The Force Unleashed (38 page)

she'd fully changed sides until Starkiller had been revealed to be a traitor, before

they'd been back to Raxus Prime.

When he raised his head and turned to her, he was resolved. Grief had evolved into

anger, and that was evolving in turn into determination. It was like watching carbon

turn to diamond in a high-pressure industrial oven. Starkiller was becoming a

different person as she watched, as Kota had during his short time on Corellia.

Not "Starkiller," she reminded herself. Galen. "We're going after Vader," he said in

a fierce but level voice. "And the Rebels."

She nodded tightly, thinking that it sounded simple but was likely to be anything

but.

They had cleared the atmosphere and were accelerating away from the planet's busy

skylanes. The Star Destroyer that had carried off Vader and his prisoners was long

gone.

"Where?" she asked, voicing the first of many questions that plagued her.

"I don't know," he admitted. "Not yet."

He closed his eyes and leaned back into the copilot's chair.

"Don't nod off without giving me some idea," she said, unable to keep the worry from

her voice.

"I'm not sleeping," he said without opening his eyes. "I'm meditating-or trying to.

Jedi can sometimes see visions of the future."

He looked tense and awkward. She had never seen the hands folded across his lap so

still. Surely, she thought, this wasn't the kind of training Darth Vader had given

him. Meditating had nothing to do with hunting and killing, or the persecution of

the innocent.

"Have you done this before?" she asked, wondering if it was training he had set

himself down the years.

He shook his head once. "I've never been a Jedi before."

An intense stillness flowed through him, as visible as though he had changed color.

She opened her mouth, then closed it. Better that he concentrate and she got on with

the business of prepping the ship for hyperspace.

Corellia shrank to a blue-green ball behind them, and the traffic thinned out. She

took navigation readings from the planet's orbital factories and double-checked them

against the system's four other habitable worlds. Everything was in accord with the

nav computer's settings. Next she ran a thorough check of the hyper-drive to make

sure it hadn't been tampered with by the Imperials. The ship had been out of her

sight for less than an hour, but .1 lot could be done in that time. Inertial

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dampeners could be rigged to fail at a critical moment, crushing everyone aboard in

the tremendous accelerations achieved during a jump. Shields could flutter, leaving

the ship vulnerable to impacts with interstellar dust. Null quantum field generators

could be timed to dump them in the middle of nowhere. She could think of a dozen

ways that Vader might have covered his bets against their escape. She checked all of

them herself, one by one.

No one had followed them from Corellia. As far as she could tell no one was

monitoring their departure.

Beside her, Galen breathed slowly and steadily with his eyes closed. An hour passed

and nothing changed. Whatever he was doing, it obviously didn't come easily. Her

understanding of the Force was limited to stories mocking the superstitious beliefs

of an old and outdated religion-plus the rumors that continued to circulate through

Imperial ranks. The Jedi Purge might have been years ago, but people had long

memories. Serving officers of a certain generation still remembered Order 66 and the

Clone Wars. The telling and retelling of such stories had created a strange backdrop

of distorted facts, mistaken beliefs, and pure misinformation that emerged whenever

the word Jedi was mentioned.

A faint vibration made the ship's decks rattle. Concerned, she checked the

sublights. Finding everything in order, she assumed that they had just passed

through a dense region of interplanetary dust.

When the vibration returned, stronger and longer than before, and the cause still

remained unknown, she began to worry about what form of sabotage she could have

missed-to the generator, the stabilizers, even life support. . .

A faint sound to her left interrupted her train of thought. She turned to look at

Galen and her eyes widened in surprise.

His lightsaber was floating in the air in front of him, turning slowly as though in

free fall.

Juno stared at it for a moment, and then reached out to check the gravity

generators. She stopped herself, knowing that they hadn't been tampered with. She

could feel the field around her, operating normally. Yet still the lightsaber

floated, and as she watched more items in the cockpit joined its aerial display: her

blaster and holster, a cup, a datapad. The ship shuddered again, as though something

powerful and mysterious was subtly interfering with its function.

Galen's eyes rolled under his closed eyelids. A line had formed between his

eyebrows. His lips twitched.

She raised a hand to shake him, but found her fingers effortlessly deflected. The

Force filling the ship was emanating from him.

His frown deepened. His head turned to the right, then to the left.

"Galen? Are you all right?"

His hands clenched and unclenched, then his whole body twitched, making her jump.

"Galen, can you hear me?"

He moaned softly, as though caught in a nightmare. His skin was slick with sweat.

She crouched in the pilot's seat, unable to do anything but watch.

He moaned again, louder this time. His legs kicked out, making the whole cockpit

shake. The objects floating in the air began to spin around them. The lights

flickered.

"No," he said distinctly. His head jerked from side to side, his face locked in a

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rictus of pain. "No, Kota-!"

His eyes shot open. She gasped. The objects around them crashed to the floor. He

stared at nothing for a second, wildly, frightened. His chest rose and fell as

though he had just run a marathon. His breathing was the only sound in the suddenly

still cockpit.

"What?" she asked when she could bear the silence no longer. "What did you see?"

He turned to her and stared as though he didn't recognize her.

Then he shook his head and the visions clouding his sight fell away.

"A terrible thing," he said in a shaky voice. "A massive space station-still under

construction..." He lunged suddenly and took her hand. His fingers gripped hers with

surprising strength.

"Yes," he said. "Plot a course for the Outer Rim. The Horuz system."

A chill colder than the snow of Corellia's mountains swept through her. "What's

waiting for us there, Galen?"

"I'll tell you on the way," he said, pulling back slightly. "What

I know of it, anyway."

She saw a new grief in his eyes, and that frightened her. "Do you know how this is

going to end?" For Kota? For us?

He hesitated, and then shook his head. "No."

She wasn't sure that she believed him, but she let the matter drop and turned to

prep the starship for lightspeed.

HORUZ SYSTEM.

The apprentice excused himself when they were under way and retired to the

meditation chamber-not to meditate but to check his lightsaber for damage and to

sort out the thoughts running through his mind. He supposed the latter was a kind of

meditation, but it wasn't one Juno could help him with. The calming, reassuring

presence she had provided in the cockpit wasn't what he needed now.

The planet Despayre.

He knelt in the center of the room and took the weapon to pieces, carefully cleaning

and reinstalling them, one by one. The lightsaber would never burn red, but it had

been wielded by a Sith all the same. Its crystals would never be clean again. He

replaced all of them, activated the blade, and found the resonance much improved. As

a weapon its function was identical, but in his hand it would perform better than

ever. The Death Star.

It all came down to weapons, as far as the Empire was concerned.

Sighing, he shut off the blade and confronted the visions he had received while

meditating. He had glimpsed the future before-several times now, while on the brink

of death-but this was different. This time it had been his conscious choice to

pierce the boundary of the present, and he had made that choice with a clear act of

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will. That didn't make interpreting what he had seen any easier. In fact, it made it

more difficult, because instead of remembering isolated fragments, now he remembered

everything, and not all of it could be true. At least, not all of it at once.

The future was a mess of possibilities-some likely, some incredibly unlikely-shot

through with hard certainties that were unchanged in every outcome. The Death Star

was one such certainty: an enormous battle station that, when completed, would rain

still more terror on the Emperor's subjects and ensure his domination of the galaxy.

Its location was another certainty, and that this was where Vader had taken his

prisoners.

The apprentice knew exactly that much with confidence. The rest was a morass of

contradictions. In some futures, he survived; in others he fell. Juno lived; Juno

died. They were together; they were apart. The Rebels prevailed; the Rebels were

annihilated. In one future, even PROXY was still alive, something that had patently

not occurred in the time line he occupied.

The glimpse of a wider universe of what might and might not have been made his head

ache, and made preparing for what might yet be even more difficult.

The thought of PROXY made his heart ache. The droid had been freed by the Core from

his primary programming on Raxus Prime, and that had allowed him to sacrifice

himself for his master rather than try to kill him. The apprentice struggled with

that fact. What was freedom worth if it led to death? Would he have sacrificed his

life for PROXY, had the roles been reversed? Would he do it for Juno?

Every time Juno called him Galen, he felt a very different kind of emotional spike.

On Raxus Prime, when he had tried to call on the naive audacity of the boy he had

once been to bring down the Star Destroyer, nothing had stirred in him. No memories,

no buried personalities, no hidden strength. He had worried at that fact ever since,

wondering if his vision on Kashyyyk had been mistaken after all, or if Galen had

been so thoroughly erased that no vestige of him remained.

But now he understood. When he had turned to Juno at the base of the cliff and told

her his name, it had been him telling her, not the ghost of his former self. Galen

had ignored his summons on Raxus Prime because he was already there. He had

possessed the strength to do what he needed to do. He always had. It was Galen as

much as Darth Vader's apprentice who had invoked the thought of Juno to make him

strong. They were one and the same person.

He still couldn't think of himself that way. He had been nothing but an apprentice

for all his conscious life. It might be years before he was completely free of his

Master's taint, if he survived that long . . .

He closed his eyes in weariness and was immediately overwhelmed by images:

...the Emperor dead and Darth Vader in charge of the Empire, with him at his side...Darth Vader dead and the apprentice knighted by the Emperor as his successor...Kota stabbing him in the back and both of them dying in a fatal exhalation of the

Force...Kota fighting the Emperor and falling, blasted by Sith lightning until he was

barely recognizable"Coming up on Horuz," Juno called from the cockpit.

He forced his eyes open, unsure how long he had been caught up in his future

memories. Standing on legs that still felt unsteady after all that had happened in

recent times, he put the lightsaber back at his hip and joined her as the ship came

out of hyperspace.

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* * *

THE DEATH STAR WAS EXACTLY as he had seen it through the Force. The size of a small

moon, it hung balefully over the prison planet, still very much under construction

but recognizably a sphere designed to be solid from pole to pole, with a concave

dish dimpling one side like a large crater, possibly belonging to an oversized

communications or sensor system. The lines of the station were blurred by thousands

of droids, ranging from tiny construction units to massive cranes and welders that

dwarfed even those on the Raxus Prime shipyard. Gaps in the exterior armor plating

revealed an extensive skeleton strong enough to hold up under significant

acceleration. Gravity generators the size of office blocks provided a steady "down"

for everyone and everything within its operating radius. He didn't know the

specifications of the various drives, reactors, and life-support systems on which

the diabolical station would depend when it was fully operational, but he could

imagine.

Sometimes imagination wasn't a good thing.

Telemetry showed thousands of ships in the sensors' range. The station's immediate

vicinity was full of support vessels carrying raw materials in and waste out. Some