Return to Ord Mantell
Kevin J. Anderson and Rebecca Moesta
To Angela M. Kato, whose hard work and charming personality helped us to find more time to write
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Sue Rostoni, Allan Kausch, and Lucy Autrey Wilson at Lucasfilm Licensing for their valuable input on this new story arc; Ginjer Buchanan and Jessica Faust at Berkley for putting their full support behind this series; the Star Wars fans at Dragon Con’s Matters of the Force panels for their enthusiastic brainstorming; Dave Dorman for his marvelous cover art; Dan Wallace and Rich Handley for their research and resource materials; the work of Brian Daley, Al Williamson, and Archie Goodwin for providing fodder for our imaginations; Catherine Ulatowski, Sarah Jones, and Angela Kato at WordFire, Inc for keeping everything running smoothly; and Jonathan Cowan for being our first test-reader.
1
The tree stood in the middle of a small jungle clearing, its gnarled, woody tentacles wrathing through the air in search of prey. As Zekk approached, the tentacles twitched, sensing his movement.
The sinuous vines were camouflaged, deceptively lush and green. He took another step forward. The ground around the tree’s warty trunk was littered with bones—broken grayish-white remnants of previous victims, stripped of flesh, now decaying in the humid air of Yavin 4. Zekk moved even closer, and the hungry tree trembled in anticipation.
He told himself he had nothing to fear. Of course he would have been much more comfortable had he been carrying a lightsaber, a Jedi weapon that could counter any attack from this plant-thing—but that would have been too easy. Much too easy.
Zekk wasn’t interested in a simple end to this exercise. Instead, he carried only a plain staff. He had found the length of dried wood in the jungle and stripped off its bark. It was all the weapon he would allow himself to use in this important test.
He stepped forward, faced the wrathing tentacle tree, and prepared to do battle. “I will let the Force guide me,” he murmured to himself, “allow it to direct my Jedi reflexes to respond to any tricks the enemy may devise.”
The carnivorous tentacle tree reached toward him, its deadly branches whispering together in a leafy sigh.
“Most of all,” he went on in a hushed voice, “I must not let myself be tempted by the easy power I can unleash through the dark side.”
Zekk had already traveled the dark paths of the Force when he trained at the Shadow Academy. Now he was a new student learning to use the light side—but at the same time, he was an old student… with many scars on his conscience.
He raised his stick. The tree’s tentacles quivered as it prepared for this easy prey.
“The Force is with me,” Zekk said, and stepped in among the dangling branches, his staff held high.
Three of the whipping vines thrashed at him, making the stick their primary target. Zekk snapped his wrist downward. A loud crack rang out as the staff beat back two of the tentacles.
Another serpentine appendage crackled and wrapped itself around Zekk’s right wrist. Without hesitation, he tossed the staff to his left hand, swung it up, and battered the offending tentacle as he yanked his hand free.
His skin burned and tingled as the clutching vine tore away from his wrist. He realized then that this plant-thing exuded some kind of irritating acid through its tiny spines. His hand began to swell, but Zekk turned his concentration back to the vines that still lashed at him. He could deal with the pain later.
He struck left and right, knocking the thrashing vines away. His hand turned red and throbbed; he could barely bend his fingers. A forest of tentacles now whipped and clawed at him. He could have severed them all with a single sweep of a lightsaber blade, but Zekk drove them back one-handed, using only his staff.
Simple victories were not worth fighting for. Without a challenge, victory was meaningless. He had come here to learn a new lesson—and unlearn an old one.
To begin Zekk’s training in the light side of the Force, Master Skywalker had told him to start with simple exercises to test his most basic skills. Somehow, Zekk didn’t think that venturing out into the jungles to battle this carnivorous tree was quite what the Jedi teacher had in mind. Perspiration trickled down Zekk’s face and neck. His long dark hair clung in damp strands around his emerald-green eyes.
Zekk smiled.
He gritted his teeth and drove inward. He had fought many times before. The Dark Jedi Brakiss had trained Zekk to become the Second Imperium’s darkest knight. Together, they—along with many other followers of the Emperor’s ways—had battled Luke Skywalker’s students at the Jedi academy.
But Zekk and the other Dark Jedi had been soundly defeated, and Brakiss killed. Broken, Zekk had turned away from the dark side. Even though he had formerly been a close friend of the Solo twins, Jacen and Jaina, Zekk could not easily grant himself forgiveness. He couldn’t just join his friends and begin training as a Jedi of the light side as if nothing had happened.
Instead, Zekk had gone off on his own to search for meaning in his life. He trained to become a bounty hunter and used his Jedi prowess to hunt down difficult bounties that no one else could capture. But in those months Zekk had learned something important about himself: although he had the skills, he didn’t have the mind-set that would allow him to find any quarry for whatever reason and simply turn the victim over to anyone who happened to pay the price.
When Nolaa Tarkona, head of a subversive political group called the Diversity Alliance, had set an open bounty on the merchant Bornan Thul, Zekk had at first gone on the search, hoping to prove himself to Boba Fett and all the other bounty hunters. But Zekk had realized in time that the information Nolaa Tarkona wanted from the human merchant concerned a deadly human-killing plague—and that if he succeeded in his task, the entire human race might become extinct.
Such consequences had forced him to change his mind and join forces with the young Jedi Knights after all. After they defeated the Diversity Alliance and the Emperor’s plague was destroyed, Zekk had decided to start all over again, to become a true Jedi Knight. This time he would do his training in the right way.
If only this tree would let him.
Shorter, spikier tentacles emerged from the hole of the tree, thrashing, grasping at him, but again Zekk drove them back with his staff. He could have pulled back at any time, but instead he pushed closer. Then, although the irritant chemical in his swollen right hand bothered him, he gripped the stick with both hands again. He would not let the pain slow him down.
Zekk didn’t have any clear idea of how he would define “victory.”
He did not intend to kill the tree, but as his battle fever picked up, he fought more furiously, pounding the tentacles with his hard staff.
Another whiplike vine snapped sharply and struck him in the forehead just above his eye, drawing a trickle of blood. He reeled backward, blinking his eyes against the stinging tears and red droplets.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, two of the vines wrapped themselves around his stick, twisted hard, and yanked it from Zekk’s hand, tearing the flesh on his palms. Then, as if sensing victory, the relentless tentacles also grabbed at his arms and legs. Zekk stood trapped in a blizzard of grasping strands.
A black static of anger overpowered his fear. Zekk used the Force to reach out and locate his stolen staff. He jerked the stick back toward him—so furiously that two vines ripped away from the central mass of the tree and began oozing clear sap.
With the dying tentacles still dangling from his staff, Zekk swung around, using it as a flail against the others. He used the Force again to tie several of the strands into knots and laughed out loud at how easy this battle was becoming.
Then, in a flash of comprehension, Zekk realized that he was not truly succeeding; he had unleashed his anger and tapped the dark side as a conduit to his Jedi skills.