But they followed orders to the letter, like good stormtroopers, and that meant that someone, somewhere, wanted Juno Eclipse alive. To suffer, perhaps, before she died. Still, every time the troopers came near her, she expected that her time had come, that they would take her down and execute her right there, with a single blaster shot to the head. At least that, she thought in her darkest moments, would be a kind of release.
Her throat and lips were parched. Her head and arms ached. She could barely feel her fingers because the locks held her so tightly around her wrists.
This time, with a siren wailing, she successfully fought the urge to despair.
“Alert!” blared a voice over the station intercom. “Navigation systems have malfunctioned. Repeat, navigation systems have malfunctioned!”
She raised her head and looked around. The other cells, visible across the central prison detainment area, were empty. Her guards were momentarily absent, probably checking the source of the alert. If she’d had any way of freeing herself, she could have run during the confusion for an escape pod and gotten away from the station forever.
And then …?
Feeling a surge of frustration, she strained against her bonds. Muscles stood out on her thin arms. Her wrists were bruised from numerous such attempts. One day, she had told herself many times, the power would flicker and the locks would fail just long enough. Until then, it was a good form of exercise. Straining and hoping was much better than thinking—about what had happened to her, or what might be to come.
The station lurched around her. She sagged momentarily before trying again. Whatever was going on, it was serious. She could hear the stormtroopers barking at one another.
“Why aren’t these bulkheads opening?”
“We have to get to the escape pods!”
“The door isn’t accepting the security codes!”
The announcer returned with an ominous-sounding update: “Security breach in sector nine. Subject Zeta has escaped. Set blasters to kill!”
“Oh, that’s not good,” commented one of her erstwhile guards. Even through his vocoder Juno could hear the fear in his voice.
She didn’t know who or what Subject Zeta was, but she was determined not to be hanging up like a dead womp rat when it found her.
Tugging on her bonds, she thought she felt one of them weaken.
Two troopers appeared in her field of vision, blaster rifles held at the ready. They were aimed not at her, but back down the hallway.
“Forget the prisoner,” said one. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
“What about … him?”
“Let him die with the rest of the experiments.”
They punched at the air lock leading from the detainee area, but had no luck there, either. The air lock was securely sealed as well. Abandoning that futile task, they ran back the way they had come. Blasterfire and screams echoed up the corridor.
Juno resumed her escape attempt. The locks hadn’t shifted a millimeter. The illusion of slippage had come as a result of blood from her right wrist lubricating the restraint on that side. She yanked harder, ignoring the pain, but was as stuck fast as ever.
“Empirical security systems are offline,” warned the announcer. “All Imperials are advised to breach bulkhead doors and secure escape pods.”
The ship juddered around her, and the announcer returned in a more anxious voice: “All escape pods have been jettisoned—empty. Uh, await further orders. What?” The announcer must have turned away with the microphone open. “What fool ordered that?”
The broadcast ended with a loud click, almost drowned out by the sound of blasterfire and the station shaking around her. The cries of stormtroopers dying made her more determined than ever to get away before whatever had killed them found her, but she could make no greater effort than she already was.
Exhausted, she sagged weakly in the locks, sucking in air that tasted of smoke and blood. It was getting warmer, too, which couldn’t be a good sign. The flexing of the walls had to be more than just turbulence. If something had gone terribly wrong and the station’s orbit had been disturbed, the commotion could come from thermal expansion—not dangerous in itself, but lethal if they came too close to the source.
Executed, killed by the thing that had escaped from Vader’s lab, or burned alive: those appeared to be the only choices open to her. After all her years of loyal service and everything she had done in the name of the Empire, and despite the constant lip service paid by Palpatine to notions of justice and the public good, this was where she had ended up. All her dreams of advancement shattered. Her life in ruins.
She wondered what her father would think of her now, if he could see her and hear her side of the story. What faith could he possibly have in a system that turned on her for no reason? What did anyone owe an Emperor who condemned her for obeying orders?
But she knew she could never have convinced him to believe the truth, just as she knew she could never have talked to him about the doubts that had stirred in her after Callos—and not just about Vader’s handling of that affair. The official story of her mother’s death was that she had been killed in crossfire. What if the Empire had been as heavy-handed on Corulag as the Black Eight had been on Callos?
For the thousandth time she saw her bombs striking home on the planetary reactor, the brilliant explosions lighting up the jungle. Only as she pulled up out of her run and sped for orbit did she note the chain reaction her strikes had caused. The stricken reactor was belching pollutants into the atmosphere and spewing megaliters of caustic chemicals from vast underground stores into the canals that fed it with fresh water. She could practically see the living surface of Callos recoil from the poisons she had inadvertently released. A cold, sick feeling began to blossom in her gut.
That feeling only became worse on her return to her base ship. Amid the backslapping of her Black Eight pilots, she had felt a growing urgency to check telemetry data gathered by the ship. From the privacy of her quarters she had watched, appalled at the sight of the reactor burning on beneath a spreading pall of deadly smoke. Lightning flashed under the dense mushroom cloud, starting fires and catalyzing deadly chemical reactions. Nearby river systems were soon utterly choked with biological debris.
Trying to keep her voice level, she had commed a friend with a background in environmental science. He had seen the data. His projections were dire.
“It’s a runaway chain reaction for certain,” he said. “I hope you got a close look at those forests while you were down there. They won’t be there six months from now, and they’re never coming back.”
A whole biosphere destroyed—for what? This wasn’t just because Callos had dared wriggle in the Emperor’s grip. Neither was it solely because she had requested a degree of clemency from the campaign’s director: Lord Vader. The Emperor was less interested in punishing, she had begun to suspect, than setting an example.
The terrible thing about examples was that there didn’t have to be anyone left alive afterward. A ruin told the story as effectively as an eyewitness—perhaps more so, for the ringing silence left in the wake of such an outrage only served to impress the Emperor’s boot heel even more deeply into the galaxy.
No protests. No alarm bells. No warnings.
What had the Empire come to?
Perhaps, she had dared to think, the Empire had always been like this.
Before she could follow that line of thought to any kind of conclusion, orders had come from Vader to report to the Executor for a new duty. Glad to be absolved of any further involvement in genocide—or so she had hoped—she had said nothing of her misgivings and moved on, mistakenly thinking that, by some small miracle, she had avoided becoming snarled in the Empire’s gargantuan workings, as Callos had been, and Starkiller, and perhaps her mother, too, all those years ago.
So many lives, ground under the treads of the Imperial machine.
Hers barely seemed worth worrying about, sometimes. But still she asked, in her darke
st hours, Why me? What had the Dark Lord seen in her that made her suited to the assignment to Starkiller?
Not her conscience, surely. Nor her sunny disposition …
“Hold it right there!”
Her head came up at the sound of blasterfire closer than it had been before. Bits of droid blew past her door, smoking from their severed joints. The voice of the station commander, a man she had only met once and intensely disliked, bellowed a second time over the cacophony.
“You’re not leaving this ship alive, lab rat!”
The unmistakable buzz of a lightsaber rose up from the chaos. She raised her chin higher, straining to see past the door frame.
No. It couldn’t be.
The head of a stormtrooper bounced past her cell, neatly severed from the rest of its body. The armor glowed in a red oval where it had been smoothly truncated through the neck.
Perhaps …?
She shook her head, telling herself she had to be hallucinating because of the heat and failing atmosphere control. It had been so long since she had last felt hope. She didn’t dare give in to it now.
Still, she didn’t take her eyes off the entrance to her cell, just in case she was wrong.
She was sure she could get used to the idea this time.
CHAPTER 13
THE APPRENTICE PRESSED FORWARD THROUGH a hail of blasterfire, his progress hampered by the need to protect PROXY as well as himself. The droid was adept at dueling him, but was not programmed to fight Imperials. Blasterfire came from all directions as troopers by the dozens rushed forward to replace those he had already dealt with. Their determination to kill him seemed out of all proportion to their situation. Surely falling into the sun was more important than dispatching one escaped invalid.
But gradually, by overhearing their panicky comments to one another, he realized the much darker truth: that their fear of him came from rumors spread regarding his innate monstrosity, the worst of Darth Vader’s experiments, which, if it got loose, would kill them all in some horribly depraved way. The rumor was a contingency prepared in case he rejected his Master’s offer of a new alliance. Either way, he would have to fight his way off the ship before he could even start to think about what came next.
At the announcement that all the escape pods had been jettisoned empty, the apprentice looked over his shoulder at the droid cowering behind his spinning blade.
“PROXY? Did you launch those pods?”
“Of course, master. It pays to be thorough.”
He resisted an impatient retort. “How much time do we have?”
“Just a few moments.”
PROXY didn’t sound worried at all. The apprentice wished he shared the droid’s confidence. He had taken long enough to fight his way through halls of preserved biological specimens to the escape pod launching point. There was still one series of corridors to negotiate before they reached the air lock leading to the Rogue Shadow. Driving two stormtroopers ahead of him with the threat of Sith lightning, he pressed resolutely on.
The prison detainment area was broad and hard to defend, but a squad of troopers gamely made a go of it. Taking cover wherever they could, they fired in rapid bursts from several directions at once, hoping to find a chink in his defense. There was none. His new green blade whirled with astonishing effectiveness. It and the apprentice were one—as though his supposed death had never happened. He felt strong, powerful, deadly.
A weapon refashioned by Darth Vader to bring ruin upon the Emperor and his minions …
The leader of the squad cast insults and aspersions over the blasterfire, as though that could possibly distract him. The apprentice let the dark side flow through him, buoyed up by his anger—at the squad leader, at the time passing so quickly, at the Emperor—and calmly mowed down anyone who stood in his path.
When the last had fallen, PROXY tapped him on his shoulder.
“Master, hurry. We’re rapidly approaching the sun. Life support will be overwhelmed any moment now.”
“Wait,” he said, raising a gloved hand. “What about—?”
Even as he looked around at the entrances to the cells, he saw her. Juno was hanging in a magnetic lock with blood dripping from her right wrist, dressed in the scruffy remains of an Imperial uniform. Her hair was unkempt and her skin dirty. Her eyes were wide with shock, taking in not just him but the ruin he had wreaked on the stormtroopers as well.
“Juno …”
“It’s—” She struggled for words. “—really you!”
He understood her hesitation. She couldn’t call his name because he didn’t have one.
“Master,” said PROXY, cutting between them. He pointed with one metal hand toward an air lock at the far end of the chamber. “We’re almost there! Hurry!”
The sound of klaxons had reached a fever pitch. The ship swayed underneath him as gravitational control began to waver. The air was almost unbreathable. Even if they left now, there might barely be enough time to prep the ship and get away.
Juno’s face was a picture of desperation.
He didn’t move. Was this a trap? He could see no sign of deception in her face, just fear.
“Master, hurry!” PROXY tugged on his sleeve and whispered urgently. “She is part of your past life now. Leave her behind, as Lord Vader commanded!”
He pulled himself free, deciding with his heart rather than his head. “I can’t. You go ahead and prepare the ship for launch. We’ll follow as soon as we can.”
“But, master—”
“Just do it, PROXY! That’s my command.”
The droid tottered off through the air lock while the apprentice deactivated his lightsaber and looked around for the magna lock generator. It had to be there somewhere, a big one, sufficient to power all the restraints in all the cells. The air was becoming fumy and thick, and the flashing lights made it hard to concentrate. Thick bundles of cables snaked along the walls and under metal grilles. He traced them as best he could to their source, a large boxy structure fixed to a wall two doors along.
He didn’t have time to perform a thorough investigation. It was the right size, so he would have to chance it. Raising both hands, he sent a wave of lightning through it, causing it to blacken and smoke. Current surged along the wires, sending out showers of sparks. Juno cried out in sudden pain.
Changing tactics, he stilled the lightning, clenched his hands into fists, and ripped the box out of the wall with one single, uncompromising wrench. The machinery inside exploded, filling the air with clouds of acrid debris. Juno cried out again, but this time in relief.
He hurried to her, finding his way via the Force through the impenetrable air. She was on her hands and knees, struggling to find her feet on the uneasy floor. She clutched at him when he burst out of the smoke and pulled her upright. She weighed almost nothing.
“I saw you die,” she said, staring at him with naked disbelief. “But you’ve come back.”
Rather than make her walk, he picked her up and hurried toward the air lock.
“I have some unfinished business,” he said curtly, not knowing where to begin.
“Vader?” she asked, then folded into a series of choking coughs.
“Don’t worry about him,” he told her. The air lock led into a narrow umbilical. Fresh air blew toward him from ahead. Heat radiated through the walls. He ducked his head and hurried toward safety.
“I’ve been branded a traitor to the Empire,” she told him. “I can’t go anywhere, do anything—”
“I don’t care about any of that. I’m leaving the Empire behind.” He put all the reassurance he could find into his voice. She had to believe him without question. “And I need a pilot.”
She buried her face in his shoulder as the familiar walls of the Rogue Shadow enfolded them. Barely had he crossed the threshold than the air lock door slammed shut on the Empirical and explosive bolts severed the umbilical.
“Welcome aboard, master,” came the voice of the droid from the cockpit.
Assu
ming Juno wouldn’t be up to flying just yet, the apprentice called ahead of them, “Get us out of here, PROXY!”
“Yes, master.”
The sublight engines instantly engaged, and they were away.
CHAPTER 14
THROUGH THE VIEWPORTS OF THE Rogue Shadow, Juno watched as the Empirical fell behind them. Tumbling and turning, the modified cruiser’s orbit had decayed beyond all hope of arresting its plunge into the sun. Barely had the Rogue Shadow detached than its outer shielding spontaneously ignited, sending waves of yellow lines creeping across the blackened hull. Without air to fuel the flames, for the moment, only metal and plastic were burning. The moment one of the viewports popped, however, the combustion began in earnest.
Her prison for six months was little more than a dark dot against the face of the sun when it suddenly flared and died. The explosion was almost anticlimactic, but it was sufficient. She unfolded her legs from beneath her, gratified to be rid of the place. Starkiller and PROXY were in the copilot’s and pilot’s seats, respectively. She was sitting behind them in the jump seat with a makeshift bandage around her wrist like some helpless piece of cargo. Like a passenger.
She had been hanging up like a forgotten nerf carcass for too long. It was time to take control of her life again.
“Out of my seat,” she told the droid who had argued for abandoning her and letting her die with the Empirical. She felt no hard feelings for him, knowing that he had only been obeying his primary programming, but that didn’t mean she had to like him.
“Yes, Captain Eclipse.” He moved back into the seat she had vacated, clicking and humming to himself.
Touching the controls made her fingers tingle. She had dreamed of this moment for weeks and never dared believe it might actually come.
“What’s our destination?” she asked Starkiller.
“Away from here.”
“That’ll do it.” She keyed a jump in a random direction and leaned back into her seat. The familiar streaks of hyperspace almost made her choke. She smiled through the wave of emotion and let the ship carry them to safety.
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