Adventures in Wild Space: The Dark/The Darkness

   

Author: Tom Huddleston

Time: 18 BBY, a year after the events of Revenge of the Sith. The Empire is beginning its rule.

Place: Space, aboard Shalla Mondatha's space food truck Moveable Feast.

Lina and Milo Graf are imprisoned on Shalla Mondatha's transport ship. Shalla--a.k.a. the bounty hunter The Shade--is bringing them to Imperial Captain Visler Korda. He has the Graf's parents captive, and he wants the information in their droid CR-8R's head. Shalla has put a restraining bolt on CR-8R to get him to comply. Before leaving Lothal’s space, she receives a couple more random prisoners from stormtroopers: a Lasat named Davin and a red headed human named Stel.

En route to Korda, the kids hear some loud noises and the ship exits hyperspace. Everything in the ship seems to be on the fritz, including CR-8R's restraining bolt. He comes to rescue the Graf children. They leave the other two prisoners in their cells, promising to come back and rescue them. They can't trust anyone. In fact, they make a point to mention that they've been betrayed in every single book so far.

When the children reach the bridge, they discover that the ship is under attack by cyborg spiders. Shalla was delivering them to a scientist named Cylo. (I haven't read the Darth Vader comics, but he appears in several issues of that book.) Of course, the spiders broke out. They attacked Shalla; now, she’s unconscious. The spiders seem to be non-aggressive. They're just searching for electrical power to eat. Otherwise, they don't attack people... unless they're trying to defend themselves. Still, that's a problem. If they eat all the electrical power on the ship, then the life support systems will be compromised and everyone will die.

CR-8R hacks into the prisoner files on the computer. He discovers that one of the prisoners was arrested for stealing and giving to the poor, and the other is a mass murderer. But the files have been corrupted and he doesn’t know which one is which! The Grafs decide to trust Stel... who immediately betrays them. Didn't they just talk about how everyone betrays them? And is it low-key racist that they believed the human was trustworthy?

Stel is working for the Empire. Davin is actually a friend of the Bridgers, sent to rescue the Grafs. Stel set a trap: when they reach the mining planet Noctu, where the Bridgers are planning to rescue the kids, they’re going to be intercepted by an Imperial ship. Lina fights Stel, who eventually falls to his "death" into a pit of spiders. Lina uses the weapons on the Moveable Feast to save the Bridgers. Once they get onto the Bridgers' ship, Mira tells the children that they might know where their parents are.

Quotes: 

• "I'm teaching them what happens if you don't eat your vegetables."
• "One of the stormtrooper boys on the last ship... I can be pretty charming when I want to be."
• "I like to be liked. Doesn't everyone?"

Final Judgment: 2 out of 5 cybernetic spiders. While there was some nice child-friendly horror moments in this book, I was mostly disappointed that Shalla Mondatha's story ended so abruptly. She was a very interesting character and was written sympathetically in the last book. I would've loved to see her story play out. Instead, she is bitten by a spider and written out of the series. The Grafs are also annoying because they continue to trust untrustworthy people. I know this is a children's book, but these children make the exact same mistakes over and over again. It gets tiring.