Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II (30 page)

By the time he had reached the summit of that rower, the stormtroopers were in utter disarray, and he hadn’t used his lightsabers once.

Satisfied, he entered a narrow junction between that cloning tower and the one above it. There he met his first real opposition. Camouflaged troopers guarded a bottleneck between the towers. On seeing him, they opened fire immediately. He shocked their armor back into opacity and quickly dealt with them, but the damage had been done. Troopers above and below the junction knew he was there, and they converged on his location en masse.

He fought his way into the second tower against a steady rain of blasterfire, while at the same time defending his back. He buckled lofty platforms, ripping stormtroopers to their deaths far below. He used cloning rubes as flying bombs, turning the floor underfoot slick with spilled amniotic fluids. He peeled plates from the walls and sent them flying into clutches of stormtroopers too rime-consuming to confront head-on. Ruination surrounded him.

Wore death, he thought. Even when he tried, the curse of Darth Vader’s training lay heavily upon him. Was this the way it would always be? Would he never shake off that fatal legacy-or was there another way to resist that he hadn’t found yet?

Great mastery of the Force had to lead to more than just the increased capacity for violence-or else every Jedi would be a Sith, and the galactic civil war would never have happened.

Again he thought of the first time the original Starkiller had faced his Master in a duel. If Vader had been a Jedi, what kind of Jedi had he been? A hero or a failure? Starkiller had a hard time believing that such great evil could have come out of indifference or inability-but at the same time he could barely credit that someone with such natural talent could have gone unnoticed, as his own had nor. Perhaps the young Darth Vader had been kept secret, too. Perhaps the mask was a matter of habit rather than necessity.

Starkiller reached the top of the second tower unscathed. An open turbolift awaited him there. He faced it for a moment, nor knowing where it would rake him but sensing it was somewhere he had to go. Whatever awaited him at the other end, he needed to face it.

He supposed his mother had felt this way on Kashyyyk, while fending off the Trandoshan slavers who threatened her family. She, too, had had no choice, but still she had fought-for something greater than her own survival, for love. Her legacy was a powerful one, and Darth Vader had never entirely managed to expunge it from the boy who would be his apprentice. Or even a clone of that boy.

He stepped into the turbolift. The doors closed, and he was taken upward. He readied himself for what was to come both physically, with lightsabers raised and ready, and emotionally, inasmuch as that was possible.

The cab slowed, stopped, and the doors slid open.

The space beyond was gloomy and vast. Starkiller emerged slowly from the lift, keeping all his senses peeled. Darth Vader was close, very close. In the shadows above he made out the faint outlines of platforms much like the ones in the cloning towers below. Beyond them, faint light gleamed on curved glass tubes, but he could not make out what lay within.

The skin of his arms prickled. Something was very close, very close indeed.

“Whatever you seek, only inside you will find. “

The words of the wise little creature he had met on Dagobah reassured him, oddly.

“A part of yourself, perhaps? “

The sound of another lightsaber echoed off the metal and glass surfaces around him.

“You have returned. “

Starkiller looked around. He couldn’t pinpoint the origin of his former Master’s voice.

“As you see, ” he said, moving slowly forward in a confident but wary stance.

“It was only a matter of time. “

“Where is Juno?” he asked. The last he had seen of her, she had been on the roof of the spire. She could have been moved anywhere since then.

A dark figure lunged at him from the shadows. Starkiller blocked a powerful slash to his head, and retaliated with a double sweep to Darth Vader’s legs. The Dark Lord leapt upward, out of reach of his weapons, and Starkiller followed.

When he landed on the first platform, Darth Vader was nowhere to be seen.

Something moved to his right. He spun to face it, lightsabers upraised.

A slender form stepped our of the shadows.

“I knew you’d come, ” said Juno, smiling. “At last, we are together again. “

Almost, he lowered his weapons. It was her. She held out her arms to embrace him. He longed to run to her. But an instinct told him something was wrong.

A flash of memory-a memory of a vision-came to him. He had seen a vision of Juno on the bridge of the Salvation, when the bounty hunter had captured her. Everything about that vision had come true, right down to the last detail. PROXY had been taken out, along with her canid second in command. She herself had been shot in the shoulder.

This Juno was uninjured.

“Stay back, ” he said, tightening his defenses.

Juno’s smile faded. Her arms came down. When she moved, she did so with a speed that wasn’t human, reaching behind her back with both hands to produce two Q2 hold-out blasters. With blank-faced, depersonalized lethality, she came for him, firing both blasters at once.

Starkiller deflected the shots right back at her, and she staggered backward with a cry. Then he was on her, bisecting her abdomen with his left lightsaber and taking her head off at the neck with his right.

As the body fell in pieces to the metal floor, showering sparks, Starkiller stood over her, breathing heavily.

The illusion died, revealing the wreckage of a PROXY droid at his feet.

“It’s a lot easier to fight the Empire when it’s faceless, ” he heard her say from the past, “when the people whose lives are ending are hidden behind stormtrooper helmets or durasteel hulls. But when they’re people we knew, people like we used to be… “

He spun, catching the faintest echo of an in-drawn, artificial breath from behind him, and caught Darth Vader’s lightsaber on the downstroke. They stood that way, locked blade-to-blade, for a moment, and then Starkiller pushed the Dark Lord back. He swept one lightsaber on a rising arc that would have taken off Darth Vader’s left arm while the other he flicked sideways, hoping to catch his opponent in the chest unit.

Vader blocked both blows, then leapt a second time, the next platform up.

“How much harder is it going to get?”

Starkiller scowled.

“Are you having second thoughts?” he had asked Juno that same day-the day after he had seen the vision of his father on Kashyyyk. Her answer had been immediate: No. But he had sensed an uneasiness within her, just as his former Master had sensed uneasiness within him shortly afterward. Their loyalties were being tested. Principles, too. Such testing was never easy.

Darth Vader was playing a very obvious game now. Starkiller could see it, and he would not be deflected from his course.

He jumped to the second level, and there came face-to-face with Bail Organa, then Kota, then Mon Mothma, then Garm Bel Iblis. When all the leaders of the Rebel Alliance lay dead at his feet, their droid bodies exposed beneath treacherous holograms, Darth

Vader attacked again. His blows were swift and economical, and the threat no less than it had ever been, but Starkiller sensed more was to come. Darth Vader would kill him, yes, without hesitation, but he would rather turn him first.

On the fourth level, he came face-to-face with his own father, and struck him down without hesitation. Dreams and memories had no power over him anymore.

He spun to face the attack he had come to expect from the real Darth Vader, full of confidence and surety. The Dark Lord fell back under his blows, and this time, when he leapt for safety, Starkiller telekinetically pulled him back down. His former Master sprawled before him, lightsaber raised defensively. He slashed the hand holding it away, and then plunged his second lightsaber deep into his chest.

With a gasping, wheezing moan, Darth Vader fell back and dissolved into another PROXY droid.

Unsurprised, Starkiller stepped back and looked around for the real Darth Vader. He could see or hear nothing, but his senses tingled with an acute and insistent message.

Above him.

He somersaulted upward and landed in a crouch, ready for anything.

“You are confident, ” said Darth Vader. “That will be your downfall. “

The Dark Lord was standing out of Starkiller’s reach. Instead of attacking, he gestured at the rows of cloning tanks beside him. Lights flickered on inside them, revealing row after row of identical forms. Clad in stripped-down version of his former training suit and attached via tubes to complex feeders and breathers, they hung weightlessly in transparent fluid, twitching occasionally in their sleep.

Starkiller felt a shock of recognition jolt through him. These weren’t stormtroopers. They were him. Incomplete, and oddly-warped from true, but definitely him.

Vader gestured again, and the clones’ eyes opened.

In them Starkiller saw nothing but hatred, anger, confusion, betrayal, madness, and loss.

Their glass cages shattered. Amniotic fluid boiled away. They pulled free from their cables and tubes and, with motions faltering at first but quickly growing stronger, climbed free from the wreckage.

Starkiller stood his ground as a circle of failed clones formed around him.

Behind them Darth Vader nodded once.

The clones came forward in one overwhelming rush.

Juno hung painfully in her shackles, doing her best to follow the fight unfolding around her although she could see little of it directly. Sometimes she closed her eyes to let her ears do the work. There was a music to the explosions and weapons fire that played our in waves and bursts all around her. Thus far none of it had impacted directly upon her, but she could feel it coming steadily closer.

After the crash and disintegration of the Salvation, a dome had closed above her, sealing this section of the facility behind a secure bubble. Outside, Rebel and Imperial forces had raged hard. Dogfights and furious standoffs between capital vessels lit up the cloudy skies of Kamino, with the occasional capitulation shining like a sun over the battlefield, albeit briefly. It was hard to determine who was winning, partly because of the clouds. She didn’t know how many ships were engaging in orbit, or how many the Emperor and Alliance commanders were holding in reserve. What she saw could be the entirety of the conflict, or the merest hint of it.

At one point, through the dome, she thought she saw the unique outline of the Rogue Shadow behind the cloak protecting it from enemy gunners’ eyes. Her heart leapt. If it was here, then Kota was here, too. Then it disappeared behind a building, just outside the bubble protecting her from the rain. Moments later, she heard the sounds of a concentrated assault on the bubbles walls. Nor long after that, gunfire came from below, within the bubble itself, and she knew the fight was definitely coming her way.

She strained against the shackles, wishing she had some way, any way at all, to join the battle. Her four guards were growing restless, probably feeling the same.

TIE fighters circled the interior of the bubble with engines screaming. The fight had stalled while Kota’s ground forces faced off against the aerial defenses, but before long the balance shifted again. Someone got a hangar door open, allowing Rebel forces access at last. Dogfights played out around her, and for the first time it occurred to her that, if the facility as a whole was the target, then she herself might not be safe.

That was a sobering thought. What if her presence was unknown-or worse, completely irrelevant-to the attacking forces? She would be collateral damage if the cloning towers fell, and there was nothing she could do about it.

Starkiller was her only hope. If anyone could get to her in time, it would be him.

Rebel starfighters buzzed the towers, but none of them attacked, yet. They were busy with the TIEs and the cannon emplacements. A series of large explosions suggested that Kota’s new squad was attacking the dome itself, hoping to expose the facility to the superior firepower outside. When they managed that, she supposed, that would spell the end for her. Not even Starkiller could fend off a concentrated assault from above.

“I don’t know about you, ” she told her guards, “but I feel like a sitting mynock out here. “

They didn’t respond, but again she could tell they sympathized.

When warning klaxons began to sound in the spire below her, their uneasiness redoubled.

“There goes your exit strategy, ” she said. “Bet you wish you’d slept in this morning. “

Faintly through their helmets she heard the sound of the stormtroopers talking to one another, over their comlinks. Maybe discussing the value in shooting her and making a run for it, although she doubted any of them would risk incurring Vader’s wrath. Even with such Rebel firepower arrayed against them, they would regard the Dark Lord as the greatest threat. She remembered feeling that way, once.

Something exploded in the spire, making it sway underfoot.

Juno felt breathless, as though the air were growing thinner.

It was him. She was certain of it. The stormtroopers knew it, too. They tightened around her, drawing a false sense of security from closer proximity to one another. They looked at her and glanced quickly away, looking more nervous than ever, and she realized only then that she was smiling.

He was so close to her.

The spire shook again, more violently than before. She wondered where Darth Vader was and what he was doing. Surely he wouldn’t have brought her to Kamino only to leave her dangling in the trap-unless it had sprung already, and she was no longer needed. But in that case, why didn’t the troopers just shoot her and be done with it? She didn’t understand the finer details of Vader’s plan. That was her only uncertainty.

Seven powerful explosions filled the interior of the dome. With a piercing splitting sound, the dome itself began to shatter. Cracks spread across the transparisteel, fissures dozens of meters long that joined one another and branched to create entirely new ones. They reached up from its base and converged on the center, high above. Where they met, gently, in slow motion, the first pieces began to fall. Each was larger than a starfighter, and easily as heavy. They turned as they fell, rumbling with ponderous grace.