Star Wars Jedi: Battle Scars (Star Wars)

Sam Maggs is a bestselling writer of books, comics, and videogames, including Marvel Action: Captain Marvel, The Unstoppable Wasp: Built on Hope, Tell No Tales, and Marvel’s Spider-Man. You can usually find her as host at comic conventions and for geeky networks like the Nerdist. A Canadian in Los Angeles, she misses Coffee Crisp and bagged milk.

Chapter 1

Today was going to be a good day for the Jedi.

Jedi Knight Cal Kestis was going to make certain of that.

Sure, it was possible that he was one of maybe only two Jedi left.

But those Jedi? They were going to have a good day.

“Hey, buddy, things looking clear?” Cal asked, his voice reverberating in his ears inside his helmet. From his back, Cal heard two little taps from his droid, BD-1’s way of communicating with him while on a stealth mission. Cal could hear BD-1’s trills via comms, but sound was risky while sneaking and the droid often preferred to communicate by a more rapid and tactile method, knowing the rest of the crew couldn’t understand him anyway. “Thanks, Beedee. Have I told you lately you’re the best?”

A pause. Then:

Tap.

Cal laughed. “Well, this is me telling you. I won’t slack off on it again.”

Tap tap.

A damn good day.

Which wasn’t usually the case, when a guy was crouched on a small, fast-moving space rock hurtling around a large asteroid in the middle of deep space, but Cal’s life wasn’t usual, and he preferred it that way. Kitted out in a full space suit, Cal took stock of his surroundings, breathing in recycled air slowly and steadily so as not to waste it. The orbital debris field circling the asteroid was dense; Cal had to make his way, leaping shard by rocky shard, each one a step closer to the main asteroid at its center, a massive excavated rock, home to the Haxion Brood base Cal and his crew were currently attempting to infiltrate. Ironic, considering the last time Cal had been around a Brood base he’d been trying to break out of it. That time, he’d been captured. This time, the better move was to get someone on the rock first in order to disable the security systems so that nothing would pick up the Stinger Mantis, Cal’s ship, entering from orbit.

And the best way to do that was for someone to hop, from tiny rock to tiny rock, all the way down to the surface of the big rock. From one moving asteroid to the next, flying through space without a tether.

No problem.

Taking a deep breath, squinting his eyes in concentration, Cal bent his knees before pushing off from the craggy rock beneath his boots.

It didn’t take much out here. One jump, and Cal was—airborne wasn’t the right word, without atmosphere or air to be found. It was more like floating. Different from flying, entirely; when Cal pushed himself into the air with the Force, he always felt that swoop in his stomach, the familiar lurch of his still-very-human body alerting him to the fact that he was far, far too high above land for good sense. But out here in space, this felt more like swimming, forward propulsion, his body with no concept of up or down, right or wrong, too high or too low. Forward, floating, only.