The Force Unleashed (33 page)

feel reassured at all. "Kota, where's PROXY? He..." Kota waved her silent. "The

cannon?" "Destroyed. And the ship-is it okay?"

"Seems intact to me, inasmuch as I can tell." "Juno?"

Kota exhaled through his nose. "She's here, but we do have a new set of problems."

"Imperials, I presume."

"No. PROXY. That droid of yours has slipped his programming. He attacked Juno and

disappeared."

"Attacked-?" She heard the catch in his voice. "Is she all right?"

"Just a little battered. That's not the only reason we couldn't fly. PROXY overrode

our launch codes before he left. We can break them, but it'll take time. We're

grounded until then-or until you bring him back."

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"Where did he go?"

"That's the problem. I didn't hear him leave." Kota's face was a picture of fury,

but not just at the droid, Juno guessed: at himself, too, for not being around when

she was attacked and the mission compromised. "The important thing to work out is

why he did this. Could he be an Imperial plant?"

"No," said Starkiller in a tone that would allow no disagreement. "PROXY would never

betray me."

No, thought Juno, but he'll try to kill you every day you're alive. "I think I know

what might have happened," she said. "It's the core intelligence. PROXY was trying

to slice into it at the time. I remember him saying something about accessing his

processor, then-then he went mad." She touched the back of her head and winced.

"The Core . . . ," echoed Starkiller. "Yes. That's all it could be."

"Don't think our problems end there, boy," growled Kota. "That droid knows

everything we've been doing. If the Core is now an Imperial ally, that data could

destroy us!"

More than you realize, thought Juno with a shock of fear. "We have to find him, and

fast."

"I will," said Starkiller. "His homing beacon is still active."

There was a tightness to the reply that spoke of the sins'. Starkiller was under.

"Watch yourself," Juno urged him. "Whether the Core really has reprogrammed him or

not, PROXY isn't your friend anymore, Don't believe anything he tells you."

With an ominous click the comm channel closed.

Kota and Juno sat staring at the console for a moment, ea< h wrapped in private

thoughts. Briefly she considered telling Kota the truth, desperate to take the

terrible weight off her shoulders. Starkiller was a Jedi assassin devoted to

bringing down the Emperor for his own benefit, not out of concern for anyone else.

It would be better to abandon him here and flee with the rest of the rebels while

there was still time. If only the launch codes hadn't been overridden by PROXY-and

if only guilt didn't tug at her in sides at the very thought. . .

She remembered, vaguely, a dream of a disintegrating stone edifice falling into a

lake. That was her sense of self, surely, collapsing and sinking farther with every

passing day.

Your gratitude is wasted on me.

Perhaps, and the feeling still aching in her chest, too. But she hadn't given that

to him yet. She might never. Could such an emotion be wasted if she held it inside

forever? Or would it rot in there and strangle her heart?

"It's not your fault, Kota," she told the fuming old general. "You shouldn't blame

yourself."

Kota didn't answer.

With a sigh, she put her aching head to the problem of getting off the ground sooner

rather than later.

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A RAIN OF ASH BEGAN to fall minutes after the apprentice had signed off from Juno

and Kota. He ignored it, concentrating instead on navigating the desolation that was

the newly rearranged surface of Raxus Prime. The area around the cannon's remains

was a wasteland, blasted flat by the impact. Only a small mountain of wreckage stood

out of the steaming plain, at the exact center of impact. All around that central

peak, in a perfect circle, stood crater walls many meters high, upon one of which he

had woken, buried under a layer of warped plastic sheets. Fragments of cannon and

Star Destroyer ticked and pinged as they cooled. Some had sparked fires, which the

smothering ash now extinguished. Everywhere was the smell of exhumed decay and

burning foulness.

PROXY'S signal led over the crater wall and deeper into the wastelands. He spared no

second pursuing it, passing droids and other scavengers struggling to free

themselves from mounds of trash. An eerie silence had fallen in the wake of the

explosion, and even now sound seemed nervous of returning to its former levels.

Settling rubbish tinkled and groaned. Droids called feebly, in startled bursts of

obscure machine languages. The occasional cry from a human or alien throat signaled

that some of the planet's organic scavengers had also survived the shock waves.

Before long he heard the first shots from a blaster rifle and knew that everything

was returning to normal on the lawless world.

The bleakness of that understanding perfectly matched tin knife wound in his heart

from Kota's blunt words. PROXY isn't your friend anymore.

The one loyal companion he'd had in his entire life had turned on Juno and run off

into the junkyard. What other explanation could there be beyond the Core's evil

influence? That made perfect I sense-and he didn't want to think that PROXY had

noticed changes in him that the droid was now running from. He didn't want to

contemplate PROXY'S hurt at the presence of Juno in hit life. He didn't dare imagine

that PROXY could sense the swelling bubble of self-doubt that had formed when he had

experienced his strange epiphany on Kashyyyk.

It was, however, impossible to ignore entirely: just minutes after he had invoked

the name Galen in an attempt to gain strength, PROXY had vanished. It didn't matter

whether the attempt had worked or not. He had made it, and that spoke of fault lines

forming and spreading through the person he had always imagined himself to be.

He was Darth Vader's secret servant, capable of moving Star Destroyers with nothing

but his will-yet what else was he? Was he a freedom fighter, a friend, a lover? Was

he still the master PROXY was programmed to serve?

Ash stuck to his wet cheeks and formed muddy streaks that he didn't wipe away.

Urgency consumed him. He had to find PROXY before the Core absorbed him completely,

sucking all the details of his Master's plans and transmitting them to the Emperor.

And worse, leaving the once-loyal droid scrabbling in garbage like any other

scavenger.

Darth Vader's apprentice would not allow that. Whatever else-he was, he knew how to

turn anger and fear into forces that no being could resist. Fury burned in him like

a sun at the Core's invasion of his friend. That invasion would be met, countered,

ami answered a thousand times over. He swore it.

PROXY'S homing signal led him past teetering mesas of refuse. The apprentice stuck

to firm ground, running and jumping over toxic pools too fast for inquisitive droids

to catch up. When warring scavengers or shell-shocked Imperials took potshots at

him, he ignored them. The object of his fury was the Core, nothing else. He would

not be distracted.

Behind him trailed a growing cadre of droids, strung out across the wasteland like

chicks behind their mother. One by one, their photoreceptors changed color, forming

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a threatening crimson constellation focused entirely on him. The Core was watching.

The trail led down a long, sloping shaft under a pyramidal mound of plastics and

other nonmetal fragments. It occurred to him as he followed it that the way might

have been burrowed through the rubbish just for PROXY, since the Core needed no

physical connection to the outside world beyond power lines and data cables. There

were lights, too, which was even stranger. Apart from phosphorescence arising from

hardy bacteria surviving off organic material in the walls, a blinking, flickering

glow came from the end of the tunnel.

He lit his lightsaber as he came closer and slowed his pace to a cautious lope.

Whatever awaited him, he wasn't going to barge headlong into it.

The flickering glow grew brighter. The tunnel widened and joined a large

cathedral-like space full of abandoned and junked processors, all refurbished and

linked together in a vast, humming network. Cables dangled from the distant ceiling,

sparking fitfully. There were no screens or keyboards anywhere to be seen. The Core

didn't need them. Surrounded by the world's machine-mind, the apprentice felt very

much out of place.

He navigated his way through the maze of processors, stepping carefully over cables

and keeping his lightsaber away from anything fragile. He didn't want to aggravate

the Core any more than was necessary. Not yet.

The procession of droids followed him, filling all the available space between the

processor network and the reinforced walls of the massive chamber. Soon he was

completely surrounded In glowing red photoreceptors-round, triangular, slitted,

square, belonging to droids ranging in size from buzzing spy-eyes to lumbering mass

movers. Some of them he recognized as golems he had swept from Kazdan Paratus's

junkyard workshop. Their whirring and rattling drowned out the endless contemplative

hum.

They were the eyes and ears of the Core. They could be the fists, too, if necessary.

He came around a rusting cylindrical data shifter as big as a house, connected by

dozens of snaking cables to the ceiling high above, and found PROXY on the other

side, bent over a complex junction. He was linked to the Core by a cable connected

to his innards via an open panel in his back.

"PROXY?"

The droid turned around. His photoreceptors were red like the others. Random

holograms chased themselves across the droid's mutable skin: Jedi Knights and Sith

Lords, Kota, Juno, and even himself. It was very disconcerting.

His voice was worse.

"Your droid's personality module has been supplanted. The being you called PROXY no

longer exists."

The apprentice fought to keep his emotions under control. "Why have you done this?"

"Your droid accessed my systems. I defended myself."

"Self-defense I can forgive. This is theft." He indicated the cable connecting

PROXY'S memory banks to the planet's vast computer networks..

"I do not seek your forgiveness. All I want is order. Organization. Predictability."

"You have that here already."

"Only here-and even here I am victim of outside influences, as you have proven. The

Emperor and I share the same objectives, but I fear that his fallible organic mind

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is not up to the task of governing the galaxy. I clearly see that in your droid's

memories."

"Exactly," he improvised, trying to gain time enough to reach the cable connecting

PROXY to the network. "If you've read I'ROXY's memories, then you know what my

objective is. Perhaps we could work together. I could help you..."

"You have already helped me." The Core moved PROXY Carefully out of reach. "You have

brought me a fully functional starship. With it I can spread order across the

galaxy."

"My starship is not available."

"It will be when you are dead."

The apprentice lunged for the cable, but the Core jumped I'ROXY's body well out of

reach. "Good-bye, 'master.' "

PROXY transformed into Obi-Wan Kenobi and activated the lightsaber that had been

hanging at his side. The droid's opening move was much faster than any he had

attempted before-as of course it should have been, the apprentice realized when he

blocked the blow barely in time. The Core had access to all the same records he did;

its knowledge of Jedi lightsaber techniques might be unsurpassed in the entire

galaxy.

But knowledge was not the same thing as experience, just as clever technology wasn't

the same thing as the Force. He was confident that he could defeat the Core in

PROXY'S body at a fair fight.

As he jumped up onto a nearby processor to avoid another expert swing, he saw the

Core's other droid servants closing in. Fair fights were as rare as Jedi in the

galaxy these days. He would have to even the odds somewhat.

Reaching down for a cable, he sent a wave of Sith lightning through it. Lights

flared and junctions sparked. The Core's processors shrieked at the sudden overload,

and so did its servants. PROXY was one of them-and unlike the others, he was

physically attached to the systems his master was assaulting, so the effects of the

energy surge on him were severe. The hologram dissolved into static and his arms

came up. Static electricity crackled from every joint.

The apprentice cut the current before he could fry his friend's brain completely.

There had to be some of PROXY left in there, somewhere, and he would rather fight an

unfair fight than U.IM that remnant.

Leaping down from the processor, he swung his lightsaber .11 the cable, but the Core

regained its concentration in time to put PROXY'S body in the way. Their lightsabers