Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II (27 page)

A space battle.

Abruptly, Vader turned and stalked back to her, his cloak heavy and wet from the rain. He raised a gloved hand as though to strike her, and she didn’t pull away. She couldn’t fight him; she knew that very well. But she wouldn’t cringe before him, either.

“I sense your fear, ” he said. With a single, surprisingly swift motion, he ripped the patch from her mouth. “Your doubt, too, is clear to me. “

The rain was cooling against her red-raw lips. “What doubt?” she asked, attempting to brazen out his uncanny insight into her mind.

He took one step to his right, and turned to face the way he had been before. Ahead of them, in the clouds, was a patch of yellow light. Not the sun, or even a bright moon. This was shifting slightly and growing brighter by the second. A meteor, she thought, coming right at her.

“Is that… ?”

Vader put his hands on his hips and nodded in satisfaction.

“He is almost here. “

Barely a minute into the dive, Starkiller knew he had to move. Nebulon-B frigates weren’t designed for rapid reentry. Anything over eight hundred kilometers an hour risked tearing off control vanes and external sensors-and the Salvation was already doing far in excess of that.

The ship shook and thundered. Strange screeching noises ran from nose to tail, as though it might tear apart at any moment. It would physically hold together long enough-he was sure of that, but the controls in the bridge were already approaching useless. The main display was full of static. He could barely make out the planet, let alone the location he was aiming for.

He needed a better vantage point if he was going to pull this off.

That he was effectively riding in a giant metal coffin was an additional thought he tried to suppress.

The ship could fly itself for a short time. He had patched the navicomp into what remained of targeting computers, leaving him reasonably certain that it could point and thrust effectively while his hands were off the controls. He didn’t want to leave it long, though, so he ran for the exit and headed upward as fast as he could, taking turbolift shafts and passages cur by the bounty hunter wherever he could. He ignored bodies, personal effects, fires-everything. Where doors or bulkheads lay in his path, he telekinetically ripped them aside and kept running.

The ship lurched beneath him as he entered the upper decks. That, he presumed, was the result of the primary forward laser cannon being ripped away by the rising atmospheric friction. Irs center of gravity perturbed, the ship began to sway from side to side. He tried not to imagine superheated air boiling up through the infrastructure from the hole left behind. He would be exposed to the same soon enough.

He reached the freshwater tanks and began moving horizontally, toward the rear rather than forward. When he reached the surgery suite-even more of a bloody mess than it had been before-he headed upward again, to where the short-range communications array protruded from a bulge on the frigate’s upper fore section.

He could hear the air rushing past as he approached the outer hull. It sounded like a mad giant screaming.

The ship lurched again, but less noisily this rime. The rupture was more distant-probably the static discharge vanes on the aft section, he decided. That would rob the ship of even more stability.

Even as he thought that, the Salvation began slewing from side to side.

“Hang in there, ” he told the ship. “I’m coming. “

He found a maintenance ladder leading to an air lock and leapt up it in two bounds, blowing the inner hatch as he came. He could feel a wild drumming from the far side of the outer door. The ship was moving so fast now that unexposed flesh wouldn’t last a microsecond. He would have to rely on a Force shield to keep him safe. A single lapse in concentration would be the end of him.

He took a second to compose himself.

For Juno.

Then he raised a hand and telekinetically burst through the outer hatch.

Instantly the world was fire. The air around the ship consisted of a blinding plasma, hotter than any ordinary flame. He forced his way into it, bracing himself against metal rungs that had turned instantly red on exposure to the outside. His eyes narrowed to slits in order to make out even the nearest outline. He could barely see the fingers in front of his face.

He didn’t need to see. The Force guided him, move by move, out onto the hull, where he braced himself with his back to the short-range array and turned to face forward. Like Kota, he would see without eyes.

A trembling shape up and to his left chose that moment to give way, showering molten fragments all along the spine of the ship. The primary array was no great loss: he couldn’t have heard anyone anyway over the racket in his ears. But the forward turbolasers and primary sensor unit, the next two chunks to go, were more of a concern. The ship was seriously unbalanced now. It shuddered underfoot, pulling wildly in different directions. If he was going to prevent it slipping into an uncontrollable rumble or rearing apart, he had to act quickly and decisively.

This was where it got difficult. He needed to maintain the Force shield against the sort of hear he might find in the outer layers of a star. He also had to keep in mind the target ahead-a target he couldn’t see through the plasma, but had to hit square-on or else the planetary shield generators wouldn’t fail. No matter what happened, he had to fly straight.

Starkiller took a deep breath. The cool trapped air behind the shield would last long enough, he hoped. He had been too worried about frying to consider suffocating to death.

He raised his hands and spread his fingers wide. His eyes closed tightly against the fiery brightness of the plasma. With each bucking and shaking of the ship beneath him, he encouraged himself to ride with it instead of fighting it. He was part of the ship, not a passenger. He was the ship, not a reckless pilot guiding it to destruction.

In the same way that he could feel his fingers and roes, his mind seeped outward into the metal and plastoid of the frigate, until every joint and weld, every porthole and deck became part of his sense of being. There was no line anymore between Starkiller and the Salvation. They were one and the same being, from the perspective of the Force.

He raised his right arm, and the ship followed the movement, listing slowly and heavily to starboard. Some of the headlong shuddering faded, as though it were grateful to have someone at the helm again. Even the wind’s shrieking seemed to ebb.

Something tore away at aft of the ship, and he bent his knees slightly to absorb the shock.

The Salvation steadied, found a new center of gravity, and roared on.

Confident that his vast metal charge was now under control, he cast his mind outward. He was shocked by how far he had fallen. The Salvation must have punctured the planetory shield itself some time ago, and he simply hadn’t noticed in all the turbulence. Now the cloud cover was less than a hundred meters below and coming up quickly. Behind the Salvation, a long fiery wake stretched across the sky, trailed by starfighters, and, farther back, capital ships on both sides, coming through the hole in the shield. The generators below would soon repair the hole, if he didn’t guide his hurtling missile correctly, leaving the Rebel ships on the inside trapped, with him.

Assuming he survived…

For Juno.

The frigate slammed into the clouds with a rearing sound. At that speed, individual droplets of water hit like thermal detonators. The Salvation’s own shields were holding, barely, but even so it lost still more of its mass to the ongoing battering. Several lower decks peeled back and were swept away, including the bridge. Most of the short-range array was gone, leaving him with just the base to hold him steady. He clenched his hands into fists and willed the ship to keep going.

Something succumbed to the plasma with a flash. A bright spark tumbled in his wake-the secondary reactor he had spent so much energy saving from the giant droid. He ignored it. The bottom of the cloud layer was approaching, and with it would come his first clear glimpse of the shield generators.

The air became still and relatively quiet when the Salvation punched through the clouds. The extra friction had slowed the frigate somewhat, making it a more manageable beast. Starkiller opened his eyes and discovered that he could see over the bulge of the forward decks to his destination. Perhaps some of the hull had been ripped away there, too.

The cloning facility lay spread out ahead of him. Had he wanted to, he could have hit it dead-center and wiped it off the face of Kamino. And had Juno not been inside, he would have been tempted. He felt no sentimental attachment to the place of his rebirth, and if there was any chance of raking out Darth Vader with it, all the better.

His sole target, however, was the shield generator buildings, and at last he saw them, as clear as they had seemed from the bridge, directly ahead.

Carefully, wary of putting too much strain on an already overtaxed chassis, he nudged the Salvations nose down. If he came in low and hit the ocean first, he could concentrate the damage to one location. If he overreached by so much as a degree, he might miss the ocean completely and scrape a long, fiery line right through the heart of the facility.

The Salvation resisted. He pushed harder. The nose descended and held there for ten seconds, strain echoing all through the ship. It wasn’t made for anything like this. Nothing larger than a starfighter was. Neither was he.

With a bone-jarring crack, the spine connecting fore and aft sections of the frigate snapped clean through. Starkiller reached out with the Force, trying desperately to keep the two pieces together, but nothing could be done. They were already moving on slightly different trajectories. Air and debris sprayed from the great wound that separated them, providing entirely unpredictable thrust.

Groaning, juddering, the fore section began to lift again. Starkiller didn’t fight it. With so much mass already stripped from it, the damage it would do when it hit was negligible. The rear was the priority. The heavy engines and main reactor continued powering forward on the trajectory it had originally been following. Was that the right trajectory or not? Starkiller anxiously studied its fall, projecting it forward to the best of his senses.

It looked good. He felt positive about it. Keeping an eye on the stubby rear section as it passed under him, he braced himself for impact. Barely a minute remained now. If he survived the crash, he would soon know whether he was right or not.

Ahead, a series of cloning towers loomed, standing as upright and tall as wroshyr trees on Kashyyyk. The fore section he stood upon was going to come down among them, doing a considerable amount of damage in the process. Starkiller didn’t mind. Until their memories were activated, clones weren’t truly alive; they were little more than meat in suspended animation. And the technicians attending them were servants of the Empire, and therefore viable targets. Some of them, perhaps, were responsible for his birth, if clone he truly was, and for their complicity in Vader’s twisted plans. He smiled as his fiery steed descended toward them, imagining them fleeing in the face of the meteor as it grew large in the sky.

He could actually see tiny long-necked figures running through the complex, white-armored stormtroopers resolutely standing at their stations, and a black-robed figure looming high above them all, watching him approach.

Vader.

Below and slightly ahead, the engines struck the surface of the sea, sending a wave of superheated steam radiating outward along the wave tops.

Starkiller couldn’t take his eyes off his former Master. He was right in his path, and not even moving! For a moment Starkiller couldn’t understand why-until, next to Vader, bound in shackles and so small he had barely noticed her, he saw—

Juno.

A huge eruption heralded the impact of the engines into the side of the shield generators. The sky and sea convulsed. A shock wave spread through the facility, making the cloning towers sway. The fore section of the Salvation rolled to starboard, but not by enough to miss the cloning towers. Its terminus was fixed.

Just seconds remained before the Salvation’s fore section hit Kamino. The facility was in close focus ahead of him, and he imagined he could see Juno’s eyes widening on seeing him, haloed with his Force shield on top of her precious ship. Did she know it was him, or did she wonder at this strange apparition? Did she imagine that he was her death coming at last, from the skies instead of Darth Vader’s hand?

Starkiller closed his eyes. He didn’t have time to wonder what was going through her mind. He had to think of something fast, or Juno was going to die.

There was only one thing he could do, and although he knew he wasn’t likely to survive, he didn’t hesitate. What was death when the love of his former life was at stake? Besides, anything was possible. Dying, as he had thought once before, always seemed to bring out the best in him.

With his mind and all the power of the Force, Starkiller embraced what remained of the frigate beneath him-and blew it into a billion pieces.

Juno was hypnotized by the fiery blaze in the sky. Ever since it had broached the cloud cover, two things had become clear. It was a ship, a big ship, and it was going to hit the facility. The roar it made vied with thunder for loudest sound in the sky. Lightning scattered from the disturbed clouds in its wake.

Then the falling ship had split in two, with one half powering down at a steeper angle, and the other continuing onward. Only then had she realized that the second one was coming right for her.

“Was this part of your plan?” she asked Vader, who still stood, unmoving, beside her.

He didn’t respond. Neither did he make any move toward the ramp that might take him to safety. Maybe, she thought, he had other means of protecting himself, means that neither she nor the stormtroopers possessed. She could see that they were getting nervous, too. The fiery balls grew brighter and brighter until they were almost too painful to look at. She refused to avert her eyes.