The Caamas Document 19 A.B.Y

PART IX

A LASTING PEACE

At its peak, Palpatine's Empire was an awe-inspiring example of omnipotence. Bu fifteen years after the death of its ruler, the Empirf was little more than a pitiable curiosity. Pushed into the wild fringes of the Outer Rim, consisting on eight small sectors and only a thousand inhabited systems, Imperial dominion was little threat to anyone-certainly not the prosperous worlds of thf ever-growing New Republic. Admiral Pellaeon commander of the Imperial Fleet, was smart enough to realize he'd been beaten.

The Caamas Document 19 A.B.Y.

After Admiral Daala had promoted him following the disastrous attack on Yavin 4, Pellaeon had pu1l his best efforts into halting the erosion of thE Empire's borders. But despite a few scattered victories, including the Battle of Orinda and the reaquisition of his flagship Chimaera at the Battle of Gravlex Med, he had been unable to stop the march of history. Pellaeon met with the remaining moffs on the capital world of Bastion and broached the unthinkable: an Imperial surrender. The moffs met his plan with understandable resistance, but eventually agreed that a conditional capitulation was the only way to guarantee the Empire's con­tinued survival. 616p158g

One of the moffs, however, had other plans. Ambitious and amoral, Moff Disra was a political genius, and he was just one member of a secret tri­umvirate determined to scuttle Pellaeon's weak­willed submission strategy and restore the Empire to its former grandeur.

Disra's aide, Major Tierce, was an expert on mili­tary tactics and claimed to be one of Palpatine's former Royal Guardsmen. Tierce was the one who had executed Rukh following the Noghri traitor's assassination of Grand Admiral Thrawn. But it was a third player-a simple con man named Flim­who was the key to Disra's plan. Flim bore an uncanny resemblance to the late Thrawn, and with blue makeup and glowing corneal inserts, the like­ness became nothing short of astonishing. Flim, or rather, "Thrawn," would be used as an inspirational figurehead, a badly needed propaganda tool that would breathe flame into the dying embers of the Empire.

Disra's first move was to intercept and capture Pellaeon's envoy before the man could deliver the offer of peace. The envoy's corvette was captured by one of Disra's Star Destroyers at Morishim, and the New Republic leadership had no way of knowing just how close they'd come to a peaceable resolution to the decades-long Galactic Civil War. Furthermore, Pellaeon remained unaware of Disra's treachery; he assumed his enemies had received the Empire's offer and were contemplating its implica­tions. Pellaeon headed off to his chosen rendezvous point, the deserted gas giant Pesitiin, and waited fruitlessly for a New Republic delegation that wasn't coming.

Disra's second step was more devious. A private performance by "Grand Admiral Thrawn" was enough to convince several Imperial fleet captains that their beloved leader had miraculously returned from the grave. On Thrawn's orders three Star Destroyers were fitted with cloaking devices and sent to Bothawui. There, high above the Bothan homeworld, the invisible ships anchored them­selves to a passing comet and waited patiently for the signal to attack.

Disra's target hadn't been a random selection. A few weeks earlier, Leia Organa Solo, now holding the position of councilor, had been visiting a Noghri relocation settlement on Wayland when a Devaronian treasure hunter had uncovered a shocking item from the ruins of Palpatine's store­house inside Mount Tantiss. The item was an unre­markable black data card, but its scandalous contents gave full historical details on the decades­old devastation of Caamas. The wholesale destruc­tion of this peaceful world has long been considered one of the galaxy's great tragedies, but for years no one was sure who had been behind the vicious and indiscriminate slaughter. Now the painful truth was laid bare: the aggressors had included a group of Bothan saboteurs.

Many galactic citizens resented the Bothans due to their notoriously devious politics, and now those citizens had a lightning rod on which to focus their fury. Angry denunciations began in the New Republic Senate, with opposing parties speaking out in support of the species, or at least pointing out that modern Bothans shouldn't be held respon­sible for the transgressions of their ancestors. However, it was argued, though many decades had passed, some of the perpetrators might still be alive and should be tracked down. And any implicated Bothan individuals or institutions could be forced to make restitution.

The battle lines were drawn, and the divisive issue threatened to tear the New Republic apart. The only solution would be to discover the identi­ties of the actual Bothans who had participated in the incident, and put them on trial for war crimes.

But such a list, designated the Caamas Document, was nowhere to be found in any cur­rent databases. A call went out to all top New Republic officials: Find a copy of the Caamas Document.

Leia Organa Solo and her husband, having just recovered from a recent confrontation with Boba Fett on Jubilar hoped to prevent the Bothan inci­dent from boiling over into violence. The two vis­ited Bothawui to inspect governmental financial records, but were swept up in an anti-Bothan riot. Twenty-seven rioters were killed in the fiasco, and Solo was framed as a murderer.

Just when things looked as if they couldn't get much worse, Lando Calrissian, taking a break from his latest mining operation on Varn, was inter­cepted by an Imperial Star Destroyer commanded by "Grand Admiral Thrawn." Although a skilled con man himself, even Calrissian was duped and had to admit that the rumors of Thrawn's death seemed to have been greatly exaggerated. Calrissian was released without harm, and he quickly carried the bleak tidings to the leaders of the New Republic.

The news hit the galaxy like a pressure bomb. Agitation over the Bothan incident built to a fever pitch with the astonishing possibility of an Imperial military resurgence, and the New Republic came to the brink of civil war.

Far from the galactic hubs of information, in lonely orbit around the gas giant Pesitiin, Admiral Pellaeon began to suspect that the New Republic had never received his overtures of peace. He was considering abandoning the rendezvous altogether when a substantial armada of battle cruisers leapt from hyperspace and moved into attack formation. The warships were pirates hired by Moff Disra, painted with insignia to make it appear as if the New Republic had rejected Pellaeon's truce and had arrived to exterminate him. Pellaeon was wise enough to realize that such underhanded tactics weren't his enemy's style. After defeating the attackers in pitched battle, he understood that someone had tried to set him up.

In all other respects, though, the grand scheme hatched by Moff Disra, Major Tierce, and Flim was working to perfection. "Thrawn" made numerous appearances, convincing even the most skeptical observers that the most brilliant of Palpatine's grand admirals had found a way to cheat death. With the New Republic dissolving into fratricidal squabbling over the Bothan incident, the newly animated Empire began to look powerful and attractive. Many planetary leaders still remembered how close Thrawn had come to conquering the galaxy a decade earlier, and this time they wanted to ensure that their homeworlds landed on the winning side. Soon, dozens of systems were clam­oring for voluntary readmittance into the Empire.

Still trying to obtain a copy of the Caamas Document, the New Republic threw together numerous plans. In a seemingly unrelated incident on Pakrik Minor, Han Solo and his wife were ambushed by Imperial fighters, but quickly rescued by a group of Imperial clones. This small sleeper cell of clones, grown from the legendary Baron Fel fighter-pilot template, had been deployed a decade earlier by Thrawn, for purposes unknown. But after ten long years waiting for orders, the clones were no longer interested in serving their Imperial mas­ters. One of their number agreed to obtain the top secret coordinates for the Imperial capital world of Bastion. Solo, Calrissian, and Lobot headed into the fortified heart of the Empire to secure the Caamas Document from Bastion's information libraries. They failed.

Fortunately, the New Republic had a backup plan. Yaga Minor was a heavily fortified ship­building center and intelligence base, one of the last jewels in the Empire's crown. An assault there would be perilous and costly, but it appeared to be the only place that might still possess a duplicate of the Caamas Document. Admiral Ackbar and General Garm Bel Iblis drew up plans for a swift raid that would catch the Imperials unawares. The key to their assault was Booster Terrik's Star Destroyer, captured more than a decade earlier at the conclusion of the Thyferran Bacta War and operated by the smuggling captain as a floating bazaar ever since. Such an Imperial-built warship would presumably be able to slip past Yaga Minor's outer defenses.

Leia Organa Solo, meanwhile, learned that Pellaeon's attempt to deliver an armistice message had not been completely unsuccessful. A few bits of the transmission had leaked out before the courier's corvette had been overtaken by Moff Disra's Star Destroyer, and the garbled fragment was at last deciphered. Realizing that Pellaeon's invitation was already weeks old, Organa Solo rushed to the ren­dezvous point and caught the Imperial admiral just as he was preparing to leave. 'Fhe two held talks aboard the Chimaera that were amicable, if incon­clusive. Pellaeon headed back to the Empire to deal with Disra and investigate the reports of Thrawn's incredible resurrection.

But back in the New Republic, passions over the Bothan incident had reached a breaking point. In orbit over the Bothan homeworld, ragtag battle­ships from dozens of pro- and anti-Bothan factions finally exploded into armed conflict, triggered by the sudden destruction of the Bothawui planetary shield generator by Imperial saboteurs. As ships fired on the planet's surface and on each other, Organa Solo struggled to impose order.

Han Solo inadvertently found the solution. Investigating a suspicious comet on close approach to Bothawui, Solo was startled when the Millennium Falcon dipped beneath the invisibility screen of a cloaked Imperial Star Destroyer. Their ambush spoiled, the three Star Destroyers abruptly dropped their cloaks and charged forward to decimate the survivors of the New Republic's fratricidal blood­bath. Unfortunately for them, the appearance of an external threat was sufficient to unite the squab­bling fleets against their common foe. Lando Calrissian led the hastily assembled armadas to vic­tory.

At Yaga Minor, Booster Terrik's vessel prepared for its information raid on the data libraries. The disguised Star Destroyer successfully cleared the outer planetary defensive ring, but was trapped by dozens of heavy industrial tractor beams as soon as it passed the point of no return. Moff Disra, Major Tierce, and Flim were all at Yaga Minor at the time of the failed attack, and "Thrawn" smugly con­tacted his helpless prey to demand Terrik's uncon­ditional surrender.

But an uninvited guest crashed the trio's private party. To the gasps of the watching pit crews, Admiral Pellaeon strode onto the bridge of the false Thrawn's command ship. Of all those present, Pellaeon had known Thrawn best, and the room held its collective breath, waiting for the admiral's judgment. In a cool matter-of-fact tone, Pellaeon dropped the explosive news that the glorious return of Grand Admiral Thrawn had been nothing more than a parlor trick.

Pellaeon's assertion was confirmed when he pro­vided data regarding Flim's origins and current whereabouts. Major Tierce attempted to deny the facts, but Pellaeon had an even more startling reve­lation regarding the former Royal Guardsman. Far from being the last of Palpatine's original body­guards, as he'd claimed, Tierce was in fact merely a clone of the true Grodin Tierce, grown during Thrawn's original military campaign. Enraged, Tierce attempted to attack Pellaeon and was killed instantly. Their coup an utter failure, Flim and Disra were taken into Imperial custody.

Luke Skywalker secured a copy of the Caamas Document. The surviving guilty Bothans were located and brought to trial, bringing an end to most of the internal New Republic discord. No obstacle remained to forestall an official treaty negotiation between the Empire and the New Republic. Within weeks, the historic peace accords were signed aboard the Chimaera by Admiral Pellaeon and acting Chief of State Ponc Gavrisom. After more than two decades, the galaxy's most devastating war ended with the muted mark of a writing stylus.

The Hand of Thrawn 19 A.B.Y.

Just prior to the hunt for the Caamas Document, Luke Skywalker left his Yavin academy and investi­gated a disturbing trend: increasing numbers of cloned crewmen had been appearing aboard outlaw pirate vessels. Ten years earlier, the New Republic had concluded that the clone threat was effectively over, following the destruction of the Mount Tantiss facility. The presence of new clones indi­cated that someone had found a way to activate Thrawn's sleeper cells of clone soldiers.

While scouting out a pirates' nest in the Kauron asteroid field, Skywalker was ambushed by blood­thirsty buccaneers and nearly killed in their inge­nious "Jedi Trap." Skywalker managed his narrow escape only through the timely arrival of Mara Jade. On her way to the nearest New Republic med­ical facility, Jade noticed a strange alien craft. The mysterious bystander broadcast an unintelligible garbled signal, then vanished into hyperspace.

Mara Jade dropped Skywalker off at a medcenter, then paid a visit to her longtime employer Talon Karrde. While there, she encountered another of the enigmatic alien ships. It jumped into hyper­space, but now Jade had two hyperspace exit vec­tors. By plotting them as straight-line paths, she found the convergence point-a jaw-droppingly remote star system near the Unknown Regions, dutifully logged in the navigational charts as Nirauan. On Nirauan, Jade investigated a shadowy cave and encountered a thick swarm of tiny winged creatures-half bat, half mynock. Jade lost her footing and was knocked unconscious when her head struck a craggy rock outcropping.

At the urging of Talon Karrde, Luke Skywalker came to the rescue, piloting the heavily armed yacht ]ade's Fire. Skywalker swooped down to the planet's rugged surface, where he was saved from having to search for Mara Jade on foot when one of the planet's batlike natives led them inside a dank, uninviting cave.

The cave dwellers he found there were known as the Qom Jha, and the bat he had initially encoun­tered was of a different tribe, the Qom Qae. Both races were cautiously friendly and requested the humans' assistance in eliminating a menace that lurked in the High Tower, a foreboding black castle perched atop a nearby promontory. Skywalker and Jade agreed.

The safest path to the tower lay beneath hun­dreds of meters of rock. Skywalker and Jade picked their way through dripping underground tunnels, using their lightsabers to clear stalagmites and foil predators. Eventually they reached their destination and discovered the High Tower's true purpose. Nirauan's High Tower was Thrawn's secret weapon-an information repository sometimes referred to as the Hand of Thrawn. The stone fortress had been the grand admiral's base of power, back when he had been sent by Emperor Palpatine to scout the Unknown Regions. Thrawn had succeeded beyond the Emperor's wildest dreams: an immense new swath of previously undiscovered territory had been meticulously mapped and cataloged, representing a bottomless new source of resources that could turn the Empire from victim to vanquisher in a single day. And the Hand of Thrawn's occupants had every intention of turning their closely guarded prize over to the cur­rent Imperial leadership on Bastion.

The stronghold was run by Admiral Voss Parck, a longtime associate of Thrawn's from the Empire's early days, and was operated by the Chiss, the blue­skinned, red-eyed people from Thrawn's home­world. The group had been waiting on Nirauan for a decade, anticipating their leader's triumphant return. For Thrawn had always promised his fol­lowers that if he should ever be killed, he would come back to them in ten years' time. Now, in light of the rumors that someone matching Thrawn's appearance had begun to rally the Empire's rem­nants, it appeared the prophecy had at last come true.

Skywalker and Jade realized that they couldn't allow Parck to contact Bastion. The two Jedi escaped the castle in a stolen alien fighter, and Jade used the beckon call installed aboard the Jade's Fire to rouse her cherished ship and guide it directly into the Hand of Thrawn's hangar bay. The yacht exploded with stunning violence, destroying every craft on the launching pad and eliminating Parck's ability to get any word to the outside galaxy.

But that wasn't enough, and they both knew it. Skywalker and Jade returned to the enemy citadel, this time to a series of chambers far beneath the structure's foundation. There, in a room so pro­tected that not even Parck knew about it, they found a Spaarti cloning cylinder. And floating inside the cylinder was a fully grown clone of Grand Admiral Thrawn.

Their difficult moral choice-to execute a help­less being in cold blood, or to stand aside and allow a new Thrawn to resubjugate the galaxy-was decided for them when the droid R2-D2 jacked into a computer system to download data. The room's automated defensive systems came on-line and focused hot blaster fire on the intruders. Jade's expert lightsaber work eliminated the threat but fatally weakened the chamber's rock wall in the process. With an angry gurgle, thousands of gallons of lake water smashed through the damaged bar­rier, flooding the room in a churning vortex of icy liquid and nullifying the Thrawn clone's impend­ing birth. Skywalker and Jade narrowly escaped, a little waterlogged, but very much alive.

Over the previous decade Skywalker and Jade had progressed from enemies to friends to fellow Jedi, and their experiences on Nirauan marked a turning point in their relationship. After surviving near­death experiences and struggling side by side against overwhelming odds, they began to realize that they seemed matched in ability and in attitude, in strength and in spirit. Though they didn't always see eye-to-eye, their differences complemented one another perfectly. Their hearts meshed together peak-to-valley in a hold that was far stronger than either heart could be standing alone. Luke Skywalker proposed marriage. Mara Jade accepted.

The two left Nirauan behind in a stolen alien starship and headed back to the New Republic with an unexpected find more valuable than ten cargo carriers of glitterstim. During his electronic link with the cloning center computer, R2-D2 had downloaded reams of data from Thrawn's personal archives, and one of the files was a complete, untouched, and entirely accurate copy of the Caamas Document.

Skywalker made preparations for his impending wedding. Three months later, the two Jedi were married in a private ceremony in Coruscant's Reflection Gardens.

After his wedding, Luke Skywalker decided to alter the instruction schedule of his Yavin training center, allowing a portion of the training to focus on younger pupils with developing Jedi skills. After all, Yoda had stated that younger students were easier to teach in the ways of the Force. Some of the more advanced trainees left Yavin 4 to engage in one-on-one teacher-student relationships throughout the galaxy, among them the more mature Jedi Kam Solusar, Kyp Durron, and Streen. Tionne took over many of the historical chores, enriching the legacy of the Jedi Knights. Mara Jade insisted she was no teacher, and spent very little of her time on the jungle moon, even when her husband returned to the praxeum to address his students.

All together, with peace finally declared between the New Republic and the formal remnants of the Empire-though many dissatisfied splinter groups still remained-and with great numbers of new Jedi Knights spreading out into the galaxy, the future looked bright at last.