PIETT'S EMPIRE BOOK 1: FROM ADMIRAL TO EMPEROR
Written and submitted by Matthew Smit

Part I:Endor
Chapters: Introduction, #1-6

Introduction- Escape and Capture

Piett stood there, startled awe painted on his face, as he watched the A-wing spiral toward the bridge. For a single, brief second he locked eyes with the pilot of the Rebel fightercraft.

Then, without any conscious effort, any thought at all, he was moving. Running for the turbolift.

As he did so, he registered the scene around him, and though it seemed vague while he was living through it, these few seconds were forever etched on his memory afterwards, clearer than his first kiss, more real than reality.

With a deafening, indescribable sound the A-Wing flew into the bridge. Engines roaring, glass shattering, officers screaming: all these were a part of it.

The fightercraft cut straight through a cluster of bridge officers as they stood paralyzed by fear.

The debris scattering across the bridge reversed directions, and sped toward the darkness of space.

Winds roared and pulled at Piett, but he fought them, overwhelmed them, kept on running. He grabbed onto the opening turbolift doors, held himself there against the overwhelming suction of space.Then there was no air, no wind, and silence.

The A-wing smashed into the back of the bridge and bloomed into an incandescent fireball as the turbolift doors shut with Piett inside, the last sight of the Executor's bridge that he would ever have. A
magnificent ship, and a magnificent crew.

There was no air in the turbolift, and black spots danced before his eyes. The descent, normally smooth, was rocked by explosions throughout the ship.

Then the doors opened, and air rushed in. Piett threw himself from the turbolift and toward the escape pod bay, gasping and sucking in air.

An impact like a massive hammer sent him sprawling onto the ground, and the ship shook and rumbled behind him.

He crawled toward the pods. The screaming rumble of thunder behind him crescendoed.

The Executor was dying.

The pod door opened, and Piett pulled himself in.

It ejected amid gouts of flame from the dying ship, and Piett saw with horror that he was not headed for deep space, but instead for the surface of the Death Star, skimming perilously close to the roiling explosions caused by the Executor's death throes.

Hhe wrested the controls of the pod out of autopilot, sending him in a corkscrewing spiral toward the moon of Endor, but watching the battle he left behind.

And so, as he watched the once-proud Empire half-vanquished or more by the scum of the galaxy, he vowed to renew all that had been lost at Endor.

He would bring back the Empire.

And he would avenge its death.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Piett glanced around the forest.

It brought back memories, that was for sure. Not all pleasant ones.

Memories of the days he had spent as a commando. The forests on Chiyfar 3 had looked a lot like this.

He brushed away the unpleasant flashbacks that threatened to surface. Now was not the time.

Something rustled in the brush behind him, and he spun, drawing his blaster as he did so.

It had been years, but commando training stuck with you.

Just like the memories.

There was a patch of white visible among the foliage.

The white stirred, and a human voice moaned from inside the bushes. It was a strained, painful sound, like the person moaning couldn't draw breath easily.

Piett holstered the blaster, and confidently approached the shrubbery.

A stormtrooper lay sheltered in the bushes, helmet off, armor charred and blackened all along the right side.

The trooper looked up at Piett, eyes glazed over with pain, shock, and recognition.

"Admiral Piett, sir." the man managed to gasp. "Lt. Comd. Talaer Shivon Andleton reporting for duty. Apologies for my current condition, sir."

He fought to salute with his burned right arm, obviously in agony.

"At ease, Lieutenant."Piett said, amazed at the man's discipline. Most stormtroopers, despite extensive training, were brainless, hard-drinking, arrogant fools.

Obviously this trooper wasn't just your average footsoldier.

And then the ignominious happened.

The Ewoks attacked.

Piett redrew his blaster.

There were sixteen of the furry buggers. Eight with spears, four with slings, and four with axes. A rabid gleam was in their eyes as they attacked.

Piett fired, wiping out one of the sling-users.

The rest of the hairy devils chittered with fear and rage. Systematically, Piett fired, five more times, wiping out a sling-user, three spearsmen, and one of the axewielders. Realizing that standing around with their collective thumb up their butt was a pretty stupid thing to do, the Ewoks charged. A couple sharp rocks hit Piett in the shins as the sling-users released.

He fried both of the offending Ewoks with a pair of well-aimed blaster shots.Another two shots wiped out the frontmost spearsmen.

And then Ewoks rained from the trees.

Piett hated to admit defeat to anyone, especially short, furry, stupid aliens with sharp wooden sticks.

But the fact of the matter was, they were surrounding him and Lt. Andleton, at least sixty of them, and they were trying to poke spears into his gonads(the highest they could reach.) Obviously, they wanted to take him alive.

Considering the option, he surrendered.

Of course, escaping from them when the time was right should be a piece of ryshcate.

Chapter One-

Humiliating. That was the word that came back to Piett again and again as he surveyed his surroundings. Hanging from a treebranch, in a net of roughly woven fibres, Piett had been stripped of his equipment belt, his blaster, his rank insignia and cylinders, and even his boots, for the Ewoks seemed suspicious of how shiny they were.

The injured stormtrooper enjoyed marginally better treatment. Stripped of armor and all equipment, he was caged on the ground, a poultice of some herbal medicine on his injuries.

Still, Piett was certain an opportunity would come. He had not yet reached the point in his captivity where he might begin to wonder if his captors actually had the skill to keep him caged. And so, since he could do nothing else, he observed the Ewoks, tried to see patterns or habits in their movements, tried to tell the smart from the stupid, the authorities from the flunkies. He mentally catalogued the location of every object he saw, as it just might prove useful.

Then he heard some of their chatter, and instantly became twice as alert. Had he heard what he thought he heard? Piett focused on the conversing Ewok guards, listening intently for the syllables he thought he had heard pronounced.

"Ochitakaesjhaeruilakovidrawoshkan." He was unable to discern one word from the next, listening to the high-speed babbling.

"Kirowakawaejifaehansolomakashd."

There! There those three damning syllables were again. Coincidence? Some native word or phrase?

"Vakikimbarwakashahansolod'regaronchuvoodatoe."

Again. It was entirely possible that the buggers simply had a like-sounding, different-meaning word, but Piett was taking no chances.

"Segumbrawahansolokandivura."

"Han Solo."Piett said aloud, addressing the guards. They gave him evil Ewok grins, and one responded.

"Vakikimbarhansolomakashad ." Nothing was for certain. "hansolo" might mean "you will be
beheaded" or some such charming thing. But Piett didn't think so. Rebels had to have reached the moon in order to disable the shields. And he was nearly certain that some of the scum still infested this blasted planetoid.

One thought ran through his head.

I have a bad feeling about this.

~~~~~~~~~

Nighttime on Endor was an unpleasant experience. Thousands of luminous eyes stared out of the abysmal darkness, glowing orbs of various colors that seemed unconnected to any physical form as they floated in the solid starless black that came as a result of a forest canopy hiding any glimpse of the sky.

It was into this nightmarish scenario that Piett meant to make his escape. He was unable to disassemble the net, but he had loosened the knots holding the ropes in place. Now he slid them out of the way and nimbly slipped out in the widened gap.

Hanging twenty feet above the ground, he began to swing back and forth, his momentum causing the net to move as well. Like the weight on the end of a pendulum he swung from side to side, each time getting closer to the trunk of the mammoth tree.

Then, he let go of the net, dropping at an angle until he slammed against the tree, scraping and abrading his skin in a dozen places.

Gripping the rough bark with both hands, he began to descend, climbing backwards.

The two Ewoks assigned to guard him overnight were in a rough wigwam a few yards away, napping. One of them snored. The sound of his escape had not awakened them.

Inside the wigwam lay all the equipment they had confiscated from him. Equipment he intended to reclaim. Circling the rough, branch-woven hut, he spotted at least three structural supports, two of which had to remain in order for the wigwam not to collapse. Working his hands under the edge, he lifted the side of the wigwam he was on nearly a foot off the ground. Letting go with one hand, he tugged at the support, working it back and forth as he tried to pull it out of the weave. It slid out after only a minute of effort. Shoddy work. The next support was harder. After managing to get it halfway out, it got caught up on a tangle of the interwoven branches. Piett yanked on it, and the wigwam promptly fell in on itself, concussing the Ewoks. Sorting through the ruins of the hut, he pulled out seven things: both equipment belts, both blaster pistols, the trooper's blaster rifle, his own rank insignia, and his boots. Having a pretentious pile of brush collapse on top of them had scuffed the black demileather. Pity.

The rest of the escape was less subtle. After blasting through the bars of Andleton's cage, he handed the man a blaster pistol (he couldn't really fire a rifle without using his injured arm), fastened both equipment belts around his own waist, put his rank insignia into his pockets, and set out into the depthless deep forest night, Andleton covering both their backs.

Whatever 'hansolo' meant, whether it was phonetic coincidence or precisely what it seemed, Piett wasn't sticking around to find out.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Endor night closed in around them, a threatening curtain of darkness attempting to smother their hope. Now and then, a large, sinuous shape would detatch itself from the shadows and slink off the 'path' they were taking. The 'path' was actually more of a vague direction, one which they hoped they were keeping to. Winding around foliage in the inky, tangible darkness, it would have been quite possible to get fully turned around and never realize it. However, that was one problem they didn't encounter. Perhaps whatever capricious gods of fate ruling over MIAs decided that briars, quickmud, grasper vines, rockrat burrows to trip them up, and the occasional tree snake were enough, at least for the near future.

Of course, once they showed that they could handle these minor hassles, those same deities would indubitably send more at them.

A lot more.

Chapter Two-

The sun rose over the forest moon of Endor to look down upon anacutely frustrated Piett. He and Andleton weren't doing too well.The part of the forest they were trying to travel through wasinfested by so many thornbushes of so many species that Piett had begun to wonder if some lifeform on this force-forsaken moon hadn't taken to farming, and now he and Andleton were marching through the unknown farmer's crop fields.

And inadvertently doing a lot of harvesting. A two hours' march later, they finally reached the end of the thornbushes. The trees ahead were sparser, but the foliage nearer the ground was thicker and nettlesome-looking. The ground was wetter. Pools of murky water and stretches of mud dotted the landscape.

But there were no thornbushes whatsoever. They went forward eagerly. In their elation, the joy of escaping the thornbushes, the confusion of the ordeal of the last few days, both of them forgot to be cautious. This was a strange forest, and one full of dangers. A fact Piett realized when he found himself wading _in_ the ground and not walking _on_ it.

Mud. Deep, thick mud. He stopped walking forward, prepared to turn around and get out of this mudhole.

At which point he realized he was sinking deeper. Not just mud,then. Quickmud.

He turned as well as he could to face Andleton.

The stormtrooper was nearly up to his waist in another patch of the stuff.

Well. This was bad. He'd faced worse situations, like the Karmiklic back on Ladures Prime, or the ambush on the marshes of Haelagoh.

Of course, he'd had Javis, Cirtaine, and Ziulic to help deal with the Karmiklic, and there had been twelve full teams with him on the marshes. Even if the ambush had been horrific enough to convince him to transfer to the Navy.

Always before, when he had encountered danger, he had had subordinates to do the dirty work, comrades to aid him in what he had to do, or a superior officer clearly defining his objective. For the first time, he faced death with only a wounded stormtrooper who might be able to help, a stormtrooper concerned with saving his own life at the moment.

Piett unslung the blast rifle from his shoulder, searching for someone or something to attach the blame to, and shoot. All he saw were the trees surrounding him, thickly hung with grey-green vines.

Say.....

A burst of blasterfire severed one of the vines on one end, and the broken end hung down.

Just out of reach. Piett fired again, scything the red bolts back and forth. A curtain of broken vines swung down all around, the ends flaming. Piett grabbed hold of the nearest, and saw Andleton catch hold of another. It took ten minutes to pull himself free of the clinging mud, and the burning vines had scorched his uniform in half a dozen places.

Here, he was faced with two options: go on, and risk death at the hands of quickmud, or go back into the endless sprawl of forest floor packed with briars. Really, there was no choice at all. He tried to tell himself it was a rational decision- re-entering the thornbushes meant heading back in the direction of the Ewoks. But really, it was just that he couldn't bear the ordeal of a million stabbing, scratching thorns another time.

And so, once Andleton was freed, they carefully went deeper into the swamp.

Chapter Three

The forest stretched onward, as far as Piett could see, and for one less than sane moment, he almost believed that it would have no end. Of course, he'd believed that of the bog-ridden swamp a few hours ago, before it gave way to more hospitable woodlands. The sky above was overcast with greyblue thunderheads, a rising storm that would, in all likelihood, break overhead far too soon for comfort.

Seventeen hundred hours. Two days since the Executor had plunged into the side of the Death Star like a rusty dagger into a duranium shield, shattering in a rush of flame. Two days since the Death Star had blazed in the sky like a second sun going supernova. Two days since the Empire Piett had known and loved had been destroyed.

Who would take over now? The Grand Admirals would attempt to hold their own territories, jealously guarding against any authority, or so he thought. They had been loyal to the ideals of the Empire, but most had also been fierce rivals, acknowledging only Palpatine as superior to them. Any alliance between them would become a struggle for power and leadership, a civil war with both sides claiming to be in charge of the one true Empire. Intelligence would probably strike out on its own under Isard's ruthless control. Piett had never trusted that woman. If he ever escaped this Force-cursed world, he would take it upon himself to ensure the survival of a fleet that would hold true to the ideals of justice and order that the Empire stood for.

Now, he just wanted to be free of this blasted swamp.

With Andleton's arm in its present condition, Piett had decided that they had traveled far enough for the day. Now, the man was setting up a makeshift camp a mile or so back, while Piett scouted out the terrain, and hunted for dinner. He and Andleton each had a comlink, so they could keep one another appraised of any problem that reared its ugly head, or so that Piett could get back to the campsite if he became disoriented.

So far, the swamp seemed devoid of animal life large enough for a decent meal. The only creatures he'd seen were small enough that one bolt from a blaster rifle would char them far beyond ' well done.'

But he knew their had to be more. Somewhere in this forest, there had to be some kind of animal, a predator maybe, that was good-sized, big enough to provide a meal or three. A shadow passed overhead, and he heard the rustling of leaves.

Of course! In a world of forests, arboreal creatures would thrive. They'd rise up the food chain. Swiftly, he glanced up, shifting his rifle's aim as well. Nothing. But whatever it was, it had been big. It had been quick. And the streamlined silhouette he saw hadn't belonged to any herbivore.

"Lunch," he said, quietly, sounding very satisfied. The creature's presence would explain why there didn't seem to be much else in the surrounding area. A predator that size would certainly strike fear into any smaller animals around, inspiring them to hide.

Piett felt a tingling on the back of his neck, and it suddenly occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, there was a logic to the behaviour of the animals lower on the food chain. He coupled this thought with another realization- maybe he wasn't the only hunter here. And maybe he was the prey.

No time to turn and face it, to make a stand. Piett threw himself forward, diving under the rapier-like claw that stabbed through the airspace he'd vacated. Painfully, he landed on the unforgiving forest ground, and rolled off his stomach into a crouch.

What he saw was unlike anything he'd expected.

The beast was something like a spider-centaur, covered in slick black fur. On the lower half, the more spidery half, were six legs, each of which divided in three at the knee. Beyond that point, they were covered in small, grasping, spiny protrusions that waved as if they had a life of their own. Above each leg was a cluster of three thick, muscled tentacles. Where a tail might be were a trio of whiplike, slender tentacles, longer than the rest, barbed with curved hooks. On the upper half were three pairs of arms. The highest pair were each tipped in a straight, swordlike claw, one of which had nearly impaled him only minutes before. The next terminated in chitin-covered, taloned hands, each with six fingers, and three opposable thumbs. The last two were six-parted pincers, opening and closing with a rather disturbing amount of force. Piett's gaze drifted upward. This creature definitely had a thing for multiples of three.

Three heads. Each with long, powerful necks, three eyes centered over three nostrils on the wedge-shaped head. Three curving antlers arced above those. Each head sported a wide beak, opened to reveal triple serrated rows of teeth, and a tri-forked tongue. Gigantic surprise.

He stepped back, bringing his blaster to bear... then tripped, his foot stuck in the burrow of some small, probably rodentlike creature. The shot went wild as he fell backward, scorching one of the nearby trees, and starting the leaves ablaze. Peachy. Just peachy. He should have stayed in the damn Ewok net to wait and see if 'hansolo' was a rebel general or a bizzare variety of Ewok torture involving primitive wooden anal probes.

Hey, at least his life expectancy would probably be a little better.

The creature began to charge...

Chapter Four

The overshadowing clouds told the forest below that rain was due to arrive, and soon. But the forest had within it a darker and more immediate promise.Something had struck a flame into existence on the branches of the tree. Leaves kindled, wood charred. Thick, ropy tendrils of white smoke wound their way toward the oncoming rainclouds. And the fire spread. The branches of a second tree caught fire, at about the same instant that the fire began on the trunk of the first tree. The forest
was thick here, and trees neighboring one another had many branches interwoven, easy bridges for fire to cross, before burning the bridges behind them. And so, it would all burn, all of it, as far as the fire had time to spread, across the dry wood, until the rain came. But the clouds seemed reluctant to loose the torrents they held within.

And, beneath this increasingly hot tableau, a man named Admiral Kinneth Piett was fighting for his life. And, at the moment, he was losing.

He threw himself sideways, out of the creature's path. It overshot its target(him), turned more quickly than anything with its bulk ought to be able to, and before it could do anything else, Piett scrambled up to his feet and took careful aim with his blaster rifle. The bizzare beast he was fighting, with its fixation for multiples of three, charged him for the third time.

The first, he had thought to hunt it, and narrowly avoided becoming a light snack. The second, he had tripped, and his shot had gone wild, sparking the forest fire. For each of them, this was the third attempt to cause the other's death. They said that third time was the charm. Piett's question was, which one of them would it be good luck to?

At the moment, he'd have given three-to-one odds that it was the beastie attacking him.

Oh well. His luck hadn't been too great since he reached this system anyway. He'd survived without it.

Piett fired. The stream of red blaster bolts seared a black and burning hole through the left temple of the creature's leftmost head. The blasterfire penetrated the skull, and cooked whatever rudimentary brains might be inside.The head slumped, dead and useless. A fanatical gleam lit the eyes of the other pair of heads, and the creature charged all the faster.A second burst of blasterfire exploded one of the creature's pincer-claws, and a third pulse burned away half of its back right foot.

The creature kept charging. Muscles tensed, and it lunged, necks stretching outward at an unbelievable speed, muscles visibly rippling beneath the fur and skin covering them over.

Piett had time for a single shot before he had to throw himself backward. It blew apart the right head's middle eye, leaving the socket a mostly empty, charred, and steaming hole, gaping hideously at him. Evidently, the blaster bolt had done more damage than was visble, for this head as well went limp.

Now the beast reared over him, ready to crash down with all of its weight and various tools for rending flesh.

Directly above him, he suddenly saw what his target should be: the still-extended neck of its centre head.

In a fraction of an iota of a infinitesimal part of a split second, he flicked the rifle's setting to continuous fire, then pulled the trigger, waving the rifle back and forth.

A spray of hot, shifting-colored blood sprayed from the beast's throat, spattering his less-than-as-clean-as-regulations-directed uniform with it. After a moment, it settled on one hue: a silvery blue-white. The blood still gushing forth from the creature stopped changing colors as well, but it remained an eye-hurting neon orange.

Piett heard three thuds. The first was the sound of his blaster rifle dropping from his hands. The second was the craetures corpse, collaping les than a foot away in front of him.

The third came from behind him.

He spun to face the noise: and found himself being stared down, rather grotesquely, by the creature's severed central head.

Wow. If he ever got off this planet, he'd give his complemnts to whoever manufactured these stormtrooper rifles. Czerka, he thought.

He could hear the sound of the beast's corpse twitching behind him in its death throes.

From his belt, he pulled his vibroblade and a micro-repulsor harness. Time to butcher as much of the creature as he could. Dinner was served. And he'd have to rig up the harness if he wanted to bring his trophy home along with the meat. he smiled wryly at the severed head. Something to hang on his wall back home. He'd never been much for trophies, although he'd taken a few over the years, but this was an exception.

Too bad he couldn't take the other heads along as well.

Then, he saw it, reflected in the creature's eyes: an orange glow, flickering erratically.

He turned to se what was making it.

Oh yeah. he'd set that tree afire with a stray blaster bolt, centuries ago, it seemed. The flame had blossomed into a full-blown forest fire, and that fire bore towards him with all its hellish wrath, an inferno bent on turning the woods to a fine white ash.

Maybe dinner would be cooked a little sooner than he'd intended.Probably a little overdone.

He hoped the stormclouds overhead would be a little less reticent, and flood the forest with its deluge of rain soon.

Chapter Five

The inferno raged around him, walls of twisting orange flame sweeping through the forest with a hellacious sound, a crackling roar, a sound more predatory than any living being would ever make.The fire was consuming the forest, swallowing it with heat and light and the promise of a painful death.Piett ran through the trees, burning pillars that dropped charred branches from above, as if they were casting spears limned with a molten light at him. Reality had taken on an unrealness, a hallucinatory appearance as Piett's adrenalin severed his bosy from his mind, leaving him unable to think, to fear, to do anything but react. Right now, it was enough to survive. It might even help him survive.

The fire was all around, eating though every tree around him with blazing orange fangs that sank to the heart of their prey, destroying it from the inside out and the outside in and every other combination thereof.

He dove under a falling branch that trailed fire in its wake, like a comet's tail on brain-jagger. Twisting around another tree as its sap overheated and it exploded, he dropped to the ground and rolled beneath a cluster of severed, burning vines that swung at him like a penulum from Hell.

Slowly, his mind adjusted to the surreal world around him. How long since the fire started? Ten, fifteen minutes? An hour? Two? He had no way of telling, for the adrenalin distorted his memory of time as a black hole bending gravity and the fabric of space itself.

He knew he'd been doing this since the fire began in earnest, but his recollection of the time since then were an amalgam of crystal-clear seconds seen in slow motion and undecipherable blurs of fast-forwarded action sequences.

He leaped over a racing wall of flame, not sure why he thought he
must go this direction, uncertain as to why he felt thatthis patch of flame had been blocking him from the path to survival.

He recalled the clouds ahead, but spared not a moment to check if they remained. Why wasn't it raining, dammit? Surely the Ewoks had some crude deity they prayed to for water in times of drought, some spirit of the sky they made pagan sacrifices to or some higher power they did awkward and idiotic looking rain-dances to please.

He really wished that they hadn't ticked this storm god off. Him, and whatever entity they thought caused fire.

Now that his brain was working again, the unpleasantness of his surroundings assaulted him.

He was half blind from the light, the smoke, the sparks. Half deaf from the roar of the flames. Overwhelming heat stifled him, reddening and inflaming his skin as surely as a Tatooine sunburn. His lungs were in agony from the superhot, moistureless air, filled with fine grey ash and suffocating smoke.

Then, over the furious noise of the fiery world around him, Piett heard something else. It, too, was a kind of a roar, but different from that of the inferno.

What made that sort of noise? A steady, unchanging roar like static over a comm channel.....

Then, he knew.

Disregarding the Hell that was slowly closing in aound and collapsing upon him, Piett broke into a sprint.

Ahead was a thick, fallen tree. It had already been dead when the flame lit upon, dry and ready for kindling. Now, a furious sheet of fire rose nearly five feet above it.

This, Piett knew, was going to hurt like a nasty son of a shut-yo-mouth.

But if he waited, if he tried to skirt around the massive tree, he would almost surely die.

Not that his odds were that much greater anyway....

At a dead run he went forward, flinging his hands in front of his face for whatever minimal protection they would give, shutting his eyes so tightly it hurt.

The second roaring sound was louder than ever, just beyond the burning barrier.

He gathered his muscles, his strength, his life and his soul, everything that made him what he was, and pushed it all into his legs, into his leap.

He threw himself over the log. Over the log and through the flame.Through the flame and over the sloping river bank.Over the bank and into the blessedly flame-quenching waters.Into the river... and the rapids. In the rapids, he had time to surface, take a single breath, and steel himself once more..............

.....before the current swept him over the waterfall.

Chapter Six

As he felt the water buoying him up begin to drop away, the first thing Piett thought of, strangely enough, were his days as a cadet.

On Carida, one Cadet Kinneth Piett had been subjected to a number of wilderness survival exercises, along with the rest of his class. He'd excelled at them, part of the reason why he'd been assigned to a SpecOps covert commando unit on the Rim Worlds.His instructors on Carida had sworn that this training prepared the cadets for any situation they might encounter in the less civilized corners of the galaxy.

They had lied.

None of the survival exercises had even mentioned the possibility of being swept over a waterfall.

For a moment, Piett thought he was somehow suspended in midair, having been swept over the edge. Time seemed to pause a moment as he hung there, and for that moment, all was serene. The roaring of the waterfall had silenced, Piett saw, because the falls was as frozen in time as he was, cascading kilolitres of water waiting another second before continuing their fall.Wow. He'd never hallucinated something before, and that was surely what this was, a hallucination. For a second, he thought it might _all_ be unreal, that he was in his quarters on the Executor having the worst and most vivid nightmare possible, and then some.

He glanced down.

Time resumed, and gravity clenched him in its unforgiving fist once more. The waterfall continued its suicidal plunge.

Nope. This was probably real.

The roiling white water descended for close to three hundred feet before crashing against jagged, craggy spires of obsidian black rocks. The shores and bottom of the pool below were made of the same material, but smoothed, as were the banks of the river that swept on from the waterfall's foot, making the water appear purely black in the places the waterfall didn't churn it a foamy white.

He'd fallen long distances before, but this time was different. Both faster and slower. Slower, because he had time to think, time to watch the world around him as he descended. faster because it felt that way, like he was tied to the nose of a swoop in a full-thrust dive.

Dive. That was it, the key, what he had to do if he had any hope of survival. That, and hope he didn't hit one of the rocks that protruded from the water's surface like the tips of massive spears, eager to impale him.

Well, he hadn't been captain of his swim team back on Carida, but he hadn't been bad either.

Kicking his legs back, he spun so that he now rushed toward the water headfirst. He extended his arms before him, took a deep breath, and was filled with a little pride, for a moment. Perfect form. He still had it.

And then he hit the water. It parted around him. The impact felt like a punch by an angry Mon Calamari, and for a moment all his muscles seized up.

He opened his eyes, never having remembered that he closed them, and found himself in a frothing cloud of bubbles, still traveling nearly as fast as he had in the air as the tons of water from the falls shoved him further under. The water was a dark marine blue, under the foaming surface, but fairly clear.

Below him loomed a pointed lance of stone, a submerged knife carved from the bottom of the river-bed.

He twisted sideways, kicked with his legs, and neatly evaded it, almost. He felt it snag on his uniform , tearing the back of it. His back scraped against the rock, but not hard enough to draw blood.

Quickly, he pulled himself through the water, out from under the falls that hammered down all that passed beneath them.He surfaced, and took a deep breath, before the current caught him.It was like being trapped in a tractor beam aimed at him from further down the river. Instantly he was pulled along, propelled as though he was being dragged by an aquatic podracer. It was all he could do to keep his head above the surface of the swiftly moving water.

Well, that was okay for now. He hadn't died with the Executor, been slain by arboreal teddy bears, swallowed by quickmud, eaten by a giant centaur-spider with a fetish for the number three, burned alive by a forest fire he'd accidentally triggered, or pulverized on the rocks below the waterfall. After all those spectacular exits to this life that he'd barely avoided, he was pretty sure he that the river didn't have what it would take to finish him off. Even with all the mean tricks she liked to play, Lady Luck probably hadn't saved his ass this many times in order to let him drown.

And so, he trusted to fate to save him. It became a tedious business after the first ten minutes and the third near-death experience underwater, but as he came up choking and spluttering, his belief paid off. The weakened current passed directly underneath a tree that had fallen so that it now bridged the river.

Reaching up with tired hands, he snagged a branch and hauled himself up out of the river, then crawled along the length of the tree until he reached the riverbank. He stood, albeit unsteadily, on the  dry ground.

Thunder crackled in the menacing clouds above. And then, of course, the long-overdue rain began to fall thickly, in near-solid curtains that drenched all they touched. The wind, cold and fierce, began a very good imitation of a Chadran squall-gale. Violet-white lightnings danced in the dark skies above.

Piett began trudging back toward the camp he and Andleton had made. It probably wasn't that far off. Just about eight or ten miles through the wildly storming forest night.