Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 03 - Paragon

strong, Tilden Kaah. With your help—and with the help of all of us here—the Keshiri will finish the job.” Anger glistened in Adari Vaal’s eyes. “I brought this plague upon us.
And I will end it
.”

Read on for an excerpt from

Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Backlash
by Aaron Allston
Published by Del Rey Books
    The rainforest air was so dense, so moist that even roaring through it at speeder bike velocity didn’t bring Luke Skywalker any physical relief. His speed just caused the air to move across him faster, like a greasy scrub-rag wielded by an overzealous nanny-droid, drenching all the exposed surfaces of his body.
    Not that he cared. He couldn’t see her, but he could sense his quarry, not far ahead: the individual whose home he’d crossed so many light-years to find.
    He could sense much more than that. The forest teemed with life, life that poured its energy into the Force, too much to catalogue as he roared past. He could feel ancient trees and new vines, creeping predators and alert prey. He could feel his son Ben as the teenager drew up abreast of him on his own speeder bike, eyes shadowed under his helmet but a competitive grin on his lips, and then Ben was a few meters ahead of him, dodging leftward to avoid hitting a split-forked tree, the recklessness of youth giving him a momentary speed advantage over Luke’s superior piloting ability.
    Then there was more life,
big
life, close ahead, with malicious intent—
    From a thick nest of magenta-flowered underbrush twice the height of a man, just to the right of Luke’spath ahead, emerged an arm, striking with great speed and accuracy. It was humanlike, gnarly, gigantic, long enough to reach from the flowers to swat the forward tip of Luke’s speeder bike as he passed.
    Disaster takes only a fraction of a second. One instant Luke was racing along, intent on his distant prey and enjoying moments of competition; the next, he was headed straight for a tree whose trunk, four meters across, would bring a sudden stop to his travels and his life.
    He came free of the speeder bike as it rotated beneath him from the giant creature’s blow. He was still headed for the tree trunk. He gave himself an adrenaline-boosted shove in the Force and drifted another couple of meters to the left, allowing him to flash past the trunk instead of into it; he could feel its bark rip at the right shoulder of his tunic. A centimeter closer, and the contact would have given him a serious friction 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