“I know, I know. You’re after immortality. Everyone is when it comes to clones. Either that or an army, and even the Emperor’s worked out that this doesn’t work in the long run. It’s too expensive and dangerous. An army made up of the same soldier is either one hundred percent loyal or one hundred percent against you. When your enemy has to convince only one mind to turn, you’re walking on thin ice.”
“I don’t want an army,” Starkiller assured him. “Tell me what I need to know.”
“You need to know that cloning won’t make you immortal, either.”
“Why not?”
“They’ve never managed to fix the memory problem. Not even the Khommites. Each clone they make is a new person—one based to a very large degree on the original, but still one that has its own identity, its own memories, its own weird quirks. They don’t think they’re the same people, just different versions of the same template. And that’s not immortality. Sorry.”
“I’ve often wondered,” said Kota, leaning into the conversation, “why the Jedi didn’t just clone ourselves after Order Sixty-six. I mean, there weren’t many of us left. Why not take the ones we did have and create some more? It wouldn’t matter if we didn’t think we were the same person. We wouldn’t have to, as long as we could fight.”
“Ah, well now, that’s an entirely different problem.” Ni-Ke-Vanz leaned forward, too. His eyebrows attained a whole new level of animation. “You see, the other thing no one has ever managed to copy is Force sensitivity. Worse than that, it actually gets in the way of the cloning process. We don’t know how. It just does. The Khommites are aware of the problem and they do everything they can to stamp it out.”
Starkiller’s surprise must have shown on his face, for the medic nodded emphatically at him.
“That’s right: They weed out Force sensitivity. Can you imagine? That’s how big a problem it is.”
“What would happen if you tried to clone someone Force-sensitive anyway?”
Ni-Ke-Vanz sank back into his seat with a dire look on his long face. “Terrible things. Insanity. Psychosis. Suicidal tendencies. Who wants a crazy Force-sensitive running amok in your lab? No one.”
“No one,” agreed Starkiller, thinking of Kamino and the damage he’d left in his wake.
“Sorry,” said Ni-Ke-Vanz, misreading his grim mood for disappointment. “Looks like you’re going to have to ride out the war with the rest of us.”
“That’s not—” he started to object. Then thought better of it. “Right. No pain, no gain. Guess I’d better get used to it.”
THEY LEFT THE CANTINA and headed back to the ships. Starkiller left Kota to organize his squad, not particularly caring about the band of mercenaries and wannabe heroes he’d assembled in little more than a day. They would perhaps be useful in preventing any kind of harm coming to Juno—and Starkiller was more than happy to employ them in that regard—but he doubted their involvement together would extend far beyond the end of the mission, whichever way it went.
Juno’s voice spoke to him from his memory.
“We can help each other.”
“Nobody can help me.”
“I don’t think you really mean that. I just think you’re afraid to let me try.”
“Is that really what you think?” he had asked. “I’m afraid of you?”
The very suggestion had seemed preposterous then, but it didn’t anymore. Just the thought of Juno had a profound effect on him. He would slash his way through a hundred Emperors to save her, if he had to. There was nothing he wouldn’t sacrifice. Not even the very Rebellion that the original Starkiller had created.
That truly was a frightening thought, one he kept carefully hidden from Kota.
The engines were warm and ready by the time the general walked up the ramp and into the bridge.
“You don’t look terribly reassured,” Kota said, taking the copilot’s seat.
“Should I be?”
The Rogue Shadow lifted off with a louder roar than usual as the repulsors fought the intense gravity of the world. Turning the ship nose-upward, Starkiller aimed for the sky. Over the screaming of the drives, conversation was temporarily impossible.
Blue turned to black, and the first stars appeared. Dodging heavy orbital traffic, Starkiller didn’t wait for the squad’s disreputable freighter. He would meet them at the other end.
Space stretched and tore. The Rogue Shadow leapt into hyperspace and began the flight for the Itani Nebula.
“Of course you should feel reassured,” said Kota, with a persistence that shouldn’t have surprised him. For more than fifteen years the Emperor and all his minions had been hunting the Jedi. It took a mammoth kind of stubbornness to have survived so long against such odds. “You’re on your way to see Juno. You’ve got reinforcements. And best of all you know you can’t be a clone.”
“So why haven’t you told anyone I’m back?”
“How do you know that?”
“Because the repairman didn’t know. And the way he was talking, Juno didn’t know, either.”
“Well, I figure that’s your business, who you tell and who you don’t.”
“Back in Athega system, you said it was entirely the Alliance’s business.”
“Maybe you convinced me to stay out of it until you’re ready. There are already too many confused people running this Rebellion. Are you saying you’re ready now?”
He searched his feelings. “No. Not until Juno is safe.”
“And she’ll probably need to see you with her own eyes, otherwise she won’t believe that you’re really back.”
“I keep telling you: I’m not him.”
The general’s blind stare was full of disbelief. “Even now you think that, after everything Ni-Ke-Vanz said?”
“He didn’t really tell us anything.”
“Only that cloned Jedi can’t exist.”
“Have never existed in the past. That’s an entirely different thing.”
“The Khommites have been grappling with the problem for a thousand years! Do you think Vader solved it overnight?”
“With the help of the Kaminoans, maybe. Or they didn’t solve it and I am as crazy as I feel sometimes.”
“You act no crazier than you originally did.” Kota wasn’t joking. “A bit more obsessive, perhaps, but who can blame you? You love her. It’s only natural to want to save her.”
You love her.
Starkiller could say nothing to that for a moment. Those three words hit him harder than he could have anticipated. Not just because it was Kota saying them—Kota, the gruff career soldier who had never displayed the slightest amount of emotional awareness in Starkiller’s presence. Because it was the present tense, not the past, and because it was about him.
There was a world of difference between Juno, the woman he loved, and Juno, the woman Starkiller had loved.
Perversely, that only deepened the blackness of his mood. Did he have the right to love anyone, if he was only a clone? She had loved the original, not him. What if she rejected him? What if she had put the original behind her and had no room in her life for him now? She was a captain in the Rebel Alliance; she had duties, responsibilities, staff, timetables. She couldn’t drop everything and run off with him—and there was no guarantee that the rest of the Rebellion would accept him if he wanted to stay.
“Who wants a crazy Force-sensitive running amok in your lab?”
Acknowledging that he was a psychotic clone who would never be worthy of either Juno or the Rebellion was somehow more acceptable than believing that he was the real Starkiller, who, beyond all kinds of understanding, had managed to return from the dead.
To kill again.
Kota got out of his seat and opened a small wall compartment. He rummaged inside for a moment, then his right fist emerged, tightly holding something in its grip. He returned to Starkiller’s side and opened his hand to reveal what he had found. There lay two bright crystals, as blue as Juno’s eyes.
“Where did
you get these?” Starkiller asked.
“Relics of the Clone War. It doesn’t matter. The point is, they’re yours if you want them.”
Kota pushed his hand toward Starkiller, who made no move to take them.
“Does this mean you believe I’m not a clone?” he asked.
The general exhaled heavily. “Honestly? I don’t know. But I’m beginning to think it doesn’t matter.”
Again the blind eyes pinned him, but for once they revealed more about Kota than the person he was looking at. Starkiller could feel the hatred churning inside the general as powerfully as it ever had. It was part of him that he had learned to live with, like his blindness. Sometimes it gave him strength; sometimes it worked against him. Starkiller couldn’t imagine what it must have been like after Order 66, balancing the need to survive against the absolute requirement of all true Jedi Knights—that they never succumb to the dark side.
Kota’s hatred was directed at the Emperor, but its focus was Darth Vader. Starkiller didn’t know why; there were probably a thousand reasons, reasons Kota himself would never reveal or dwell upon, most likely. The general wasn’t one for living in the past, or for worrying about the means as long as the end was in sight. To him, the return of Starkiller was an opportunity to strike at Darth Vader, just as, to Starkiller, Kota was a means of finding and saving Juno.
You love her.
Some obsessions were worth it. Starkiller took the crystals and made his way back to the meditation chamber, seeking a peace he suspected the general would never find.
THEY WERE MET AT NORDRA by outliers of the fleet and given the coordinates they needed. Kota quizzed them about recent traffic. There had been some, but nothing suspicious. Juno herself had come through less than a day earlier.
Starkiller felt all his hopes and fears magnify at that simple confirmation of fact. She was close, so very close. Soon he would be with her. What happened after that, only time and fate would tell.
The squad’s freighter wasn’t far behind the Rogue Shadow. For all its lopsided engines, it could clearly hold its own. The convoy of two headed off toward the nebula, scanners peeled for anything out of the ordinary. Slowly, slowly, the kaleidoscopic view shifted ahead of them.
“This is taking too long,” Starkiller said through grinding teeth. “I’m using the hyperdrive.”
“The mass shadow of the nebula—”
“I don’t care.” His hands flew across the controls. “The others can come the long way if you want.”
“They’d better. None of them is as good a pilot as you.”
Starkiller acknowledged the compliment with a brisk nod. When the navicomp was ready, he sat for a moment with his hands on the controls.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said slowly, “about the Alliance.”
“About your place in it?”
He shook his head. “About what it should do next. If I give you the nav coordinates and schematics for a secret cloning facility on Kamino—everything needed to launch a successful assault—will that go some way toward helping them believe in me again?”
Kota chewed this over. “The facility where Vader claims you were made?”
“If his claims are true, then Kamino is much more of a threat than any ordinary stormtrooper factory.”
“Maybe. But the Alliance couldn’t pull off an attack like this without your help.”
“They’ll have to,” he said. He activated the drives. Realspace smeared and stretched, vanished into the paradoxical light of hyperspace. “They wouldn’t trust me to lead anything yet, anyway.”
“I would.”
“The Alliance is more than just you and your militia, Kota.”
Instead of being offended, the general grinned. “If what you saw comes to pass, you’ll be glad you picked us up.”
Starkiller acknowledged that, but his mind was unchanged. Judging by everything he’d learned from Kota, the Alliance didn’t need someone to lead them into battle. It needed to find strong leadership among the leaders it already had.
The ship shook, disturbed by the widely distributed mass of the nebula. He gripped the console, urging it to fly straight by the force of his will. This had to work. He had to arrive on time. There was simply no other option.
The Rogue Shadow exploded out of hyperspace, tumbling wildly. He corrected its trim automatically, firing retros even as he searched the scopes for the fleet. The sky was a mess of glowing gas and light. The scanners picked up two minor asteroid fields, a distant protostar with a single gas giant, and, finally, a small scattering of starships.
He brought the ship about, ion engines blazing.
“No sign of attack,” he said.
“Stay on guard,” said Kota. “A powerful glimpse of the future like you experienced is rarely wrong.”
The fleet grew larger and more detailed through the cockpit viewport. Starkiller searched the ships for the one he was after. He recognized the Salvation more by instinct than knowledge. Like all Nebulon-B frigates, it was heavy at fore and aft, with a relatively thin spine connecting each end. Engines and reactor were confined to the rear; command and crew quarters were up front, near primary communications and sensor arrays. This example looked old but well maintained, a reliable worker that had found a good home with the Rebel Alliance.
The Salvation wasn’t the biggest or the newest ship in the fleet. But Juno was inside it. He was sure of it. Finally he had found her.
“Rogue Shadow,” came a voice over the comm, “please transmit landing codes.”
Starkiller froze at the sight of something on the side of the approaching frigate.
“What is it, boy?”
He could only point at the crest adorning the Salvation—adorning every ship in the fleet, he saw as they grew nearer. He remembered seeing it only once before, on Kashyyyk, but he knew what it was. It had been an integral part of the life Darth Vader had stolen from him, when he was a child.
“My family’s crest,” he said. “It’s … everywhere.”
“Yes,” said Kota, tapping the chest plate of his armor—where, Starkiller belatedly realized, the same symbol lay buried under a thick layer of muck. “I suppose I should’ve told you about that.”
“What does it mean?”
“That you’re part of the Rebel Alliance whether you want to be or not.”
“Rogue Shadow,” came the voice from the fleet a second time, “landing codes immediately.”
Four Y-wings were nosing in their direction—to either escort or intercept, Starkiller thought through the fog of surprise.
Kota leaned over and punched the comlink.
“This is General Rahm Kota,” he said, “requesting permission to board the Salvation. Authorization Talus Haroon Ten Eleven Thirty-eight.”
The voice didn’t respond immediately. When it did, there was no mistaking the surprise. “Code checks out. Good to have you back, General. You’re cleared for docking.”
The Y-wings peeled away.
“If you give me the data on Kamino,” said Kota, “I’ll do what needs to be done.”
Starkiller leaned forward and peered through the canopy at the Salvation. The crest painted on the hull loomed over him like a shadow.
His father’s voice came to him from the deepest refuges of his memory.
“I never wanted this for you.”
He sensed the final pieces falling into place, the last of the gaps closing up. He was here, on the brink of seeing Juno again, and his mind was whole. Whoever he was, wherever he had come from, he was complete.
He only hoped, against hope, that he would be enough.
CHAPTER 12
JUNO STOOD ON THE BRIDGE of the Salvation, feeling the smooth operation of the ship and crew around her as though they were parts of her physical body. With a change of uniform and a decent meal in the recent past, she felt entirely transformed. Being restored to command had felt like being returned to life. There was indeed something in what Leia had said about having a frigate at he
r disposal: It was truly nothing to be sniffed at.
At the back of her mind, though, was something her flight instructor had drummed into her all the way through her training. Getting too comfortable was just asking for the universe to provide a kick in the pants. She went through everything that had happened in recent days, searching for the one thing that had gone wrong, for the boot that might already be on its way to shake her out of her complacency.
“Uh, Captain,” said Nitram with surprising hesitancy, “we have the Rogue Shadow in view.”
“Impossible,” Juno said automatically, assuming someone had made a mistake. “It was destroyed on Cato Neimoidia.”
But even as she said the words, she saw it in the scopes, accelerating smoothly toward her.
“It can’t be him,” she said to herself through a stab of surprise and guilt in equal measures.
Then a more likely possibility occurred to her: “The Imperials must have captured it and are using it as a disguise. Target it—all weapons!”
The bridge crew jumped into life around her. Alert sirens wailed.
Then Kota’s voice boomed out of the comm.
“This is General Rahm Kota, requesting permission to board the Salvation.”
“He can’t be,” she repeated, barely hearing the authorization code he gave. “It can’t be him.”
“Captain?”
She blinked. “If it’s a trick, there’s only one way to find out. Let him board. We’ll greet him with every soldier available.”
“Yes, sir.”
She stood straighter and kept her hands behind her back. They were clenched into fists.
You abandoned him, she told herself. You gave up on him. You left him behind.
Any relief she felt at the possibility of his survival was buried under the crushing weight of remorse.
“Blackguard to Blackout,” came Kota’s voice over the comm.
“I’ll take it,” she said, reaching for her comlink.
Nitram patched the transmission directly through to her.
“This is Blackout,” she said, taking a deep breath. “What’s your status, Blackguard?”
“Back in the game,” he said with obvious relish. “I have intel on a major target that I can’t take out on my own. Do you think the Alliance will be interested?”
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II Page 15
