The Force Unleashed (7 page)

and making it squawk and wobble in midair. As soon as it saw him, it began to tug

more vigorously, provoking a fullscale collapse that buried it under a large mound

of rubbish.

Caught by its predicament, the apprentice used the Force to push the rubbish away,

allowing the droid to burst free. It danced with considerable disorientation in the

air for a moment before regaining its balance, grabbing the freed cable from among

the debus, and zigzagging up the canyon with it clutched tightly in its single

manipulator, razzing loudly as it went.

Scavengers, he decided, probably hooked up in a network to the Core. Nothing to

worry about, unless he interfered with the running of the planetary junk heap.

Rodians were a different matter entirely.

"Captain Eclipse," he said into his comlink.

"Juno here," she replied immediately.

"Do Imperial records have any reports of Rodian scavenger, on Raxus Prime?"

"Accessing the data bank now."

While she searched, he found them swarming over the corpse of a crashed starship

that lay directly in his path-obviously the corvette she had mentioned earlier. From

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the vantage point of a teetering trash hill, he peered through electrobinoculars at

the green-skinned aliens and the tribe of tiny, brown-robed Jawas they had coerced

into service, either by bribes or threats of violence. There were dozens of them,

with several tracked vehicles lined up to take their booty away. The Corellian

corvette, its precise make rendered indeterminate by the damage it had sustained in

the crash, was being sliced up for scrap, meter by meter, with delicate and

therefore more valuable components removed before the cutting machines came in. The

apprentice was put in mind of the creatures that fed on the bodies of whaladons when

they drifted to the bottom of an ocean: in months or even weeks there might be

nothing left of the starship at all except the crater it had made on falling.

The apprentice didn't have months or weeks up his sleeve. The longer he roamed Raxus

Prime, the greater the chances that he might be discovered.

The starship lay directly between him and the Temple and was far too big to get

around. That could take him hours. He would have to either go through the starship,

or move it.

A slow smile crept across his face. Why be coy? He was the apprentice of Darth Vader

and a servant of the dark side. It didn't pay to creep about in fear of raising his

head.

Juno returned with the details of his find. "Looks like you have stumbled across

Drexl Roosh and his clan. Drexl is wanted for thirty-eight counts of fraud, selling

faulty materiel, and illegal slave trading."

"I think we've discovered where he's getting all of his goods." One of the Rodians

was yelling at the others in Basic, adding insults to the Jawas for good measure.

"Move faster, you scum! The avenger droids will be on us soon." He waved a large

blade with imperious disdain, not caring whom it struck. "If you bottom feeders

don't get these Jawas moving, I'm going to add another ten thousand credits to each

of your heads! Do you hear me?"

This, the apprentice assumed, was Drexl. The purple-faced Rodian wore a jetpack and

heavy armor and was strutting self-importantly back and forth.

On moving to another vantage point, the apprentice ascertained that the starship had

at least one engine still in its housing, a bulky hyperdrive that seemed to be

undamaged. Perfect.

As he conducted his survey, a scuffle broke out between a trio of scavenger droids

and the Rodians overseeing the Jawas' work. T he droids had boldly tried to sneak

into the giant carcass and prompted a volley of energy fire warning them away. They

responded with jolts of electric current delivered through the damp ground and along

electrically conducting walkways. The Rodians suddenly had a fight on their hands

and took cover behind mounds "l organic scraps while the Jawas ran for shelter

anywhere they could find it. The apprentice watched with amusement as the pointless

skirmish unfolded. It ended, inevitably, with three showers of droid fragments and

another bad smell added to the air.

"You idiots!" Drexl bellowed. "Clean up this mess and come back to camp with

something we can sell, or don't come back at all!"

His jetpack ignited and the Rodian lifted off from the waste-strewn surface. With a

roaring noise, he sped into a tunnel leading deeper into Raxus Prime's trash

infrastructure, leaving small fires in his superheated wake. The Core announced

something about malfunctioning salvage droids and sending in more to investigate.

The apprentice made a mental note to avoid crossing the droids, unless he had to,

and began to climb down through the litter of foothills.

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* * *

A RODIAN SENTRY, STILL JITTERY from the skirmish with the droids, barely had time to

squawk in his alien tongue before the apprentice silenced him forever with a quick

sweep of his blade.

He hurried by, into the bowels of the corvette. A ramp had been added to aid the

Jawas in their exploration and evisceration of the ship. It led up at a shallow

angle into a stack of collapsed levels that had once been the crew midsection. He

ran lightly along it, making no sound at all.

Barely had he entered than an alarm went up-triggered not by him, but in response to

a new influx of droids. The effect was the same. Every Rodian scavenger was on

alert. His job instantly became that much more complicated.

A herd of Jawas ran by, squeaking, their glowing yellow eyes flashing on and off. He

let them go, not having a second to spare, and followed the most likely route to the

hyperdrive. When a pair of Rodians stepped out of a hole in the wall ahead of him,

he didn't give them a chance to raise their blasters. He sliced one in two while the

other fell back clutching his throat.

"Are you having fun down there?" came Juno's voice over the comlink.

"I'm making progress," he said as his objective came into sight. The turbines of the

massive hyperdrive lay dead ahead, their shielding removed in preparation for

extraction elsewhere. Naked conduits and cable bundles snaked into the walls or hung

limp, severed, on the floor.

"Progress at what?" she asked him. "Making things complicated?"

He didn't respond. Her tone was borderline insolent, but she did have a point. Time

was passing. The last thing he wanted was to get caught up in a dispute between

Drexl's band and the Core's droid immune system. The sooner he was moving toward his

objective, the better.

Another Rodian came running up the corridor behind him, firing at his back. He

deflected the shots with his lightsaber and brought the ceiling down on the raider,

effectively sealing himself into the hyperdrive access room. No matter. The walls

were-weak with metal fatigue. He could punch out in an instant when he was

finished.

Kneeling in front of the turbines, he took a handful of cables in both hands and

called on the Force. Energy surged through him, making him stiffen. Sith lightning

sparked from his skin and snaked through the ragged metal walls, floor, and ceiling.

Distantly he heard screams as the many beings inside the wrecked corvette suffered

from the aftereffects. He ignored them, along with the smell of smoke rising from

his own tattered uniform.

Focus, he told himself. Undirected power was power wasted. Gritting his teeth, he

gathered the energy and directed it down his arms, into his hands. Blue light

strobed across his vision as the lightning flowed into the wires and from there into

the hyperdrive mi bines. Groaning, then shrieking, the massive engine came alive.

Damaged, completely out of alignment, and barely controllable, the turbine shook

with propulsive power, then strained against the braces still holding it to the

corvette's warped chassis.

The deck kicked underneath the apprentice. He swayed as the entire corvette shifted.

With a terrible sound, it began to move, plowing a brutal furrow through the

surrounding rubbish. He could picture it clearly in his imagination and through the

vibrant flow of the Force. As lightning poured through him and into the engine, it

pushed the stricken corvette physically out of his path. I he way to the Temple was

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now clear.

When he sensed that it had gone far enough, he relaxed his concentration. Smaller

discharges of energy skittered across his skin. Somewhat shakily, he stood, then

almost toppled over as the engine continued to fire, sending the corvette onward,

out of his Control.

He hadn't expected that. There was enough residual potential in the turbine to keep

it running for dozens of seconds. He had to get out of the corvette before it

dragged him any farther from his goal.

Straining, he blew a hole in the side of the downed ship wide enough for a TIE

fighter to pass through. The wall of a junk canyon was gliding by, raining rubbish.

With one smooth leap, he caught hold of dangling cable and swung free of the wreck.

It roared on, dragging itself through the dregs of the galaxy on its disintegrating

belly, sending waves of disturbed filth radiating out ward from its path.

"Are you creating a distraction, Starkiller," squawked Juno from the comlink, "or

trying to draw attention to yourself?"

"Choose the answer you prefer," he said as he swung from cable to cable back the way

the corvette had come. Scattered Jawas in singed robes were clambering into their

transports to give chase to the corvette. He ignored them, used Sith lightning to

blast a dozen droids that rushed him with electric claws raised, then turned left

where the corvette had formerly rested to resume his approach to the strange parody

of the Jedi Temple.

* * *

THE STRUCTURE'S BASE WAS EITHER buried under or part of the endless dump that was

the Raxus Prime surface. The apprentice ascended cautiously to the foyer, where

buckled armor plates had been hammered as close to flat as was possible and welded

into approximately level floors. Abandoned thrust tubes stood in for marble columns.

Sensor arrays made reasonable facsimiles of window frames, and curving tank walls

created the illusion of arched ceilings high above.

The system's primary added to the superficial beauty of the scene by casting beams

of weak light in downward-sloping diagonal lines from his right to his left, in

which dust motes danced languidly on the air.

But beneath it all the stench of decay remained, and with every step he took the

floor shifted and creaked. Wires and decaying insulation protruded from the seams.

In every corner lurked piles of rubbish that might have been festering since the

Empire's founding.

As he walked cautiously forward, feeling the nearness of Kazdan Paratus but

uncertain of his exact location, one of the rubbish piles stirred. From it stepped a

humanoid machine made from the junked droid parts he had expected to find on his

journey.

The braincase of an FX-8 medical droid was bolted onto a body cobbled together from

several types of outdated protocol models. Its limbs appeared to come from a mixture

of EV and B1 battle droids, tipped with instruments and tools that wouldn't looked

out of place in a workshop. Its sole functioning photoreceptor glared a bright,

furious yellow. Its lurching gait achieved an appreciable speed before he sliced its

head off.

A second patchwork droid emerged from a different rubbish pile, followed by a third.

The sound of more droid golems stirring line from elsewhere in the Temple. The

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apprentice fought them ¨ with practiced ease. He had been dueling PROXY all his

life; knew the weaknesses and strengths of droids, even one capable, by a clever use

of repulsor technologies and a specially adapted antique training lightsaber, of

imitating a Jedi. Ones such as these, with barely a matching part among them, were

child's play.

Soon the foyer was full of the twitching, smoking bodies of the temple's hapless

guardians. He began to tire, not from exertion but from the tedium of knocking down

droid after droid, to no apparent end. There might have been thousands of them.

Deactivating his lightsaber, he took a deep breath. With one mighty exhalation of

power, he blasted all of them-those in pieces and those approaching with

needle-tipped fingers and vibrosaws upraised-out of the foyer doors. Then he blasted

the rubbish piles after them. He kept pushing until a dark cloud toured out over

Raxus Prime's hideous landscape-an artificial hurricane full of droid golems.

When the foyer was clear, the apprentice straightened. He was no longer pushing with

the Force, but the floor beneath him shook nonetheless. A heavy booming sound came

from deeper in the Temple, and was getting louder. He had certainly attracted

someone's attention now.

A huge junk golem smashed through a nearby wall, servomotors growling, brandishing

two of the biggest vibro-axes he had ever seen, one in each hand. It took two steps