by Greg Keyes
That took a certain amount of finagling, including forging a code that would allow him to fly without a check that might alert Uncle Luke or anyone else who would try to stop him.
Because Uncle Luke was wrong, this time. Anakin could feel it in his very center. The Jedi trainees were in grave danger; Talon Karrde would not get there in time. It might already be too late.
It was strange that Uncle Luke still insisted on thinking of Anakin as a child. Anakin had killed Yuuzhan Vong. He had seen friends die and caused the deaths of others. He was responsible for the destruction of countless ships and the beings who crewed them, and that only scratched the most recent skin of the matter.
It was a blind spot the adults in his life had, an ambivalence and a denial. They didn't understand who he really was, only what he appeared to be. Even his mother and Uncle Luke, who had the Force to help them.
Aunt Mara probably understood—she had never really been a child, either—but even she was blinkered by her relationship with Uncle Luke; she had to take his feelings into account, as well as her own.
Well, there would be anger. He could explain to Uncle Luke about the feeling he had in the Force, but that might only alert the Master to Anakin's certainty in this
matter. Even if Uncle Luke could be convinced to send someone now, it might be someone else, someone older. But Anakin knew it had to be him, he had to go. If he didn't, his best friend was doomed to a fate much worse than death.
It was the only thing in his life he was really sure of right now.
"Cleared for takeoff," the port control said.
"Power it up, Fiver," Anakin murmured. "We've got someplace to be."
CHAPTER THREE
When the stars rushed back into existence, Anakin put his XJ X-wing into a lazy tumble and cut power to everything but sensors and minimal life support. Ordinarily he wouldn't play it so cautious; after all, someone would almost have to be watching for the hyperwave ripples of an X-wing entering the system to have any chance of detecting it. But given the feeling in his gut, there might just be someone doing that.
The roll and yaw he'd put the X-wing in wasn't random, but was designed to give his instruments a full accounting of the surrounding space in the least possible time. While the sensors did their job, Anakin reached out with the sense he trusted most—the Force.
The planet Yavin filled most of his view, its vast orange oceans of gas boiling into fractal, elusive patterns. Its familiar face had marked the days and nights of much of his childhood. The praxeum—his uncle Luke's Jedi academy—was located on Yavin 4, a moon of the gas giant. He could remember watching Yavin in the night sky, a colossal mirage of a planet, wondering what could be there, pushing his evolving Force senses to explore it.
He'd found clouds of methane and ammonia deeper than oceans, hydrogen so stressed by pressure it became metal, life crushed thinner than paper but still thriving, cyclones heavier than lead but faster than the winds of any world habitable by humans. And crystals, sparkling Corusca gems climbing those titan winds, spinning in an
ancient dance, capturing what light they could find in the thinner upper atmosphere and gripping it tight in their molecules.
He saw none of this as one might with eyes, of course, but over the nights, through the Force he had felt them, and with references to the library gradually understood them.
In his imagination he had seen more. Pieces of the first Death Star, which had met its end in these very skies, pounded into monomolecular foil by fierce pressure and gravity. Older things, relics of Sith, and species even more lost and distant in time. Once a planet like Yavin swallowed a secret, it wasn't likely to give it up again. Given the other secrets that had turned up in the Yavin system— and the Sun Crusher Kyp Durron himself had once managed to pull from the belly of the orange giant—that was for the best.
Just beyond the vast rim of Yavin, a bright yellowish star winked—Yavin 8, one of the three moons in the system blessed with life. Anakin had a friend there, a native of that world who had trained briefly at the academy and returned home. He could feel her, very faintly. Yavin 4 was just around the rim, where he had other friends. In a way, the whole system was like a familiar room to Anakin, the sort he could walk into and immediately know if something was out of place.
And something felt very out of place.
In the Force he could feel the Jedi candidates, for they were all strong with it. He could feel Kam Solusar and his wife Tionne, and the ancient Ikrit, not students but full-fledged Jedi. These were seen as through a cloud, suggesting they were at least trying to maintain the illusion that hid Yavin 4 from the casual eye.
But even through that, one presence shone brilliant, made brighter by familiarity and friendship. Tahiri.
She felt him, too, and though he could not quite hear any actual words she might be trying to send, he did feel
a sort of rhythm, as of someone talking quickly, excitedly, without pause for breath.
One corner of Anakin's mouth turned up. Yes, that was Tahiri, all right.
What felt wrong was a little nearer and much weaker. Not Yuuzhan Vong, for they could not be felt in the Force, but someone who shouldn't be there. Someone slightly confused, but with a growing sense of confidence.
"Hang on, Fiver," he told his astromech. "Get ready to run or fight in a hurry. It might just be Talon Karrde and his crew here ahead of schedule, but I'd sooner bet against Lando Calrissian in sabacc than to count on it."
affirmative, the display blinked.
They tumbled into sensor range, and his computer built a silhouette from the magnified image.
"That's not so bad," he murmured. "One Corellian light transport. Maybe it is one of Karrde's bunch." Or maybe not. And maybe there were a hundred Yuuzhan Vong ships on the other side of the gas giant or Yavin 4, invisible to his Jedi senses and hidden from his sensors. Whatever the case, waiting around wasn't going to improve matters. He powered up, corrected his tumble, and engaged the ion engines.
He activated his comm system and hailed the stranger. "Transport, acknowledge."
For a few moments, he got nothing, then the audio crackled. "Who is this?"
"My name is Anakin Solo. What are you doing in the Yavin system?"
"We're Corusca gem miners."
"Really. Where's your trawler?"
Another pause, then words underlined with a bit of anger.
"We can see the moon now. We knew it was here all along. Your Jedi sorcery has failed you."
THE TRANSPORT IS ARMING WEAPONS SYSTEMS, Fiver
noticed. Anakin nodded grimly as the other vessel swung toward him.
"I'm only warning you once," Anakin said. "Stand down."
For an answer, he got a blast from a laser cannon, which at that distance he managed to avoid as easily as he might deflect a blaster shot with his lightsaber.
"Gee," Anakin muttered. "I suppose that says it all." He opened his S-foils. "Fiver, give me evasive approach six, but I still want the stick just in case."
ACKNOWLEDGED.
He dropped toward Yavin 4 and the transport at full thrust, spinning and dancing as he went, and when he felt his target firmly enough in the Force, he sliced the night of vacuum with ruby red. The transport returned fire and began its own evasive maneuvers, but that was like a bantha trying to dodge a mace fly.
They had good shields, though. As Anakin completed his first pass, his opponent was still essentially untouched. To make matters more interesting, four winks of blue flame and his instruments agreed that the transport had just fired proton torpedoes at him. Anakin had been preparing to turn for another pass; instead he continued his noseward plunge toward the moon.
"Four proton torpedoes. These guys really don't like us, Fiver."
the transport seems hostile, Fiver acknowledged. Anakin sighed. Fiver was a more advanced astromech than R2-D2, but he missed his uncle's droid's personality at times. Maybe he ought to do something about that.
Two laser blasts hit his shields in quick succession, but they did their job. On his tracker, the proton torpedoes continued to close as Anakin met resistance from the atmosphere. He plunged on, and the ship began to vibrate faintly. His nose and wings were starting to heat up from the upper atmosphere. If he didn't time this exactly right, he would scatter all over the jungle kilometers below.
When the lead torp was almost on him, he cut his engines and yanked the nose up. The atmosphere, still thin, was nevertheless able to give the XJ X-wing a good strong slap, hurling him away from the moon. Servos whined and something somewhere made a startling ping. Using the momentum from the atmospheric skip, Anakin turned further spaceward, blood rushing from his head as the g's mounted, then he kicked in the engines again.
Behind him, the proton torpedoes didn't fare as well. They tried to turn after him, of course. Two didn't make it, and continued plunging moonward. The other two skipped along wildly different courses than Anakin and would never find him again before running out of fuel.
"Nice try," Anakin said grimly. Now he was climbing uphill, out of the gravity well, his lasers pumping a steady rhythm. He took another hit from the enemy's more powerful gun, and for an instant the lights dimmed in the cockpit. Then they flared back to life as Fiver rerouted, and Anakin took a hammer to the transport. Their shields faltered, and he slagged their primary generator. Looping around them nose to tail, he drilled laser turrets, torpedo ports, and engines.
Then he tried the comm again. "Ready to talk now?" he asked.
"Why not?" the voice from the other end replied. " You can still surrender if you want."
"That's—" Anakin began, but Fiver interrupted.
HYPERSPACE JUMP DETECTED. 12 VESSELS HAVE ARRIVED, DISTANCE 100,000 KILOMETERS.
"Sith spit!" Anakin muttered, bringing his sensors to bear.
They weren't Yuuzhan Vong ships, he saw that immediately, just a motley collection of E-wings, transports, and corvettes.
They were hailing him. He opened the link.
"Unidentified vessel, this is the Peace Brigade," a voice
crackled. "Stand down and surrender, and you won't be harmed."
They were too far away to hit him. Soon they wouldn't be. Anakin closed his S-foils, rolled, opened the throttle, and raced toward the distant viridian of Yavin 4.
Anakin vaulted from the cockpit of the X-wing into silent near darkness. A twilight line of illumination in the distance was the entrance he had flown through into what had once been a part of an ancient Massassi temple complex, much later the central hangar for the Rebel fleet, and which now saw little use at all, since most ships landing at the academy set down outside.
Anakin's flight boots scuffed the ancient stone surface, and the sound grew around him into the hushed beating of enormous wings. He smelled stone and lubricant and more faintly the musky jungle outside.
Someone was watching Anakin from the darkness.
"Who is that?" a voice asked, each word stretching to fill the abyss.
"It's me, Kam. Anakin."
A faint glow appeared, and then a bank of light panels came on. Some ten meters away Kam Solusar stood, hooking his lightsaber back into his belt.
"I thought it felt like you," Kam said. "But there's been an unknown ship in orbit for several standard days now. We've been trying to keep them confused."
"Peace Brigade," Anakin explained. "And the one ship has friends now, about twelve of them. And they aren't confused anymore."
He'd been walking toward Kam while he spoke, and suddenly his old teacher swept forward, clasping his arm. "It's good to see you, Anakin. And you? You're alone?"
Anakin nodded. "Talon Karrde is on the way with a flotilla. He's supposed to evacuate you and the students. Uncle Luke wasn't expecting the Peace Brigade to show up so soon, I guess."
Kam's eyes narrowed. "But you were, weren't you? You came here without permission."
"I came against orders, actually," Anakin corrected. "That's not important now. Getting the students to safety, that is."
"Of course," Kam agreed. "How long before the Peace Brigade can land?"
"An hour? Not long."
-And Karrde?"
"He could be days."
Kam grimaced. "We can't hold out here that long."
"We might. We're all Jedi."
Kam snorted. "You need a sense of your limitations. I have a sense of mine. We might do very well, but we'll lose kids. I have to think of them first."
They were approaching the turbolift when the door hissed open and ejected a blond-and-orange blur. The blur smacked Anakin at chest height, and he suddenly found surprisingly strong arms wrapped around him in a fierce embrace. Bright green eyes danced centimeters from his own.
He felt his face go warm.
"Hi, Tahiri," he said.
She pushed back from him. "Hi, yourself, great hero-irom-the-stars who's too good to keep in touch with his best friend."
"I've—"
"Been busy. Right. I know all about it—well, not all about it because we get the news so late here, but I heard about Duro, and Centerpoint, and—"
She stopped suddenly, either because she saw it in his face or felt it in the Force. Centerpoint Station was a sensitive subject.
"Anyway," she went on, "you won't believe how boring it's been without you. All the apprentices have gone off, and that just leaves these kids—" She stepped away, and for the first time, he really saw her.
Whatever she detected in his eyes cut her off in midsen-tence. "What?" she asked instead. "What are you looking at?"
"I—" Now his face felt like it had been grazed by blasterfire. "You look . . . different."
"Older maybe? I'm fourteen now. Last week."
"Happy birthday."
"You should have thought of it then, but thanks anyway. Dummy."
Anakin found himself suddenly unable to meet her eyes. He dropped his gaze. "You're, uh, still barefoot, I see."
"What did you expect? I hate shoes. I only wear them when I have to. Shoes were invented by the Sith to keep our delicate toes in anguish and misery, I'm sure of it. Did you think just because I grew a centimeter or two I'd start torturing my feet?"
She looked up at Kam suspiciously. "What's he doing here, anyway? I know he didn't come to see me."
Anakin flinched at the hurt he heard in that.
"Anakin's come to warn us of trouble," Kam replied. "In fact, you'll need to do your catching up later."
"Really? Trouble?"
"Yes," Anakin said.
Tahiri put her hands on her hips. "Well, why didn't you say so? What's going on?"
"We need to talk to Tionne and Ikrit," Kam told her, continuing forward into the turbolift.
"Now," Anakin added, following him.
"But what's going o«?" Tahiri shouted at their suddenly retreating backs.
"I'll explain on the way," Anakin promised.
"Fine." She ducked into the lift just as the door was closing.
"The Yuuzhan Vong warmaster basically put a price on our heads," Anakin said. "On all our heads, all the Jedi. He announced that if what's left of the New Re-
public will turn over all of its Jedi to him—and Jacen especially—he won't take any more planets."
"Boy, that sounds like a lie," Tahiri said.
"Doesn't matter. People believe him. Like the people in the ships approaching right now."
"They want to turn us over to the Yuuzhan Vong? Let them try!"
"Don't worry, they will."
The door opened and they emerged onto the second level. Kam started down the main corridor and then through a series of passages that were utterly familiar to Anakin, though they all seemed somehow narrower than when he had last seen them. The Massassi temple that housed the academy had once seemed impossibly huge. Now it seemed merely large.
They reached the central area, and twenty-odd faces turned toward them. Human, Bothan, Twi'lek, Wookiee— more than a dozen species were
represented. All were quite young except one—Tionne, Kam's wife, a graceful silver-haired woman with pearl-white eyes. Her eyebrows lifted in surprise and her lips in pleasure.
"Anakin!" she said.
"Tionne," Kam said gently but urgently, "we need to talk."
"Anakin!" Sannah, a girl of thirteen with brown hair and yellow eyes, waved at him. Even younger Valin Horn was waving, though he wasn't shouting.
"He's busy!" Tahiri told them. But when Anakin went to talk with Kam and Tionne, Tahiri came along.
"Tahiri—" Kam began.
"Oh, no," she said. "You aren't leaving me out of this."
"I wasn't going to," Kam said gently. "I was going to ask you to find Master Ikrit and meet us in the conference room."
"Oh. Okay."
She whirled off down the corridor on bare feet.
Tahiri was back with Ikrit only moments later. The old Jedi Master padded into the room on all fours, his long floppy ears dragging the ground. His normally bright eyes seemed a little dull to Anakin, and he felt an inexplicable pang.
"Master Ikrit."
"Young Anakin. It is good to see you," Ikrit replied. "Though you bring troubling news."
"Yes." He raced through the details once again, for Ikrit and Tionne.
"They would take our children?" Tionne murmured, more darkly than was her wont.
"The Peace Brigade? Absolutely. Tionne, it's bad for Jedi out there right now."
"I understand," she said, then clenched her fist. "No, I don't understand. Has the galaxy gone mad?"
"Yes," Kam said softly. "It's an old madness, war."
"You don't have any ships, do you?"
"No. Streen went with Peckhum in the supply ship."
"Whereto?"
"Corellia. He should be back soon. Though I suppose they won't, now."
"We'll have to hide them here, then," Anakin said. "Where?"
"Down the river! The cave beneath the Palace of the Woolamander," Tahiri offered. "Master Ikrit's cave."
Anakin raised his eyebrows. "That's a good idea. They'd be really hard to find there, especially if the Peace Brigade doesn't start looking right away."
"What do you mean by that? " Kam said, his voice suddenly cautious. "Why would they delay the search?"