She sighed and wiped her hands on her uniform pants. “Well, PROXY, it’s just you and me again.”
“Yes, Captain Eclipse.” The droid rarely seemed flapped by his master’s behavior. “I’ll begin a check of all systems, if you so wish.”
“That would be fine.” She stayed in her chair, still rubbing her palms against her legs. “Is he always like this, PROXY?”
“Like what, Captain Eclipse?”
“Moody and withdrawn. I almost caught him smiling a couple of times on Raxus Prime. Now, nothing. What’s going on inside his head?”
“I cannot speak with any confidence regarding his programming, Captain Eclipse,” said the droid with a puzzled blink. “Perhaps Lord Vader could explain, since he was the author of both our systems.”
That was an odd phrase. “What do you mean? Vader programmed Starkiller?”
“My master has been in Lord Vader’s care since he was a young child.”
“Like a father.” She frowned.
“My master refers to Lord Vader only as Master or Teacher,” the droid corrected her. “Never Father.”
That reassured her, oddly. The thought of Vader nurturing a toddler was too strange to be true. “Well, what happened to his real parents? Where did he come from?”
“I do not know, Captain Eclipse.”
“Does he never talk about them?”
“They have been expunged from his primary memory, I believe.”
“What about friends?” She hesitated slightly, then asked, “Girlfriends?”
“My master leads a solitary life,” the droid told her. “Lord Vader insists that it is essential to his development.”
“Development into what, exactly?” she asked, thinking Jedi killer, deranged mystic, murderer. The way he had casually abandoned the falling TIE fighter facility over Nar Shaddaa bothered her sometimes.
“We are all servants of my master’s Master,” the droid said, pointedly reminding her, perhaps, of her primary duty, too.
“Your programming is absolutely spot-on there, PROXY.” She levered her resistant body out of the pilot’s chair and straightened her uniform. “You continue with the systems check from in here. I will perform a quick visual inspection of the hull.”
“I advise caution,” PROXY warned her. “Many of the life-forms on Felucia are hostile to humans.”
“Have no concern on that score.” She opened a hatch and removed her BlasTech pistol, which she holstered around her waist with a well-practiced movement. “I can look after myself.”
“One of your predecessors used exactly those words before he was shot in the back by a Corellian gunrunner.”
She stopped on the verge of leaving the cockpit, unsure if PROXY was goading her, joking, or offering an innocent observation. Part of her wanted to know all about her seven predecessors, but a greater part wanted PROXY never to talk of them again.
“Just you watch your own back, PROXY,” she told him. “Your master’s Master has a Master, too, you know.”
“Yes, Captain Eclipse.”
She left the ship, face burning for the second time in a matter of minutes. What was wrong with her? The slightest hint that she had overheard the conversation between Starkiller and Lord Vader regarding the Emperor and she’d be dead for sure. If Vader’s agent didn’t do it, the droid would. He was an expert hand with a lightsaber, after all.
Maybe that was what had happened to the other pilots …
She stepped off the ramp and stamped about on the surface of the giant mushroom, testing its spongy surface. Her anger at herself rose with every second. Of course she had wanted to reestablish control over the situation, but dropping dire hints wasn’t the way to do it, even if the droid had started it. She could only be competent and professional, and she’d had plenty of practice doing that in the past. Now was absolutely the wrong time to break the habit of a lifetime.
Eventually she calmed down and went about the duty she had set for herself: examining the outer hull for any damage resulting from their rough descent. It seemed unblemished, apart from a few new stains added by plants they had passed, firing sticky bullets of sap designed to bring down flying insects. That observation helped revive some of the excitement she had felt on the descent.
Life in abundance, she reminded herself. Think of that for a change.
And she did manage it, marveling at the huge diversity of plants, fungi, insects, and animals in the jungle surrounding her. Many were rubbery and translucent. Liquid oozed from gaping pores and vents. The most corpulent of the life-forms looked as though they would burst if she so much as touched a finger to them. But all had teeth or spines and other means of self-defense. Many were vigorous hunters or parasites. She could hear the roaring of mighty predators and the crashing of large bodies through the undergrowth, distantly and sometimes directly beneath her strange, precarious landing site.
The more she observed, the more she thought of Callos. She had never set foot on that world, but from orbit it had had the same verdant sheen as Felucia. Could it have possessed forests as vibrant as these, as rich and splendid with life in all its forms? As she patrolled the lip of the giant mushroom pad, she wondered how many species had never been cataloged here, and now never would be on Callos. A familiar guilt rose up in her like sickness, making her want to throw up, and she had to turn back to the ship.
Since you feel so strongly on this matter, Vader had told her, I will give you an alternative course of action.
The images of the planetary reactor blowing up were burned into her mind. The Black Eight had pursued the mission objective with their usual surgical precision, coming low over the horizon and launching their pay-loads well before the reactor’s defenses could even come online. Each strike had been on target, sending up billowing clouds of burning gases. If war could be called beautiful, then that had been a beautiful moment indeed.
Your gratitude is wasted on me.
That was perfectly clear to her now.
But it didn’t change a thing.
“The checklist is complete, Captain Eclipse,” PROXY informed her via comlink from the cockpit. “I have detected a slight misalignment of the aft deflector shields.”
She grunted confirmation. The damage had almost certainly been sustained in the magnetic lanes of Raxus Prime, while dodging airborne lumps of explosive debris. “I will be right in, PROXY. Break out the tool kit. We’re going to have that repaired before Starkiller returns.”
“Yes, Captain.”
Juno took one last look around her, savoring the chance even though it brought back unpleasant associations. The forest was in fact fragile, despite its vibrant lethality. It might look as though it could endure a thousand years, outlasting even the Emperor himself, but a single nudge in the wrong direction could bring it all tumbling down, clotting and rotting until nothing was left but a deep organic sludge, fit only for refining into oil or protein cakes. In the wrong hands, Felucia could be the vegetable equivalent of Raxus Prime in a year.
Better to focus, then, on that which couldn’t be killed: on ships like the Rogue Shadow and their systems. The manifold problems of life and death couldn’t be fixed with a spanner, and it was well beyond her purview to try.
CHAPTER 8
THE APPRENTICE DUCKED ANOTHER BOLT of Force energy hurled by the Felucian warrior to his right and sent a jagged line of Sith lightning crackling across the distance between them. The warrior dropped dead to the ground but two more leapt out of the bushes behind him, waving their bone swords and howling in their strange, guttural language. He recognized the largest as one he had injured previously, but he moved now with perfect grace and aggression; the shaman he had spared several minutes earlier must have doubled back and healed the warrior’s injuries. He vowed not to make the same mistake again.
The bone swords were resistant to his lightsaber, but his skill with the Force far exceeded theirs. Dodging their clumsy telekinesis and unwieldy blows, he dispatched them calmly and without fuss, saving his energy for the
real enemy waiting for him.
Shaak Ti: Togruta Jedi Master and practitioner of both Makashi and Ataru lightsaber techniques. She was old and strong, and must have been wily indeed to have survived so long. Order 66 may have been issued many years ago, but it was still firmly in place all across the Empire. The apprentice swore to bring that fact home to her just as soon as he could.
Getting to her, however, was proving to be something of a problem. Although he had sensed her clearly from orbit as a deformation in the Force, much like a body of mass deformed the fabric of space–time, he hadn’t anticipated the dense flows he would encounter on the surface. The entire jungle was alive with the Force, from the tiniest spore to the mightiest rancor, and the Felucians themselves were alive with it, too—so alive, in fact, that they tapped into the Force as naturally as humans breathed an oxygen-rich atmosphere. That made them dangerous to him, the Sith apprentice who had come to crush the regime Shaak Ti had nurtured on Felucia.
She had taken a world enjoying the normal flows between the light and the dark sides of the Force and twisted it out of balance. There was still darkness on Felucia, but it was stifled, frustrated, weakened. He strained to awaken it, to remind it of its proper place in the universe. The light side had held sway for far too long. It was time to redress the issue. Killing Shaak Ti would do that quite nicely.
A rancor bearing a Felucian rider thundered through the forest, crushing delicate life-forms beneath its clawed feet and sniffing for his scent. The apprentice jumped from mushroom cap to mushroom cap until he was in a position above the rider’s head, then he leapt down with lightsaber swinging. The rider’s organic headdress covered everything from the neck up, as with all the warriors. He had some Force resistance, but he couldn’t withstand Darth Vader’s apprentice for long. Once the rider was dispatched, he brought down the rancor with a stream of Sith lightning that made its eyes shine like the headlights of a city speeder. It died with a roar that echoed through the jungle.
He hopped off its back as it dropped to the forest floor, having seen a landmark in the direction he was heading. Straddling a narrow, weed-choked river was a series of bulbous structures that looked remarkably like buildings, albeit buildings hollowed from the boles of giant fungi. Felucians ran through these narrow streets preparing defenses and mustering their rancor mounts. If they were getting ready for a fight, he wouldn’t disappoint them.
The river wound through the forest to his right. He circled the rancor corpse to find it. Along the way he sidestepped another of the pungent acid pools he had noted already. They puzzled him, obscurely, since they didn’t seem to be caused by pollution, as were their counterparts on Raxus Prime. He had learned to steer well clear of the occasional bubbles that surfaced through them, popping with an unhealthy splat and releasing an odor he hoped to forget very soon.
At the river’s edge he used the Force to attract one of the many flat-backed river beasts he had seen the Felucians ride. Its mind was semisentient at best, but its mighty flukes could manage a fair turn of speed. Gripping its carapace with one hand, he rode its undulating body toward the town, occasionally pausing to fling lightning at Felucian guards who bothered him.
“That’ll do,” he told his half-submerged steed as they approached the town’s borders. The beast nuzzled into the bank and he leapt aground near a massive, conical standing stone that loomed half a head taller than him among the gelatinous trees. He put a hand against it for balance and was surprised by two things: that it was warm and that it wasn’t made of stone at all.
Puzzled, he swung his lightsaber in a sweeping arc, cutting the odd monument in two. The top fell away with a crash, revealing an interior made of fibers and organic material. Bone, he thought. A tooth.
The ground beneath him shook, and he braced himself against the monument. From the town he heard the sound of Felucians crying out in alarm.
A curious thought began to take shape in his mind.
Ignoring it for the moment, he advanced on the town with lightsaber swinging. He hacked through the jungle, felling every plant within his range. Felucians tried to stop him, but he hurled giant trunks at them, driving them back. See what I can do, he tried to demonstrate. I’ll do it to your homes if you don’t leave me alone.
The message sank in. There was no reception waiting for him as he neared the town’s borders, which consisted of an irregular oval a kilometer or two across, surmounted by several of the strange giant teeth. A moat of acid and dead vegetation wound through the crowding mushroom trunks, obviously a defensive barrier more against pests than against serious invaders such as the apprentice. He hopped over the acid and slashed at another tooth as he landed.
Again the ground shook. A visible wave rippled along the village’s border, as though something was moving under the soil. Several long, snaking tubes that he had assumed were roots shifted restlessly back and forth.
The few Felucians visible on the streets fled into the jungle.
“Did you tell them to leave, Shaak Ti?” he called. He could sense the Jedi Master nearby, burning brightly in the Force but hidden like a lantern behind a shutter.
His voice echoed down the empty street, unanswered except by the braying of a domesticated beast, tied by rope to the base of a slender, towering fungus. The apprentice hopped off the border wall and walked into town, keeping his lightsaber carefully at the ready. Circular doors and windows hung open, inviting him inside. Bioluminescent growths cast a pale blue glow over the interior of the buildings, but he wasn’t tempted to investigate further. There could have been mountains of credits or exotic spices in there, but he hadn’t come for anything like that.
“Shaak Ti!” he called, turning his head to look from side to side. He passed more of the giant teeth as he approached the center of the town. They were smaller and cleaner than the previous ones, less infested with mildew and mushrooms, and functioned as fences defining gardens or lanes. It struck him, though, that the houses had been built to accommodate the fences, rather than the other way around—which would make sense if the teeth belonged to some vast and sprawling creature that lay directly underfoot. Why else would so many of the teeth be pointing inward, leaning almost horizontally in a way that would trip or even injure an unwary passerby?
The confirmation of that guess came when he turned the last corner and found himself facing the center of the town.
There, perched on the concentric gums of a vast sarlacc pit, touched by neither the massive feeding tentacles nor the flexing of the slender teeth, sat Shaak Ti. Her legs were crossed and her eyes closed. Deep in meditation, she didn’t look up as he approached, and seemed not to be aware of him at all.
He didn’t believe that for a second. With a flick of one wrist, he ripped a mushroom out of the sarlacc’s skin and threw it at her head.
She flicked it away with the Force, barely moving an eyebrow.
“You reek of that coward Vader,” she said, unfurling her legs and standing in one smooth movement. Her horn-like montrals framed her red-skinned face like an elaborate headdress. The white oval patches around her eyes gave her a slightly startled look, but the apprentice was under no illusion that he had surprised her. She was dressed in the fashion of the Felucians, in a garment made of vegetable material—some still living, judging by the mossy sheen on her belt—and bone. Her striped lekku hung well out of the way down her back, adorned by ribbons and decorative tassels.
He raised the tip of his lightsaber in challenge, but still she didn’t reach for hers.
“My Master is not a coward,” he said.
“Then why are you here in his place?” she asked with a knowing smile. “Welcome to the Ancient Abyss, a place of sacrifice since time immemorial.”
He smiled, letting anger fuel his hatred for her and for all that the Jedi represented. With the dark side behind him, he reached out for the mind of the sarlacc and goaded it to lash out at her.
All the creature did was roar. It resisted him, he realized, with her help.
She smiled in mockery. “Are you prepared to meet your fate?”
Then her lightsaber was lit and she was spinning through the air toward him, striking downward as she fell.
The apprentice simultaneously backflipped and blocked her opening blow. The force of it surprised him, and the recoil threw him backward. His hood caught on one of the sarlacc’s teeth, and he tore it impatiently away before the snag could interfere with his defense. Shaak Ti’s lightsaber was a jagged blue blur between them. He blocked her as best he could until he had his balance again.
Then he jumped. Over her he spun and fell down two layers of teeth toward the mouth of the sarlacc. From there he jumped up again, angling away from her to avoid giving the Jedi the advantage of height, but she was there ahead of him, driving him back down with a series of blows so rapid he barely caught them all.
In desperation, he summoned a bolt of Sith lightning and sent it down, into the flesh of the sarlacc. The beast roared and shook, giving him the opening he needed. Shaak Ti’s right foot slipped, forcing her to flip elegantly out of reach of his blade. He leapt after her, swinging as he came.
The fight progressed around the sarlacc’s center rings, blow and counterblow accompanied by the roaring of the beast. The apprentice cut off teeth and threw the fragments at his adversary’s head. In return she took tighter control of the beast’s distributed intelligence and sent its food-seeking tentacles flailing for him. He repulsed them and fought on.
Down they drove each other, closer and closer to the very lip of the creature’s enormous mouth. The air was foul down there, heavy with digestive by-products and the stink of rotting meat. Ghastly exhalations rolled over them as the sarlacc roared on. The apprentice was running out of teeth to sever, so he resorted more and more frequently to Sith lightning and random slashes of his lightsaber to keep it twitching underfoot. Thick ichor leaking out of the wounds made the footing even more treacherous.
“You can’t keep this up forever,” he taunted Shaak Ti as they dueled.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Page 7
