Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II (22 page)

More questions flooded in.

He’s hack-but how? And how did the bounty hunter know about him before I did?

The seconds ticked again. Her heart restarted. There was suddenly no more time to think. The man she had loved began to run toward them, his face a mask of fierce determination, and she knew that he had seen her, too.

She opened her mouth to shout a warning, but the bounty hunter shoved her through a doorway, out of view. She jerked to a halt at the end of the chain and went down to her knees, fighting waves of agony. Behind her, she heard Starkiller call her name, but his voice was drowned out on the second syllable by a massive explosion.

Smoke and debris rushed out of the corridor and filled the room. Even out of the blast’s direct line she was still stung by the shrapnel. She covered her mouth and closed her eyes an instant too late. Blinking, coughing, deafened, she fought waves of unconsciousness as the bounty hunter dragged her back to her feet and pulled her into the corridor.

Through streaming eyes she saw a huge hole where Starkiller had been standing. Drips of molten metal rained down on the cavernous space below.

“If you killed him…” she started to say.

“You’re as foolish as he is, ” the bounty hunter said with a sneer in his voice. He hurried along the corridor, pulling her after him. The tugs on the chain were sharp and insistent. Between the pain and trying to maintain her footing on the uneven floor, she had no inclination to talk anymore. Wherever he was raking her, he was in a much greater hurry than he had been before.

They left the burned corridor and entered an area that was relatively undamaged. Juno thought she recognized the location, and that was confirmed when she and her captor reached a large double door, lying open in their path. The cargo bay. It was empty apart from a dozen crates and two dead Rebel crew members. Dim red light flickered and played across the vast space. Again she worried about the reactor’s functionality.

The bounty hunter tugged her inside and closed the doors behind them. As they slid shut, she caught something moving in the shadows above, but couldn’t make our what it was. Nor the cargo arm, that was for sure. It was much too big.

Behind them came the sound of destruction once again. The bounty hunter hurried to the marching double door on the far side of the bay, dragging her behind him like a recalcitrant child.

“You have no idea who you’re dealing with, ” she said, and received only silence in reply.

The doors began to open ahead of them, revealing the orange-yellow vista of the Itani Nebula. The fight continued for control of space around the Salvation. Energy weapons flashed and flared. Starlight gleamed off wreckage and combative starships alike.

On the other side of the force field preventing them from being sucked into space was a transport the likes of which Juno had never seen before. Too compact to be a freighter but too stocky to be a starfighter, it was much taller than it was either wide or deep, giving it a slightly long-trunked appearance. It had the same functional and highly customized look as the bounty hunter beside her, and Juno had no doubt at all that it belonged to him.

“Shame it’s the other side of the force field, ” she said. “Now what are you going to do?”

As the sound of rending metal behind them grew louder, the bounty hunter punched another button on his right gauntlet and turned to face the opening.

Figuring that he was never going to be this distracted again, Juno grabbed the chain with both hands and pulled it our of his grasp. Simultaneously, she rocked back on one leg and kicked him in the back with all her strength, propelling him toward the force field. While he was off balance, she ran for the other doors, hoping to get her hand on the activation switch before he recovered.

What came next happened almost too quickly for her to take in.

First, the doors ahead of her burst open, punched by unimaginable force from the far side.

Then the force field collapsed, sending everything in the room rushing toward the endless vacuum of space-including her and the dark figure standing where the inner doors had once been.

She lost her footing and jarred her shoulder. Dazed by pain, she would have tumbled helplessly out of the cargo bay but for a cable that whipped about her waist and dragged her back toward the bounty hunter.

At the same time, a stubby missile protruding from the top of his jetpack launched itself our into the void. Halfway between the cargo bay and the hanging ship outside, its tip unfolded into a grappling hook that an instant later found solid purchase on the side of the ship.

The cable binding Juno brought her within arm’s reach of the bounty hunter. Unaffected by the rapidly thinning atmosphere, he slapped a breather across her face and bodily threw himself out of the cargo bay, taking her with him.

She kicked and struggled but his grip and the cable combined were impossible to resist. Her cry of anger and frustration fogged up the mask of the breather, so for a moment she couldn’t tell what was happening behind her. They jerked to a halt, and she assumed at first that it was because they had reached the bounty hunter’s ship, but a rapid volley of blasterfire back the way they had come, followed by the straining sound of the grapnel retractor, revealed that something very different was happening.

She held her breath, cursing the foggy visor and willing it to clear more quickly. By the fiery light of the nebula she glimpsed the Salvation looming ahead of her, sparkling jets indicating where breaches were venting air into the vacuum. Flames burned on the other side of several transparisteel windows. Bodies tumbled like dead stars, too many to count.

Clinging to the edge of the cargo bay door, withstanding the emptiness of space, the doors that were trying to close on him, and the shots fired his way by the bounty hunter, was Starkiller. One hand reached for her, fingers straining as though clutching at something invisible. Through the Force, he was trying to bring her back.

The whining of the grapnel reached a higher pitch. It was only a matter of time before something snapped-either the cable or the motor trying to reel it in. Juno had no doubt of that. Starkiller had shifted whole Star Destroyers. It would be nothing for him to overpower a single motor.

The bounty hunter reached around her to push yet another button on his gauntlet. For a second it had no obvious effect. Then, in the cargo bay behind Starkiller, something vast and angular moved.

Sparks flared. Starkiller turned with lightsabers swinging. The force pulling her back to safety faltered-and then died entirely as the cargo bay doors slammed shut between her and him.

Juno could hold her breath no longer. She raged against her captor, calling him things she hadn’t called anyone since her earliest days in the Academy. She kicked and flailed against his chest, not caring how much it hurt her shoulder. The pain she felt ran deeper than flesh. Her entire being was in agony.

He was alive. She had seen him. A thousand questions bar-raged her-questions she didn’t want to ask, but would have to address later, because they weren’t ever going to go away.

How did be survive?

Where bad be been for the last year?

Why bad be stayed away when the Rebel Alliance bad needed him so badly?

Why didn’t he tell her?

For now it was terrible enough that she was being taken from him, and there was nothing she or anyone could do to stop it.

Juno.

Her proximity filled his mind, making it hard to deal with anything or anyone else around him. After leaving Kota, his comlink had squawked and blared about distant events and conflicts, so he had switched it off in irritation. He didn’t care what happened outside the ship, only what happened to Juno inside it. When stormtroopers had crossed his path, he had blasted them out of the way with disinterested ferocity. Nothing could slow him. Nothing would stop him. The only thing keeping him and Juno apart was distance, and that could easily be overcome.

” Whatever you have seen, follow it you must. “

“To the ends of the galaxy if I have to. “

But the man in his vision was wilier than Starkiller had anticipated. The trail he had been following led nowhere, and was seeded with numerous traps and troopers designed to slow him down. If Juno was being taken to the cargo bay on level seven, then she was going by a very different route.

He forced himself to concentrate, seeking her through the many walls and decks of the Salvation, and finally sensed her presence two decks up. They were connected through the Force, by invisible lines that might fade but would never entirely break. Now he saw them clearly, it was just a matter of following them. Forgoing stairwells or lifts, he simply blasted his way through the ship’s infrastructure. Metal and plastoid could be repaired. Wires and hydraulics could be rerouted. Human life-Juno’s life-could not be replaced.

And he had seen her, briefly, face white and spattered with her own blood, eyes wide and staring at him in utter disbelief. What was going through her mind he could not begin to guess. Joy? Confusion? Relief? Doubt? They had only locked stares for a moment before the man who had taken her captive pushed her out of sight. Then he had fired a missile at Starkiller’s feet that had blown a massive hole in the frigate. Starkiller had thrown up a Force shield at the last instant, but had still found himself four decks away when the blast dissipated. By the time he had retraced his steps, Juno was gone.

She was nearby, though, and it had taken him less than a minute to catch up, thinking hard all the way. If Juno was bait, why hadn’t the trap been sprung? Starkiller was still alive and unfettered, and so, presumably, was Juno. Where did this particular gambit end?

“I do not expect you to survive, ” the voice of his former Master said in his mind. “But should you succeed, you will be one step closer to your destiny. “

Starkiller could clearly remember the moment those words had been spoken. It seemed an eternity ago, while receiving orders to kill the mad Jedi droid maker, Kazdan Paratus. He had succeeded in that mission, but his destiny remained as elusive as ever.

What did Darth Vader want?

Sometimes it seemed that only Darth Vader could answer that question.

Starkiller reached the cargo bay doors. They were locked, but that didn’t slow him for longer than a second. Inert matter was no match for the Force, and therefore no obstacle to him. Had Juno not been on the other side, he would have vaporized it in an instant, sending scalding metal shrapnel flying all through the cargo bay.

She was facing him, being dragged backward by a loop of cable wrapped around her waist. The armored man blew out the cargo bay’s external force field, and the vacuum pulled them with the rushing atmosphere outward into space. Starkiller grabbed hold of the nearest solid object in order to stop himself from sliding out after them. There was a stocky ship hanging just outside the air lock, obviously waiting to scoop them up and rake them elsewhere. Juno’s captor fired a grappling hook toward it and began to reel him and his struggling prisoner aboard.

Starkiller braved the hurricane pouring past him and skidded to the very edge of the air lock. There he found purchase against the bulkhead and stretched one hand out toward them. Again, he could have wrenched them back into the frigate without great difficulty, were it nor for fear of hurting Juno in the process. If he pulled too hard, she might be crushed. Also, the man holding her was armed and unafraid to use his weapon. If he turned the weapon on her, she might be killed before Starkiller could prevent it.

Still he tried, straining against the cable winch and, when that proved too difficult, actually dragging the ship in toward the frigate. Why fight the winch when he could just as easily move the anchor it was attached to? The stocky ship rocked and swayed and began to creep toward him, Juno and her captor with it…

Then a shadow fell across him from behind. His concentration wavered. Something was moving toward him. Nor a stormtrooper, visible or otherwise. It came from above, and got bigger the more it came into view.

Dying wasn’t going to help Juno. He turned, lightsabers upraised to strike whatever it was. A droid of some kind, with multiple glowing photoreceptors and a vast, armored body that towered over him, balanced on eight thick legs.

He had seen it before, in his vision of Kamino. That knowledge didn’t help, however, as it raised its forelegs and tried to spear him with four powerful lasers. He jumped, and the orange beams followed him, leaving glowing lines in their wake. It was big but fast, and he barely stayed ahead of its deadly attack. Behind him, the cargo bay doors slammed shut and life support began pumping in air. It smelled scorched and acrid under the giant droid’s relentless assault.

Running wasn’t helping, either. It was only wasting time. Starkiller rook stock and decided to try another tactic.

He leapt into a corner and faced the droid with his lightsabers crossed. The convergent beams hit both blades and were reflected back at their source. The droid’s mirror finish bounced them right back at him, doubling the number of attacks he had to deal with. Instead of retreating, he changed the angle of his blades. The four laser beams reflected by him sliced down toward the ground, slicing arcs in the durasteel floor. Metallic smoke rose up around the droid in thick streamers. By the time it realized his intentions, it was too late.

Already straining under the droid’s weight, the floor sagged and gave way. The droid’s lasers switched off, entirely too late. The sharp tips of its eight legs scrabbled for purchase, leaving deep scratches in the floor, which only gave way further.

With a grinding of metal, the droid dropped our of sight and crashed through the levels below, one after the other.

Almost before it had vanished from sight, Starkiller was moving. The external door was shut, but he forced it open and braved the renewed storm of air to see outside. Juno and her captor were no longer visible. The stocky ship’s trio of engines was firing, pulling it away from the frigate. Starkiller reached out to catch it, too late. The craft barely wobbled as it receded into the distance, and vanished into hyperspace.