by Greg Bear
Chapter 55
Anakin Skywalker understood the nature of the Force-the many natures of the Force-better than a century of teaching in the Temple could have taught him. And he understood now that his trial was far from over. He had to remove Jabitha from the mountain and get back to Obi-Wan, and he had to wrestle with what he had discovered about himself.
But the wrestling would have to wait. A Jedi with responsibilities had to put away the personal and get on with his duty, no matter what it might cost him.
The entrance to the ruin was dark. Dust sifted from a shattered stone lintel. He wiped the dust from his eyes arid crawled into the darkness, until the rubble cleared and he faced a long, black corridor.
His senses had become marvelously acute, sharper and more intuitive than ever before. Despite the darkness, the corridor offered no mysteries. It was simply a hallway in what was left of the palace. He saw himself at the end of the hallway, turning right.
And when he reached the end of the hallway and turned right, he saw ahead to another corridor, larger, its thick roof supporting much of the mass of talus and rubble that covered the ruins. That corridor led to the chamber where Obi-Wan and Anakin had first met the Magister.
Jabitha was in the chamber already, so it was not far away. He walked there, his footsteps sure but his thoughts a painful riot.
The ceiling shuddered with a sound like a dying bantha. Other groans and shrieks of rock grinding against rock echoed down branching hallways, and somewhere, very close, rock tumbled into a corridor and sealed it off, then crushed it completely. A blast of air and dust blew out over him like the penultimate breath from the dying palace.
He stepped over tendrils that crept along the cracked floor, new tendrils. Sekot still lived here, still felt its way through the broken shafts and voids. There was still life here, and something like the voice of their ship, soft in his thoughts, almost drowned out by the tumult of Ke Daiv's death.
Anakin thought for a moment that he saw Vergere gleaming softly ahead, and wondered if she had died on Zonama and left behind a spirit to guide him. But the image was not there when he reached that point, and Anakin shook his head. He was dreaming, hallucinating. Perhaps he was going insane.
His mother had many waking dreams, disturbing and strange, she had once told him. That had scared him a little.
He came to the circular chamber with its high, thickly vaulted roof, the skylight now collapsed, and a thick pillar of rubble fanning out. Jabitha stood by one side of the rubble, on her knees, her head bowed.
Anakin approached her. She looked up and held a powered torch beam on his face. She had found the light somewhere in the rubble, perhaps in her rooms in the palace.
Sticking out between two large carved stones was an arm, most of the flesh gone now. On one finger gleamed a thick steel ring set with a pentangle of small red stones. Anakin recognized one of the old signet rings once handed out to Jedi apprentices.
"He's dead," Jabitha said. "Only the Magister could wear this ring. It meant he was linked with the Potentium."
"We have to go," Anakin told her softly. The corridors echoed with more groans, more shrieks and rumbles. The floor beneath them trembled.
"He must have died during the battle with the Far Outsiders," Jabitha said. She shone the torch beam around the chamber, looking for any others. The chamber was deserted. "But who was sending his messages?"
"I don't know," Anakin said. Then once again, from the corner of his eye, he caught a gleam of light in the darkness, away from Jabitha's torch. He turned and saw the feathered Jedi Knight standing on her reverse-articulated legs, feet splayed as if prepared to leap, staring at him with no apparent emotion.
Jabitha could not see her. Nor did the girl see the figure become the Magister, her father. The transformed figure stepped forward.
Anakin felt no fear. He felt instead in the presence of another young person very like himself, a friend. This made him consider once again the real possibility that he was going insane.
"I sent the messages," the figure told Anakin.
The girl remained crouched over her dead father. Anakin bent and touched her head, and she was comfortable, then stood and faced the image.
"Who are you?" he asked, his voice cracking.
"A friend of Vergere," it said."I think my name, to some, is Sekot."
Chapter 56
To prepare the way for a retrieval ship to land on the mountain, Tarkin ordered a swarm of droid starfighters to take any other ships in the area.He watched with satisfaction from his lofty orbit, Sienar at his side, as the starfighters harried the outmoded YT-1105 and another Sekotan ship.
"We'll sacrifice one to gain another," Tarkin said.
"Take care with the larger Sekotan vessel," Sienar said, though he was not at all sure that Tarkin was willing to hear reason."It may be exceptional."
"Sir," the captain said, "we are losing most of our starfighters over the inhabited valleys in the north.Their defenses are relentless and apparently without limit.And there are-"
"Quiet!" Tarkin shouted."I think you overestimate these primitives.Once we are done with our primary mission, we will sweep up the rest by main force.No more delicacy.If they do not submit, we will destroy them utterly."
Chapter 57
Anakin stayed close by Jabitha, as much for his sake as for hers. The atmosphere within the chamber was thick with dust. Dust sifted from the ceiling, puffed from the outer halls as ceilings collapsed elsewhere in the ruin.
Tendrils on the floor moved with deliberation toward Jabitha, encircled her. Sekot itself would protect the Magister's daughter. In some fashion Anakin could not yet fathom, the figure before him regarded the Magister's children as brothers and sisters.
"You are the Jedi apprentice," the image said.
Anakin nodded.
"And your master is elsewhere, fighting the new invasion."
"I feel him out there," Anakin said.
"How I would love to learn the secrets of the Jedi! What can you teach me?"
"Who are you?" Anakin said. Like Obi-Wan, he was now finding mystery and delay to be a real irritation.
"I don't know for sure. I'm not very old, but my memories go back billions of turnings. Parts of me saw the pinwheel grow in the sky."
Anakin thought of Vergere's message contained within the seeds. "You're the mind I sensed, aren't you?" he asked. "The voice behind the seed voices."
"They are my children," the image said. "They are cells in my body."
"You really are Sekot, then, aren't you?" Even under the present circumstances, he could not help but feel awe and wonder.
"I tried to be the Magister, but I can't continue. I grieve for him. He was the first to know me. The Magister was going to reveal me to his people, but the Far Outsiders arrived. I had never known anything like them. The Magister's peoples were gentle."
"Can you see around the entire planet? What else is happening outside?"
"I see wherever my parts reach. I am almost blind down here. They burned me down here. I've never known such pain. The Magister told me to burn them back, so I helped him make weapons. But I did not know what to believe."
"Why?" Anakin knelt beside Jabitha. The tendrils encircled them, rustling faintly across the floor.
"He told me I was the Potentium, the force behind all life. He thought I reached everywhere. I don't. I'm just here. He saw what he wanted to see, and told me what he wanted to hear me speak into his own ears. He said there was no evil in the universe, only good. I did not see how wrong he was until he died. Then I reached out with the weapons we had made, and I killed. The Magister had said that would be good, but I knew it was not."
Anakin sucked in his breath. "Just like me," he said.
"I killed more, but it was still not enough. It was Vergere who drew away the Far Outsiders. She did not kill them; she persuaded them. I wish she was still here, but there is only a little part of her. The message to you and your master."
"Did
she know the Magister was dead?"
"No one knew, until now."
Anakin held out his hand to fend off a questing tendril.
The image seemed to be hurt by this. "Why do you distrust me? I want to protect her."
"I don't distrust you. But I don't think either of us knows what we're doing. We should get her outside and wait for my master to arrive."
"It is you I feel closest to," the image said. "The Magister's peoples made me their servant, and you were a slave. I did what they told me to do. You did what your owner told you to do. So like me! I tried to be like the others, but I am not like them. My mind is made up of so many parts, spread out over so much of my world. And your mind is so different from the others. I have no real parents, and your parents-"
Anakin interrupted with a stammered question. "What m- made you wake up? Why did you suddenly appear, after bil lions of years?"
"I had to come into being to communicate with the new ar rivals, the Magister's peoples. All of me came together, reached up to talk with them, and I was-"
A large chunk of the roof collapsed on the far end of the chamber, showering them with splinters and shards of broken stone. "We have to go now!" Anakin said. "Can you help me?"
The image emerged from the swirling dust, glowing faintly in the darkness. "I will shore up the hallways. You will carry her outside."
Tendrils grew from trunks that pushed up through cracks in the floor. They spread ahead of Anakin, forming red and green vaults overhead, as he picked up Jabitha and slung her over his shoulder. As a deadweight, Jabitha was not easy to carry. He was beginning to regret putting the girl to sleep, but it had been the best thing to do at the time.
She came out of her trance as they passed through the last open doorway, and struggled to get down from his shoulder. "Where are we?" she cried out, and then stared up at the pinwheel in the night sky and the rolling blanket of stars beyond.
A shadow passed over the landing field and their Sekotan ship. It blocked out the pinwheel and then dropped down to cover the ship like a predator pouncing on its prey. This was not another Sekotan ship, and it was not the Star Sea Flower. Anakin heard the whine and roar of repulsor engines pounding against the rock.
It was a sky-mine delivery ship, doing double duty now as a landing craft.
A shaft of light appeared in one side of the hulk. Troops marched down the ramp in quick tight cordons and surrounded Anakin and Jabitha. A squad circled the body of the Blood Carver.
Two officers walked down the ramp with more dignity, as if they had all the time in the universe. Anakin thought they might be brothers, they so resembled each other, though they wore quite different uniforms. Both were thin and carried themselves with assurance and perhaps too much pride. Both looked arrogant. He knew instantly, with instincts he had developed long before becoming a Jedi, that they were very dangerous. They turned toward the boy and the girl.
In the ordinary scheme of things, neither would have cared much for the fate of two children. The taller of the two, by a spare centimeter or two, lifted his hand and whispered something into the other's ear.
"Him," the shorter man said, pointing imperiously at Anakin. "Leave the girl here."
Anakin tried to stay with Jabitha. She reached out for him, and their fingertips gripped for an instant before a bulky soldier dressed in a Republic Special Tactics trooper uniform pulled him away. For a second, the boy's anger threatened to flare again, but he saw they were not going to harm Jabitha, and he could not kill them all.
And would not if he could.
"My name is Tarkin," the shorter of the officers said to him in deeply mannered tones. "You're the Jedi boy who collects old droids, no? And marvel of marvels, you're now the pilot of this ship?"
Anakin did not answer. Tarkin rewarded his silence with a smile and a pat on the head. "Learn some manners, boy." Two soldiers hurried him, struggling, into the innards of the dark ship.
"What about Ke Daiv?" Raith Sienar asked.
"A failure from the beginning," Tarkin said. "Leave him here to rot."
Jabitha yelled for Anakin, but the ramp closed with a hiss and a metallic bang. He felt the ship rise abruptly and climb. Tarkin and Sienar immediately escorted him to the bay where the Sekotan ship had been hoisted and stowed in a catchall harness.
"Stay with your ship, boy," Tarkin said. "Keep it alive. You are very important to us. The Jedi Temple awaits your speedy return."
Chapter 58
They'll keep the sky mines away from that ship," Obi-Wan told Shappa as they ducked in and out of the mountain ravines at the cloud line. "No one trusts them in close quarters not to go after friendlies."
Three droid starfighters still doggedly followed, but Shappa's craft was too swift and maneuverable to be caught.
"They'll take the Magister's daughter!" Shappa said grimly. He pushed his hand even deeper into the console, which wrapped its tissues up to his elbow, shoving back his sleeve.
"I don't think so," Obi-Wan said, brow furrowed in intense concentration. He closed his eyes, feeling ahead for all futures, for the knot rapidly coming unwound, for the strands of fate whirling off in all directions, not unlike the pinwheel that filled the sky.
"You're right," Shappa said as they leapt up over the rim of the field and circled. "They've left her behind, and she's alive!"
"Move in and retrieve her," Obi-Wan said. "Leave me on the field."
"But the starfighters will kill you!"
"Perhaps," Obi-Wan said. "But there's nothing more you can do for me, and nothing I can do for you."
Shappa opened and closed his mouth, trying to think of something appropriate to say, then nodded and concentrated on bringing his ship down.
There was no time for farewells. One moment the Jedi Knight sat beside him, and the next, just as the hatch opened, he was gone like a twist of smoke in the wind.
The next thing Shappa knew, the Magister's daughter dropped through the hatch, kicking and screaming.
"Now go!" Obi-Wan shouted after her, and slammed the ship's hull with the flat of his hand.
Shappa did not need encouragement. Starfighters buzzed up over the rim of the landing field. Jabitha held on for dear life as Shappa lifted the ship away.
Obi-Wan Kenobi flung aside the bandages that impeded his free motion and simultaneously drew forth his lightsaber. The blade hummed into angry green life. Once, the weapon had belonged to Qui-Gon. Holding it in his hands, Obi-Wan felt he now had the strength of two. He needed every gram of hope, and if sentiment gave him strength, helped him focus and emulate his former Master, then so be it.
The Force did not disagree. Qui-Gon had had a special relationship with the Force, and he had taught his apprentice well.
"Come on," Obi-Wan whispered as he stalked across the field. Two Starfighters had remained to see what prey they could find on the mountain. The other had gone off after Shappa's craft. "Come on," he repeated a little louder this time.
He walked up to the Blood Carver's body. It lay in a crumpled heap surrounded by boot prints. Something about it troubled him, but there was little time.
As Obi-Wan rose from his stoop, a starfighter dropped from the sky, laser cannons lighting up the shattered landscape. Obi-Wan deflected two of its blasts with his blade, but their force nearly ripped the lightsaber from his hands. A third blast pulsed brilliant red to one side and hit the Blood Carver's corpse square.
Ke Daiv received his ritual cremation then and there.
The second starfighter joined the first, curving high up into the sky.
From out of nowhere, as if sneaking suddenly between veils of stars, Charza Kwinn's old YT-1150 screamed over the field, guns yelping out quick bolts that shattered the two Starfighters before they could even think about a return run. Their smoking remains slammed into the side of the mountain and started a rumbling avalanche that spilled down over the palace ruins. Boulders tumbled across the field, huge and implacable, worse than any phalanx of warriors.
&nb
sp; Obi-Wan raised his blade and swung it over his head as a beacon.
The Star Sea Flower whipped up on end and glided backward like a falling leaf just meters above the smoking, grinding flow of rock and dirt. Its loading ramp dropped like a jaw. Obi-Wan vaulted over the edge of the ramp, and the ship lifted him away just as the last of the landing field was reclaimed by the mountain.
Obi-Wan sloshed through the dank corridors to the pilot's cabin. Food-kin scampered out of his way, snapping with excitement.
"They have your Padawan," Charza Kwinn bristled, bending over backward to peer at the Jedi. "Sit down and buckle up."