Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare

525 Pages·2012·15.44 MB·English

by  Jason Fry

Title page painting by Dave Seeley
“Armory and Sensor Profile” illustrations by:
Ansel Hsiao: this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, and this
page Ian Fullwood: this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this
page, this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page
“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.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-34554274-8
www.starwars.com
www.starwars.suvudu.com
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
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
1 BEFORE THE REPUBLIC
2 THE ANCIENT REPUBLIC
3 ZENITH OF THE REPUBLIC
4 WARS WITH THE SITH
5 DECLINE OF THE REPUBLIC
6 FLASHPOINT: NABOO
7 BEGIN, THE CLONE WAR DOES
8 THE SEPARATIST WAR MACHINE
9 THE OUTER RIM SIEGES
10 THE RISE OF THE EMPIRE
11 EMPIRE TRIUMPHANT
12 IN THE EMPIRE’S SERVICE
13 THE ORIGINS OF REBELLION
14 THE ALLIANCE STRIKES
15 WHEN THE EMPIRE STRUCK BACK
16 SHOWDOWN AT ENDOR
17 AN EMPIRE IN FRAGMENTS
18 END OF AN EMPIRE
19 THE NEW JEDI ORDER
20 THE NEW GALACTIC CIVIL WAR
21 ETERNAL WAR
Acknowledgments
About the Authors/Illustrators
PROLOGUE
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:
I’ve 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 they’d 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 better—I knew we were going to a place from which we’d
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 us—five Battle
Dragons and eight Nova battle cruisers. They’d 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 doesn’t. Nothing does. I knew what he wanted to know, but I didn’t 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 orders—dead 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 don’t 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 cruiser’s 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
stars—above and below, on all sides, because I wasn’t looking up at the sky but
floating in it. I’d 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 surprised—mouths gaping, eyes staring. But
mostly they were in pieces.
The Battle Dragon approached like an underwater leviathan. Your brain can’t
trust your eyes in vacuum—without an atmosphere to dull detail, everything is
equally sharp. And when it’s 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 didn’t—she passed right below me. She was far enough away that I didn’t
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.
And that was when it happened.
I didn’t lose consciousness. I could still think and see. But I was no longer
seeing what was around me or hearing the hiss of my ruined suit. I had a vision.
I was shown everything at once—everything that had been and everything that
will be.
I saw great beings made of light, who could be everywhere and nowhere at
once. They were vaster than nebulae and tinier than cells, and they assembled
solar systems like children with toys. I saw strange ships made of whirling,
tumbling rods and cones, and heard them scream and moan as they shuddered
by. I saw great chrome warships whose mirrored hulls turned sunlight into
blinding sheets, and black battleships whose spines were crowned with terrible
spiked cathedrals. I saw hammerheaded battle cruisers burning, and slab-sided
Mandalorian constructs sparkling with rime. I saw Star Destroyers arrowing
through the night, and blistered Mon Calamari cruisers schooling, and fighters
of all shapes and sizes swarming. I saw ships that seemed built from clumps of
multicolored wire, and ones that looked like organs torn from living things.
And I knew all these ships were filled with beings whose lives had been given
to war. Hutt and Tionese, Republic and Sith, Loyalist and Separatist, Imperial
and Rebel—I knew it didn’t matter who had killed whom, or when or how or
why. All at once I understood that those of us born to be sacrificed upon the pyre
of war become one when we die—mingled smoke gone up to whatever gods you