Title page painting by Dave Seeley “Armory and Sensor Profile” illustrations by: Ansel Hsiao: this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page Ian Fullwood: this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page “The Anaxes War College System” illustrations by Ansel Hsiao Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. A Del Rey Trade Paperback Original Copyright © 2012 Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization. Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc. eISBN: 978-0-34554274-8 www.starwars.com www.starwars.suvudu.com v3.1 JASON: This is for that kid who just got his first glimpse of the Star Wars saga today, and knows his or her life just changed. I hope books like this help you dream and have fun. PAUL: To Mr. Henry B., in payment of an old debt of honor, which was not expected to involve Ewoks CONTENTS Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Prologue 1 BEFORE THE REPUBLIC 2 THE ANCIENT REPUBLIC 3 ZENITH OF THE REPUBLIC 4 WARS WITH THE SITH 5 DECLINE OF THE REPUBLIC 6 FLASHPOINT: NABOO 7 BEGIN, THE CLONE WAR DOES 8 THE SEPARATIST WAR MACHINE 9 THE OUTER RIM SIEGES 10 THE RISE OF THE EMPIRE 11 EMPIRE TRIUMPHANT 12 IN THE EMPIRE’S SERVICE 13 THE ORIGINS OF REBELLION 14 THE ALLIANCE STRIKES 15 WHEN THE EMPIRE STRUCK BACK 16 SHOWDOWN AT ENDOR 17 AN EMPIRE IN FRAGMENTS 18 END OF AN EMPIRE 19 THE NEW JEDI ORDER 20 THE NEW GALACTIC CIVIL WAR 21 ETERNAL WAR Acknowledgments About the Authors/Illustrators PROLOGUE At the Battle of Endor, Grand Admiral Osvald Teshik continued to fight after the rest of the Imperial task force retreated, engaging Alliance warships for four hours before his Star Destroyer was disabled and captured. He was tried and executed by the Alliance to Restore the Republic for atrocities committed against the citizens of the galaxy. The following is a transcript of his last statement: I’ve been here before, you know. Four years ago, Emperor Palpatine sentenced me to death. Why? Being Emperor is its own why. But he was angry that your privateers had been running wild in the Core, and that they’d kidnapped that swollen gasbag Adviser Veshiv from Esseles. Since I commanded that oversector, I had to sate his anger. And to do that, I had to die. So he sent me to Hapes aboard the Pursuit light cruiser Shepherd, carrying two squadrons of TIE fighters and accompanied by eight gunships. My men thought we were a recon patrol and that our mission was to keep the Hapans honest. But I knew better—I knew we were going to a place from which we’d never return. When we came out of hyperspace I accessed my orders. They read PROCEED AT SPEED TO ANDALIA AND ENGAGE ENEMY FORCES. A good chunk of the Hapan war fleet was waiting there for us—five Battle Dragons and eight Nova battle cruisers. They’d been tipped off. The crews expected us to run, and with reason. Against such odds, running was the only sane decision. I had to repeat myself when I told the deck officer to launch all fighters. I saw his face when he realized he was going to die. I saw he wanted to know why. We all do. We think it will matter, that knowing will grant us honor, that it will silence our futile bleating at the prospect of becoming nothing. It doesn’t. Nothing does. I knew what he wanted to know, but I didn’t tell him. The TIEs lasted two minutes. I watched the Battle Dragons’ turbolasers lance out, brilliant green, searching in the darkness. I watched the Hapan gunners find the range, begin to turn TIEs into flowers of flame. I watched the fighters wheel around for another pass, their laser bolts sparking useless blue spirals and whorls off the Hapan shields. Then they were all dead, and it was our turn. We were the last survivors. Six of the gunships were gone inside a minute, vaporized by the battle cruisers. The captains of the last two gunships panicked and turned into each other. They collided head-on. I watched the atmosphere boil out of their cracked hulls, condemning the men inside to bad deaths where they might have been blessed with merely pointless ones. By then our shields were failing. I found myself wondering if the Emperor had a snoopship nearby, so he could see his sentence carried out, or if arranging it had been satisfaction enough, or if he even remembered. Some of my officers were still barking orders—dead men clacking their jaws in a dumb show of honor. Others were begging me for new instructions. A few were sitting catatonic at their posts while the alarms screamed around them. Then the forward shields flashed and winked out of existence. The lead Battle Dragon launched torpedoes. I heard the deck officer yell “Incoming.” He was still at his post. The next thing I knew, I was floating in space in an evac suit. I don’t know how I got there. I can only conclude that we were hit hard and my Academy training took over. I must have checked for escape pods, failed to find any, and got into a suit. I must have been in the rear of the bridge tower when the Hapans targeted my cruiser’s main reactor. And I must have been close to a hull breach. So instead of being atomized with the Shepherd when the reactor blew, I was ejected from her. It was scant reprieve. Something was wrong with my suit. It was torn, or a seal had melted. Either way I could hear the hissing and feel that my body was growing numb. I hung there in space and watched the Hapan ships advance. The Transitory Mists were sheets of green and blue and red, and everywhere else there were stars—above and below, on all sides, because I wasn’t looking up at the sky but floating in it. I’d never seen so many stars, not even as a boy on Kallistas, lying on the roof of the threshing-house with insects humming in the summer dark. And I could see the band of the galaxy, a river of light bisecting the sky. It was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Around me, it was different. I was surrounded by chunks of durasteel, bent and blackened. Everywhere there were lengths of wire and conduit, slowly wheeling end over end. There were drifts of transparisteel splintered into jagged shards, reflecting starlight. And there were men. A few were whole. Their bodies were bloated and blue and they looked surprised—mouths gaping, eyes staring. But mostly they were in pieces. The Battle Dragon approached like an underwater leviathan. Your brain can’t trust your eyes in vacuum—without an atmosphere to dull detail, everything is equally sharp. And when it’s robbed of the ability to judge distance, the mind scrabbles for purchase. Is that chunk of durasteel a centimeter across and about to hit your faceplate, or a meter wide and the length of a landing field away? Watching the Battle Dragon coming, I tried to remember how large she was, tried to figure out how far away she was, tried to calculate if she would hit me. She didn’t—she passed right below me. She was far enough away that I didn’t impact her particle shields, but close enough that I could count the rungs of the ladderwells on her sensor masts. They were crowned by running lights, which left spots on my vision when they flashed. She took forever to go by, while my feet kicked slowly above her. I fought down panic that she would suck me down after her or drag me into her wake. I reminded myself that there was neither air nor water between us, that what separated us was the absence of matter. Then she was gone, vanished into hyperspace with the rest of the task force, and I was alone with the stars and the dead. And that was when it happened. I didn’t lose consciousness. I could still think and see. But I was no longer seeing what was around me or hearing the hiss of my ruined suit. I had a vision. I was shown everything at once—everything that had been and everything that will be. I saw great beings made of light, who could be everywhere and nowhere at once. They were vaster than nebulae and tinier than cells, and they assembled solar systems like children with toys. I saw strange ships made of whirling, tumbling rods and cones, and heard them scream and moan as they shuddered by. I saw great chrome warships whose mirrored hulls turned sunlight into blinding sheets, and black battleships whose spines were crowned with terrible spiked cathedrals. I saw hammerheaded battle cruisers burning, and slab-sided Mandalorian constructs sparkling with rime. I saw Star Destroyers arrowing through the night, and blistered Mon Calamari cruisers schooling, and fighters of all shapes and sizes swarming. I saw ships that seemed built from clumps of multicolored wire, and ones that looked like organs torn from living things. And I knew all these ships were filled with beings whose lives had been given to war. Hutt and Tionese, Republic and Sith, Loyalist and Separatist, Imperial and Rebel—I knew it didn’t matter who had killed whom, or when or how or why. All at once I understood that those of us born to be sacrificed upon the pyre of war become one when we die—mingled smoke gone up to whatever gods you believe in. For they are the ones who created war. And they breathed it into our hearts when they created us. War has always been with us, and always will be with us. I saw that too, as my flesh turned black and my brain froze in deep space. I saw beings by the billions undone in cruel and careless instants—by blasters and swords and teeth and fists. I saw fields and forests scoured into ash by orbital bombardments. I saw planetary cores cracked by flights of missiles. And I saw the battle station you destroyed, saw it hanging half complete above a green world. Yes, I knew what has now come to pass—the Emperor’s demise, the Death Star’s ruin. Shall I tell you what else I saw—things that are yet to be? I think I will—because you won’t believe me anyway. Nobody believes in their own end until it’s upon them, until it can’t be escaped. I saw ruined towers on Coruscant overtopped by curtains of spiked green and purple. I saw the forests of Kashyyyk burning, and the seas of Mon Calamari boiling, and planets ripped in two by the fiery lances of superlasers yet to be built. And other things I’ll take with me, into the vanishing. So why am I here? Because I was right. There was a snoopship there, sent to record my death for the Emperor’s satisfaction. I must have activated my beacon —Academy training again—because the snoopship’s crew found me and brought me aboard and handed me over to the medical droids. The only survivor of the Battle of Andalia was the man sent there to die. Or a quarter of me survived, anyway—the rest was cut away and discarded, to be rebuilt as tubes and clockwork. After all that, the Emperor let me live. Why? Perhaps it was because he thought the lesson had been taught, and I still had value as a servant. Perhaps it was because he no longer cared. Or perhaps it was because he saw this day coming and desired a witness. As I told you, being Emperor is its own why. Whatever the reason, I survived—and so now it falls to you to kill what’s left. Go ahead, Rebel—let’s get it over with. Turn Grand Admiral Teshik to smoke. But remember what I saw and take heed of what I said. You’ll be smoke, too, soon enough. For each of our wars is just one little piece of a greater war, one endless and incalculably larger. And your Rebellion’s part in that war didn’t conclude with your victory at Endor. In fact, it’s barely begun. Rakatan warriors storm a Killik nest (Darren Tan) “War is ruin, predicted and then remembered as glory.” —Satine Kryze, Duchess of Mandalore Very little is known about the galaxy’s first civilizations, but the legends of the eldest spacefaring species tell an intriguingly similar story—about a terrible war waged with unimaginable weapons. Pre-Republic specialists believe that the Columi, the Gree, the Kwa, and the Sharu all had contact with a species known as the Celestials, or the Architects, beings of astonishing power and malleable form. The Columi retreated from the stars after contact with the Celestials, and the Sharu sought refuge in primitivism. But the Gree, the Kwa, and the Killiks became their servants, helping build astonishing technological projects—projects some scientists believe included the assembly of star systems and the engineering of the hyperspace anomalies west of the Deep Core, if not the barrier surrounding our galaxy. But another slave species revolted, wresting control of the Celestials’ domain some thirty thousand years ago and waging war against the Gree, Kwa, and the Killiks. They were known as the Rakata, or the Builders, a species of bipeds with amphibian features whose technologies were powered by the Force. Drawing on the Force made the Rakatan hyperdrive useless for traveling between points in realspace—instead, it homed in on the Force signature of planets brimming with life. Rakatan shields and energy weapons, meanwhile, used crystals to focus the Force. The Force was fuel for the Rakata’s Infinite Empire, and so they needed slaves —which they found on many worlds and trained to use their technologies. For millennia the Rakata ruled the galaxy, crossing space in their skipships,