“You have returned.”

Starkiller looked around. He couldn’t pinpoint the origin of his former Master’s voice.

“As you see,” he said, moving slowly forward in a confident but wary stance.

“It was only a matter of time.”

“Where is Juno?” he asked. The last he had seen of her, she had been on the roof of the spire. She could have been moved anywhere since then.

A dark figure lunged at him from the shadows. Starkiller blocked a powerful slash to his head, and retaliated with a double sweep to Darth Vader’s legs. The Dark Lord leapt upward, out of reach of his weapons, and Starkiller followed.

When he landed on the first platform, Darth Vader was nowhere to be seen.

Something moved to his right. He spun to face it, lightsabers upraised.

A slender form stepped out of the shadows.

“I knew you’d come,” said Juno, smiling. “At last, we are together again.”

Almost, he lowered his weapons. It was her. She held out her arms to embrace him. He longed to run to her. But an instinct told him something was wrong.

A flash of memory—a memory of a vision—came to him. He had seen a vision of Juno on the bridge of the Salvation, when the bounty hunter had captured her. Everything about that vision had come true, right down to the last detail. PROXY had been taken out, along with her canid second in command. She herself had been shot in the shoulder.

This Juno was uninjured.

“Stay back,” he said, tightening his defenses.

Juno’s smile faded. Her arms came down. When she moved, she did so with a speed that wasn’t human, reaching behind her back with both hands to produce two Q2 hold-out blasters. With blank-faced, depersonalized lethality, she came for him, firing both blasters at once.

Starkiller deflected the shots right back at her, and she staggered backward with a cry. Then he was on her, bisecting her abdomen with his left lightsaber and taking her head off at the neck with his right.

As the body fell in pieces to the metal floor, showering sparks, Starkiller stood over her, breathing heavily.

The illusion died, revealing the wreckage of a PROXY droid at his feet.

“It’s a lot easier to fight the Empire when it’s faceless,” he heard her say from the past, “when the people whose lives are ending are hidden behind stormtrooper helmets or durasteel hulls. But when they’re people we knew, people like we used to be …”

He spun, catching the faintest echo of an in-drawn, artificial breath from behind him, and caught Darth Vader’s lightsaber on the downstroke. They stood that way, locked blade-to-blade, for a moment, and then Starkiller pushed the Dark Lord back. He swept one lightsaber on a rising arc that would have taken off Darth Vader’s left arm while the other he flicked sideways, hoping to catch his opponent in the chest unit.

Vader blocked both blows, then leapt a second time, the next platform up.

“How much harder is it going to get?”

Starkiller scowled.

“Are you having second thoughts?” he had asked Juno that same day—the day after he had seen the vision of his father on Kashyyyk. Her answer had been immediate: No.
But he had sensed an uneasiness within her, just as his former Master had sensed uneasiness within him shortly afterward. Their loyalties were being tested. Principles, too. Such testing was never easy.

Darth Vader was playing a very obvious game now. Starkiller could see it, and he would not be deflected from his course.

He jumped to the second level, and there came face-to-face with Bail Organa, then Kota, then Mon Mothma, then Garm Bel Iblis. When all the leaders of the Rebel Alliance lay dead at his feet, their droid bodies exposed beneath treacherous holograms, Darth Vader attacked again. His blows were swift and economical, and the threat no less than it had ever been, but Starkiller sensed more was to come. Darth Vader would kill him, yes, without hesitation, but he would rather turn him first.

On the fourth level, he came face-to-face with his own father, and struck him down without hesitation. Dreams and memories had no power over him anymore.
He spun to face the attack he had come to expect from the real Darth Vader, full of confidence and surety. The Dark Lord fell back under his blows, and this time, when he leapt for safety, Starkiller telekinetically pulled him back down. His former Master sprawled before him, lightsaber raised defensively. He slashed the hand holding it away, and then plunged his second lightsaber deep into his chest.

With a gasping, wheezing moan, Darth Vader fell back and dissolved into another PROXY droid.

Unsurprised, Starkiller stepped back and looked around for the real Darth Vader. He could see or hear nothing, but his senses tingled with an acute and insistent message.

Above him.

He somersaulted upward and landed in a crouch, ready for anything.

“You are confident,” said Darth Vader. “That will be your downfall.”

The Dark Lord was standing out of Starkiller’s reach. Instead of attacking, he gestured at the rows of cloning tanks beside him. Lights flickered on inside them, revealing row after row of identical forms. Clad in stripped-down version of his former training suit and attached via tubes to complex feeders and breathers, they hung weightlessly in transparent fluid, twitching occasionally in their sleep.

Starkiller felt a shock of recognition jolt through him. These weren’t stormtroopers. They were him. Incomplete, and oddly warped from true, but definitely him.
Vader gestured again, and the clones’ eyes opened.

In them Starkiller saw nothing but hatred, anger, confusion, betrayal, madness, and loss.