The book made it to number one on the New York Times list, the authors’ Holy Grail. (It actually beat out John Grisham’s The Firm. He later sent me a copy of his book with an autograph and a very nice, very tongue-in-cheek request for me to get out of his way.)
Heir went through multiple printings—I don’t remember how many. In fact, Bantam was still printing new hardcovers after the paperback came out, which Russ told me almost never happens. (As I recall, his actual comment had a bit more French in it—he was as astonished as anyone else.)
The book actually made it into a Jeopardy! question, which is beyond even New York Times Holy Grail status. (“Timothy Zahn’s best-selling novel Heir to the Empire is a sequel to this movie trilogy.” I still have that episode on tape somewhere.)
The Star Wars fans were out there, all right. And after three new movies, the hit Clone Wars TV show, and numerous books and comics, they and Star Wars are still going strong.
Reading Heir again after all these years has been an interesting and slightly unsettling experience. On the one hand, I see all the stylistic things I would change if I were writing it today—some of the sentence and paragraph structure, bits and pieces of writing technique, maybe some of the pacing. But on the other hand, the story still holds up well. Maybe even a little better than I’d expected it to.
So I invite you now to join Betsy and me on a journey down memory lane. Twenty years is a long time, but we’ll do my best to remember how it all happened.
—TIMOTHY ZAHN
C H A P T E R 1
“Captain Pellaeon?” a voice called down the portside crew pit through the hum of background conversation. “Message from the sentry line: the scoutships have just come out of lightspeed.”
Pellaeon, leaning over the shoulder of the man at the Chimaera’s1 bridge engineering monitor, ignored the shout. “Trace this line for me,” he ordered, tapping a light pen at the schematic on the display.
The engineer threw a questioning glance up at him. “Sir …?”
“I heard him,” Pellaeon said. “You have an order, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir,” the other said carefully, and keyed for the trace.
“Captain Pellaeon?” the voice repeated, closer this time. Keeping his eyes on the engineering display, Pellaeon waited until he could hear the sound of the approaching footsteps. Then, with all the regal weight that fifty years spent in the Imperial Fleet gave to a man, he straightened up and turned.
The young duty officer’s brisk walk faltered; came to an abrupt halt. “Uh, sir—” He looked into Pellaeon’s eyes and his voice faded away.
Pellaeon let the silence hang in the air for a handful of heartbeats, long enough for those nearest to notice. “This is not a cattle market in Shaum Hii, Lieutenant Tschel,” he said at last, keeping his voice calm but icy cold. “This is the bridge of an Imperial Star Destroyer. Routine information is not—repeat, not—simply shouted in the general direction of its intended recipient. Is that clear?”
Tschel2 swallowed. “Yes, sir.”
Pellaeon held his eyes a few seconds longer, then lowered his head in a slight nod. “Now. Report.”
“Yes, sir.” Tschel swallowed again. “We’ve just received word from the sentry ships, sir: the scouts have returned from their scan raid on the Obroa-skai system.”
“Very good.” Pellaeon nodded. “Did they have any trouble?”
“Only a little, sir—the natives apparently took exception to them pulling a dump of their central library system. The wing commander said there was some attempt at pursuit, but that he lost them.”
“I hope so,” Pellaeon said grimly. Obroa-skai held a strategic position in the borderland regions, and intelligence reports indicated that the New Republic was making a strong bid for its membership and support. If they’d had armed emissary ships there at the time of the raid.…
Well, he’d know soon enough. “Have the wing commander report to the bridge ready room with his report as soon as the ships are aboard,” he told Tschel. “And have the sentry line go to yellow alert. Dismissed.”
“Yes, sir.” Spinning around with a reasonably good imitation of a proper military turn, the lieutenant headed back toward the communications console.
The young lieutenant … which was, Pellaeon thought with a trace of old bitterness, where the problem really lay. In the old days—at the height of the Empire’s power—it would have been inconceivable for a man as young as Tschel to serve as a bridge officer aboard a ship like the Chimaera. Now—
He looked down at the equally young man at the engineering monitor. Now, in contrast, the Chimaera had virtually no one aboard except young men and women.
Slowly, Pellaeon let his eyes sweep across the bridge, feeling the echoes of old anger and hatred twist through his stomach. There had been many commanders in the Fleet, he knew, who had seen the Emperor’s original Death Star as a blatant attempt to bring the Empire’s vast military power more tightly under his direct control, just as he’d already done with the Empire’s political power.3 The fact that he’d ignored the battle station’s proven vulnerability and gone ahead with a second Death Star had merely reinforced that suspicion. There would have been few in the Fleet’s upper echelons who would have genuinely mourned its loss … if it hadn’t, in its death throes, taken the Super Star Destroyer Executor with it.
Even after five years Pellaeon couldn’t help but wince at the memory of that image: the Executor, out of control, colliding with the unfinished Death Star and then disintegrating completely in the battle station’s massive explosion. The loss of the ship itself had been bad enough; but the fact that it was the Executor had made it far worse. That particular Super Star Destroyer had been Darth Vader’s personal ship, and despite the Dark Lord’s legendary—and often lethal—capriciousness, serving aboard it had long been perceived as the quick line to promotion.
Which meant that when the Executor died, so also did a disproportionate fraction of the best young and midlevel officers and crewers.4
The Fleet had never recovered from that fiasco. With the Executor’s leadership gone, the battle had quickly turned into a confused rout, with several other Star Destroyers being lost before the order to withdraw had finally been given. Pellaeon himself, taking command when the Chimaera’s former captain was killed, had done what he could to hold things together; but despite his best efforts, they had never regained the initiative against the Rebels. Instead, they had been steadily pushed back … until they were here.
Here, in what had once been the backwater of the Empire, with barely a quarter of its former systems still under nominal Imperial control.5 Here, aboard a Star Destroyer manned almost entirely by painstakingly trained but badly inexperienced young people, many of them conscripted from their home worlds by force or threat of force.6
Here, under the command of possibly the greatest military mind the Empire had ever seen.
Pellaeon smiled—a tight, wolfish smile—as he again looked around his bridge. No, the end of the Empire was not yet. As the arrogantly self-proclaimed New Republic would soon discover.
He glanced at his watch. Two-fifteen. Grand Admiral Thrawn7 would be meditating in his command room now … and if Imperial procedure frowned on shouting across the bridge, it frowned even harder on interrupting a Grand Admiral’s meditation by intercom. One spoke to him in person, or one did not speak to him at all. “Continue tracing those lines,” Pellaeon ordered the engineering lieutenant as he headed for the door. “I’ll be back shortly.”