That wasn’t entirely a lie. She did need to report in detail to Lord Vader, just as she had on every mission she’d ever flown for him. The thing was, she didn’t really need to do it right away. It could wait a standard hour or two, or even until the morning. But there was something else on her mind, something much more important that really couldn’t wait any longer.
Is there a psychological profile in there, too? she had asked the droid before they’d set out on their first mission together.
Yes, the machine had told her, but it’s restricted.
That fact had burned in her all the way to Nar Shaddaa. It came as no surprise that such a file existed somewhere in the vast bureaucracy that was the Imperial Navy. Everyone probably had one, except Darth Vader and the Emperor. What rankled was that it was being talked about. PROXY knew where it was. The wretched machine might even have read it, for all his protest about it being restricted. A droid capable of impersonating Jedi Knights might have unknown capacities for deception.
She wanted to know what that profile contained. What was it telling people about her? What secrets did it reveal to the galaxy in general—about her early life, her father, her career? About Callos?
Her mouth was set in a determined line when she reached her quarters on the forty-first deck and activated her datapad. Handpicked for special duties by Darth Vader himself, she had a certain degree of access to files normally hidden to those of her rank. Would that be sufficient for her to locate and read the file she wanted? There was only one way to find out.
Carefully, and thoroughly, she began slicing into the flagship’s data banks.
The first files she found concerning her contained nothing unexpected, little more than the brief bio PROXY had given Starkiller in the hangar bay. She skimmed over them in seconds, probing deeper through the architecture of the data banks, seeking forgotten or overlooked corners of information. More snippets emerged. One talked about her mother, a woman she barely remembered who had been killed in crossfire between Imperial loyalists and insurgents on their home planet. She had been a teacher. The file contained a holo Juno had not seen before, an image of her mother with her long blond hair pinned back by a brooch made from a round black stone. Her eyes looked lively and amused. She seemed terribly young to be a mother, and dead.
Among a list of high-ranking Corulag graduates, she came across her name appended to her complete academic record. The list of subjects and grades filled her with pride, as it always did, but with that emotion also came sadness. She had worked so hard and achieved so much, not just for herself, but for her father, too. A distant and strict man, especially after the death of his wife, he had been a fierce admirer of those serving the Empire. A civilian engineer, he would have signed up for the Academy himself had he not failed the physical. So he should have been proud of his daughter, who had graduated with such honor and gone on to achieve everything he had ever wanted. Why, then, had he not even shown up at her graduation? It didn’t make any sense.
That was an old, familiar hurt. The profile could talk about that aspect of her life as much as it wanted and she wouldn’t think twice. She hadn’t seen her father in years and wouldn’t mind if she never did again. Only in recent days, away from her former squadron mates and lying alone in her bunkroom at night, did she ever wonder what had become of him. Would she end up as bitter as he was? How many more missions like Callos would it take before she forgot why she had joined up in the first place?
In a small holo appended to the last file she found, her father looked at her with empty eyes around his narrow, imperious nose. She closed that window with an impatient flick of her index finger.
This was getting her nowhere. Searching through archives for her name could leave her mired in trivia for days. There had to be a better way.
She leaned back in her seat and thought for a moment. It was PROXY who had alerted her to the existence of the file, so the droid must have access to its location, if not the actual contents. Therefore, if she could somehow pin down the information PROXY had scanned in the last day or two, she might get a result.
Time had passed during her search. She barely noticed her weariness, trained as she was to spend long hours in the cockpit on full alert. She could grab a short nap later to catch up on what she’d lost. It took her just minutes to find an ID that looked like it might belong to the droid—one not on the official log but with access pretty much everywhere—and to begin following it through the data banks. Like most advanced droids, PROXY had a lively, curious nature. His ruminations led him through numerous fields, including history, repulsor maintenance, astrography, and psychology. It could take her all night to find just one address among all the others. But she persisted, determined to know what her superiors really thought of her after Callos.
Without warning, her screen cleared. She blinked bleary eyes at a new view, a data feed she appeared to have unintentionally sliced into. It was one occasionally accessed by PROXY, showing a gunmetal-gray corridor leading to a heavy, secure door. The view came with sound. She could hear footsteps, faintly, from the other side of the door. Someone was pacing restlessly back and forth. And breathing: heavy, rhythmic breathing, as of lungs straining at a mechanical respirator …
A shock of adrenaline rushed through her. Only one person in the galaxy breathed like that. She must have patched by accident into Lord Vader’s private chambers. Her hand reached up to cancel the feed lest she be discovered spying on him, but before she could complete the command, the door hissed open and her curiosity was caught.
Revealed in the doorway was Starkiller, a picture of impatience and restraint. He had clearly been waiting to speak to his Dark Lord all this time. In four quick paces he walked past the vantage point of her hidden security cam and out of view.
With a series of hesitant commands, not quite believing her audacity, she tested to see if the viewpoint was movable. It rotated smoothly to bring Starkiller back into sight, revealing a room as empty of personality as the rest of Darth Vader’s secret hideout. The Dark Lord himself stood with his back to the room, staring at the burning red sun outside.
Starkiller knelt behind Vader and waited. He seemed well accustomed to doing that, despite the energy boiling through him, barely contained by his skin.
Without turning, Lord Vader asked, “Master Kota is dead?”
Starkiller didn’t answer straightaway. He raised his head, considered the question, and then said, “Yes.”
“His lightsaber.”
Starkiller unclipped the second weapon from his belt. Vader turned just enough to reach out with one hand. The fallen Jedi’s lightsaber was snatched into Lord Vader’s grasp as though by invisible fingers.
Juno let out a surprised gasp and stifled it under both hands, irrationally afraid that the Dark Lord might hear her through the one-way security link.
Oblivious to her scrutiny, he turned back to the viewport and examined the lightsaber in his hands. Starkiller waited, immobile, as though he could have knelt there all night.
Finally Vader spoke again.
“My spies have been watching another Jedi. Kazdan Paratus is hiding on the junk world of Raxus Prime.”
“I’ll deal with him as I dealt with Rahm Kota,” said Starkiller unhesitatingly.
Well, that’s that, thought Juno, abandoning all hope of sleep that night. No rest for the wicked. She moved to disconnect and get ready for the call to arms, but her finger hovered over the switch, unable to let the moment go. Her position was an illicit but privileged one, and hard to abandon.
Vader looked up from the lightsaber and turned to face the young man kneeling before him.
“Kazdan Paratus is far more powerful than you,” the black-masked figure said, filling her with apprehension. “I do not expect you to survive. But should you succeed, you will be one step closer to your destiny.”
Starkiller nodded eagerly. “The Emperor.”
“Yes. Only together can we defeat him.”
“I wil
l not fail you, Lord—”
Juno’s finger stabbed down hard on the cutoff switch and she recoiled into her chair. Apprehension had become pure horror. Could she possibly have heard correctly? The Emperor? Vader and his dark apprentice were going to betray the Emperor?
No, she told herself, getting up from her chair and pacing back and forth across the small room. It couldn’t be true. There must be more to it than she thought. Perhaps if she’d kept listening …
When she tried to get the feed back, the connection was gone. The screen remained resolutely blank, as though taunting her fearful concerns.
Darth Vader had been the Palpatine’s right-hand man for as long as the Emperor had been in power. It was inconceivable that he would turn on his Master now. Even if he was considering it, what could he and one scruffy agent do against Imperial Guards and well-armed aides who attended the Emperor everywhere he went? The thought was preposterous. She had to put it out of her mind as a product of fatigue and go about her duty as though nothing had happened.
It wasn’t as if she could turn either of them in on such flimsy evidence. If she tried, she’d be killed for sure, whether the accusation was true or not …
Right on cue, her communicator buzzed.
“Yes?” she said, speaking as though nothing untoward had happened.
“I need you in the Rogue Shadow,” Starkiller informed her, as she had known he would. “We have a new mission.”
“I’ll be right there.”
She took a moment to smooth her uniform and her hair, and to rub the dark circles under her eyes, then she hurriedly shut down her datapad and left the room.
CHAPTER 5
THE JUNK WORLD OF RAXUS PRIME was in the Tion Hegemony on the Outer Rim, so there was time during the journey for both her and Starkiller to refresh and research their objectives. He was as distracted as she felt, much to her relief. He kept asking PROXY to repeat details he had missed while deep in thought. Eventually he excused himself to enter the ship’s small meditation chamber and gather his energies.
She did the same, in her own way, by reclining her seat and putting her feet up on the instrument panel. There was time at last for that short nap she had promised herself.
But everything she had learned in the previous few hours kept circling through her mind, making it hard for her to relax. For the hundredth time, she reminded herself to forget Vader and the Emperor and concentrate on the mission at hand. If she was going to have insomnia, she might as well think about something useful.
Kazdan Paratus was an odd beast by anyone’s definition. PROXY was unable to reproduce his form because all physical details of this particular Jedi had been erased from the records—perhaps by the paranoid old Master himself. Patchy Jedi history files accredited him with considerable skill at droid making, responsible for numerous one-of-a-kind machines possessing abilities far beyond those of ordinary droids. In recognition for his unique talents, the Jedi Council had made him the Temple’s official engineer and allowed him a dedicated workshop on Coruscant.
The Clone Wars had lured him out of seclusion to study the Confederacy’s droid armies. Life on the front line had afforded him numerous opportunities to examine the war automata, while at the same time building medical droids, power droids, and other units designed to support the clone army. A disastrous campaign, during which most of his clone troopers had been killed, led to him cobbling together a makeshift contingent of combat droids under his own command. That happenstance—or perhaps deliberate design—had enabled him to dodge justice upon the issuing of Order 66. Since that day, he had been in hiding.
But now he had turned up on Raxus Prime, dumping ground for garbage and industrial poisons. Had he been forced there by necessity, or willingly sought shelter there among the broken machines? The records couldn’t tell her that.
At least he wasn’t a general, though. How dangerous could a droid maker be? Darth Vader might consider him more powerful than Starkiller, but she couldn’t see why. His agent had made short work of Jedi Master Rahm Kota, after all.
Her thoughts drifted. She entered a dream-like state midway between waking and sleep. The slightest flicker on the control board and she’d be alert, but otherwise she was at rest. If not entirely at peace …
“They have no defenses,” she informed Lord Vader over her TIE bomber’s comms. “The battle is over.”
“It is far from over, Captain Eclipse. Continue your assault.”
Teeth grinding, she clenched her flight stick with both hands and considered her alternatives. She would never disobey a direct order, but the consequences …
“I sense your disapproval, Captain. Speak your mind if you must.”
Wasn’t he reading it already? She shuddered at the thought. “With respect, sir, it would be genocide to maintain the bombardment—a completely unnecessary waste of life. They are already beaten.”
“Since you feel so strongly on this matter, Captain, I will give you an alternative course of action. Strike the planetary reactor at the following coordinates, and strike it hard. Once that is out of action, I will consider this mission complete.”
The coordinates came, and she breathed an inaudible sigh of relief. One precision strike was infinitely preferable to blanket bombing. “Thank you, Lord Vader.”
“Your gratitude is wasted on me. Give me success, Captain. That is all.”
The channel closed, and she relayed the orders to the rest of the Black Eight. One small victory in a much larger battle: she couldn’t afford to dwell on it. Readying her payload, she plotted a course down through the atmosphere of Callos, glad that she would add only a little more damage to all that the little green world had already suffered …
She woke from the dream with a start. Enough, she told herself. She could only beat herself up so much over what had happened. What difference did it make now? She was going to drive herself mad by dwelling on it forever.
Besides, she had more important things to worry about now. What with Darth Vader, Starkiller, rogue Jedi, and the Emperor, she had to stay alert for anything that might give her a chance of getting out in one piece.
Lights were winking on the Rogue Shadow’s console. “Tell your master we are coming out of the jump soon,” she said to the droid. “If this is a trap like Nar Shaddaa, he will want to be ready.”
“I will inform him,” PROXY told her as she fine-tuned the ship’s drives in readiness for their arrival. When Starkiller entered the cockpit behind her, she didn’t look up from her work.
The streaked starscape of hyperspace snapped back to normality. The world’s gravity gripped them. Sublight engines brought the Rogue Shadow around so they were oriented correctly and heading into the desired orbit.
Raxus Prime welcomed them in all its decrepit glory. The gray, synthetic world’s surface was covered by almost as much metal as Nar Shaddaa, but there the similarity ended. Whereas one was alive with light and commerce, the other was a steaming rubbish dump inhabited by scavengers and scum. Juno had never been assigned here during any of her previous missions, and had never felt an urge to visit. It had a noxious reputation.
She could immediately see why. It wasn’t just the filthy atmosphere and the mountains of decaying rubbish. This world was no moon, like Nar Shaddaa; it was a proper planet, one with a startlingly strong magnetic field. Every orbital lane was filled with junk, and so were a series of complex magnetic field-lines sweeping near the surface itself. These lines carried iron-bearing fragments aloft in a grim parody of a gas giant’s rings. They were crawling with tiny vessels, either automated or single-pilot, searching for anything of value. Every now and again lasers flared, cutting at hulks or at rivals homing in on a nearby trinket.
Then there was the Core, the artificial intelligence built by the Republic to guide the refuse world’s operation. PROXY said that he would try to patch them into its announcement system once they were within range, but she didn’t see what help that would be if the Core turned on them.
This was going to be no simple sit-and-wait mission. She tightened her grip on the controls and guided the ship patiently through the navigational nightmare.
PROXY had moved forward to take the copilot’s seat beside her. Starkiller, when he came, stood behind them both, assessing the scene through the cockpit viewport.
“PROXY,” he asked, “are you picking up any communications yet?”
The droid put a metal hand to his forehead and made a strange noise. Juno looked up. PROXY’s photoreceptors flickered; he tilted forward, as if in pain.
“Too many to decipher, master.”
The droid’s holoprojectors flickered unexpectedly. Juno edged away from an angular vision of metal and cutting blades, with glowing red eyes and insectile limbs. Before she could ask what was going on, the vision had vanished and the droid continued.
“I can hear hundreds of droids calling out to one another.” He looked up at his master, who studied him with a frown. “This is where droids go to die.”
“Or are taken,” Juno muttered as she scanned the screens before her.
“What about Kazdan Paratus?” Starkiller asked PROXY.
“I can’t hear any clues that would lead us to him.”
Juno’s eyes widened. Her right index finger came up to draw her companions’ attention back to the view. “What about starting over there?”
So saying, she banked the ship to starboard, the better to reveal the structure she had just discovered.
Five slender towers rose up out of the junk piles like a surreal tribute to the past. The central tower was the tallest of the five, with a boxy structure near its tip that always made her think of old-fashioned torpedo fins. The other four were simpler, less ornate. Although undoubtedly made of junk itself, their unique lines could not be mistaken for those of any other monument in the galaxy.
“That looks exactly like the old Jedi Temple on Coruscant,” she said.
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