Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II (28 page)

The first came down hard and fast, striking a well-defended portion of the facility outside the dome immediately surrounding her. There was a bright flash of light. The boom followed later, along with a rising sensation that she assumed was the shock wave rolling through the flexible foundations of the ocean-bound facility. She could see the cloning towers swaying from side to side. A vast column of flash-boiled steam and wreckage rose up into the sky. Hot, damp air rushed outward in its wake.

Still the other fragment of the ship came toward her. Seconds remained before it hit-not long enough to think anything coherent, barely time even to observe what was happening. The stricken ship was glowing red, with the last shreds of plasma still clinging to it like flames. Its class was almost unrecognizable, but she made out stumps that might once have been a communications array on the upper port side. That made it a Nebulon-B frigate, one of many EF76s in the service of either the Empire or the Rebel Alliance. It could have been any one of them.

So why, then, did she feel a cold stab of certainty in her gut that this was none other than the Salvation?

Her own ship was going to kill her.

The irony wasn’t lost on her.

At the last instant she made out a tiny human figure standing on the upper hull. The flames and rushing wind swept past him, as though he were impervious to their touch. His arms were upraised in defiance and his head was tipped back so she couldn’t see his face. But she knew. Just as she knew that it was the Salvation, she knew it was him.

He would come for her in flames and smoke, wreaking destruction all around.

Despite the apparent certainty of her death, she smiled. Either he would save her-in which case there was nothing to worry about-or he wouldn’t, and she didn’t want to live anyway.

The ship was almost upon them when the figure brought his hands down in a fierce, pounding motion, and the last solid fragment of the Salivation exploded into fiery pieces.

She had to close her eyes. The conflagration was too intense, and the sound was that of worlds ending. The cloning tower kicked beneath her. She was momentarily afraid that she might be falling with it into the sea. But then she was rising again, and she understood that the structure had survived, somehow, and so had she.

Her eyelids flickered, braving the brightness that only slowly faded around her. A cloud of hot metallic fragments was spreading across the city. Dense splinters rained from it, hissing where they landed. Heavier fragments struck with more substantial thuds, near and far. None struck her. The rain ceased for a moment, and then returned, settling the cloud of dust still further. Of the Salvation, nothing at all remained.

Darth Vader lowered the hand he had risen to shield his helmet and took stock around him. Juno did the same. Fires blazed in the wreckage where the rear half of the Salvation had come down. Alarms sounded through the facility, loud enough even for Juno’s blast-numbed ears to hear them. Ash was settling on every horizontal surface and forming a thick, gray sludge.

Above, the clouds, already disturbed by the Salvation’s fiery passage, were being torn apart by a new outrage. Starfighters and capital ships powered down from orbit in large numbers, dodging and firing at one another as they went. Juno recognized more frigates, and dozens of Headhunter, Y-wing, and TIE fighters. There were bombers, cruisers, even Star Destroyers bringing up the rear. An all-out war was taking place above Kamino, between Imperial and Alliance forces, and it, too, was growing ever nearer.

“I ask again, is this part of the plan?”

Instead of answering, Vader stalked off, waving for the stormtroopers to remain where they were. When he was gone, they stationed themselves several paces away from her and carefully-watched the perimeter around them. High above their heads, the secure facility’s dome began to close.

Juno coughed and wished she could wipe her eyes clear of ash. Her ship had blown itself practically to atoms; she had seen it happen, right in front of her. There was no chance at all that Starkiller could have survived. He had been riding right on top of it.

But she knew as well as they did that this wasn’t the end. He had come back from the dead sufficient times now to make anything possible. Anything at all.

The giant reptilian biped loomed over him, roaring in its own language. He didn’t understand what it was saying. Fear made it almost impossible to think. All Starkiller wanted to do was run.

A bright yellow blade slashed across his vision, and the lizard fell backward, dead. The woman who had wielded the blade rushed to him and enfolded him in her cloak. He tried not to cry, but the fear was too great.

“Take him, Mallie-take him somewhere safe!” His father’s voice cut through the screams and shouts that filled the village. “I’ll hold them off. “

“Don’t be a fool, Kento. You can’t do it alone. “

“I can slow them down while you get into the forest. Go!”

“No. ” Mallie stood up and faced her husband. “You know Kkowir better than I do. “

“All you have to do is get to the Kerritamba, or if they’re under attack, try the Myyydril caverns as a last resort- “

“But there’s the Sayormi to think about, and the dead area. You’re the expert, Kento. If anyone goes, it should be you. “

The boy looked up at his parents in anxious confusion, unable to understand what the argument was about. Weren’t they both coming? Wasn’t it time to run now?

Explosions sent trees tumbling nearby. One of them crushed the hut he had known all his conscious life. There his mother had told him stories of the great Wookiee warriors and showed him how to braid his own friendship band. There his father had thrown him up to the ceiling and held him floating aloft, spinning as though sitting on air. The crushing of the walls sent splinters flying, and he screamed at the thought of everything he loved disappearing in an instant.

More of the big lizards came running out of the trees, firing at the villagers and setting their hair on fire.

His father went to run forward, his blue lightsaber raised, but his mother caught his arm.

“Kento, ” she said in a soft but firm voice, “you know I’m right. “

His anguish was plain to see, even for a very young child. When he sagged, something broke inside him.

” You always are, my love. “

They embraced, quickly, and then she ran toward the lizards, shouting a battle cry. Her son cried out, too, wondering where she was going, but his father scooped him up and began running for the trees.

“Don’t worry, son, ” he said as they escaped. “I’ll keep you safe. And when she comes back, we’ll make a new home. Somewhere safe and special, I promise you. “

Behind them, the lizards cried out in surprise and pain. He tried to look, but his father held on too tightly. And when the trees enfolded them, the sound of his mother fighting became muffled and indistinct. Slowly, over the course of many years, it faded into silence.

Starkiller’s eyes jerked open. Where was he? All was dark around him. He smelled smoke and his body felt as though it had been hit by an asteroid. The last thing he remembered was tightening the Force shield around him and destroying the Salvation so it wouldn’t kill Juno. He was somewhere on Kamino, then. But his mind remained full of strange images and feelings that he had never experienced before.

Kashyyyk. Trandoshan slavers. His parents… ?

He tried to shrug them off. They had been dead for a long time, and the living mattered more. But he was struck by this brief glimpse of the woman who had given birth to him. Tall, with short brown hair and a physique honed by years of training, she, too, had been a Jedi Knight, like her husband. She had been a warrior, and yet she had loved her son as well. She had loved him and most likely died defending him and the Wookiees they had befriended. And until this moment, he had never known she existed or that his father had made a promise he couldn’t keep.

Where had the memory come from?

It didn’t matter. She didn’t matter. Starkiller had to get moving, or the promise he had made to himself would also go unfulfilled.

For Juno.

He reached for his comlink, but it was gone. Lost during the fall, presumably. He sat up and felt around him, seeking the dimensions of the space he found himself in. It was a deep, stone pit-and for a terrible moment he feared that he was back in the training rooms Vader had confined him to ever since his reawakening. But then he found a doorway, not far from the pile of rubble he had brought down with him. Somewhere far above, he was sure, was the hole he had made when he had hit the facility. There was no way of telling now just how far he had tumbled, burning and smoking like a meteor.

He wrenched the door off its hinges. Outside was marginally lighter. A corridor led off into the distance. He loped along it, concentrating on faint sounds of fighting in the distance. Numerous varieties of weapons were in play, and several starfighters screamed overhead. That meant the shields were safely down, and the Rebel forces were making their way into the facility. He allowed himself a small feeling of satisfaction, even though he knew the battle was far from won. The Imperials were well entrenched on Kamino. They wouldn’t go down without a fight.

The corridor led to a darkened command room. He flicked a switch and its blast shields opened, letting in the cool gray light of the outside world. Details assaulted him, too many at once. The first thing he needed to do was work out where he was. To his right were the cloning spires where he had seen Juno, now protected behind a clear, curved dome. They were too smoke-blackened to make out if she was still there. A thick column of steam rose up from the shield generators, forming a spreading mushroom cloud high above the facility. Fighters on both sides dodged and weaved around the cloud, while higher up capital ships vied for ascendancy.

Closer at hand, he made our flashpoints of engagement where Rebel forces were trying to penetrate the high-security dome around Darth Vader’s restricted area. They were coming under heavy fire from all directions. Troop carriers descended under close escort to provide reinforcements, but for every one that landed two were diverted or destroyed. Bombing runs softened up the Imperial defenses, which had both the advantage and disadvantage of being relatively fixed. TIE bombers returned the favor, attempting to blow the Rebels to pieces whenever they stopped moving too long. Cannon emplacements strafed any Rebel ships that came too close in their attempt to penetrate the dome, while AT-STs patrolled the perimeter, constantly vigilant.

Starkiller needed to get through the same defenses as the Rebels in order to save Juno. He scanned the controls in front of him, looking for maps or hidden routes that he could access. There were maintenance hatches spaced irregularly around the base of the dome, but he didn’t have the codes required to open them.

He didn’t let that bother him. There were alternatives to codes.

Picking the closest hangar hatch, he memorized the way there, activated his lightsabers, and left the control room.

The memory of Kashyyyk stayed with him as he fought his way through the Imperials, occasionally dodging the odd Rebel who thought he was on the Imperials’ side. He didn’t know the location of his birthplace, and knowing now that both his parents were Jedi made it even more difficult to guess. Their relationship would have been forbidden by the Jedi Council, and then endangered even further by Order 66 and the subsequent slaughter of all their kind. How they had stayed hidden was unknown. Somehow they had ended up on Kashyyyk, where an attack by Trandoshan slavers had forced the two of them to come out of hiding. It was this, probably, that had brought Darth Vader to the planet, in search of Starkiller’s surviving father.

The death of his mother was now his earliest memory. And was it really his? That, too, he had no way of knowing. If Vader was telling the truth, his true birthplace lay ahead, under the high security dome, and the memory of Kashyyyk belonged to another man.

He reached the maintenance hatch and cut his way through it. A stormtrooper armed with a flamethrower tried to roast him once he was inside, but a solid Force push threw him back into his squadmates, where his fuel tank exploded. Starkiller rook a moment to bring down the ceiling over the hatch, so no one could follow him, then crawled on hands and knees into the secure facility.

He kicked our the vent on the far end of the tunnel and dropped onto a walkway that followed the base of the dome. Inside the dome, the battle was even more difficult for the Rebels. They had no air support and only a handful of limited access points. Several TIE fighters patrolled from above, ready to rain fire on anyone unauthorized. The Rebels desperately needed a way to get their own fighters into play.

Starkiller ducked as shots from a weapon lanced out at him from the far side of the dome. Snipers. He ran along the walkway to his right in order to present a moving target, speeding up and slowing down to make getting a bead even more difficult. There was no sign of Darth Vader, and Starkiller was too far away to see if Juno was on top of the cloning spires.

Down among the Rebel fighters, though, he spotted a familiar white topknot. Kota was fighting his way toward a command center, accompanied by the members of his squad, but sniper fire was making their progress slow. Starkiller looked up and waited for the muzzle flashes. The snipers harrying Kota were situated in a tower not far away, within reach of the walkway he was following.

He ran faster and leapt when he was at the closest point to the tower. For a moment he was in free fall, and then he hit the side of the tower with lightsabers pointing forward. They arrested his downward slide just above an observation window, which he shattered with a quick Force push. Swinging himself down and through the window, he made his way to the nearest stairwell be-fore any of the snipers could turn their high-powered weapons inward.

He burst in the door on the uppermost level and found himself at the center of a web of concentrated blasterfire. Each of the snipers was armed with at least one nonspecialist weapon, and they had all abandoned their harrowing of Kota in order to deal with him. His lightsabers swung like propellers, reflecting every shot back to their source. The air filled with smoke and cries, until finally the last sniper fell, slumped over his weapon.