The Force Unleashed (32 page)

sky.

"Juno," he called into the comlink. "Juno, answer me. Von have to get the ship in

the air."

Kota's voice unexpectedly came in reply. "What's going on, boy?"

Can't you see it, he wanted to say, then realized who he was talking to. He

described the scene in as few words as he could, un able to tear his gaze away from

the sight of the disintegrating ship yards. Huge, molten chunks were tearing free

and tumbling either out into deep space or down into lower orbits while further

explosions continued to tear the facility apart. The scaffolding around the nearly

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completed Star Destroyer had bent and torn completely away, leaving the ship free to

power down into the atmosphere of Raxus Prime. Already it was visible as a distinct

triangle glowing orange around its leading edges and conning tower. It was coming

directly toward him.

It was aiming for him.

"Juno can't fly the ship at the moment," said Kota firmly, "and neither can PROXY.

We have to find another solution." "What's wrong with Juno?"

"Concentrate on what's important, boy. That Star Destroyer is coming down fast.

You'll never get clear in time. You need to pull it into the cannon."

The apprentice was temporarily lost for words when he realized what Kota was

suggesting.

Kota wanted him to move the Star Destroyer using nothing but the Force.

"You're insane," he gasped. "It's massive!" "What is mass?" Kota said. "It's all in

your mind, boy. You're a Jedi! Size means nothing to you!"

Kota's voice had changed. The surly, drunken slur was completely absent; in its

place was the durasteel bark of the seasoned combat veteran the apprentice had first

met.

"Can you hear me, boy? Reach out and grab that ship, or you'll die on this trash

heap!"

The Star Destroyer was growing visibly larger and hung like a burning, triangular

moon low in the sky of Raxus Prime.

You're a Jedi! Size means nothing to you!

He wasn't a Jedi but the message was the same. The Force didn't recognize big or

small, heavy or light, hard or easy. The living flows of the galaxy encompassed all

scales, from the very small to the extremely large. The Star Destroyer was part of

it, and so was he. The Force bound them as surely as gravity. He could make its

invisible muscles flex, if he dared.

Had his Master ever done anything like this} Had the Emperor? Had any Sith or Jedi

in the history of the galaxy?

He doubted anyone would ever know about his success or failure in the next few

minutes. "Be quick about it, boy!"

Fast or slow were also irrelevant to the Force, but the apprentice took Kota's

point. The sooner he started, the sooner it would be done.

Deactivating his lightsaber and attaching the hilt to his belt, he adopted the

opening stance of the Soresu form, with his right arm and fingers outstretched,

pointing at the Star Destroyer. His empty left hand he tucked in next to his heart.

With his legs braced firmly in the trash, he reached as deep as he had ever reached

into the Force, and then went farther still, feeling as though a mighty chasm had

opened up under him and his mind and will plunged down into it. The chasm filled.

His mind opened. The physical existence of the Star Destroyer slid painlessly

inside.

Nearly sixteen hundred meters long and capable of carrying a crew in excess of

thirty-seven thousand, the ship was a familiar design. Its engines and armament

weren't fully installed, but its Class One hyperdrive would have taken it anywhere

in the Empire at speed, there to deploy walkers, fighters, barges, and shuttle Armed

with a host of turbolaser and ion cannons, plus no less than ten tractor beams, it

could have blockaded an entire system on its own. The reinforced durasteel hull was

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solid enough to rip a gouge in Raxus Prime that might take centuries to fill.

Scavenger droids would have a field day when it came down. Wherever it went down . .

.

There is no wherever, he told himself. There is only where I tell it to.

Focus.

The tip of his right index finger and the Star Destroyer became as one in his mind.

Every nut and bolt and plate and wire of the massive machine was contained within

that tiny space. It wasn't hard to move an arm, a finger, a single human cell. He

could direct one barely without thinking, so why not the other, too? Instinct was

clearer on that point than the workings of his mind. Ignoring perspective, the two

were about the same size in his field of vision.

Except the Star Destroyer was growing larger with each passing second, and waves of

TIE fighters and TIE bombers were pouring forth from its brand-new hangar decks.

Laserfire cut huge super-hot channels through the atmosphere ahead of them.

The apprentice ignored it all. While the illusion held, he moved his hand a very

slight distance to his right. The sensation of containing a vast, million-ton

machine in the tip of one finger was deeply disorienting. He felt as though every

muscle fiber, nerve, and bone groaned along with the metal seams and joints of the

ship. What it felt, he felt, too, and even a small acceleration had a profound

effect on such a large scale. It resisted with all the momentum it possessed.

Hatches swang open; rivets popped; bulk heads twisted; pipes burst.

The Star Destroyer didn't appear to have moved much in the sky. It was still coming

in low on the horizon, aiming to pass over him and strafe him from above. He shifted

his hand a second time, but instead of changing its course he mistakenly gave it a

slight tumble. He needed to apply the Force the right way for this to work, taking

the growing forces of friction and the shifting of its center of gravity into

account. A spinning Star Destroyer would do more damage than one burying itself

nose-first into the cannon and its superstructure. Damage was good, when it came to

destroying the Emperor's handiwork, but too much damage could destroy him and

perhaps the Rogue Shadow as well under a deadly rain of molten shrapnel.

Bring it down in one piece, he told himself. Bring it down hard.

The ship growled and squealed in metal torment. He was getting the hang of it; he

could see how its course was slowly shifting. As wide across as his outstretched

hand now, it was hitting the atmosphere at a steeper angle than he had intended,

burning bright red and already gouting a trail of black smoke and sparkling debris.

He became aware of a sound communicated through his feet: a rumbling much deeper and

more sustained than the pounding of the cannon, which had fallen silent after the

firing of the third projectile. The Star Destroyer's incomplete frame was acting

like a giant tube, and the atmosphere was resonating inside. His whole body sang

with it.

More. The Star Destroyer was really picking up speed now. The thickening atmosphere

had a slight braking effect, but nothing could prevent the inevitable. It was going

to hit soon. A wild exodus of droids ran past him, fleeing the crash site. The TIE

fighters it had launched raced ahead of the chaotic atmospheric waves it generated.

He ignored them and concentrated on shifting ground zero as close to the cannon as

he could.

Sparks danced in front of his eyes. The edges of his vision faded to black. Light

and dark swirls spun around him, wraithlike. He felt momentarily faint and wondered

if it was possible to dissolve into the Force. He was a speck caught in the updraft

over a forest fire-yet somehow he had the audacity to try to command the fire to do

his will.

Who did he think he was?

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A sudden panic almost made him lose control. The Star Destroyer, now a burning,

shrieking meteor, filled his entire forward vision. The hull was peeling away in

fiery, golden strips, each one weighing hundreds of tons, exposing the darker

skeleton beneath. It looked like a death's-head, a ghastly mask not dissimilar to hi

Master's, but one molten like lava. This could well be the end of everything, he

thought distantly. Of him, of his plans, of his feelings for Juno, and of the boy

called Galen who had lost a father a long time ago and whose grief had already been

effectively erased

But his name had survived, and names had power. The apprentice clutched at it with

desperation, needing to regain control of the Star Destroyer lest it tear itself

apart and disperse the impact. He needed to find his focus again, to ignore the

feeling of dissolution eating at the edges of his self, and to tip the balance of

power back toward him.

Galen had stood up to Darth Vader as little more than a child Galen had wrested the

lightsaber from a Dark Lord of the Sith and stood bravely in the face of death.

Galen may have been ground down by years of training and darkness since, but was he

truly gone-or had he just gone into hiding until the opportunity came to emerge back

into the light?

Are you there, Galen? I need your help!

No answer came.

The Star Destroyer's catastrophic reentry made the world shake. There was no time to

try again. For Juno, then.

He gritted his teeth and snarled at the sky. The dead weight ol the Star Destroyer

shifted one last time, changing its angle of de scent just enough to hang together

those last few hundred meters, but not enough to risk bouncing. Only seconds

remained before it hit and it was still getting bigger. It was impossible that the

sky could contain so much metal!

Abandoning his control over the ship, knowing there was nothing now that he could do

to alter its course, the apprentice staggered backward, dazed. The Force fled from

him, leaving him wrung out and drained. With a sound like the world ending, the Star

Destroyer completed its first and final journey. It hit the cannon, exactly as it

was supposed to, and the sky turned white. The ground buckled beneath the

apprentice's feet. He pinwheeled, unable to find his balance, as a tsunami of junk

and waste rose up ahead of him and blotted out the sun.

* * *

THE WORLD JERKING BENEATH HER woke Juno from her daze. She clutched the sides of the

narrow bunk and cried out in fear. The ship was coming down! She'd lost control and

they were all going to crash!

It took her the better part of ten seconds to realize that the ship wasn't

crashing-but something no less dangerous was going on outside its durasteel hull.

Her head pounded when she lifted herself off the couch. The veins in her temples

throbbed painfully, and there was a very tender point at the back of her skull, but

she ignored that for the moment and concentrated on the ship.

"What's happening?" she shouted, staggering out of the sleeping quarters and through

the hold. The floor bucked beneath her, throwing her from side to side. Loose items

lay scattered all about. The hull creaked and groaned like an oceangoing vessel

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during a storm.

That image wasn't so far from the truth, she discovered, when she finally made her

way to the cockpit and found Kota clutching the sides of the copilot's chair with

blind impotence and, through the forward viewport, a raging sea of rubbish upon

which they appeared to be riding.

She gaped at the sight. Huge shock waves rolled beneath the ship, compressing and

decompressing the garbage of Raxus Prime, lubricated by vast reserves of spilled

oil, foul water, and waste chemicals. A vast column of smoke filled the sky ahead,

lit with a flickering red glow from the ground below. It looked as though a volcano

had belched forth from the planet's skin, erupting like some vast and malignant

pimple. A black mushroom cloud was spreading from the top of the smoke column.

Slowly the shock waves ebbed until the ship was merely rock ing from side to side.

Juno became aware of the sound of her own breath. She sounded as though she had been

running.

Kota relaxed his death grip on the chair. His hands shook as he reached for the

comlink.

"Are you there, boy?" he called into it. "Has the cannon been destroyed?"

Static was his only answer. "Can you hear me, boy?"

Juno fought a sudden rising nausea and moved forward. Kota's head whipped around.

His blind face was agonized. "Kota, what's going on?"

He did not respond, but turned back to the comlink and spoke more urgently, "I

repeat, boy: has the cannon been destroyed?"

She eased herself into the pilot's chair, feeling as though she had been whacked by

a metal pipe. Gradually things began to piece together. Only Kota and she were

aboard the ship, hence Kota's frantic attempts to raise Starkiller. But what about

PROXY? Had the droid gone out after him?

Her mouth opened in an O of shock as she remembered what had happened.

Kota shouted as though the static were a personal affront.

"Answer me, boy!"

A clicking rose up out of the white noise, followed by a weary but familiar voice.

"Relax, General. I'm still here." Kota sagged with relief. "Good. Good." She didn't