Hey folks, Grubkiller here.
Here's part 7 of this story.
Hope you enjoy.
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Kashyyyk, Imperial facility.
On a landing pad, protruding from a massive Imperial facility, an Imperial officer wearing a pelt of Wookiee fur around his white uniform, watched patiently and anxiously as an Imperial Lambda-class shuttle came in for a landing.
When the shuttle landed, its ramp lowered, and as the cabin depressurized a group of four Imperial Royal Guardsmen marched down, with their laser pikes shouldered. They parted ways for a young woman, likely late teens. She wore an all-white skin-tight outfit, in addition to a white cape. She had fair-skin and brown hair.
The young woman was followed by a silver and blue astromech droid.
"Princess Leia." The Imperial officer said with a slight bow of his head. "It's an honor to have a Senatorial observer."
But the young woman was unamused, wearing a scowl as she was.
"You can drop the charade, Captain Sturn. We both know I was sent here as a hostage to keep my father from speaking out against the Empire."
"Then we both understand the situation, Senator. If your father keeps his mouth shut, I'll keep you out of harm's way. If not," he said as he looked down into the base area and watched as his troops corralled battered and chained up Wookiees into cages, "you'll become the unfortunate victim of a Wookiee uprising." He then looked back down at her. "These slaves are mindless brutes, you know."
She looked down at the once proud wookiees brought so low and then looked back up at her, still wearing her scowl. "Show me to my quarters."
"Of course," Sturn said as he signaled his men to lead the young princess and her droid into the facility.
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Nar Shadda, cantina.
If Nar Shadda looked like a muggy, smoggy rodent hole from orbit, it certainly looked like that up close. Certainly to the three figures who walked through the mean streets of the smuggler's moon. There was crime on every corner and it smelled of rot.
But they had been searching this planet for months, trying to find the one figure who had been last seen here, falling from a crumbling space station.
Starkiller was wearing a bounty hunter uniform, which consisted of Mandalorian chest and arm plates, and covered with a robe of rags. The perfect disguise on a planet of scum. He was flanked by the slender PROXY and the voluptuous Juno, who wore an all black jumpsuit, which accentuated her body in all its womanly glory and was slightly unzipped. The Imperial insignia was scratched out.
Starkiller and his three companions walked slowly into the 'Vapor Room', his eyes peering into the corners, studying every face and figure he found there. The cantina's atmosphere reeked of numerous negative emotions, but threat was not one of them... not yet anyway. All eyes turned to him for a moment, then a Gamorrean with an upturned nose and prominent belly raised a glass above his head in toast to the local King Ozz. The rest of his table purred loudly in agreement. Attention returned to frothing mugs, smoking pipes, and watching the holograms of dancing half-naked Twi'lek girls.
Starkiller and his companions walked right up to the bartender, a Whiphid, who was cleaning some glasses.
"What'll it be?" He asked in a strange alien dialect.
"I'm looking for someone. Does the name Kota mean anything to you?" He asked.
The alien bartender crossed his arms and stroked his beard. "Kota... Kota..." he said, as if trying to remember. Then he shook his head.
Starkiller waved his hand across the alien's tusked face. "You will tell us where you've seen Kota."
"Doesn't ring a bell...Errrgh!" he said before Starkiller clenched his fist and the alien rose off of his feet, clutching his throat.
"Does this ring a bell?" Starkiller asked.
'Arrghh! I don't want any trouble." The alien shouted. "Do you honestly expect me to remember every bum who shows up here?"
Starkiller felt someone grab onto his wrist, not hard, but gently. He looked over to see that it was Juno, who was looking at him with pleading eyes. He reluctantly let do and dropped the bartender, who choked and coughed for air.
Then Juno stepped forward, dropping a few credits on the counter. The Whiphid, still wheezing, scooped up the credits. "Look, someone with that name may come here. Usually within stumbling distance of this place."
Juno nodded and flashed a smile. As they walked away however, the bartender pressed a few buttons on his counter, and began to put out some notifications.
They then walked upstairs and found an empty table. Juno was fiddling with some buttons on her comm unit, which was linked to some of the Rogue Shadow's systems. She also used it, with PROXY's help, to slice into the local security cams.
"Master, I've been accessing local news reports and monitoring communications between different underworld groups. I've been unable to find any mentions of General Kota or any Jedi."
"No sign of Kota outside." Juno said as she checked the cameras. "Though I am noticing an increased volume of foot traffic. All armed."
But Starkiller knew better than to out all of his trust in technology. He scanned all the faces around the bar. Eventually he found one human who caught his eye.
Facedown across a table in the darkest corner of this disreputable cantina slumped a man who wanted to disappear. The Vapor Room was a particularly good place to make the attempt. Primarily a Gamorrean hangout - especially those who worked for the hutts - but attracting its share of Rodian and human patrons as well, it was an after-hours dive boasting bottomless shadows in every corner. The air hung in dense, aromatic sheets that moved only when staggering beings passed through them. The music was wildly hybridized, like the bartenders, who glowered sullenly as they wiped grease-smeared glasses and spread pools of liquor in thin layers across the bar top.
An empty tankard of Andoan ale rested near the slumped man's shoulder. His face was determinedly hidden from view, as if the only conscious desire he had left in him was to keep it that way. When he came up for a drink, which had happened with decreasing frequency in recent hours, he kept his face carefully averted from the cantina's patrons. Greasy gray hair protruded from what had once been a rigorously maintained queue. His robes were ill fitting and stained.
No one in the Vapor Room knew who the man was or what he had done. No one remembered who had brought him to Nar Shadda. They didn't care. They just wanted to be left alone to drink until their next shift came around.
The man who wanted to disappear had turned his back on the galaxy, but it hadn't turned its back on him. Despite his very best efforts, he had been noticed. Inevitably so. A man with his injuries was common enough, but one who could still pour a glass of Corellian brandy without spilling a drop …?
Word had spread, and that word was trouble.
Starkiller had just one purpose. This, the first real test of his Master's new plan, was the only thing on his mind.
It had been a long journey, with many risks taken. None had been as important or as dangerous as this.
"I think I may have found him," Starkiller said, leaning into Juno without taking his eyes off the man in the corner. "Wait here."
But before he got up, he felt Juno's hand atop his. "What happens if he recognizes you?" Juno asked with concern.
"He won't," he said, remembering the general's burned eyes and the absent scars on his own hands. His body had changed in subtle ways, thanks to Lord Vader. The Force-signature he had possessed over Nar Shaddaa, in the midst of his murderous mission, would be very different from the one he projected now. "Be ready to move."
As Starkiller walked out of the booth, Juno began adding attachments to her sidearm, creating a modified blaster rifle. At the same time, PROXY was scrolling through his training modules.
More people, Rodians, Humans, Gamorreans, started to move into the bar. All armed, according to the feed from the security cams that Juno had sliced into.
Calm. Reassurance. Hope.
The apprentice looked around the cantina, making sure that attention had really drifted away from him. Then he kicked the table, startling Kota awake.
The fallen Jedi lifted his head with a jerk, revealing a disheveled shadow of the man he had once been. His cheeks were hollow and thick with stubble. Dirty bandages, wrapped around his head, hid his eye sockets from view.
"General Kota?"
Kota's voice was slurred. "I've paid for this table. So whoever you are, get lost."
"General Kota, I've tracked you across the galaxy, and all over Nar Shadda."
"Who are you, boy?" Kota's brows tightened. "A bounty hunter?"
"Not quite. But I have been watching you." He leaned closer and lowered his voice. "I think we can help each other, Jedi."
Kota pulled a face and gestured toward his bandaged eyes. "I'm no Jedi now. Not since this."
"I don't need your eyes, just your mind—and everything you know about fighting the Empire."
Kota slumped back into his chair, looking more weary than drunk. "Nobody fights the Empire and wins, boy."
"Eclipse to Starkiller. We have a situation developing." He heard in his comm piece. A sudden commotion in the doorway attracted the apprentice's attention, and he turned around only to see six thugs forming a semi-circle around Starkiller
Juno intercepted another message from the bartender alerting station security to Kota's presence. "Hurry up! If we catch them the bounty is ours," she played in Starkiller's earpiece."
He sighed and straightened, unhooking his lightsaber and placing himself between Kota and the thugs.
"You'd better hope you're wrong about that, General."
With a snap-hiss loud enough to attract the attention of everyone in the Vapor Room, he activated the glowing green blade that had once belonged to the man whose life he'd ruined.
Kota flinched as though he had been struck and dived under the table. At that moment the thugs opened fire. Gamorreans squealed and leapt for cover as deflected energy bolts ricocheted around the room. Glasses shattered. Brightly colored liquid went everywhere, the more volatile catching fire and adding to the chaos.
"Stand up, General," the apprentice called over the racket. "They may be shooting at me right now, but they came here for you."
Then he was forced to concentrate on the crime gangs and their local allies. Starkiller then unleashed a force repulse on his immediate adversaries and sent them flying across the room. More began to rush him.
Whoever was behind Kota's attempted capture, they weren't taking any chances.
As more thugs ran into the cantina, Juno and PROXY sprung into action. Juno kicked over the table and used it as cover, before laying down suppressing fire on the entrance. She gunned down a half-dozen thugs, and forced the rest to take cover.
PROXY leapt over cover as his chassis began to shimmer blue, before taking the shape of a red-faced zabrak with red robes. He then ignited a dual-edged red-lightsaber and began to cut his way through the crowd of thugs, absorbing plently of blaster fire on the way.
"Come on," Starkiller yelled at the cowering general. "Follow the sound of my lightsaber!"
He turned his back on Kota, hoping the old man recovered a sufficient sense of self-preservation to look after himself. Not only did his would-be rescuer have to take out the Imperials, but he had to do it without harming any innocent bystanders. That wouldn't look good to anyone schooled in the Jedi ways.
As they fought their way toward the cantina's back door, he looked to Juno. "Juno, we're going to need that dust off real quick." Starkiller said as he tore debris from the ceiling and started lobbing it at the thugs.
Juno lowered her blaster and took cover, pressing a few buttons on her wrist unit, bringing up a map of the surrounding area. At the same time, PROXY took the two halves of his lightsaber and plunged both ends into the door, cutting a hole out of the locked door.
"That could be a problem. That bartender contacted the local garrison. Imperials will be everywhere shortly." She said.
"Just find us a suitable landing area." He tossed his lightsaber like a boomerang and sliced the legs off of several thugs, causing them to fall over in pain. He then used the force to telekinetically toss those leg-less bodies into more thugs. "Have the ship lock onto our signal."
"Will do."
He glanced behind him. Kota was finally moving, hunched over like a stunned mine crab with his hands splayed before him. Hopefully the Force would be with Kota, because the apprentice knew with one look through the door that he would have his work cut out for him. There were at least two dozen thugs in the storeroom, taking cover behind crates and barrels.
There wasn't time to hesitate.
Drawing on the Force, as PROXY finished cutting, the apprentice burst the door open, using it as a projectile that knocked down a few thugs. He tore the crates apart, and filled the air with debris. Chased by blasterfire, Starkiller ran across the room in three steps and leapt onto the nearest thugs. Lightsaber flashing, he cut him and his friend to pieces and used the Force to lift several discarded rifles. Turning them against the remaining thugs, the floating blasters barked and sent their targets reeling backward.
As PROXY and Juno ran out of the cantina, with Kota stumbling after them, Starkiller used the force to collapse the ceiling behind them, covering their backs.
Kota was keeping up, barely. He grabbed the old man's arm and dragged him out of the storeroom and along a series of corridors. The Vapor Room's supply dock wasn't far away, and although he expected it also to contain a heavy Imperial presence, getting the Rogue Shadow in wasn't an impossibility.
After running up a skyscraper, Juno continued to looked at her wrist pad. "There's a dock on the adjacent building that the Empire hasn't seized yet, she said, pointing to another building across the way. "That's where the Rogue Shadow will be. Just give me a few minutes to locate a way acr-"
"No time," Starkiller said. He used the force on Juno and lifted her up.
"Wait, what are you, AAHHH!" She let out a scream as she was quickly floated across to the other side, where she spoke into her comm unit. "A little warning would go a long way next time."
Starkiller smirked before he turned to PROXY, who's training timer had ended, and his systems had to recharge. He heard a power whine and the droid's hologram disappeared, leaving a slumped over droid. The apprentice used the force to do to PROXY what he did to Juno.
He was about to do the same with Kota.
But he froze.
A glimpse of a black-robed figure standing with the stormtroopers stopped him in his tracks. On sight of him, it tilted its black helmet and ignited a red lightsaber. The stormtroopers dropped to their knees and fired.
For the barest of moments, the apprentice was frozen. His stomach dropped away into Nar Shadda's underworld, and he felt betrayed all over again.
Then his mind caught up with his gut, shouting, That's not Vader! The red blade protruded from the top of a long black staff, not a lightsaber hilt. The helmet was smooth and rounded, lacking the familiar death's-head aesthetic of his Master's. Instead of two rounded photoreceptors, this helm boasted a single strip visor, suggesting that beneath might lie the face of an ordinary human male rather than whatever blasted visage his Master kept permanently hidden. The figure wore combat armor under his flowing cloak—exactly like one of the Emperor's Royal Guard, but entirely in black.
The apprentice's blade came up of its own accord. Moving in extreme slow motion, as though the air were made of treacle, he deflected volley after volley from the blasters back at the troopers who fired them. They staggered and fell with smoke pouring from shoulder and neck joints. Their cries barely registered.
The black guard deflected every bolt he sent his way. When the last of the troopers fell, the black guard stepped forward with his saber-staff lowered to charge.
"Eclipse to Starkiller, where are you?" Juno called. "The engines are hot and so is this landing sight."
Starkiller swore he could hear blaster fire at the other building.
"We can't get to the dock!" the apprentice warned both Juno and PROXY. "We need another rendezvous point!"
"There's another shipping dock not far from you," Juno responded as his lightsaber clashed with his new enemy's. "What's that noise? You're not fighting Kota, are you?"
"Too hard to explain," he grunted, not sure what the explanation even was. "Get to the dock and wait for me there."
He broke off communications to block a downward slash that almost knocked him flat. Glancing around for Kota, he was relieved to see that the general was safely behind cover. Now he could summon the full power of the dark side. Drawing on the sense of betrayal and shock he had felt on seeing the figure waiting for him—this deadly, dark assassin who might or might not have something to do with Darth Vader—he pushed with all his might.
His ears rang, such was the energy he released. The roof buckled underneath him; rivets popped and welds tore. His assailant went flying across the wide space, arms spread wide apart. The saber-staff cut a long, twisting line in the metal floor as its owner rolled and came up standing.
A bolt of Sith lightning shot from the hand not holding the staff. The apprentice grinned, having anticipated that tactic. He met the lightning bolt with one of his own. They collided in a spitting, crackling ball of pure energy that danced crazily from side to side. The air filled with the sharp stink of ozone.
The hooded assassin grunted and applied more effort. The apprentice met that effort and exceeded it. The ease with which he drove his assailant's lightning back surprised him. For one wielding a Sith blade, the man he was fighting had less power than he should have.
The ball of energy where their crackling bolts met drifted closer and closer to the black guard. He grunted audibly and leaned physically forward with both hands upraised, one in a shaking claw and the other stabbing the saber-staff into the beam, adding its energy to his desperate attack. To no avail. The ball inexorably approached, driven by the dark power of the apprentice's will. When it touched the hilt of the black guard's saber-staff, all its pent-up energy was drawn into him.
With a truncated shriek the guard flew out the open dock and fluttered away, dead before his feet even left the ground.
The apprentice let the tension flood out of him and brought his arms down. He then picked up the lightsaber staff, sliced off the staff part and threw it to Kota. "Here, you'll need this."
Kota grumbled and continued to stumble after him.
Comming Juno, Starkiller followed the directions she gave him to their new rendezvous. It wasn't far, with only a couple of obvious ambush points along the way. Thanking her, he ran through an observation deck and along an exterior crosswalk, barely noticing the view.
"Can't you go faster, General?"
"I'd rather walk, boy."
Ignoring the General's insolence, his mind worked over everything that had just happened, trying to find the sense in it.
A dark figure wielding a modified red blade and lightning, a Royal Guard but black all over … The Sith connection could not be denied. Unless Darth Vader had trained a second apprentice in the last six months—which didn't strike him as likely, for why would he then set them against each other?—there was only one other possible Master for such a being.
The Emperor.
Great minds thought alike. The apprentice grimaced as he approached the first of the likely ambush points, an air-conditioning heat exchange, where he would be forced to traverse a wide but long duct and pass through a series of fans. Darth Vader had sent his apprentice on a mission to find and kill the last of the Jedi. Perhaps the Emperor had intended the same with his dark minion.
If so, he would be disappointed by the results. Kota could be the scapegoat for Starkiller's kill. He may not have had his senses back as he had on the TIE fighter factory, but the Emperor's emissary had died all the same. That would send a clear threat to the Emperor, perfectly in line with Darth Vader's wishes.
Assuming Kota survived, of course, stumbling, drunk, and blind as he was.
A squad of troopers was waiting for him in the heat exchange, with some thugs as well. He made short work of them, neither rushing recklessly in nor drawing the fight out. There was no point to be made here. They were simply inconveniences.
He tossed the last of the trooper into the spinning blades of a fan four times as tall as he was. It exploded in a ball of flame, almost taking out its twin farther along the heat exchange. Out of the cloud of metal fragments leapt a second of the Emperor's Sith assassins, saber-staff upraised. The apprentice met him with a clash of sparks and lightning.
Sith against Sith, they fought backward and forward through the broad, metal-lined space. This assassin was more proficient than the first, wiry and strong with a good reach and penchant for telekinetically throwing items from inside the apprentice's blind spot. He proved to be tough work until the apprentice wrenched the next giant fan off its gimbals and sent it spinning through the air. The black guard seemed so stunned by the sight of it that he didn't jump until it was too late. One spinning blade took his right leg off at the knee. From then, the fight was over.
The apprentice left the dismembered black-clad body behind and hurried on his way, through a maintenance area filled with nervous workers and up a ramp to the docks that Juno pointed out.
Stepping out into the open air, he and Kota found themselves facing another squad of troopers,and two more of the Emperor's assassins. Two transport freighters heavily weighted with supplies hung overhead, motors whirring to keep them on station, presumably waiting to land. A pair of AT-CT Imperial walkers were using their tractor beams to put supply crates onto the ships.
The apprentice bent his knees and adopted a fighting stance.
"Are you sure you want to do this?" he asked his gathered foes.
The answer came in the form of blasterfire from the troopers, a barrage from the Imperial cargo walkers, and a combined charge from the two assassins. He whirled and leapt, filling the air with reflected energy. All thought ceased; his connection to the Force became deeper than it ever had been before. He moved with grace and pure reflex, ducking under saber-staff blows, hurling troopers bodily at their allies, and even raining supplies from one of the freighters above.
Even Kota got in on some of the action, slicing through a few troopers with his captured red saber pike.
It was at this moment that the two AT-CTs dropped their supplies and turned around, using their heavy blasters to bombard Starkiller's position. Starkiller dodged the rounds and quickly used the force to toss debris at the walkers. But one of them responded by using its tractor beam to stop the flying debris in midair and then shoot it back to Kota.
Starkiller quickly pushed the blind General out of the way and into cover.
"Oh ho ho, this is crazy. A blind man and a fool against the Empire."
The crew of the Imperial transport bailed out in a small speeder. Seeing it abandoned gave Starkiller an idea. When the walkers and the remaining troops regrouped for a second combined charge, Starkiller wrenched the transport physically downward from the sky, crashing its entire weight down on them all—and then, when the petals of the explosion were at their peak, sweeping the entire mess off the dock with one cathartic flexure of telekinesis.
He stood in a tiny dome of clear space, exhaling pure energy, as the circle of burning debris rained down through Nar Shadda's thick polluted air. Triumph and satisfaction filled him like pure helium, buoying him upward.
"How many were there?" asked a voice from behind him.
He turned to see Kota stumbling out of cover. Although drunk, he was a sobering presence. The empty eye sockets hidden behind his filthy bandage seemed to stare right through the young man before him.
The apprentice straightened and lowered his lightsaber. He wondered if Kota was about to berate him for causing so much death and mayhem. "I lost count," he confessed.
"Doesn't matter. There will be more. It's a fool's errand, boy. The Emperor's army is infinite."
The apprentice scowled. A telling-off he could handle. Indulgent despair was a different thing entirely.
"We have to go, General."
"You'll eventually be killed—or worse. And what will have changed? Nothing."
The apprentice clicked the comlink for Juno's attention. "I'd rather die fighting than drown in some cantina, old man. Are you with me or not?"
Kota took a step forward, stumbled, and looked momentarily lost. "Do you have a name, boy?"
"No."
Again the apprentice felt as though he were being studied by eyes that no longer existed. "Well, there's no denying your willingness to kill stormtroopers. I have a contact in the Senate who might be able to use your lightsaber. Where's your ship?"
The apprentice smiled slightly as the Rogue Shadow rose up behind him, its repulsors whining and ramp extending. Perfect timing, he thought. If only Kota could have seen it …
With one hand in the old man's right armpit, he guided the first of his would-be rebels into the ship.
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Well folks, that was part 7 of this story.
Part 8'll be out soon.
Hope you enjoyed.
Until next time, Grubkiller out.