The apprentice reached out one hand with the palm cupped and lifted the device into the air. Drexl’s feet left the ground and his legs pinwheeled in space. “Waaargh!” he cried, frantically trying to start the jetpack. Higher he rose, wriggling and wailing. The jetpack coughed and flared into life. The apprentice held it tight for a moment as Drexl pushed the throttle forward in an attempt to break free. When the engine was straining at its maximum output, the apprentice flipped it upside down and let go.
With one final cry, Drexl Roosh plowed into the ground and the jetpack exploded. The shock wave was too much for the ceiling, which collapsed in a slow but inevitable rush. The apprentice walked through the chaos, deflecting the worst of it. In the path he left behind, no living beings stirred.
CHAPTER 30
STARKILLER’S VOICE CRACKLED FROM the comlink.
“You were right, Juno. It was Drexl.”
She glanced over her shoulder before answering. PROXY was sitting in the copilot’s seat, still trying to slice into the world’s core computer. Kota was in the hold, no doubt sleeping again.
“Do you think Drexl saw you?”
“I’m sure he did. But don’t worry. I think I got to him before he alerted the Imperials. The situation is contained.”
By contained, she presumed he meant that Drexl and his minions were dead. That gave her a slightly sick feeling in her stomach. How many beings had Starkiller destroyed now in the pursuit of his mission? Was anything worth so much death?
PROXY muttered something to himself, but she ignored him. The comlink signal was crackly with so much electromagnetic interference in the area.
“I’ve reached the cannon,” Starkiller was trying to tell her. “I just have to deal with a bit of security.”
“All right,” she said. “PROXY accessed the construction plans. Once you get past the Imperials, you shouldn’t have any trouble reconfiguring the cannon to fire at the shipyard.”
“That’s good. I’d hate to have to aim this thing with my bare hands.”
She wasn’t in the mood for joking. “Good luck.”
“Thanks.”
She sighed and leaned back into her seat. With her hands over her eyes, she groaned at the awkwardness of the brief conversation. Maintaining so many masks was wearing her down. She didn’t know how much longer she could keep it up.
“My primary programming?” the droid said. “I’m programmed to kill my master.”
“What’s that, PROXY?”
“I have tried dozens of tactics, but I continue to fail him.”
Juno uncovered her eyes and sat up straighter. The droid was perched on the edge of the copilot’s seat, staring out the viewport at nothing.
She waved a hand in front of his photoreceptors. He glanced at her and then turned his head pointedly away.
“Well, if you think it will help,” he said.
“PROXY, are you all right?”
“I suppose you could access my core process—”
The droid suddenly went rigid. His photoreceptors flickered then turned a bright, bloody red. One of his training images—a red-skinned Zabrak with a fierce expression—rippled across his body.
“PROXY, who are you talking to?”
The droid turned to look at her. “Yes. I am on my way now. Just a few loose ends to deal with.”
Juno backed away, too late, as PROXY reached out with claw-like hands for her.
THE APPRENTICE STOOD AT THE top of a mound of foul-smelling organic rubbish and surveyed the cannon superstructure. The shipyard over Raxus Prime was building arguably the Empire’s greatest assets—the Star Destroyers that policed the space lanes and put down innumerable rebellions—and it was guarded accordingly. He took a long moment to consider his best route through the cannon superstructure. A closely monitored perimeter kept stray droids from wandering too near. Automatic cannon emplacements fired at semi-regular intervals, as though to remind the locals that they were being watched. The Imperial ground forces obviously had no fear of heavy assault, as the routes in and out of the superstructure weren’t even fenced off. Get rid of the cannon and he could practically walk right in.
A number of walkers clanking around inside the perimeter might make things difficult, he reminded himself. And he would have to find the cannon’s control room before someone guessed what he had in mind. He didn’t want it shut down. It might take days for the enormous linear accelerator to charge up again—and if the production supplying the giant metal “cannonballs” should happen to be put into reverse …
Be quick, he told himself. That was the solution. Don’t think too much about anything. Let your instincts guide you.
His instincts weren’t doing a very good job on any other aspects of his life, but at least he was still alive. He felt safe trusting them once again, in the service of his distant Master.
My Master is not a coward, he had told Shaak Ti.
Then why are you here in his place? she had responded.
Because he could do things his Master could not. That was the only answer he would accept. He was anonymous and less likely to attract attention. He might even, one day, become stronger than his Master—although that thought seemed almost preposterous. How many people had challenged the infamous Lord Vader, Jedi or otherwise? All had failed. What made him special?
And then there was the vision he had received of a gravely injured Darth Vader. Past, present, or future, it clearly demonstrated that the Dark Lord was not invulnerable. Human tissue lay behind that mask and armor. Tissue died eventually.
But the Dark Lord’s attacker in that vision had died, too. That was how it had seemed to go. Died and become more powerful than ever, if the Emperor’s words were to be believed. Perhaps they couldn’t be. Perhaps that vision was nothing but fantasy. He couldn’t tell, but he did take some comfort from it. No one was indestructible. No tyranny lasted forever.
And in the meantime, he had a job to finish.
Don’t think, he reminded himself. Just do!
With lightsaber raised, he leapt from the summit of the rubbish pile into the nest of Imperials below.
THE UTTER DARKNESS OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS slowly gave way to an irrational dreamscape combining the forests of Felucia, Kashyyyk, and Callos. The three worlds were now so entangled in Juno’s mind that she could barely tell them apart. Similarly, the man she was chasing through the trees could have been her father, Kota, or an older version of Starkiller. She wouldn’t be sure until she caught up with him and turned him around.
The chase felt never-ending. His pace perfectly matched hers. No matter how hard she tried to keep up with him, he never drew closer—but he never pulled away, either. He seemed to be leading her somewhere.
Just as she began to despair of ever catching him, he ran through a gap in a dense stand of saplings, and when she went to follow him, she found herself on the shore of a wide lake. The man she had been pursuing was nowhere to be seen. Her attention was caught by a massive, cubical structure resting on a wooden platform in the middle of the lake. The structure appeared to be made of solid stone, with no windows, doors, or openings of any kind. It was so large that clouds skimmed the top. The wooden platform holding it just above the water was obviously very old. It strained under the weight of the giant stone cube. She could hear it creaking from where she stood on the shore. Even as she watched, two of the piles splintered and gave way. The cube tipped slightly in that direction, then settled amid a chorus of complaints from the wooden beams below. Two sections of the upper edge dislodged and splashed loudly into the water.
It’s going to fall into the lake, she told herself. And that was a very bad thing. Why it was a bad thing, exactly, she didn’t know, but the certainty of it filled her completely. Tugging off her uniform jacket—which she had been wearing in the dream, even though she had lost it while imprisoned on the Empirical—she took a running leap into the water and started to swim.
She had to repair the platform and stop the cube from collapsing. Tha
t was the thought that filled her mind. But even as she swam, another wooden pile gave way with a crack. The cube shifted again, and more chunks fell into the water. Waves buffeted her. She gasped as water went up her nose, but kept on swimming.
The creaks and groans of the straining wood grew louder. Collapsing piles sounded like blaster shots all around her. Boulders rained into the lake, tossing her from side to side. Spluttering, half drowned, she tried to see where she was going but the vast stone edifice was invisible behind the surging waves. She was lost and everything was going to collapse if she didn’t find her way soon.
A hand reached down to save her. She clutched at it without knowing who it belonged to. The fingers were strong and warm and lifted her as easily as though she were a child. She came right up out of the water and found herself standing on solid ground. The man who had saved her loomed over her like a giant with the sun behind his head so she still couldn’t make out who he was.
Squinting, she tried to see his face. It melted and changed the more she tried to pin it down. He shrank and grew darker and became PROXY, with glowing red photoreceptors and outstretched hands.
She screamed and fell back into the water. This time she didn’t come back up, and she was glad to let the darkness take her.
DESOLATION. DESTRUCTION. DEATH.
That’s what I bring, the apprentice thought, wherever I go. Ten stormtroopers, a hundred, a thousand—the numbers don’t matter. Faceless, futureless, disposable, they’re all the same to me.
And that isn’t power.
He glanced behind him, at the swath he had cut through the Imperial forces. Wrecked walkers lay in smoking ruin, red-glowing gashes still visible in their armored exteriors. Stormtroopers lay in piles where they had died, futilely regrouping to turn back his advance. Choked, blasted with lightning, dismembered, they had at least met quick deaths. He had lost the stomach for prolonged engagement. He just wanted to get in and out and back to the ship—where a host of difficult problems remained, for certain, but at least he wasn’t treading the same old territory.
I am my Master’s weapon, he thought. I lay waste to all that stands in his path. But where is the power in that? There are levels of mastery beyond the simple act of killing that Darth Vader has never taught me. One must be able to control without applying lethal force; otherwise there will soon be nothing left to control. It takes more than a really big stick to own the galaxy.
Fear, he decided. That was the key. People were afraid of his Master and the Emperor above him. If he was ever to rule as they did, he would have to learn that art himself. But from whom? And to what end? If Darth Vader taught him those secrets, he might rise up against his Master and wrest control of the galaxy from him. The teachings of the Sith—such as he had been exposed to, anyway—had little to say about limiting the desire for power. There could be no such limits. They were expressly forbidden.
From one of the cannon engineers, he extracted the location of the targeting control systems. He hurried there through thickening layers of defenses. The workings of the cannon were almost deafening now, as it charged up its mighty capacitors and electrified its linear induction rails. The booming of each metallic missile, which accelerated to supersonic speeds in less than a second, was almost physically painful. Even the act of moving such a large mass into position through the guts of the machine made more noise than he had ever heard before. He doubted his ears would recover.
When he reached the controls, it was a relatively simple matter to program the cannon to shift targets just slightly: from the magnetic scoops that gathered up each orbital projectile and brought it safely in to dock, to the disk-like infrastructure itself. He estimated that two shots would probably do the job, but three would make certain of it. Beyond that, the shipyard’s orbit would start shifting, so the cannon might hit nothing at all. He planned to be well on his way by that point, with his mission to hurt and embarrass the Empire complete.
He finished programming the cannon and waited patiently for confirmation. As soon as he had it, he stabbed his lightsaber deep into the control panel’s guts, thereby ensuring that no surviving controller could reset the cannon’s aim. Confident that the machine would follow its new programming to the letter, he made his way through the superstructure to the outside world, where the air might not have been any fresher but at least it was a little less thick with blood.
The first of the three cannonballs was in place. An earsplitting whine indicated that the linear accelerator was fully charged. With a surge of acceleration that made the ground literally move beneath his feet, the ball of metal was suddenly airborne, glowing red with friction as it arced up into the sky. Its course seemed true. The apprentice watched, hypnotized, as it shrank to a dot then disappeared completely from sight. Even then he followed its progress with his mind, knowing the course it was expected to follow.
The bright circle of the shipyard was easily visible in the sky. He stared at it until it was burned into his retina. When the first of the explosions came, as expected, he was surprised at its brightness.
The weapon had a second cannonball in place. As it seared up through the atmosphere, the apprentice let his gaze fall and continued on his way. The explosions were spreading across the shipyard’s superstructure. That process would only increase when the second missile arrived. He didn’t need to watch the progress of his plan to know that it would succeed. His time would be better spent getting away than in indulging hubris.
When the third missile was on its way, he had reached the crater below which Drexl’s former hideout had rested. Scavenger droids swarmed over the site like insects on a carcass. A contingent lashed out at him as he approached, and he was forced to deal with them before he could continue. Only when that was done did he glance up at the sky.
What he saw froze the marrow in his bones.
“Juno,” he called into the comlink. “Juno, answer me. You have to get the ship in the air.”
Kota’s voice unexpectedly came in reply. “What’s going on, boy?”
Can’t you see it, he wanted to say, then realized who he was talking to. He described the scene in as few words as he could, unable to tear his gaze away from the sight of the disintegrating shipyards. Huge, molten chunks were tearing free and tumbling either out into deep space or down into lower orbits while further explosions continued to tear the facility apart. The scaffolding around the nearly completed Star Destroyer had bent and torn completely away, leaving the ship free to power down into the atmosphere of Raxus Prime. Already it was visible as a distinct triangle glowing orange around its leading edges and conning tower. It was coming directly toward him.
It was aiming for him.
“Juno can’t fly the ship at the moment,” said Kota firmly, “and neither can PROXY. We have to find another solution.”
“What’s wrong with Juno?”
“Concentrate on what’s important, boy. That Star Destroyer is coming down fast. You’ll never get clear in time. You need to pull it into the cannon.”
The apprentice was temporarily lost for words when he realized what Kota was suggesting.
Kota wanted him to move the Star Destroyer using nothing but the Force.
“You’re insane,” he gasped. “It’s massive!”
“What is mass?” Kota said. “It’s all in your mind, boy. You’re a Jedi! Size means nothing to you!”
Kota’s voice had changed. The surly, drunken slur was completely absent; in its place was the durasteel bark of the seasoned combat veteran the apprentice had first met.
“Can you hear me, boy? Reach out and grab that ship, or you’ll die on this trash heap!”
The Star Destroyer was growing visibly larger and hung like a burning, triangular moon low in the sky of Raxus Prime.
You’re a Jedi! Size means nothing to you!
He wasn’t a Jedi but the message was the same. The Force didn’t recognize big or small, heavy or light, hard or easy. The living flows of the galaxy encompassed all scales,
from the very small to the extremely large. The Star Destroyer was part of it, and so was he. The Force bound them as surely as gravity. He could make its invisible muscles flex, if he dared.
Had his Master ever done anything like this? Had the Emperor? Had any Sith or Jedi in the history of the galaxy?
He doubted anyone would ever know about his success or failure in the next few minutes.
“Be quick about it, boy!”
Fast or slow were also irrelevant to the Force, but the apprentice took Kota’s point. The sooner he started, the sooner it would be done.
Deactivating his lightsaber and attaching the hilt to his belt, he adopted the opening stance of the Soresu form, with his right arm and fingers outstretched, pointing at the Star Destroyer. His empty left hand he tucked in next to his heart. With his legs braced firmly in the trash, he reached as deep as he had ever reached into the Force, and then went farther still, feeling as though a mighty chasm had opened up under him and his mind and will plunged down into it. The chasm filled. His mind opened. The physical existence of the Star Destroyer slid painlessly inside.
Nearly sixteen hundred meters long and capable of carrying a crew in excess of thirty-seven thousand, the ship was a familiar design. Its engines and armament weren’t fully installed, but its Class One hyperdrive would have taken it anywhere in the Empire at speed, there to deploy walkers, fighters, barges, and shuttles. Armed with a host of turbolaser and ion cannons, plus no less than ten tractor beams, it could have blockaded an entire system on its own. The reinforced durasteel hull was solid enough to rip a gouge in Raxus Prime that might take centuries to fill. Scavenger droids would have a field day when it came down.
Wherever it went down …
There is no wherever, he told himself. There is only where I tell it to.
Focus.
The tip of his right index finger and the Star Destroyer became as one in his mind. Every nut and bolt and plate and wire of the massive machine was contained within that tiny space. It wasn’t hard to move an arm, a finger, a single human cell. He could direct one barely without thinking, so why not the other, too? Instinct was clearer on that point than the workings of his mind. Ignoring perspective, the two were about the same size in his field of vision.
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