by James Luceno
Cody stood to his full height and pointed toward the orchards. “We go in with the harvesters.”
Obi-Wan glanced uncertainly at Anakin and motioned him off to one side.
“It’s just the two of us. What do you think?”
“I think you worry too much, Master.”
Obi-Wan folded his arms across his chest. “And who’ll worry about you if I don’t?”
Anakin canted his head and grinned. “There are others.”
“You can only be referring to See-Threepio. And you had to build him.”
“Think what you will.”
Obi-Wan narrowed his eyes with purpose. “Oh, I see. But I would have thought Senator Amidala of greater interest to you than Supreme Chancellor Palpatine.” Before Anakin could respond, he added: “Despite that she’s a politician also.”
“Don’t think I haven’t tried to attract her interest, Master.”
Obi-Wan regarded Anakin for a moment. “What’s more, if Chancellor Palpatine had genuine concern for your welfare, he would have kept you closer to Coruscant.”
Anakin placed his artificial hand on Obi-Wan’s left shoulder. “Perhaps, Master. But then, who would look after you?”
Despite their two pairs of powerful legs and the saw-toothed pincers that extended from their lower mandibles, the broad-bodied harvesters were single-minded creatures, complaisant except when threatened directly. From their flat heads sprouted looping antennae, which served not only as feelers, but also as organs of communication, by means of powerful pheromones. Each beetle was capable of carrying five times its considerable weight in foliage and branches. Similar to the Neimoidians who had domesticated them, their society was hierarchical, and included laborers, harvesters, soldiers, and breeders, all of whom served a distant queen that rewarded effort with food.
Obi-Wan, Anakin, and the commandos who made up Squad Seven had to run to keep up with the beetles as they hurried their fresh-picked loads from the orchard to the cave-like entrance to a natural mound at the base of the redoubt. The beetles’ carapaces afforded them cover from surveillance sorties by battle droid STAP patrols. More important, the harvesters knew safe routes through mined stretches of cleared ground that separated the trees from the fortress itself.
The beetles’ frequent habit of lowering their heads to exchange information with hivemates moving in the opposite direction demanded that the Jedi and troopers keep between the harvesters’ rear legs. Hunched over, Obi-Wan ran with his lightsaber in hand but deactivated. As the shielded royal residence came into view, a certain uneasiness seemed to take hold of the creatures, disrupting the ordered nature of their columns. Obi-Wan suspected that outbound beetles were relaying accounts of potential perils to the nest posed by the Republic’s unrelenting barrage. In response to the crisis, soldier beetles were joining the procession, quick to shepherd nervous strays back into line.
Anakin’s greater height required him to remain farther back, almost directly under the beetle’s pug tail. To Obi-Wan’s right ran Cody, with his teammates trailing behind and flanking him.
Soldier beetles or no, discipline was breaking down fast.
A harvester providing cover for one of the commandos veered from the column before it could be guided back into line. Instead of hurrying under another beetle, the commando stuck with the stray, and quickly found himself out in open ground.
Obi-Wan felt a ripple in the Force an instant before the harvester’s right foreleg tripped a land mine.
A potent explosion fountained from the rocky ground, blowing away half the creature’s foreleg. The commando threw himself to one side, rolling out from under a trio now of pounding legs, only to have to bob and weave as the harvester began to run in frantic circles, seemingly determined to trample the commando underfoot. A glancing blow from the beetle’s left rear leg tipped the commando off his feet. Confused, the harvester lowered its head and butted at the hard white object in its path, again and again, until there wasn’t a smooth area left in the commando’s armor.
The harvester’s distress was having an impact on the rest of the beetles, as well.
While most were pressed tightly together, others were suddenly scurrying away from the main column, sending the soldier beetles to high alert. Tripping two mines in succession, a second harvester was lifted off the ground by the ensuing explosions. With that, the column dissolved into disorder, with harvesters and soldiers running every which way, and commandos and Jedi alike doing their best to protect themselves.
“Stay close to the ones who are still headed for the nest!” Anakin shouted.
Obi-Wan was doing just that when he noticed that the trampled commando was back on his feet and staggering toward him, tapping the side of his helmet with the palm of his gloved hand, and obviously indifferent to where he placed his booted feet. Barreling straight for the maw of the mound, a harvester bore down on the commando, clamping its pincers around his waist, then lifting him high into the air. Summoning the last of his reserves, the commando twisted his body back and forth, but was unable to break free.
All at once Anakin was out from under his protective harvester.
Lightsaber tight in his gloved hand, he bounded across the denuded landscape toward the captive commando, the Force guiding him to safe landings among the mines. The harvesters might have taken him for a demented turfjumper were they not so fixed on safeguarding their loads and reaching the security of the nest.
Anakin’s final leap dropped him directly in front of the harvester that had seized the commando. With one upward stroke of his lightsaber he rid the beetle of its pincers, freeing the commando, but also sending the soldier beetles into a frenzy. Obi-Wan could almost smell the pheromone release, and decipher the information being exchanged: The area is rife with predators!
From the brood rose a shriek so high-pitched as to be barely audible, and a stampede was under way. Mines began to detonate to all sides, and out from billowing smoke above the orchard canopy swarmed more than a hundred STAPs.
A Neimoidian version of the agile repulsorlift airhook used as an observation vehicle throughout the galaxy, each Single Trooper Aerial Platform was equipped with twin blasters that delivered more firepower than the stubby-barreled models carried by infantry droids.
From maximum range the swarm rained energy bolts on everything in sight, dropping harvesters in their tracks and turning the rocky ground into a killing field. Explosions erupted in jagged lines as scores of mines were detonated. Supporting the commando trooper with his left arm, Anakin warded off blaster bolts on the run. The rest of Squad Seven supplied cover, blowing STAPs out the sky with uninterrupted fire.
Cody motioned everyone into a shallow irrigation trench just short of the mound. By the time Obi-Wan arrived, the troopers were deployed in a circle, and continuing to pour fire into the sky. Anakin slid into the trench a moment later, lowering the commando gently to the muddy slope. Squad Seven’s medical specialist crawled over, removing the commando’s ravaged utility belt and deeply dented helmet.
Obi-Wan gazed at the face of the injured clone.
A face he would never forget; now a face he couldn’t forget.
All these years later, he could still recall his brief conversation with Jango Fett, on Kamino. He glanced at Cody and the rest. An army of one man … But the right man for the job.
The clones’ rallying cry.
The injured commando had already prompted his armor to inject him with painkillers, so he remained pliant while his chest plastron was removed and the black bodyglove undergarment knifed open. The harvester’s pincers had crushed the armor into the commando’s abdomen. His skin was intact, but the bruising was severe.
With only half the original army of 1.2 million in fighting shape, the life of every clone was vital. Blood and replacement organs—what the regular troopers referred to as “spare parts”—were readily available—“easily requisitioned”—but with the war reaching a crescendo, battlefield casualties were on the rise and treat
ed as high priority.
“Not much I can do for him here,” the medspec told Anakin. “Maybe if we can get an FX-Seven air-dropped—”
“We don’t need a droid,” Anakin interrupted. Kneeling, he placed his hands on the injured commando’s abdomen and used a Jedi healing technique to keep the clone from going into deep shock.
A sudden noise from above caught everyone’s attention.
Scores of boulder-sized objects were spewing from openings in the lower ramparts of the fortress. Cody pressed a pair of macrobinoculars to his eyes and gazed upward.
“That’s no ordinary avalanche,” he said, passing the glasses to Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan raised the glasses and waited for the lens to autofocus.
Rolling toward the trench at better than eighty kilometers per hour were some of the most feared of the Separatists’ infantry arsenal.
Droidekas.
Known also by the fearsome title destroyer droids, droidekas were rapid-deployment killing machines produced by an alien species that encouraged mayhem at every opportunity. A combination of sheer momentum and sequenced microrepulsors allowed the bronzium-armored droids to roll like balls then unfurl in a blink as tripoded gunfighters, shielded by individual deflectors and armed with paired, twin-barreled, high-output blasters.
Since the shields were powerful enough to resist lightsabers, blasters, even light artillery bolts, the proven strategy for dealing with droidekas was simply to run from them.
More so, because surrender was never an option.
But Anakin had another idea.
“Comm fire support for an artillery strike,” he ordered Cody, loud enough to be heard above STAP and DC-15 fire. “Do it now.”
Cody was more than willing to comply. After all, the order had come directly from “the Hero with no Fear,” as Anakin was sometimes known. “The Warrior of the Infinite.” There was, though, a chain of command to maintain, so Cody looked to Obi-Wan for confirmation.
Obi-Wan nodded. “Do as he says.”
The commando called for his comm specialist, who splashed through the shallow water and flattened himself alongside Cody. When the spec had provided needed coordinates, Cody opened a frequency to the fire support base and spoke in a rush.
“To FSB from Squad Seven. We’re taking continuous fire from STAPs in sector Jenth-Bacta-Ion, and are about to be buried under destroyer droids deployed from the redoubt. Request immediate artillery support at coordinates accompanying transmission. Recommend tactical electromagnetic pulse airburst, followed by SPHA-T barrage.”
“Pulse weapons don’t discriminate, Commander,” Obi-Wan thought to point out.
Cody shrugged. “It’s the only way, sir.”
“Tell them we’ve got a wounded trooper for the Rimsoo,” Anakin said. The term stood for “Republic Mobile Surgical Unit.”
Cody relayed the message. “Warn the evac pilot that he’ll be setting down in a hot area. We’ll mark a safe landing zone with smoke, and leave two behind to assist.”
The assistant squad leader moved his right hand through a series of gestures. When the gestures had been repeated down the line, the commandos removed their helmets and began to deactivate the electronic systems built into their armor.
To a clone, they hunkered down in the fetid water.
A screaming came from the south.
Then: a nova-bright flare of white light, followed two seconds later by a roar that turned Obi-Wan’s eardrums to mush. A shock wave spread from the ramparts, down onto the clear ground at the foot of the mound and out over the already blazing orchards. Above the trench, half the droidekas deployed prematurely from ball position and began to tumble down the slope in a tangle of limbs and weapons. Behind the trench, STAPs fell like stones, plunging from the sky into the burning trees.
What harvesters remained alive ran in dizzying circles, spilling their precious loads.
Now from the south came an infernal wail as SPHA-Ts—the Republic’s walking artillery—loosed lasers on those droidekas that had survived the pulse weapon. Deprived of shields and unable to fire, they melted like wax in the gushes of radiant energy that struck the slopes.
Still without helmet, Cody stood up, signaling with both hands.
Obi-Wan interpreted the gestures: Sixty count, then suit up and break for the entrance to the nest.
He prepared by calming himself.
For all their reliance on droids, for all their infatuation with high technology, for all their inborn cowardice, greed, and guile, Neimoidians had a soft spot for their youth—their seven formative years as grubs, struggling for limited food in communal hives, discovering early on the benefits of duplicity and self-regard. The fungus foodstuff of those early years was as dear to them as adults as it was to them as hatchlings, and no wonder, since it was that same fungus that had found favor with species galaxywide, and from which the Neimoidians had evolved into a wealthy, spacefaring society, with ships enough to attract the eye of the notorious Trade Federation and, ultimately, droids enough to equal an army.
It would have been natural to assume that the fungus—prized for its medicinal as well as nutritional value—was somehow concocted from manax foliage gathered by the harvesters. But in fact the leaves and branches provided little more than a growth medium. Enzymes produced by the beetles, coupled with the dank conditions within the burrows and grottoes of the nest mounds, encouraged the rapid growth of a product that required only a modicum of refinement to become palatable.
Elsewhere during the sieges of Deko and Koru Neimoidia, Obi-Wan had never visited a fungus farm, but no sooner had he and Anakin dashed through the cavelike opening to the nest than the briefings he had received more than ten standard years earlier came back to him in a flash.
Here were the partly masticated leaves, carefully arranged in layers; the clumps of branches and other impurities; the laborer beetles; the droid overseers; the conveyors and similar contraptions devoted to sorting and transport … Not a Neimoidian in sight, but that was consistent with their doctrine that exertion of any sort was anathema. In the deep recesses of the mound, untouched by sunlight, the starter fungi—molds, mildews, and sickly-white mushrooms—would be undergoing treatments with natural and synthetic growth-acceleration agents. And higher up, in what constituted the basement of the citadel, the matured end product was probably being consumed by grubs, or packed and readied for shipment.
Cody ordered the squad to secure the area. Those in the rear were still taking sporadic fire from STAPs, but the droid pilots couldn’t get close to the entrance because of the bodies of dead beetles piled outside.
Squad Seven’s medspec hurried over to Obi-Wan and Anakin.
“Sirs, I recommend you keep your rebreathers close at hand. Odds are we won’t have to penetrate any deeper into the nest, but there’s always a chance of encountering free-floating spores in other areas.”
Obi-Wan quirked his brows together. “Toxic, Sergeant?”
“No, sir. But the spores have been known to have an adverse effect on humans.”
“Adverse how?” Anakin asked.
“The effect is most often described as ‘dislocating,’ sir.”
Obi-Wan glanced at Anakin. “Then I suggest we do as he says.”
The fingers of his left hand were prizing the small, twintanked rebreather from its pouch on his utility belt when a volley of blaster bolts streaked into the grotto. Caught in their upper chests, two troopers were knocked off their feet.
The source of the sudden fire was the mouth of a narrow side tunnel that could be sealed by an overhead door. Anakin was already racing for the tunnel, lightsaber gripped in both hands, deflecting most of the bolts back through the entrance.
Obi-Wan leapt to one side, raising his blade to deal with two bolts that got past Anakin. The first he returned toward its source; the second, he parried at a deliberately downward angle. Striking the grotto’s hard-packed floor, the deflected bolt ricocheted to one wall, then to the ceiling, to the other wall,
and back to the floor, from which it caromed squarely into the control panel that operated the tunnel door.
Showering sparks, the device shorted out, and a slab of thick alloy dropped from its pocket in the wall, sealing the tunnel with a loud thud!
Switching off his lightsaber, Anakin cast a complimentary glance over his shoulder.
“Nicely done, Master.”
“The beauty of Form Three,” Obi-Wan said with theatrical nonchalance. “You should try it sometime.”
“You’ve always been better at evasion than I have,” Anakin said. “I prefer more straightforward tactics.”
Obi-Wan rolled his eyes. “Master of understatement.”
“General Kenobi,” the comm spec said from across the grotto. “Provincial recon reports that Viceroy Gunray and his entourage are heading for the launching bays. They’re protected by super battle droids, a group of which are now closing on our position.”
Anakin swung to Obi-Wan. “One of us has to divert the droids.”
“One of us,” Obi-Wan repeated. “Haven’t we been through this before?”
“The beauty of our partnership, Master. You lure the bodyguards away, I capture Gunray. It hasn’t failed us yet, has it?”
Obi-Wan compressed his lips. “From a certain point of view, Anakin.”
Anakin scowled. “Fine. Then I’ll be the bait this time.”
“That makes no sense,” Obi-Wan said quickly, shaking his head. “We play to our separate strengths.”
Anakin couldn’t restrain a smile. “I knew you’d listen to reason, Master.” He singled out four commandos. “You’ll come with me.”
“Sir!” they said in unison.
Obi-Wan, Cody, and the rest of Squad Seven set out for the turbolift shafts. Obi-Wan hadn’t gone five meters when he stopped and swung around.
“Anakin, I know we’ve got a score to settle with Gunray, but don’t make it personal. We want to take him alive!”