“Oh, that’s the smell in the air,” Whie said. “Madness. They all went mad, didn’t they? You can hear the rocks screaming.”
Scout’s mouth went dry. “Whie?”
“Can’t you hear it? I can’t make it stop,” he said.
“You’re scaring me again.”
“Don’t worry. This is my place. My home. They know me here.” He pushed his foot through the pile of bones. “A mother and child, I think. They came in here to hide from my father, didn’t they?”
“Well, sir,” Fidelis stammered. “I’m sure I couldn’t say.”
Scout held up her hand at the sound of distant footsteps, the clink and rustle of metal. Then, by some trick of the caves, a set of orders came through a crack in the rock as if the trooper giving them was only a few meters away. “Spread out through the caves. Captives can be taken dead or alive.”
Scout stirred. “Dooku’s droids are coming after us.”
“Time to get moving,” Whie agreed. “Hey—where’s Master Yoda?”
“He left. He said we should rendezvous back at the ship in twelve hours.”
“I didn’t hear that,” Whie said suspiciously. “Why would he tell you and not me?”
“I don’t know,” Scout snapped back. “Because you’re acting really weird right now?”
Whie started an angry reply, then bit it back. He nodded, tight-lipped. “Good answer. It isn’t easy for me, being here. My thoughts keep spinning out: I have to cut them off. I’ve been using the Silent Meditation Master Yoda taught us back when we were all five. Do you remember that one?”
“Yeah.” Eyes half closed, tongue curled up to just touch the roof of the mouth: the Force running in a wheel from the top of one’s head, spilling down through one’s spine, then the marrow of one’s thighbones, then draining from the pressure point in the soles of the feet to discharge. A child full of the Force like a cloud carrying lightning is, he used to say. Let the charge run through you to the ground, to the ground. She could still hear his kindly old voice—relax you must!—and the sound of kids giggling around her in the sleepy sunlit classroom.
Whie’s voice broke into her memory. “This is what happened to Asajj Ventress’s Master, you know. He was marooned on a strange, violent planet, and the Jedi abandoned him. Master Yoda abandoned him.”
“Do you really think that’s the whole story?”
Whie shrugged. “Funny coincidence. That’s all I’m saying. Fidelis, get us farther away from these droids, would you?”
“Certainly, sir. I know every crack and cranny in these caves. If you will follow me?”
The Padawans hiked after him, Scout second with her lightsaber shedding its pale blue gleam; Whie bringing up the rear, moving easily. The weight of rock overhead didn’t seem to bother him, but Scout hated it: the crushing weight, millions of metric tons of stone, rotten with holes and apertures. A couple of mortar rounds or a concussion grenade could bring the whole string of caverns down, burying them alive.
Stop it, she told herself. A Jedi—even a young, frantic Jedi—doesn’t let herself panic. You worked all your life to take these risks, Tallisibeth. You earned this fear. What would Jai Maruk think?
At the thought of him, grief and warmth stole into her. She remembered crying over him as he lay dying in the Phindar Spaceport. Don’t leave me, Master, she had said. His answer—Never, my Padawan.
Behind her, Whie laughed. “Remember that thing Master Yoda used to say? When you look at the dark side, careful you must be…”
“…for the dark side looks back,” Scout said.
Drip, tap, drop, tick.
Count Dooku sat at the desk in his study, pretending to read the day’s dispatches from the Clone Wars, but actually listening to the ceaseless Vjun rain tick-spattering against the windows behind him. Listening, too, with a sense other than hearing.
Yoda was close by.
He was moving carefully, quietly, hiding his presence in the Force; riding on its back like a leaf whirled gently down a stream. But on Vjun, the Force was bent mightily to the dark side, and every now and then the Master opposed its current. It was these moments Dooku was listening for. Once, several minutes ago, the old Jedi had misstepped, putting a foot against the current, and the shock of it had rumbled through the very bedrock beneath Château Malreaux, announcing the Master’s coming like a distant groundquake.
Or maybe it hadn’t been a mistake. Maybe Yoda wanted Dooku to know he was on his way.
Since then the world had been silent. The old Jedi was moving like a water-skeeter over the surface of the Force, with nothing to herald his coming but a faint sensation of heat on Dooku’s skin, as if he were a blind man at sunrise, the dawn invisible to him but for a pale, spreading warmth.
He hadn’t really expected the Master to allow himself to be brought into Château Malreaux under guard. Combat timing is, the Master used to say; and the job of the warrior, to destroy his opponent’s timing. Even now Dooku could see the Master in his mind’s eye, stumpy little form in brown robes on the first day of lightsaber practice, clucking and passing out the wooden practice swords, kids giggling, the smell of clean linen and matting, the Master shuffling out in front of them all, the long, snoozing sigh: and then the rush, the little figure calling the Force to fill him up, the pull of it so strong that Dooku and the other gifted children could feel it, like a current streaming from the corners of the room into Yoda’s horny feet, running in electric streams through his legs and trunk, the fire in his eyes, the Force gathered at the tip of his wooden sword like caged lightning, and when he lifted his foot and stamped it back down into a wide ready stance, you could feel the whole Temple shake.
Tap, drop, tip.
No, it would be interesting to see Yoda again. Like revisiting one’s childhood home. Not that Dooku intended to get caught up in nostalgic sentiment. Sitting here with the fate of millions in his hands, subordinates begging for orders, victims begging for mercy: naturally it was tempting to remember those earlier, comparatively carefree days, when he was a boy dreaming of the lives he was going to save, instead of counting his corpses by the thousands. Funny to think he had ever been so young that a single life seemed precious.
But he was all grown up now, and past such sentiment; no longer a boy to be ordered around.
Except by Sidious, of course.
Ventress’s words came circling back into his head. How can he let you live?…He will use you up…Talking to get herself out of trouble, of course; but by the stars she had chosen her dodge shrewdly. One thing you could say for Asajj: her instinct for where to drive the knife home was impeccable.
You must stand too much in his sun, Count.
Dooku glanced at the holomonitors grouped on his desktop, many scenes vying for his attention: a view of the battle on Omwat; a panning shot of the devastation on Honoghr, six months after the toxic catastrophe there—part of General Grievous’s proposal to step up use of bioweapons in the Outer Rim campaigns; a holofeed from the Senate chamber of the Republic; an urgent interrupt showing a small ship coming hard into Vjun orbit, chased by two interceptor craft from the high-orbital pickets; real-time updates from the troops that had followed Yoda and his children into the caves; and a battery of surveillance views from the château itself: front grounds, main hall, servants’ entrance, and the hallway outside this study.
The Count didn’t like surprises.
Tap, drip, tap! Rain coming harder now, knocking against the windows.
He reached forward to magnify the view of the incoming ship his fighters were chasing, then stopped, examining his hand. The stupid thing was shaking again. The warm feeling on his skin intensified, like a blush of shame, and the trembling got worse. It was strangely as if he was afraid. His rational mind was quite calm, but for some reason his body was responding as if he were a schoolboy on the edge of speaking to a beautiful girl: fear and shame and longing and hope all jumbled madly together.
Tap, tap!
At last the Co
unt realized that wasn’t the sound of rain. He whirled around to stare out his study window. Perched impossibly on the thin ledge outside, five stories above the ground, Master Yoda was rapping on the glass with his stick. Rain was running down the furrows of his wrinkled face, and he was grinning like a gargoyle.
A Hoersch-Kessel Chryya-class modified very fast courier dropped through Vjun’s atmosphere like a thunderbolt, with two Trade Federation pickets in hot pursuit. Hot being the operative word, as the pilot of the Chryya seemed to have skipped the unit on atmospheric braking in flight school. Instead of burning off speed in a long, shallow series of loops in the upper atmosphere, the very fast courier was coming down at a suicidally steep angle. Her thermal scalings were a deep, ominous, throbbing orange. A trail of superheated air and burning atmospheric particulates streamed behind her like a comet’s tail.
One of the pursuing picket ships shot overhead into the distance, not daring to keep to that impossibly steep reentry angle. The other, glowing bright red, stayed doggedly on the Chryya, firing short bursts from her forward cannon that failed to hit their mark. The sky screamed as the ships tore it in half like flimsiplast. The Chryya jerked and twisted gleefully through the hail of incoming fire, swiveled her top-mounted laser to point straight aft, and let go with one continuous stream of fire.
For a long moment the picket ship’s forward deflectors held.
When the end came, it wasn’t the energy blast punching through her armor that killed her; it was the sheer ambient heat that reached the hull’s melting point. For one eternal instant the ship’s edges seemed to blur and run, hurtling toward the ground like a burning drop of blood. The pilot tried to pull out of the dive, but the enormous g forces tore the melting frame apart, and the ship dissolved, smacking into the ruined city of Bitter End like a fiery snowball.
A couple of kilometers away, the Chryya settled daintily on the ground one hundred meters from Yoda’s abandoned B-7.
“What was that?” Obi-Wan Kenobi said, unbuckling himself from the turret cannon gunner’s chair. “I thought you were going to get us shot. Then I was sure you were going to get us incinerated. Then I was positive you were going to crash.”
Anakin bounced out of the pilot’s chair, grinning. “Just a little thing I like to call—”
“Showing off?”
“Showing off! It’s not just about winning, Master. Federation attack droids coming in two files from the B-Seven landing sight: six, seven, eight of them,” he added carelessly, glancing at the Chryya’s tactical monitor. “It’s about winning with style.” He put his hand on the lightsaber at his side and prepared to launch himself out the Chryya’s forward hatch. “Ready?”
“No!” Obi-Wan dropped back into the turret gunner’s chair and used the Chryya’s laser cannon to blow holes through three of the attack droids hurrying down the path toward them before the others scrambled madly for cover. “All right. Now I’m ready.”
Anakin drew two blasters from the gun locker by the forward hatch. “I love this planet. It’s just steeped in the Force. I could feel it the moment we touched the atmosphere. I’m usually a good pilot—”
“Great pilot,” Obi-Wan admitted.
“—But here it was like the ship’s hull and my skin were the same thing. I could feel exactly how much heat she could take, how much torque, how many rolls…”
“Clearly you weren’t using the Force to commune with my stomach.” Obi-Wan, still looking a little green, picked up a blaster rifle and a couple of concussion grenades.
“The difference between Coruscant and here is like the difference between swimming in fresh water and in the ocean. I feel so buoyant.”
Anakin tapped the hatch lock and launched himself outside with a towering leap. Bright glares of blasterfire sparkled around the hatch, but he was through, twisting in the air, a blaster in each hand, firing as he went, one, two, three, four shots—two droids holed through their video sensors, running blindly across the hillside, sparks shooting from their scrambled sensor arrays.
Anakin hung in the air for an impossibly long time, let himself fall at last into a shoulder roll, two more shots at a droid trying to sneak up behind him, taking off its weapon hand and blowing out a knee, and then he was standing, perfectly balanced, with the blaster pistols steaming in the thin Vjun rain. “I could walk on water,” he said.
The droids began to retreat—a swift, efficient action for those still undamaged, though the two Anakin had blinded were stumbling and weaving around the terrain, emitting high-pitched shrieks that sounded like unnatural yelps of mechanical pain. Obi-Wan followed Anakin into the open, using his lightsaber to deflect a few blaster bolts sent at him by the retreating droids.
“Why are they making that noise?” Anakin asked.
“Echolocation. It’s a last-ditch backup directional sense—they’re squeaking like hawk-bats, trying to make an active sonar graph of the terrain.” Anakin gave him a look. “I’m not joking,” Obi-Wan said. “It was in one of the latest updates.”
“Must have missed that one,” Anakin murmured, watching the blinded droids clang into one another as they staggered back after their fellows.
“Come on. Let’s see if they’ve got Yoda and the Padawans over there.”
They ran after the retreating droids, stopping just long enough at the B-7 to make sure there were no Jedi captives there.
The droids scrambled up a hillside and withdrew into the mouth of a cave. “What do you think?” Obi-Wan asked, passing over a pair of electrobinoculars. The two of them were now lying flat behind a little mossy ridge, looking up at a dark slash, like a wound in the venomous green hillside above. They could see light sparkling on the tips of blaster rifles from droids lying flat in the cave’s mouth.
Anakin considered. “Long run uphill to get to the cave’s mouth. No cover. They’d be firing down at us from a shielded position. Kind of a killing field, when you get right down to it.”
“That’s sort of what I thought.”
Anakin unclipped a dimpled sphere from his belt and hurled it uphill.
“Wait!” Obi-Wan said, too late. Anakin had already used the Force to guide the concussion grenade into the cave’s mouth, where it detonated with a deep, flat sound, like a sound tube dropped from the top spire of the Jedi Temple hitting the stone pavement below.
One heartbeat. Two.
Metal debris blasted out of the cave mouth like confetti. A moment later, Obi-Wan felt a deep, percussive thud shaking the ground beneath his belly. Then another. Then more. The sound of falling stone roared out of the cave mouth, followed by a huge exhalation of dust, puffing from the opening like a giant’s dying breath.
“Great,” Obi-Wan said. “The caverns are collapsing on themselves.”
Whole sections of the hillside buckled and slumped, going soft and dark like bruised fruit under the thin skin of Vjun moss. The rumbling sounds of crashing stone went on and on. The ground buckled as whole patches of the hill tipped slowly in on themselves and folded into the dirt.
The smile slowly drained from Anakin’s face.
“I’m not sure a grenade was the best idea,” Obi-Wan remarked.
“You don’t suppose Yoda was in there, do you?” Anakin asked. “And the Padawans?”
“You better hope not.” Seeing the young man’s stricken face, Obi-Wan relented. “I’m sure we would have felt it in the Force if Yoda had been killed. But next time, think a little bit longer before rearranging the landscape, would you?”
“Yes, Master,” Anakin said. Technically he was no longer Obi-Wan’s Padawan, but he tended to slip back into sounding like one when he was acutely aware of having screwed up. “What next?”
Obi-Wan got to his feet. “Next, I think we…ugh!” he said, staring down. His Jedi robes were stained green, as if with the juice of some poisonous fruit, and where he had been lying on the Vjun moss, made damp with the planet’s faintly acid rain, the thread was already beginning to rot.
“I know. I can fe
el my skin beginning to burn from the drizzle,” Anakin said.
“What a horrible planet,” Obi-Wan remarked. “I’d hate to be the minister for tourism here.” He pointed to a magnificent manor house perhaps a kilometer inland, white stone bordered with blood red. “I think we head there. It looks to be about Count Dooku’s style, and wherever Dooku is, Yoda will be close at hand.”
Usually the Force only helped Scout predict her enemies’ moves when they were face-to-face, but the air of Vjun was rich even for her, and a prickling premonition had danced over her skin seconds before the caves started to collapse. “Fidelis! Get us out of here!” she’d said, and the droid, responding to the urgent tone of command, had grabbed her belt and hauled her along. They pelted down a long, thin passageway at top speed. Then came the first explosion, a dull crack like blasters close at hand, followed by a rumbling thunder that did not fade but grew louder as the caves behind them began to crumble.
They stared at one another as the still air of the cavern suddenly began to puff and quarter, like a crazy wind. The floor of the passage shook beneath their feet. “Uh-oh,” Scout whispered.
“Keep running!” Fidelis shouted. “We’re almost there!” Moving swiftly in the gloom, he raced through another passage, carrying Scout so high and fast her feet missed the floor for steps at a time.
A rumble, a roar, a deafening crash. “One of the lakes has slid!” Fidelis said. Scout was still trying to puzzle out what he meant when a wall of water dropped suddenly on top of them. Some fissure must have opened up in one of the great underground pools, and what had once been a quiet and predictable little lake was suddenly a moving waterfall that dropped from above, smacking Scout’s head against the droid’s metal side so hard it made her ears ring.
“Master!” the droid cried. In the strobing flare of Whie’s lightsaber, Scout could see him in flashes, knocked down by the sudden rush of water and swept back along the passageway. There was another titanic crash as the roof collapsed on the cavern they had just abandoned.