The Force Unleashed (37 page)

Vader casually tossed him toward the icy cliff. He slid across the ground, clutching

weakly at the snow, and then spilled over the edge.

The world turned for a moment and he thought he might have fainted as he fell. The

bottom of the cliff was thousands of meters below, impossibly distant. It didn't

seem to be coining closer, which puzzled him momentarily.

When he came back to himself, he found that he was clinging to the cliff face with

the last of his strength.

A feeling of acceptance infused him. The mission his Master had given him was

complete: the Rebels had been gathered in one spot so they could be taken and

killed. That was the reason he had been spared, when Darth Vader had stabbed him in

the back on the Emperor's orders. His one remaining duty was to die.

There was guilt in that feeling, too. By planning to use the Rebel Alliance to his

own ends, he deserved whatever fate awaited him.

But part of him raged at the way he had been outwitted. He had betrayed his Master,

yes, but his Master had betrayed him first. That part of him longed to lift himself

up and resume the fight. With the Force behind him, he could strike down Darth Vader

and free the others.

Strike down his Master, as he had failed to do two times now.

Only then did he realize that this was exactly what Vader was trying to do.

On the Emperor's orders . . .

It had indeed all been an act, right from the beginning. His resurrection, his

"death," even his kidnap from Kashyyyk. Vader and his apprentice were puppets

dancing to the Emperor's tune, now and always. Wriggle though they might, their

strings remained.

He wanted to laugh, but all that emerged was a short, painful gasp.

His Master appeared in the sky above him, looming vastly in silhouette, blocking out

the world.

"Without me..." the apprentice whispered, "you'll never-be free..."

Darth Vader raised his bloody blade, but the sound of another lightsaber igniting

behind him forced the Dark Lord to turn around.

The apprentice couldn't keep his eyes open any longer. His fingers were numb; he

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couldn't feel anything at all. Weightless, he seemed to drift away from the cliff

wall. His eyes were closed, but somehow he could still see. As though from a

position high above, he watched his Master spin around to face Obi-Wan Kenobi.

The Dark Lord froze. In that moment of hesitation the long-dead Jedi Master

attacked, his face a mask of determination. At the very last moment Vader parried,

then parried again. He took a step backward, toward the cliff's edge, and then

rallied. With two sweeping strokes, so fast they blurred in the cold air, he

disarmed Kenobi and slashed him in half.

As the pieces fell to the ground, the hologram enfolding them dissolved. Sparking

fitfully and spilling delicate components into the snow, PROXY twitched once, and

then his photoreceptors went out.

Darth Vader stepped within reach and nudged the droid's body with his toe. It didn't

react.

Remembering the apprentice, he wheeled back toward the cliff. The boy he had wrested

from Kashyyyk watched dispassionately, not fearing if he was discovered. But Vader

saw nothing because there was nothing to see. His former apprentice was less than a

thought on the wind, removed from everything he had been and all that he had failed

to do by an act of will greater than any he had achieved before.

Vader lowered his lightsaber and stalked back into the ruins, where stormtroopers

had bound the Rebels like criminals and were marching them through the shattered

doors.

Suddenly the apprentice was back in his body. The cliff's edge and his life's ruin

was far, far above him. He could feel nothing at all, physically or emotionally,

except a vague curiosity.

What is it about dying, he asked himself, that brings out the best in me? First

seeing the future . . . then leaving my body . . .

The world turned black and cold. There was nothing he could do to stop that, so he

gave in to it and let all his concerns wash away.

One last thought curdled incomplete in his mind: J wish I could've told Juno . . .

Then he was gone into the deep and dreamless dark.

JUNO BLINKED TEARS FROM HER eyes as she brought the ship around. The fastest launch

she had ever performed may have taken her out of reach of the Imperial ambush, and

the cloak might have kept her well off the Star Destroyer's scopes, yet there was

nothing she could do but wait until Vader's forces had finished cleaning up before

returning to the scene. She forced herself to assume an innocent-looking orbit

around Corellia and wait for an opening. If she went in too soon, she might

jeopardize the one chance she had left.

My master will need you later, PROXY had said. Whatever the droid had in mind, she

hoped it had worked; otherwise she'd be going back for nothing.

Vader's shuttle lifted off in a swirl of steam. Accompanied closely by its escort of

TIE fighters, it docked with the Star Destroyer and disappeared from sight. She

didn't know exactly what it contained, but she could imagine.

Take them alive. The Emperor wants to execute them personally.

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A frustrated sense of urgency made her get up and pace the interior of the ship,

hoping to boil off some of the energy filling her. It didn't help at all. There were

too many memories inside the cramped rooms: Kota's old bandage discarded in the

cargo hold; the meditation chamber room in which she had first discovered the inner

conflict Starkiller was enduring; some leftover pieces from PROXY'S repair.

She tried screaming, but the echoes only made the ship's spaces feel even emptier

than before.

Finally the Star Destroyer broke away from its objective orbit and moved out of the

atmosphere. She watched it go every millimeter of the way, alert for any sign that

it might be a decoy. Even when it had reached clear space and activated its

hyperdrive, she cooled her heels for another ten minutes-long enough to be certain

the site wasn't being watched but before CorSec would turn up to perform a belated,

and likely predetermined, sweep of the area. The local Diktat was little more than a

puppet of the Imperial Governor. As with Kashyyyk and Raxus Prime, all evidence of

what had happened here would soon be swept under the rug.

Before that could happen, she put the ship into a hot, cloaked descent, hoping

against hope that someone, anyone, had survived.

The Rogue Shadow hovered on its repulsors, level with the eagle's nest. She peered

through the viewport at the shattered pillars and into the room itself. It was clear

of everything but rubble and blaster burns on the walls. The Senators were gone, of

course, and so was Kota. The corpses of the fallen bodyguards had been dragged into

the corridor outside, but she saw nothing other than planetary uniforms among the

outstretched limbs there.

Something caught her eye on the shelf outside: a single body, sliced in two. She

gasped on recognizing PROXY'S gray skin. Snow had already dusted him, and she swung

the ship lightly overhead, blowing it away. Doing so exposed a patch of dried blood

not far from where he lay and brought into sharper relief a series of footprints

leading to the edge of the cliff. She didn't want to look, but she had to. There was

a tiny brown dot at the bottom of the precipice. Juno reached for the ship's sensor

controls, then thought better of it. This she needed to see with her own eyes.

Bringing the ship about and letting gravity tug it down the sheer side of the cliff,

she braced herself for what she would find.

He lay on his side, curled like a child with one hand up close to his face. The

ship's wash made his hair and cloak move in a semblance of life. It was a cruel

illusion. The snow beneath him was only centimeters thick, nowhere near enough to

have cushioned a fall that far.

With the rational dispassion of someone keeping her emotions carefully in check, she

debated whether to collect his body and take it away, or leave it as a piece of

material evidence in the hope that it might encourage just one honest CorSec

operative to look deeper and wonder what had really happened . . .

His hand moved in the downdraft and she assumed that was an illusion, too.

When it moved again, she nearly crashed the ship in her haste to bring it down and

was running to him before the shutdown command had even reached the engines.

He was trying to sit up, without much success, blinking snow from his eyes and

waving his left arm feebly through the air. She knelt next to him and got her arms

under him. Once she had his weight, he was able to bend more successfully. It

surprised him, her helping, and he looked up at her with his one open eye as though

he hadn't noticed the ship arrive.

His lips moved, but she couldn't hear what he was trying to say.

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"It's Juno," she reassured him, just in case the fall had affected either his memory

or his comprehension, or both.

"Juno," he repeated as though struggling to think some vast and complicated thought.

"My name ..." He stopped and swallowed. "My name is Galen."

That broke the dam. She clutched him to her and cried for PROXY, who had died trying

to save him-and for those whose hopes and dreams seemed sure to follow. She cried

for herself and the life she had lost when Darth Vader had betrayed them the first

time around. She cried for the Rebel Alliance, which had died just moments after it

had been born. She cried for all the people of the galaxy, whose fate rested in such

weak and fallible hands.

He patted weakly at her shoulder, as though to comfort her, and that only made it

worse.

Eventually, the flood of grief eased and she had herself back under control. Her

extremities were going numb, and he had to be frozen right through. That seemed

stupid when the ramp of the ship was less than five meters away.

"We need to move," she said.

He nodded, and then winced as he shifted his right leg underneath him.

His bones must be shattered into a thousand pieces, she thought. Nevertheless, he

was able to stand and even to walk with only a small amount of assistance. They

almost lost their balance a couple of times going up the ramp, but soon the warmth

of the ship enfolded them both. He collapsed shivering into the copilot's seat and

put his head in his hands while she warmed up the drives and prepared for liftoff.

She retraced his terrible fall down the cliff face. When they came to the top, he

shakily reached out a hand and said, "Stop here."

Before them lay the scene of Vader's treachery. He stared at it with jaw clenched

and eyes shining for a long minute, then said, "My lightsaber."

She understood. There was just enough room for the ship to put down, but he was on

his feet again before she could suggest it. Moving painfully but with every limb in

full working order, he walked back to the ramp and waited for her to open it.

When the ship was in position, he dropped out of it and limped into the eagle's

nest. He didn't waste any time, reappearing seconds later with his lightsaber unlit

in his hand. She lowered the ship as close to the ground as she dared to make his

ingress easier. The moment she heard his boots on the deck, she shut the ramp,

activated the cloak, and headed for the skies.

"They're gone," he said as he eased himself back into the seat. "Vader took them

all-to the Emperor."

She saw no reason to deny that certainty, simply to comfort him. But there were

elements of Vader's plan that made her wonder if it could be so cut-and-dried.

"I don't understand," she said. "Why would Vader let us-no, encourage us to destroy

so many Imperial targets?"

"To sell the deception," he said, his lips in a thin white line. "Credits,

starships, Imperial lives-they're all meaningless to Vader. He needed me to find the

Emperor's enemies, no matter the cost. And I did exactly what he wanted ..."

She could see his grief visibly turning to anger as he realized just how he had been

played for a fool by his Master. It was difficult to put herself entirely in his

shoes, but their lives did have several points of overlap: a disapproving father

figure who had ultimately betrayed them; a sense of duty that had led them to commit

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acts they now knew were wrong; an increasingly uncertain future ahead of them.

Unsure how he would take the overture, she reached out and placed a hand on his

shoulder.

"Yes, you did do what he wanted. There's no point hiding from it-and now the fate of

the Alliance rests on your shoulders. The question is, what are you going to do

about it?"

He glanced up at her, startled by her honesty, and then looked down at the

lightsaber hilt in his lap, wrestling with his emotions and thoughts. She retracted

her hand and let him think, knowing that it had taken her a long time to perform the

U-turn that had led her to believe in the Rebels' cause-and she hadn't even realized