by Greg Bear
The Admiral Korvin contained three landing ships, each of which carried ten of the versatile starfighters. With slender nacelles that could split, rotate, and become legs, these droids were flexible, ingenious, and powerfully armed. They were perhaps the best of the centrally controlled Trade Federation weapons systems.
Inside the broad mouths of the lander weapons pods, loading drums spun about with hollow ratcheting sounds. The starfighters were attached quickly to broad, flat drums for rapid-fire deployment just above the planet’s atmosphere. The drums were mounted in turn on vertical rotors. When the starfighters were launched they would emerge from the pods like bullets out of a spinning cylinder. When a drum was empty, it would be ejected into space, and the next would move forward on the rotor.
Sienar admired the Xi Char engineers who had designed and built the starfighters, but he doubted the droids would be decisive.
A ferocious battle had just recently been decided, apparently in favor of the locals. Whatever had left those hideous marks on the surface of the planet was no longer in evidence.
“I would like to introduce you to your sponsor on Zonama Sekot, the authorized representative, in my quarters, in one hour,” Sienar told the Blood Carver.
Ke Daiv may have felt curiosity—emotions or impulses were hard to read on the face of the highborn Blood Carver—but he simply bowed his head and narrowed his nose flaps, forming once again that disconcerting hatchet that denoted respect and compliance, as well as—with certain color changes—anger, rage, and intent to kill.
The black and red ritual airship carried them beyond the last dwellings of Middle Distance and along a narrowing in the canyon. This far north and west, the rocky walls were wet and slippery but almost devoid of Sekotan growth. Boras could not gain purchase here. Streamers of cloud dropped into the canyon and left the air around the gondola thick with moisture.
Anakin stood in the prow, foot propped in a heroic pose on a forward cleat. His seed-partners clustered around him, quiet for once, peering over the rail with their small, intent black eyes as if looking into their future.
Obi-Wan stood two steps behind Anakin, letting the boy enjoy this moment. There would be little enough joy in the next few days, he suspected. What Anakin had detected days before—and called a “single wave”—now left the space around them charged with a feeling of imminent and massive change in the Force, which Obi-Wan could only describe as a void. Neither Qui-Gon nor any other Jedi Master had ever hinted at such things. That the change was coming from beyond Zonama Sekot, however, was not as apparent to Obi-Wan as it had been to Anakin. I sense something very close, triggered by something from without. But Anakin is correct—it will be a trial.
The airship’s guiding ropes flexed under the pressure of winds rising out of the deep gorge and the rushing waters below. The pilot was having some difficulty keeping the airship from exerting too much strain and parting the ropes. The airship would not last more than a couple of minutes in these winds, in such close quarters, before being smashed against the sheer, slick stone walls—an ignominious end for a party of clients!
That kind of danger Obi-Wan appreciated: immediate, manageable, if one trusted the conveyance and its pilot—and the young woman seemed experienced enough. None of the other passengers—not Gann, nor Sheekla Farrs, nor the three attendants—showed alarm. In fact, they seemed to feel the same exhilaration he did.
Anakin looked back and grinned at his master. “The seeds are trembling—feel them? They know something big is happening!”
Gann hooked two hands to the rail and sidled closer to Obi-Wan. “The boy’s a natural,” he said over the roar of wind. “There can be only one pilot. Have you decided which of you it will be?”
“The boy will be pilot,” Obi-Wan said. He could never hope to match Anakin’s skill in that area.
Gann nodded approval. “He’s obviously the one,” he said. “But he has so many partners! We’ve never joined that many together.” He shook his head in some dismay. “I have no idea how you’ll control them. I’ll be most interested to see what Shappa Farrs has to say.”
The canyon walls spread farther apart, and the airship moved closer to the eastern rim. Its cable guides depended from long, leafless limbs pushed out by the gnarled boras that lined the edge of the precipice. The pilot deftly kept a uniform strain on the cables.
The river’s roar subsided with the broadening of the canyon, and the wind quieted, as well. The gondola rocked gently.
Anakin’s partners grew more agitated as the airship glided above some of the most spectacular congregations of Sekotan creatures they had yet seen. With more purchase available on the canyon walls, boras and other organisms had carved out terraces similar to those that supported the houses at Middle Distance. In their natural state, the terraces supported dense jungles. Like acrobats, large, long-limbed climbers slowly lifted themselves up and over the canopy with slender, vine-clinging claws. Avians with translucent carapaces flitted over broad flowers spread wide in the sun. Minutes later, the flowers folded their spectacular petals, broke loose from the boras, and inched up hanging tendrils to higher, more brightly lit terraces.
Anakin whispered soothingly to his seed-partners as he absorbed Sekot’s variety.
A young woman emerged from the small gondola cabin and walked past Obi-Wan with a polite smile. Her attention was on Anakin, and she paused beside him in the bow. Obi-Wan observed her with interest, not least because she was the spitting image of the Magister’s illusory twin daughters.
This girl, however, was solid and real.
A seed slipped down Anakin’s arm in small jerks and clamped its hooks painfully into his flesh. Anakin grimaced, turned to lift the seed back onto his shoulder, and saw the girl. His eyes widened.
“Have we met?” she asked him, with a pretty frown of inquiry.
“You look familiar,” Anakin said.
“Oh, then maybe it was one of Father’s things,” she said, nodding as if that explained everything. “He puts holograms of me in different places at different times. Like arranging flower pots. It’s aggravating.”
“How does he do that?” Anakin asked, but the girl decided not to answer.
“Sheekla told me to explain the different kinds of boras here.”
“Finally! Everything is so mysterious.”
“Trade secrets—I know,” the girl said. “Sometimes it’s a bore. What’s your name? Father forgets that when I’m not really there, I don’t actually meet people.”
Anakin was at a loss for a moment and looked past her at Obi-Wan. She, too, looked over her shoulder. “Is he your father?”
“No,” Anakin said. “He’s my teacher. Didn’t your father tell you?”
“There’s a lot my father doesn’t tell me, and a lot you don’t know about my father. I actually haven’t seen him in months—not since …” Her eyes lost their focus for a moment, then brightened once more.
“I am Anakin Skywalker, and this is Obi-Wan Kenobi.”
“I live in Middle Distance with my mother and my younger brother, but he’s just a baby. Father sends us messages now and then. Anyway, I can’t explain everything to you now. Maybe later. I’m supposed to tell you about boras, and where they come from, and what they do when they’re forged and annealed. You can listen, too,” she said, glancing back at Obi-Wan.
“Thank you,” Obi-Wan said.
“By the way, my name is—”
“Wind,” Anakin said.
She laughed. “Wrong! That’s one of Father’s jokes. My real name is Jabitha. Father knows all about Jedi training,” Jabitha said solemnly. “He told me a year ago that it’s very hard to become a Jedi Knight. So you must be special.” She patted a seed. “They seem to think so. You’re popular.” She took a deep breath. “Seeds are where the boras begin. Each bora creates seeds in the middle of our summer, when the storms whirl out of the south and bring rain. Most of the seeds creep off into the growth, the tampasi, in the old Ferroan language. Boras me
ans trees, and tampasi means forest, but they’re not really trees or forests.”
“All right,” Anakin said. The vibrating seeds were a real distraction now. His head was starting to hurt from their jostling.
Jabitha patted a few of his restless seeds, and they made little drum sounds. Her touch seemed to soothe them for the moment. “The seeds take root in a nursery protected by the oldest boras. Then they go through the forging. That’s really something to see! The boras drop dead limbs and old dry leaves and these special little pellets all over the nursery, until the entire open area is covered. The seeds just dig around and eat and eat and eat for hours, growing all the time. When the seeds are big enough, the oldest boras call down lightning from the sky—just call it down, with uplifted branches. The branches actually have iron tips! The lightning forks down and sets what’s left of the nursery heap ablaze, and the seeds kind of cook inside, though they aren’t killed. Something changes and they split open. The seeds have a way of expanding outward, almost exploding, making these puffed-out bubbles, shapes with thin walls of tissue—like the lamina, only even more malleable and alive.
“Other boras called annealers have these long spadelike shaping arms that sculpt the exploded seeds. The air is thick with this perfumey smell, like cakes in an oven … It’s very complicated, but when they’re done, the seeds become different kinds of boras, and they can move out of the nursery and take up their places in the tampasi.”
“When did the settlers learn to control the shaping?” Obi-Wan asked.
“Before I was born,” Jabitha said. “My grandfather was the first Magister. He and my grandmother studied the boras and made friends with them—that’s a really long story—and they were allowed to watch the changes in a tampasi nursery. After a while, the boras invited them in as shapers—but it took them twenty years to learn the craft. They taught it to my father. A few years later, the rest of the settlers came from Ferro.”
“The image we saw of you in the Magister’s house was not a hologram,” Obi-Wan said. “It was a mental image, projected by some extraordinary will.”
Jabitha looked uncomfortable. “I guess that’s my father, then,” she said. She turned and looked over the basket’s railing. “Those are wild-type boras,” she said. “We call them rogues. They don’t have any nursery affiliations. They scavenge off the communal fields.”
Anakin again saw white triangular flying shapes, as well as many-legged creeping cylinders, bigger than a human, moving in and out of caves in the walls of the valley. Small avians twinkled in the valley shadow like night wisps on Tatooine. Dark tentacles lashed out from the shadows beneath overhangs to snatch at them.
This part of the valley seemed engaged in a much more familiar planetary life cycle—eating and being eaten.
“Do they ever rejoin with the communal boras?” Anakin asked.
“No. They’re called lost ones,” Jabitha said. “Father thinks some of them escape from the burning nurseries and get shaped elsewhere, maybe by other rogues. But they’re useful. I think they keep the communes on their toes. Sometimes they fly in and snatch seeds, to eat or to raise as their own. I’ve even seen clouds of smaller wild-types come in during the forging, before the lightning is called down, and snatch up the branches and scraps and pellets intended for the seeds. There aren’t many rogues overall. This part of the valley is pretty thick with them, however.”
“Have you ever shaped anything?” Anakin asked.
“I helped my mother make our house a couple of years ago. We had three seed-partners Mother had bonded with, and I helped her use the carvers and prods … but that’s getting ahead of things!”
Anakin shook his head. “It all sounds terrific. But I still don’t see how you can turn seeds into spacecraft.”
“You have to be patient,” Jabitha said petulantly. She looked at Obi-Wan. “My father made the first spacecraft when he was a boy. They used the engines from their original colony ship. That was just after my grandfather went looking for more settlers. We wanted all types of people here.”
“We have met only Ferroans,” Obi-Wan said.
“There are others. Quite a few now. They work in the factory valley.”
“Why did your father decide to sell these spacecraft?”
Jabitha ignored Obi-Wan’s question. “Look! We’re getting close.”
Sheekla Farrs stepped forward as the airship was pulled into a docking chute and tied down. Jabitha leapt over the railing onto the landing and helped Anakin out of the gondola. Obi-Wan she left to his own devices. Anakin seemed very interested in everything she had to say.
Jabitha could become a distraction for Anakin, but likely a welcome one, Obi-Wan decided. She would take his mind off ships and help him come to a better understanding of social relationships. Anakin’s social up-bringing, with the exception of his times spent with the other affiliates and auxiliaries, had been piecemeal at best. A few normal encounters with people his own age could be very helpful—and this girl seemed refreshingly normal. When she is actually physically present!
But Obi-Wan was still concerned about so many unanswered questions. They were still no closer to understanding what had happened to Vergere.
The night before, while Anakin slept, Obi-Wan had visited the library, trying to keep his seed-partners from chewing on the texts. The library had told him nothing he needed to know.
Obi-Wan Kenobi hated knots, puzzles, and conundrums. As Anakin—and Qui-Gon—had reminded him so often, he was a linear kind of guy. But he understood something very well.
The Force was never a nursemaid.
Though at times a very patient man, Raith Sienar itched to get on with his mission. Instinct told him time was of the essence, that such an open world, with such a valuable secret, was like a ripe carcass under a sky full of winged scavengers.
Not that he had ever contended with winged scavengers. Sienar preferred the high-tech comforts of a well-developed planet, whose wilderness had long since been tamed. But he was an educated man and he knew a scavenger when he saw one.
He felt like a scavenger himself, right now.
The first of many.
He looked down on the small image of Kett that flickered to bluish life on his command table. “Yes, Captain?”
Kett seemed uncomfortable. “I have complied with your orders and released the Blood Carver in your ship, Commander.”
“All went well?” Sienar had introduced Ke Daiv to his sponsoring “pilot” in the small shuttle docking bay where the private starship had been loaded. Ke Daiv had seemed uncomfortable working with a droid. Sienar had not bothered to explain how he had come by this droid, or how the droid had become a sponsor of clients for Zonama Sekot. Some secrets were best kept.
“Yes, sir.”
“And he is well away, heading toward Zonama Sekot?”
“Yes, Commander.”
“And no one on the planet has detected our squadron, this far out in the system?”
“No, Commander.”
Sienar breathed a sigh of relief. “Then we will await word from Ke Daiv before we make our next move. You seem unhappy, Captain Kett.”
“May I speak freely, Commander?”
“Indeed, please do.”
“None of this is in accord with our original orders, as outlined by Tarkin.”
“And so?”
“I hope to be blunt without causing offense. This is a delicate time, Commander. My ships were once part of an honorable and effective defense force assigned to protect ships belonging to members of the Trade Federation. Our record goes back centuries, with never a blot.”
“A record to be proud of, Captain.”
“I do not know how we will be treated as part of the Republic defense forces. I hope the integration will be smooth, and that I may continue my honorable career.”
Honor, Sienar thought, is much overstated in that record. You took part in the worst of the Trade Federation transgressions. You personally held planetary systems at blast
erpoint, forced concessions, escorted contraband drugs and machines, and transported immigrants whose bodies were laced with time-delay biological weapons … You will be lucky if people like Tarkin can divert the attention of the senatorial arm of justice and save you from a summary trade-crimes trial. But he maintained a sympathetic face for the captain.
“I do not trust this Blood Carver, sir. His people are notorious for fiery tempers and dirty deeds.”
“He was handpicked by Tarkin. You have in your orders that he is to be accorded complete cooperation in whatever he might do.”
Including assassination of your commander should things go wrong.
“I am aware of that, sir.”
“Then what is your point, Captain Kett?”
“I wish to communicate my unease, sir.”
“So noted. I hope you will maintain your vigilance.”
“Yes, sir.”
Sienar disconnected, and the image blipped into nothing.
Using the Blood Carver as a client was not a brilliant stratagem, but it would serve. Judging from all he had learned from the pilot of the ruined Sekotan craft now in his deep-city hangar, before that pilot had died …
Things Sienar had not revealed to Tarkin—he’d even lied to Tarkin about how he obtained the ship. Facts that he had learned long before Tarkin had in his slippery way tried to involve Sienar in this overblown and all-too-obvious scheme.
From the Gensang pilot’s dying words, encouraged by subtle Agrilat drugs, Sienar had concluded that Zonama Sekot’s settlers were hungry for something, or just plain greedy—that they had found a treasure of incredible proportions, and instead of arranging for a well-orchestrated exploitation, with bidding wars conducted between members of the Trade Federation, they had taken a decidedly risky path, catering to the galaxy’s spoiled little rich boys, and engaging in a remarkable but ultimately futile quest to hide themselves.
