soldiers on Tatooine during their search for an R2 unit that had carried the plans for the Death Star Among the Millennium Falcon’s passengers from Tatooine was Vader’s former Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi On the Death Star Kenobi’s allies succeeded in their mission to rescue Princess Leia Organa the Rebel leader who’d placed the Death Star plans in the R2 unit Because Darth Vader had once lived on Tatooine he was nagged by two questions How long had Obi-Wan been there And why
CHAPTER 1 The lone Star Destroyer traveled silently across interstellar interstellar space with the precision of a massive dart An Imperial-class warship it mea sured 1,600 meters long from its aft ion engines to its sharp-tipped bow and was equipped with enough firepower to reduce a civilization to ashes Even without its sixty turbolaser turbolaser batteries and equal number of ion cannons the wedge-shaped starship looked like it was ready to cut through anything in its path The ship’s name was the Avenger its commanding officer was Captain Needa The Avenger arrived at its designated coordinates then deployed its cargo of hyperdrive pods from a recessed launch bay Each 3.4-meter-long pod was programmed to travel thousands of light-years on a one-way trip to a specific destination never to return to the Avenger or any other Imperial ship Across the galaxy other Star Destroyers carried out the same task releasing hyperdrive pods into space
Soon thousands of pods were racing off to almost as many worlds including planets and moons that had yet to be conquered by the Empire Each pod contained a probot a probe droid engineered for long-range covert covert surveillance Each probot had a single purpose to find the Rebel Alliance’s new base The Avenger’s pods were targeted for three planetary planetary systems Allyuen Tokmia and Hoth The Empire had little information regarding Allyuen and Tokmia and only slightly more for Hoth a blue-white sun that was orbited by six planets and a wide asteroid belt According to an old navigational chart Hoth’s inner five planets were lifeless the outermost planet also named Hoth was covered entirely by snow and ice and was orbited by three nameless moons Because of the sixth planet’s thin at mo sphere and close proximity to the asteroid field it was also frequently battered by meteors Speeding through space a pod arrived in orbit of the ice world It automatically applied emergency braking thrusters allowing Hoth’s gravity to pull it down through the thin at mo sphere The pod streaked downward until its journey ended on the planet’s surface surface where it smashed through layers of snow and impacted along the upper slope of a high ravine As smoke billowed from the impact site and darkened darkened the surrounding snow the pod opened to reveal the probot’s armored form Equipped with a repul sorlift
and silenced thrusters the probot had a wide sensor-laden sensor-laden head that rested upon a cylindrical sup port body under which dangled four manipulator arms and a high-torque grasping arm Although the probot’s probot’s primary function was to gather and transmit data for the Empire it was also equipped with a single defense defense blaster Activating its repulsorlift the black probot rose up through the smoke and went immediately to work It used its sensors to scan for Alliance transmissions and to survey the terrain seeking signs of life and habitation habitation The probot hovered momentarily as it gathered and analyzed data then moved on gliding noiselessly through the chilled air unknowingly coming closer and closer to the Rebel base Luke Skywalker wearing an Alliance-issued insulated insulated patrol suit rode his two-legged snow lizard a tauntaun over a windswept ice slope on Hoth A thin layer of snow had built up on Luke’s protective greenlensed greenlensed goggles so he momentarily released one gloved hand from the reins to swipe at the goggles and clear his vision Luke was looking for wild tauntauns wampa ice monsters and any other of Hoth’s few indigenous creatures creatures Sensors were being planted for the Alliance’s regional warning network which would anticipate Imperial Imperial or alien intruders and it was Luke’s job to make
