Star Wars: True Route

Darren Vale was supposed to die in a ruined temple in the Philippines. To be fair, the mission had gone to hell, his partner was dead, a piece of metal was sticking through his torso, and death was beginning to look like the first competent decision anyone had made all day. Then a strange woman offered him a deal. Live. Observe. Interfere. The next thing Darren knows, he wakes up on Nar Shaddaa with no money, no identification, twenty rounds of ammunition from a planet nobody has heard of, and the deeply inconvenient realization that Star Wars is real. Worse, it is approximately 29 BBY. Palpatine is Chancellor. Anakin Skywalker is still a Padawan. The Clone Wars have not started. Order 66 is years away. Somewhere, pieces of the future are already being quietly assembled. Darren knows what is supposed to happen.Probably.Unfortunately, his knowledge comes from movies, novels, games, comics, Legends, Canon, retcons, arguments on the internet, and several memories that may be completely wrong. The galaxy, meanwhile, has shown absolutely no interest in respecting a plot summary. So before he can save the Republic, expose the Sith, prevent a galactic civil war, rescue doomed Jedi, or accomplish any of the other perfectly reasonable tasks expected of a man with no spaceship and barely enough credits for lunch, Darren must deal with more immediate problems:getting documentation, learning how not to shoot a blaster into the floor, figuring out which aliens are trying to rob him, discovering why mercenaries keep dying around the same cargo routes, and acquiring enough money to leave Nar Shaddaa without selling an organ. Possibly his own. Fortunately, Darren has a few useful qualities. He is a former soldier, an experienced mercenary, difficult to intimidate, pathologically sarcastic, and very good at noticing when a situation is about to become someone else’s disaster. Unfortunately, he is also arrogant enough to think that knowing the ending means understanding the story.It doesn’t.Because the moment Darren starts changing things, the future starts changing back. Criminal networks notice him. Allies develop agendas of their own. People he remembers as fictional characters turn out to be considerably more complicated in person. Every life he saves changes someone else’s odds, every secret uncovered attracts attention, and somewhere far above the level where a broke mercenary is currently arguing over docking fees, extremely dangerous people are building plans that were never designed to survive an unpredictable variable. Darren has one advantage. He knows that the galaxy is heading toward catastrophe. The galaxy has several billion advantages. It doesn’t know it’s supposed to lose. STAR WARS: TRUE ROUTE is a long-form alternate-history adventure about survival, mercenary work, politics, war, loyalty, bad intelligence, worse decisions, and one man’s increasingly expensive attempt to interfere with destiny without becoming another bastard convinced that only he knows how the galaxy should work. Saving the future was never going to be easy. First he has to afford the ticket. — Description from novelcodex.orgFull novel: Star Wars: True Route — read the rest free on N​o⁠v​e⁠l​C⁠o​d⁠e​x⁠.​o⁠r​g⁠