by Greg Bear
“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 billions of years?”
“I had to come into being to communicate with the new arrivals, 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.”
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 w
as 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.
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.”
Anakin felt as if he had been swallowed alive. He huddled next to his ship, hand on the fuselage, feeling her quiver in the capture harness. Shoulders hunched, he controlled his rapid breathing and tried to come up with a plan, any plan, to regain control over his life.
He could not shake the vision of the dying Blood Carver. Firing lasers at droids was no preparation for his first personal kill, and the way he had done it …
Anakin moaned. The four guards in the bay turned at the sound, shrugged, and looked away. Just a frightened youngster.
Jabitha appeared beside him. Anakin looked up and blinked. Again the image shifted, and Jabitha became Vergere, then the Magister. Anakin stood and sidled up against the nose of his ship. He did not know if he could stand any more of Sekot’s illusions.
“They are trying to destroy the settlements,” Sekot said, seeming to kneel beside him. “I can’t let this go on much longer.”
“What can you do?” Anakin asked in a low whisper.
“The Magister prepared for this, but we have never …” Sekot seemed at a loss for words. “Practiced? We have never had a drill and tried everything all at once.”
“Tried what?”
Sekot stared straight ahead. “The engines, the hyperdrive cores.”
“What, you’re all going to escape in big ships?”
“We will do what we need to survive. Do you know where you are?”
“In a sky-mine delivery ship. I’m a prisoner,” Anakin said.
“You are in orbit around me. You are part of the fleet I may have to destroy soon. I would regret harming you.”
“You can do that? Blow up all these ships?”
“It’s possible. I’m trying not to be too destructive all at once, but the Magister never had time to teach me everything. I do not know what we are all capable of, the settlers and me, working together.”
“Did you kill any Far Outsiders?”
“I must have,” Sekot said.
“Would this be any different for you?” Somehow, that seemed important.
“I don’t know. Every experience is new. I do not know myself very well. I am only now aware of how much death there is in my own parts, how they compete with each other and keep a balance of coming and going, being and ending. All across my surface there is death and birth, all the time. Do I feel bad about this? Do you know when the parts of your body kill invading organisms?”
“No,” Anakin said. Some Masters were fully aware of all the minute living things within their bodies. Padawans were rarely taught such skills. They could be distracting.
A guard came over to check him out. “Who are you talking to?” the guard asked, glancing at the ship in her harness.
“The planet,” Anakin said. “It’s getting ready to blast you out of the sky.”
The guard grinned. “It’s a backwater, a jungle,” he said. “Putting up a pretty good fight, I hear, but nothing we can’t beat.”
Anakin pressed his lips together. The guard could not face the boy’s direct gaze. He backed away, then returned to his post, shaking his head.
Sekot returned. “I wish there was another way. I mean you no harm,” it said.
“You have to defend yourself.”
“I wish there was more time.”
Anakin shivered. “So do I,” he said. Time to calm his inner turmoil and prepare for the proper passage, for the death of a Jedi apprentice.
Tarkin was beside himself with pride. “They thought they could keep their secrets from us,” he said to Sienar as they emerged from the turbolift onto the bridge. The captain of the mine ship, a disheveled, scum-yellow-haired fellow well into old age, received a look of disdain from Tarkin and scuttled back into the recesses to get out of the way of the commander of the fleet.
“The Republic’s forces need a manicure and a heavy trim,” Tarkin confided to Sienar, a display both of good humor and determination. “And after this success, I’ll be the barber, Raith.”
“I shall sweep up after you,” Raith said tonelessly.
Tarkin chuckled again. “My success will reflect well on all around me,” he said. “Even that cuticle hiding from his superiors. I can’t wait to get back to the Einem and finish our work.”
“We could just leave them with this warning—as a resource for future investigation,” Sienar suggested halfheartedly. “I doubt they’ll be going anywhere.”
Tarkin did not reply. He stared down through the captain’s broad viewport at the cloud-shrouded southern hemisphere, and above the equator at the battle still being fought between the planet’s defenses and droid starfighters. Flashes and sparkles of laser fire and blazing jungle illumined the night-bound planet beyond the orange and gray band of the terminator.
He was not pleased with what he saw. “Still not subdued.”
“You’re trouncing their defenses badly,” Sienar said. Other lights glimmered in the darkness, as well, and Sienar, less arrogant and less pleased with himself, traced their outlines with interest. Longitudinally oriented rectangles hundreds of kilometers long were outlined by what looked like lightning. Some large change was disturbing the atmosphere.
He doubted starfighters could be blamed for
that.
“How soon until we dock with the Einem?” Tarkin called back to the captain, still hidden in shadow.
“Fifteen minutes, Commander,” the captain replied in a croak.
“Antiquated,” Tarkin murmured in disgust. “Time for the new and for the young.” He turned for the turbolift. “Let’s interview the boy before we dock.”
I don’t know what shape he’s in,” Obi-Wan told Charza Kwinn as the Star Sea Flower pulled up through the atmosphere. The sky darkened and the faint sound of rushing atmosphere diminished beyond the port. “I think he’s shrunk inward, pulling all his signs with him.”
“But he is still alive, you are certain?” Charza Kwinn asked.
“He was captured with the ship. They’ll keep him alive to keep the ship alive.”
“I can’t believe the Republic would do such a thing, attack this planet,” Charza said. The food-kin arrayed themselves on the instruments, eyes fully extended, alert and ready for action.
“I suspect there’s confusion during the assimilation,” Obi-Wan said. “Some ambitious and unscrupulous elements are taking advantage of it.”
“You are sworn to protect the Republic,” Charza said. “Can you fight against them?”
“I am sworn to protect my Padawan,” Obi-Wan said. It was a deeper law, a more ancient tradition, but Charza’s question still hit home. How did Obi-Wan know what had been decided back on Coruscant?
Charza anticipated his thoughts. “They would never allow the destruction of a helpless world,” he said. “That is more like the Trade Federation of late. And if they know the boy is Jedi—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Obi-Wan said. “We are under illegal attack. We will rescue the boy.” And the senate will have to sort it all out when we get back to Coruscant.
“I have already plotted a course,” Charza said, and showed Obi-Wan the projected orbit and rendezvous. “The mine ship will be more vulnerable just before it docks. These big old control ships have poor eyesight from above and below. I will slip in through the lower blind spot, push up against the underside of the mine ship, where its hull is thinnest, and try out a new toy.” Charza made a high, brushy, sloshy sound to show his amusement.
