The Force Unleashed by Sean Williams

atmosphere now, and there is a lot of
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    interference. PROXY is picking up what might be droid signatures heading in that
    direction."
    "You think it could be a welcoming committee?"
    "Maybe, I-whoa!" A blast of static was followed by a relieved gasp from Juno.
    "What's wrong?" he said into the comlink.
    "Nothing-now. I just got too close to one of those magnetic lanes, and an unstable
    derelict exploded. Everything's under control. You just worry about keeping your
    boots clean."
    He half smiled and kept moving through the teetering piles of garbage along a
    stretch that resembled a canyon with sheer walls and squelching floor. Only then,
    after Juno's brief communication, did he notice an odd thing. Among all the
    technological leavings, he hadn't spotted a single droid part yet. Not one. If this
    was ¨ line droids came to die, as PROXY had said, what happened to their bodies?
    He sensed movement ahead and slowed his pace to an ordinary walk, then a more
    stealthy creep as voices became audible, too. Not human voices: a mixture of
    electronic babble and high-pitched, liquid Rodese. Droids and Rodians, then.
    He assumed that his orders remained unchanged from his last mission: Leave no
    witnesses.
    With a flourish, he activated his lightsaber and kept it at the ready.
    * * *
    THE FIRST DROID HE ENCOUNTERED was a spindly thing with one photoreceptor, one
    manipulator, a poorly tuned dual repulsor and power plant, and very little else. It
    was tugging at a cable protruding from an almost sheer cliff face of garbage. As its
    repulsor Whined, small avalanches tumbled from above, bouncing off its metal shell
    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