Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II (6 page)

A powerful excitement thrilled through him. For the first time, in the middle of combat, it came to him that he was truly alive. He wasn’t a shadow lurking in a hole somewhere, dreaming of being. The Force was with him, and he was free. He was free, and he had a mission.

The potentate was long gone. Starkiller tore his way into the turbolift shaft, bypassing security codes by means of sheer power, and rode to the upper levels. The transparisteel walls revealed the hanging city in all its glory, curving away from him to his left and right, but he wasn’t interested in taking in the sights. He studied the buildings looking only for tactical information. The vision of Kota had hinted at an open space and a large gathering of people. The scans he had taken from orbit hadn’t showed anyplace like that. The largest structure in the city was the Imperial barracks, a circular building at its direct center.

When the turbolift reached the summit and the doors opened on the city, he was greeted by the distant roaring of a crowd.

He stepped out and listened closely. The roar was coming from the barracks.

He set off on foot, running swiftly through the streets. They were only sparsely populated, with the occasional green-skinned Neimoidian scuttling by, determinedly staying out of his way. He could hear no audible alarms, but had no doubt that they were ringing somewhere. That suspicion was confirmed at the sound of booted feet stamping along the streets behind him.

He shifted to an aerial route, climbing to the top of the nearest building and leaping from it to the next in line. That way he could avoid the roads entirely. He felt weightless as he swung from handhold to handhold with the Force thrilling through him like the purest oxygen. The city’s lower levels clustered around the bases of several broad, circular rowers, connected by looping tramlines, and it was a simple matter to travel from one to the other into the city’s heart, as light as air itself.

When the Imperial security forces got wise to his plan and activated gun emplacements in the city’s upper levels, things became considerably more interesting.

Dodging weapons fire from tram-track to building and back again, Starkiller felt a familiar calm creeping over him. It was a calm born not of peace or tranquillity, but of violence and anger. Countless hours of meditating on the dark side, fueling the negative energies that Darth Vader encouraged him to embrace, made this kind of combat trance almost second nature to him. Fighting people was harder than fighting PROXY droids, but there was a greater pleasure in it too, more of a challenge. A warrior who fought only rationally and without emotion fought exactly like a droid. People were stranger, more unpredictable, and therefore fundamentally more difficult to defeat. He swung his lightsabers as though in slow motion. He watched reflected energy bolts creep between him and his targets with a laziness that belied their deadly power.

Once, in his other life, he had been sent to Ragna III to quell an uprising of the hostile Yuzzem. Barely twelve years old, he had been betrayed by the weapons his own Master had given him. All had failed on landing, along with his starship, leaving him armed only with the Force and his wits. Singlehandedly, he had fought to the nearest Imperial installation and escaped off-world, expecting either rebuke for failing his mission or praise for having survived. He had received neither-and the memory of his puzzlement came to him now, as clear as the crystal in the heart of his first lightsaber. The lesson hadn’t been to survive, he had eventually come to understand: it had been to come to terms with his own destructive power. In his wake, he had left dozens of Yuzzem injured or dead. Until it had been forced upon him, he had never known just what he was capable of-and just how little praise he needed to keep on doing it.

Later in that other life, Starkiller had raged against all the deaths he had caused in the service of his dark Master. Starkiller had been Darth Vader’s weapon, aimed squarely at the Emperor’s enemies, and nothing, he had sworn, would stand in his way. Only at the last minute had he swerved aside, deflected by Juno’s love from his former purpose, to another he had been unable to complete. He was no one’s weapon now but his own, but he still felt an echo of that remorse, that nagging feeling that killing wasn’t the answer, despite the calm acceptance he felt while waging war on Kota’s captives. Trained for violence, remade in violence, he struggled with the concept that anything other than violence might constitute a solution to any problem, but he was willing even in the heat of his familiar battle trance to entertain the possibility.

The crowd noise grew steadily louder as he approached the barracks-chanting, roaring, filled with mob fury. The weapons fire concentrated on him intensified, too. Jump troopers equipped with jetpacks were beginning to converge on his location. He angled toward a slender tower connected to the barracks by several high-rise accessways. When he was within leaping distance, he jumped for one of its transparisteel viewing platforms, lightsabers stabbing ahead of him. The window shattered.

He rolled across the platform and came up running for the stairs. Bystanders leapt out of his path, waving their upper limbs and screaming for help. They were extravagantly dressed, and few of them were Neimoidians. Humans vastly outnumbered aliens. They didn’t look like Imperial officers, though.

Starkiller ground his teeth together as he entered what looked like nothing so much as a casino. That was why there were so many extra ships around the Imperial compound: the potentate was running a decidedly non-official credit-making venture on the side. He was no different from the many Starkiller had rooted our for Darth Vader while still in the service of the Empire. Venal, self-serving, and cruel, they squeezed their minions with an iron grip while at the same time currying favor from those like them higher up the chain.

The Empire’s well-being was no longer his concern, but the galaxy as a whole would be better off if he took another corrupt Imperial down along the way.

He could feel the crowd’s roar through the soles of his feet. He was close now, very close. The casino’s defenses were tight but no match for him. What he couldn’t fight through, he simply destroyed. At the final juncture, he guided a sky-tram off its tracks and into the side of the building, tearing a hole large enough for an army to burst through. He jumped into the maelstrom of sparks and molten metal and ran to where he could sense Kota, still fighting for his life in the potentate’s theater of death.

One long, straight corridor led to a double door made of durasteel. It was guarded by six stormtroopers. Starkiller didn’t bother stopping to fight them. With a gesture, he pushed them aside, then burst open the doors.

The full-throated roar of the crowd hit him hard, like a physical blow. He slowed to a walk as he passed through the door and found himself in a giant stone arena-a combat zone painted red with blood, exactly as he had seen in his vision. The steep sides were full of spectators, but only a handful were present in the flesh. The rest attended via hologram. Their blue, flickering fists, claws, or tentacles were upraised, chanting in numerous languages at once.

Starkiller didn’t understand what they were saying, but he could work out the gist of it. “Kill, kill, kill!”

In the center of the arena, surrounded by a legion of dead and wounded assailants, was Rahm Kota. One fist was wrapped tightly around the throat of a dying stormtrooper. His green lightsaber blazed as he raised it to deliver the killing blow. Starkiller felt the stirring of another memory: he had been in such positions before, tossed into arenas and forced to kill everyone who came against him. That was for training, though. He didn’t think there was anything remotely educational about this spectacle.

“Kota!” he cried.

The aging general raised his head, searching for the source of the voice over the baying of the crowd. “It can’t be… “

Starkiller ran out into the center of the arena. The crowd howled and hissed.

From far above came a booming command. “Send out the Gorog!”

Starkiller came to a halt in front of his second Master.

“By the Force, ” Kota whispered, staring at him with eyes that no longer worked-thanks to an injury Starkiller himself had delivered-but seemed to see regardless. His exhaustion radiated from his filthy skin like the heat of a sun. He was battered and weary and on the verge of collapse. He staggered back, looking almost drunk with fatigue. “I saw you die..

“You saw me in your future, too. “

“I did, but…”

A series of thudding clangs came from a vast gate on the other side of the arena, and the huge metal doors began to open. From the darkness on the other side came a vicious snarl.

Starkiller turned to face the latest threat.

“Why don’t you sit this one out, General?”

Kota gripped Starkiller’s shoulder and bared his teeth. “Never. I’ve got a score to settle. “

Something moved on the other side of the gates. Something heavy and bestial and very, very big.

Starkiller grinned back, although he didn’t know what was funny. He wanted to ask about Juno, but just then wasn’t the time. “You were never very good at taking orders. “

Our of the darkness thundered a bull rancor, roaring and spraying drool. Starkiller came forward three paces, putting himself squarely between the beast and Kota, feeling nothing but confidence. On Felucia, his former self had defeated just such a beast. This one, he was sure, would prove to be as significant a foe. He raised his lightsaber to strike.

There was something wrong with the way it was running, though. Its eyes were wide and staring, but they weren’t quire focusing on either Starkiller or Kota, and the light he saw in them wasn’t fury. It was something else, something Starkiller didn’t immediately comprehend.

“I don’t care whether the restraints have been tested or not, ” boomed the voice a second time. “Open the Gorog gate now!”

Starkiller recognized the voice as belonging to the potentate who had “welcomed” him on the landing deck, and heard another loud clang. The bull rancor glanced over its shoulder, and Starkiller realized then that it wasn’t running toward him, but away from something else.

The look in its eyes was fear.

Through the open gate behind the rancor came a giant hand, attached to an arm as thick as a small cruiser. Each clawed finger was as long as a starfighter. With surprising speed, it reached out and snatched the bull rancor off the floor of the arena, right in front of them, and pulled it screaming back into the darkness. Something crunched, and the screams were cut off. Bones cracked and splintered with a sickening sound. Sinewy tissue stretched and tore.

The crowd was utterly silent, now. Not a soul moved.

Starkiller backed up a step, staring up into the shadows in shock. What exactly had he just seen? Was it a hallucination?

An earsplitting roar came from the darkness, and he braced himself to find out.

Two days earlier…

Dac’s moon, Juno very quickly discovered, was as unexciting as its name suggested. It was a gray, airless rock tidally locked to the waterworld it orbited, so its back side pointed endlessly outward at the stars. Juno had spent several hours watching those stars-and the faint specks that indicated ships traveling to and from the Mon Calamari system-waiting for the Organa operative she was slowly beginning to believe wasn’t coming at all.

“I have completed my scan of Dac’s traffic control, ” PROXY told her. “There is no mention of a ship or ships intercepted on suspicion of anything related to the Rebel Alliance. “

She irritably tapped the controls of the two-seater R-22 Spearhead interceptor she’d found waiting for her in the Solidarity’s hangar bay. How long did she have to wait before she gave the mission up as a waste of time? She had better places to stew over her lot than the back side of this sterile dustbowl.

At least, she told herself, PROXY was working properly now. The damage to his holographic camouflage systems that had frozen him in the image of his former Master had been successfully repaired by R2-D2. Only occasionally now did he adopt one of his many stored templates-including Juno’s-but most of the time he was just his skinny metal self, with glowing yellow eyes and an unflinching desire to serve her. The latter was the one remaining fragment of his primary programming, given to him by his deceased Master. The rest had been burned out of him by the Core on Raxus Prime.

“Ten more minutes, ” she said, “and that’s it. Princess or no Princess. “

“Will we attempt this mission on our own, Captain Eclipse?”

She had been giving that a lot of thought. “Dac won’t save itself. “

But she wasn’t Starkiller, and she didn’t want to become him. All her life, she had been part of a system. It suited her, the hierarchy of command and her place in it. Yes, she argued sometimes, and she especially didn’t like being reprimanded, but on the whole she preferred it to going alone. Nothing had made her happier than when the Rebel Alliance firmed up its command structure, with Bel Iblis providing strategic and tactical advice, Bail Organa or his daughter supplying access to crucial resources and intelligence, and Mon Mothma presenting the public face of the Alliance to those beings who required inspiration. The Alliance fleer didn’t have a Supreme Commander per se-it didn’t actually have much of a fleet to speak of yet, just a ragtag accumulation of ships-but the fact that a vacancy existed had reassured her. Someone would eventually step up to fill it, she had been certain.

And for a while, the system had worked. Orders filtered down from one commander or another, and the Alliance had held intact. Now, though, with Bail Organa absent and something of a schism developing between Mon Mothma and those of a more military bent, including Bel Iblis, nothing was certain anymore. Who exactly did tell Juno where her duties lay? Did the leaders have to take a vote now before making any kind of decision? If Leia Organa felt compelled not to take sides while her father was absent, what happened next time there was an emergency and the Alliance needed to act quickly?