They hurried through the ship with their lightsabers at the ready. Starkiller remembered one of his training sessions, when Darth Vader had placed a blast helmet over his young apprentice’s eyes and locked him in a cage with a trio of starved howling rasps. The hunger-maddened birds had pecked and bitten at him until, by sheer necessity, he had learned to listen to what his instincts, not his covered eyes, were telling him. Not one of the birds had survived.
Apart from soldiers clearing away rubble and healing the injured, the way ahead seemed clear, but it paid to be too careful.
More explosions came from the decks ahead and below. Their direction of travel became less horizontal, more vertical, as they reached the steeply pitched nose of the ship. He and Kota forwent lifts and descended the dark, booming shafts by their own means. Severed cables snaked around them as they jumped from level to level. The bridge grew rapidly closer.
Blasterfire strobed at them out of a gaping doorway. The lift doors had been blown away and a pair of stormtroopers waited there to make sure no one followed by that means. Starkiller and Kota made short work of them, downing one with his own fire, slashing the other in two once they were in range. Immediately fire came from the next floor down. This time their adversaries weren’t visible.
Kota stood over the fallen troopers and pointed down into the shadows. Starkiller could see nothing with his eyes, but he drew the full power of the Force into his hands and blasted the empty air. Blue lightning made short work of the camouflage system of the trooper hiding there. He writhed and sparked until Starkiller released him, letting him drop heavily to the depths below.
They moved more cautiously from then on. The sound of blasterfire echoed around them, but none was aimed at them. The lower decks were where most of the fighting was taking place. Starkiller longed to know what was happening outside, but didn’t dare break his concentration to check.
Three invisible troopers guarded the entrance to the bridge level. He blasted his way through them, not giving them the slightest chance to fight back. Four more stood outside the bridge itself. Emergency lighting and smoke made details hard to discern, but it looked like the doors behind them had been blown in.
Starkiller rushed forward. If he was too late—if they had—
Kota cut in front of him, holding him back with one hand on his chest.
“What are you doing?” Starkiller growled as he tried to find a clear line of approach.
“Cool down, boy,” said the general. “Fight without hatred, or you’ll lose the war.”
Starkiller took the advice to heart. He recognized the feelings rising inside him, and he reminded himself where they could lead. He wasn’t Darth Vader’s servant anymore. He was no instrument of the dark side. He didn’t want to find Juno only to have her reject him for being a monster. He needed to be calm, to find himself, to proceed with surety in any direction but toward his doom.
Doing so slowed him down by less than a second. The four troopers fell, sparking and whining, and he was through the shattered doors, into the bridge.
Thick smoke hid the carnage, but he could smell it in the air. A fire was burning and no one was putting it out. He extinguished the flames with one sweep of the Force and sucked the acrid black smoke into the corridor outside. The unnatural wind howled, echoing the tension in his heart.
Bodies everywhere, most in Rebel uniforms. He stepped across them, searching their faces, turning them over when they lay facedown. There—the dog-faced officer he’d seen killed in the vision. No sign of PROXY. Lying in a pool of deep red blood—
Juno.
He ran to her side, stifling a scream growing in his chest. Too late! He had arrived too late! The attack had happened exactly as he had seen it, and now the third of the visions was about to come true. He would hold Juno’s body in his arms and—
“Boy,” Kota cautioned him. The ship was shaking, echoing his distress. Starkiller tried to rein in his feelings, but they were too overwhelming. If she died, what reason did he have to live?
Juno’s eyes opened.
He fell backward in surprise. She stared up at him and tried to lift her head. Only then did he notice that there wasn’t a scratch on her, or her uniform. The blood she was been lying in had belonged to someone else.
“Master?”
Sparks flashed through a rent in her skin, and suddenly the illusion failed.
“PROXY!”
“Yes, Master. I—” The droid held his head as though in pain. One of his eyes had shorted, and there was a broad hole in his chest. His left arm was missing from the elbow down. “I was informed that you were dead. So was Captain Eclipse. I believe she will be most surprised to see you.”
“She’s alive?” Starkiller gripped PROXY by his narrow metal shoulders. “Where? Tell me where!”
The droid’s innards ground together, like the workings of a sand-filled machine. His image flickered and changed again, becoming an image of a green-armored man with a T-shaped visor. PROXY’s right arm lifted to point at the bridge entrance.
“The Imperials took her toward deck seven,” he said, returning to his true form. His arm fell to the deck with a clank. “She is injured.”
Starkiller stared at the droid in confusion and alarm. The green armor matched the vision of the bounty hunter he had seen talking to Darth Vader on Kamino, accepting instructions to recapture the missing clone. But what was he playing at? Why invade a ship, effectively destroy its command structure, and not take it over? Why was Juno in particular, the ship’s captain, still alive?
Because she was more than just a captain.
She was bait.
He stood up, full of a dark and terrible determination.
“Order the attack on Kamino, General,” he said, moving for the exit.
Kota looked around him in momentary confusion. “But the crew—”
“Your squad can fly this thing. Inform the rest of the fleet. We need to send Darth Vader the message that we mean business.”
“All right, but what about—?”
“Deck seven is the cargo bay. If I hurry, I can cut them off.”
Starkiller ignited both his lightsabers and ran out into the smoke.
CHAPTER 14
JUNO STRUGGLED BACK TO CONSCIOUSNESS through thick and suffocating fog. She had been dreaming of the Empirical, of being confined to shackles and strung up for weeks on end, with her wrists bleeding and her shoulders aching. The pain seemed utterly immediate and unceasing now, particularly in her left hand and right shoulder. It shouted at her with a voice that was almost audible.
“Wake up, Captain Eclipse. You have to walk now. My troopers are needed elsewhere.”
Lights flashed in her eyes. She felt a sharp jab in her neck. Something jetted into her bloodstream with an audible hiss.
Bright alertness rushed through her, accompanied by a sharp taste of metal. She was being held upright by two armored stormtroopers with her head dangling forward and her feet brushing the ground. Her muscles jerked. Pain flared.
Suddenly fully awake, she struggled against the hands holding her, and tried to pull away from the armored figure standing in front of her. His green-gray duraplast visor came closer, filling her vision.
“You are expendable, Captain Eclipse,” said the man within. “I warn you against inconveniencing me too much.”
The coldness of his tone convinced her more than his words. She stopped pulling against the stormtroopers who held her and stood as straight as she was able. A third trooper affixed binders around her wrists so her hands were held securely in front of her. The movement pulled at her injured shoulder and prompted another flare-up of pain. She remembered being hit by blasterfire and nothing after that. Someone had applied a field bandage to the wound, which was something, but it meant she couldn’t tell how severe it was. The fingers of her left hand were burned and red, otherwise undamaged.
“Why haven’t you killed me already?” she asked the man in green. He didn’t lack the capacity to do so
, judging by the impressive array of blades, dart launchers, and flame projectors strategically placed about his person, not to mention the BlasTech EE-3 carbine rifle he carried in one hand. “While I live, I’ll do everything in my power to regain control of the ship.”
“It’s not your ship I’m after.” He waved one gloved hand and the troopers fell away. With the other hand he clipped a chain to her binders. “When my employer is done with you, you can have it back for all I care.”
“Your employer—?”
He turned and tugged firmly on the chain. The wrench to her shoulder blotted out all other thoughts but to follow him. Sparks danced in her vision for a moment, and when they cleared the troopers had fallen behind. Her captor was leading her through a broad corridor literally blasted through the ship, one of several, if she remembered the data PROXY had shown her right before the bridge was invaded. It was hard to match its trajectory to the ship’s original designs, but she thought they might be headed toward the base of the primary communications array.
“If you have an employer, that makes you a bounty hunter,” she said, fishing for information. “At least, you don’t look like any kind of Imperial I’ve ever seen. But you use Imperial troops, so you know people in high places. Is Grand Moff Tarkin still ticked off about what we did on Dac? Is that what this is about?”
The bounty hunter said nothing. They turned a corner and arrived at a vertical shaft.
“You’ve got a jetpack, but I haven’t,” she said. “Unless you want me to climb tied up like this … ?”
He whistled and from above descended a cable and harness, which he wrapped around her, pinning her arms to her body.
She braced herself for the ascent, but even so, when the cable started moving, she almost blacked out. The pain was incredible. Whoever had put the bandage on had cared less about her comfort than merely stopping the blood flow from the wound.
The roar of the bounty hunter’s thrusters ruled out any further conversation. She concentrated instead on trying to find a way out of her predicament. The binders were very tight, so tight her hands were already going numb. No chance of wriggling out of them, then. Her blaster was probably still back on the bridge, and she had no way of calling for help, except by shouting. Thus far she had seen no sign of her crew, anywhere along the route. Chances were they were busy elsewhere, with a diversion staged by the bounty hunter’s troopers.
Her best chance of escape, then, lay at the other end of their journey, when the binders came off and her hands were free—and even then she had to hope for a distraction to give her an advantage. There was no way she, injured, could take on an exceedingly well-armed bounty hunter in a fair fight and expect to prevail.
The cable jerked to a halt next to a hole carved in the wall of an empty mess. The bounty hunter came up beside her and landed safely on the deck. His thrusters cut out with a hiss. He reached out and bodily hauled her onto the solid deck. Juno didn’t struggle. One wrong step when the cable came off and she’d fall to her death below.
From around her came the sounds of fighting: blasterfire, explosions, screams and shouts, feet running in all directions. The air was laced with a thick, dangerous tang, as though the ship itself were wounded. She hoped the guards she’d stationed at its critical points had managed to repel at least some of the boarders. If she were to die, she didn’t want her last recorded act in the Alliance to be the destruction of her ship.
“Whatever your employer is paying you,” she said, “the Alliance will double it.”
He said nothing, pulling her after him along the charred makeshift corridor.
“You’re a man of principle, then?”
“It’s about repeat business, and your Alliance most likely won’t exist long enough to pay my first fee.”
“You’re overconfident, like the Emperor.”
“I have reason to be. His credit’s good.”
“Is he your employer?”
He said nothing.
“It must be Tarkin, then,” she said, thinking: Try to get him talking. Sooner or later he’s bound to let something slip. “He’s the only one I can think of with a motive for capturing me. He wants me to be his new slave, right?”
He ignored her.
“Who, then? Who would go to so much trouble?”
“It’s not about you.”
“But you need me. Why?” An idea struck her. “This is all about Kota, for what he and I did on Cato Neimoidia. It must be—but I didn’t think Baron Tarko was so well connected—”
“Quiet.”
The bounty hunter had slowed as though sensing danger ahead. She listened but could hear only the sounds of distant demolition, communicated through the floors and walls around her. It sounded like a wrecking droid was coming through the ship toward her.
“At least tell me how you found the fleet,” she said. “Who did you torture to get that information?”
He didn’t answer.
Behind them, metal tore and glass shattered. The bounty hunter turned and raised his rifle. Someone or something was coming up through the floor, ten meters away.
Juno stared in shock as a figure dressed entirely in black leapt out of the new hole in the floor, swinging two bright blue blades through the air. The bounty hunter fired at the figure, three precise shots in quick succession. The energy bolts were deflected into the walls, where they discharged with bright flashes. By their light, Juno saw the face of the man running toward her.
It was him.
Time stopped. The universe shattered around her. Natural laws unraveled and everything she thought she knew dissolved to nothing.
It was him, but it couldn’t be. It couldn’t be, but it was. Her heart leapt even as all the pieces fell into place, forming a terrible new pattern. She knew now who the bounty hunter was really seeking, and who was behind the plan. The pattern made sense in an instant, even as everything else seemed to fall apart. Starkiller was heading into a trap, and she was the lure.
Her mind teetered on the brink of hysteria. First Kota and now him. Doesn’t anyone stay dead anymore?
More questions flooded in.
He’s back—but how? And how did the bounty hunter know about him before I did?
The seconds ticked again. Her heart restarted. There was suddenly no more time to think. The man she had loved began to run toward them, his face a mask of fierce determination, and she knew that he had seen her, too.
She opened her mouth to shout a warning, but the bounty hunter shoved her through a doorway, out of view. She jerked to a halt at the end of the chain and went down to her knees, fighting waves of agony. Behind her, she heard Starkiller call her name, but his voice was drowned out on the second syllable by a massive explosion.
Smoke and debris rushed out of the corridor and filled the room. Even out of the blast’s direct line she was still stung by the shrapnel. She covered her mouth and closed her eyes an instant too late. Blinking, coughing, deafened, she fought waves of unconsciousness as the bounty hunter dragged her back to her feet and pulled her into the corridor.
Through streaming eyes she saw a huge hole where Starkiller had been standing. Drips of molten metal rained down on the cavernous space below.
“If you killed him—” she started to say.
“You’re as foolish as he is,” the bounty hunter said with a sneer in his voice. He hurried along the corridor, pulling her after him. The tugs on the chain were sharp and insistent. Between the pain and trying to maintain her footing on the uneven floor, she had no inclination to talk anymore. Wherever he was taking her, he was in a much greater hurry than he had been before.
They left the burned corridor and entered an area that was relatively undamaged. Juno thought she recognized the location, and that was confirmed when she and her captor reached a large double door, lying open in their path. The cargo bay. It was empty apart from a dozen crates and two dead Rebel crew members. Dim red light flickered and played across the vast space. Again she worried about the react
or’s functionality.
The bounty hunter tugged her inside and closed the doors behind them. As they slid shut, she caught something moving in the shadows above, but couldn’t make out what it was. Not the cargo arm, that was for sure. It was much too big.
Behind them came the sound of destruction once again. The bounty hunter hurried to the matching double door on the far side of the bay, dragging her behind him like a recalcitrant child.
“You have no idea who you’re dealing with,” she said, and received only silence in reply.
The doors began to open ahead of them, revealing the orange-yellow vista of the Itani Nebula. The fight continued for control of space around the Salvation. Energy weapons flashed and flared. Starlight gleamed off wreckage and combative starships alike.
On the other side of the force field preventing them from being sucked into space was a transport the likes of which Juno had never seen before. Too compact to be a freighter but too stocky to be a starfighter, it was much taller than it was either wide or deep, giving it a slightly long-trunked appearance. It had the same functional and highly customized look as the bounty hunter beside her, and Juno had no doubt at all that it belonged to him.
“Shame it’s the other side of the force field,” she said. “Now what are you going to do?”
As the sound of rending metal behind them grew louder, the bounty hunter punched another button on his right gauntlet and turned to face the opening.
Figuring that he was never going to be this distracted again, Juno grabbed the chain with both hands and pulled it out of his grasp. Simultaneously, she rocked back on one leg and kicked him in the back with all her strength, propelling him toward the force field. While he was off balance, she ran for the other doors, hoping to get her hand on the activation switch before he recovered.
What came next happened almost too quickly for her to take in.
First, the doors ahead of her burst open, punched by unimaginable force from the far side.
Then the force field collapsed, sending everything in the room rushing toward the endless vacuum of space—including her and the dark figure standing where the inner doors had once been.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II Page 17
