The Force Unleashed (6 page)

other units designed to support the clone army. A disastrous campaign, during which

most of his clone troopers had been killed, led to him cobbling together a makeshift

contingent of combat droids under his own command. That happenstance-or perhaps

deliberate design-had enabled him to dodge justice upon the issuing of Order 66.

Since that day, he had been in hiding.

But now he had turned up on Raxus Prime, dumping ground for garbage and industrial

poisons. Had he been forced there by necessity, or willingly sought shelter there

among the broken machines? The records couldn't tell her that.

At least he wasn't a general, though. How dangerous could a droid maker be? Darth

Vader might consider him more powerful than Starkiller, but she couldn't see why.

His agent had made short work of Jedi Master Rahm Kota, after all.

Her thoughts drifted. She entered a dream-like state midway between waking and

sleep. The slightest flicker on the control board and she'd be alert, but otherwise

she was at rest. If not entirely at peace...

"They have no defenses," she informed Lord Vader over her TIE bomber's comms. "The

battle is over."

"It is far from over, Captain Eclipse. Continue your assault."

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Teeth grinding, she clenched her flight stick with both hands and considered her

alternatives. She would never disobey a direct order, but the consequences...

"I sense your disapproval, Captain. Speak your mind if you must."

Wasn't he reading it already? She shuddered at the thought. "With respect, sir, it

would be genocide to maintain the bombardment-a completely unnecessary waste of

life. They are already beaten."

"Since you feel so strongly on this matter, Captain, I will give you an alternative

course of action. Strike the planetary reactor at the following coordinates, and

strike it hard. Once that is out of action, I will consider this mission complete."

The coordinates came, and she breathed an inaudible sigh of relief. One precision

strike was infinitely preferable to blanket bombing. "Thank you, Lord Vader."

"Your gratitude is wasted on me. Give me success, Captain. That is all."

The channel closed, and she relayed the orders to the rest of the Black Eight. One

small victory in a much larger battle: she couldn't afford to dwell on it. Readying

her payload, she plotted a course down through the atmosphere of Callos, glad that

she would add only a little more damage to all that the little green world had

already suffered...

She woke from the dream with a start. Enough, she told herself. She could only beat

herself up so much over what had happened. What difference did it make now? She was

going to drive herself mad by dwelling on it forever.

Besides, she had more important things to worry about now. What with Darth Vader,

Starkiller, rogue Jedi, and the Emperor, she had to stay alert for anything that

might give her a chance of getting out in one piece.

Lights were winking on the Rogue Shadow's console. "Tell your master we are coming

out of the jump soon," she said to the droid. "If this is a trap like Nar Shaddaa,

he will want to be ready."

"I will inform him," PROXY told her as she fine-tuned the ship's drives in readiness

for their arrival. When Starkiller entered the cockpit behind her, she didn't look

up from her work.

The streaked starscape of hyperspace snapped back to normality. The world's gravity

gripped them. Sublight engines brought the Rogue Shadow around so they were oriented

correctly and heading into the desired orbit.

Raxus Prime welcomed them in all its decrepit glory. The gray, synthetic world's

surface was covered by almost as much metal as Nar Shaddaa, but there the similarity

ended. Whereas one was alive with light and commerce, the other was a steaming

rubbish dump inhabited by scavengers and scum. Juno had never been assigned here

during any of her previous missions, and had never felt an urge to visit. It had a

noxious reputation.

She could immediately see why. It wasn't just the filthy atmosphere and the

mountains of decaying rubbish. This world was no moon, like Nar Shaddaa; it was a

proper planet, one with a startlingly strong magnetic field. Every orbital lane was

filled with junk, and so were a series of complex magnetic field-lines sweeping near

the surface itself. These lines carried iron-bearing fragments aloft in a grim

parody of a gas giant's rings. They were crawling with tiny vessels, either

automated or single-pilot, searching for anything of value. Every now and again

lasers flared, cutting at hulks or at rivals homing in on a nearby trinket.

Then there was the Core, the artificial intelligence built by the Republic to guide

the refuse world's operation. PROXY said that he would try to patch them into its

announcement system once they were within range, but she didn't see what help that

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would be if the Core turned on them.

This was going to be no simple sit-and-wait mission. She tightened her grip on the

controls and guided the ship patiently through the navigational nightmare.

PROXY had moved forward to take the copilot's seat beside her. Starkiller, when he

came, stood behind them both, assessing the scene through the cockpit viewport.

"PROXY," he asked, "are you picking up any communications yet?"

The droid put a metal hand to his forehead and made a strange noise. Juno looked up.

PROXY'S photoreceptors flickered; he tilted forward, as if in pain.

"Too many to decipher, master."

The droid's holoprojectors flickered unexpectedly. Juno edged away from an angular

vision of metal and cutting blades, with glowing red eyes and insectile limbs.

Before she could ask what was going on, the vision had vanished and the droid

continued.

"I can hear hundreds of droids calling out to one another." He looked up at his

master, who studied him with a frown. "This is where droids go to die."

"Or are taken," Juno muttered as she scanned the screens before her.

"What about Kazdan Paratus?" Starkiller asked PROXY. "I can't hear any clues that

would lead us to him." Juno's eyes widened. Her right index finger came up to draw

her companions' attention back to the view. "What about starting over there?"

So saying, she banked the ship to starboard, the better to reveal the structure she

had just discovered.

Five slender towers rose up out of the junk piles like a surreal tribute to the

past. The central tower was the tallest of the five, with a boxy structure near its

tip that always made her think of old-fashioned torpedo fins. The other four were

simpler, less ornate. Although undoubtedly made of junk itself, their unique lines

could not be mistaken for those of any other monument in the galaxy.

"That looks exactly like the old Jedi Temple on Coruscant," the said.

Starkiller nodded. "Set us down as close as you can."

She searched the surrounding area through a thick drizzle of oily rain. "I will do

my best. There are few clearings." The top of the ziggurat looked dangerously uneven

and unsteady. "You will need to approach it on foot."

The Rogue Shadow banked gently from side to side as it traversed the garbage-laden

magnetic lanes and cleared two large mountains of debris. The deeper she went into

the atmosphere, the dimmer the primary star became and the greener its light seemed,

until she felt her sinuses clogging up out of sympathy.

"There," she said, finally finding a space large enough for the Rogue Shadow to

settle. "With a lake view and everything..."

The space was on the shoreline of an irregular body of liquid, one of several pooled

among the high points on the junk landscape. She didn't dare set down hard, lest the

relatively level surface buckle under the weight of the ship. Instead she hovered on

the thrusters, skating lightly over the surface as Starkiller made his way back to

the ramp.

"Circle past the Temple and wait for my signal," he commed in a businesslike tone.

"Be careful," she sent in reply. "The sludge out there looks corrosive." She waited

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until the black-clad figure had progressed in inhumanly long leaps from metal ruin

to metal ruin and finally disappeared from sight before pushing the repulsors to

maximum and angling the ship up into the sky. She was glad to be doing so. In just

the few seconds the hatch had been open, a foul stench had filled the ship from nose

to tail.

"Juno out."

The APPRENTICE BARELY HEARD HIS pilot sign off as he hurried through the toxic

wasteland that was the surface of Raxus Prime. His concentration was intense,

fending off distractions from every side: the stench rising from the lake; the sharp

and treacherous terrain; the sound of wind whistling through the twisted spires and

snapped stanchions of the foul forest he found himself in. He kept his mind focused

on his prey: the mad droid maker, Kazdan Paratus. Mad he had to be, for who would

willingly live in such a place? Even the most desperate fugitive would seek better

climes.

The spires of the mock Jedi Temple were invisible behind the mountains of wreckage.

Much was destroyed beyond recognition, bin among the discards he saw the occasional

fragment of star-lighter, groundspeeder, air or water refiner, solar panel, antenna

dish, and more. Every conceivable material had made it to this, the bottom rung of

the Raxus system. No degradation had been spared. What couldn't be redesigned,

rebuilt, reclaimed, or recycled was simply waiting to be crushed into poisoned pulp

by the Weight of further refuse piled on from above. It painted a depressing picture

of the galaxy's prodigious consumption.

The apprentice spared no time thinking about that, either. He had one task to

perform, to the very best of his abilities. He had no intention of doing otherwise.

Rahm Kota may have tested him, but he had emerged superior in the end. There was

nothing Kazdan Paratus could throw at him that he couldn't handle. He was sine of

it.

And he would not think of the face he had seen while dealing with Kota. It was

nothing, just a strange glitch in the program of his life. Raised under the careful

eye of his dark Master, his skills had been honed to the point that not even Jedi

could stand against him. Soon, very soon, he would be ready to stand at Darth

Vader's side and take on the ultimate challenge of all: the Emperor.

He had regained his focus during meditation on the way to Raxus Prime by staring

into the red-hot blade of his lightsaber. He had treated his most recent injuries

with bacta patches so they would no longer trouble him. He hadn't eaten, for he

found that food deadened another hunger inside him-the hunger for greatness similar

to that possessed by his dark Master. Or was his Master possessed by it? It didn't

matter. From his point of view, they were the very same thing.

The power of the dark side filled him. Strength coursed through his veins, swelling

his heart with resolve. He would not fail. And how could he? He was Darth Vader's

apprentice.

Juno's voice came from the comlink, cutting through the Core's bland announcements

with Imperial precision.

"There is some sort of activity near a downed corvette north of your position."

"What kind of activity?"

"I'm not certain. We are in the upper atmosphere now, and there is a lot of

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interference. PROXY is picking up what might be droid signatures heading in that

direction."

"You think it could be a welcoming committee?"

"Maybe, I-whoa!" A blast of static was followed by a relieved gasp from Juno.

"What's wrong?" he said into the comlink.

"Nothing-now. I just got too close to one of those magnetic lanes, and an unstable

derelict exploded. Everything's under control. You just worry about keeping your

boots clean."

He half smiled and kept moving through the teetering piles of garbage along a

stretch that resembled a canyon with sheer walls and squelching floor. Only then,

after Juno's brief communication, did he notice an odd thing. Among all the

technological leavings, he hadn't spotted a single droid part yet. Not one. If this

was ¨ line droids came to die, as PROXY had said, what happened to their bodies?

He sensed movement ahead and slowed his pace to an ordinary walk, then a more

stealthy creep as voices became audible, too. Not human voices: a mixture of

electronic babble and high-pitched, liquid Rodese. Droids and Rodians, then.

He assumed that his orders remained unchanged from his last mission: Leave no

witnesses.

With a flourish, he activated his lightsaber and kept it at the ready.

* * *

THE FIRST DROID HE ENCOUNTERED was a spindly thing with one photoreceptor, one

manipulator, a poorly tuned dual repulsor and power plant, and very little else. It

was tugging at a cable protruding from an almost sheer cliff face of garbage. As its

repulsor Whined, small avalanches tumbled from above, bouncing off its metal shell