Jason Fry - Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare

Title page painting by Dave Seeley

Armory and Sensor Profile illustrations by:
Ansel Hsiao:

The Anaxes War College System illustrations by Ansel Hsiao

Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the authors imaginations or are used fictitiously.

A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original

Copyright 2012 Lucasfilm Ltd. & or where indicated.
All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

D EL R EY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-345-54274-8

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v3.1

JASON: This is for that kid who just got his first glimpse of the Star Wars saga today, and knows his or her life just changed. I hope books like this help you dream and have fun.

PAUL: To Mr. Henry B., in payment of an old debt of honor, which was not expected to involve Ewoks

At the Battle of Endor, Grand Admiral Osvald Teshik continued to fight after the rest of the Imperial task force retreated, engaging Alliance warships for four hours before his Star Destroyer was disabled and captured. He was tried and executed by the Alliance to Restore the Republic for atrocities committed against the citizens of the galaxy. The following is a transcript of his last statement:

Ive been here before, you know. Four years ago, Emperor Palpatine sentenced me to death.

Why? Being Emperor is its own why. But he was angry that your privateers had been running wild in the Core, and that theyd kidnapped that swollen gasbag Adviser Veshiv from Esseles. Since I commanded that oversector, I had to sate his anger.

And to do that, I had to die.

So he sent me to Hapes aboard the Pursuit light cruiser Shepherd, carrying two squadrons of TIE fighters and accompanied by eight gunships. My men thought we were a recon patrol and that our mission was to keep the Hapans honest. But I knew betterI knew we were going to a place from which wed never return. When we came out of hyperspace I accessed my orders. They read PROCEED AT SPEED TO ANDALIA AND ENGAGE ENEMY FORCES.

A good chunk of the Hapan war fleet was waiting there for usfive Battle Dragons and eight Nova battle cruisers. Theyd been tipped off.

The crews expected us to run, and with reason. Against such odds, running was the only sane decision. I had to repeat myself when I told the deck officer to launch all fighters. I saw his face when he realized he was going to die. I saw he wanted to know why. We all do. We think it will matter, that knowing will grant us honor, that it will silence our futile bleating at the prospect of becoming nothing.

It doesnt. Nothing does. I knew what he wanted to know, but I didnt tell him.

The TIEs lasted two minutes. I watched the Battle Dragons turbolasers lance out, brilliant green, searching in the darkness. I watched the Hapan gunners find the range, begin to turn TIEs into flowers of flame. I watched the fighters wheel around for another pass, their laser bolts sparking useless blue spirals and whorls off the Hapan shields. Then they were all dead, and it was our turn.

We were the last survivors. Six of the gunships were gone inside a minute, vaporized by the battle cruisers. The captains of the last two gunships panicked and turned into each other. They collided head-on. I watched the atmosphere boil out of their cracked hulls, condemning the men inside to bad deaths where they might have been blessed with merely pointless ones.

By then our shields were failing. I found myself wondering if the Emperor had a snoopship nearby, so he could see his sentence carried out, or if arranging it had been satisfaction enough, or if he even remembered.

Some of my officers were still barking ordersdead men clacking their jaws in a dumb show of honor. Others were begging me for new instructions. A few were sitting catatonic at their posts while the alarms screamed around them. Then the forward shields flashed and winked out of existence. The lead Battle Dragon launched torpedoes. I heard the deck officer yell Incoming. He was still at his post.

The next thing I knew, I was floating in space in an evac suit. I dont know how I got there. I can only conclude that we were hit hard and my Academy training took over. I must have checked for escape pods, failed to find any, and got into a suit. I must have been in the rear of the bridge tower when the Hapans targeted my cruisers main reactor. And I must have been close to a hull breach. So instead of being atomized with the Shepherd when the reactor blew, I was ejected from her.

It was scant reprieve. Something was wrong with my suit. It was torn, or a seal had melted. Either way I could hear the hissing and feel that my body was growing numb.

I hung there in space and watched the Hapan ships advance. The Transitory Mists were sheets of green and blue and red, and everywhere else there were starsabove and below, on all sides, because I wasnt looking up at the sky but floating in it. Id never seen so many stars, not even as a boy on Kallistas, lying on the roof of the threshing-house with insects humming in the summer dark. And I could see the band of the galaxy, a river of light bisecting the sky.

It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.

Around me, it was different. I was surrounded by chunks of durasteel, bent and blackened. Everywhere there were lengths of wire and conduit, slowly wheeling end over end. There were drifts of transparisteel splintered into jagged shards, reflecting starlight. And there were men. A few were whole. Their bodies were bloated and blue and they looked surprisedmouths gaping, eyes staring. But mostly they were in pieces.

The Battle Dragon approached like an underwater leviathan. Your brain cant trust your eyes in vacuumwithout an atmosphere to dull detail, everything is equally sharp. And when its robbed of the ability to judge distance, the mind scrabbles for purchase. Is that chunk of durasteel a centimeter across and about to hit your faceplate, or a meter wide and the length of a landing field away? Watching the Battle Dragon coming, I tried to remember how large she was, tried to figure out how far away she was, tried to calculate if she would hit me.

She didntshe passed right below me. She was far enough away that I didnt impact her particle shields, but close enough that I could count the rungs of the ladderwells on her sensor masts. They were crowned by running lights, which left spots on my vision when they flashed. She took forever to go by, while my feet kicked slowly above her. I fought down panic that she would suck me down after her or drag me into her wake. I reminded myself that there was neither air nor water between us, that what separated us was the absence of matter. Then she was gone, vanished into hyperspace with the rest of the task force, and I was alone with the stars and the dead.