by Greg Bear
"We have to land somewhere," Anakin said.
"Do it," Ke Daiv said.
Jabitha had crowded up beside Anakin to stare through the port. Suddenly she gave a sob. "There!" she cried.
They had come halfway around the peak of the mountain. Buried in a massive landslide from the higher elevations lay the ruins of a huge complex of buildings. The area had been altered so drastically, and the complex covered so completely, that they had missed it on their first circuit.
Anakin saw the spare edge of the old landing field, with its reddish black lava surface. "I'll put down there," he said.
"Where's Father?" Jabitha asked, her cheeks wet with tears.
Chapter 50
The sky mines zigged and zagged in search of prey, their contrails catching the sunset light over the clouds like flaming letters in the sky. They numbered in the hundreds of thousands, tiny highly explosive oblate spheroids equipped with fierce tracking ability and split-second maneuverability. They were forcing Shappa to drop lower and lower.
"We won't be able to stay in the air for long," he said. "A few minutes at most, and then they'll find us."
Obi-Wan said nothing for a long moment. Following the sky mines would come hunter-killer starfighters, and the air over the clouds would be filled with swift destruction. The Sekotan ship was unarmed. They wouldn't stand a chance.
"Then take her down," he said.
"They've landed on the Magister's mountain. At least they will have some protection in the palace." Shappa glared at him, challenging Obi-Wan to contradict his beliefs, his hopes.
The Sekotan ship dropped through the cloud deck, and they were surrounded by a silvery gloom. Winds whipped them this way and that before Shappa brought his craft down on a scourged prairie of bare, blackened rock. All around, jagged outcrops of twisted stone showed that a fury of destructive energies had melted and rearranged the landscape, killing all life.
Shappa removed his hands from the controls and bustled around the rear of the cabin, making checks on the equipment installed there. He came forward and found Obi-Wan still in his seat, lost in intense thought.
"Look what they did," Shappa said softly, peering through Obi-Wan's port. "What did we ever do to deserve such destruction? How could the Potentium have allowed such evil?"
Obi-Wan rose from his seat. No sense contradicting Shappa now. Didacticism-always a tendency in him-was of no use here. Shappa was an ally and had to muddle through as best he could with the beliefs that gave him strength.
"How far are we from the mountain?" Obi-Wan asked.
"About a hundred kilometers."
"And where is Charza Kwinn?"
Shappa looked at his displays. "The other ship has also descended below the clouds."
There was nothing Obi-Wan could do for now. His sense of the future was as clouded as the sky. Anakin's fate was pushed up against a knot, a fistula in the pathways to different futures. What struck Obi-Wan most was the terrifying connections between so many futures that bunched up in these next few hours. So many events whirled around his Padawan, so many interconnected lives.
H e wished he could speak with Mace Windu, Yoda. Qui-Gon. This was completely beyond his comprehension.
If he felt this way, after more than a decade and a half of Jedi training, Obi-Wan could hardly imagine how Anakin felt.
Obi-Wan closed his eyes to consult the wisdom that Qui-Gon had left behind.
The boy's trial. . . he will face it alone. You must trust in your Padawan. And you must trust in the Force. After Qui-Gon's death, in a way, you lost that trust. You relied on a sense of duty and a daily regimen of work and study and training to replace what had once been a marvelous sense of awe and wonder at the ways of the Force.
The Force disappointed you, did it not, Obi-Wan?
It allowed your Master to die.
It could allow Anakin to die.
And if it does, that will kill any chance of your remaining a Jedi.
The future could not be read. The Force was silent and compressed around them all, as if holding in a giant breath.
Chapter 51
Jabitha walked across the barren field, climbing up and over ribbons of once-molten rock. She breathed in thin, ragged jerks. The air was too thin for her. She was used to the luxurious and rich atmosphere of the northern valleys, not the desolate and dead atmosphere on her father's mountain.
"The palace should be over there," she said, her voice little more than a whisper.
Anakin's vision swam for a moment, and he worked a small Jedi technique on his blood pressure and chemistry to give himself more strength and clarity with less oxygen.
Ke Daiv stood a few steps behind them, lance blade ready. Anakin measured all the distances, estimated the times. The Blood Carver was closer to Jabitha. He could easily kill her before Anakin could reach him, and what would Anakin do to him anyway?
Bank the anger. Bank the frustration. Convert them and store the energy.
Anakin gave a small nod. Jabitha turned. "There's almost nothing left," she said. And then again, "Where's my father? Where are all the others who worked here?"
"They are all dead," Ke Daiv suggested. "Our only concern is fuel."
"There were fuel reserves near the palace," Jabitha said with a strange tone of defiance. "If we can't find the palace, we won't find the fuel!"
Anakin saw a corner of stone masonry jutting from a pile of rocky rubble about a hundred meters away. He turned to Ke Daiv. "Maybe over there," he said.
Jabitha was on the edge of collapse. The Blood Carver seemed to find the thin air no trouble at all. Anakin wondered why they hadn't noticed it when they were first taken here. Surely the palace had been in this condition already. Something had worked an even more startling deception on them.
The girl stumbled, then turned in a daze and walked for the ruin as fast as she could. Anakin and Ke Daiv followed. Anakin made sure he was closest to the Blood Carver. He tracked the motions of the lance, the yellow and red glitter of the blade in the last of the sunset light. The mountain's peak, black and deep brick red at other times, was now a ghastly orange, backed by the cryptic glyphs of the sky mines, endlessly and hungrily searching. Beyond the violently calligraphed sky rose the pinwheel of the distant companion stars, purple against the orange and red and gold.
Anakin looked over his shoulder at their ship. We haven't even given her a name yet, he thought. What would Obi-Wan call her?
Jabitha's shoulders trembled. She was expending her little remaining energy on racking sobs. "The messages were all lies. Nobody came here, he said everything was fine . . . But you!" She turned on Anakin. "You came here!"
"We saw the palace," Anakin said. "At least, we thought we did-"
"Fuel, and quickly," Ke Daiv insisted sharply. "The sky mines will drop low enough to find where we've landed. And others may come soon, as well."
"They'll sacrifice you, won't they?" Anakin said. The wall of the building loomed above them. A small door, possibly a service entrance, showed to the right, half-obscured by rubble. "They don't care what happens to you."
Ke Daiv did not dignify this with a response.
"Just what did you do to earn such disgrace?" Anakin asked. Without thinking, he tilted his head to one side, and three fingers on his right hand curled.
"I killed my benefactor's son," Ke Daiv said. "It was prophesied he would die from a severe head wound in battle. So his father beseeched the clan that his son would never fight. The clan agreed, but ordered him to go on a ritual hunt to fulfill his training. I was an orphan brought into their family, and the head of the clan appointed me to protect my benefactor's son. I accompanied him on the hunt. We fought with a wild feragriff in the ritual preserves on a moon over Coruscant." The Blood Carver's nose flaps had spread wide now, a motion Anakin had learned to interpret as uncertainty, questing for sensation, information, confirmation. He's weaker now. His past makes him weak, just like me.
Anakin saw Jabitha enter the doorway. S
he would not see.
"The prophecy came true. You killed him with a stray shot," Anakin finished the story.
"It was an accident," the Blood Carver murmured. Ke Daiv straightened. His face became sharp again, and he pushed the lance forward, poking at Anakin to get him to go through the door after the girl.
"No," Anakin said.
Sky mines jagged wildly just a few hundred meters overhead, their engines screeching in the thin air. Anakin saw another silhouette at an even greater distance a droid starfighter. Just one. The invaders were concentrating their forces in the north, but sky mines were cheap. They could be spread everywhere. In time, they might even blanket the planet. Someone might be planning to kill all living things on Zonama Sekot Jabitha, Gann, Sheekla Farrs, Shappa, Fitch, Vagno, Obi-Wan. And all the others.
"You still have honor," Anakin said. "You can still make up for what you did." But something else built inside, a shadow far thicker than the descending night. It could easily fill his being.
The Blood Carver had hurt Obi-Wan, threatened Jabitha, called Anakin a slave. For these things there was no possible redemption. The banked anger threatened to spill over, unconverted, pure and very raw, hot as a sun's core. Anakin's fingers curled tighter.
"My benefactor cursed me," Ke Daiv said.
Let it be done now. Anakin had made his decision, or it had been made for him. No matter.
Anakin let the fingers go straight.
Ke Daiv closed on the boy, swinging his lance. "Stop that," Anakin said coldly.
"What will you do, slave boy?"
It was the connection Anakin had sought, the link between his anger and his power. Like a switch being thrown, a circuit being connected, he returned full circle to the pit race, to the sting he had felt with the Blood Carver's first insult, with the first unfair and sneaky move that had sent Anakin tumbling off the apron. Then, back farther, to the dingy slave quarters on Tatooine, to the Boonta Eve Podrace and the treachery of the Dug, and to the last sight of Shmi, still in bondage to the disgusting Watto, to all the insults and injuries and shames and night sweats and disgrace piled upon disgrace that he had never asked for, never deserved, and had borne with almost infinite patience.
Call it instinct, animal nature, call it the upwelling of hatred and the dark side-in Anakin Skywalker, all this lay just beneath the surface, at the end of its journey out of a long, deep cave leading down to unimaginable strength.
"No! Stop it, please!" Anakin yelled. "Help me stop it!" The rumbling of his ascending power drowned out this plea for his master to come and prevent a hideous mistake. I am so afraid, so full of hate and anger. I still don't know how to fight.
Jabitha appeared in the doorway, eyes wide, watching the boy crouched low before the Blood Carver. Ke Daiv lifted his lance. What would have once seemed quick as lightning was now, in the eyes of the young Padawan, a slow, curiously protracted swing.
Anakin raised his hands in the twin and supremely graceful gestures of Jedi compulsion. Pure willful self flooded his tissues. The urge to protect and to destroy became one. He straightened and seemed to grow taller. His eyes became black as pitch.
"Stop it, please!" Anakin shouted. "I can't hold it back any longer!"
Chapter 52
They have many more ships than we suspected," Tarkin observed. He looked down in wonder at the battle unfolding on the planet below. Sweat appeared on his brow. Sienar, resigned to whatever might happen, took some comfort in Tar-kin's concern.
Magnified scenes of conflict spaced themselves around the command bridge of the Rim Merchant Einem. The sky mines themselves were sending signals back to their delivery ships, and the ships forwarded them to the command center.
Droid starfighters engaged countless ships rising from opening hangars in the jungle, swarms of ships like green and red insects. These defenders seemed lightly armed but highly maneuverable. Their principal tactic was to catch up with the starfighters, grasp them in tractor fields, and drag them down to impact in the jungle below. Tarkin was losing a great many starfighters this way.
"They will not escape the sky mines," he said. Indeed, many mines were finding their targets, destroying the red and green defenders before they could fly far from their concealed bases.
But Sienar saw something else was happening. It was subtle at first. The rectangular bulges in the jungle they had noticed earlier now cast long shadows as the terminator between night and day approached. Natural enough, but the shadows were lengthening faster than the lowering angle of sunlight would explain. The rectangles were rising.
Sienar estimated the tallest of them stood more than two kilometers above the jungle.
They reminded him of trapdoors slowly opening.
But he said nothing to Tarkin. This was no longer Raith Sienar's fight.
Tarkin murmured under his breath and moved his viewpoint farther south. Thousands of projected images flashed before him like revealed cards. "There," Tarkin said, a note of triumph in his voice. "There's our prize, Raith."
Parked on the extreme edge of a talus-covered field on the only mountain to rise above the southern cloud deck was a Sekotan ship. No figures were visible in its proximity. It seemed to have been abandoned.
Raith leaned forward to see the ship in more detail. It was larger than any he had heard of and different in design, as well. The very sight of it made his mouth water. "Are you going to destroy it?" he asked Tarkin bitterly. "To complete my disgrace?"
Tarkin shook his head, saddened by Sienar's mistrust. To the captain he said, "Direct sky mines away from the mountain. And let's take care of that pesty YT-1150. Put all the mines in that sector on its track." He faced Sienar with the expression of a beast of prey about to pounce. "We're going to capture that ship and take it back to Coruscant. To be fair, I'll give you credit, Raith. Some credit."
Chapter 53
The mines are dropping below the clouds," Shappa observed. "We won't be safe here much longer. But they seem to be abandoning the Magister's mountain."
Obi-Wan flexed his fingers and leaned forward in the seat. "Is Anakin still on the mountain?"
Shappa swallowed hard and nodded. "Your ship reports her passengers are outside, not visible. Her mind is young, Obi-Wan. She does not understand what is happening, and she misses contact with her pilot. But something else is causing alarm. I'm not sure what."
"The mines?"
Shappa shook his head. "I doubt it."
"If we are not safe here . . ." Obi-Wan ventured.
"Then we should attempt a rescue," Shappa concluded. "The Magister's daughter was on that ship."
Shappa raised his vessel from the dark and desolate rocky prairie and quickly ascended through the clouds. "Our sensors will warn us of immediate mines, but these ships are not designed to be weapons of war, or to understand defensive maneuvers. I will do my best."
Obi-Wan nodded, still flexing his fingers. He knew that Anakin was alive, but he also knew that something significant had happened, a minor unknotting in the boy's pathway. He could not tell if the outcome was positive or negative.
To bring back a spiritually damaged boy of Anakin's abilities might be worse than finding him dead. It seemed cruel, but Obi-Wan knew it was a simple truth. Qui-Gon would have agreed.
"The sky mines are concentrating on your YT-1150," Shappa said, studying the displays closely as they flew toward the mountain. "It is eluding them, so far."
"Charza Kwinn is one of the best pilots in the galaxy," Obi-Wan said.
Chapter 54
Jabitha walked across the landing field toward the two figures crouched next to each other. Their struggle, if struggle it had been, had lasted only a few seconds, and yet somehow they had moved into the shadow of a huge boulder, where she could barely make out their outlines. She walked slowly, fearful of what she might find. She did not want to feel the Blood Carver's lance once again, nor did she wish to find the boy dead. But she dreaded something else almost as much.
Her skin crawled at th
e thought that this young boy could have survived against so formidable an opponent.
"Anakin?" she called, a few steps away from the rock.
The Blood Carver emerged from the shadow, triple-jointed arms loose by his sides. He seemed exhausted. In the last of the daylight, his skin glimmered a deep orange color, and Jabitha's heart filled her throat. He was still alive. The boy had not moved from beneath the overhang.
"Anakin!" she called out again, her voice trembling.
Ke Daiv stepped toward her and lifted a hand. She was almost too afraid to look at his face, but when she did, she screamed. His eyes had turned white, and the flesh around his head and neck had cracked. He was bleeding profusely, and his dark orange blood dripped down over his shoulders. He was trying to say something.
Jabitha backed away, speechless with terror.
"I tried to control it," Anakin said, and emerged into the twilight. The pinwheel's purple glory illuminated them with the fading of the dusk. The Blood Carver lurched forward step by step toward the edge of the field, away from the Sekotan ship.
"Stop him," Anakin said. "Please help me stop him."
Jabitha walked beside the boy toward the pitiful figure of their enemy.
"Is he dying?" she asked.
"I hope not," Anakin said as if ashamed. "By the Force, I hope not."
"He was going to kill you," she said.
"That doesn't matter," Anakin said. "I should never have let it loose like that. I did it all wrong."
"Let what loose?"
He shook his head, trying to erase a nightmare, and grabbed the Blood Carver's arm. Ke Daiv swung about as if on a turntable and fell to his knees. Blood dripped from his mouth.
Jabitha stood before the two, the young boy with the short, light brown hair and the tall, gold-colored Blood Carver who might be dying. She shook her head in desperate confusion. "You saved us, Anakin," she said.
"Not like this," he said. "He was being brave in the only way he knew, the only way they taught him. He's like me, but he never had the Jedi to help." To Ke Daiv, he said, "Please be strong. Don't die."