Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

by Sean Williams

  She nodded tightly, thinking that it sounded simple but was likely to be anything but.

  They had cleared the atmosphere and were accelerating away from the planet’s busy skylanes. The Star Destroyer that had carried off Vader and his prisoners was long gone.

  “Where?” she asked, voicing the first of many questions that plagued her.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Not yet.”

  He closed his eyes and leaned back into the copilot’s chair.

  “Don’t nod off without giving me some idea,” she said, unable to keep the worry from her voice.

  “I’m not sleeping,” he said without opening his eyes. “I’m meditating—or trying to. Jedi can sometimes see visions of the future.”

  He looked tense and awkward. She had never seen the hands folded across his lap so still. Surely, she thought, this wasn’t the kind of training Darth Vader had given him. Meditating had nothing to do with hunting and killing, or the persecution of the innocent.

  “Have you done this before?” she asked, wondering if it was training he had set himself down the years.

  He shook his head once. “I’ve never been a Jedi before.”

  An intense stillness flowed through him, as visible as though he had changed color. She opened her mouth, then closed it. Better that he concentrate and she got on with the business of prepping the ship for hyperspace.

  Corellia shrank to a blue-green ball behind them, and the traffic thinned out. She took navigation readings from the planet’s orbital factories and double-checked them against the system’s four other habitable worlds. Everything was in accord with the nav computer’s settings. Next she ran a thorough check of the hyperdrive to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with by the Imperials. The ship had been out of her sight for less than an hour, but a lot could be done in that time. Inertial dampeners could be rigged to fail at a critical moment, crushing everyone aboard in the tremendous accelerations achieved during a jump. Shields could flutter, leaving the ship vulnerable to impacts with interstellar dust. Null quantum field generators could be timed to dump them in the middle of nowhere. She could think of a dozen ways that Vader might have covered his bets against their escape. She checked all of them herself, one by one.

  No one had followed them from Corellia. As far as she could tell no one was monitoring their departure.

  Beside her, Galen breathed slowly and steadily with his eyes closed. An hour passed and nothing changed. Whatever he was doing, it obviously didn’t come easily. Her understanding of the Force was limited to stories mocking the superstitious beliefs of an old and outdated religion—plus the rumors that continued to circulate through Imperial ranks. The Jedi Purge might have been years ago, but people had long memories. Serving officers of a certain generation still remembered Order 66 and the Clone Wars. The telling and retelling of such stories had created a strange backdrop of distorted facts, mistaken beliefs, and pure misinformation that emerged whenever the word Jedi was mentioned.

  A faint vibration made the ship’s decks rattle. Concerned, she checked the sublights. Finding everything in order, she assumed that they had just passed through a dense region of interplanetary dust.

  When the vibration returned, stronger and longer than before, and the cause still remained unknown, she began to worry about what form of sabotage she could have missed—to the generator, the stabilizers, even life support …

  A faint sound to her left interrupted her train of thought. She turned to look at Galen and her eyes widened in surprise.

  His lightsaber was floating in the air in front of him, turning slowly as though in free fall.

  Juno stared at it for a moment, and then reached out to check the gravity generators. She stopped herself, knowing that they hadn’t been tampered with. She could feel the field around her, operating normally. Yet still the lightsaber floated, and as she watched more items in the cockpit joined its aerial display: her blaster and holster, a cup, a datapad. The ship shuddered again, as though something powerful and mysterious was subtly interfering with its function.

  Galen’s eyes rolled under his closed eyelids. A line had formed between his eyebrows. His lips twitched.

  She raised a hand to shake him, but found her fingers effortlessly deflected. The Force filling the ship was emanating from him.

  His frown deepened. His head turned to the right, then to the left.

  “Galen? Are you all right?”

  His hands clenched and unclenched, then his whole body twitched, making her jump.

  “Galen, can you hear me?”

  He moaned softly, as though caught in a nightmare. His skin was slick with sweat.

  She crouched in the pilot’s seat, unable to do anything but watch.

  He moaned again, louder this time. His legs kicked out, making the whole cockpit shake. The objects floating in the air began to spin around them. The lights flickered.

  “No,” he said distinctly. His head jerked from side to side, his face locked in a rictus of pain. “No, Kota—!”

  His eyes shot open. She gasped. The objects around them crashed to the floor. He stared at nothing for a second, wildly, frightened. His chest rose and fell as though he had just run a marathon. His breathing was the only sound in the suddenly still cockpit.

  “What?” she asked when she could bear the silence no longer. “What did you see?”

  He turned to her and stared as though he didn’t recognize her. Then he shook his head and the visions clouding his sight fell away.

  “A terrible thing,” he said in a shaky voice. “A massive space station—still under construction—” He lunged suddenly and took her hand. His fingers gripped hers with surprising strength.

  “Yes,” he said. “Plot a course for the Outer Rim. The Horuz system.”

  A chill colder than the snow of Corellia’s mountains swept through her. “What’s waiting for us there, Galen?”

  “I’ll tell you on the way,” he said, pulling back slightly. “What I know of it, anyway.”

  She saw a new grief in his eyes, and that frightened her. “Do you know how this is going to end?” For Kota? For us?

  He hesitated, and then shook his head. “No.”

  She wasn’t sure that she believed him, but she let the matter drop and turned to prep the starship for lightspeed.

  CHAPTER 37

  HORUZ SYSTEM.

  The apprentice excused himself when they were under way and retired to the meditation chamber—not to meditate but to check his lightsaber for damage and to sort out the thoughts running through his mind. He supposed the latter was a kind of meditation, but it wasn’t one Juno could help him with. The calming, reassuring presence she had provided in the cockpit wasn’t what he needed now.

  The planet Despayre.

  He knelt in the center of the room and took the weapon to pieces, carefully cleaning and reinstalling them, one by one. The lightsaber would never burn red, but it had been wielded by a Sith all the same. Its crystals would never be clean again. He replaced all of them, activated the blade, and found the resonance much improved. As a weapon its function was identical, but in his hand it would perform better than ever.

  The Death Star.

  It all came down to weapons, as far as the Empire was concerned.

  Sighing, he shut off the blade and confronted the visions he had received while meditating. He had glimpsed the future before—several times now, while on the brink of death—but this was different. This time it had been his conscious choice to pierce the boundary of the present, and he had made that choice with a clear act of will. That didn’t make interpreting what he had seen any easier. In fact, it made it more difficult, because instead of remembering isolated fragments, now he remembered everything, and not all of it could be true. At least, not all of it at once.

  The future was a mess of possibilities—some likely, some incredibly unlikely—shot through with hard certainties that were unchanged in every outcome. The Death Star was one such certainty: an
enormous battle station that, when completed, would rain still more terror on the Emperor’s subjects and ensure his domination of the galaxy. Its location was another certainty, and that this was where Vader had taken his prisoners.

  The apprentice knew exactly that much with confidence. The rest was a morass of contradictions. In some futures, he survived; in others he fell. Juno lived; Juno died. They were together; they were apart. The Rebels prevailed; the Rebels were annihilated. In one future, even PROXY was still alive, something that had patently not occurred in the timeline he occupied.

  The glimpse of a wider universe of what might and might not have been made his head ache, and made preparing for what might yet be even more difficult.

  The thought of PROXY made his heart ache. The droid had been freed by the Core from his primary programming on Raxus Prime, and that had allowed him to sacrifice himself for his master rather than try to kill him. The apprentice struggled with that fact. What was freedom worth if it led to death? Would he have sacrificed his life for PROXY, had the roles been reversed? Would he do it for Juno?

  Every time Juno called him Galen, he felt a very different kind of emotional spike.

  On Raxus Prime, when he had tried to call on the naïve audacity of the boy he had once been to bring down the Star Destroyer, nothing had stirred in him. No memories, no buried personalities, no hidden strength. He had worried at that fact ever since, wondering if his vision on Kashyyyk had been mistaken after all, or if Galen had been so thoroughly erased that no vestige of him remained.

  But now he understood. When he had turned to Juno at the base of the cliff and told her his name, it had been him telling her, not the ghost of his former self. Galen had ignored his summons on Raxus Prime because he was already there. He had possessed the strength to do what he needed to do. He always had. It was Galen as much as Darth Vader’s apprentice who had invoked the thought of Juno to make him strong. They were one and the same person.

  He still couldn’t think of himself that way. He had been nothing but an apprentice for all his conscious life. It might be years before he was completely free of his Master’s taint, if he survived that long …

  He closed his eyes in weariness and was immediately overwhelmed by images:

  —the Emperor dead and Darth Vader in charge of the Empire, with him at his side—

  —Darth Vader dead and the apprentice knighted by the Emperor as his successor—

  —Kota stabbing him in the back and both of them dying in a fatal exhalation of the Force—

  —Kota fighting the Emperor and falling, blasted by Sith lightning until he was barely recognizable—

  “Coming up on Horuz,” Juno called from the cockpit.

  He forced his eyes open, unsure how long he had been caught up in his future memories. Standing on legs that still felt unsteady after all that had happened in recent times, he put the lightsaber back at his hip and joined her as the ship came out of hyperspace.

  * * *

  THE DEATH STAR WAS EXACTLY as he had seen it through the Force. The size of a small moon, it hung balefully over the prison planet, still very much under construction but recognizably a sphere designed to be solid from pole to pole, with a concave dish dimpling one side like a large crater, possibly belonging to an oversized communications or sensor system. The lines of the station were blurred by thousands of droids, ranging from tiny construction units to massive cranes and welders that dwarfed even those on the Raxus Prime shipyard. Gaps in the exterior armor plating revealed an extensive skeleton strong enough to hold up under significant acceleration. Gravity generators the size of office blocks provided a steady “down” for everyone and everything within its operating radius. He didn’t know the specifications of the various drives, reactors, and life-support systems on which the diabolical station would depend when it was fully operational, but he could imagine.

  Sometimes imagination wasn’t a good thing.

  Telemetry showed thousands of ships in the sensors’ range. The station’s immediate vicinity was full of support vessels carrying raw materials in and waste out. Some were short-range shuttles obviously designed to hop between the construction site and the prison on Despayre, which it orbited. Others were BFF-1 bulk freighters. Staring at the incredible venture taking place in front of him, the apprentice realized that he had found the answer to one mystery.

  “I guess this explains what the Empire wants with all those Wookiee slaves,” he said. “Droids alone couldn’t build that monster. Not in a thousand years. Nor could the scum you’d usually find in an Imperial prison.”

  Juno nodded distantly, her attention firmly focused on flying the ship. They were moving quickly, mindful of the load on the stygium crystals in the cloaking device. With so many Imperial ships nearby—including dozens of TIE squadrons backed up by no less than six Star Destroyers patrolling the area—turning it off simply wasn’t an option. The Rogue Shadow needed to be in and out quickly so Juno wasn’t spotted and intercepted. Even operating at the maximum safe speed, it was going to be tight.

  His belly felt full of hydrogen at the thought of what had to happen next.

  The Rogue Shadow banked around a beefy gas hauler that lumbered across their path and slid between two large freighters following a parallel course toward the station’s south pole. A piece of spinning metal, evidence of an accident or perhaps just spillage from an overstuffed waste hauler, tumbled across their path, and Juno let the shields take the impact. The margins for error were getting tighter with every kilometer they traveled. By the time they were within landing range of the station, it would be like flying through soup.

  “Juno—”

  “Don’t say it.” Her gaze stayed determinedly forward as she wrenched at the controls. “Don’t say a word.”

  He held on as the shields took another battering, this time from a small droid chasing a lost component with manipulators extended. The impact made the ship lurch.

  She glanced at him. “Just tell me you’re still sure. This is what we have to do, right?”

  “It is.”

  The Rogue Shadow flew through a cloud of orange gas that left the viewport, and no doubt the hull, a different color. Juno swung the ship hard right to avoid a tumbling rock the size of a small asteroid and only just missed crashing into a trio of TIE fighters that suddenly appeared from behind another freighter. In the act of breaking for a safer quarter of the sky, the shields took a further five hits. One shield, the left rear, was already issuing a warning.

  “All right,” she said, flicking switches at a furious rate. In the shadow of a giant crane, the Rogue Shadow came to a sudden halt. “That’s it. I can’t take you any farther.”

  The apprentice double-checked telemetry as he stood. They had just passed through a field keeping a thin atmosphere wrapped loosely around the massive structure. For the slaves, he assumed. The air was cold but breathable, the distance to the surface a hundred meters.

  “This’ll be close enough,” he said over the sound of the ramp opening. His lightsaber was at his hip; there was no reason to hang around. “Keep the ship cloaked and wait beyond scanner range.”

  She followed him to the ramp, and actually came out with him, which he had not expected. Steadying herself with one hand on his shoulder, she looked over the edge. The view was giddying, all droids and ships with navigational lights endlessly blinking.

  “I have a really bad feeling about this,” she said.

  He tried to muster a casual tone. “Then we must be doing the right thing.”

  She turned away from the view and looked up at him. “Am I going to see you again?”

  “If I can free the Rebels, they’ll need extraction.” He did his best to sound nonchalant, but her eyes wouldn’t brook dissemblance. “Probably not, no.”

  “Then I guess I’ll never need to live this down.” She pulled him closer to her and kissed him hard on the lips.

  Utter surprise was his first response. Then time slowed, and he felt as though he we
re already falling. With a sense of unexpected surety he held her in return and breathed in her scent, relishing the feel of her in his arms—Juno Eclipse, former captain of the Imperial Navy and now pilot for the Rebel Alliance; Juno, his companion and occasional sparring partner these long weeks and months; the woman he had trusted with his life on more than one occasion and would again without a second’s thought.

  For one long, wonderful moment, they were just Juno and Galen, and everything was right.

  Then something butted against the Rogue Shadow’s shields and the floor shifted underneath them. They stepped apart, reaching for something more secure to hang on to.

  She looked back into the ship, obviously torn between her duty and him. Her eyes shone with all the colors of the Death Star, and her own crisp, beautiful blue.

  He positioned himself at the edge of the ramp. The taste of her was still strong on his lips. Despite everything, he smiled.

  “Good-bye, Juno.”

  Before she could say anything, he turned and dived with arms outstretched into the roiling atmosphere. Glowing gold with the protective power of the Force, he fell as straight and free as an arrow toward the surface of the Death Star below.

  CHAPTER 38

  DETAILS OBSCURED FROM ABOVE TOOK on sharply defined clarity as they came rapidly closer. Juno had stationed the ship above the equator. What had looked like a broad, dark line turned out to be a steep-walled trench filled with construction machinery, slaves, and cargo-carrying walkers. Weapons emplacements and armed squads of stormtroopers kept a close eye on the toiling Wookiees. Laser welders sent sprays of bright sparks into the air as giant sheets of metal were fixed in place. Broad sections of hull remained incomplete, providing access to the station’s innards for the swarms of many-legged droids assisting in the construction. Conveyor belts of components hovered on repulsorlift beds from site to site like miniature skylanes, crossing at every conceivable angle.

  The apprentice wove around bundles of giant metal girders and other debris as he fell, trusting in the Force to protect him from the worst of it. As he neared the surface of the Death Star, he flipped upside down so he was descending feetfirst and braced himself for impact.