Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II by Sean Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

first time, in the middle of combat, it came to him that he was truly alive. He wasn’t a shadow lurking in a hole somewhere, dreaming of being. The Force was with him, and he was free. He was free, and he had a mission.
    The potentate was long gone. Starkiller tore his way into the turbolift shaft, bypassing security codes by means of sheer power, and rode to the upper levels. The transparisteel walls revealed the hanging city in all its glory, curving away from him to his left and right, but he wasn’t interested in taking in the sights. He studied the buildings looking only for tactical information. The vision of Kota had hinted at an open space and a large gathering of people. The scans he had taken from orbit hadn’t showed anyplace like that. The largest structure in the city was the Imperial barracks, a circular building at its direct center.
    When the turbolift reached the summit and the doors opened on the city, he was greeted by the distant roaring of a crowd.
    He stepped out and listened closely. The roar was coming from the barracks.
    He set off on foot, running swiftly through the streets. They were only sparsely populated, with the occasional green-skinned Neimoidian scuttling by, determinedly staying out of his way. He could hear no audible alarms, but had no doubt that they were ringing somewhere. That suspicion was confirmed at the sound of booted feet stamping along the streets behind him.
    He shifted to an aerial route, climbing to the top of the nearest building and leaping from it to the next in line. That way he could avoid the roads entirely. He felt weightless as he swung from handhold to handhold with the Force thrilling through him like the purest oxygen. The city’s lower levels clustered around the bases of several broad, circular rowers, connected by looping tramlines, and it was a simple matter to travel from one to the other into the city’s heart, as light as air itself.
    When the Imperial security forces got wise to his plan and activated gun emplacements in the city’s upper levels, things became considerably more interesting.
    Dodging weapons fire from tram-track to building and back again, Starkiller felt a familiar calm creeping over him. It was a calm born not of peace or tranquillity, but of violence and anger. Countless hours of meditating on the dark side, fueling the negative energies that Darth Vader encouraged him to embrace, made this kind of combat trance almost second nature to him. Fighting people was harder than fighting PROXY droids, but there was a greater pleasure in it too, more of a challenge. A warrior who fought only rationally and without emotion fought exactly like a droid. People were stranger, more unpredictable, and therefore fundamentally more difficult to defeat. He swung his lightsabers as though in slow motion. He watched reflected energy bolts creep between him and his targets with a laziness that belied their deadly power.
    Once, in his other life, he had been sent to Ragna III to quell an uprising of the hostile Yuzzem. Barely twelve years old, he had been betrayed by the weapons his own Master had given him. All had failed on landing, along with his starship, leaving him armed only with the Force and his wits. Singlehandedly, he had fought to the nearest Imperial installation and escaped off-world, expecting either rebuke for failing his mission or praise for having survived. He had received neither-and the memory of his puzzlement came to him now, as clear as the crystal in the heart of his first lightsaber. The lesson hadn’t been to survive, he had eventually come to understand: it had been to come to terms with his own destructive power. In his wake, he had left dozens of Yuzzem injured or dead. Until it had been forced upon him, he had never known just what he was capable of-and just how little praise he needed to keep on doing it.
    Later in that other life, Starkiller had raged against all the deaths he had caused in the service of his dark