Star Wars: Rogue Planet

  Anakin leaned out over the woven rail of the hanging gondola and peered down at the river, thin and white and roaring even from this height. He saw sleek, pale creatures as wide as a Gungan sub, and about the same shape, gliding back and forth above the river. Other, smaller shapes, dark and quick, veered around them.

  “I’d love to ride a raft down there,” Anakin said.

  “It’s too dangerous,” the airship pilot warned. A young man of sixteen or seventeen standard years, barely an adult by the Ferroan measure, he stood behind three thick control levers aft of the cabin, steadying the airship’s course.

  “Nobody’s tried it?” Anakin asked him.

  “Nobody with half a brain.” The pilot grinned. “We have better ways to take risks.”

  “Like what?”

  “Wellll-llll”—the pilot drew out the word to some length—“on Uniting Day …” Gann returned from the narrow prow and gave the pilot a look. He was telling tales out of turn.

  “Ten minutes before we arrive,” Gann said. “You have all that is necessary?”

  Obi-Wan looked to Anakin, who winked and patted his waist. “Yes,” Obi-Wan answered. “But I’d be much more comfortable if we were more familiar with the procedures.”

  Gann nodded. “I’m sure you would,” he said. “Everybody would. There is only one client this day, counting you and the boy as a partnered team. So you are alone in your time of choosing. Any more than that—” He glanced at the pilot. “—would be telling.”

  The young pilot nodded soberly.

  The other passengers on the airship were Ferroans, as well, with pale blue and ghostly white skins, long jaws, and wide eyes. The female Gann had been conversing with was larger and somewhat more heavily muscled than the males. She walked around the cabin as they approached the high, vine-suspended landing, and introduced herself to Obi-Wan and Anakin.

  “I am Sheekla Farrs,” she said, her voice strong and deep. “I am a grower and daughter of Firsts. Gann gives you to me now for the rest of this day.”

  “Sheekla,” Gann said, bowing slightly and retreating a step. Farrs leaned close and sniffed at Obi-Wan’s face, then drew back with a discerning squint. “You aren’t afraid.” She did the same for Anakin, who glanced at Obi-Wan in some embarrassment. “Neither are you,” she concluded.

  “I can’t wait,” Anakin said. “Are we going to see the ships?”

  When Farrs laughed, her deep voice became high and quite musical. “Today you meet your seed-partners. When that is done, you design your ship. My husband, Shappa, will guide you in that task.”

  The pilot unhooked the airship from its cable and turned it into the shade of a ridge wall, then deftly strung it onto a secondary cable and toward the landing. The basket wobbled between a pair of heavy black dampers mounted on thick pilings. The cable sang as the dampers pinched in and grabbed the basket, tugging it down slightly before the gate was opened by attendants at the landing. A ramp was dropped, and Sheekla Farrs indicated they should cross ahead of her.

  “That was rugged,” Anakin told Obi-Wan as they disembarked. “If there’s some sort of airship race here, can we try it?”

  “We?” Obi-Wan asked.

  “Sure. You’d be great,” Anakin said. “You learn fast. But …” He waggled his shoulders. “You got to be more confident.”

  “I see,” Obi-Wan said.

  “We are now at Far Distance,” Sheekla Farrs said. “This is where we join our seed-partners and the prospective clients. There is a ceremony, of course.” She smiled at Anakin. “Very formal. You’ll hate it.”

  Anakin wrinkled his nose.

  “But you’ll be meeting what could become your ship,” she added.

  Anakin brightened.

  “And you’ll undergo what the Magister experienced, so many years ago, when he alone saw Zonama and knew Sekot for the first time.”

  “Who’s the Magister?” Anakin asked.

  Sheekla Farrs gave Obi-Wan a glance then that he could not read, though it seemed to mingle both respect and warning. “He is our leader, our spiritual adviser, and the knower. His father was founder of Middle Distance and the pioneer for all we do here.”

  Gann made his farewells, promising to meet with them later, and Farrs led them across the bridge that connected the landing to a broad tunnel dug directly into the rock wall. Water dripped to either side of a long walkway elevated above the floor of the tunnel, its lamina surface damp with seep. Green tendrils crisscrossed the wet floor like a grid. Everything was very regular, very patterned, almost too tidy.

  “The seed-partners emerge from a Potentium,” Farrs told them as they approached the end of the tunnel.

  Surprised by that word, Potentium, Obi-Wan reached back far into his memory, to conversations with Qui-Gon Jinn before the Jedi Master had taken him on as a Padawan.

  Farrs pushed through the door and took them into a broad courtyard open to the sky. The trunks of smaller boras leaned over the courtyard on three sides. On the fourth side, the neatly paved stone floor ended abruptly at the abyss. They heard the sound of the river beyond, apparently rushing into a subterranean cavern. “If you fail, they will return to the Potentium. All is conserved. The seed-partners are very important here.”

  “I don’t know that word,” Anakin said to Obi-Wan. “What’s a Potentium?”

  Qui-Gon and Mace Windu had once dealt with a group of apprentices who had shown promise, but had not been accepted as Jedi Knights. In disappointment and anger, one of them had tried to start his own version of the Jedi, enlisting “students” from aristocratic families on Coruscant and Alderaan. Qui-Gon had mentioned the Potentium, a controversial view of the Force.

  The theory of the Potentium had long since been judged by the Council to be in error, and abandoned. It was no longer even mentioned to Padawans.

  “I’ll be curious to discover the meaning myself,” Obi-Wan said. And how and why it is being used here!

  The courtyard was filled with a brightly dressed crowd of celebrants, standing in clusters of five and six throughout, all silent. Anakin and Obi-Wan advanced slowly at the urging of Sheekla Farrs. A woman’s low voice began singing—the same song they had heard coming from the other airships.

  In Ferroans, maturity darkened the hair of males, but not females. Two older men with jet-black hair stepped forward, carrying sashes hung with bloodred, gourdlike fruits. The taller of the two slung a sash around Obi-Wan’s neck, and the other slipped his over Anakin’s head. Now all joined in the song, and the chorus of voices echoed from the courtyard’s stone walls.

  Farrs smiled broadly. “They like the way you look and smell. You aren’t afraid.”

  The taller man backed away a step, walked in a circle, thrusting his chin at three points of the Zonama compass, and then turned back to Obi-Wan and held out his hands.

  “Your offering to the Potentium,” Farrs suggested.

  At a gesture from Obi-Wan, Anakin slipped his hand through his loose tunic and drew out the pouched belt containing the bars of old Republic aurodium. He passed it to Obi-Wan, who passed it in turn to the elder, who accepted it with a smile and a slight bow.

  “Now, we introduce you to Sekot,” Farrs said, rewarding them with a beaming and most unmercenary smile. “I am so very, very optimistic!”

  The lengthy journey through hyperspace was beginning to wear on Raith Sienar. He sat in a chair facing a blank bulkhead in the commander’s quarters aboard the Admiral Korvin, shifting a small metal cylinder from hand to hand, lost in thought.

  While the theory of hyperspace fascinated him—and while he was always interested in designing ships that could travel more and more swiftly by means of this mode of extradimensional travel—Sienar was much less interested in so testing himself. The routines of command held even less interest. He much preferred working alone and had always structured his life so that he spent most of his time by himself, to think.

  Now, that tendency was just one more weakness.

  There had
been three inspections so far of the Admiral Korvin and the holds that carried the greater part of their armament. With some plan forming, as yet embryonic, he had ordered a personal and individual inspection of the various weapons systems—the walking droids, the flying droids, those that could both walk and fly, the large droids and the small droids, many no larger than his hand—so tedious, when he wanted little to do with these machines. He knew their limitations, whatever puff talk Tarkin had delivered.

  He could not forget the droids that had stood around like sticks on Naboo, slow to think, slow to fire, centrally controlled by their organic idiot counterparts. The droids that had essentially brought down the Trade Federation.

  However much Sienar tried to muster enthusiasm for his tools, he could not stop that intellectual itch that told him he was being set up. He just could not figure out why he was being set up. Who would benefit from the failure of this mission?

  The time was approaching—if time could be called any such thing on a ship hurtling above time—when he would have to meet with his appointed “assistant,” the Blood Carver, Ke Daiv. Ke Daiv gave him the creeps, but at least he seemed intelligent and, despite his failure against the Jedi, competent enough. Strangely, as Sienar got up from his chair and paced his spacious and well-appointed cabin, he was not disturbed by the possibility that Ke Daiv was the one assigned to execute him should he fail.

  He needed more armor, and he needed an ally whose motives he understood and could at least partially trust.

  He drew himself up. It was time to probe Ke Daiv’s armor. He would do it ahead of schedule, and while they were still incommunicado in hyperspace.

  That would require some preparation.

  He pulled a small box from his locked and coded luggage case and examined it in a bright light that descended from the ceiling at the touch of a button. A small table and set of tools rose from the floor before the closed forward-facing port that filled most of a wall in the commander’s sitting room.

  The tools on the table he had requisitioned from ship’s stores the day before. His fingers were less than steady, but the work of preparing the box was not exceptionally delicate.

  One of the reasons he had little faith in droids was that he had long ago created ways to subvert them. For reasons of his own—and because he had always been convinced battle droids would fail on their own—he had never marketed these items.

  Inside the box was a custom droid verbobrain of his own design, carrying his own programs.

  He fingered a communications button, and an image of Captain Kett flickered to low-resolution “life” before him. He could see Kett, but Kett could not see him.

  “Send me a Baktoid model E-5, fully operational and armed, to my quarters.” Baktoid Combat Automata had designed and manufactured these heavy, unwieldy droids as Trade Federation replacements after Naboo, before assimilation into the Republic. He would have preferred a lighter model, but the E-5s had more than enough power and their motivators were quite good. They were, in Sienar’s opinion, the best of a mediocre lot, their greatest weakness being their lack of intelligence. Their verbo-brains were as slow as any tank’s. But then, that is what Baktoid specialized in: transports and tanks.

  Sienar knew the chief designer well. The dunderhead just loved tanks.

  He opened the box, removed the verbobrain, and inserted a new programming cylinder into a vacant slot. Immediately, the spinner within the unit began to whir and seek data from its radiance of inputs.

  With this, Sienar believed he could make an E-5 dance like a female Twi’lek.

  And with the modified E-5 a fixture in his quarters, he would meet with Ke Daiv, and tell him a thing or two about the people—the humans—he was working for.

  The crowd had parted in silence to let Obi-Wan and Anakin through. They walked across the courtyard alone. Sheekla Farrs held back and watched them approach the massive stone and lamina door. The door swung wide. Beyond lay a great, open spherical chamber, like the inside of a ball with its top cut away. Late-morning sun moved in a brilliant oblong across the rear of the chamber, which crawled with thousands of living things: spike-covered balls a little smaller than a human head.

  Obi-Wan observed this motion with some concern. Anakin, however, looked upon the thousands of thorny spheroids with a smile.

  “These will grow to become our ship,” he whispered to Obi-Wan.

  “We don’t know that yet,” Obi-Wan said.

  “A Jedi can feel his destiny, can’t he?” Anakin asked.

  “A fully trained Jedi may rely on such feelings, but changes in the Force can deceive an apprentice.”

  Anakin ran ahead, and Obi-Wan broke into a trot to keep up. The boy held out his arms as if in welcome.

  Across the wide chamber, every thorn-covered organism stopped its rustling motion. Except for a morning breeze lazing down from the opening to the sky, silence filled the room.

  “They’re seed-partners!” Anakin shouted.

  The door behind them closed noiselessly. They were alone with the seed-partners, if that was what they were. Obi-Wan felt it best to keep an open mind, but it was obvious Anakin had no doubts whatsoever.

  “What are you waiting for?” the boy shouted. His voice did not echo—the thick carpet of spikeballs absorbed all sound.

  “We should let them take the initiative,” Obi-Wan advised softly.

  Anakin scowled impatiently. Suddenly, he was a twelve-year-old boy, nothing more. He showed nothing of the three years of training in the Temple. Obi-Wan placed his hand on Anakin’s shoulders and felt the tension in the boy’s body and limbs, like a young animal, totally impenetrable to suggestion.

  The dropping away from his Padawan of every aspect of Obi-Wan’s teaching dismayed him for a moment. It was as if he stood behind a totally different child than the one Qui-Gon had thought so special.

  Anakin spoke, his words barely audible.

  Then, louder, “I’m ready.”

  Only now did Obi-Wan catch on, and the hair on his neck bristled in a way it had not for years, since he had encountered and defeated, though just barely, the strange red-and-black Sith with the double-bladed red lightsaber, Darth Maul, the Sith who had mortally wounded Qui-Gon.

  The boy had totally damped all extraneous personal vibrations. He had become quiet in the Force in a way Obi-Wan still found exceptionally difficult, though not impossible, and the boy had done this in fractions of a second.

  With the swift and native genius of a child, Anakin had made himself into a quiet antenna listening to the creatures within the sphere.

  And the spikeballs, in turn, equally quiet, listened to both of these potential new clients with all the openness of a different variety of childhood.

  “They want something from us,” Obi-Wan suggested.

  Anakin shook his head. The apprentice was disagreeing with the master, not for the first time and, Obi-Wan suspected, not by a long shot for the last.

  “We’re not what they expected,” Obi-Wan said.

  Anakin nodded.

  Two of the bristling spheres disengaged midway up the wall of the chamber and clambered over their companions until they came to the clearing on the bowl of the floor, the empty space surrounding the two humans. The spikeballs rolled slowly, in a wavering path, until they were just centimeters from the boy’s feet.

  More spikeballs disengaged and followed. In a few moments, Anakin and Obi-Wan were surrounded by ten of the milling seed-partners, each making small clicking noises and producing a rich, flowery smell.

  “They approve,” Anakin said, glancing at his master. “They sense we’re not afraid.” Within the boy’s eyes, enthusiasm had been tempered by a new caution. “But … if they approve, it means a real commitment, doesn’t it?”

  “I presume,” Obi-Wan said.

  “For them, it’s got to be serious.”

  “Perhaps.”

  The ten spikeballs drew back and stopped their restless motion. The air was rich with their scent, now ta
ngy, like breeze from a salty sea.

  “I wish Sheekla had told us more,” Anakin said, his eyes darting around the chamber.

  The atmosphere was thick and damp, as if a storm were near.

  The spikeballs began to vibrate on the floor. Obi-Wan looked up to the rim of the chamber wall and saw many more descending. The purposeful descent quickly turned into frenzied dropping. The carpet of seed-partners unraveled as dozens, then hundreds of the thorny spheres broke free and fell to collide with their companions in the bottom of the bowl. The spikeballs bounced, whistled, clicked, and released a nose-cloying cloud of electric-flowery scent.

  “They’re all going to drop!” Anakin shouted, and turned, but there was nowhere to run. He stood straight, then crouched and reached for Obi-Wan. “This is going to be bad! But whatever you do, don’t be afraid!”

  Obi-Wan instinctively reached for his lightsaber, but that would have been useless. All they could do was stand back-to-back and cover their faces as every spike-ball in the chamber poured down onto the floor in a thorny cascade. In seconds, Anakin and Obi-Wan were awash in the deluge, bumped and battered mercilessly. They pushed out with their hands to keep their faces clear. But the torrent pressed from all sides, rising over their heads and slamming the backs of their hands against their lips and noses. Fragments of spikeball shells flew into the air, and a cloud of dust rose from the churning heap.

  They could not move.

  In seconds, they could not even breathe.

  I have great respect for the culture of the Blood Carvers,” Raith Sienar told the tall, quiet, golden figure that stood in the anteroom to the commander’s quarters. He could hear Ke Daiv’s slow, soft breathing and the steady click-click of his long black nails on one hand, knocking together like wooden chimes in a breeze.

  “Why did you bring me here?” Ke Daiv asked after a moment. “It is early in the mission.”

  “So insolent!”

  “It is my way. I serve and obey, also in my way.”

  “I see. Please, make yourself comfortable.” Raith stood back and gestured toward the sitting room.