Star Wars Visions: Ronin

Book 0: Star Wars

by Emma Mieko Candon

Genres: Media Tie-In; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Brought to you by Penguin.

A stunning original novel inspired by the upcoming Star Wars Visions animated anthology series. Experience Star Wars like never before.

© Emma Mieko Candon 2021 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Release date: October 12, 2021

Publisher: Random House Worlds

Print pages: 352

Sample

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away….

 

At the far edge of the galaxy, a lone wanderer roams the Outer Rim. In defiance of Imperial edict, the RONIN dares to wear a certain blade on his sash. None know his name, nor what he seeks—only that death and disaster follow in his footsteps. No doubt the gods themselves have cursed his forgotten name….

 

CHAPTER
ONE

Two months after the Ronin arrived on the Outer Rim world of Genbara, he ran out of credits. This concerned him less than it did B5-56, who took every opportunity to scold.

“Look at it this way,” he told his trundling companion. “No need to worry about where we’ll sleep.”

A man with no coin had no reason to pace his trek in terms of outposts and inns. He could pay for no bed. Thus, he could wander to his heart’s content, and the woodland vistas of Genbara did reward the wandering. Vast stretches of pine were interrupted only by patches of farmland, claimed by settlers rebuilding their lives far from the scars war had left on worlds nearer the galaxy’s Core.

The Ronin slept that night under a small lean-to that a local woodcutter had told him of the day before, when he passed the old man’s hut on his way into the mountains.

“The mountains, sir? Are you sure?” the woodcutter had said as he sucked his teeth. They sat on the veranda of the man’s hut and shared a pot of stale tea. It had been the last in the Ronin’s tin, but he offered it freely in exchange for hot water and company. “You’ll want to follow this road up, past the ridge. It will take you to a village in the valley. If it’s still there.”

An ominous thing to say. To the Ronin, it suggested he was on the right course. B5 saw the look in his eye. The droid’s own eye flashed from red to blue under his thatched hat as he murmured a warning.

The woodcutter, who had no facility with Binary, mistook the dome-headed astromech’s sound for nervousness. He grinned. “There were four villages up there, little droid, when I first built my humble hut. Then there were three, then two—now just the one. Word is they angered a spirit. A spirit that doesn’t take kindly to settlers.”

Yet he thinks the spirits don’t mind him? said a voice in the Ronin’s ear.

“Mountains are different,” the Ronin said.

The woodcutter, who thought he had been spoken to, nodded sagely. B5 swiveled a baleful eye to fix on the Ronin in what was likely supposed to be a glare. The Ronin pretended not to notice it, but he did remind himself to be careful. On occasion, when in the company of others, his responses to the voice were dismissed. On other occasions, they were not, and this could go quite badly. If the village in the mountains still stood, he would be among new people soon, and they sounded like a superstitious lot.

---

—

The following morning, he stretched the cold out of his limbs as he rose and ate half a ration-stick from his pouch, the last remaining. The chewing was slow going, with the ache; he rubbed at the line of old metal that supported his jaw from ear to ear.

B5 grumbled at him all the while, calling him old and simple besides. Surely, the droid said, his master remembered that he had the means to acquire enough credits to fund his fool journey until it killed him—or at least enough to purchase a more up-to-date prosthetic. Yet he hoarded his bounty to the point that some shamefully mundane evil would doubtless get him first. Perhaps the chill, or infection, or worse.

“You know I would be more foolish to try to sell one of these,” said the Ronin, patting the treasures hidden in the folds of his robes. “Where would I say I got it?”

Then what do you plan to do with your winnings, other than collect them? the voice asked, rather bitterly at that.

He couldn’t give her an answer. Not one she could stand.

Moved by a reflexive guilt, he glanced at the inner lining of the long hooded vest he wore as a cloak. The robe had weighed the same for at least a year now, when he had last added to the collection within. The crystals sewn into the seam glinted as if in greeting, letting off red flickers that illuminated his fingers, elated by the promise of his attention. They wanted him to touch them, to take them and give them use.

He let the robe fall closed, crystals untouched. Here was his reason, even if she didn’t care for it: So long as he carried them, they could bring no further harm.

Outside of what harm you commit, she said.

“If you wish me dead,” he said as he stepped out onto the needle-strewn path between the pines, “you have only to point the way.”

Go on to your little village, then.

Experience told him that she would provide no further advice. After all, she would doubtless prefer that whatever he met in the village be the end of him rather than the other way around.

---

—

The chill of the night bled into spring as the sun rose. The Ronin stopped on the ridge overlooking the last village left in the mountains, B5-56 at his side. In the distance, at the far end of a pine-ridden valley, the swooping lines of a crashed ship gleamed whitely. Some sleek, gallant vessel that had met its ignoble end face-first in the sloping mountainside. Its silver hull shone like a star under the fierce morning light.

Poetic, wouldn’t you say? said the voice.

“I would say it’s broken,” said the Ronin.

B5 whined, disappointed.

“Doing what again? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

B5 sighed as magnificently as Binary allowed.

Together, they set off down the path to the last village in the mountains. Somewhere within it, they would find the Ronin’s quarry—or they would find nothing. A cowardly part of him hoped for the latter. Perhaps it was this part that made him slow as they reached the last rise before the village proper, where a teahouse stood beside an ancient bending pine. A troubling odor wafted out of the structure into the road, and despite B5’s scold—didn’t they have somewhere to be?—the Ronin let it lure him to the door. He found the shopkeep—a tidy Sullustan fellow whose rounded cheeks had grayed with age—seated on the clean-swept floor, fiddling with a rectangular power droid’s wiring and bemoaning its temperamental nature.

The Ronin’s shadow startled the shopkeep, who scrambled upright to study the stranger. His wary black eyes flicked up to take in the Ronin’s intimidating height, draped in road-stained garb, and down to the two scabbards hung conspicuously at his waist.

You look entirely evil, she said.

The Ronin frowned; the shopkeep flinched. “No, not you,” said the Ronin. Then he cursed, which didn’t help. “Your power droid. It’s leaking. I could smell it from the road. I can fix it for you.”

The shopkeep remained wary until B5 peered out from behind the Ronin’s cloak. The droid greeted the shopkeep and apologized for his companion’s dreadful appearance all in one go. Feed him, said B5, and he’ll fix any droid you point him to.

Even ten years ago, the Ronin might have argued for dignity’s sake—was he to be some manner of beggar, exchanging menial repairs for menial returns? Now he knew himself with the humility of age. When the shopkeep agreed, he simply asked where the man kept his tools.

The voice said nothing, though her impatience weighed on his mind like the threat of incoming rain. She would have preferred he throw himself boldly into whatever she had lying in wait. He preferred to make himself useful.

The power droid proved an easy enough fix. The Ronin had only to work off the stained front of its chassis and reach around its cabling to identify the leak. His fingers came away silty with exhaust debris that had disrupted the pathway of the power coupling. He asked the shopkeep if there was a sizable transmitter, or perhaps a chronometer he could bear to live without. The shopkeep returned with an ancient holoprojector, which the Ronin deftly dismantled. He found he only needed one of the projector’s two safety sealants to properly contain the leak and had the whole thing cleaned and fitted back together within the hour.

“Mortifying, isn’t it?” said the shopkeep to B5 as they watched the Ronin work. “I could have repaired an astromech like yourself in my sleep, back during the war. Still could, perhaps. But they never asked the specialists to look after our own power droids, and here I am, utterly helpless when it stops warming my tea.”

When the Ronin stood, the shopkeep ushered him out into the shaded seating area just outside the teahouse. He promised to provide a proper pot of his most exquisite blend, which was even now steeping on the humming power droid. “To think I mistook you for a bandit!”

The Ronin merely nodded thanks. From this vantage, he could see the entirety of the village proper. A humble affair, mostly comprising two rows of wooden slat and thatch-roofed houses reinforced with the discarded durasteel remnants of ships that had fallen in the war; these were lined neatly across from each other, aside from the handful of other outlying structures and a pair of simple, unfortified watchtowers. A grand storehouse occupied the center of town, hung with banners and protected by an old ship door. Most of the villagers worked the rice fields that sustained them, while some met in the central square before the storehouse to discuss this or that spot of business, and children ran cackling through the streets. A peaceful tableau. The sort only delicately held, this far into the Outer Rim.

Peace is scarce and dearly bought, she said.

This time, the Ronin managed to hold his tongue, though B5 detected a twitch in his lips; the droid beeped irritably, for which he earned a scold from the shopkeep while the man delivered the tea. B5 primly informed the shopkeep that it was rude to say things others couldn’t understand.

“Thank you,” the shopkeep chuckled in the Empire’s tongue—he thought himself chided. He poured an expertly steeped cup for the Ronin, who accepted the brew and found himself pleased by the local peculiarity of the aroma, faintly sweet with pine.

“How did you come to be traveling the countryside on foot, sir?” asked the shopkeep.

“A certain someone is always after me about exercise,” said the Ronin.

B5 whistled hotly.

The shopkeep chuckled. “Of course you’re right, he should listen to your sage advice.”

The Ronin was inclined to weigh in on B5’s smug silence, but his attention twitched away. He let his eyes glide after what had pulled his mind and was drawn toward an oncoming rumble, echoing from the mountains. The source of the sound soon tore down the path the Ronin had walked only an hour before.

An enormously thick and armored vessel, one that had been built for war. It thundered down the mountain path, past the teahouse, toward the village. No branches snapped as it plowed through the trees. It had come this way before. The teahouse trembled in its wake and the shopkeep cursed its passage, as rattled as his teacups.

The sound of the vessel’s approach soon reached the town. The figures in the field dropped their tools. Adults grasped at children as they fled toward their homes, sheltering the young with their own bodies.

Scarce peace indeed.

“Bandits—they’ve been hiding in a deserted village across the mountain,” the shopkeep said, low and apologetic as he ducked behind a wall, peeking down at his neighbors below. “Soldiers. Ex-soldiers—or the remnants of Sith troops. We don’t know. Does it matter?”

That explained what had happened to the other mountain villages. Angry spirits were, in the Ronin’s experience, much harder to come by than bandits.

Will you not go to them? she asked. She meant to tease him. Goad him, more like. It would suit her if he ran toward danger the second impulse told him to. But impulse would so likely see him dead before he accomplished his goal. Moreover, he didn’t yet know if this was the sort of bandit who had earned his effort—or if the greater danger yet lay in wait within the village. Soon enough, he would see.

B5 whined lowly, as if his master’s thoughts were audible. The Ronin couldn’t be certain whether B5 wanted him to go now or if he feared his master going at all. Perhaps he wished for some impossible alternative course of action to present itself. B5 did hate to see the Ronin bleed, and it was all but certain that today, he would.

Below, the armored vessel came to a looming halt in the village square, doubly as tall as any of the houses. There, it opened its doors. Three slabs of metal broke from its sides and extended forward into ramps, down which the bandits marched. They wore scraps of discarded armor—blaster-scarred white helmets, shoulder plates, greaves—and little else but loincloths, bandannas, and armbands to mark themselves to one another. They fancied themselves mighty for their nakedness.

Such brave men, who stormed down the street to kick open wooden doors and drag out crying villagers.

The voice chuckled. The Ronin gritted his teeth and sipped his tea.

“Sir, it’s dangerous—please, wait inside,” the shopkeep urged, an arm slung around B5’s head, as if in fear the astromech would skid off.

Indeed, two bandits had turned their eyes up toward the teahouse. The Ronin frowned down at them. The distance was too great for them to properly fix on his silhouette, and he had no fear of bandit blasters.

In any case, it was not these bandits who held tight to the edge of his attention, that drove him to study all before him—it was some other presence, a hidden thing, tense and poised to strike. If the Ronin hadn’t seen his quarry, he suspected it was because he had not seen them yet.

---

—

Such was the scene below: The bandits gathered the villagers together in the dusty square. The better to dispose of them, should they so decide. Every last family member was caught, dragged, and made to huddle together in a display of abject helplessness.

“Thank you, thank you for the fine welcome,” crowed a bandit wearing the orange pauldron of a commander. “Now it’s time to pay up. We’ve come to collect this year’s taxes.”

The long-haired bandit beside him leered. “That was an order! Which one of you’s the chief?”

A figure emerged from within the crowd, small, lithe, and wild-haired. A child, no older than ten. He walked forward, posture stiff, and in a clear voice declared, “I am the current village chief. And you—you’ve taken enough.”

The commander leaned back, appraising the child. “You? I know you. You’re the chief’s son.” He spat. “Running away and leaving his village to a child. What a coward your father must be.”

He broke into laughter, and the other bandits laughed with him.

Up above, the shopkeep whispered to the Ronin, sweat beading his brow. “The village chief is sick,” he said, voice tight with anger and with fear. “The boy—he’s too brave.”

“So valiant!” a bandit howled in the square below.

“ ‘You’ve taken enough!’ ” another bandit simpered. “Ahh, you’re adorable, kid.”

“A brave speech, boy,” said the commander, when the laughter had died down. “But a man’s word is only as good as his weapon, I’m afraid. Now where’s yours? Hmm?”

The boy chief met the commander’s leer head-on. That alone nearly made the Ronin stir from his seat.

Then the boy chief’s arm shot straight into the air.

As it flew up, two shots fired, one from either side of the village. The Ronin tracked the trajectory of each bolt.

One had come from a rooftop near the square, another from one of the watchtowers overlooking the village. On the rooftop stood a three-eyed Gran in light armor, carrying a rifle with a bayonet blade, flat teeth bared. Up in the tower, a well-wrapped Tusken, already taking their next aim with a long sniper rifle. Gran and Tusken each fired another bolt, and another, rapid and precise. With each blast, a bandit fell.

“Well done, guards—I leave the rest to you!” the boy chief cried, and he dashed out of the square, leading the villagers in a herd. Not a single straggler was left behind. They had practiced this evacuation.

What a clever bunch of mice, trapping the cats, the voice said.

“Don’t be rude,” said the Ronin.

The shopkeep was too nervously enthralled by the violence to mind his guest’s muttering.

Below, more hired bodyguards burst out of their hiding places—bounty hunters, by the look of their sturdy, mismatched gear.

A bug-eyed silver protocol droid with a blaster-blackened chassis stalked out of an alley, their rotary blaster cannon mowing down the bandits in the square.

A lean, scaled Trandoshan hurtled down the main drag, taking advantage of his long arms and long weapons—a blade and a naginata—to carve through any bandit who dared cross his path.

A floating dome of a cockpit exploded out from a pile of crates, piloted by a dextrous Dug crouched in its center. A blade hung from each of the five insectile legs sprouting from the drone’s underbelly, and it whirled in a storm of slashes as its pilot howled a battle cry.

A stray bolt lanced up from the fight and caught a support beam of the teahouse; the shopkeep gasped, appalled in the midst of victory.

The Ronin, meanwhile, could only frown. Something on the wind kept his attention squared not on the bodyguards, nor the bandits desperately ducking for cover, but on the bandits’ massive vessel. He felt the voice’s attention settle there too.

For all the violence the bodyguards had unleashed, that lurking tension remained. It bled into the Ronin’s limbs, winding ever tighter in each of them as a hatch on the bandit vessel’s flat roof slid open.

From that hatch rose a figure, carried by a lift. Her dark cloak and veil hid her from the glaring sun as she stood atop the vessel, a short staff held loosely in her grasp. The Ronin shivered at the sight of her.

Well, said the voice. Run along now.

The tea tasted sour at the back of his throat. His fingers tightened minutely on the teacup. He had no reason to doubt what he saw.

Yet something held him still. Perhaps that it had been a good year, at least, since he last faced one of his quarry. Perhaps that he did not yet have proof of what he faced. After all, he didn’t recognize the veiled figure’s stance. He felt that he should have.

As if I’ve ever lied to you. What else do you think she could be?

He didn’t know. Yet neither did he move. The world turned without him.

The Trandoshan now stood in the square amidst a scattering of bodies, his blade and naginata at the ready, as he turned his sharp-toothed maw to face the bandits’ vessel. “Surrender,” he called to the bandit standing over them all. “Do so, and we might just spare your life.”

The bandit raised her staff to her shoulder. The sneer carried in her snarl. “You’re confused.”

“What?” the Trandoshan growled.

“You’ll surrender.” Her head tilted back. “Although I’ll kill you anyway.”

The bandit had barely finished when the protocol droid at the edge of the square let loose a stream of blasterfire from its rotary cannon alongside a string of curses. In the blink of an eye, the bandit unfurled her weapon.

From the end of her staff, six red blades of light extended outward in a deadly flower. When she spun the staff, it formed a white-red shield of light that deflected every last one of the blasts.

“Red lightsabers—she’s one of the Sith!” the protocol droid shouted.

More than anything, it was a warning.

The bodyguards’ following cascade of blasterfire had an air of panic. They no longer fought to win, but to survive, no doubt driven by memories of the war and the fiendish devastation that followed each Sith warrior.

The bandit deflected every bolt, her lightsaber parasol a whirl of color. One shot ricocheted off her shield and screeched through the sky, straight into the teahouse.

The Ronin moved at a speed he hadn’t asked from himself in years. In the blink of an eye, he no longer sat before a low table but stood beside the curved pine in front of the teahouse. When he glanced behind him, he saw smoke and rubble. The blast had carved a hole straight through the teahouse wall. The shopkeep had fallen back and, thankfully, the Ronin did not smell singed flesh.

The scorch of metal, now. That was a different matter.

Beside the shopkeep lay B5-56, twitching on the floor, hat knocked askew. Blue shivers of electricity washed over the droid’s surfaces. An old heat crept up from the Ronin’s gut to his head, matched only by an accompanying chill.

He had delayed too long.

I told you, didn’t I? she whispered, although there was a bite to it. Whatever she felt toward him, B5 was another matter.

“S-sir, what should we…” the shopkeep stammered, too shocked to hide behind his remaining walls, let alone flee into the mountains.

“Shopkeep,” said the Ronin, “do you think you can repair him?” He picked up the teakettle from where it had fallen on the floor as the shopkeep nodded uncertainly. “Make sure my partner is fully operational by the time this water boils.”

The shopkeep looked from the Ronin to B5, large eyes unblinking. He nodded once, then again. “Yes—yes, of course!”

A bit of the commander in you yet, I see, she said as the Ronin turned to leave the teahouse. He found he lacked the stomach to reply.

 

CHAPTER
TWO

“Keep firing! Don’t give her a chance to strike!” the Trandoshan called to his fellows.

They panicked so quickly, these rats. The bandit—the Sith—smirked behind her half-mask, a piece of lacquered armor wrought in the long-toothed grin of a proper demon. It had been so long since she was last correctly named. The people of these mountains called her all manner of superstitious things—an evil spirit, a devil witch, a god of foul luck—or they called her bandit, thief, and villain. But Sith? They were too eager to believe the Sith extinct.

So, she would relish the opportunity to recall her truest self.

The bounty hunters—for that was what they were—fired upon her in a frantic wave. The Sith flourished her lightsaber forward, letting it bloom. The auxiliary fit onto the hilt channeled the power of the kyber crystal straight, then outward into six blades that, when she spun the weapon, resembled a parasol. It was, more important, a conveniently deadly shield.

For now, manipulating the physical lift caused by the parasol’s spin let her leap up, carried skyward. The shots drew up short. Fear. It throbbed in time with her eager heart.

“No good!” the Trandoshan howled to his underlings. “Fall back! Don’t let her engage in close combat! Hrk—”

The Sith had landed before him. As she stood, her hand swept up, and with the black current of the Force, the bandit grasped the Trandoshan by the scaled throat as effortlessly as if she had taken it with her own fingers. She squeezed until his eyes bulged, pleased by the flow of her power. Living things outside of her own body rarely moved so lithely with her intent. Something in the air today had sharpened her.

“What were you saying about close combat?” she asked.

The bounty hunters cried out, fearful for one of their fellows. The Sith paid them no mind. Blasterfire sounded behind her again. Her men had risen, invigorated by her turn on the field. They knew they couldn’t lose whenever she deigned to join them.

The Trandoshan gargled, feet kicking at the air. His eyes darted from side to side, to where his men were now hunted by hers. Her own gaze never strayed. She heard screams. Thuds. He gasped. She suspected he had just seen someone die.

Some part of the Sith sympathized, even understood. But she had no true feeling for men who lived for the vainglory of credits.

“Did you really think you could stand a chance against a Dark Lord?” she mused.

The bounty hunter struggled to speak, words barely able to escape his mouth with her hold on his throat. “R-run! We can’t hope to—”

No last words for men without creed. She dropped the Trandoshan. He fell toward the ground, and in the same moment she thrust with her sword arm. Her six short blades speared him through, unfurling on the opposite side of his corpse in a burst of red light.

On the far side of the square, the protocol droid shuddered. Cursed. Opened fire with its rotary cannon.

The Sith flung the body off her saber and lunged toward the droid. Its circuitry couldn’t hope to keep up with her as she was, a living torrent bright with the white flare of the Force. She struck the droid down with a swift bisection—and halted.

As it clattered to the sand at her feet, she inhaled smoke. Blasterfire thickened the air with its searing heat, and on the ash she tasted some new shadow.

The Sith straightened and turned just so to glance over her shoulder. There, in the mouth of the village’s lone cross street that led to the square, stood a darkness of a man. Tall and tattered at his edges, though his broad frame and steady step brought to mind the inexorable chill of a glacier.

Smoke roiled between them. She realized abruptly the wrongness of him: Bright power seethed within a murky shell.

“You’re no villager,” she said. “Who dares face me?”

“A simple wanderer,” he said, and his voice curled at the edge of her memory like parchment set alight.

Her lip twisted behind her mask. She knew a threat when she met it. Fire called to fire, no matter how—or for what mad reason—it tried to douse itself.

She shucked the lightsaber’s parasol auxiliary and tossed the slender contraption forward. Her blood told her to meet the man with her blade. The auxiliary landed tip-first on the gravel of the village square. Tottered.

The Sith flew. She leapt up through the air, saber raised, and brought it crackling down upon the man’s skull.

Until she—it—the world stopped. She shuddered in midair, muscles trembling with kinetic energy suddenly seized. Her body would not move. Neither would her lightsaber. It hovered, centimeters from the man’s impassive face, caught with his naked palms.

No—between. A sliver of space sheathed his hands from her sizzling blade, a fraction pulsating with the feverish pressure of white flare shot through with black current. The Force.

“You. You’re a Jedi,” she snarled.

The very word disgusted her. She so rarely had reason to even think it, here on the edge of civilization. She would have to now. For what reason would a Jedi, vaunted protector of the Empire, have to go slumming in the Outer Rim? None but her, the lone surviving Sith in this half-forgotten sector of the galaxy. This man thought he could kill her.

Let him try.

The man—the Jedi—shoved her away explosively, rejecting every last one of her molecules in a raging white burst. She flew back, her body a puppet. Instinct brought her limbs back in sync. It was as if for a furious moment her body had been so much nothing. She twisted in the air and landed hard on her heels.

Blade out, she faced the man, eyes wide as she tracked his every breath. His hand rested by his hip, by one of the hilts at his belt. Two scabbards. Not just a Jedi—a knight, deemed by his masters to be worthy of a blade.

So much the better. She would enjoy wrenching it from his dying grasp.

“It’s been a long time since I killed a Jedi.” She remembered her last. She, a whip of a girl. He, a grimacing tower of a man. He had split as cleanly as the protocol droid now sparking on the far side of the square.

She came for the Jedi again. No man died simply because she wished it.

And again, her blade met a jarring stop. This one was more honest and true, a twinned flare of light. Another lightsaber clashed against her own—crimson.

No Jedi would carry such a color. Unless—to mock her? No.

The Sith dodged back, lightsaber held up to ward off the other. “You…”

The man’s hand moved by his waist. She tensed to meet whatever blow he would bring to her next. Instead a whistling screech came from behind. She whipped around.

The protocol droid’s severed torso hurtled toward her through the air, sailing on the black current. She sliced through it and spun back to face her opponent—the man had already lunged with blinding speed, his blade up.

“Coward,” she hissed, dodging back again.