Light, dark, Shaak Ti had tried to tell him, they are just directions.
We’re always moving, he thought, toward the dark or toward the light. It’s impossible to stand still. Some, like Darth Vader and the Emperor, had been descending through the dark side for so long that the light must have become a faint and distant memory. Some hovered eternally in the gray, never entirely choosing a side. There were, in fact, no actual sides, just the direction in which one happened to be moving. It was all relative.
Coming to that understanding gave him a new kind of strength. When Sith betrayed one another, it wasn’t because they were enemies. Their paths had simply diverged. So fighting Maris wasn’t turning his back on the dark side. She was simply in his way, like so many other people before him.
Do not be fooled, Shaak Ti had also said, as so many have before you, that you walk on anything other than your own two feet.
Blocking Maris Brood’s spinning strikes, he changed from the staid form of Soresu into the more aggressive Juyo favored by the dark side. Maris noticed the shift in his fighting style but, having only been trained in Jedi methods, failed to understand what it meant. She continued attacking with increasing desperation, even as he began to drive her back across the mounds of bones, past the body of her giant pet and away from Senator Organa. Her breathing became hard and her moves less focused. Fear began to dominate the wild look in her eyes. She was close to losing her concentration entirely.
Use the fear, he wanted to tell her. Use the fear to make you angry, because anger makes you strong. I killed your Master. Mine tried to kill me and I am stronger for it. You could be, too, if you would only realize that simple truth!
But even in the depths of her darkness, the light had corrupted her too deeply. She was a lost cause.
Enough, he thought.
Raising his left hand, he used the Force to lift a mound of bones into the air. Rattling and tumbling, they swirled around the two of them, picking up speed. Maris didn’t know where to look. While she was distracted, he disarmed her with two swift, precise moves. Her blades skittered away through the bones and she fell back, rubbing her singed forearms. Defiance gleamed in her eyes, but too late. Much too late.
When she turned to run, he struck her in the back with Sith lightning and she fell sprawling to the bones.
With his lightsaber held loosely in his right hand, he approached her.
“No,” she gasped, making a futile attempt to imitate the bone-dance floating around them. He batted the missiles away.
“Please!” Defiance turned to despair and still she resisted her anger. “Don’t!”
“Why not?” He stood over her, lightsaber raised, point-down, to strike. “If you’re the slave to the dark side you claim to be, I’d be doing the galaxy a favor.”
“But it’s not my fault. Shaak Ti abandoned me on this horrible planet.” Tears sparkled in her eyes. “Felucia is evil. It corrupted me. Just let me get away from here and I’ll put the dark side behind me. I want to.”
“Why should I believe you?”
She came up onto her knees. “Please let me go. You’ve won, haven’t you? The Senator is yours. There’s no need to kill me.” She reached for him. “Save me instead. Please.”
He backed away, repelled by the display. You’re not worthy of the dark side, he wanted to say.
But this was what the dark side had turned her into. She had aspired to being a Jedi Knight, once, and now she was reduced to begging for her life. What talents she had were poisoned, turned to destruction, directed inward—used toward no greater end than her own survival.
The dark side had changed Felucia in a similar fashion. The stench of death and decay in his nostrils came from more than the bull rancor’s blood all over him.
Corruption.
He lowered his lightsaber and deactivated it. The swirl of bones fell to the ground with a clatter.
She clambered to her feet, looking as though she couldn’t believe her luck. “Thank you.”
He wasn’t sure he could believe it, either. Was he sparing her out of pity or because he recognized the emotions poisoning her? “Don’t say anything. Just get out of here.”
“Can I come with you? I don’t want to stay here—”
“You’ll just have to, until another ship comes along. Or maybe the Imperials can give you a lift.”
She backed away, as though he might change his mind at any moment. Then she turned and made a break for the tree line. He watched her in case she went for her weapons and tried to take him by surprise. For all her pleading and bargaining, he didn’t trust her one millimeter.
At the tree line she stopped and turned. Her tears were gone. Then, with a parting wink, she was, too.
Bones crunched behind him. He turned and saw a battered and dirty Bail Organa climbing across the mounds of bones toward him.
“I’ve seen her kind before,” Organa said severely. “A young Jedi who turned to the dark side, corrupted and evil, murderous …”
The apprentice held out his hand and steadied the Senator. Years of pain showed in the man’s brown eyes. The words Organa said next surprised him.
“You shouldn’t have let her go free.”
“You really think she’s free?” he asked. She’s as free as I am, he thought. Free to make mistakes, and hopefully free to learn from them. “She’ll carry the memory of what she’s done here forever.”
Organa stared at the forest wall a moment longer, then nodded his understanding. Or that he thought he understood. “Sometimes memories aren’t enough. Sometimes we, the victims, must be more … proactive.”
“Exactly.” The apprentice took the chance to direct the conversation somewhere far away from the dark, painful places of his own hidden psyche. “That’s why I’m here, Senator. We desperately need your help. The galaxy needs your help. We have to stop living in the past and come out fighting for what we believe in.”
Bail Organa looked at him with bemusement. “Kota and I had this argument many times, before—”
“The time for argument is past. The Emperor has had his way for too long—and we are the ones who will stop him. Are you with us?”
“Take me to Kota,” said the Senator wearily. “It makes more sense to talk about this face-to-face.”
The apprentice was happy for Organa to believe, for the moment, that Kota was entirely behind this new development.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go. The Imperials will be crawling all over this jungle soon anyway …”
As he turned away to comm Juno, he caught Organa looking again at the jungle where Maris Brood had disappeared.
“May the Force be with us,” the Senator muttered. “All of us, one way or another.”
CHAPTER 26
DAYS ON FELUCIA, JUNO DECIDED, were the longest in the galaxy. They felt like it, anyway. The first time she had come here, she had spent the downtime consumed with worry about Starkiller’s planned betrayal of the Emperor. That was still the plan—but she remained somewhat unsure whether his motives were any nobler than revenge for his betrayal at the hands of his former Master. The ends justified the means, she eventually concluded, and if that meant their fates were entangled a little longer, all the better.
While Kota paced, she monitored Imperial transmissions emanating from the verdant world. Someone had to keep an eye on the Senator’s transport, so she stationed PROXY outside with his lightsaber and a blaster to keep wildlife—much more determined and vicious than last time—away from both ships and kept an ear out herself for any sign that trouble was on its way. If things got sticky, she could fly the Rogue Shadow and PROXY the transport.
When Starkiller commed to tell her that he’d located and secured Senator Organa, she felt her stress levels ease.
“Give me the coordinates and I’ll pick you up.”
He did so, and then added something that made her even more anxious than before. “Don’t be alarmed when you see me. It’s only superficial.”
“W
hat’s only superficial?”
The sound of a rancor roaring came over the comlink. It sounded close. “Hurry, Juno. Things are getting a little uncomfortable here.”
She did as she was told, calling PROXY and telling him that she was taking the ship on a short hop but would be back soon. The droid reassured her affably enough that he would be fine while she was gone. Then she hollered for Kota to strap himself in.
The general came forward to sit in the copilot’s seat even though he couldn’t see through the forward viewport or use the controls. “What’s the hurry?” he asked.
“Our friends need a lift,” she said, flicking switches and warming up the repulsors.
“Bail is safe?”
“So I’m informed. Now don’t ask me any more questions. This is going to be tricky if we’re to avoid appearing in someone’s line of sight.”
The Rogue Shadow lifted off the giant mushroom cap but stayed low, just above the layer of strange vegetation hugging the planet’s surface. Jerking the ship from side to side, she kept it as low as the ray-like predators she’d seen circling prey through the trees. She cursed every time the undercarriage grazed a bulbous seedpod or looping branch, concerned more about her flying than about the splashing sounds such impacts made. Nothing on Felucia could hurt the ship badly—unless she flew into a mountain or brought it to the attention of the Imperials.
She flew over an eight-meter-high rancor that was running with its head down along a path identical to hers, pushing trees aside in its haste. It didn’t even look up. Thirty seconds later she passed another. It, too, was following the same heading.
“I think I’ve worked out what uncomfortable meant,” she said. “Hold on, General. I’m going to shave a few seconds off our arrival time.”
Pushing the throttle down harder, she threw caution to the wind, bringing the Rogue Shadow up in a steadily rising gradient and then flipping it over when they reached Starkiller’s coordinates. She had to concentrate on the maneuver—employing the repulsors with carefully timed thrusts so that the ship would shed its forward velocity and come down the right way up, all at the same instant—and as a result only glimpsed the chaos ensuing on the ground. A war seemed to be breaking out between a herd of angry rancors and thousands of Felucian scavengers over a single, giant carcass. The remains were bloody and barely recognizable as a biped of enormous size, but she had no time to speculate on its nature.
Two men were waving for her attention from the edge of the bloody melee. She directed the ship’s downwash away from them, scattering three rancors that appeared to have been bothering them in the process. When she opened the belly hatch and extended the ramp, the sound of Felucia’s animal kingdom in open revolt almost deafened her.
Footsteps ran up the ramp. “Okay,” said Starkiller. “We’re aboard. Take us away.”
She glanced over her shoulder to make sure and froze that way for half a second.
Starkiller was covered from head to foot in a thick layer of blood.
Don’t be alarmed, he had said. That was an understatement.
Shutting her open mouth and turning back to the controls, she pulled the Rogue Shadow away from the carnage below and reentered the safety of the jungle canopy.
AS JUNO FOLLOWED PROXY’S HOMING beacon back to their mushroom landing site, she watched the reunion between Kota and Bail Organa with half an eye. The old man was awkward and dismissive of any open affection, but the Senator seemed unfazed.
“My friend, I’d almost given up hope of seeing you again, but I should’ve known better. You always were a master of last-minute rescues and sudden reversals.”
“Pah. I had nothing to do with it. And if you hadn’t gone off on this fool’s errand of yours, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
Organa’s expression turned utterly cheerless. “You should know that Shaak Ti is dead,” he said. “She was murdered by Vader or one of his assassins.”
“Probably the same one who did this to me.” Kota indicated his bandaged face with the flick of one callused finger. “I tried contacting Kazdan Paratus, but he has fallen silent, too.”
“We will fear for him together, Master Kota, until we find out for certain.” Organa nodded and looked down at the floor. “The dark times seem only to grow darker.”
“There’s one thing to be grateful for,” said Kota. “Leia is safe.”
The Senator put a hand on Kota’s shoulder and gripped tight. He nodded once, as though finding his voice. “I was afraid to ask. I’m more than grateful; I’m in your debt forever.”
Kota pulled away. “Find me something to drink and I’ll call us even.” Scowling, he wandered to the rear of the ship, where Juno heard him clunking around among the stores.
That left the Senator and Juno alone for the rest of the trip. Starkiller was cleaning himself up in the crew quarters, having said nothing about the condition he was in. Juno hadn’t pursued the matter, thinking it couldn’t be that important if no one had raised it, but with Organa looking awkward and embarrassed at his friend’s behavior and with nothing but the low-flying hop to distract him, she clutched at the topic like a life preserver.
“So what happened to you back there?” she asked. “It looked as though every living thing for a dozen kilometers wanted to make you its lunch.”
Organa seemed relieved to break the awkward silence. He fell into the copilot’s seat with a sigh and brushed at the stains on his once-fine shirt. “Not us,” he said. “You must have seen the body of the bull rancor back there. Well, his mates weren’t happy that he’d died, for starters, and that much fresh meat won’t sit around for long in a place like this. It is a hard world,” he added, as though thinking of something someone else had said. “To survive there must take a depth of character rare these days. We should be forgiving of those who fail.”
Juno let him finish that other conversation in his own head, figuring he had a lot more recent developments to process than she did, but she wasn’t ready for the next conversation he initiated.
“The young man you and Kota are traveling with—what can you tell me about him?”
She glanced at Organa, then back at the jungletop ahead of them. “What do you mean?”
“Well, for starters: who is he? Where does he come from? I’ve never heard of anyone as powerful as him running loose in the Empire, and I’m keen to know how he avoided detection by Darth Vader. Do you know who his Master was and where he or she is now?”
Organa was staring hopefully at her, no doubt thinking that another Jedi—possibly a friend of his—had survived somewhere, somehow, and that the existence of Starkiller presaged a new means of evading the deadly threat of the Empire. She didn’t know how to tell him that they’d been lucky so far, and far from innocent. The only reason Starkiller had avoided Darth Vader’s blade for so long was that they had been allies—and even then, the good fortune hadn’t lasted forever.
In the end she did as she had done with Kota: tell the truth, but not the whole truth. “Your guess is as good as mine, I’m afraid,” she said. “He keeps himself to himself. This may sound strange to you, but I don’t even know his real name.”
“That does sound a little unusual, but I’ve heard of stranger arrangements.” He assayed half a smile, then let it drop. “The feats he accomplished back there showed outstanding strength. I haven’t seen anyone like him since the Clone Wars—and that’s not necessarily a good thing. Such power, unchecked, can be dangerous. The dark side feeds on a taste for power. It can be deadly for those caught in the way—as a young learner discovered today, very nearly at the cost of her life.”
There, again, a reference to something she knew nothing about. Juno felt irritated at herself for a faint flicker of jealousy. Why did so many of Starkiller’s missions involve young women in peril?
“I think he’s trying to do the right thing,” she said carefully.
“I should trust him, then, as you obviously do?”
She answered without hesita
tion, “With my life,” then felt that she had perhaps spoken too quickly or forcefully to be considered objective.
The Senator glanced through the cockpit viewport. “Ah, I never thought a transport could look so good.”
Juno followed his index finger and saw PROXY waving on the edge of the giant mushroom, next to the Senator’s transport. “It’s in good condition,” she told him, bringing the Rogue Shadow about to land. “We sprayed it with insecticide so the trip home won’t be too uncomfortable.”
“Thank you … uh.” The Senator hesitated in the act of standing.
“Eclipse, Senator. Captain Juno Eclipse.”
“Thank you, Juno. If ever you need a change of pace, Alderaan can always use a pilot with a conscience—particularly a good one like you.”
“I’ll bear that in mind, sir,” she said, feeling color rising to her cheeks. “But I think my course is clear for the moment.”
He smiled and went aft.
THE THREE MEN MET ON the surface of the mushroom while she ensured that the ship was ready for space. Starkiller looked as clean as he ever had, with no evidence left of the gore that had befouled him. Feeling left out, she hurried through the checklist and strolled down the ramp to stretch her legs—and to offer an opinion if required.
“Open rebellion is too dangerous,” the Senator was saying. “Kota, I know I owe you my life, but—”
“You don’t owe me anything,” the general interrupted gruffly. “I told you on Cloud City that I can’t help you. Not since …” Again, the gesture at his ruined eyes that Juno had seen all too many times. It had become a catchall excuse for anything the ex-Jedi found too confrontational. “He’s your hero,” Kota said, raising his chin in Starkiller’s direction, “and it’s his rebellion. Join us because he’s asking you to, not me.”
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Page 19
