Star Wars.
Galaxy of Fear.
Planet Plague.
by John Whitman.
PROLOGUE.
With a crackle of energy the image solidified before the scientist"s eyes. It was only a hologram, but it was a hologram of the most powerful being the galaxy had ever known.
It was the Emperor himself.
Although the scientist was seated at his control module, at the center of his own network of power, he trembled. He could order the deaths of hundreds if he wished. With his terrible knowledge he could engineer nightmares. But as powerful as the scientist was, the Emperor could snuff him out with little more than a thought.
"What is thy bidding, my lord?" the scientist asked in a trembling voice.
"Your enemies have gained a distinct advantage." Beneath the hood of his plain black robe, the Emperor"s ancient face looked wrinkled and frail. But his voice, even though it was beamed from a thousand light-years away, still had evil power. "Failure has become a possibility."
The scientist shuddered. As always the Emperor seemed to learn of events almost before they occurred. He already knew that an intruder named Hoole, along with his droid and two young humans, had ruined the scientist"s experiment on D"vouran, the living planet. They had also destroyed his work with the undead on Necropolis.
"M-My lord," the scientist said as confidently as he could manage.
"I a.s.sure you these incidents have not delayed my work. Hoole is only an overly curious anthropologist, and the two humans are only children. They cannot possibly know our intentions."
"Do not underestimate the resourcefulness of your enemies." The Emperor"s eyes darkened. "That was Grand Moff Tarkin"s mistake when he built the Death Star."
The scientist bowed. The Death Star-a battle station equipped with a planet-destroying laser-was supposed to have been the cornerstone of the Empire"s Doctrine of Fear. But the Rebels had managed to destroy it.
The scientist would not make the same mistakes as the Death Star"s creator. "My lord, I swear, the next phase of Project Starscream will be delivered on schedule."
The Emperor gave a slight nod. "See to it. Personally." The ruler"s image vanished.
The scientist stood up and regained his composure. He dared not disappoint the Emperor. He would handle the next phase of Project Starscream personally. And if Hoole somehow interfered, the scientist would deal with him personally, too.
The scientist smiled. He knew that Hoole would never suspect that he was the enemy.
CHAPTER 1.
Someone was pounding on the door.
"Tash, open up!" It was the voice of her brother, Zak.
"Go away," she warned.
"Come on, it can"t be that bad," he argued.
"You think?" Tash yelled through the wall of the room. "Wait until you start getting them." She heard Zak sigh and walk away.
Tash stared at her reflection in the small mirror and groaned.
Tash was thirteen years old. She"d always thought it wouldn"t happen to her until she turned fifteen or sixteen.
"There you go," she muttered, "before your time as usual."
She stared at the four red splotches on her face as if glaring would scare them away. But they weren"t going anywhere. They sat in the middle of her face, framed by her blonde hair. They were as noticeable as...o...b..tal beacons.
To Tash, it was amazing that the intelligent species of the galaxy had learned to travel from one end of the stars to the other, create droids that were as intelligent as humans or any other organic creature, but still no one had come up with a cure for every teenage human"s nightmare.
Zits.
She was in the main refresher on board the ship Shroud, on which she traveled with her brother, Zak, their uncle Hoole, and his a.s.sistant droid DV- 9, or Deevee for short. The main "fresher had the best lighting, and Tash wanted to see just how big her pimples had grown.
Someone pounded on the door again. "Tash!" Zak was back. "Come on, I"m not feeling well. I need the medkit."
"All right!" she said. She opened the door and stared, daring Zak to say something about her face.
But Zak hardly noticed. He went right to the medkit, opened it, and took out two pain relievers, which he quickly swallowed.
"Did Uncle Hoole say you could have those?" she asked.
"Yeah." Zak nodded. "I asked him."
She noticed that her brother"s face looked flushed, and he seemed a little sluggish. Zak was a year younger than she was. Normally he was chaotic, unpredictable, and fun-loving. Not sluggish.
"Are you getting sick?"
"No way," he responded. "Just a headache from listening to Deevee"s lessons. I"m going back to the c.o.c.kpit. By the way," he added as he went into the hall, "that pimple on your chin is about to go nova!"
Tash grimaced. So much for sympathizing with him. If he was feeling good enough to insult her, he was feeling good enough, period.
Tash went to her cabin and shut the door. The best thing to do about pimples was to wait them out. She had some important work to do in her cabin anyway.
She sat at her small desk, skimming the galactic communications network called the HoloNet on the computer terminal. It was sometimes hard to get a connection in deep s.p.a.ce, but Tash had spent hours Net-skimming, and she"d found a way to bounce a computer link off of a deep-s.p.a.ce station thirty light-years away, then to planetary antennae in the Corellian system, and finally into the Deep Core Worlds, where the central HoloNet was established.
Tash typed her code name into a message: SEARCHER CALLING FORCEFLOW.
ForceFlow was another HoloNet explorer whom Tash had met over a year ago. ForceFlow had introduced Tash to the legends of the Jedi Knights, who had been the protectors of the galaxy before the rise of the Empire. She didn"t know ForceFlow"s real name, but she did know that he or she had access to a lot of information.
Tash wasn"t looking for information on the Jedi today. She had decided to ask about something more personal.
She was going to ask ForceFlow about her uncle.
In the six months that she and Zak had lived with him, Hoole had refused to tell them anything about himself or his work. But over the past few weeks several people had hinted that Hoole was involved in the Empire"s shadow world of criminals and a.s.sa.s.sins. Contacting ForceFlow was a long shot, but people in strange places seemed to know their uncle, and Tash"s curiosity had gotten the better of her.
After a moment, a line of text appeared on her computer screen.
FORCEFLOW HERE.
HI, she typed. I HAVE A QUESTION FOR YOU. IT"S PRIVATE.
A line appeared in response.
WAIT. I AM CODING OUR TRANSMISSION. There was a pause.
When the text continued, it was highlighted in blue, indicating that the HoloNet link had changed. IMPERIAL WATCH-DOGS ON MY TAIL. CAN"T TAKE ANY CHANCES.
Tash knew that ForceFlow often posted information on the HoloNet that the Empire considered illegal. Even the Jedi lore that she had first discovered was outlawed, but ForceFlow had uploaded it anyway. For that reason ForceFlow was often hard to reach, and always very secretive. Tash typed back, IS IT SAFE FOR US TO TALK?
FOR NOW. NO ONE CAN BREAK MY CODES.
GREAT. I WANT TO ASK YOU ABOUT-.
But Tash was unable to continue. She nearly fell off her chair as the Shroud lurched crazily in s.p.a.ce.
CHAPTER 2.
For a split second the power was cut off and the lights went out, plunging Tash into darkness. A moment later the lights came back on, but her delicate HoloNet connection had been lost.
"Oh, laser burn," she muttered under her breath. "Zak, you"re going to get it for this."
Zak had no interest in piloting, but he was a born tinkerer. Tash would have bet a year"s worth of Octavian fruit pudding that he was up in the c.o.c.kpit right now, taking the console apart.
The ship shook again, and Tash jumped up from her desk, slipping out the automatic door as soon as it opened and hurrying toward the c.o.c.kpit.
"What"s going on up here?" she demanded as she entered the control room. She half-expected to see the navicomputer spread out in pieces on the floor.
Instead she saw Zak slumped over the controls. His head was buried in his folded arms, his face hidden behind his uncontrollable mop of brown hair.
"Zak!" she yelled.
At the sound of her voice, Zak slowly lifted his head and blinked.
"Hey, Tash," he said drowsily. "I must have dozed off."
"By the look of things, I would say you fainted," said a low voice behind Tash.
Uncle Hoole had come up behind her without making a sound. Hoole was a member of the Shi"ido species. They were tall, gray humanoids, and stealth was the least of their gifts. The Shi"ido were shape-shifters.
The Shi"ido studied Zak with his dark eyes, and his narrow gray face wrinkled into a frown. "Are you feeling all right?"
Zak sat up straight. His eyelids drooped, and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead. He still managed a smile. "Me? Sure. I"m prime."
The Shroud"s engines let out a groan of distress. Hoole slipped past Tash and examined the readouts quickly. "You laid your head down on the reverse- power coupling controls," Hoole said. "You are flooding too much fuel into the hyperdrive system." Hoole flipped a few switches, and the Shroud settled into a smooth flight pattern.
Zak rubbed his eyes and tried to shake his head clear. "Wow, talk about an afternoon nap."
"Try midmorning nap," Tash replied, pointing at the chronometer.
Although they were in deep s.p.a.ce, the ship"s chronometer kept GST, or Galactic Standard Time.
Zak shrugged. "I haven"t been this tired since we hiked to the top of the Triplehorn mountains back on Alderaan."
Tash and Uncle Hoole exchanged concerned glances. Zak had been through a lot recently. On their last planetary stop, he had been kidnapped by a wanted criminal named Evazan who was working on some bizarre experiments to bring the dead back to life. Eventually Tash and Hoole had been able to save Zak and to defeat Evazan with the help of the bounty hunter Boba Fett. In fact, they had gotten away in the criminal"s own ship, the Shroud, in which they now flew.
Despite the terror he"d witnessed, Zak seemed to come out of that frightening experience without any serious harm. Now, however, he looked terrible.
"No way," Zak said, when Tash suggested that what he"d been through might be making him sick. "I"m telling you, I"m as shipshape as an Imperial cruiser. " He jumped up and spun unsteadily around on one foot, turning back to face his sister. "I just needed a little sleep, that"s all." As if to prove it, Zak wriggled his way past Tash and Hoole and bounded down the corridor to the Shroud"s main lounge.
Hoole stared after him. "I"m afraid I have not been around humans long enough to understand your physiology," he said to Tash. "Is this common?"
"I don"t know," Tash said. "Back on Alderaan, Mom always seemed to know if we were sick or not."
Tash felt a twinge in her heart when she mentioned her mother. Her parents were dead, thanks to the Empire. They had been on the planet Alderaan when it was blasted into rubble by the Death Star six months ago. Tash tried to swallow a sudden lump in her throat. "I think... I think if she were here she"d say Zak was coming down with the flu or something."
"Let us hope it is nothing worse than that," Hoole said. "Zak was in Evazan"s hands for some time before we reached him."
"Do you think Evazan might have done something to Zak that we don"t know about?"
"I"m not sure," the Shi"ido said, almost to himself. "Let us go see what DV-9 has found in Evazan"s computer files."
Evazan was also known as Dr. Death, and his mark was everywhere on the ship he had once owned. The corridors were dark and gloomy. The simple couches in the main lounge were torn and gouged. Beyond the lounge lay a small science laboratory. Hoole and his a.s.sistant droid, DV-9, had thrown away specimen jars full" of strange matter and cleaned up as much of the lab as they could, but the walls and countertops were still stained with things Tash did not want to think about.
Mechanically, however, the Shroud was a first-rate ship, with a high- powered computer system and memory banks filled to capacity with information.
Entering the lab, Tash and Hoole found Deevee at work on the computers, with Zak hovering behind him. "Zak, you should be in bed,"
Tash said.
"But look what Deevee"s found," he replied.