Read Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 03 - Paragon for Free Online

burn.
    He rolled into a ball and let senses other than sight guide him. A Force shove to the right kept him from smacking into a much thinner tree, one barely sturdy enough to break his spine and any bones that hit it. He needed no Force effort to shoot between the forks of a third tree. Contact with a veil of vines slowed him; they tore beneath the impact of his body but dropped his rate of speed painlessly. He went crashing through a mass of tendrils ending in big-petaled yellow flowers, some of which reflexively snapped at him as he plowed through them.
    Then he was bouncing across the ground, a dense layer of decaying leaves and other materials he really didn’t want to speculate about.
    Finally he rolled to a halt. He stretched out, momentarily stunned but unbroken, and stared up through the trees. He could see a single shaft of sunlight penetrating the forest canopy not far behind him; it illuminated aswirl of pollen from the stand of yellow flowers he’d just crashed through. In the distance, he could hear the roar of Ben’s speeder bike, hear its engine whine as the boy put it in a hard maneuver, trying to get back to Luke.
    Closer, there were footsteps. Heavy, ponderous footsteps.
    A moment later, their origin, the owner of that huge arm, loomed over Luke. It was a rancor, humanoid and bent.
    The rancors of this world had evolved to be smarter than those elsewhere. This one had clearly been trained as a guard and taught to tolerate protective gear. It wore a helmet, a rust-streaked cup of metal large enough to serve as a backwoods bathtub, with leather straps meeting under its chin. Strapped to its left forearm was a thick durasteel round shield that looked ridiculously tiny compared to the creature’s enormous proportions but was probably thick enough to stop one or two salvos from a military laser battery.
    The creature stared down at Luke. Its mouth opened and it offered a challenging growl.
    Luke glared at it. “Do you really want to make me angry right now? I don’t recommend it.”
    It reached for him.
SEVERAL DAYS EARLIER
Empty Space Near Kessel
    It was darkness surrounded by stars—one of them, the unlovely sun of Kessel, closer than the rest, but barely close enough to be a ball of illumination rather than a dot—and then it was occupied, suddenly inhabited by a space yacht of flowing, graceful lines and peeling paint. That was how it would have looked, a vesseldropping out of hyperspace, to those in the arrival zone, had there been any witnesses: nothing there, then something, an instantaneous transition.
    In the bridge sat the ancient yacht’s sole occupant, a teenage girl wearing a battered combat vac suit. She looked from sensor to sensor, uncertain and slow because of her unfamiliarity with this model of spacecraft. Too, there was something like shock in her eyes.
    Finally satisfied that no other ship had dropped out of hyperspace nearby, or was likely to creep up on her in this remote location, she sat back in her pilot’s seat and tried to get her thoughts in order.
    Her name was Vestara Khai, and she was a Sith of the Lost Tribe. She was a proud Sith, not one to hide under false identities and concealing robes until some decades-long grandiose plan neared completion, and now she had even more reason than usual to swell with pride. Mere hours before, she and her Sith Master, Lady Rhea, had confronted Jedi Grand Master Luke Skywalker. Lady Rhea and Vestara had fought the galaxy’s most experienced, most famous Jedi to a standstill. Vestara had even
cut
him, a graze to the cheek and chin that had spattered her with blood—blood she had later tasted, blood she wished she could take a sample of and keep forever as a souvenir.
    But then Skywalker had shown why he carried that reputation. A moment’s distraction, and suddenly Lady Rhea was in four pieces, each drifting in a separate direction, and Vestara was hopelessly outmatched. She had saluted and fled.
    Now, having taken a space yacht that