Jedi Trial Read Online Free

that nobody has ever impressed Obi-Wan with their potential as much as you have.”
    Anakin shook his head. “Then why am I still a Padawan? We’re fighting a major war, and I could do more to help win it! I’m good enough to go on small missions, I’m good enough to fight under someone else’s command, but they think I’m not good enough to handle my own command!”
    “Oh, you’re good enough,” Halcyon said. “I’ve watched you and listened to you these past few days, and I definitely think you’re good enough.”
    Anakin reached out with his prosthetic hand and clamped onto Halcyon’s forearm. “Would you speak to the Council for me, Master Halcyon?” he asked earnestly.
    Halcyon’s shoulders slumped. “Anakin, right now, the only way the Council would listen to me is to decide against whatever I recommend.” He shook his head again. “No, having me speak to them for you would be counterproductive.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sure the Council is aware of your abilities. You’ll begin your Trials when you are ready, Anakin.”
    “We’ll see,” Anakin Skywalker replied, unconvinced.

4
    L uck, good or bad, is the great unknown factor in war. Often the outcome of battles, the fate of entire worlds, is determined by luck.
    It was luck of one sort or the other that placed Lieutenant Erk H’Arman of the Praesitlyn defense force and his Torpil T-19 starfighter on patrol along the southern coast of the continent on which the Intergalactic Communications Center was located, about 150 kilometers from the center itself, when the invasion began. He and his wingmate were cruising at a leisurely 650 kilometers per hour at twenty thousand meters. For the Torpil T-19, 650 kph was almost standing still.
    “Looks like a big sandstorm down there,” Erk’s wingmate, Ensign Pleth Strom, commented. Neither pilot bothered to scan the terrain beneath the raging storm with his onboard surveillance suite. A storm is a storm is a storm—nothing they hadn’t seen many times before. “Hate to have to do a forced landing in that stuff.”
    Starfighter pilots considered atmospheric flying the worst possible waste of their skills, and both menclaimed at every possible opportunity that their tour with the Praesitlyn defense force was a form of punishment for some unspecified transgression. It wasn’t, of course, but rather the luck of the assignment system: their numbers had come up, that was all, as they knew perfectly well. But if hotshots like Erk and Pleth weren’t showing what they could do by taking on the entire Separatist fleet, they complained about being misused by their commanders.
    Flying a high-performance fighter in an atmospheric environment was a lot different from piloting the same machine in the vacuum of space and, in truth, required a range of skills no less impressive. In an atmosphere, a pilot was subjected to g forces, air drag on his or her machine, and fatal malfunctions caused by high-flying creatures that got sucked into a fighter’s power system and gummed it up, not to mention what would happen if a flock of the things penetrated a cockpit while the craft was traveling at a thousand kph.
    The worst aspect of combat in an atmospheric environment was that the great speed and maneuverability of their craft often could not be used, because most of their combat missions would be in a close air-support role for ground forces. Even the gaudy paint jobs that aces tended to affect on their craft had to be abandoned for ground-support missions. While all kinds of stealth measures were available for use in space, in an atmosphere the fighters had to be invisible to the naked eye; they were coated with a self-camouflaging substance so that to ground observers or fliers at higher altitudes they blended in with the sky above or the ground below.
    Erk and Pleth were more than just good pilots who could fly in all conditions. Others might also be good pilots, able to master the
science
of flight, make