He almost felt sorry for them.
Chapter 47
Anakin, fully recovered now, could feel the ship's immediate response, the wonderful surges of instant power, the way she cut through die air almost as effortlessly as if they were in a vacuum. The hull created subtle lift and was remarkably stable. On any world with an atmosphere, she would land sweetly. It took very little of his attention to fly the ship. Information arrived in comfortable flows through his contact with the ship's mind. She truly was a dream, alive to his touch.
But any joy he might have taken in this first flight was tainted by his concern for Obi-Wan. His face was deeply carved by a grim frown.
The Blood Carver stared at the young human, nose flaps closed, sharp as a blade. "I did not kill your master," Ke Daiv said. "It would have served no purpose."
"But you would have killed me, once," Anakin said through clenched teeth.
"I follow orders," the Blood Carver said.
"So you're an assassin. Do you even know my name?"
"You are the on ly one named Skywalker."
"If you're going to kill me, I'd like to know your name."
"Ke Daiv."
"I've never met a Blood Carver before," Anakin said. "I can't say it's a pleasure."
"Just fly. We need to find fuel."
"I don't know where to get any!" Anakin lied. The seeds knew-they were talking with other parts of Sekot.
And something or someone else flowed through his fingers where they were enmeshed by the controls. Anakin kept seeing misting ghosts around the cabin, like afterimages from bright sun-he had to work to concentrate on the scene around him.
"I have been busy in Middle Distance," Ke Daiv said. "I have learned where secret reserves of fuel are kept. Fly due south."
"Why would they need secret reserves?" Anakin asked. He turned the ship.
"There are mysteries on this planet," Ke Daiv said with a slight hiss. "Not long ago, there was a great war."
"We saw the damage."
"Did you learn what caused the war?"
"I really don't think I should be talking with you." But I should see how well he reacts to Jedi compulsion. I've never been trained in mind tricks, but I know I can do it. Maybe even better than Obi-Wan.
The boy shook his head, distracted by seeing a vague image wrap over the Blood Carver's features. The wraithlike form drifted with his attention to different parts of the cabin.
"Who are you, really?" Anakin asked to hide his confusion.
"I am from an old clan, an even older nation, swallowed by the Republic, taken in after our defeat at the hands of the Lontars."
Concentration was becoming increasingly difficult. Anakin fumbled to keep up the conversation, to keep it away from his main concerns. "That was hundreds of years ago. The senate forced the Lontars to stop their aggression."
"Not before my people had been nearly wiped out," Ke Daiv said. "The few survivors were taken to Coruscant and kept in seclusion. We were warriors. We were called allies, but we could not be trusted. Few understood us. In time, when the rulers of the galaxy lost interest, we made our livelihoods selling crafts."
So you've lived on Coruscant all your life."
"You said you should not be talking to me," Ke Daiv reminded him.
"What else is there to do? Why didn't you get a ship for yourself?"
The wraith took on form-an oblong head, torso shifting, still too vague to be identifiable. Then he made out the feathers, the elliptical eyes. Anakin held back an exclamation, and sweat broke out on his forehead. I don't need this now!
"I am not appealing to the seed-partners," Ke Daiv said.
"Too bad. These ships are really great."
"I have always hoped for independence," Ke Daiv said.
"Yeah, me too," Anakin said sharply. "Fly all over the galaxy. . . Freedom to see everything, no obligations, no . . ."
"No history, no future," Ke Daiv said.
"Right," Anakin said. He's losing focus. He's weak. Now's the time to move on him. I have to keep control. No distractions.
But he could not push aside the feathered being's image. She was trying to say something, repeating something over and over, like a muted recording.
Anakin raised his hands, and the panel let go with a soft sucking sound. The image vanished. He made as if to wriggle the tension out of his fingers. "Got to get used to these controls." He looked at the Blood Carver. His fingers instantly formed the graceful shape of compulsion.
Ke Daiv seemed unconcerned.
"You should let me take you back to Coruscant," Anakin said. "I could show you the Temple where I live."
Ke Daiv regarded him, eyes small and somehow sad, his oddly handsome face almost unreadable. "We are not destined to share clan."
"No, just a visit."
Anakin moved his hand to another position, a milder form of persuasion, and felt for connections in the Force. Jedi must be in sympathy and understanding with what they seek to control. You and he are not that different.
"We're not that different."
"We are different, Jedi. You have honor. I have merely the duty to work my way out of disgrace."
"Tell me about it," Anakin said. "I was a slave."
"You are valued among the Jedi. And those who command tell me the Jedi pose a danger."
"We defend, we don't cause trouble."
"That is young talk," Ke Daiv said.
"You're young, too."
Ke Daiv looked at his set of controls. One of several displays spun into view in front of him. He tensed in the seat, which would not let him sit comfortably. "There is a ship chasing us. It is the ship that brought you here. And . . . there is another. Go faster."
Anakin squinted at him.
Ke Daiv swung his flexible arm back, and the lance nearly caught Jabitha in the face. She screamed.
"Faster, to the Magister's mountain," the Blood Carver insisted, his voice chillingly calm.
"We're going as fast as we can!" Anakin cried. He did not have the training or the concentration now to compel the Blood Carver to do anything. He placed his hands on the controls.
The little creature instantly returned, filling his eyes and his mind. There was no sense fighting her. The image was crystalline. Her expression, what he could read in the piebald arrangement of feathers and whiskers, was stern, and her large, slanted eyes darted left and right, anticipating danger. Anakin recognized her now. This was Vergere.
"Jedi," she said. "Whoever you may be. I have left this message in my seed-partners, in the hopes they will find you, or you will find them. There is little time left. I am leaving with the visitors who have provoked a war here and wiped out half of Zonama Sekot. It is the only way to study them, and the only way to avoid a greater war and save this world."
Anakin tried to stay calm. The integrated seeds contained all of the message that Obi-Wan had caught only a fragment of. That the ship was delivering the message now, in the middle of his trial, when he was at his most vulnerable, seemed grossly unfair.
But fairness had never played much of a part in Anakin Skywalker's life.
"The Zonamans call these visitors Far Outsiders. They are different from all the living things we have studied. The Far Outsiders know nothing of the Force. And the Force knows nothing of them. Yet they are not machines, they are definitely alive, and they may pose a great threat to us all. They are fascinated by me, by my abilities, and they have accepted me in exchange for breaking off their attack and leaving this system.
"I go with them to learn their secrets, and I vow, as a Jedi Knight, that I will survive and report my discoveries. But also, I lead them away from a planet I have come to love. Know this, Jedi-"
Vergere's face seemed to glow with enthusiasm. "There is a great secret here, which you may discover in time. The heart of a great living creature has started to beat, and a great mind has become aware of itself. I have witnessed the birth of an amazing being-"
Vergere turned aside, and the messa
ge ended abruptly.
There was no more.
"What are you staring at?" Ke Daiv asked, thumping the lance on the bulkhead over Anakin's seat. The lance tip left a mark that quickly closed up and healed.
Anakin jumped. "Just let me fly," he said, frowning.
Suddenly, the Sekotan ship, his childish enthusiasm for machines, his resentment at the turns his life had taken, everything that had before now defined Anakin Skywalker, seemed vague and unimportant.
Vergere might have sacrificed her life to pass this information to another Jedi.
Anakin now saw more clearly the shape of his trial. He knew why he was important, and why he must defeat Ke Daiv and all the others who might try to destroy him.
The survival of the Jedi themselves could be at stake.
Chapter 48
Shappa rose high into the mesosphere, on the edge of space, and pushed his ship until her skin glowed from the heat of friction. They were catching up with Anakin's ship, now about forty kilometers ahead and thirty kilometers below them. The air was a deep purple here, and the curve of Zonama Sekot was clearly evident. The forward ports had narrowed against the transmission of heat from the ship's skin, but Obi-Wan could still make out the endless blanket of clouds below, and the peak of the Magister's mountain on the horizon.
Charza Kwinn was now a thousand kilometers behind them, and trouble was following the Star Sea, Flower.
"My people won't hold fire for much longer," Shappa said. "I wonder if they know what they're getting into, attacking us?"
"Clearly, they don't," Obi-Wan said. He could not figure out a reason for any attack on Zonama Sekot. Something had gone awry during the transition, the assimilation of Trade Federation ships into the Republic forces. Perhaps outlaw elements in the Trade Federation had broken ranks and gone off on their own. That would explain the presence of droid starfighters, but not their actions.
"Those are Republic vessels," Shappa said, glancing at Obi-Wan. "Minelayers, I think."
Obi-Wan studied the images from Shappa's sensors. They were indeed sky-mine delivery ships, and above them, ten thousand kilometers out, Corellian light cruisers found only in the Republic forces.
"Forgive me," Shappa said. "But if you represent the Republic ..."
"I know nothing of this," Obi-Wan said grimly.
"Little matter," Shappa said. "We have regarded ourselves as outside the jurisdiction of the Republic, the Trade Federation, or any other governing body. Our Magister foresaw our need early on-and the Magister before him. We knew that in time we would have to find an even more obscure hiding place. It is the will of the Potentium."
That word again, a discredited concept from the past.
"Was the original Magister given Jedi training?" Obi-Wan asked.
"Yes," Shappa said with an odd reluctance.
"What was his actual name?"
"That name is sacred to Zonamans, and must not be spoken," Shappa said.
Obi-Wan tried to recall the more obscure bits of the Jedi history he had been taught in the Temple. The Potentium had meant a great deal of trouble for the Jedi a hundred years before. Advocates of the concept h ad believed that the Force could not push one into evil, that the universe was infiltrated by a benevolent field of life energy whose instructions were inevitably good. The Potentium, as they called it, was the beginning and ending of all things, and one's connection with it should not be mediated or obscured by any sort of training or discipline. Followers of the Potentium insisted that the Jedi Masters and the Temple hierarchy could not accept the universal good of the Potentium because it meant they were no longer needed.
But in the end, those Jedi apprentices who had been caught up in the movement had left the Temple, or were pushed out, and dispersed around the galaxy. As far as Obi-Wan could remember, none of the believers had actually succumbed to the dark side of the Force-something regarded as a prodigy by Jedi historians. From time to time, young Jedi caught up in their first experience of the Force broached the Potentium philosophy and had to be patiently retutored in the history of the Force, in the many and various reasons why the Jedi understood there were definite divisions and pitfalls in life's tenure in space and time.
For days now, a name had remained on the tip of his tongue-a particularly prominent young Jedi apprentice who had left the Temple voluntarily and renounced his training.
"Was your original Magister named Leor Hal?" he asked Shappa.
Shappa stared straight ahead through the port on the pilot's side of the cabin, jaw tight. "I knew you would figure things out soon enough," he said.
"He was a powerful student," Obi-Wan said. "Even after he left, he was regarded with respect."
"He was regarded as a dupe and a fool," Shappa said.
"An idealist, perhaps, but not a fool."
"Well, his own prejudices against any political system or philosophical organization . . . they established much of the character of Zonama's settlement."
"He recruited among the Ferroans?" Obi-Wan ventured.
"He did. My people have always been a sunny people, believers in independence and basic goodness. We came here to escape and raise our children in a new state of bliss."
"And when the Far Outsiders arrived ..."
"It was a rude awakening," Shappa said. "But the Magister's heir insisted they were outside the Potentium. They knew nothing of its ways, and we must teach them."
"How did he react to the presence of Vergere?"
"He shunned her, for his father's sake," Shappa said. "He gave her no assistance."
"But he built weapons."
"He did. He knew that many could misinterpret the Potentium, and that they might try to destroy us for our differences."
"What did the original Magister build?"
"He was the one who began selling ships. He told us we needed to raise enough money to buy huge hyperdrive cores. And to import huge engines, study them, and use the Jentari to remake them as even more powerful engines, for our own purposes."
"To what end?"
"Escape," Shappa said. He drew himself up. "Now, I believe the time has come."
"But he is dead," Obi-Wan said.
"Nonsense. You met with him."
"No. It is clear now."
"The Magister is not dead!" Shappa cried out, and shook his fist at Obi-Wan. "He sends instructions to us from his palace!"
"Perhaps even the palace no longer exists," Obi-Wan said.
"I will not hear of this!" Shappa shouted. "I will help you rescue your boy, and then . . . you must leave!" He turned away, intensely agitated, and studied his displays. "Perhaps the Jedi did send you here to disrupt us. And the Republic ships-
The sky ahead filled with tiny points of light. Sky mines were descending through the upper reaches of the atmosphere, spreading out for thousands of kilometers around like diffuse orange blossoms.
"They're trying to destroy us all!" Shappa groaned, his face a mask of fear and disappointment.
Chapter 49
Anakin brought his ship low around the peak of the mountain, flying in a smooth, beautiful arc, with perfect control.
All was quiet within the cabin. Jabitha had curled up on her couch and seemed to be trying to sleep. Anakin felt very protective toward her, but there was nothing he could do now. Rash behavior would get him killed, and now was not the time to indulge his brash and youthful tendencies.
"The palace should be right around here," Anakin said. Ke Daiv remained silent, the tip of his lance blade poised near Anakin's neck. "I don't see anything ... no landing field, nothing!"
"You have been here before?" Ke Daiv asked.
"Just a few days ago," Anakin said. "It was huge ... it covered the peak of the mountain."
"And this is the only mountain," Ke Daiv mused. "You wouldn't trick me, Jedi?"
"No," Anakin said, frustrated. "I tried that... it didn't work."
Ke Daiv made a small clucking sound. "Circle again."
Jabitha spoke up. "Are we a
t the palace?" she asked. Anakin did not know how to answer.
"Come here and show us where to go," Ke Daiv ordered. She rose from the couch and stepped forward gingerly.
"I don't see it," she said tremulously. Then her eyes widened. "Wait-that's the Dragon Cave, full of steam right next to an underground glacier . . . We used to hike there, years ago. But what's that? I've never seen that." She pointed to a long slope of talus, huge pieces of rock tumbled into temporary stasis on one side of the mountain, jumbled terrain dropping below the clouds. "That's new."
"You said you haven't been here in a year," Anakin said. "Not since the attack?"
Jabitha's face colored. "Father said never to discuss the attack with strangers."
Ke Daiv watched and listened with cautious interest.
"It looks like the mountain's been hit by laser cannon fire, or something even more powerful," Anakin observed, mindful that this was probably not what the girl would want to hear.
Ridiculous! Father told us the mountain was-"
She clamped her mouth shut and shook her head stubbornly. "I won't tell secrets."
"Too late now for secrets," Ke Daiv said. "Tell all." "I don't know what to say!"
"She doesn't know anything," Anakin said. "I was here just recently, and I saw a palace."
"It is still on the maps at Middle Distance," Ke Daiv said, by way of agreement.
"We must find fuel, whatever has happened." "We have to find the palace!" Jabitha insisted. "It's here. My father's here. They have to be!"
Anakin swung the ship up for a higher-altitude sweep. It was now that he spotted the blossoms of sky mines spreading out overhead. Ke Daiv saw them at the same time.
"Looks like they won't mind losing you," Anakin said tersely.
The Blood Carver stared through the port, his face unreadable, but the lance tip fell slightly. Anakin knew that now was the time to bring the ship down, release Jabitha, and take on Ke Daiv once again, all by himself.
The sky mines would provide the perfect excuse. They were designed to prevent ships from leaving a planet; they rarely if ever exploded on the surface.