The loop couldn’t last forever. With a blinding blue flash he and the Jedi were blown far apart, crashing with arms outstretched into the walls of the hut and dropping to the floor. Their lightsabers skittered away in opposite directions, dead.
Flat on his back, the apprentice wheezed through his mask like an asthmatic Gand, only gradually regaining sensation in his arms and legs. His muscles twitched spastically when he tried to move. Acrid steam poured from his mask’s narrow eye slits. Fearing that his Jedi opponent might be on his feet before him, he called on all the power of the Force to lift himself bodily into the air. Hanging suspended like a doll, with his feet some centimeters off the ground, he blinked his searing eyes until he could see again.
The Jedi was faring no better. He, too, was upright, but only just. He, too, had lost his lightsaber and not yet managed to reclaim it. The apprentice leered behind his mask. He had several other lightsabers to choose from, belonging to all the Jedi Knights he had killed. All he had to do was select one at random and strike.
Instead he reached out with his left hand and, as his dark Master had done to the first Jedi killed on this spot, long ago, gripped his opponent about the throat with the Force. Still smoking from the lightning attack, the young man jerked abruptly into the air.
They faced each other across the ruined hut, neither touching the ground.
“Kill me,” gasped the Jedi, “and you destroy yourself.”
The apprentice laughed gloatingly, a hideous sound that bore little relationship to anything made by a human throat. Summoning his lightsaber, he activated it and threw it at the stricken Jedi. The blade went through the Jedi’s right shoulder and deactivated when the pommel hit flesh. The Jedi arched his back but didn’t cry out. Savoring the moment, the apprentice unhitched one of the other lightsaber hilts from his belt, ignited it, too, and impaled the Jedi again. Over and over he stabbed the Jedi Knight until there were no more hilts at his belt and the ground beneath his victim was stained deep red.
Still the Jedi lived. A flicker of annoyance spoiled the moment, but then he remembered that there was one more lightsaber he hadn’t used: the Jedi’s own. Snatching it to him, the apprentice ignited the blade, drew his arm back, and stabbed the Jedi Knight through the heart.
That did the trick. The body dropped to the ground, inert, and the apprentice allowed himself to stand properly on the soil. The dark side throbbed through him. He was the living embodiment of power.
Tipping his masked head back, he crowed in triumph like a feral wolf cat.
“I never wanted this for you,” whispered a hollow voice out of the shadows.
He spun, lightsaber back in his hand and lit in less time than it took to think about it. Someone else stood in the hut: a man with long dark hair and a Wookiee sash down his front. He looked at the body of the Jedi Knight on the ground, grief and loss in his eyes.
The apprentice went to strike him down, but stopped, recognizing him as the man from two visions: the father of the boy who had been taken and the man he had glimpsed over Nar Shaddaa.
“I never wanted any of this for you,” the man said. “I’m sorry, Galen.”
Rooted to the spot, the apprentice stared as the Jedi Knight turned to walk back into the shadows. Vision or reality? Truth or fantasy? His mind felt as though it were turning as fast as a pulsar.
“Father, wait!” The voice burst out of him, unfiltered by hideous deformities or the strictures of the mask. Suddenly he was the boy again, whole but alone, standing abandoned in the bloody hut. “Father, no!”
The Jedi Knight walked on without pause and vanished into the shadows.
Collapsing to his knees, the apprentice lowered his head and screamed.
CHAPTER 22
A BEDRAGGLED FIGURE EMERGED FROM the ruined hut, eyes wild and jaw set. With determination, he set off along the dry creekbed, following the directions he had been given in another age, another life. Empty of thought, he let duty sweep him forward. Duty to his Master, to Juno, to Kota, to the Wookiees …
What duty he owed himself, he didn’t know. He hadn’t realized that there had even been a him to think of outside his relationship with Darth Vader. He had imagined himself simply made, somehow, one of his Master’s stranger biological experiments, with no parents and no home but the one he remembered. What if the visions he had endured were real and he had had a family, here on Kashyyyk? How did that affect his place in Vader’s schemes? Did it change everything, or nothing?
Juno called on the comlink to ask him if he was all right. He said he was. She asked if he was sure. He said he was. She sounded hurt by his terseness, but he couldn’t help that. He was so full of emotion—confusion and doubt, and dismal certainty and hope as well—that he couldn’t cope with her feelings on top of it. He was trying his best not to feel at all.
Galen?
He had a job to do.
As he ran through the undergrowth, putting the depthless shadows of the hut behind him, he repeatedly touched his hands, reassured as he never had been before by the feel of skin on skin.
THE MOORINGS WERE LARGER EVEN than he had guessed from the brief plans displayed by the astromech droid. Its mistress’s instructions had been simple: destroy the moorings and the skyhook would be ruined. That sounded deceptively easy, given the amount of fortification and security in place.
Simplicity suited him, however. He didn’t want to think, to have to agonize over motives and methods. He just wanted to act. With none of the joy he had felt while assaulting the lodge and with none of the challenge offered by the black Imperial Guards on Bespin, he plowed through the faceless stormtroopers as a wampa would stride through snow. Sith lightning crackled; bodies broke under his irresistible telekinesis; his mind influenced the decisions of officers, who ordered their underlings to attack one another in droves. None could stand up to him and survive.
When he reached the base of the skyhook, he was momentarily given pause. How to bring about the ruin of six constructs several stories high? Their super-strong materials were designed to handle the stresses of holding the massive station directly above, against all the laws of physics. How would he overcome their resistance?
The answer, as always, lay in the Force. The Force was beyond physics. The Force could not be resisted, when wielded by confident hands. The Force would always be sufficient.
Turning his back on the body-strewn battlefield, he put both hands on the base of the nearest mooring. Closing his eyes and his mind to all forms of distraction, he imagined himself at one with the metal, permacrete, and stone. He felt the mooring’s strengths and its weaknesses. He resonated with it, until it was hard to tell where his hands stopped and the mooring began.
When he could achieve no greater focus, he reached out for the dark side and let it guide him.
Energy came like a dam bursting, as wild as every predator on Kashyyyk combined but as pure as a laser. He tilted his head back and relished the wonder and terror of what he had brought into being. This was a power far greater than Sith lightning, designed for one single task. He lost himself utterly in that task. He became destruction.
The mooring shook. Its more delicate components—nanowires, sensitive self-regulating systems, microscopic hydraulic channels—fused almost immediately. Once the complex processes maintaining its stability were disrupted, a chain reaction began that could not be stopped. Pressures mounted in areas close to exceeding their maximum load; hairline cracks formed and spread; a deep vibration sprang up that could not be dampened. Even if left to its own devices, the mooring would shake itself to pieces in minutes.
The apprentice maintained his assault until hairline cracks became gaping rents and the vibration shook the world, howling material agony over the renewed firing of blaster cannons. When the first shower of boiling dust and pebble-sized fragments rained down on him, he decided it was time to step back and take stock—and to prevent some hapless stormtrooper creeping up on him and shooting him in the back.
He op
ened his eyes and looked up. The mooring was barely recognizable as the same structure. Electrical discharges danced across its conducting surfaces. Ultra-stressed permacrete flowed like treacle. Larger fragments began to fall and he batted them away with the Force, feeling no more drained by his exertion than he would have from a light run. He almost smiled at his accomplishment, but one stark fact sobered him to the core.
One down. Five to go.
The Imperials were rallying. They needed to be reminded of who they were dealing with. While crossing to the next mooring in line, he detonated fuel tanks and exploded ammunition stores. AT-STs cracked open like seedpods and burst into short-lived flame. He reached his target without encountering serious resistance and brought it down as he had the first.
By now the Imperials on the ground were calling for reinforcements from above. A trio of TIE fighters shrieked down through Kashyyyk’s atmosphere, stitching the blackened permacrete with needles of fire. He laughed mirthlessly. They considered that a solution?
With a well-timed nudge on the lead TIE fighter’s port solar gather panel, he sent it tumbling into the permacrete, where it exploded instantly. The impact shook the ground beneath his feet and sent cracks spreading across its face.
That gave him an idea. When the two remaining TIEs came around for another pass, he sent them both into the third and fifth moorings. The fourth took so much collateral damage that it fared almost as badly as its siblings.
Only one mooring remained.
As he turned to it, he became aware of the clanking of an AT-ST coming from behind him. He turned just in time to deflect a barrage of precision weapons fire from the nose of a walker that was sprinting at him as fast as its two mechanical legs could run. A flurry of concussion grenades followed.
He detonated them all before they could arrive and repulsed the furious blossoming of hot gases in a sphere around him.
The AT-ST didn’t take the hint. It was moving fast, bearing down with its flat footpads as though trying to physically trample him. Maybe it was. The walker had registration markings identifying it as belonging to the commander of the Imperial ground forces.
Captain Sturn had come to finish the job at which his underlings had failed so miserably.
The apprentice dodged the stamping feet as they went by and zapped the rear of the walker with lightning. Nothing happened. Sturn’s walker obviously possessed a layer of shielding above and beyond that provided to his grunts. The AT-ST’s armaments also set it apart from the others, including a long-barreled hunting cannon and what appeared to be a net launcher on its left flank.
Sturn brought the walker about. The apprentice reached out to twist the man’s mind, but found it too opaque with anger and resentment; not fear, though. Sturn wasn’t the sort of man who would be frightened of one person. He was convinced of his own invincibility, certain that there was no resistance he couldn’t quash. The apprentice had met men like him before, many times. The AT-ST’s extra weaponry confirmed it. He imagined Sturn hunting Wookiees for sport, when he wasn’t persecuting his junior officers for fun and plotting the betrayal of his superiors. The apprentice had dispatched many such men in the service of his Master.
The apprentice smiled with no trace of humor. Normally he liked nothing better than putting beings in their place, but this was just irritating.
Sturn’s walker jogged ponderously toward him. He considered his options. It would be a simple matter to crush the walker as he would a faulty comlink, collapsing the casing and instantly killing the man within. He could play with the walker as he had played with the two by the lodge and blow it up from within. He could even use it as a battering ram to destroy the last mooring, thereby killing two spade-headed smookas with one swipe. The grim irony in that appealed to him.
He deflected another round of cannon fire into the mooring and noticed only then that the thick cable leading up to the skyhook station was visibly vibrating. Strange surges rushed up and down its length as though it had been plucked by a giant hand. He shielded his eyes against the glare of the sun and looked upward. The skyhook was faintly visible, as was a cloud of debris coming down from above. Small specks quickly resolved into objects as big as boulders. They were growing rapidly in size.
He performed a quick mental calculation. The debris would arrive about the same time as Sturn’s walker. Ideal.
He reached out and crumpled the walker’s cannon and grenade launchers. For a moment, the only sounds came from his lightsaber and the heavy tread of the AT-ST.
He straightened. Through the command viewport, he saw a man with a red face wearing what looked like Wookiee fur trim on his uniform. The captain’s mouth was open, bellowing orders at his hapless gunner. The apprentice couldn’t hear the words, but he could imagine.
The walker reared up one leg to stamp him into the ground.
At that moment the debris hit with all the force of a hundred shooting stars, striking everything around the base of the skyhook—the sixth mooring included—and crushing the walker into scrap metal. Debris went everywhere. The noise was unimaginable. The apprentice didn’t flinch or move in the slightest as rubble rain impacted about him. He only watched, with satisfaction, as the skyhook base ripped free of the planet and recoiled like a whip into the upper atmosphere. The station exploded shortly thereafter, briefly outshining the sun, even through the dust and smoke of his handiwork.
The rain of rubble ceased. He remained exactly where he was, hypnotized by the slowly fading star in the sky, until the Rogue Shadow swooped down directly in front of him, repulsors whining to hold itself just above the ground.
He blinked, realizing only then that Juno was trying to talk to him.
“I said, it’s done. Hop aboard. Let’s get out of here.”
He moved as though in another vision, stepping lightly up onto the open ramp but feeling like he weighed a thousand tons.
With a piercing whine, the cloaked ship angled up from the cratered ground and made for free space.
CHAPTER 23
PROXY FUSSED OVER STARKILLER AS never before, brushing ash and dust from his clothes with vigorous flicking motions of his slim metal hands. Maybe the droid had never been separated so long from his master before; Juno didn’t know, and she didn’t care to ask. The look on Starkiller’s face was thunderous.
“Who was she?” he said to Kota, who had moved back to the jump seat, freeing up the copilot’s spot for him.
“Princess Leia Organa. Her father is Bail Organa, my contact in the Senate.”
“I want to talk to him.”
The general passed a hand across his face, as though resting his eyes. “You can’t.”
Starkiller’s fury found the outlet it had been looking for. “I just risked my life rescuing his daughter from a planet overrun by stormtroopers—”
“Don’t, boy.” Kota raised one weary hand as Starkiller loomed over him. “You can’t talk to Bail because I can’t find him. He’s gone missing.”
“What?” Starkiller’s frustration redoubled. “When?”
“I haven’t been able to contact him since we left Bespin. The last time I saw him was on Nar Shaddaa some weeks after—after I fell. He found me, and tried to recruit me then to rescue Leia. I refused, of course.” He indicated his eyes as though that explained everything. “When I refused, he sent me to Cloud City. I haven’t seen or heard from him since.”
Kota turned away, shrunken and inward looking, as though regretting his decision. In another time, Juno supposed, Kota wouldn’t have hesitated an instant. He would have happily marched into a den of Imperials and dealt them the rough justice they had administered to his own friends. But what could he have done now, one blind old man against thousands of able-bodied, well-armed soldiers?
She stayed carefully out of it, and not just to avoid the argument. Her heart was stinging from its own wounds, and she remained unsure exactly which side of the fence she stood on where the two men were concerned.
Starkiller backed down
without apologizing. They seemed to find that an acceptable resolution. Kota stayed in the jump seat, chin tilted resolutely downward, while Starkiller retreated to the meditation chamber. After he had gone, the air smelled of sulfur and smoke.
Juno looked down at the controls. He hadn’t given her a heading. She trimmed the Rogue Shadow’s trajectory automatically—and PROXY mirrored her every move in the seat beside her, an act she still found profoundly disturbing. Knowing better now, however—that the droid couldn’t help it, that this was as much a part of his being as breathing was for her—she didn’t ask him to stop.
“How do you cope with him when he’s like this?” she asked the droid.
PROXY didn’t need to ask who she was talking about. “I usually fight him. That seems to help. Would you like me to—”
“No, PROXY. Stay there. I think it’s time someone tried a different tack.”
Leaving the ship in Kota’s and the droid’s unlikely hands, she climbed out of her seat and headed aft.
* * *
THE MEDITATION ROOM WAS DARKER than it seemed through the security slice. Its air was cooler, somehow, and the sound of the ship’s hyperdrive came as though from thousands of kilometers away. Despite its spareness, there was a calmness to the angular space that struck her as soon as she entered. The chamber felt poised between moments, possessing a kind of criticality that she supposed someone of Starkiller’s former occupation would need to acquire. The ability to remain calm while hunting Jedi didn’t come easily, she was sure. And the cost …
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