The Rise And Fall Of Darth Vader Read Free

smoldering mess. Noticing Anakin, the Anx turned his long, pointed chin to the boy and said, “That’s what happens to slaves who try to escape on Tatooine.”
    Anakin felt his throat become painfully dry. No matter how often his mother reminded him that there were less fortunate beings in the galaxy, there was no denying the fact that they were both slaves, the property of Gardulla the Hutt.
    Tatooine, thought Anakin. Welcome to Tatooine.

CHAPTER TWO

    Slavery was illegal throughout Republic space, but the planet Tatooine was in the galaxy’s Outer Rim Territories, where the laws of the Republic rarely applied.
    Shmi Skywalker had been a slave almost her entire life, ever since space pirates captured her family during a space voyage. Separated from her parents at a young age, she had changed owners many times. One former master, Pi-Lippa, had been kind and had taught Shmi valuable technical skills. Though Pi-Lippa had planned to free Shmi, she’d died before she could, and Shmi instead became the property of one of Pi-Lippa’s relatives, who did not want to free her.
    Before coming into Gardulla’s ownership. Shmi had given birth to Anakin. Shmi could not explain Anakin’s conception - there had been no father - but she accepted him as the greatest gift she could have ever received.
    In the months that followed his arrival on Tatooine, Anakin kept his eyes and ears open. He eavesdropped on conversations between Gardulla’s attendants, guards, and other slaves, and watched carefully when mechanics and technicians came to repair or replace sand-fouled machinery. He wanted to learn everything he could about the desert world, its inhabitants, and their technologies, because he believed such knowledge might be the only way he and his mother would ever find freedom.
    And so he learned about the early colonists of Tatooine, the miners whose search for valuable minerals ended as an astronomically expensivedisappointment. Some of the miners chose to remain on the desert world while others were simply stranded. One of the first human settlements was at a place called Fort Tusken, which was assaulted by Tatooine’s indigenous humanoids, the nomadic Sand People, who subsequently became known as Tusken Raiders. Favoring traditional club and ax weapons, Sand People wore head-concealing sandproof masks, and heavy cloaks that protected them from the elements and helped them blend in with the landscape. Sand People never adapted to easy contact with settlers, and were reputed to be as ferocious as they were mysterious. Anakin had yet to see them, but had been told that it was their howls he sometimes heard after darkness fell. He found them bloodcurdling.
    Tatooine’s other significant natives were the Jawas, diminutive beings with glowing eyes who salvaged the miners’ enormous abandoned vehicles to scavenge the desert for any scrap of metal or bit of junk that they could transform into goods for sale or trade. Although Jawas were almost as malodorous as a backed-up refresher, Anakin looked forward to their visits to Gardulla’s estate because he learned a great deal by watching them work. Much to the amazement of the other slaves and a few attendants, Anakin quickly gained a reputation for being able to fix discarded appliances.
    As for Gardulla, Anakin learned that she competed with an even larger Hutt, named Jabba, over control of various enterprises on Tatooine. Anakin also discovered that Gardulla fed those who displeased her to a monstrous krayt dragon that she kept in a pit beneath her fortresslike palace off Mos Espa Way, and that she was addicted to betting on the Podraces. Anakin was in no hurry to meet any krayt dragons, but he was intrigued by everything he heard about the dangerous, high-speed sport that involved a pair of repulsorlift engines tethered to an open-cockpit vehicle. The first time he overheard two of Gardulla’s attendants discussing the design of a Podracer they’d seen, he remembered the dream