Heir to the Jedi Read Online Free PDF

meter above the swamp. It was a small stone structure hidden under the canopy of a thinekk tree and further camouflaged by creeping vines. Before the whir of our speeder repulsors faded, Soonta urged me to dismount quickly. The stress in her voice jarred against the languid croaking of frogs and the bored conversation of alien birds.
    “We should move away from the water’s edge,” Soonta said. “Just in case there may be ghests nearby.”
    “Ghests?”
    “Yes,” she said, putting her hand on the small of my back and gently ushering me away from the speeders and into a thicket of bushes that dared me to pass through without getting stabbed and scratched by thorns. “They’re large creatures that like to move quietly in the water before erupting to pluck food off the shorelines, especially herbivores and birds, and we just flew down from the sky to land at the shore—”
    Soonta’s sentence was cut off as an enormous scaled figure splashed out of the swamp and pounced on my speeder bike, wrapping it up with clawed hands and biting down into the front steering vanes with a mouthful of sharp teeth. We scrambled back as the ghest roared, frustrated to find it had ambushed something that was not meat, and it slammed the speeder into the rock shelf with its powerful arms, destroying the vanes in the process and effectively totaling the vehicle. The ghest turned its pale round eyes on us and hissed as it slipped back into the water, disappearing completely, leaving us with thudding hearts in our chests and a single working speeder.
    “Your point is well taken,” I said. “Will it try again?”
    “When we try to leave, yes. There is no doubt,” Soonta said. “It prefers ambush. It knows the speeders are not food now but that we are. It will be watching.” I noticed that there was no way for us to watch the ghest in return. The swamp water revealed nothing of what moved underneath the surface.
    “Can we shoot it?” I asked.
    “Yes. But it is notoriously difficult to get off a lethal shot before a ghest bites you in half. They are not hunted so often as they used to be, but when they are, they are hunted in teams, and those teams often return with a dead ghest and at least one dead Rodian.”
    “Hmm. It won’t come after us on the land?”
    “It’s technically possible but highly doubtful. Ghests are much slower on land and perceive that as a weakness. They prefer the quick strike.”
    We stood in silence for a couple of minutes, looking for any signs of movement in the dark waters. The surface remained still and gave no hint that something stalked us from below. During that time it occurred to me that this had been horrible planning on Soonta’s part.
    “Why did we land so close to shore?”
    “There was no place else to land. You saw that for yourself as we came in.”
    “So you risk an attack like that every time you visit your uncle’s final resting place?”
    “Hardly ever. Someone in the family clears a path and landing area each time we visit. But the jungle is robust, new growth shoots up, and it’s been too long since anyone visited. I might have been the last one to visit, and that was almost a standard year ago.”
    “So how are we getting back?”
    “We’ll have to double up on my speeder.”
    I gestured at the still waters where the ghest waited. “But that thing would never let us get off the ground. You can’t call for someone to come get us?”
    “I know from experience that my comm won’t reach anyone from this place.”
    “What about an emergency beacon?”
    The Rodian gave that single twitch of her head to the left that meant no. “These demonstration models are stripped down, built for speed rather than safety. Our clients always want a demonstration of speed but never ask for a demonstration of emergency services.”
    I sighed in frustration. “Well, let’s do what we came to do, and worry about getting out of here afterward,” I said.
    “Agreed,” Soonta said, and we