Thick duranium shackles that pierced its dense flesh down its back prevented it from coming any farther than the center of the arena. It strained against the chains, roaring. One mighty fist lunged forward to take out its frustration on the tiny creatures standing before it, with their bright blades raised in futile defiance.
Starkiller went one way, Kota the other. The stone cracked beneath them. Dust and splinters of rock flew like shrapnel. Starkiller rolled on landing, then jumped again as the Gorog groped after him. It missed by barely a meter, amazingly fast for a creature so large. He slashed at it, but although his blades parted the red-black skin, he couldn’t cut deep enough to do any real damage.
He was going to have to fight the Gorog some other way.
“You’re a Jedi!” said Kota from his memory. “Size means nothing to you!”
The Gorog’s heavy, domed head swung to its left, looking for the general. Starkiller drew its gaze back to him, pushing through the Force at its nearest foot. It barely moved, but the effort didn’t go unnoticed. Keeping its center of gravity low and stable probably took much of the creature’s resting energy, so the last thing it would want was to be nudged off balance in the middle of a fight. Whether it reasoned consciously or simply reacted by instinct, Starkiller didn’t care. He definitely had its attention now.
Both fists came for him, converging with enough force to crack a moon in two. He stood his ground, adding his defiant shout to the creature’s angry roaring. The fists came together, making Starkiller’s world shake, but he went unharmed behind the strongest Force barrier he could muster. When the fists lifted, he found himself buried almost a meter deep in a gravel pit of shattered rock.
The Gorog stared down at him in slow-witted surprise. He took the opportunity to leap onto one of its arms and run along it all the way up to its mountainous right shoulder.
It swiveled from side to side, trying to track him, and scratched blindly at its back. The heavy chains clanked and rattled. Starkiller leapt onto one of the anchors that bit deep into the creature’s flesh and braced himself against the filth-stained metal. His arms could barely reach from one side to the other. Starkiller took a moment to concentrate, and then poured a powerful stream of lightning through the thick metal teeth, directly into the rippling muscle tissue.
The Gorog flailed and roared. It rose up and up until the surface Starkiller was clinging to became very nearly vertical. He ceased shocking it and climbed from anchor to anchor, heading for its head. Its hands groped blindly, swinging the chains from side to side. He dodged claws longer than his entire body and leapt, finally, onto the great bald skull. A metal plate sealed shut a massive rent in its skull, where some genetic defect or wound had left its brain exposed.
He didn’t know if it could feel him yet, but he didn’t doubt that it would soon. Raising both lightsabers blade-down, he stabbed deep into the metal plate and ran forward, melting a double line downward, toward its hideous face. At the same time, he shocked it with lightning, using the plate and his lightsabers to conduct the electricity directly to the creature’s giant neurons.
The Gorog’s fury doubled. The head whipped from side to side with a great grinding of vertebrae and sinew. Huge ropes of spittle splashed from its slavering mouth. The sound of its roars was deafening at such close range.
Starkiller leapt onto one of its thick, plated eyebrows and clung tight to a branch-like hair with one hand. The other pointed down into the creature’s nearest eye, ready to send a shock along its optic nerve, right into its brain.
The eye rolled, fixed him in its black stare. The pupil tightened. It had seen him. Before Starkiller could move, one mighty hand came from behind him and, with the force of a mass-drive cannon, swept him from his precarious perch.
For a moment he was both weightless and stunned. The world turned around him, and he thought he heard Juno saying, “Have you done this before?” and himself responding, “Trust me. I’m doing the right thing, for both of us.”
Then he hit the stadium, and only a Force-barrier reflex honed by thousands of hours of punishing training stopped him from breaking every bone in his body.
His senses only slowly returned. Holograms flickered and sparked around him as he climbed groggily to his feet.
He was halfway up the side of the arena, surrounded by spectators from afar, chanting for one side or the other. Starkiller wondered if it mattered to them exactly who was fighting, and why. The promise of violence was all they cared about.
Well, he could give them that.
The Gorog hadn’t given up on him, either. It had broken half of its chains during its frenzied writhing, and it pulled free of the rest to follow him into the seating. The few spectators who hadn’t already fled Starkiller’s vicinity now did so, fearing what might come next. The stadium’s walls shuddered as the huge creature applied its full weight to them.
Starkiller took a moment to look for Kota. The old man was neither lying squashed on the arena floor nor foolishly rushing in to help, and both relieved him. He needed Kota alive, if he was going to find Juno soon, and he didn’t want to be distracted by keeping the old man that way. But he didn’t want to lose him, either.
A quick search through the Force revealed him to be climbing upward through the stands, slashing at anyone who stood in his way. Settling that score he had mentioned, Starkiller assumed. Then there wasn’t time to ponder the matter any further.
The Gorog approached, dark blood running down from the gash on its scalp and dripping into its gaping mouth. The taste seemed to enrage it.
One arm swept across the stands, destroying hologram generators and snapping pillars by the dozen. Starkiller ran in the opposite direction. Someone was shouting orders from the skybox above, but he didn’t pay any notice.
The creature followed him around the stadium, making it shake and reel.
A huge slab of stone, dislodged by one of its wild grabs, came down just in front of him. Starkiller leapt higher, to the very top of the stands. There he found a ramp along which the very last of the spectators were fleeing. He followed it to the roof of the stadium, and waited to see if the Gorog was following.
It was, using its arms to drag itself higher and kicking out with its legs to gain extra thrust. Through deep rents in the stone floor of the stadium, Starkiller could see the open air below.
He ran from the ramp onto the roof. The Gorog followed without hesitation, shouldering through an opening barely wide enough for its arm, let alone the rest of its body. It blinked in the daylight. All the lights and buzz of the suspended city meant nothing to it when its quarry stood just out of reach, tantalizingly still.
It lunged, and missed. Lunged, and missed. It didn’t care what damage it caused. Metal supports bent. Guy wires snapped and whipped away. A handful of jetpack-equipped stormtroopers buzzed about its head, trying to bring it back under control, but it had eyes only for Starkiller.
He led it halfway around the arena before he felt the first lurching from below. A number of supports and stanchions were broken, ruining the integrity of the entire arena. The Gorog just kept on coming. Only when they had returned almost to their point of origin did it seem to notice the way the surface beneath it was sinking, beginning to drop.
The broad disk of the arena roof shuddered. Starkiller jumped to the only structure still attached to the city above: the skybox from which the potentate, he assumed, had enjoyed the best possible view. He landed on the roof just as the last support for the arena gave way and began the long tumble to the sinkhole below.
The Gorog howled as it, too, began to fall.
Starkiller cut a hole in the roof of the skybox and jumped nimbly inside.
There he found the potentate standing his ground in front of an ornate gold throne. A half circle of slain Neimoidian aides lay at his feet. He held his blaster on Kota, who was approaching with lightsaber at the ready, unhindered at all by either fatigue or blindness.
Starkiller’s arrival distracted the poten
tate, who snapped a quick shot at him, easily deflected.
Before Kota could strike—settling the score for a week of endless slaughter—the whole skybox lurched, sending all three of them flying. Metal squealed. Transparisteel shattered. The roar of the Gorog filled the air. Starkiller clutched a console as the skybox lurched again, tipping the floor steadily closer to vertical.
“You fool,” cried the potentate, spread-eagle on the floor. “You’ve killed us all!”
Starkiller peered warily out the nearest window. It was immediately clear what had happened. The Gorog had arrested its fall by catching hold of the skybox with one hand, and now it was trying to climb to safety. In doing so, however, it was steadily destroying the skybox itself.
The gold throne broke free from its restraints and slid toward the shattered viewport. It scooped up the potentate as it went, dragging him down with its considerable mass. He clutched at the floor but could do nothing to arrest his fall. He screamed as he went out the window and fell straight into the Gorog’s gaping mouth.
The tiny meal galvanized what was left of the Gorog’s facility to reason. It looked up into the skybox, seeing it for the first time as a container, not simply something to hang on to. It saw the shining of the energy weapons that had stung it. With its free hand, it lunged for them, but succeeded only in bringing down still more of the structure. There was no way now to avoid falling. It knew that in the depths of its deranged mind. With the last of its strength it lunged again, and caught its enemy at last.
“Kota!” Starkiller shouted as the Gorog ripped the Jedi general from the skybox and dragged him down with it.
“Turn away, boy,” he heard Kota saying in his mind. “Get on with your mission. There are some things you aren’t ready to face.”
He blinked. The words were another memory, not an instruction from the falling general. He wasn’t going to take orders from the past—especially when he hadn’t followed them the first time around.
There’s nothing I can’t face, Starkiller thought.
He let go of the console and took a running jump through the shattered window.
It was surprising just how far the Gorog had already fallen toward the gaping mouth of the sinkhole, but he refused to be discouraged. He dived in a straight line, using the Force to propel him through the whipping wind. He remembered with perfect clarity his former self’s plummet to the surface of the incomplete Death Star, and hard on the heels of that memory came the sensation of Juno’s lips against his. Longing for her filled him, driving him downward even faster.
The stench of the Gorog’s fear and rage came heavily on the air as he approached it. The beast was tumbling. The fist containing Kota flashed once in front of him, then a second time. The general was slashing at the fingers holding him pinned, to little effect. Starkiller had to get him free before Kota’s strength gave out and he was crushed to a pulp.
Selecting his point of landing with as much care as he was able, Starkiller came down on the creature’s back, close enough to one of the duranium anchors to take hold of it. He braced himself with both feet against the spine, ignoring the way the world was spinning around him. The Gorog didn’t know he was there. It wouldn’t be expecting an attack from this side.
He took a deep breath, reaching deeper into the Force than he had before. He had never journeyed to the center of a planet, where the molten metal raged and burned under pressure hard enough to make diamond out of dust, but he imagined something much like that. This time, he wanted to do more than just enrage the Gorog. He could feel the web of veins thudding a panicky beat beneath the skin. He concentrated on that beat, on the rapid pulsing of life that would be extinguished when it reached the bottom of the sinkhole. Why wait that long, when Kota’s life was at stake as well?
For a moment, he faltered. He had never killed anything this big before.
But it was just one life, and it stood between him and his goal. He had no choice.
Instead of a wild crackle of lightning, he discharged a single pure bolt into the metal anchor, stabbing deep through the creature’s chest into its heart.
Its back arched. A strange, fluting cry emerged from its mouth. Starkiller rode out the spasm, maintaining the electric shock for as long as he was able. Muscular waves rolled back and forth, twisting him from side to side. It felt like a groundquake—a fleshquake on a planet-sized monster.
The pulsing coming through the soles of his boots ran wild, faltered, ceased.
He sagged as the mountain of flesh finally grew still. The fight was over, but darkness enfolded them as they entered the mouth of the sinkhole and went into free fall.
Starkiller used rough pits in the creature’s skin to pull himself up to the shoulder, then down the limp arm that had held Kota captive. The general was clinging to the slackened thumb, head cocked as though he could see the sinkhole walls sliding by. He shouted a greeting over the sound of the rushing wind.
“I hope you’ve got a way out of this, boy.”
Starkiller put an arm around Kota’s shoulders. Together they leapt off the Gorog’s hand. Starkiller could slow their fall somewhat, but he couldn’t fly. The beast fell ahead of them. Maybe, he hoped against hope, it would go some way toward arresting their impact.
“If you’re wearing a comlink,” Kota said, “hand it over.”
Starkiller did so, even though that was as faint a hope as his own. “The whole city’s jammed.”
Kota punched keys on the comlink. “Let’s hope she can reach us in time.”
Starkiller’s heart quickened. She?
He glanced down into the shadow, wondering how deep the sinkhole could possibly be. Above, he saw only the shrinking circle of cityscape. He stared until it was occluded by something solid. He thought he recognized the silhouette. The roar of a starship’s engines echoed down the sinkhole, as the familiar angles and planes of the Rogue Shadow dived down toward them, and then overtook them so it could intercept them from below.
Though Starkiller pushed down against the starship’s hull with the Force to cushion their fall, they still hit the surface hard. Starkiller blinked away stars and groaned under the return of gravity. Kota was faring no better, clutching his shoulder and struggling to sit up. A hatch popped open nearby, and the old man waved the younger man ahead of him.
Starkiller was already moving. His entire being thrilled at the certainty that Juno was here at last. He could practically see her already, waiting at the controls for him to arrive, ready with some quip about being late to his own funeral.
He dropped down through the hatch and ran breathlessly to the cockpit.
“Juno!”
He stopped dead. The cockpit was empty. All he heard in reply was a ghost of her voice, speaking from the depths of his memory.
“Please don’t make me leave another life behind.”
CHAPTER 6
One day earlier …
JUNO TOOK ONE LAST look at the fluted domes of Heurkea a floating city, before diving under the waves. Its shell-like buildings gleamed red and gold by the light of Mon Calamari system’s primary, looking more like something grown than built—much like the coral of Mester Reef beneath her. None of the reef protruded above the water, and she was submerged up to her waist, buffeted by the alien sea as she stared at the city. She wanted something beautiful to hold in her mind before entrusting her life to air that stank of rotten rubber.
Ackbar ducked under without hesitation, followed a second later by Bail Organa, who had donned an old clone subtrooper breathing apparatus like hers. In a wet suit and mismatching white helmet he looked about as ridiculous as Juno felt. For the first time she didn’t worry that her weapons would be sealed in their packs until they emerged at the other end. If anyone saw them climbing out of the water at the far end, they would certainly not regard them as any kind of threat.
The Quarren were already underwater. Holding her breath instinctively, Juno took a single step forward, off the rough coral surface, and let herself sink
into the water.
It was blue and clearer than she had expected. The cargo freighter was moored safely out of sight at the base of the reef, guided there by remote control once the ten conspirators had disembarked. She could see its featureless nose almost as though through air. She couldn’t, however, see their destination. Trusting to the Quarren’s sense of direction, she followed strongly kicking feet around the bulk of the reef and into the open ocean. PROXY took the shape of Seggor Tels, using repulsors to swim rather than sink straight to the bottom. Juno kept careful track of which Tels was which, just in case.
Strong currents favored them half the way, then shifted direction as the seabed grew nearer, making progress much more difficult. Heurkea was a true floating city, with no structural connections to the bedrock, but several chunky cables did run from its undulating base down into the sludge. Ferrying waste one way and geothermal power another, she guessed, but just then wasn’t the time to wonder about the city’s inner workings. As its underside came into view, she kept her eyes open for the vent Tels had described. PROXY had sliced into plans of the city and confirmed that it was still there. The vent had been sealed up early in the Imperial occupation of the city, but laser-cutting equipment designed for underwater use would make short work of that obstacle.
There: a dark patch against the city’s white underbelly. She waved to catch the others’ attention, and pointed. She could have used the subtrooper gear’s comlink, but they were maintaining strict radio silence.
White light flared as one of Siric’s apprentices activated the cutting equipment. Bubbles of steam spread upward and flattened out against the city’s hull, forming rippling streams and threads. Juno waited for lights to flash and alarms to sound, but nothing happened. The Imperials had clearly grown complacent about security, at least in this damp corner of the galaxy.
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