Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

by Sean Williams

  CHAPTER 34

  JUNO’S PISTOL WAS IN HER hand before the first explosion had faded away, but she didn’t know where to aim it. Starkiller looked as shocked as everyone else in the room. When he ran to the ledge to look outside, that expression only worsened.

  She knew then that something had gone terribly wrong.

  The door exploded behind her, throwing her forward in a cloud of dust and stony splinters. Her hands came up to protect her face. She rolled as she had been trained to and rose in a crouch with the pistol pointing at the open doorway. Clouds of smoke and dust billowed through it, lit from behind by flashes of light. Over the ringing in her ears she could hear people fighting and dying. The Senatorial guards rushed into the melee, but she held still, waiting for the one perfect shot she knew she was going to get.

  More screams. The smoke took on a reddish tinge. A shadow loomed out of it, growing closer.

  She snapped off three shots. All were deflected by a bright red blade. One discharged at her feet, sending her flying again, stunned. The pistol went flying.

  Darth Vader strode through the doorway as though he owned the world. The squad of stormtroopers at his back obviously thought he did, too.

  “Take them alive,” he ordered, indicating the trio of Senators. “The Emperor wants to execute them personally.”

  Before anyone else could react, Kota whisked the lightsaber from Starkiller’s belt and launched himself at the Dark Lord. Vader raised a hand and caught the general telekinetically about the throat. Kota dropped the lightsaber and desperately clutched at the invisible fingers choking him, but the pressure only increased. When his resistance was crushed, Vader threw him bodily toward the stormtroopers and turned his attention elsewhere.

  Bail Organa, Mon Mothma, and Garm Bel Iblis were surrounded. Flushed with fury, the former Corellian Senator spat at the feet of Darth Vader, while his companions stood with quiet dignity. Mon Mothma raised her chin.

  But it wasn’t her Vader was looking at.

  Starkiller stood framed by the pillars in the northern wall of the eagle’s nest. He was frozen in the pose of one thoroughly beaten yet barely, defiantly, contained. His eyes blazed. His fists shook.

  Darth Vader inclined his head. “You have done well, my apprentice.”

  Bail Organa hissed audibly between his teeth. If looks could kill, Starkiller would have dropped on the spot. Garm Bel Iblis had turned a deep shade of purple, and Mon Mothma was as rigid and pale as a sculpture in ice.

  Before Starkiller could reach out for where his lightsaber lay fallen on the ground, the stone conference table lifted into the air and hurled itself at him. Crashing through three of the pillars and catching him squarely in the chest, it drove him out into the snow. Ignoring everyone else in the room, Vader strode heavily after him, lightsaber raised.

  Juno scrambled to her feet, but a metal hand stopped her from rushing out to certain death.

  “Not that way, Captain Eclipse,” hissed PROXY in her ear. He pushed her toward a side passageway that appeared to be empty of stormtroopers. While the guards were distracted, he adopted a perfect image of her, complete with dusty smudges to her temples, so her absence wouldn’t be noted. “My master will need you later.”

  Fighting a wave of shock that threatened to overwhelm her, she did as the droid suggested, stumbling on stairs still rocking from the area’s bombardment.

  Vader here—and Starkiller hadn’t expected it!

  If she could get back to the ship in time, and if he had survived the crushing blow Vader had delivered, perhaps things weren’t completely lost.

  She half laughed, half wept at her insane optimism as she hurried down the narrow stairwell to the Imperial hordes below.

  CHAPTER 35

  THE APPRENTICE CROUCHED FACEDOWN in the snow, surrounded by rubble. His breath came in agonized, short gasps, but he was grateful for each one. He should be dead. That blow should have killed anyone. The fact that he was breathing testified to one mistake his Master had made.

  He had been rebuilt tougher than before.

  As heavy boots crunched through the snow toward him, he knew that it would take more than one mistake to bring about the fall of Darth Vader.

  He raised his head and spoke painfully through clenched teeth.

  “You agreed to stay away …” Blood dripped from his teeth onto the icy ground.

  “I lied,” said his Master, “as I have from the very beginning.”

  The power of the dark side lifted him out of the snow and into the air. Pain threatened to overload his nervous system, but he refused to cry out.

  From the very beginning?

  “You never planned,” he gasped, “to destroy the Emperor!”

  “Not with you, no.”

  Vader casually tossed him toward the icy cliff. He slid across the ground, clutching weakly at the snow, and then spilled over the edge.

  The world turned for a moment and he thought he might have fainted as he fell. The bottom of the cliff was thousands of meters below, impossibly distant. It didn’t seem to be coming closer, which puzzled him momentarily.

  When he came back to himself, he found that he was clinging to the cliff face with the last of his strength.

  A feeling of acceptance infused him. The mission his Master had given him was complete: the Rebels had been gathered in one spot so they could be taken and killed. That was the reason he had been spared, when Darth Vader had stabbed him in the back on the Emperor’s orders. His one remaining duty was to die.

  There was guilt in that feeling, too. By planning to use the Rebel Alliance to his own ends, he deserved whatever fate awaited him.

  But part of him raged at the way he had been outwitted. He had betrayed his Master, yes, but his Master had betrayed him first. That part of him longed to lift himself up and resume the fight. With the Force behind him, he could strike down Darth Vader and free the others.

  Strike down his Master, as he had failed to do two times now.

  Only then did he realize that this was exactly what Vader was trying to do.

  On the Emperor’s orders …

  It had indeed all been an act, right from the beginning. His resurrection, his “death,” even his kidnap from Kashyyyk. Vader and his apprentice were puppets dancing to the Emperor’s tune, now and always. Wriggle though they might, their strings remained.

  He wanted to laugh, but all that emerged was a short, painful gasp.

  His Master appeared in the sky above him, looming vastly in silhouette, blocking out the world.

  “Without me—” the apprentice whispered, “you’ll never—be free—”

  Darth Vader raised his bloody blade, but the sound of another lightsaber igniting behind him forced the Dark Lord to turn around.

  The apprentice couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer. His fingers were numb; he couldn’t feel anything at all. Weightless, he seemed to drift away from the cliff wall. His eyes were closed, but somehow he could still see. As though from a position high above, he watched his Master spin around to face Obi-Wan Kenobi.

  The Dark Lord froze. In that moment of hesitation the long-dead Jedi Master attacked, his face a mask of determination. At the very last moment Vader parried, then parried again. He took a step backward, toward the cliff’s edge, and then rallied. With two sweeping strokes, so fast they blurred in the cold air, he disarmed Kenobi and slashed him in half.

  As the pieces fell to the ground, the hologram enfolding them dissolved. Sparking fitfully and spilling delicate components into the snow, PROXY twitched once, and then his photoreceptors went out.

  Darth Vader stepped within reach and nudged the droid’s body with his toe. It didn’t react.

  Remembering the apprentice, he wheeled back toward the cliff. The boy he had wrested from Kashyyyk watched dispassionately, not fearing if he was discovered. But Vader saw nothing because there was nothing to see. His former apprentice was less than a thought on the wind, removed from everything he had been and all that he had
failed to do by an act of will greater than any he had achieved before.

  Vader lowered his lightsaber and stalked back into the ruins, where stormtroopers had bound the Rebels like criminals and were marching them through the shattered doors.

  Suddenly the apprentice was back in his body. The cliff’s edge and his life’s ruin was far, far above him. He could feel nothing at all, physically or emotionally, except a vague curiosity.

  What is it about dying, he asked himself, that brings out the best in me? First seeing the future … then leaving my body …

  The world turned black and cold. There was nothing he could do to stop that, so he gave in to it and let all his concerns wash away.

  One last thought curdled incomplete in his mind: I wish I could’ve told Juno …

  Then he was gone into the deep and dreamless dark.

  CHAPTER 36

  JUNO BLINKED TEARS FROM HER eyes as she brought the ship around. The fastest launch she had ever performed may have taken her out of reach of the Imperial ambush, and the cloak might have kept her well off the Star Destroyer’s scopes, yet there was nothing she could do but wait until Vader’s forces had finished cleaning up before returning to the scene. She forced herself to assume an innocent-looking orbit around Corellia and wait for an opening. If she went in too soon, she might jeopardize the one chance she had left.

  My master will need you later, PROXY had said. Whatever the droid had in mind, she hoped it had worked; otherwise she’d be going back for nothing.

  Vader’s shuttle lifted off in a swirl of steam. Accompanied closely by its escort of TIE fighters, it docked with the Star Destroyer and disappeared from sight. She didn’t know exactly what it contained, but she could imagine.

  Take them alive. The Emperor wants to execute them personally.

  A frustrated sense of urgency made her get up and pace the interior of the ship, hoping to boil off some of the energy filling her. It didn’t help at all. There were too many memories inside the cramped rooms: Kota’s old bandage discarded in the cargo hold; the meditation chamber room in which she had first discovered the inner conflict Starkiller was enduring; some leftover pieces from PROXY’s repair.

  She tried screaming, but the echoes only made the ship’s spaces feel even emptier than before.

  Finally the Star Destroyer broke away from its objective orbit and moved out of the atmosphere. She watched it go every millimeter of the way, alert for any sign that it might be a decoy. Even when it had reached clear space and activated its hyperdrive, she cooled her heels for another ten minutes—long enough to be certain the site wasn’t being watched but before CorSec would turn up to perform a belated, and likely predetermined, sweep of the area. The local Diktat was little more than a puppet of the Imperial Governor. As with Kashyyyk and Raxus Prime, all evidence of what had happened here would soon be swept under the rug.

  Before that could happen, she put the ship into a hot, cloaked descent, hoping against hope that someone, anyone, had survived.

  The Rogue Shadow hovered on its repulsors, level with the eagle’s nest. She peered through the viewport at the shattered pillars and into the room itself. It was clear of everything but rubble and blaster burns on the walls. The Senators were gone, of course, and so was Kota. The corpses of the fallen bodyguards had been dragged into the corridor outside, but she saw nothing other than planetary uniforms among the outstretched limbs there.

  Something caught her eye on the shelf outside: a single body, sliced in two. She gasped on recognizing PROXY’s gray skin. Snow had already dusted him, and she swung the ship lightly overhead, blowing it away. Doing so exposed a patch of dried blood not far from where he lay and brought into sharper relief a series of footprints leading to the edge of the cliff.

  She didn’t want to look, but she had to.

  There was a tiny brown dot at the bottom of the precipice.

  Juno reached for the ship’s sensor controls, then thought better of it. This she needed to see with her own eyes.

  Bringing the ship about and letting gravity tug it down the sheer side of the cliff, she braced herself for what she would find.

  He lay on his side, curled like a child with one hand up close to his face. The ship’s wash made his hair and cloak move in a semblance of life. It was a cruel illusion. The snow beneath him was only centimeters thick, nowhere near enough to have cushioned a fall that far.

  With the rational dispassion of someone keeping her emotions carefully in check, she debated whether to collect his body and take it away, or leave it as a piece of material evidence in the hope that it might encourage just one honest CorSec operative to look deeper and wonder what had really happened …

  His hand moved in the downdraft and she assumed that was an illusion, too.

  When it moved again, she nearly crashed the ship in her haste to bring it down and was running to him before the shutdown command had even reached the engines.

  He was trying to sit up, without much success, blinking snow from his eyes and waving his left arm feebly through the air. She knelt next to him and got her arms under him. Once she had his weight, he was able to bend more successfully. It surprised him, her helping, and he looked up at her with his one open eye as though he hadn’t noticed the ship arrive.

  His lips moved, but she couldn’t hear what he was trying to say.

  “It’s Juno,” she reassured him, just in case the fall had affected either his memory or his comprehension, or both.

  “Juno,” he repeated as though struggling to think some vast and complicated thought. “My name …” He stopped and swallowed. “My name is Galen.”

  That broke the dam. She clutched him to her and cried for PROXY, who had died trying to save him—and for those whose hopes and dreams seemed sure to follow. She cried for herself and the life she had lost when Darth Vader had betrayed them the first time around. She cried for the Rebel Alliance, which had died just moments after it had been born. She cried for all the people of the galaxy, whose fate rested in such weak and fallible hands.

  He patted weakly at her shoulder, as though to comfort her, and that only made it worse.

  Eventually, the flood of grief eased and she had herself back under control. Her extremities were going numb, and he had to be frozen right through. That seemed stupid when the ramp of the ship was less than five meters away.

  “We need to move,” she said.

  He nodded, and then winced as he shifted his right leg underneath him.

  His bones must be shattered into a thousand pieces, she thought. Nevertheless, he was able to stand and even to walk with only a small amount of assistance. They almost lost their balance a couple of times going up the ramp, but soon the warmth of the ship enfolded them both. He collapsed shivering into the copilot’s seat and put his head in his hands while she warmed up the drives and prepared for liftoff.

  She retraced his terrible fall down the cliff face. When they came to the top, he shakily reached out a hand and said, “Stop here.”

  Before them lay the scene of Vader’s treachery. He stared at it with jaw clenched and eyes shining for a long minute, then said, “My lightsaber.”

  She understood. There was just enough room for the ship to put down, but he was on his feet again before she could suggest it. Moving painfully but with every limb in full working order, he walked back to the ramp and waited for her to open it.

  When the ship was in position, he dropped out of it and limped into the eagle’s nest. He didn’t waste any time, reappearing seconds later with his lightsaber unlit in his hand. She lowered the ship as close to the ground as she dared to make his ingress easier. The moment she heard his boots on the deck, she shut the ramp, activated the cloak, and headed for the skies.

  “They’re gone,” he said as he eased himself back into the seat. “Vader took them all—to the Emperor.”

  She saw no reason to deny that certainty, simply to comfort him. But there were elements of Vader’s plan that made her wonder if it could be
so cut-and-dried.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would Vader let us—no, encourage us to destroy so many Imperial targets?”

  “To sell the deception,” he said, his lips in a thin white line. “Credits, starships, Imperial lives—they’re all meaningless to Vader. He needed me to find the Emperor’s enemies, no matter the cost. And I did exactly what he wanted …”

  She could see his grief visibly turning to anger as he realized just how he had been played for a fool by his Master. It was difficult to put herself entirely in his shoes, but their lives did have several points of overlap: a disapproving father figure who had ultimately betrayed them; a sense of duty that had led them to commit acts they now knew were wrong; an increasingly uncertain future ahead of them.

  Unsure how he would take the overture, she reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “Yes, you did do what he wanted. There’s no point hiding from it—and now the fate of the Alliance rests on your shoulders. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”

  He glanced up at her, startled by her honesty, and then looked down at the lightsaber hilt in his lap, wrestling with his emotions and thoughts. She retracted her hand and let him think, knowing that it had taken her a long time to perform the U-turn that had led her to believe in the Rebels’ cause—and she hadn’t even realized she’d fully changed sides until Starkiller had been revealed to be a traitor, before they’d been back to Raxus Prime.

  When he raised his head and turned to her, he was resolved. Grief had evolved into anger, and that was evolving in turn into determination. It was like watching carbon turn to diamond in a high-pressure industrial oven. Starkiller was becoming a different person as she watched, as Kota had during his short time on Corellia.

  Not “Starkiller,” she reminded herself. Galen.

  “We’re going after Vader,” he said in a fierce but level voice. “And the Rebels.”