Starkiller nodded. “Set us down as close as you can.”
She searched the surrounding area through a thick drizzle of oily rain. “I will do my best. There are few clearings.” The top of the ziggurat looked dangerously uneven and unsteady. “You will need to approach it on foot.”
The Rogue Shadow banked gently from side to side as it traversed the garbage-laden magnetic lanes and cleared two large mountains of debris. The deeper she went into the atmosphere, the dimmer the primary star became and the greener its light seemed, until she felt her sinuses clogging up out of sympathy.
“There,” she said, finally finding a space large enough for the Rogue Shadow to settle. “With a lake view and everything …”
The space was on the shoreline of an irregular body of liquid, one of several pooled among the high points on the junk landscape. She didn’t dare set down hard, lest the relatively level surface buckle under the weight of the ship. Instead she hovered on the thrusters, skating lightly over the surface as Starkiller made his way back to the ramp.
“Circle past the Temple and wait for my signal,” he commed in a businesslike tone.
“Be careful,” she sent in reply. “The sludge out there looks corrosive.” She waited until the black-clad figure had progressed in inhumanly long leaps from metal ruin to metal ruin and finally disappeared from sight before pushing the repulsors to maximum and angling the ship up into the sky. She was glad to be doing so. In just the few seconds the hatch had been open, a foul stench had filled the ship from nose to tail.
“Juno out.”
CHAPTER 6
THE APPRENTICE BARELY HEARD HIS pilot sign off as he hurried through the toxic wasteland that was the surface of Raxus Prime. His concentration was intense, fending off distractions from every side: the stench rising from the lake; the sharp and treacherous terrain; the sound of wind whistling through the twisted spires and snapped stanchions of the foul forest he found himself in. He kept his mind focused on his prey: the mad droid maker, Kazdan Paratus. Mad he had to be, for who would willingly live in such a place? Even the most desperate fugitive would seek better climes.
The spires of the mock Jedi Temple were invisible behind the mountains of wreckage. Much was destroyed beyond recognition, but among the discards he saw the occasional fragment of starfighter, groundspeeder, air or water refiner, solar panel, antenna dish, and more. Every conceivable material had made it to this, the bottom rung of the Raxus system. No degradation had been spared. What couldn’t be redesigned, rebuilt, reclaimed, or recycled was simply waiting to be crushed into poisoned pulp by the weight of further refuse piled on from above. It painted a depressing picture of the galaxy’s prodigious consumption.
The apprentice spared no time thinking about that, either. He had one task to perform, to the very best of his abilities. He had no intention of doing otherwise. Rahm Kota may have tested him, but he had emerged superior in the end. There was nothing Kazdan Paratus could throw at him that he couldn’t handle. He was sure of it.
And he would not think of the face he had seen while dealing with Kota. It was nothing, just a strange glitch in the program of his life. Raised under the careful eye of his dark Master, his skills had been honed to the point that not even Jedi could stand against him. Soon, very soon, he would be ready to stand at Darth Vader’s side and take on the ultimate challenge of all: the Emperor.
He had regained his focus during meditation on the way to Raxus Prime by staring into the red-hot blade of his lightsaber. He had treated his most recent injuries with bacta patches so they would no longer trouble him. He hadn’t eaten, for he found that food deadened another hunger inside him—the hunger for greatness similar to that possessed by his dark Master. Or was his Master possessed by it? It didn’t matter. From his point of view, they were the very same thing.
The power of the dark side filled him. Strength coursed through his veins, swelling his heart with resolve. He would not fail. And how could he? He was Darth Vader’s apprentice.
Juno’s voice came from the comlink, cutting through the Core’s bland announcements with Imperial precision.
“There is some sort of activity near a downed corvette north of your position.”
“What kind of activity?”
“I’m not certain. We are in the upper atmosphere now, and there is a lot of interference. PROXY is picking up what might be droid signatures heading in that direction.”
“You think it could be a welcoming committee?”
“Maybe, I—whoa!” A blast of static was followed by a relieved gasp from Juno.
“What’s wrong?” he said into the comlink.
“Nothing—now. I just got too close to one of those magnetic lanes, and an unstable derelict exploded. Everything’s under control. You just worry about keeping your boots clean.”
He half smiled and kept moving through the teetering piles of garbage along a stretch that resembled a canyon with sheer walls and squelching floor. Only then, after Juno’s brief communication, did he notice an odd thing. Among all the technological leavings, he hadn’t spotted a single droid part yet. Not one. If this was where droids came to die, as PROXY had said, what happened to their bodies?
He sensed movement ahead and slowed his pace to an ordinary walk, then a more stealthy creep as voices became audible, too. Not human voices: a mixture of electronic babble and high-pitched, liquid Rodese. Droids and Rodians, then.
He assumed that his orders remained unchanged from his last mission: Leave no witnesses.
With a flourish, he activated his lightsaber and kept it at the ready.
THE FIRST DROID HE ENCOUNTERED was a spindly thing with one photoreceptor, one manipulator, a poorly tuned dual repulsor and power plant, and very little else. It was tugging at a cable protruding from an almost sheer cliff face of garbage. As its repulsor whined, small avalanches tumbled from above, bouncing off its metal shell and making it squawk and wobble in midair. As soon as it saw him, it began to tug more vigorously, provoking a full-scale collapse that buried it under a large mound of rubbish.
Caught by its predicament, the apprentice used the Force to push the rubbish away, allowing the droid to burst free. It danced with considerable disorientation in the air for a moment before regaining its balance, grabbing the freed cable from among the debris, and zigzagging up the canyon with it clutched tightly in its single manipulator, razzing loudly as it went.
Scavengers, he decided, probably hooked up in a network to the Core. Nothing to worry about, unless he interfered with the running of the planetary junk heap.
Rodians were a different matter entirely.
“Captain Eclipse,” he said into his comlink.
“Juno here,” she replied immediately.
“Do Imperial records have any reports of Rodian scavengers on Raxus Prime?”
“Accessing the data bank now.”
While she searched, he found them swarming over the corpse of a crashed starship that lay directly in his path—obviously the corvette she had mentioned earlier. From the vantage point of a teetering trash hill, he peered through electrobinoculars at the green-skinned aliens and the tribe of tiny, brown-robed Jawas they had coerced into service, either by bribes or threats of violence. There were dozens of them, with several tracked vehicles lined up to take their booty away. The Corellian corvette, its precise make rendered indeterminate by the damage it had sustained in the crash, was being sliced up for scrap, meter by meter, with delicate and therefore more valuable components removed before the cutting machines came in. The apprentice was put in mind of the creatures that fed on the bodies of whaladons when they drifted to the bottom of an ocean: in months or even weeks there might be nothing left of the starship at all except the crater it had made on falling.
The apprentice didn’t have months or weeks up his sleeve. The longer he roamed Raxus Prime, the greater the chances that he might be discovered.
The starship lay directly between him and the Temple and was far too big to get
around. That could take him hours. He would have to either go through the starship, or move it.
A slow smile crept across his face. Why be coy? He was the apprentice of Darth Vader and a servant of the dark side. It didn’t pay to creep about in fear of raising his head.
Juno returned with the details of his find. “Looks like you have stumbled across Drexl Roosh and his clan. Drexl is wanted for thirty-eight counts of fraud, selling faulty matériel, and illegal slave trading.”
“I think we’ve discovered where he’s getting all of his goods.”
One of the Rodians was yelling at the others in Basic, adding insults to the Jawas for good measure. “Move faster, you scum! The scavenger droids will be on us soon.” He waved a large blade with imperious disdain, not caring whom it struck. “If you bottom feeders don’t get these Jawas moving, I’m going to add another ten thousand credits to each of your heads! Do you hear me?”
This, the apprentice assumed, was Drexl. The purple-faced Rodian wore a jetpack and heavy armor and was strutting self-importantly back and forth.
On moving to another vantage point, the apprentice ascertained that the starship had at least one engine still in its housing, a bulky hyperdrive that seemed to be undamaged. Perfect.
As he conducted his survey, a scuffle broke out between a trio of scavenger droids and the Rodians overseeing the Jawas’ work. The droids had boldly tried to sneak into the giant carcass and prompted a volley of energy fire warning them away. They responded with jolts of electric current delivered through the damp ground and along electrically conducting walkways. The Rodians suddenly had a fight on their hands and took cover behind mounds of organic scraps while the Jawas ran for shelter anywhere they could find it. The apprentice watched with amusement as the pointless skirmish unfolded. It ended, inevitably, with three showers of droid fragments and another bad smell added to the air.
“You idiots!” Drexl bellowed. “Clean up this mess and come back to camp with something we can sell, or don’t come back at all!”
His jetpack ignited and the Rodian lifted off from the waste-strewn surface. With a roaring noise, he sped into a tunnel leading deeper into Raxus Prime’s trash infrastructure, leaving small fires in his superheated wake. The Core announced something about malfunctioning salvage droids and sending in more to investigate.
The apprentice made a mental note to avoid crossing the droids, unless he had to, and began to climb down through the litter of foothills.
A RODIAN SENTRY, STILL JITTERY from the skirmish with the droids, barely had time to squawk in his alien tongue before the apprentice silenced him forever with a quick sweep of his blade.
He hurried by, into the bowels of the corvette. A ramp had been added to aid the Jawas in their exploration and evisceration of the ship. It led up at a shallow angle into a stack of collapsed levels that had once been the crew midsection. He ran lightly along it, making no sound at all.
Barely had he entered than an alarm went up—triggered not by him, but in response to a new influx of droids. The effect was the same. Every Rodian scavenger was on alert. His job instantly became that much more complicated.
A herd of Jawas ran by, squeaking, their glowing yellow eyes flashing on and off. He let them go, not having a second to spare, and followed the most likely route to the hyperdrive. When a pair of Rodians stepped out of a hole in the wall ahead of him, he didn’t give them a chance to raise their blasters. He sliced one in two while the other fell back clutching his throat.
“Are you having fun down there?” came Juno’s voice over the comlink.
“I’m making progress,” he said as his objective came into sight. The turbines of the massive hyperdrive lay dead ahead, their shielding removed in preparation for extraction elsewhere. Naked conduits and cable bundles snaked into the walls or hung limp, severed, on the floor.
“Progress at what?” she asked him. “Making things complicated?”
He didn’t respond. Her tone was borderline insolent, but she did have a point. Time was passing. The last thing he wanted was to get caught up in a dispute between Drexl’s band and the Core’s droid immune system. The sooner he was moving toward his objective, the better.
Another Rodian came running up the corridor behind him, firing at his back. He deflected the shots with his lightsaber and brought the ceiling down on the raider, effectively sealing himself into the hyperdrive access room. No matter. The walls were weak with metal fatigue. He could punch out in an instant when he was finished.
Kneeling in front of the turbines, he took a handful of cables in both hands and called on the Force. Energy surged through him, making him stiffen. Sith lightning sparked from his skin and snaked through the ragged metal walls, floor, and ceiling. Distantly he heard screams as the many beings inside the wrecked corvette suffered from the aftereffects. He ignored them, along with the smell of smoke rising from his own tattered uniform.
Focus, he told himself. Undirected power was power wasted. Gritting his teeth, he gathered the energy and directed it down his arms, into his hands. Blue light strobed across his vision as the lightning flowed into the wires and from there into the hyperdrive turbines. Groaning, then shrieking, the massive engine came alive. Damaged, completely out of alignment, and barely controllable, the turbine shook with propulsive power, then strained against the braces still holding it to the corvette’s warped chassis.
The deck kicked underneath the apprentice. He swayed as the entire corvette shifted. With a terrible sound, it began to move, plowing a brutal furrow through the surrounding rubbish. He could picture it clearly in his imagination and through the vibrant flow of the Force. As lightning poured through him and into the engine, it pushed the stricken corvette physically out of his path. The way to the Temple was now clear.
When he sensed that it had gone far enough, he relaxed his concentration. Smaller discharges of energy skittered across his skin. Somewhat shakily, he stood, then almost toppled over as the engine continued to fire, sending the corvette onward, out of his control.
He hadn’t expected that. There was enough residual potential in the turbine to keep it running for dozens of seconds. He had to get out of the corvette before it dragged him any farther from his goal.
Straining, he blew a hole in the side of the downed ship wide enough for a TIE fighter to pass through. The wall of a junk canyon was gliding by, raining rubbish. With one smooth leap, he caught hold of dangling cable and swung free of the wreck. It roared on, dragging itself through the dregs of the galaxy on its disintegrating belly, sending waves of disturbed filth radiating outward from its path.
“Are you creating a distraction, Starkiller,” squawked Juno from the comlink, “or trying to draw attention to yourself?”
“Choose the answer you prefer,” he said as he swung from cable to cable back the way the corvette had come. Scattered Jawas in singed robes were clambering into their transports to give chase to the corvette. He ignored them, used Sith lightning to blast a dozen droids that rushed him with electric claws raised, then turned left where the corvette had formerly rested to resume his approach to the strange parody of the Jedi Temple.
THE STRUCTURE’S BASE WAS EITHER buried under or part of the endless dump that was the Raxus Prime surface. The apprentice ascended cautiously to the foyer, where buckled armor plates had been hammered as close to flat as was possible and welded into approximately level floors. Abandoned thrust tubes stood in for marble columns. Sensor arrays made reasonable facsimiles of window frames, and curving tank walls created the illusion of arched ceilings high above.
The system’s primary added to the superficial beauty of the scene by casting beams of weak light in downward-sloping diagonal lines from his right to his left, in which dust motes danced languidly on the air.
But beneath it all the stench of decay remained, and with every step he took the floor shifted and creaked. Wires and decaying insulation protruded from the seams. In every corner lurked piles of rubbish that might have been fest
ering since the Empire’s founding.
As he walked cautiously forward, feeling the nearness of Kazdan Paratus but uncertain of his exact location, one of the rubbish piles stirred. From it stepped a humanoid machine made from the junked droid parts he had expected to find on his journey.
The braincase of an FX-8 medical droid was bolted onto a body cobbled together from several types of outdated protocol models. Its limbs appeared to come from a mixture of EV and B1 battle droids, tipped with instruments and tools that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a workshop. Its sole functioning photoreceptor glared a bright, furious yellow. Its lurching gait achieved an appreciable speed before he sliced its head off.
A second patchwork droid emerged from a different rubbish pile, followed by a third. The sound of more droid golems stirring came from elsewhere in the Temple. The apprentice fought them off with practiced ease. He had been dueling PROXY all his life; he knew the weaknesses and strengths of droids, even one capable, by a clever use of repulsor technologies and a specially adapted antique training lightsaber, of imitating a Jedi. Ones such as these, with barely a matching part among them, were child’s play.
Soon the foyer was full of the twitching, smoking bodies of the Temple’s hapless guardians. He began to tire, not from exertion but from the tedium of knocking down droid after droid, to no apparent end. There might have been thousands of them.
Deactivating his lightsaber, he took a deep breath. With one mighty exhalation of power, he blasted all of them—those in pieces and those approaching with needle-tipped fingers and vibrosaws upraised—out of the foyer doors. Then he blasted the rubbish piles after them. He kept pushing until a dark cloud soared out over Raxus Prime’s hideous landscape—an artificial hurricane full of droid golems.
When the foyer was clear, the apprentice straightened. He was no longer pushing with the Force, but the floor beneath him shook nonetheless. A heavy booming sound came from deeper in the Temple, and was getting louder. He had certainly attracted someone’s attention now.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Page 5
