The Force Unleashed (18 page)

come to be blinded, and she had never asked. She figured she could guess, and that

he wouldn't ever want to talk about it, with her or anyone.

He stood with a grunt.

"If you won't give me any peace and quiet," he said, "I'm going to the cargo hold to

sleep."

"You do that, General," she said, relieved that the moment was over and unsure what

exactly had passed between them. "I'm going to see if I can find out what that

skyhook is for."

He patted her dismissively on the shoulder and shuffled out of the cockpit, making

his way by feel through the ship's hard-edged interior.

Juno checked the instruments to make sure they were still flying true. Starkiller

hadn't called in yet. She wondered if that was a good sign or the worst imaginable .

. .

WITH ONE DESPERATE LUNGE OF his lightsaber, the apprentice killed the last of the

giant spiders that had ambushed him in the forest's lower levels. Hideous creatures

with fat, red-pigmented bodies and tenacity beyond all reason-he almost wondered if

they saw his potential escape as a personal affront as well as lost lunch-they had

tracked him for over a kilometer before finally springing their trap. Barely had he

begun to wonder at the dearth of Kashyyyk's dangerous undergrowth dwellers in his

vicinity than five of the giant weavers had suddenly converged on him at once,

swinging on thick strands of web with mandibles raised and dripping poison. He had

barely survived the ambush.

Wiser now, and splattered in thick green ichor, he abandoned the undergrowth for the

upper levels of the forest. It was taking him too long to approach the coordinates

Kota had given him. Leaping from branch to branch, he ascended two hundred meters

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before the light started to brighten appreciably. Such was the perpetual gloom below

that he felt as though he was ascending from deep underwater.

Kota hadn't told him what lay at the coordinates, and he hadn't commed the Rogue

Shadow to find out. He wanted to learn for himself, to test the aging general's

memory, reliability, and word.

Once he was sure he was out of the territory of the deadly spiders, he took a more

level heading, albeit one still angling slightly upward. The forest canopy stretched

at least another half a kilometer above him, consisting of the branches of mighty

trees overlapping one another for support and carrying many thousands of species on

their broad terraces. The kingdoms of animal, vegetable, and even mineral flourished

everywhere he looked. Birds flew in complex flocks around nesting grounds like small

cities. Insects crawled and swarmed in sappy splits in the bark. Soil from rotting

vegetable matter and airborne dust pooled in the joints between branches and trunks,

creating oases for leafy plants and spreading vines. The cool air was full of animal

sounds and the rustling of leaves.

It was very different from Felucia, where everything seemed swollen with moisture

and the Force, always on the brink of bursting. Here life was hard-edged and

knife-sharp. Turning one's back on it was very, very dangerous.

Back in a relatively safe domain, leaping or swinging on vines I mm branch to

branch, the apprentice was able to resume thinking about what he had seen from

orbit.

A skyhook.

Startling enough on its own. Only a handful existed in the galaxy, and most of those

were on Coruscant. But that wasn't what had struck him.

As the Rogue Shadow had descended to the world's surface, he had seen the skyhook

from a different angle. Catching the last rays of the sun, it had resembled a fiery

line reaching up into the sky-up to a point in low orbit where a cluster of tiny lights gathered.

He had seen that vision before, of the skyhook over Kashyyyk. It had come to him

while he'd been unconscious in Darth Vader's secret laboratory, undergoing surgery

for the terrible wounds his Master had inflicted. He had thought those visions

nothing but dreams, meaningless fancies thrown up by his subconscious while his body

was under duress.

Could they in fact have been glimpses of his future?

He didn't know. Certainly he had never before achieved fort sight, not through

meditation or any of the other trials he hail set himself, but that didn't rule it

out. He had been suspended between life and death for months. Who knew what straits

he had endured on the road back to survival? It would be foolish to discount the

possibility, for the visions might contain information that could help him on this

particular journey, and others.

He struggled to recall more details of the vision, but found n difficult. His

memories were jumbled. Something about the smell of raw meat, and Darth Vader

talking about someone who had died. The hint of more was tantalizing but worthless

on its own. He needed something tangible or else it would only distract him.

In the vision, the view of the skyhook seemed to come from a ground-level

perspective. There couldn't be many places offering that on Kashyyyk. And there had

been someone else with him. A young woman. Juno, perhaps?

He frowned, sensing that he was drifting from the truth of the vision, whatever that

was. Not Juno. Someone else. Someone un known.

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Friend or foe?

The vision was exhausted, and so was he from trying to wring more from it. He had

felt weighed down ever since he'd arrived on Kashyyyk. There was something in the

air of the place, in the trees, in the color of the sun-and it bothered him. If the

source wasn't the vision, then what could it be?

He abandoned the attempt and concentrated solely on negotiating the forest's upper

fringes.

As he neared the coordinates Kota had given him, the sound of industry rose up over

the natural ambience of Kashyyyk.

The first to reach his ears was that of a shuttle taking off. Its flat, metallic

whine ramped up, almost to the level of being painful, then faded away to the west.

Birds erupted from the trees around him, adding their own clamor to the aftermath.

When they had settled down, he made out the clanking of Balmorran All Terrain Scout

Transports. The awkward-looking, two-legged machines had earned the apprentice's

unending dislike on Duro, where Darth Vader had sent him to put down a local despot

who had grown too big for his Imperial boots. The machines were hi ivy and

graceless, but troublesome in proficient hands. He hoped he could stay out of their

gunsights for as long as he was on Kashyyyk.

Whirring landspeeders, buzzing vibrosaws, and the whine of a generator drifted to

him as he neared their collective source. He was momentarily puzzled as to how such

a large-sounding settlement had found a secure foothold in the dangerous forest. The

answer came to him before long.

The forest ended as though a knife had been carved through it and the trees to one

side scraped away. Raw, scarred dirt lay exposed to the naked sun for the first time

in millennia, knotted with dead roots and mixed liberally with angular wood chips.

The ground sloped down in a large valley to a choked riverbed, then angled up again

to a summit that would have seemed prominent on any other world, but which remained

dwarfed by the trees that crowded resentfully around the cleared area. On the summit

of the far side of the valley was a lodge, clearly the home of someone important,

doubling as an Imperial base, one bristling with weapons emplacements and satellite

dishes, planted high above the forest with a shuttle landing pad jutting out of one

side.

From where he crouched, he could see several steps leading up to the main entrance.

A single shuttle rested on the pad, its arms folded demurely upward over its body.

AT-STs strutted about below with an air of iron impregnability, shadowed by droids

of all shapes and sizes. Stormtroopers patrolled the lodge's perimeter with blaster

rifles at the ready, some herding Wookiees in groups of three or four. The planet's

tall, heavily furred indigenes seemed to be wearing restraints, although it was hard

to make out why across such a long distance.

The apprentice took all this in from a lofty vantage point on the very fringe of the

forest, crouched on a slender bough like a Kowakian monkey-lizard. There was no

obvious way into the lodge that he could see. Perhaps with a little more

information, In could come up with some kind of plan.

From far below came the tinny crackle of a stormtrooper's vocoder.

Exactly what he needed.

Dropping with apparent weightlessness through the branches, he landed between the

members of a two-man patrol. Before either could sound the alarm, he raised his left

hand and ordered one of them to sleep. As that trooper sagged gently to the ground,

the second fell under the influence of a different mind trick.

"You're not alarmed," he told the trooper. "I'm authorized to be here. In fact,

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you've been expecting me."

The man in the anonymous white helmet nodded. "Everything's in order, sir. Can't

explain what's gotten into Britt here, though..." He kicked his unconscious fellow

with one white boot.

"Britt isn't your concern. You want only to help me."

"Yes, sir. I'm at your disposal. How can I assist you?"

The white helmet tipped inquisitively to one side, and the apprentice gave thanks

for the small minds of most stormtroopers.

"Tell me who's in charge here."

"Captain Sturn, sir."

"And where would I find him?"

"In the lodge with the guest, sir, if he's not out hunting." "Who's the guest?"

"I don't know, sir, but we're under strict orders to keep them out of harm's way.

These Wookiees are mindless brutes."

The apprentice ignored the speciesist slur. "Is this person a guest, or a hostage?"

"I don't know, sir."

"Can you show me to the guest quarters?"

"I'm not authorized for that area, sir." Again the helmet tilted. "Why don't you ask

Captain Sturn these questions?"

His hold on the stormtrooper's mind was slipping. Before it could fall away

entirely, the apprentice asked him about the Wookiees.

"What are we doing with them, sir? Why, giving them what they deserve. Filthy,

mindless animals. Hey, you're not one of those sympathetic types, are you? One of

them tore my platoon leader limb from limb, right in front of me. Kill them all, I

would, like Captain Sturn..."

"Enough." He waved his hands across the stormtrooper's face mil stepped back to

avoid his collapse. Leaving the pair where Be) lay, he melted into the shadows of

the undergrowth and began to circle the enormous clearing. The lodge at its heart

was built tough, with no obvious weak points. The far side projected over the ridge,

into virgin forest. He didn't want to get entangled MI .mother web-weaver ambush if

he could avoid it. By any account, it'd take an army to get in there, or firepower

above and beyond anything he had at hand-unless he stole some of the Imperials'

concussion grenades, or got his hand on a blaster cannon . . .

A slow smile crept across his face. He didn't need anything like that. He had the

dark side of the Force on his side. Edging back up mi o the trees, he set out to

find the best possible place to launch an assault.

Only once, when the scent of a distant burn-off hit his nostrils, did the strange

feeling of disorientation strike him again. He put it firmly out of his mind. Dozens

of stormtroopers lay in his immediate future, and all of them would be keen to keep

him from his goal. He would give them cause to reconsider.

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WITHIN HALF AN HOUR OF slicing into the local Imperial main frame, Juno had exactly

half an answer.

The purpose of the skyhook was to ferry Wookiee slaves from the surface of Kashyyyk

into low orbit, from which point they would be taken elsewhere.

Where they were to be taken, however, was hidden by a deeper level of security than

she could penetrate. And the matter of why was completely obscured. After that

productive half hour had come a frustrating search through every available record,

looking for any kind of clue but finding none. She was as much in the dark on that

point as she had been at the beginning.

She did learn that Darth Vader himself had visited the planet years earlier, but

that appeared to have been on a completely unrelated matter.

Leaning back into her seat, she ran her fingers through her hair and stretched.

Starkiller was busy on the ground. Kota was back in the hold. PROXY was still

keeping himself amused. It had only just occurred to her that, for the moment, she

was completely alone.

Leaning forward again, her fingers began tapping at the keys. Certain Imperial

records were duplicated all across the galaxy. They came with every invading force,

updating local networks and keeping themselves up to date in turn by downloading new

information from capital ships passing through. Thus the administration of the

Empire kept itself consistent across many thousands of Inhabited worlds-for how else