Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II

by Williams, Sean

  Instead, he closed his eyes and reached out with the Force.

  Juno.

  He could see her in his mind’s eye as clearly as if she were standing before him. Blond hair, blue eyes, strong jaw, proud nose—he would carry her face with him for the rest of his life, now that he had escaped Darth Vader’s dire influence. When they were together again, they would never be separated. It was just a matter of closing the gap between them—and what was distance but an illusion of the mind? To the Force, all things were one.

  Faintly, he heard the Rogue Shadow creaking and swaying, but he didn’t let himself be distracted. He was out among the stars, seeking, searching. There were quadrillions of minds in the galaxy, and he was looking for just one of them. He sensed fear and great tragedy, cruelty and petty hate. He saw death everywhere, and life, too, ebbing and flowing in that eternal tide. The Force surged within him, primal, powerful, potent—like a beast one never entirely tamed. He felt Kota next to him, full of anger and impatience. He sensed—

  A hint of Juno flashed through his mind.

  “I don’t trust that kind of power. A lesson learned the hard way is hard—perhaps impossible—to unlearn.”

  They weren’t her words, and it wasn’t her voice, but she was near their source, which was itself a tantalizingly familiar presence.

  Water.

  Kota’s urgency flared, pulling Starkiller out of his meditation. A dozen floating objects fell to the floor with a loud clatter.

  “What is it?” He checked the scopes for any sign of the Imperials, but they were empty. “What’s wrong?”

  “I didn’t say anything,” said the general. “Or do anything. I’m just sitting here, waiting.”

  There was no denying what he had felt. Kota was impatient, and that impatience was throwing Starkiller off. “You think I’m wasting my time. You don’t think I can do it.”

  “You’re right on one point, boy. The galaxy is a big place, and the whole point of the Rebel Alliance is to stay hidden—but I’d never try to guess what you’re capable of or not.”

  “So you think I’m wasting my time.”

  “I think your priorities are wrong.”

  “Like Mon Mothma’s.”

  “Yes, exactly so. You’re letting your own fears cloud your judgment.”

  Starkiller turned to face Kota. “What do you think I’m afraid of?”

  “Being yourself. Being Starkiller. Being Ga—”

  “Don’t say that name. I’m not him. I’m a clone, a copy—and a bad one at that.”

  “Is that what Vader told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Kota spoke with surety and great force. “No one can clone Jedi. It’s never been done.”

  “That you know of.”

  Kota grabbed Starkiller by the shoulders. “I can sense how powerful you are—and here you are wasting it—”

  “By rescuing you? By looking for Juno?”

  Kota stalked to the far side of the cockpit and rubbed at his forehead with his right hand. “Listen. The Alliance leadership is deadlocked. It can’t agree on our next move. We don’t have the firepower to take out a meaningful Imperial target, but nobody wants to risk lives making small hit-and-run attacks, either. We need to do something, anything. We need somewhere to start.”

  He stopped and turned his blind gaze back onto Starkiller.

  “With your power we can—”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Juno is more important.”

  “Why is she more important?”

  “Because …” Starkiller swallowed. He had never admitted this to anyone, not even Juno. “Because …”

  Kota waved the question away. “It doesn’t matter. We both know the answer—and still I have to ask you what difference that makes. She’s one person. We’re fighting an entire galaxy.”

  “The Emperor is just one person.”

  “And so is Darth Vader, and so are all their minions. They add up, boy.”

  “But we have to defeat them one at a time.”

  Kota made a dismissive noise and resumed pacing. “Don’t try to trap me in riddles. You’re no philosopher. You’re a fighter like me, and you hold the fate of the Rebel Alliance in your hands.”

  “Nobody fights the Empire and wins. You told me that once. Do you remember, Kota?”

  “Yes, I remember.” Kota dismissed that, too. “I was a different person back then. You brought me back to myself, back to the Force. You showed me what was possible.”

  “Maybe I’m really showing you now,” Starkiller said. There was a very large, very complicated thought in his mind that he struggled to put into words. “Maybe—maybe where we begin is as important as what we do.”

  “You sound like a teacher I once had, and you make about as much sense as he did. Do you think she cares one bit about that?”

  Starkiller hadn’t considered that point. He had no idea what Juno was thinking. He couldn’t even find her.

  So much time had passed. He felt disconnected from everyone he had known best: Juno, Kota, even himself. He felt the world around him slipping away, as though he were becoming a ghost, insubstantial and irrelevant.

  “I just want …” Juno. There was no point saying that again. “Kota, listen to me. I rescued you so you could help me, but you’re not helping at all. I need a place to think this through on my own. To meditate without you distracting me.”

  Kota stared at him, a disbelieving expression on his face. “We’re at war, and you want a quiet place to think?”

  “It’s important to me to find her. I won’t stop until I do.”

  “And meanwhile the Alliance will be destroyed. Is that what you want?”

  Starkiller stood, tired of being loomed over and yelled, “You talking like this is why I have to go!”

  “Fine, then. Go to the forests of Kashyyyk or the caves of Dagobah, or wherever you think you’ll find what you need and let the galaxy die.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m not going to let the galaxy die. I want what she wants—what you want, too, just in a different order.”

  Kota faced him, standing straight and tall. “Is that true?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I believe you?”

  Starkiller hesitated. His feelings were muddied on everything beyond finding Juno. But he meant Kota no harm, and he was certainly no ally of Darth Vader and the Emperor.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, you can. I’m not a coward, Kota, and I will come back.”

  Kota shook his head and seemed to deflate. He looked old and tired, and for a moment Starkiller wished he could take back everything he had said and give Kota, his mentor and friend, everything he wanted. But there was no doing that now, and it would have been a lie. Juno came first. Then the Rebellion. That was how it had to be.

  “All right.” Kota headed toward the exit of the cockpit. “Go wherever you want. Take the ship: It’s always been yours anyway. Just drop me at the nearest spaceport before you get lost in the stars, so I can find someone who will fight.”

  Starkiller swiveled the pilot’s chair toward the console and stared, without really seeing anything, until he was sure Kota had gone. Then he lowered his head onto the blinking instruments and closed his eyes. The face of the empty moon rotated far below, unnoticed, irrelevant.

  He was doing the right thing. He was sure of it.

  The only question remaining was: where to start?

  Water.

  He looked up and began calculating a course for the first waterworld he thought of—Dac, the home of the Mon Calamari.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE CARGO FREIGHTER TOUCHED DOWN on Dac’s moon with a dust-softened thump. Bail Organa, back in his grunt pilot’s pressure suit, released the controls and set the instruments to standby. No one had followed them on the short journey, and no one would look twice at an authorized vessel in such an utterly uninteresting place. For as much time as they could spare, they would be
unobserved and unsuspected of anything at all.

  “Nice spot for a summer palace,” Juno said as PROXY went aft to warm up the R-22. “You should think about moving here.”

  “The quiet is tempting.” Organa’s wry tone perfectly matched hers. “But I don’t think I’ll be settling anywhere soon. The Emperor will get tired of looking for me eventually, and that’s the time to reappear. There’s a lot of work to be done out there.”

  On that last point Juno heartily agreed. They had discussed the Senator’s plans on the way from the surface. He believed that he was too well known to be assassinated in public. Robbed of the hope of quiet, out-of-sight murder, the Emperor, Organa said, would stick to the philosophy of keeping his enemies close and rely on other methods to deal with the growing Rebellion.

  Juno supposed that he knew the Emperor better than anyone alive, except Darth Vader, but she wondered if he was secretly as worried as she would have been. Painting a target on one’s head and sticking it out into the firing line had never struck her as being particularly life affirming. For oneself or one’s family.

  “Any idea,” she asked, “what this work you’re planning to do might actually be?”

  “I know what you’re really asking. You want to know which way I’ll side with respect to Mon Mothma and Garm Bel Iblis.”

  “Spot-on, Senator.”

  “Well, it’s a tricky question at the moment. With the Dac resistance movement on our side, we’ll soon have more ships, but that doesn’t mean we can afford to be complacent. One shipyard doesn’t make us the equal of the Empire. And for that I’m glad. I don’t trust that kind of power. A lesson learned the hard way is hard—perhaps impossible—to unlearn.”

  “Assuming we don’t all get killed along the way.”

  “Assuming that, yes.” He looked at her with one hand cupping his cheek. “Where do you sit on this, Juno? You’re not afraid of action, but I don’t see you running off to start your own revolution.”

  She didn’t dodge the question. “I think we need to act decisively, but smartly, too. What we did here, for instance—it made a difference. And if we’d taken Tarkin hostage, it might have made a big difference.”

  “Do you think the Emperor would have cared if we’d threatened to shoot Tarkin? I don’t.”

  “No, but those around him might have. When the ruler of the galaxy doesn’t lift a finger to save a Grand Moff, what kind of message does that send?”

  “True.” He nodded. “For what it’s worth, I agree with you. There are tipping points and levers we can use to apply force all through the Imperial administration, and the sooner we start applying them, the sooner the Emperor will start to feel the pressure. But the importance of a symbolic victory should never be downplayed, and neither should the risks. Too many choices, too much at stake, as ever. The future will judge us, not each other.”

  “If we have a future.”

  “Oh, there’s no doubt about that, Captain Eclipse. The question is: What sort?”

  Juno smiled, noting how cleverly he had avoided giving a direct answer to her original question. But she didn’t pursue it. It had been good seeing him, and she didn’t want to spoil the moment with politics.

  “Pleasure serving with you again, Senator Organa,” she said, extending her hand.

  He gripped and shook it. “The feeling is mutual, Captain Eclipse. I hope this won’t be the last time I hear from you.”

  “And vice versa.”

  “That job’s still going, remember.”

  She rolled her eyes. “The best you could offer at the moment would be low-pay haulage. I did enough of that when I was with the Empire.”

  He laughed and saluted as she retreated to the cargo bay. PROXY had the R-22’s landing lights on and the repulsors thrumming. She climbed up into the cockpit and slid easily into the pilot’s seat next to him. When the hatch was sealed, Organa opened the bay doors and she guided the fighter outside, into the gray, lunar light. Juno lifted a hand in farewell, knowing that Organa would be watching through the forward observation ports. The cargo freighter lifted off, hatch slowly sealing shut on its empty hold.

  “All systems are fully operational,” PROXY advised her. “We are ready to return to the fleet and report.”

  She wasn’t looking forward to that. The question of what she should tell who remained very much open. Should she debrief with Leia or report on developments with the Rebel Alliance leadership?

  “First we have to find out where the fleet is, exactly,” she said. “Plot a course for Malastare. That’s the best place to start looking.”

  “Yes, Captain Eclipse.”

  Juno tapped her index fingers on the instrument panel while PROXY performed the hyperspace calculations. The mission on Dac had been an unqualified success, but it had left her with a faintly empty feeling, as though opportunities had been missed and the obvious overlooked. She didn’t know where that feeling came from, exactly. Perhaps no more than because every time she worked with Bail Organa one-on-one it reminded her of Starkiller.

  On Felucia they had discussed the mystery surrounding his past and whether she trusted him. On Corellia they had been looking for PROXY, lest information the droid contained fell into the enemy’s hands. This time, there had been no mention of Starkiller, but thoughts of him had been unavoidable. If he hadn’t died, Kota wouldn’t have died; if Kota hadn’t died, they wouldn’t have been on Dac in the first place. The shadow he cast still stretched long over the Rebellion, a year after his death.

  She physically shook herself. How much longer would it take before she got over him? Hadn’t she grieved enough?

  “Coordinates prepared,” said PROXY. “Are you well, Captain Eclipse?”

  “Yes,” she said, rubbing her eyes and telling herself to get a grip. “I’m all right. Give me the controls. I’ll take us there.”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  The R-22 hummed under her hands, ready for dust-off. She took a deep breath. This was what life was about, she reminded herself: the roar of engines; the flow of data; the magical yet utterly mechanical routine of traveling from A to B through hyperspace. She had missed being directly behind the controls of a ship. That was the one thing she regretted about accepting the commission to command the Salvation.

  She wondered briefly how Nitram and her crew were faring without her. They felt unimaginably distant, like a dream she had once had.

  Like the past she couldn’t call back.

  “Enough,” she told herself, and hit the repulsors with a firmness that surprised her.

  SHE SLEPT BRIEFLY during the hyperspace jump, in several short bursts. It was a long journey, from the Outer Rim on one side of the galaxy to the Mid Rim on the other. First they followed the Overic Griplink to Quermia, where they joined the busy Perlemian Trade Route. The risk of discovery was greater where traffic flowed most readily, so at Antemeridias they took a side route, following the Triellus Trade Route around Hutt space all the way along the galactic arms to the Corellian Run. There they took a series of complicated legs incorporating parts of the Llanic Spice Run, the Five Veils route, and the Sanrafsix Corridor to an uninhabited world called Dagobah on the Rimma Trade Route. They followed that particular route to the Hydian Way, and thus came to Malastare from the opposite direction to the one she had originally set out on.

  Juno stretched as far as she could in the cramped cockpit when the high-gravity world hove into view. Orbit was a mess of ships displaying Imperial and independent transponders. The world’s last Chief Magistrate had been transferred thanks to his habit of shooting the locals for sport, and the Empire’s rule had been contested ever since. High-gravity AT-AT walkers hunted for Rebel outposts in deserts while insurgency groups picked off Imperial officials in the city. Both indigenous Dugs and settled Gran fought fiercely alongside each other to maintain their independence. Juno hoped the citizens of Dac would look to Malastare as an example of how to proceed in the coming months.

  Even here, she realized with a
sinking heart, was a reminder of times past. The former Chief Magistrate had been Ozzik Sturn, who had moved from Malastare to Kashyyyk, where he had come last in an encounter with Starkiller.

  Ripples in a pond, she thought, as she had over Cato Neimoidia. Starkiller had been a particularly large pebble …

  She took the controls and descended on course for Port Pixelito, the world’s capital city and largest spaceport. A trio of TIE fighters buzzed her, but she easily outflew them. Unlike Dac and Cato Neimoidia, Malastare had little the Empire actually wanted; otherwise there would have been Star Destroyers descending en masse to remind the world of where its loyalties should lie. The low-level campaign against its citizens was just enough to remind them that they shouldn’t get too comfortable. Their time would come.

  Port Pixelito was a tangled sprawl of low, squat buildings, as befit the higher gravity. Air traffic was lighter and less regulated than elsewhere, and Juno guided her straining R-22 to an empty berth without needing to register with the local authorities. Malastare was, effectively, a free port for non-Imperials, making it a perfect place for the Rebel Alliance to reallocate goods and staff. She had visited several times prior to gaining command of the Salvation, and made several important contacts, as well. The man she was coming to see was just one of them.

  The repairman.

  When the starfighter was in its berth, she shut down the engines and popped the hatch. City smells rushed in, prompting her to pull a face. A crumbling civil administration had disadvantages, too.

  “Stay with the ship,” she told PROXY. “If anyone comes near it, do your best Wookiee impersonation and scare them away. I won’t be long.”

  “Yes, Captain Eclipse. I will inform you of any unexpected developments.”

  She checked the charge on her blaster and hurried off, scowling at a number of unsavory characters checking out the R-22’s well-maintained lines. Poor security was another problem Malastare suffered from, thanks to the ongoing urban conflict. Starfighters were valuable machines that could be easily adapted to other purposes. Left unguarded, the R-22 wouldn’t last an hour.

  Juno emerged from the spaceport and checked her bearings. The streetscape had changed somewhat since her last visit. At least one of the major landmarks was gone, probably demolished during a strike from either side. People brushed by her, grunting impatiently. She spotted a dozen different species in the first ten seconds.