by Timothy Zahn
Four shapes were charging toward them, blasters blazing. From behind Anakin, Thrawn was returning fire, his weapon flashing brighter and making a higher-pitched sound than Republic blasters. One of the four assailants fell, but the other three continued forward.
Even with the gas fogging his mind, Anakin had enough awareness to know he didn’t dare ignite his lightsaber—with his muscles uncoordinated the weapon would be as dangerous to him as to the enemy. But there were other ways. Again reaching to the Force, he got a mental grip on the nearest chair and threw it into the attackers’ path.
Or rather, tried to. With no accuracy and only limited strength he was barely able to tip the chair over in front of them. But it was enough. For a moment they were distracted, their shots going wild, and in that moment two more of them fell to Thrawn’s counterattack. Anakin tried to throw another chair, or even just nudge the blaster out of line.
But the fog was growing thicker, and his mind and hands were turning to lead. He had the vague impression he was tapping his comlink with the emergency code…
He woke up with a start to find himself lying on his back on the cantina floor. R2-D2 was standing over him, prodding him with one of his grappler arms, moaning with quiet anxiety. “I’m all right, Artoo,” he assured the droid, his voice slurring a little. The air seemed clear; taking a deep breath, he ran a quick mental inventory.
Everything seemed intact. His mind was still fuzzy, but it was rapidly coming back to normal. He flexed his fingers—no problems there. Lifting his head, he looked around.
The cantina, not surprisingly, was deserted, the earlier patrons having fled. Aside from himself and R2-D2, only Thrawn remained, sitting in a chair a few meters away, his back to Anakin. His gun hand was resting on the chair’s armrest, his weapon pointed toward the door. A few meters in front of him lay four bodies, and the smell of death was in the air.
“Welcome back,” Thrawn said. He didn’t turn around, Anakin noted, but kept his face turned toward the door. “Your droid seemed worried.”
“Artoo sometimes thinks I need looking after,” Anakin said, carefully pushing himself to his feet. There was a moment of dizziness, but it passed quickly. “Any idea what that gas was?”
“Something designed to make us easier to kill,” Thrawn said, his voice going grim. “A diversionary attack from in front, with a simultaneous attack from behind. You will note where the first two shots were aimed.”
Anakin looked at the bar. Right where he’d been standing were two fresh blaster burns. “I guess I should thank you for pushing me out of the way.”
Thrawn half turned, a frown on his face. “That was not my intent,” he said. “Such gases are designed to flow downward toward their victims. I therefore used you and the bar to leap upward out of its effect. I assumed you would follow.”
“Yeah, I was a little busy being shoved to the side,” Anakin growled. A movement on the far side of the bar caught his eye, and he leaned over the wood to look.
The bartender was back there, asleep on the floor. His arms were crossed over his stomach, his hands bound together with thin rope. “Looks like he didn’t know it was coming.”
“Or else simply didn’t move back sufficiently far to avoid the effects.” Thrawn paused. “You are a Jedi, then?”
“I’d have thought that was obvious.”
“Not at all,” Thrawn assured him. “Our myths of the Republic speak of two groups of beings with such powers: the Jedi, and the Sith. But the Sith are reputed to be clever and capable warriors. Tell me, do you recognize any of our attackers?”
Anakin turned back to the bodies on the floor, resisting the awful urge to lift Thrawn out of his chair and dangle him over the bar while he explained the true difference between Jedi and Sith.
But for all the Chiss’s sarcasm, Anakin had to privately admit the implied accusation wasn’t wrong. Focused on dragging the truth about Padmé out of the bartender, he’d gotten unforgivably sloppy. He should have expected a layered attack and been ready for it.
As to the bodies on the floor…“I don’t think I’ve seen any of them before,” he said, eyeing the three humans and one olive-skinned, amphibious Rybet. “Why, do you think I should?”
“I thought it possible,” Thrawn said. “Three points. First: The placement of their initial shots prove they intended your death. That argues against a goal of forcing you to unlock the ambassador’s ship. Second: The layered two-prong attack indicates they have knowledge of how to attack a Jedi. Third: The fact that only four of those who were following us attacked while the fifth remained outside suggests these four attackers were considered expendable by their comrade.”
“Or else the fifth had been ordered to report to someone else and needed to stay free and clear to do that.”
“Indeed,” Thrawn agreed. “In which case, he now faces a dilemma.”
“Yes, I see,” Anakin murmured, looking again at the door. “I assume you locked us in?”
“Yes, and have confirmed that the window coverings were secure,” Thrawn said. “No one can see inside.”
“So our fifth man knows that at least one of us is still alive,” Anakin continued. “Only he doesn’t know which one. And he knows that all four of his friends are dead, or else they would have come out by now.”
“Or possibly are taken alive,” Thrawn said. “That may be his greatest fear.”
“Yeah.” Anakin looked at the bodies again. “Too bad we couldn’t have managed that.”
“In combat, quick decisions must be made,” Thrawn said. “Added to his concerns is the Jedi fighter craft now resting nearby. He has many questions, but no answers.”
“And he won’t want to leave without them,” Anakin said slowly, thinking it through. “So he has to be still waiting out there, either mixing with the rest of the citizens or lurking at the edge with comm in hand ready to call his boss.”
“Which we must prevent.”
Anakin cocked an eyebrow. “We don’t want him talking to his boss?”
“We don’t want them speaking via comm,” Thrawn corrected.
“Ah,” Anakin said, nodding understanding. “We want him to go there in person.”
“Exactly,” Thrawn said. “I presume your fighter has jamming capability?”
“Yes, and Artoo can switch it on from here.” He gestured to the droid. “Go ahead.”
R2-D2 warbled acknowledgment. “Jamming is on,” Anakin said. “So how do we follow him?”
“Let us first design the story he will return with,” Thrawn said. “Since their attack was layered toward Jedi, I suggest we present you as having been injured or killed. I’ll carry you to your fighter, place you inside, and allow your droid to fly you away. Once we determine which of the onlookers is our quarry, I can follow him to his residence or vehicle, allow him to deliver his message, then capture him. An interrogation, plus an examination of his equipment, should yield the data we seek.”
Anakin pursed his lips. That assumed, of course, that this whole scenario was connected with Padmé’s disappearance and wasn’t just someone’s crazed vendetta against Jedi. So far, they hadn’t proven that.
But at the moment this was the only lead he had. He had to follow it, and trust in the Force to guide him to his wife.
“One problem,” he said. “Playing dead with you carrying me leaves me in a position where I can’t easily react or fight back. What if he decides to take another shot at me, just to make sure?”
“A reasonable concern,” Thrawn conceded. “Have you an alternative suggestion?”
Anakin looked around the cantina. None of the bodies was the right size for him or Thrawn to adopt their clothing; nor was there anything else in sight that could be used as a disguise.
On the other hand…
“You said he’s afraid one of his friends survived,” he said. “Let�
�s play on that.” Reaching out to the Force, he got a grip on one of the dead humans and lifted him off the floor.
“Interesting,” Thrawn said. If he was startled by the body’s sudden movement, it didn’t show in his voice. “This requires a change in the story, though. The Jedi he sought to kill will now be alive.”
“I like this one better,” Anakin growled.
“I didn’t say it was worse, merely different,” Thrawn said mildly. “Can you make him appear to be living?”
“Let’s find out.”
It turned out to be trickier than Anakin had expected. Life wasn’t just limbs moving back and forth, he quickly discovered, but also the more subtle flexing of muscles beneath the skin, plus the interplay of muscle groups with balance and kinesthetics.
An hour’s worth of practice, and he would have had it down cold. But a few minutes was all he got before Thrawn called a halt. “That will be sufficient, and we have no more time,” the Chiss said. “I suggest you take him out and lay him across the top of your fighter for transport.”
Anakin thought about that. Balancing him up there would be tricky, even wedged in between the canopy and R2-D2’s dome. “He’d fit better in the landspeeder,” he pointed out.
“Would you normally leave your fighter behind while transporting a prisoner?”
Anakin scowled. Under certain circumstances that wouldn’t be completely out of the question. Here and now, though, he had no intention of leaving his Actis unattended. “You’re right,” he said. “Okay, I’ll take our puppet and head out. Any particular direction you want me to go?”
“I suggest you fly toward the ambassador’s ship,” Thrawn said. “If our attackers were alerted by the smugglers, they’ll know of that spot and assume you’re traveling there. Meantime, I’ll endeavor to identify and follow our quarry.”
“Right,” Anakin said. “I’ll go nice and slow to keep the jamming field over the whole area as long as possible.”
“Very good.” Thrawn eased himself out of his chair and turned around.
Anakin caught his breath. The chest of the Chiss uniform had turned from black to a dirty gray, and was pocked with a dozen ragged-edged blaster burns. “What—?”
“Their blasterfire was impressively accurate,” Thrawn said, moving carefully toward the door. “Fortunately, Chiss uniforms are designed to absorb and disperse as much energy as possible.” He looked down at his tunic. “It is, unfortunately, not a perfect system.”
“Still better than nothing,” Anakin said, his respect for the Chiss reluctantly rising a couple of notches. He’d seen hardened clone warriors turn to jelly with fewer wounds than that through their chest plates. “You going to be okay?”
“I’ve already treated the wounds,” Thrawn said. “Until they’re fully healed, I’ll make do. Are you ready?”
Stretching out to the Force, Anakin started the dead man doing a shuffle-walk toward the door. “Ready,” he said. He moved up beside the puppet and put his left arm around the other’s waist, supporting him as he might a wounded prisoner. He took a couple of experimental steps forward, moving the body’s legs to keep time with his own. “How does it look?”
“Adequate.” Walking stiffly to the door, Thrawn unlocked it. “Go. Good fortune.”
“Come on, Artoo,” Anakin said. The inside of the door, he saw now, was pocked with fresh blaster burns. Apparently, injured Chiss didn’t shoot very accurately. Pushing open the door with his free hand, he stepped out into the street.
Black Spire hadn’t looked all that big as he and Thrawn rode through in their landspeeder. Not nearly big enough to support four or five hundred people.
But clearly it did…and every one of them seemed to have turned out to gawk at the Republic starfighter that had landed in the center of their town.
Perhaps a dozen people turned as Anakin stepped into the sunlight. The rest of the crowd, still fascinated by the shiny fighter, ignored him completely. “Move aside!” Anakin called, pouring on every gram of authority that a lifetime’s worth of war command had given him. “Move aside! Republic business.”
He wasn’t sure that people out here even knew what the Republic was. But if they didn’t, the tone of his voice was apparently enough. The crowd began to shuffle aside, opening up a crooked path to the Actis. “Come on,” Anakin said under his breath, remembering to move the body’s legs as he started down the open path, his senses alert to danger. If their quarry wanted to finish off either him or his injured comrade—or both—this would be the time for him to take that shot.
No attacks had come by the time they reached the Actis. Anakin waited for R2-D2 to jet up and lock himself into his socket, then lifted his burden onto the top of the vehicle, pushing him as he would a wounded man and making it look like the body’s arms were searching weakly for handholds.
He got him wedged between the droid and canopy rim. Then, remembering to keep the body’s limbs moving in a hopefully realistic manner, he climbed into the cockpit and closed the canopy. Easing in the repulsorlifts, he rose into the sky.
The Actis’s jammers were designed to block enemy fighter transmissions hundreds of kilometers away. But that required a focused field, one that was primarily aimed forward toward where those enemies would normally be in battle. Still, the field spread out a short distance in all directions around the fighter, which meant he should be able to block anything from Black Spire up to around a dozen kilometers away. Rotating the Actis in midair, moving at a leisurely pace in order to give Thrawn as much time as he could, Anakin lined up the nose with Padmé’s distant ship. He eased in the thrusters—
An instant later there was a dull thud from beneath him and the Actis suddenly rolled sideways, dropping nearly all the way onto its left side.
“Artoo!” Anakin snapped as he jabbed the repulsorlift controls. Even as his brain registered the urgently glowing red lights on the monitor the fighter leapt forward, pressing him back into his seat as the thrusters came on at full power, burning them through the air at maximum acceleration. A second later the compensators kicked in, easing the pressure and letting him get to the controls again.
Only there was nothing he could do. The thud he’d heard, he realized now, had been a small explosion from the Actis’s portside repulsorlift. The only thing that had prevented the fighter from dropping onto that side and falling out of the sky was R2-D2’s quick thinking in kicking in the thrusters. That had given them enough forward motion to create sufficient lift over the stubby airfoil wings to compensate for the lost repulsorlift.
The only problem was that they were now blazing across Batuu at nearly a thousand kilometers an hour, leaving Black Spire far behind.
Lifting the jamming Thrawn was counting on to force their quarry out into the open.
To make matters worse, somewhere in all of that flurry of activity the body they’d decoyed their quarry with had slipped off the Actis and vanished into the forest far below.
Cursing under his breath, Anakin grabbed the control yoke and sent the fighter into a tight 180-degree turn. Once he was pointed back at Black Spire the communications blanket should come back into play. If their quarry had missed that brief window of opportunity, or if Thrawn had at least tagged him, they might still be able to pull this off.
R2-D2 warbled a question. “I don’t know,” Anakin told him. “The landing field, I guess. Unless he bought or rented a house here he’s probably living out of his ship. How much speed do we need to stay level without the repulsorlift?”
The droid’s answer wasn’t encouraging. “No chance of going a little slower?” Anakin asked hopefully, cranking the thrusters back to just above R2-D2’s estimated danger speed.
The reply this time was more emphatic. “No, landing on our portside wing isn’t really an option,” Anakin said with a sigh. “What about Thrawn’s ship, the one in orbit? Did it have a port we could dock
in?”
Another whistled negative. “Yeah, I didn’t see one, either,” Anakin said. “Nothing to do but head back to Black Spire. Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”
By the time the outpost was once again in sight on the horizon he had a plan.
It wasn’t much of a plan. Anakin himself didn’t really like it. R2-D2 absolutely hated it.
But Thrawn was down there alone, injured, and facing a killer who might know where Padmé was. If Anakin was going to be in time to help out, this was his only option.
The landing field was a smaller clearing in the forest to the west of Black Spire. Anakin turned the Actis toward it, dropping to treetop level and keeping his speed as low as he could without losing control. The near end of the clearing flashed beneath him—he caught a glimpse of Thrawn crouched behind his landspeeder exchanging blasterfire with a hooded figure that was moving toward him—
Yanking back on the stick, he turned the Actis straight up, its nose pointed toward the sky, its thrusters blasting at the ground below. The sudden increase in air resistance against the fighter’s belly pressed him into his seat and sent its forward momentum plummeting. He watched the airspeed indicator, mentally crossing his fingers…
He was halfway across the landing field when he saw that the deceleration wasn’t going to be enough. Long before the fighter came to a midair halt it would be over the forest again, with no guarantee that there would be an open area where he could set it down.
Which left him only one option. Punching the canopy control with one hand and his restraint release with the other, he stretched out to the Force and jumped.
His head barely cleared the still-opening canopy. But the gamble worked. With the Actis rapidly slowing, and the Force adding speed and strength to his jump, Anakin found himself dropping almost straight down toward the clearing below. A quick twist of arms and hips to orient himself for a feetfirst landing—
He’d had barely enough time to grab his lightsaber when the hooded figure below raised his blaster and opened fire.
