by Greg Bear
"The sky is still full of mines," Obi-Wan said. He touched his set of controls lightly. His fingers sank into the panel, and rows of small green lights flashed around his hands. Impulses passed up his arms, and he was directly connected with the ship and with Anakin, as well. The ship fed him her specifications and characteristics. In a few seconds, he learned almost all a pilot needed to know-but Anakin had spent hours attached to the ship, and his expertise was much greater. There is only one pilot.
"I think it's best if I just supervise," Obi-Wan said.
"You can keep track of what's going on down below. Sekot talks to the ship while we're in range."
"Sekot?"
"The mind Vergere was talking about."
"Vergere?" Obi-Wan was at a loss.
Anakin quickly explained.
The ship skipped lightly along the upper atmosphere near the equator, reentered with six quick shudders, and shed her friction-generated heat.
"She likes being warmed that way," Anakin said.
"I can tell. She's frisky."
"She's great." Anakin could feel relaxation and reassurance smoothing up along his shoulders, into his neck and back. He sighed and wriggled in the seat. Being connected with the ship was like conversing with an old friend, and they had so much gossip to catch up on.
She almost made him forget the last few hours.
But Tarkin's forces were not about to let them go. All the sky mines and most of the starfighters that had fled the ruined mountain were now massing directly west of them, and another tide of mines was dropping from the east. They were about to be enveloped once again in devious, automated death.
Above, a tight-packed ceiling of starfighters flowed in like a storm. Whatever damage the Rim Merchant Einem had sustained had not reduced its ability to command and control.
Anakin could easily imagine the grimly determined face of Tarkin, tracking them with gray hunter's eyes.
"We have to go lower."
"The factory valley," Anakin said. "Our ship says the canopy has withdrawn and they've stopped manufacture."
Obi-Wan could piece together the ship's message, but not as quickly as Anakin.
"But they've been stockpiling a lot of ships, Obi-Wan. And something else ..."
"What?"
"She says the settlers are going to escape."
Obi-Wan narrowed one eye. "Everybody, in one big ship?"
"That's what she seems to think. Could they make something that big?"
"With the Jentari, I don't see why not. But it would take days to assemble all the settlers, even if they were willing to go."
Starfighters climbed from behind a low chain of hills and fanned out in a V behind them. Anakin accelerated and dropped down to the level of the tampasi, as he had done earlier when Ke Daiv rode beside him.
The starfighters tracked close behind, weaving around the taller boras.
"There it is," Anakin said. The factory valley's concealing canopy had shrunk away, exposing the basalt floor and leaving the stone pillars thrust up like snaggled peg teeth.
The sky over the valley was alive with the still-raging battle between the Sekotan defenses and yet more starfighters.
"It looks very narrow from up here," Obi-Wan said.
"It is," Anakin said.
Obi-Wan kept track of the Sekotan ships defending the planet. They came in a bewildering variety, none larger than sixty or seventy meters in any dimension, and none as sleek or fast as their ship. But all pursued starfighters with impressive determination, clamping them in implacable jaws and bringing them down to the tampasi, or to the valley floor, where they exploded in brilliant red flashes and arcing showers of metal debris. Smaller craft took on the sky mines by simply ramming into them.
"They don't have pilots," Obi-Wan said.
"I think Sekot is the pilot. It's controlling all of them."
Obi-Wan was still absorbing the idea of a planetwide mind, but he did not doubt his Padawan.
"It's going to be real close," Anakin said. "Any other ship and we'd get creamed for sure."
"They're forming up all along the valley," Obi-Wan observed. "We have about three minutes until we reach the end." He suddenly accessed different eyes, and seemed to rush along the valley walls well ahead of them, seeing patterns of enemy ships in much greater detail. The tampasi was supplying their ship with its own sensory data, and the ship was translating for her human occupants.
"Don't you just love her?" Anakin said softly.
"She's showing us we don't have a chance," Obi-Wan observed. "More starfighters from orbit, and more mine delivery ships-"
"Never give up!" Anakin reminded his master.
Pillars of brilliant light rose into the sky, three to the north, one to the south. The air all down the valley pulsed with an immense pressure wave. Starfighters overhead were blown high into the stratosphere and churned as if with a giant paddle. Only by staying within a few meters of the valley floor did their ship maintain her course.
The terminator between day and night was sweeping toward them, brightening one wall of the valley with what, in other circumstances, would have been a lovely yellow dawn glow. Clouds rushed to fill in the wake of the pressure wave, and they, also, caught the dawn glow, which painted them with an uncanny purple and gold aura.
Yet to the north, the dawn was interrupted by what looked at first like steep mountain peaks shooting up from the planet's crust. They were too regular and smooth to be mountains, however.
They were vanes of some sort, and they looked oddly familiar to both Anakin and Obi-Wan.
"The ship says if we don't want to go with them, we'd better get out of here," Anakin said. "We'd better find some way to go into a solar orbit. And fast."
Obi-Wan, using all the new sources of vision, examined the vanes from many angles. They're hyper drive field guides-and they're over three hundred kilometers high! And the shafts of light- those are the plasma cones of engines. Huge engines.
He looked across the console at his Padawan.
Another pressure wave shot down the valley and shook the ship. Boras all along the rim were being uprooted and tossed to the bottom of the valley.
"This is insane," Obi-Wan said. "We don't know where they'll go."
"Or if they can survive," Anakin said.
"Let's take our chances up there."
The starfighters were in disarray, their sensors blinded by the sudden shafts of light rising beyond the valley. Cracks formed in the valley floor, and magma rose sluggishly. The entire crust was strained by the force of the huge new engines.
"We'll have to maneuver through a lot of mines," Anakin said.
"Do it." Obi-Wan frowned in concentration, trying to see where all the pathways were going, where their tiny path might converge with much greater events in the immediate future. But nothing was clear.
Anakin brought the Sekotan ship up above the valley walls just as another funnel of searing brilliance scorched a hole through the atmosphere a hundred kilometers north, incinerating all in its path, friend and foe alike. The light seemed to blossom at its base, then darkened to smoky orange and went out, and a wall of debris pushed outward. If that was an engine, it had just failed, but it had cleared a path for them into space.
Anakin bared his teeth, expecting to die at any moment-
"Never give up!" Obi-Wan reminded him.
-And drove them straight up through boiling atmosphere, through fragments of ruined engine and flaming wreaths of fuel.
The stars gleamed clear in a black spot at the end of the tunnel of ionized air. The black spot closed rapidly.
The little ship cleared the atmosphere and climbed with unbelievable speed into space, reaching orbital velocity in seconds. Starfighters gathered on all sides to pursue.
The YT-1150 of Charza Kwinn pushed up from behind. Charza had followed them down the valley floor but could not keep up with them now, so he fell back and drew away the droid ships, spiraling higher and higher, finally achieving orbit.
The last they saw of him, he was engaging a defense escort ship.
Then, from the Rim Merchant Einem, just visible over the limb of Zonama Sekot, came a concentrated bolt of turbolaser fire, expertly aimed. It caught their little ship broadside and blinded them for a moment, crisping one lobe.
Anakin felt the ship's high-pitched, bone-grating signal of pain.
Obi-Wan looked behind, using the senses still supplied by Sekot, and saw engines flare to life across the planet's northern hemisphere, their intense plasma cones pu shing Zonama Sekot slowly, majestically, out of its own orbit. All the renegade ships surrounding the planet had to scramble to keep clear of both the flares and the planet's new vector through space.
Zonama Sekot had never been more beautiful. She shimmered against the backdrop of the pinwheel and the far, rippling sheets of stars. Her clouds and vast tampasi faded beneath a sunrise that could not compete with Sekot's own, self-generated energies.
"She's leaving!" Obi-Wan cried out. He reached out to grab hold of something, an instinctive reaction, completely futile.
All the stars around the planet's circumference seemed to suck inward and then bounce back. In the pit of his stomach, Obi-Wan could feel a huge emptiness in space and time, unlike anything he had ever experienced.
He lost his extra senses, his connection with Sekot. Only a brief farewell lingered, the last touch of a far-reaching tendril, ancient and young at once.
Anakin was still lost in their ship's pain. Behind them, Tarkin's confused fleet scattered as if caught in a great wind. All the ships' orbits had changed unexpectedly, and the navigational systems could not compensate. Mines collided with mines and Starfighters, delivery ships smashed into defense escorts, and at least two escorts rammed the Rim Merchant Einem.
Not his concern. Anakin knew they had only a short time to go where they needed to go. Take us, he told their ship.
He entered a state where he understood the ways of the higher spaces. The vastness of the universe no longer frightened him. The ship rooted him to their reality. Even in her pain, she was teaching him how to navigate the more difficult dimensions.
Anakin in turn gave the ship what considerable skills he possessed.
Together, they took themselves into hyperspace and fled the triple star system that had once held the secret promise of Zonama Sekot.
The ship was indeed faster than anything that had ever flown before.
Chapter 66
Obi-Wan slept. Exhaustion caught up with him, and sleep came without his even being aware of it. He awoke a few hours later and saw Anakin also asleep, arms still embedded in the console. The boy's eyes twitched. He was dreaming.
Obi-Wan stroked the ship lightly. "Any friend of Anakin Skywalker's is a friend of mine," he murmured.
The console rippled beneath his touch. A display of the ship's vital systems appeared before him. She was giving everything she had to get them to where they wanted to go, but that wasn't going to be enough. The ship's injuries were too great.
Obi-Wan leaned forward. "There's another station," he said. An emergency outpost, a barren, rocky world thousands of parsecs closer than Coruscant, sometimes used by Jedi, unknown to anyone else, and otherwise almost deserted. He had been there only once, after a particularly harrowing adventure with Qui-Gon.
The ship accepted his coordinates. A new display affirmed that the ship could reach this destination.
"And when you can, send a message to the Temple." He provided the transponder frequencies. "Someone should meet us at the outpost. Mace Windu, or Thracia Cho Leem. Or both. It is very important that my Padawan be counseled by another Master after his ordeal."
Anakin came awake and blinked owlishly in the warm cabin lights.
"You were dreaming," Obi-Wan said.
"Not me. The ship," Anakin said. "Or maybe we were dreaming together. We were traveling around the galaxy, seeing wonderful things. It was so great to just be free. You were there with us. I think you were having fun, too."
Anakin held out his hand, fingers spread, and Obi-Wan met it with his own hand. A few more years and the boy would reach his full growth.
In more than just size.
"I'm going to give her a name," Anakin said, looking away.
"What?"
"I'm going to call her Jabitha."
Obi-Wan smiled.
"It's a pretty name, isn't it?"
"It is a pretty name."
"Do you think they're still alive?"
"I don't know," Obi-Wan said.
"Maybe they all just vanished and no one will ever see them again."
"Perhaps."
Anakin had a hard time asking the next question. "Our ship is dying, isn't she?"
"Yes."
Anakin stared straight ahead, face blank.
The boy loses everything he loves, and yet still he is strong.
"Vergere ..." Anakin began.
"Tell me more about what Vergere said."
"I'll get the ship-I'll get the Jabitha to show you the entire message."
Vergere appeared once more in the cabin, head feathers awry, slanted eyes wary, communicating the news of her discoveries to any Jedi who might follow in her path.
Chapter 67
The Jabitha, lay in a cold and flimsy hangar on the outpost world Seline. The Sekotan ship's skin was rapidly losing its color and iridescence.
Anakin sat on a bench before the ship, chin in his hands. Outside, winds howled and spicules of ice shattered with a harsh, tinny rattle against the hangar's thin metal skin.
Anakin tried to imagine the Jabitha back in her birthplace of warmth and lush, tropic beauty, back with her family . . . wherever they might be.
Seline was a poor place for a Sekotan ship to die.
Obi-Wan and Thracia Cho Leem entered the hangar. Thracia removed her weather gear. Anakin looked up, then returned his gaze to the ship.
Thracia approached the boy.
"Not so young now, Anakin Skywalker?" she asked, sitting on the bench beside him. Anakin slid over a few centimeters to make room for the diminutive Jedi Knight.
Anakin did not answer.
"Young Jedi, you have learned some hard truths. Power and even discipline are not sufficient. Self-knowledge is the most difficult of our many journeys."
"I know," Anakin said softly.
"And sometimes wisdom seems impossibly far away."
Anakin nodded.
"You must let me feel what is within you now," Thracia said gently. Then, with the faintest tone of warning, "You are still being judged."
Anakin screwed up his face, then relaxed and let her probe.
Obi-Wan slowly turned his eyes to the dead ship, now good only for cold and heartless research, and left the hangar. This was not for him to witness. There had to be an objective evaluation; that was half the essence of Jedi counseling.
As for the other half. . .
That was Thracia's greatest skill-healing.
There would be many more battles for his apprentice, many more disappointments. And many more joys. More joys than sadnesses, Obi-Wan fervently hoped.
This was how it was, how it felt, to have the heart of a Master.
Coda
No more Sekotan ships are made. In a few years, all of them are dead or destroyed.
Tarkin and Raith Sienar manage to bring the crippled fleet home. Inspired by what he calls a "great example," Tarkin redeems himself before the Supreme Chancellor with secret plans for a moon-sized battle station. Tarkin claims sole credit for the design. Sienar does not dispute him; it is a brainchild he is eager to disown. Sienar has a bad feeling about such an expensive concentration of might.
The new order will find both Tarkin and Sienar useful.
Charza Kwinn and his shipmates survive and reach Coruscant, where they are assigned new missions. In later years, with the rise of the Empire and a decline in cordial relations with nonhumans, Charza becomes a smuggler and pirate to feed his food-kin. He limits his prey to Imperial vess
els.
A legend grows in the galaxy of a rogue planet that wanders between the stars, forever lost, ruled by either a madman, a madwoman, or a saint, the legends are never clear which.
Months after Thracia Cho Leem counsels Anakin Skywalker, without explanation, she leaves the Jedi order.
Obi-Wan Kenobi has his work cut out for him. The young man, his Padawan, is growing stronger, overcoming disappointment, acquiring discipline. But the knot in Anakin's future has not completely loosened. The trial is not over; it may not be over for decades.
No balance.
No balance yet.
