death Star. Then he looks at what they've actually been working on, and it turns out the Taurill have fouled up the Superlaser "as wrong as they could possibly be", put together the hull wrong, and stuck the main computer on the big waste-heat radiator. He goes to shout at the Taurill, knowing that General Sulamar won't even notice what's been done wrong. This is the competent villain team.
Just to do things out of order, Luke takes Callista to Hoth now. He tells her that this is where Obi-Wan first appeared to him, to tell him to go find Yoda, who taught Luke at the last planet they were at. They find a destroyed ship on the ground here already, though. It wasn't a crash, though; it exploded on the ground. Then an automated motion-tracking weapon system starts shooting at them, so Callista runs around to draw fire (in those words!) while Luke does Jedi stuff to handle them. She then takes pride in their working as a team--her doing monumentally stupid stuff, and Luke saving her sorry ass. She doesn't see it quite that way, though.
Then Echo Base opens up and apparently it's less exploded on the inside, because the five in there tell Luke and Callista to hurry inside--it seems that these five are poachers who were after wampa furs, but the wampas I guess are intelligent and pack beasts now, because a horde of them destroyed the ship on the ground, and now thanks to Luke/Callista taking out their weapons emplacements, they're defenseless and can't even make much of a last stand.
They take the poachers back to their ship, but in the few minutes they were outside, wampas snuck aboard Luke's little ship and destroyed the comm, navicomputer, and spacesuits. Before Callista can start whining, the seven of them fall under attack! The wampas are attacking en masse! They're led by... a one-armed wampa that recognizes Luke's lightsaber?!
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| No joke, the army of wampas is being led by the same exact one that Luke disarmed in Empire. |
I know I just used this video, but, well,
So do all Star Wars planets have a surface area of about four miles square?
We leave Hoth's surface to go to its asteroid belt. The Taurill have successfully taken apart all the stuff they did wrong, and Bevel Lemelisk is staring at it during the worst of the unbuilding. General Sulamar comes up behind him and after a great deal of thought, tells him "Good work, Engineer. Carry on." Sheesh. Sulamar's worthless. In fact, Durga calls up Lemelisk to tell him to leave the construction yard to double-check the computer cores that Sulamar has procured for the Darksaber. He doesn't trust Sulamar's word on them being good enough, and sensibly wants his best technical man to take a look at the computer cores for him. All the best stuff in this book is Hutt-centric.
Nal Hutta, the Hutt homeworld, has a habitable moon called Nar Shaddaa, and it's here Lemelisk goes to pick up his computers. In the meantime, he has a flashback of how Vader encouraged construction on the first Death Star to stay up to code: executions for the low performers. Lemelisk feels glum about the quality of this project, though, but swears that he's going to do his duty, even if it costs him his life again (remember, the Emperor used to execute him a lot).
Wedge Antilles has taken a break from the war games posturing to take his current girlfriend, Qwi Xux, to Nar Shaddaa. Qwi, if you remember, is the feather-haired lady who helped build the Death Star and Sun Crusher. Qwi demonstrates how smart she is by looking at a casino and realizing how hard it is to beat the odds, then shows how dumb she is by not understanding common turns of phrase like "you can say that again". Wedge finds both endearing. Then, to the surprise of absolutely no one... she sees Bevel Lemelisk in the distance! Four miles square. Since Wedge is being dumb today, he tells her to shut up, finish her drink, and then they're going back to the ship. Uh... I can't justify this one.
We cut over to Lemelisk, in what I'm pretty sure is the first mid-chapter point-of-view change. He scoffs at the terrible computers that Sulamar dug up, since they're not military ship computers at all, but sewage controllers. Durga shows up in person, because he's actually marginally competent, and asks Lemelisk if these computers will do. Lemelisk gives him an honest answer, in that they can probably be made to work. The chapter ends with Lemelisk whispering to Durga, highest crime lord of the Hutts, that he's going to be happy to get away from Nar Shaddaa... "There are too many unsavory types here!" Okay, that got a smile from me.
Artoo and Chewbacca sneak into Nar Shaddaa on the Millenium Falcon now, mostly because neither they nor the ship have done anything in a while. Since Chewie is a savage lesser race, he has to physically intimidate one random tentacled alien in the course of them finding out about Durga, by means of having an unnamed hacker do the actual finding out. They find out about Sulamar's purchase of the computer cores. This leads them to an inescapable conclusion: the Empire has teamed up with the Hutts!
General Crix Madine is paying attention to his tracker on Durga's ship, and it hasn't moved for a while--Durga is on Nar Shaddaa. A random girl in his command suggests they could get Wedge to see what he's up to, since Wedge is already on Nar Shaddaa, and it's only four miles square in area so just being on the same planet is akin to being down the street. Crix says no, I guess because the book would be a hundred pages shorter if either he or Wedge followed up on this.
He then wastes a couple pages flashing back to his backstory, but he's strictly a minor character so I'm not going to go into that. The gist of it is that he feels guilty about the Empire, so he's not going to let the Hutts build a Death Star.
Luke and Callista and the poachers hack up a ton of wampas. One of the poachers dies, but the rest of them get inside the old Rebel base and... close the doors. I guess wampas are smart enough to disable spaceships, but not put an ambush in the most likely location for people to retreat to? They seriously just start banging at the door. One of the poachers, just to drive home how stupid/evil he is, moans about the waste of all those wampa pelts outside. You know, the ones currently attached to monsters trying to eat him.
Then, to the surprise of no one but the characters, a wampa inside kills another poacher and the wampas turn the lights off. I think they're probably putting too much effort and lives into this for how much they're going to get back, but on the other hand, I never was a hideous monster living on a frozen wasteland.
For some reason, wampas only destroy things when people are trying to use them, I guess, since it's been years since the Rebel base was evacuated in Empire Strikes Back, but the wampas only destroyed the generator now. Since Luke and Callista's only chance of survival is for them to escape in their ship, they run back out of the base and back to their ship. Along the way, Luke cuts the one-armed wampa in half.
This chapter is really about as disjointed as I'm making it out to be. Their ship still can fly, it just can't go into hyperspace or talk to anyone, so they fly away before the wampas can cut through the hull with their claws, because I guess the ship is made out of tinfoil.
Where can they go now, though? Surprisingly, not the obvious.
We go back to Leia and Han now. Durga provides the information on Imperial troops that he promised, in the form of a surly alien in some sort of shell who's honestly a bit of a complainer. He tells them that the Imperial fleets have massed behind one female leader, a fact which I suppose has completely eluded all the New Republics information sources, since this comes as a complete surprise to the leader of the New Republic. Leia doesn't even question the possible validity of this claim--just recognizes it must be Daala!
Let's check up on Daala now. She and Pellaeon both insist neither wants to run the Empire after they beat the New Republic, passing responsibility around like a hot potato. They decide to not attack Coruscant, since it'll be a tough battle... but on the other hand, New Republic intelligence is so bad that the attack would come as a complete surprise and they'd probably win. That's not in the book; that's my commentary. Actually, they decide Coruscant would be too tough and so they decide to attack Yavin IV and Luke's Jedi there first. Because attacking a large group of trainee space wizards who are apparently just always a hair's breadth away from turning to the Dark Side to avenge perceived slights can only result in good things.
We cut back to Kyp Durron and Dorsk 81 in what's probably the G-plot by this point. This book has way too many points of view and tries to have way too much going on. We completely skip how they got from "looking at the night sky and noticing that's Imperial space somewhere over there" to "these two are sitting in a stolen spaceship looking at Daala's fleet buildup", so... Kyp's looking at a bunch of star destroyers now, basically. They don't know the Empire's plans, though, so they decide to join in the pep rally (really) that Daala is throwing so that they can learn the Empire's plans. This works perfectly.
After they hear the plans, though, Kyp freaks out and makes a scene, since otherwise this would be too easy. They get challenged, they pull lightsabers, they fight back to their stolen ship, they escape. A horde of stormtroopers at a pep rally and the whole fleet floating outside are completely incapable of stopping them. Daala is that bad a commander. She can't kill one shuttle with a Super Star Destroyer and two hundred other star destroyers.
The two escape back towards Dorsk's homeplanet, since I guess they... stole an Imperial shuttle from a New Republic world, blindly jumped at this huge chunk of the galaxy and completely coincidentally landed right where the Empire happened to be massing, without being challenged, then were invited to join the pep rally without being challenged until partway through the meeting, and now are retracing their steps? Did I miss anything? This doesn't work. No wonder KJA skipped the intermediate steps; this one falls completely apart if you try to track how it works.
Crix Madine and two others are piloting A-wings to go do reconnaissance at the Hoth Asteroid Field, because that's where he's traced Durga to. One of his wingmen blows up because she hits an asteroid, and he feels bad about it, then he sees the Darksaber.
Since we're already at Hoth, we cut over to Luke and Callista. Their ship has been wrecked, including the life support, so they're close to death. Luke insists that Callista take the one space suit that they've managed to fix, since he has Jedi powers. He puts himself into a sleeping trance to call out to Leia, just like in Empire Strikes Back, and while he's doing that, Callista gets to look at him and consider maybe using the Dark Side, since... it could help, I guess? Not sure what it's supposed to do to fix their situation one way or the other.
It's time for all the plotlines to start interacting with each other! Finally! Leia and Han leave Nal Hutta, and join Wedge and Chewie and Artoo, all of whom are now off of Nar Shaddaa.
Chewie shares his information on General Sulamar having teamed up with Durga, Leia gets Luke's Force plea for help. The Republic fleets under Ackbar and Wedge Antilles will be along shortly, as soon as they can get organized, but for now the main movie cast all jump into the Falcon and go save Luke, just like they did at the end of Empire Strikes Back. There's no difficulty in saving them, they just pop over however many light years to Hoth (the same system that holds the Darksaber as well as Luke) and scoop them up.
Callista and Luke are saved! It takes all of, oh, a page to get themselves all restored from their lack of life support in space. Well, at least it didn't drag on, although Callista does have enough time to get out one worried whine before Luke gets up.
Lemelisk sees his Taurill workers getting distracted by something shiny, and realizes he's going to have to go over their work again. Y'know, Durga, sometimes it's worth paying for the best to actually have the best working for you. He groans about how Sularmar's computers keep crashing and he's using shoddy material for other stuff, and... All in all, it's hard not to feel sorry for Lemelisk. He's just not got the tools he needs to succeed. You'd want to give him a comforting hug, if he weren't described as smelly, fat, and unshaved. That drops the adorableness factor a bit.
Between all of this, he has a quick flashback that ties in the Ackbar pilot flashback earlier--he tells us of the rebel raid to kill Tarkin that instead ended with them rescuing Ackbar. Every single character with at least one frame of screentime in the movies has to have a heroic backstory like this. It doesn't add much to this story, though.
Madine and his one surviving commando infiltrate the Darksaber and comment how shoddy it looks and wonder if they even need to sabotage it. They still manage to get caught by the skeleton crew, however, when the other commando, while they are still unseen, jumps out where she can be seen and tells Crix Madine to run. Sheesh, I guess I see why he prefers to handle the whole mission by himself now. She gets herself shot to death and he gets captured thanks to her negative helpfulness and dragged in front of Durga.
Back to Bevel Lemelisk for our point of view. He watches as Durga and Sulamar gleefully stomp around like kids on Christmas as they celebrate Darksaber being operational. I should point out that there's no indication of time passing since the last time we saw Lemelisk, when he was bemoaning how much he needed to review to check that it was actually built correctly. So I'm going to assume that was earlier this same afternoon.
Just then... a bomb goes off! It seems Crix managed to set one up before he was captured. Durga is so upset that he uses his electrified chair button to zap his chief of security for letting that slip past. Except, a random Weequay dies instead!
Durga frowned and glanced down at his control pad. "Oh," he said. "Sorry, wrong button." The smell of disintegrated flesh wafted through the deck in greasy, sooty wisps from the collapsed body.
"Well, let that be a lesson to you, then," Durga said, glowering at his intended victim.
I know I have a childish sense of humor, but I laughed.
However, Lemelisk hasn't had a flashback yet this chapter, so he flashs back to some of his own executions, like being slowly dipped in copper (why copper? "It's what the smelter used that day." picture the Emperor saying that, because that's an exact quote, and I don't know why but I fucking love that mental image.) or thrown out an airlock.
When he's done, we cut over to Madine. He has a James Bond-esque homing device on him that's calling for help, and then... he sees General Sulamar!
There is a flash of recognition as New Republic General Crix Madine recognizes Imperial General Sulamar, and vice-versa!
Kyp Durron and Dorsk 81 return from fleeing from Admiral Daala. They're back at Dorsk 81's home planet, sounding the alarm that an Imperial fleet is going to be right there, any minute now. Even the planetary leader just poo-poos the whole idea that they're going to be under attack, even though two Jedi Knights on a stolen Imperial shuttle just landed here specifically to tell him that. Jedi, what do they know? Imperial forces never attack neutral parties. Alderaan was an inside job.
We cut over to Daala and Pellaeon, both in shock that their pep rally was infiltrated by Jedi. Pellaeon suggests they might want to review their security, and Daala says that's not important right now. Jedi can literally just walk into your strategy meetings and listen to your whole plan, and that's not an immediate problem? I'd like to take a moment to remind you that when this was written, she didn't officially have brain damage. This is supposed to be the finest female tactician in the Empire.
She sends Cronus, the man who showed her the Super Star Destroyer she now uses as a flagship, to go follow the straight-line course that the Jedi used to escape back to Dorsk 81's homeworld, and then, foolishly, sends Pellaeon to Yavin IV with the other half of her fleet and the mention that she'll be following behind.
I said before that her competence is directly linked to how close she is to Pellaeon. You can bet that this strategy is going to prove to be a stinker as soon as she's in another star system from him.
For now, though, it works okay. Cronus goes over to this planet and immediately bombs it to near-destruction from orbit and completely unopposed... just as the Jedi had warned of. I'm calling this Daala's first military victory, although remember that they're blowing up a community of clones that haven't changed so much as the color they paint their bedrooms for a hundred generations, so this is roughly akin to calling an airstrike on an unprepared Amish village a "stunning victory".
Wedge and Ackbar get news of both of Daala's offensives--the massacre at Dorsk 81's homeworld, and the other one headed for Yavin IV. Realizing that neither is a feint, they agree to divide their forces to engage both foes at once.
As mentioned last time, Pellaeon is attacking Yavin IV. He and his stack of Star Destroyers look around--cautiously. They don't expect the Jedi trainees to offer much resistance, but they're surprised that they don't see anything coming in.
Meanwhile, back somewhere in the Inner Core, Daala has had her Super Star Destroyer Night Hammer renamed as the... Knight Hammer. Because it's going to be used to destroy Jedi Knights, see? This is why she's not with Pellaeon's fleet. Despite the fact that a pair of Jedi previously infiltrated her defenses and learned all her plans, she has to divide her forces to delay so she has the time to rechristen the Knight Hammer and paint the whole thing jet black. She has never heard of "defeat in detail". Also, she's the least competent character in this whole cavalcade of bad decision-making that makes up this book.
If she's the best female tactician ever, I think the Empire's gender discrimination was justified.
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| Actually it's about....um....ethics...um...what was I talking about again? |
Squadrons of TIEs fly into the atmosphere, and start indiscriminately carpet-bombing the forests of Yavin IV. Whenever they start to get close to the Jedi, however, one or another of them will grab a giant rock and swat the TIE like a fly.
The Empire even lands ground forces, like its AT-ST walkers. Dorsk 81 takes a moment to do something that isn't just tagging along with Kyp and smashes one of these. He then proposes that the Jedi should all pool their powers to target all the Star Destroyers in orbit, since the big threat is, after all, the giant fleet up there, not the tiny fraction of their fighters and ground vehicles that they've fielded already. This is fairly sensible, so naturally everyone else gasps at the sheer scale of what they're trying to accomplish and Dorsk 81 gets to mumble the whole "Size matters not" platitude. Since he's Dorsk 81, however, no one wants to listen to him until Kyp speaks up in his defense. Then they're all for it. Guess who is the author's favorite and who is about to get a dramatic sacrifice?
Dorsk 81 goes up to the apex of the Temple, and has a couple of pages to reflect on his life... basically, he was a clone who decided to strike out and away from all the other Dorsk n's, and became a Jedi so he could be his own person. He never really got a personality beyond that, so we change to the dramatic scene instead: all the other Jedi send him their Force power, since the Temple amplifies and channels Force around like that, and he uses it to grab all the Star Destroyers in orbit and hurl them far away. Apparently size does matter, since channeling so much Force burns him from the inside out, and he dies in Kyp's arms. He doesn't even really get good dying words, just pointing out the obvious in that the Star Destroyers aren't there any more.
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| Rest in peace, you will...hey, wait. Dorsk...dorks...oh FUCK YOU, Kevin J. Anderson! |
So Dorsk 81's sacrifice only seems to have bought about five minutes' reprieve. I love having dramatic deaths be meaningless in four pages.
Colonel Cronus, the leader of Daala's other fleet, spends this chapter shooting up a bunch of random planets that I don't think were ever mentioned outside this chapter. The only interesting thing here is when he hits a fleet that's powered by solar sails. Keep in mind, this was before Attack of the Clones had Dooku's little ship thingy with the solar whatevers, but that was one ship that you could probably see an arrogant noble having. Not a whole goddamned fleet of them.
Anyway, once he's done shooting up the morons, he decides to go to Yavin IV and meet Daala, too.
We cut back to Crix Madine and Durga's crew. General Madine has been captured, and he and General Sulamar recognize each other. Madine exposes that Sulamar is, shockingly, not a real Imperial General at all! He's actually a lieutenant who kept getting transferred around because he kept fouling things up. Durga laughs, admits that that makes sense, and then forces Sulamar to sit in one of his electric chairs to control the Darksaber.
We briefly cut to Wedge flying to rescue Crix, in what is the first time in this book that travel across the galaxy didn't take place effectively instantaneously, then back to Crix and Sulamar. Sulamar tries to boast about all his military victories, but it turns out that each instance is actually Sulamar fouling up and people dying because of his incompetence, and Crix explains the real stories in each case. Durga laughs at all this, then proves why he's the A-string villain here:
Bevel Lemelisk, the pot-bellied, grizzled old engineer, who appeared to watch the entire proceedings with a combination of amusement and distaste, made a comment seemingly to himself but loud enough that everyone heard. "The Emperor could have imagined more... entertaining executions." The old man visibly restrained a shudder.
Durga grumbled, still waving Sulamar's blaster pistol around. "I don't see any need to draw this out. After all, we have better things to do. A galaxy to conquer, and so forth."
And then he just straight-up shoots Madine to death. No elaborate death traps, no taking prisoners, nothing. Just sanely gets rid of a liability.
Which gave us one of the greatest images ever.
Luke, Han, Leia, Callista, Chewie, and the droids are all on the Millenium Falcon, flying back to Yavin IV. Callista continues her whole-book bitch-fest about not being able to use the Force, until the Falcon almost slams into the Knight Hammer. Daala starts shooting at them and demands surrender. But having dealt with Daala before, no one is particularly worried:
Han toggled the communication system. "Daala, you are such a pain," he said, then snapped it off, dodging another burst of turbolaser bolts by flying a figure eight past the Star Destroyer's targeting locks.
"Han, stop showing off," Leia said.
I'm not in any way exaggerating or misrepresenting this. No one seems ruffled by Daala and her Super Star Destroyer except for C-3P0.
So they fly past mile after mile of Super Star Destroyer weaponry firing at them on their way down to the surface. TIE Fighters assail them from all sides, and the heroes shoot down most of them that come too close. Eventually, they make their way down to the planet and Kyp shows them Dorsk 81's corpse. No one is very bothered this, either.
A bunch of the Jedi trainees from the Jedi Academy trilogy spread out into the jungle and stomp all over Daala's ground forces. No one is taking this particularly seriously; they just make sport of the Empire's finest.
Before it gets too embarrassing, Callista decides that she hasn't been the center of attention in way too long and splits off by herself. She can't try new things to get her Force powers back because Luke is too intimidatingly competent, so she decides to run off into the jungle in the middle of a ground war and orbital laser bombardment while she has no Force sensitivity to see if she can't do it by herself. If the enemy forces weren't commanded by Daala, she'd probably not survive this.
Wedge and his fleet see the Darksaber. We aren't treated to any descriptions of its grand size, or its poor construction, or its potential destructive power, or the threat it poses to galactic stability, or... anything. Just a quick note that, yup, it's there. And a cylinder.
We cut over to Durga, Sulamar, and Bevel Lemelisk. Durga is forcing not-general Sulamar to fly the Darksaber, insists that things don't need to be double-checked first, and says "What could go wrong?". To review: he's put a terrified lieutenant in charge of his superweapon (one who's got a history of killing everyone around him by sheer incompetence), poo-pooed the idea of checking to see if stuff works, and then sealed the deal by invoking a tired old cliche.
Lemelisk runs for the escape pods.
Now we finally get an adjective or two from Wedge about Darksaber: it's big. Madine's transmitter that they followed out here goes out, indicating that he's dead.
Darksaber notices the Alliance fleet coming after it, and so it turns to run away, into the thickest part of the asteroid field. Its heavy-duty shields make sport of the asteroids, bulling through them by sheer greater mass, where one of Wedge's Correllian Corvettes is wiped out by a piece of debris bouncing away from Darksaber's shields, but otherwise they follow in its wake, letting the superweapon clear the path for them. I think this particular image is pretty cool.
Anyway, the asteroid field gets thicker, to the point of having "moon-sized" rocks out there, which even the Darksaber can't shoulder aside. Durga continues to poo-poo the idea that they're in danger, even after even Sulamar has it figured out, and pushes them to keep going.
Finally, as Darksaber comes across a pair of planetoids grinding against each other that it can't avoid, Durga orders that the Darksaber's superlaser should fire!
Oh, boy! This is going to be so awesome! This planet-destroying laser is triggered, and
pfffffft! A fizzle of sparks splattered out the front end of the Darksaber, but nothing more.the Darksaber smashes straight into the planetoids it was trying to annihilate, and blows up. This was our titular A-plot and the main storyline of the book.
Callista runs away from Luke, deep into the jungle, and finds a semi-crashed TIE Bomber. She kills the pilot, who had been trying to fix his ship, then flies off in it. The fact that she has no trouble flying off in it suggests it didn't really need emergency repairs in the middle of a jungle currently being bombarded by a Super Star Destroyer, but I guess maybe even this nameless pilot realized that he was in less danger from Daala's guns than trying to attack Jedi.
She flies up to Knight Hammer and acts like she's more damaged than she is to gain admittance. Okay... given how bizarre the battle would look to the Imperial side, I don't even consider that to be massive incompetence so much as harried confusion.
Han and Leia go up in the Falcon, along with Kyp Durron, to take out a few more Imperials. They blow up some ground forces and then some TIEs. Then Kyp suggests that the Millenium Falcon, a small and hard-used freighter, go up against Knight Hammer, the biggest and most powerful regular combat vessel ever produced by the Galactic Empire, in straight combat.
This works. Daala launches two hundred more TIE fighters and turns all of Knight Hammer's weaponry against the Falcon. The Falcon starts to lose shield power under all of this, and Han seems quite surprised by this. Even the heroes in the book have this low a level of respect for Daala; she only outguns them by a few orders of magnitude.
Then Admiral Ackbar shows up with his fleet. They wipe out a hundred TIEs in the space of one sentence. The Falcon lands in his flagship and the fleet moves to engage Daala.
That's when Colonel Cronus (remember him?) shows up with another stack of Star Destroyers. Turns out Cronus is smart enough to not wait for orders from Daala, which she'd doubtlessly fuck up; he joins the battle on his own initiative, and most of Ackbar's fleet is worn down by sheer weight of numbers--most of the Imperial fleet is now massed in this one star system, and the Alliance has half of one diplomatic escort.
We cut back to Pellaeon. He was thrown away from the Yavin system earlier, if you recall, and we find out that all Dorsk 81 was able to do at the cost of his own life was to push 'em a couple of weeks away by sublight and do some scarily targeted damage to their hyperdrives and nothing else. He sets a course back towards Yavin IV, and this four-page interlude mostly seems to be here to prove he wasn't forgotten.
Callista claims some sort of reactor leak that lets her be alone in a landing bay stuffed with fully-readied but not fielded TIE craft. Because if you have a dangerous, potentially explosive fighter coming in, the first place you should put it is in a giant warehouse inside your own armor plating that's stuffed with more fueled and armed fighters, and then not have a bomb crew immediately try to secure it.
It turns out it's even worse (or more convenient) than that, since after calling up a schematic, Callista finds that she's way back along the Knight Hammer's length, and near its engines, so she decides to try to blow up all the stuff in the landing bay to cripple the ship.
To make a long story short, she succeeds without ever being interrupted once. While the Knight Hammer is trying to catch Ackbar's flagship, she sets off her explosive landing bay and completely cripples all of the Super Star Destroyer's engines, leaving it dead in space while she heads up to the flag deck to have it out with Daala personally.
Daala is on her bridge, feeling smug about getting close to winning for once, and her long-range sensors even detect Pellaeon's fleet. Then last chapter's explosions occur, throwing her around and stopping the chase for Ackbar. Knight Hammer engines aren't just disabled by this--they're physically gone, and the big ship is now locked onto a course with the planet Yavin.
She orders a complete evacuation of Knight Hammer, and as people start to scramble for escape pods, one particularly dim lieutenant asks what about her? She doesn't seem to be leaving. She just stands there and cries in response. Y'know, this book didn't seem so sexist when I was first reading it, but now...
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| I found this image under the header "Star Wars Legends Concepts That Need to Return". No. Just no. |
None of these are ever asked. Instead, Callista starts dreaming that she can somehow use the Force again. While she's distracted, Daala just shoots her. Luckily, Callista was right, and she manages to deflect the first few attacks with her lightsaber. Then Daala switches to stun, which Callista can't deflect for some reason, and Daala steps over her to get to the escape pod.
Luke is down on Yavin IV, where the Imperial ground forces have given up on trying to take down the Jedi, and are instead cowering in their giant armored war machines, hoping that they don't get found, so Luke isn't worried about that. He's trying to sense Callista, and he feels her battle with Daala. She is, yup, using the Dark Side, just as we already knew is all she can touch. Luke gets to play her usual role and whine about fate and love, but then he can no longer sense Callista and the Knight Hammer hits the gas giant Yavin. The end of Callista, hopefully (it's not).
Back to the Darksaber's hulk. Wedge's fleet picks up Bevel Lemelisk, and Qwi Xux, who as you will remember he was on a date with when she recognized Lemelisk earlier, re-identifies the fact that this is, indeed, Bevel Lemelisk, who she worked with when she was an Imperial scientist. Wedge is surprised that she knew what she is talking about. Seriously, this book is sexist. Anyway, Lemelisk is arrested, and Wedge says that he thinks that Lemelisk is probably going to be executed for his crimes.
"Ah, well." Surprisingly, Bevel Lemelisk reacted with resignation instead of fear. "If you're going to execute me," he said, "just make sure you do it right this time."
I can think of worse last words. That's a good ending to a goofy and almost-lovable character.
By the time Pellaeon has gotten close to the Yavin inner system, the New Republic has far too large a fleet there for him to fight. He's coming in to surrender, when he picks up notice of an escape pod that hadn't been found earlier! It's Daala! She's covered in... blood? Why? She wasn't covered in blood when she went in, so either she had a very messy period, or she was cutting herself. Both options are pretty dumb, so I'm going to ignore that detail. Pellaeon starts to feel relief that she's going to take command and he won't have to deal with it, but she resigns her rank before he can give her command.
I said she got more competent the closer she stands to Pellaeon, this is the most effective thing she's done all book. I stand by this theory.
Because this means that Pellaeon is now the leader of the Empire. This sets up Timothy Zahn's swan song to the New Republic era of Star Wars novels where Pellaeon negotiates a peace treaty with the New Republic. Just in time for the Yuuzhan Vong invasion. We'll get to that eventually, I promise.
In the final wrap-up chapter....There's really nothing to summarize or bring out here except that at the very end of the book, Luke gets a message from Callista, so she survived, too, but she wants to continue trying to relearn her Jedi powers by herself instead of getting Luke's help.
THE END.
So, Darksaber. It's a really dumb book, with three almost completely unrelated plotlines and lots of failures of logic and plot holes to keep you on your toes. It's also, surprisingly, a bit of fun to read in the same way that a mindless action movie is enjoyable. It's got some gems scattered here and there, but it's mostly overshadowed by one big problem: the story is completely fucking pointless.
To reiterate why, there are three main plotlines: Durga and the Darksaber, which is the titular plot and the one that has the most possibility of going somewhere; Daala and the Imperial fleet, which is a continuation of KJA's infatuation with her after he introduced her in the Jedi Academy trilogy; and Callista trying to regain her Force powers with Luke's aid.
Durga's superweapon simply did not work. That's kind of an amusing reversal of expected fortunes, but the fact remains that the A-string villain in this story managed to defeat himself twice (first with the automated ore extractors when he was first introduced, then with the Darksaber's destruction here). He didn't exactly kill or even threaten any major characters from elsewhere in the EU, unless you somehow were a Crix Madine fan, and the Darksaber was destroyed when he crashed it, unused and unusable.
Daala, with the full weight of the Empire behind her, managed to only wipe out the equivalent of one unarmed Amish village and kill one Jedi. She lost countless Star Destroyers, stormtroopers, and other pieces of the Imperial war machine to do this. Even her Super Star Destroyer was completely destroyed by one single intruder who wasn't even a Jedi. No one even took her seriously in this book. It's hard to be menaced by a villain that the heroes laugh at. Furthermore, her inclusion just made the book harder to follow, since Daala and the Darksaber plotline didn't intersect at all.
Callista, on the other hand, managed to hit exactly one important plot point for her story arc ("run away from Luke") in 430 pages, and in the meantime she's primarily characterized by her inability to be sympathetic because she's whining about eugenics, her own problems, and Luke's responsibilities the whole time. Oh, and she almost got Luke killed.
So, really, the plot of the book would have been just about the same if the heroes hadn't even roused themselves. Daala can't win a battle and would have eventually lost even if no one tried to thwart her. Durga was doing pretty good through most of the story, then suddenly caught The Idiot in the last 70 pages and lost everything because of it... and we discovered his plot couldn't have worked, because the Darksaber didn't work. And Callista's story isn't worth the page space it takes up.
But we're still not done with Callista. She's got one more intensely dumb book to show up in, the completion of the so-called "Callista Trilogy"....Planet of Twilight.
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