Except the Star Destroyer was growing larger with each passing second, and waves of TIE fighters and TIE bombers were pouring forth from its brand-new hangar decks. Laserfire cut huge super-hot channels through the atmosphere ahead of them.
The apprentice ignored it all. While the illusion held, he moved his hand a very slight distance to his right. The sensation of containing a vast, million-ton machine in the tip of one finger was deeply disorienting. He felt as though every muscle fiber, nerve, and bone groaned along with the metal seams and joints of the ship. What it felt, he felt, too, and even a small acceleration had a profound effect on such a large scale. It resisted with all the momentum it possessed. Hatches swang open; rivets popped; bulkheads twisted; pipes burst.
The Star Destroyer didn’t appear to have moved much in the sky. It was still coming in low on the horizon, aiming to pass over him and strafe him from above. He shifted his hand a second time, but instead of changing its course he mistakenly gave it a slight tumble. He needed to apply the Force the right way for this to work, taking the growing forces of friction and the shifting of its center of gravity into account. A spinning Star Destroyer would do more damage than one burying itself nose-first into the cannon and its superstructure. Damage was good, when it came to destroying the Emperor’s handiwork, but too much damage could destroy him and perhaps the Rogue Shadow as well under a deadly rain of molten shrapnel.
Bring it down in one piece, he told himself. Bring it down hard.
The ship growled and squealed in metal torment. He was getting the hang of it; he could see how its course was slowly shifting. As wide across as his outstretched hand now, it was hitting the atmosphere at a steeper angle than he had intended, burning bright red and already gouting a trail of black smoke and sparkling debris. He became aware of a sound communicated through his feet: a rumbling much deeper and more sustained than the pounding of the cannon, which had fallen silent after the firing of the third projectile. The Star Destroyer’s incomplete frame was acting like a giant tube, and the atmosphere was resonating inside. His whole body sang with it.
More. The Star Destroyer was really picking up speed now. The thickening atmosphere had a slight braking effect, but nothing could prevent the inevitable. It was going to hit soon. A wild exodus of droids ran past him, fleeing the crash site. The TIE fighters it had launched raced ahead of the chaotic atmospheric waves it generated. He ignored them and concentrated on shifting ground zero as close to the cannon as he could.
Sparks danced in front of his eyes. The edges of his vision faded to black. Light and dark swirls spun around him, wraith-like. He felt momentarily faint and wondered if it was possible to dissolve into the Force. He was a speck caught in the updraft over a forest fire—yet somehow he had the audacity to try to command the fire to do his will.
Who did he think he was?
A sudden panic almost made him lose control. The Star Destroyer, now a burning, shrieking meteor, filled his entire forward vision. The hull was peeling away in fiery, golden strips, each one weighing hundreds of tons, exposing the darker skeleton beneath. It looked like a death’s-head, a ghastly mask not dissimilar to his Master’s, but one molten like lava. This could well be the end of everything, he thought distantly. Of him, of his plans, of his feelings for Juno, and of the boy called Galen who had lost a father a long time ago and whose grief had already been effectively erased.
But his name had survived, and names had power. The apprentice clutched at it with desperation, needing to regain control of the Star Destroyer lest it tear itself apart and disperse the impact. He needed to find his focus again, to ignore the feeling of dissolution eating at the edges of his self, and to tip the balance of power back toward him.
Galen had stood up to Darth Vader as little more than a child. Galen had wrested the lightsaber from a Dark Lord of the Sith and stood bravely in the face of death. Galen may have been ground down by years of training and darkness since, but was he truly gone—or had he just gone into hiding until the opportunity came to emerge back into the light?
Are you there, Galen? I need your help!
No answer came.
The Star Destroyer’s catastrophic reentry made the world shake. There was no time to try again.
For Juno, then.
He gritted his teeth and snarled at the sky. The dead weight of the Star Destroyer shifted one last time, changing its angle of descent just enough to hang together those last few hundred meters, but not enough to risk bouncing. Only seconds remained before it hit and it was still getting bigger. It was impossible that the sky could contain so much metal!
Abandoning his control over the ship, knowing there was nothing now that he could do to alter its course, the apprentice staggered backward, dazed. The Force fled from him, leaving him wrung out and drained. With a sound like the world ending, the Star Destroyer completed its first and final journey. It hit the cannon, exactly as it was supposed to, and the sky turned white. The ground buckled beneath the apprentice’s feet. He pinwheeled, unable to find his balance, as a tsunami of junk and waste rose up ahead of him and blotted out the sun.
THE WORLD JERKING BENEATH HER woke Juno from her daze. She clutched the sides of the narrow bunk and cried out in fear. The ship was coming down! She’d lost control and they were all going to crash!
It took her the better part of ten seconds to realize that the ship wasn’t crashing—but something no less dangerous was going on outside its durasteel hull.
Her head pounded when she lifted herself off the couch. The veins in her temples throbbed painfully, and there was a very tender point at the back of her skull, but she ignored that for the moment and concentrated on the ship.
“What’s happening?” she shouted, staggering out of the sleeping quarters and through the hold. The floor bucked beneath her, throwing her from side to side. Loose items lay scattered all about. The hull creaked and groaned like an oceangoing vessel during a storm.
That image wasn’t so far from the truth, she discovered, when she finally made her way to the cockpit and found Kota clutching the sides of the copilot’s chair with blind impotence and, through the forward viewport, a raging sea of rubbish upon which they appeared to be riding.
She gaped at the sight. Huge shock waves rolled beneath the ship, compressing and decompressing the garbage of Raxus Prime, lubricated by vast reserves of spilled oil, foul water, and waste chemicals. A vast column of smoke filled the sky ahead, lit with a flickering red glow from the ground below. It looked as though a volcano had belched forth from the planet’s skin, erupting like some vast and malignant pimple. A black mushroom cloud was spreading from the top of the smoke column.
Slowly the shock waves ebbed until the ship was merely rocking from side to side. Juno became aware of the sound of her own breath. She sounded as though she had been running.
Kota relaxed his death grip on the chair. His hands shook as he reached for the comlink.
“Are you there, boy?” he called into it. “Has the cannon been destroyed?”
Static was his only answer.
“Can you hear me, boy?”
Juno fought a sudden rising nausea and moved forward.
Kota’s head whipped around. His blind face was agonized.
“Kota, what’s going on?”
He did not respond, but turned back to the comlink and spoke more urgently, “I repeat, boy: has the cannon been destroyed?”
She eased herself into the pilot’s chair, feeling as though she had been whacked by a metal pipe. Gradually things began to piece together. Only Kota and she were aboard the ship, hence Kota’s frantic attempts to raise Starkiller. But what about PROXY? Had the droid gone out after him?
Her mouth opened in an O of shock as she remembered what had happened.
Kota shouted as though the static were a personal affront.
“Answer me, boy!”
A clicking rose up out of the white noise, followed by a weary but familiar voice.
“Relax, Gen
eral. I’m still here.”
Kota sagged with relief. “Good. Good.”
She didn’t feel reassured at all.
“Kota, where’s PROXY? He—”
Kota waved her silent. “The cannon?”
“Destroyed. And the ship—is it okay?”
“Seems intact to me, inasmuch as I can tell.”
“Juno?”
Kota exhaled through his nose. “She’s here, but we do have a new set of problems.”
“Imperials, I presume.”
“No. PROXY. That droid of yours has slipped his programming. He attacked Juno and disappeared.”
“Attacked—?” She heard the catch in his voice. “Is she all right?”
“Just a little battered. That’s not the only reason we couldn’t fly. PROXY overrode our launch codes before he left. We can break them, but it’ll take time. We’re grounded until then—or until you bring him back.”
“Where did he go?”
“That’s the problem. I didn’t hear him leave.” Kota’s face was a picture of fury, but not just at the droid, Juno guessed: at himself, too, for not being around when she was attacked and the mission compromised. “The important thing to work out is why he did this. Could he be an Imperial plant?”
“No,” said Starkiller in a tone that would allow no disagreement. “PROXY would never betray me.”
No, thought Juno, but he’ll try to kill you every day you’re alive. “I think I know what might have happened,” she said. “It’s the core intelligence. PROXY was trying to slice into it at the time. I remember him saying something about accessing his processor, then—then he went mad.” She touched the back of her head and winced.
“The Core …,” echoed Starkiller. “Yes. That’s all it could be.”
“Don’t think our problems end there, boy,” growled Kota. “That droid knows everything we’ve been doing. If the Core is now an Imperial ally, that data could destroy us!”
More than you realize, thought Juno with a shock of fear. “We have to find him, and fast.”
“I will,” said Starkiller. “His homing beacon is still active.”
There was a tightness to the reply that spoke of the stress Starkiller was under.
“Watch yourself,” Juno urged him. “Whether the Core really has reprogrammed him or not, PROXY isn’t your friend anymore. Don’t believe anything he tells you.”
With an ominous click the comm channel closed.
Kota and Juno sat staring at the console for a moment, each wrapped in private thoughts. Briefly she considered telling Kota the truth, desperate to take the terrible weight off her shoulders. Starkiller was a Jedi assassin devoted to bringing down the Emperor for his own benefit, not out of concern for anyone else. It would be better to abandon him here and flee with the rest of the rebels while there was still time. If only the launch codes hadn’t been overridden by PROXY—and if only guilt didn’t tug at her insides at the very thought …
She remembered, vaguely, a dream of a disintegrating stone edifice falling into a lake. That was her sense of self, surely, collapsing and sinking farther with every passing day.
Your gratitude is wasted on me.
Perhaps, and the feeling still aching in her chest, too. But she hadn’t given that to him yet. She might never. Could such an emotion be wasted if she held it inside forever? Or would it rot in there and strangle her heart?
“It’s not your fault, Kota,” she told the fuming old general. “You shouldn’t blame yourself.”
Kota didn’t answer.
With a sigh, she put her aching head to the problem of getting off the ground sooner rather than later.
CHAPTER 31
A RAIN OF ASH BEGAN to fall minutes after the apprentice had signed off from Juno and Kota. He ignored it, concentrating instead on navigating the desolation that was the newly rearranged surface of Raxus Prime. The area around the cannon’s remains was a wasteland, blasted flat by the impact. Only a small mountain of wreckage stood out of the steaming plain, at the exact center of impact. All around that central peak, in a perfect circle, stood crater walls many meters high, upon one of which he had woken, buried under a layer of warped plastic sheets. Fragments of cannon and Star Destroyer ticked and pinged as they cooled. Some had sparked fires, which the smothering ash now extinguished. Everywhere was the smell of exhumed decay and burning foulness.
PROXY’s signal led over the crater wall and deeper into the wastelands. He spared no second pursuing it, passing droids and other scavengers struggling to free themselves from mounds of trash. An eerie silence had fallen in the wake of the explosion, and even now sound seemed nervous of returning to its former levels. Settling rubbish tinkled and groaned. Droids called feebly, in startled bursts of obscure machine languages. The occasional cry from a human or alien throat signaled that some of the planet’s organic scavengers had also survived the shock waves.
Before long he heard the first shots from a blaster rifle and knew that everything was returning to normal on the lawless world.
The bleakness of that understanding perfectly matched the knife wound in his heart from Kota’s blunt words.
PROXY isn’t your friend anymore.
The one loyal companion he’d had in his entire life had turned on Juno and run off into the junkyard. What other explanation could there be beyond the Core’s evil influence? That made perfect sense—and he didn’t want to think that PROXY had noticed changes in him that the droid was now running from. He didn’t want to contemplate PROXY’s hurt at the presence of Juno in his life. He didn’t dare imagine that PROXY could sense the swelling bubble of self-doubt that had formed when he had experienced his strange epiphany on Kashyyyk.
It was, however, impossible to ignore entirely: just minutes after he had invoked the name Galen in an attempt to gain strength, PROXY had vanished. It didn’t matter whether the attempt had worked or not. He had made it, and that spoke of fault lines forming and spreading through the person he had always imagined himself to be.
He was Darth Vader’s secret servant, capable of moving Star Destroyers with nothing but his will—yet what else was he? Was he a freedom fighter, a friend, a lover? Was he still the master PROXY was programmed to serve?
Ash stuck to his wet cheeks and formed muddy streaks that he didn’t wipe away. Urgency consumed him. He had to find PROXY before the Core absorbed him completely, sucking all the details of his Master’s plans and transmitting them to the Emperor. And worse, leaving the once-loyal droid scrabbling in garbage like any other scavenger.
Darth Vader’s apprentice would not allow that. Whatever else he was, he knew how to turn anger and fear into forces that no being could resist. Fury burned in him like a sun at the Core’s invasion of his friend. That invasion would be met, countered, and answered a thousand times over. He swore it.
PROXY’s homing signal led him past teetering mesas of refuse. The apprentice stuck to firm ground, running and jumping over toxic pools too fast for inquisitive droids to catch up. When warring scavengers or shell-shocked Imperials took potshots at him, he ignored them. The object of his fury was the Core, nothing else. He would not be distracted.
Behind him trailed a growing cadre of droids, strung out across the wasteland like chicks behind their mother. One by one, their photoreceptors changed color, forming a threatening crimson constellation focused entirely on him. The Core was watching.
The trail led down a long, sloping shaft under a pyramidal mound of plastics and other nonmetal fragments. It occurred to him as he followed it that the way might have been burrowed through the rubbish just for PROXY, since the Core needed no physical connection to the outside world beyond power lines and data cables. There were lights, too, which was even stranger. Apart from phosphorescence arising from hardy bacteria surviving off organic material in the walls, a blinking, flickering glow came from the end of the tunnel.
He lit his lightsaber as he came closer and slowed his pace to a cautious lope. Whatever awaited him, he
wasn’t going to barge headlong into it.
The flickering glow grew brighter. The tunnel widened and joined a large cathedral-like space full of abandoned and junked processors, all refurbished and linked together in a vast, humming network. Cables dangled from the distant ceiling, sparking fitfully. There were no screens or keyboards anywhere to be seen. The Core didn’t need them. Surrounded by the world’s machine-mind, the apprentice felt very much out of place.
He navigated his way through the maze of processors, stepping carefully over cables and keeping his lightsaber away from anything fragile. He didn’t want to aggravate the Core any more than was necessary. Not yet.
The procession of droids followed him, filling all the available space between the processor network and the reinforced walls of the massive chamber. Soon he was completely surrounded by glowing red photoreceptors—round, triangular, slitted, square, belonging to droids ranging in size from buzzing spy-eyes to lumbering mass movers. Some of them he recognized as golems he had swept from Kazdan Paratus’s junkyard workshop. Their whirring and rattling drowned out the endless contemplative hum.
They were the eyes and ears of the Core. They could be the fists, too, if necessary.
He came around a rusting cylindrical data shifter as big as a house, connected by dozens of snaking cables to the ceiling high above, and found PROXY on the other side, bent over a complex junction. He was linked to the Core by a cable connected to his innards via an open panel in his back.
“PROXY?”
The droid turned around. His photoreceptors were red like the others. Random holograms chased themselves across the droid’s mutable skin: Jedi Knights and Sith Lords, Kota, Juno, and even himself. It was very disconcerting.
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed Page 23
