by James Luceno
He nodded. “Power failure. Brief, but more than enough time for you to get out of here.”
“Us,” Anakin amended. “You’re coming along.”
“I appreciate that.” He frowned in uncertainty. “Hope I wasn’t wrong in figuring that you two will be able open the door … manually, I mean.”
“We can open the door,” Obi-Wan assured him.
“How long before the power fails?” Anakin asked.
“An hour from now.” Travale glanced at K’sar. “What about him?”
Anakin stood up and crossed the room. “I know you’re not interested in small talk, but we think we may have a way out of here. Does that interest you?”
The Bith’s lidless black eyes grew considerably larger. “Yes. Yes! Thank you.”
“Just be ready.”
“Take the tunnel to the left of the guard station,” Travale was telling Obi-Wan when Anakin returned. “Keep taking lefts until you reach a stairway, then follow that to the docking level.”
“You’re going a different way?” Anakin said.
“Someone has to deactivate the tractor beam, or your ship’s not leaving. Two levels below this one there’s a power coupling station. I know just enough to disable it temporarily.”
“You’re not going alone,” Obi-Wan said.
Anakin grinned at him. “I believe it’s your turn …”
Obi-Wan didn’t argue. “That means K’sar goes with you. Don’t allow him out of your sight, Anakin.”
Travale nodded toward the cell block corridor. “We’ll still have the guards to deal with.”
“Don’t worry about them,” Anakin said.
Spreading his hands, he snapped the cuffs from his wrists. Obi-Wan did the same, then snapped Travale’s open.
Travale smiled broadly. “I love a good plan.”
Anakin and Obi-Wan were standing by the door when the cell’s grime-encrusted illuminator faltered and died. Obi-Wan shoved his hands sideways through the air, and the door retracted.
Travale shook his head in wonderment. “It never ceases to amaze me.”
Anakin swung to K’sar. “Now! Hurry!”
The four of them moved into the unlit hall.
“Emergency power should come on shortly,” Travale said.
Ahead of them they could hear the five guards toggling switches on the console and speaking in excited voices. Anakin wasn’t halfway to the anteroom when one of the guards appeared at the end of the narrow corridor. The Aqualish’s huge eyes allowed him to see in the dark, but not as well as the Bith, nor as well as the Jedi. Before the guard could realize what was happening, his raised blaster was soaring down the corridor into Anakin’s hand. A Force push from Obi-Wan sent the Aqualish flailing back into the anteroom and slamming into the turbolift wall.
The rest of the guards hurried out from behind the darkened console to counterattack. By then Obi-Wan and Anakin were on them, dropping them with punches, side kicks, Force pushes. Bodies sailed across the anteroom, tumbled over one another, smashed into display screens. One Aqualish managed to get off a shot, but the blaster bolt missed anyone during its mad carom around the room.
The fracas was over almost before it began.
In the red glow of emergency lights, K’sar cast a dumbfounded look around.
“You’re Jedi!”
“Two out of three,” Travale said.
“But … what are you doing here—on Escarte?”
Anakin pressed his forefinger to his lips with elaborate seriousness. “Republic business.” Then into K’sar’s hands he pressed the blaster he had summoned from the guard.
K’sar stared at the weapon. “But—”
“I won’t need it.”
“Here’s where we part company,” Travale said to Anakin. “Remember: stay left until you reach the stairway.”
“Where are you sending him?” K’sar asked.
“Docking Bay Thirty-Six.”
The Bith nodded. “I know the way.”
Travale chuckled. “This just gets keeps getting better and better.” He swung back to Anakin. “K’sar will also know the way to Docking Bay Forty. That’s where we’ll be waiting for you. Escarte Control won’t be able to bring the tractor beam back online immediately, and judging by the way you fly, you shouldn’t have much trouble dodging the patrol craft. But good luck, anyway.”
“Thanks, but there’s no such thing.”
As Travale and Obi-Wan were running off, Anakin noticed that one of the turbolift cars was descending.
“Security detail coming to check on the guards,” K’sar said. Anakin nodded toward the dark corridor they were supposed to take. “Go!”
K’sar’s long legs propelled him at a fast clip. But instead of going left as Travale had advised, he turned right at the first intersection.
Anakin grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. “This isn’t the way we were told to go.”
“The captain’s a newcomer to Escarte,” the Bith said, short of breath. “I’ve been here for fifteen years. I know every route through this rock.”
Anakin regarded him in silence.
“Trust me, Jedi, I have nothing to gain by lying to you and remaining here.”
Anakin tapped him into motion. Several minutes of running brought them to a rickety stairway, which K’sar didn’t hesitate to climb.
“I’d still like to know what you did to end up in detention,” Anakin asked from behind K’sar.
“And I wish I could tell you,” he said. “My superior—a Gossam—said I had made an accounting error that would cost the Commerce Guild a small fortune.”
“You were always an exec?”
“I started out as a technician—design, installation, the whole gamut. Gradually, I worked my way up.”
“Up, maybe. But you’re on the wrong side in this war. Your entire species.”
K’sar stopped to catch his breath. “Clak’dor Seven had little choice,” he said. “The Separatists were offering unrestricted access to hyperspace routes, better deals on trade goods, no interference … As for me, I was already working for the guild. One day it was business as usual, the next—on the heels of what happened on Geonosis, at any rate—the guild was suddenly at war with the Republic.” He raised his gaze. “We go left at the top of the stairs.”
Anakin heard a note of indecision in his voice. “You don’t sound as sure as you did.”
“I haven’t been in this area for a long while, but I’m certain we can reach the docking level.”
The rock walls of the corridor into which they raced bore the scars of the giant drills that had hollowed Escarte. Light and oxygen were scant, and the uneven floor was slippery. Anakin clamped his right arm around the Bith’s narrow waist to help him along.
“Wait, wait!” K’sar said suddenly.
“What’s wrong?’
K’sar eyes filled with dread. “I made a mistake! We shouldn’t have come this way!”
Anakin prevented him from moving. “Too late to turn back.”
“We have to! You don’t understand—”
K’sar words were swallowed by the sound of servomotors and hydraulics. Around a bend in the gloomy tunnel raced a dwarf spider droid, its long-barreled blaster cannon already sweeping side to side, in search of targets.
Someone’s coming,” Obi-Wan warned Travale.
They were standing on a narrow gantry that accessed the control panel for Escarte’s number three tractor beam coupling station. Six meters high, the tower rose from a circular platform that projected from the wall of a deep air shaft. They’d had to wait for full power to return to the area before seeing to the task of disabling the tractor beam. Initially, Travale had made a few mistakes, but he had sorted through his confusion and was almost done.
Obi-Wan peered around the corner of the tower in the direction of the voices he had heard. Three Geonosian security guards were approaching the coupling station from a corridor on the far side of the shaft.
“Ne
ver a lightsaber when you need one,” Travale whispered. “Can you divert them somehow?”
Obi-Wan considered his options, then made a flicking motion with the fingers of his right hand. An unidentifiable sound issued from deeper in the corridor the guards had taken. Whirling, the three Geonosians hurried off to investigate.
Travale shook his head back and forth in appreciation of Obi-Wan’s skill. “It’s a wonder the war isn’t over yet.”
“Too few of us.”
Travale studied Obi-Wan for a moment. “Is that the reason?”
Obi-Wan touched Travale on the arm, and motioned with his bearded chin to the tower. “No time to waste.”
The Jedi watched over Travale’s shoulder as he dialed the coupling power feed to zero.
“These things are the future,” Travale said. “Fill a ship with enough tractor beam arrays and you could prevent an enemy from jumping to hyperspace.”
“There aren’t ships large enough.”
“There will be,” Travale said. “To ensure that another war doesn’t happen.”
Mainstay of the Commerce Guild’s mining operations, the dwarf spider droid was a hunter-killer. The spider didn’t stand much taller than a Trade Federation battle droid, but it was agile and equipped with two powerful blaster cannons. Perched at the juncture of four splayed legs, the hemispherical body was dominated by two huge circular photoreceptors, which appeared to be fixed on Anakin and K’sar as the droid rushed in to make the kill.
Anakin threw K’sar to one side and rolled as the dwarf spider fired. Two glaring bolts gouged a trench in the hewn floor of the tunnel, and the report of the cannon resounded deafeningly from the walls. The head pivoted, photoreceptors finding Anakin, and the weapon discharged again.
Anakin flipped himself away. Calling on the Force, he swirled his hands in front of him to prevent the intense heat from engulfing him. Rolling once more, he tried to get underneath the droid’s striding legs, but the spider anticipated him, skittered backward, and loosed another burst.
Anakin leapt.
Propelled by the Force, as well as the force of the explosion, he struck the arched ceiling and fell hard to the floor. Blacking out for a moment, he awoke to find the droid charging toward him, reorienting the smaller of its cannons to place him in the crosshairs. Catapulting to his feet, he flew forward, intent on ripping the power cells from beneath the droid’s dome. No less determined, the droid countered by retreating and rearing up. Falling short of the mark, Anakin curled his body, counting on momentum to carry him forward.
The spider continued to retreat, then dropped back on all fours, traversing its cannon.
Feigning a sidestep, Anakin hurled himself completely under the droid, but still couldn’t find cover. He heard the sound of the spider’s dome rotating, then the sound of the muzzle of the long cannon hitting the scabrous wall. Realizing that it had entered a section of the tunnel too narrow to allow for a half turn, the droid stamped its legs in frustration, then began to back itself into the wider stretch.
Without a clear plan in mind, Anakin chased it, heard the dome begin to pivot once more, then the sound of a hand blaster set on full automatic.
Ten meters down the corridor, K’sar was on his feet, the heavy weapon held in front of him in a two-handed grip, firing directly into the spider’s bulging red photoreceptors and power cells. Confused, the droid tried desperately to spin around, but there wasn’t room. Loose rock calved from the walls as the barrel of the cannon struck again and again. All the while, the Bith continued to advance, emptying the blaster’s power cell. An electronic shriek tore from somewhere inside the spider, and sparks began to geyser from its perforated dome. The four legs danced in anger for a moment longer, then stopped, and the tunnel began to fill with smoke. Finally the droid collapsed, the tip of its cannon slamming into the floor at K’sar’s feet.
Anakin eased around the smoking machine and gently removed the blaster from the Bith’s shaking grip. The droid’s dome pinged as it cooled; a steady susurration escaped the blaster’s gas chamber.
“How much farther?” Anakin asked after a moment.
“We’re close,” K’sar said in a daze. “Half a kilometer or so past the bend.”
“Can you make it?”
K’sar nodded, and they hurried through the final stretch, emerging from a tunnel opening at the rear of the docking bay. A hundred meters away the cruiser was sitting just where the tractor beam had left it. Few guards were about, and most of them were battle droids.
Anakin took a moment to study the disposition of the droids, then turned to K’sar, who seemed to have recovered from the ordeal in the tunnel.
“No matter what I do, I want you to head straight for the boarding ramp. Don’t stop running until you’re inside the ship, understand?”
K’sar nodded.
Anakin leapt out of the corridor, deliberately calling attention to himself to distract the droids from firing at K’sar. Evading blaster bolts with perfectly timed jumps and rolls, he got close enough to the droids to wave some of them into others, toppling them as if they had been picked up by a strong wind. From one, he called a blaster rifle into his own hands, and mowed down those that were still on their feet.
Following K’sar up the boarding ramp, he rushed into the cockpit and began to power up the cruiser’s defensive systems. Bolts from the droids’ blasters ricocheted from the fuselage and transparisteel panels. Traversing the cruiser’s fore and aft cannons, Anakin fired, burying the droids under huge chunks of ferrocrete blown from the walls and ceiling.
When the flight systems were online he left the cockpit to search for K’sar, who was sitting on the floor of the main hold, panting.
“Why aren’t you raising the ship?” the Bith said. “Guild corvettes are probably already on the way.”
Anakin stepped closer to him, his expression darkening visibly. “You and I need to talk first. And either you answer my questions, or I jettison you here, and let the Gossams do what they will with you.”
The Bith’s eyes expanded. “Talk? About what?”
“A hyperwave transceiver you designed fourteen years ago.”
“Fourteen years ago? I can barely remember last week.”
Anakin glared at him from beneath an angrily furrowed brow. “Think harder.”
“Why are you doing this to me? I just saved your life!”
“Remind me to thank you later. Right now you’re going to tell me about the transceiver. It would have been a special order. More than the usual secrecy. You would have been well paid. You installed it in a mechno-chair.”
K’sar started. His wrinkled mouth puckered and he stared at Anakin in terror. “Now it all comes together—my arrest and imprisonment, the death sentence! The transceiver … that’s what brought you here.”
“Who placed the order?”
“I suspect you already know the answer.”
“How did he contact you?”
“Through my personal comlink. He needed someone of great skill. Someone willing to follow his every instruction without question. The designs he sent were like nothing I had ever seen. The end result was almost … artistic.”
“Why did he allow you to live—afterward?”
“I was never sure. I knew I’d been useful. I thought he might require additional devices, but I never heard from him again.”
“If you’re right about your arrest, that means he has been keeping an eye on you. Tell me the rest and we might be able to keep you from his long reach.”
“That’s everything!”
“You’re holding something back,” Anakin said in a flat, menacing tone. “I can feel it.”
K’sar gulped, and clutched at his neck. “I built two of them!”
“Who received the second one? One of the Separatist leaders?”
Swallowing with difficulty, K’sar said: “It went to Sienar!”
Anakin blinked in surprise. “Raith Sienar?”
“To Sienar Advanced Project
s. It was designed for some sort of experimental spacecraft they were building.”
“Who was the craft meant for?”
“I don’t know—I swear, Jedi, I don’t.” K’sar paused, then added: “But I knew the pilot Sienar hired to deliver the ship.”
“Knew?”
“I don’t know if she’s still alive. But I know where you could begin to look.”
Obi-Wan and Travale negotiated the cofferdam that linked Escarte’s air lock to a docking ring just forward of the cruiser’s tri-barreled thruster fantail.
Stepping into the main hold, Travale gave a shout of joy.
“Good to be alive!”
Obi-Wan glanced at Thal K’sar, thinking the Bith might feel the same. Instead, K’sar was curled up on the hold’s worn acceleration couch. Obi-Wan hurried on to the cockpit and strapped into the copilot’s seat.
“Any problems reaching the ship?”
“The usual close calls,” Anakin said evasively. “Obviously you were successful at disabling the tractor beam.”
“Not a skill I expect to draw on again, but, yes, thanks to Travale.”
Anakin glanced at the console, waiting for the cofferdam telltale to go off, then called on the thrusters to move the cruiser away from Escarte. Off to port, Obi-Wan saw two Guild corvettes dead in space.
“And here I was certain we weren’t out of this yet.”
Anakin shrugged. “Anticlimactic.”
Obi-Wan regarded him for a moment. “K’sar seemed rather … subdued. Were you able to question him?”
Anakin busied himself with the controls. “Briefly.”
“And?”
“We have a new lead.” Before Obi-Wan could reply, Anakin said: “Hyperspace coordinates coming in.”
Banking widely, the cruiser left Escarte and sluggish light behind.
Coruscant had places one couldn’t persuade a droid air taxi driver to take one, even with the promise of a free year of lubrication baths at Industrial Automaton.
The labyrinth of dark back streets south of Corusca Circus.
Daring Way, where it crossed Vos Gesal in upper Uscru.
Hazad’s Skytunnel in the Manarai Uplift.