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Published by Bantam Books May 1997 The battle between good and evil continues. Princess Leia has been taken captive by a charismatic and ruthless warlord bent on destroying the New Republic. Luke is trapped on a strange planet where the Force is his worst enemy. And as Han, Chewie, and Lando race to their rescue, a strange life-form, unlike any the galaxy has ever seen, awakens...a life-form so malevolent it will destroy everything--both the Empire and the New Republic--on its path to dominion. |
Excerpt
The first
to die was a midshipman named Koth Barak. One of his fellow crewmembers
on the New Republic escort cruiser Adamantine found him slumped
across the table in the deck-nine break room, where he'd repaired half
an hour previously for a cup of coffeine. Twenty minutes after Barak
should have been back to post, Gunnery Sergeant Gallie Wover went looking
for him.
When
she entered the deck-nine break room, Sergeant Wover's first sight was
of the palely flickering blue on blue of the infolog screen. "Blast
it, Koth, I told you . . ."
Then
she saw the young man stretched unmoving on the far side of the screen,
head on the break table, eyes shut. Even at a distance of three meters
Wover didn't like the way he was breathing.
"Koth!"
She rounded the table in two strides, sending the other chairs clattering
into a corner. She thought his eyelids moved a little when she yelled
his name. "Koth!"
Wover
hit the emergency call almost without conscious decision. In the
few moments before the med droids arrived she sniffed the coffeine in the
gray plastene cup a few centimeters from his limp fingers. It wasn't
even cold.
Behind
her the break room door swooshed
open. She glanced over her
shoulder to see a couple of Two-Onebees enter with a table, which was already
unfurling scanners and life-support lines like a monster in a bad holovid.
They shifted Barak onto the table and hooked him up. Every line of
the readouts plunged, and soft, tinny alarms began to sound.
Barak's
face had gone a waxen gray. The table was already pumping stimulants
and antishock into the boy's veins. Wover could see the initial diagnostic
lines on the screen that ringed the antigrav personnel transport unit's
sides.
No virus.
No bacteria. No poison.
No foreign
material in Koth Barak's body at all.
The lines
dipped steadily toward zero, then went flat.