An unfortunate blessing
By Mireille
02-01-01/2013
Previously: Vader managed to capture his son but Luke escaped from Executor before crashing on Myrkr. There, He became gravelly injured and Vader found him just as the Emperor turned against his traitorous servant. With Vader's help, Luke escaped the search parties and even received proper medical aid, but before he could be fit with a prosthetic leg, they were forced to once again hide into the forest. While moving around to avoid capture, father and son slowly bond over shared memories and revealed secrets, but not all revelations are pleasant. Weeks after their first run-in, they finally stumbled onto a smuggler's base where they hoped to find transport to Kamino.
Good evening everyone! As always, thanks to everyone who has reviewed this story's latest post! Your comments really mean a lot to me and I'm really happy that you enjoyed this last part as much as I had fun writing it!
Thanks as well for the favorites and alerts. I still hope to one day hear your thoughts in more details. (and yes, I do answer all the signed comments, so don't hesitate to leave a comment :) I don't bite, I promise!)
In regards to the anonymous reviews, thanks for your comment, Star Wars Girl and guest. Will they have a fight on their hands? Won't they :P How will they make it past that blockade ;P Will Karrde sell them out? Stay tuned for some of those answers :)
For everyone else, please, don't hesitate to share your thoughts :D The more I know that people read and enjoy this fic, the more I want to post more ASAP and end up actually making time write more of it (sacrificing other activities or lesser responsibilities in the process (hint hint) ;P)
And now, on with the fun! Karrde's decision is waiting to be revealed :) As is Anakin's and Luke's handling of the situation afterward! Have fun!
Disclaimers: Nothing in the Star Wars Universe belong to me; everything belongs to Lucasfilm and Walt Disney Co. I'm only writing stories for fun.
Part 10: Decisions and consequences
For a long moment, no one said anything anymore.
"We're-" Luke tried.
"Lord Vader, I presume?" Karrde cut in, smirking knowingly at the taller man.
Anakin simply stared through his disguise.
"And that would make you Luke Skywalker, the rebel Jedi hero. Interesting." Karrde commented as he stroke his mustache, falling deep in thought.
Luke tried once again to salvage the situation. "Come on," he snorted in mock-derision. "If Koon really were Darth Vader, you'd already be choking to death and-"
"Not while on Myrkr, I'm afraid," Karrde slowly shook his head in negative. "Besides, the search party informed us of your powerless status so that we wouldn't be afraid of you if we found you."
Both fugitives exchanged a look. They were done for.
"I'm afraid that your defection is already public knowledge, my Lord," Karrde shrugged, surprisingly unconcerned for someone who was meeting the infamous Sith Lord in a more than threatening context. Still keeping his cool, the smuggler produced a datapad with the details of the bounty set on Ani's living head.
The ex-Sith silently took it from his hand, and swore inwardly the moment that he saw its content. Indeed, Just like his son had foreseen, he was not only in the top dockets, but his possible aliases, including his real name, as well as his likely appearances were all detailed with the bounty.
"How do you know who-"
"You are missing a leg, Skywalker. They found it and ran a DNA scan on it. If I may say so, that was not very wise of you to leave it behind. You should have destroyed it."
Wonderful, Anakin seethed. Now Palpatine knew 'everything' for sure.
"I'm surprised that it survived the fire that swept through the area..." Luke grimaced and looked up at his father once again.
Ani nodded at him before he turned back toward the smuggler and glared hard at the self-satisfied outlaw. Despite his mask, his change of attitude was felt by the two other men; Luke winced while Karrde focused his whole attention on the bigger threat of the two fugitives. "What do you intend to do with this information?" Anakin finally inquired in basic.
While his son kept throwing him nervous glances, Ani kept his left hand on his concealed weapon.
"I haven't decided yet," Karrde answered easily and leaned back in his seat in a non-threatening manner.
Belatedly, Ani noticed that they were still alone with the smuggler. It could only mean that Karrde was truly open to options.
"Then provide us with what we need and I will pay you twice the amount of both of our bounties combined."
"Hmmm," the man pursed his lips. "I doubt that even you have that kind of money, my Lord. However, money is not the only thing that is useful in my field of work."
"We can work for our passage," the young Jedi quickly offered.
"That, you might, but I had another form of payment in mind," the smug man replied suavely.
"What do you want?" Anakin cut in, matter-of-fact. The unwary smuggler was quickly running out of what little patience Luke had begun to nurture in his ex-Sith of a father. Either Karrde loved to live dangerously, or else he didn't realize just how unheard of it was for someone to bait even a former Sith like he was doing.
"Answers to some of my questions," the smuggler answered without detour. "In my experience, that kind of privileged information is as valuable as money. Besides, I owe one favor to Jedi Skywalker."
"Me?" the youth frowned, pointing at his chest in confusion while he turned his head toward the man who was holding their fate in his hands. "Have we ever met before-"
"We never did, but your father, Anakin Skywalker, saved my family from slavery during the apex of the Clone wars."
While Luke gaped in disbelief at the irony of the situation, Anakin refrained from chuckling out loud.
If Karrde knew that he was, in fact, bargaining with his savior... and threading on dangerous territory.
"So," the outlaw prompted them, "how did the Empire's second-in-command end up defecting with the last remaining Jedi, his sworn rebel enemy?"
Poodoo! Anakin swore. He had meant to keep their secret for themselves, but their host was obviously very clever and had gone straight for the hardest questions, as well as those of a very personal nature.
Anakin had been expecting questions regarding imperial intelligence, or even about the Emperor's best kept secrets, but not that...
Not the sordid story of his failure as a husband and father.
He sighed in resignation even as he let go of his hidden weapon. "Luke is my son. 'I' used to be Anakin Skywalker."
While Karrde didn't show any sign of the shock that he must have been feeling, Luke nudged his father hard with his leg even as he stared up at him in rebuke.
He didn't agree with his use of the past tense, Ani understood, and then confirmed a moment later when the child mouthed 'used to?' at him.
Anakin shrugged slightly, his attention focused on their single witness.
"I always thought, too, that the hero-with-no-fear couldn't lose any battle to anyone, not even to Darth Vader... But.., weren't Jedi supposed to be celibate?"
"They were... I couldn't."
If Karrde expected to hear more very private details from him, he would be greatly disappointed. He would not spill his and Padme's private secrets to anyone but his son.
Karrde seemed to understand that and simply nodded in comprehension. "So how did Father and Son end up on both sides of the war?" The outlaw asked instead in avid curiosity.
"We had both been told that the other had died, and then the surviving Jedi wisely protected my son from whom I had become until Luke was old enough to learn the truth."
From a certain point of view, Anakin grimaced to himself as he remembered Luke's account of his first and edited introduction to the story of the past.
"Father only found out about me 'after' I became the hero of Yavin, and I... only recently learnt the truth about him," his son concluded quickly; despite their progress as a family since they had become stranded on Myrkr, the child was still understandably uncomfortable with even any inference to Bespin.
Bespin, and Anakin's last crime ever against his flesh and blood.
"And now?" The astute smuggler asked next. "Is Anakin joining his son? Or is the last Jedi Knight still Lord Vader's prisoner?"
"We-" Luke began.
"I would think the answer obvious by now."
"In appearances, perhaps," the outlaw shrugged easily yet again, "but they can be deceiving, as you must know."
"For now," Anakin commented without answering the man's last statement, "the only thing that matters to us both is to leave here and escape the imperial blockade."
"After that, the priority is to rid Father of his life suit while re-establishing contact with allies," Luke added confidently while he assuaged any doubt as to their current status of allies. "Can you take us to Kamino?"
Both Jedi remained silent while Karrde pondered their request.
"Any other spaceport would do as well if the distance is an issue," Ani added when the silence lasted a little longer than he was comfortable with.
"Forgive me," Karrde finally answered, "I... Neither the distance nor providing you with transport is an issue. As I said before," he commented, gazing at the concealed man this time, "I have a debt with Anakin Skywalker. However, I have no idea how to ensure your safe passage."
The fugitives exchanged a perplexed gaze.
Karrde sighed, clearly at a loss of ideas. "Apparently, they are confident that you survived your crash landing and that they will catch you on your way off the planet; they simply spared no effort to create a perfect net with no hole to slip through."
"How?" Ani inquired, instantly falling back on his imperial knowledge and long-acquired experience as the commander-in-chief of the fleet.
"For one thing, they do not authorize unscheduled take-offs. When they searched the premises for you, they also asked for our scheduled movements for the next three months, and then gave each of us one of these."
While Luke frowned at the chip that their unexpected and welcomed ally produced from his breast pocket, Anakin swore under his breath.
Personal tracking beacons.
He then answered Luke's unspoken question. "Each one of them is matched to a hard-wired number which is then matched with their owner's ID, which is taken upon delivery. Those two information can then be validated when a chip's carrier's wish to make it past a blockade."
"And the ID is established by a DNA test, I bet," Luke concluded, crestfallen.
"Which means that you can't borrow or steal one of those without being found out at the check point, exactly," Karrde explained further.
His son considered for a moment before he turned his head back toward his father. "I thought that this kind of tech was too expensive and top secret to be used on a large scale like a planet. Since when has it become more affordable or less valuable for intelligence?"
"It hasn't," the ex-Sith Lord answered.
"Someone wants you both at 'any' cost."
Anakin agreed with that foregone conclusion yet something kept nagging at him about the efficiency of the means that were deployed to catch them on their way off.
Although Palpatine would definitely want to find and capture them, it was not his style to use that kind of highly useful and unique intelligence tech with civilians, even less on a planetary scale. With that operation, however, that tech was as good as useless as its specs and several copies of the units would find their way on the black market the moment anyone was allowed through the blockade.
Since he knew how much Palpatine liked his unsuspected surveillance toys that he could then use to keep track of allies and enemies without their ever being aware of their electronic tail, someone else was behind that equally brilliant and wasteful strategy. Unless revenge meant so much to his ex-master that he was ready to sacrifice anything for it, but once again, that wasn't Sidious' style.
So who could it be?
"We'll have to use scramblers so that they can't see us on their scanners," Luke then commented in the silence.
"That would be unwise," Ani slowly shook his head. "If they scan the ship for occupants and ID chips before they board us, the hole created by the scramblers will be just as incriminating as a scan of our forms without ID signals attached to them."
"Then, there's also the fact that they harvested several ysalamiri while they were here. You can't count on your special abilities to save you."
Indeed, Anakin mused further, it was someone other than Palpatine behind that blockade.
Someone who had thought of everything in every minute detail, and then some.
Granted, Sidious was a master schemer, a deceiver and a vengeful tyrant, but it was also completely unlike him to overuse his resources, let alone pointlessly expose his best kept secrets; with the involvement of ysalamiri in the plan, the personal tracking beacons became completely superfluous. After all, a mere paralyzing ion blast and ysalamiri-blanketed ships would suffice to trap them, yet the ultra secret tech was still brought into play and on a planetary scale to boot.
He concluded that whoever was overseeing this blockade didn't know the limits of a Jedi's power, only that their preys had them.
Now who..?
"Then how can we make it past the blockade?" His son queried, turning his concerned blue eyes back toward him.
"I haven't figured it out yet," the smuggler admitted, crossing his arms over his chest. "We can't call for help either because all our communications are monitored."
Luke nervously sat up at that. "Then someone might have also recognized us and is selling us out even as we speak!"
"No," Karrde answered confidently. "It is my policy that I am the only one with the codes to open communication channels with others off-planet. The ships are also locked out until take-off. That keeps my people honest while those who would try to betray me are quickly found out." He shrugged at Luke's expression of awe. "I can't afford to lose my advantage to unloyal employees. It's a harsh galaxy out there."
"Indeed," Ani acquiesced quietly. "Tell me, do you ferry more than merchandise? Like local animals or other non sentient living forms?"
"Yes..." Talon nodded slowly while Luke scowled in lack of comprehension.
Ani simply reassured his son with a gentle pat on his nearby artificial hand. "I think I found a hole in the imperials' net."
Both younger men listened to him, with different reactions to his complex plan.
Time would be short, Karrde then told him when he informed them that he had a scheduled take-off in three days time.
That left the Jedi very little time to create the missing piece that would save their lives, but for a mechanical wizard like him, and with the help of his equally skilled son, Ani was confident that they could meet that deadline.
Besides, they had to or else they would either be stuck on Myrkr for an extra three weeks or worse, captured and delivered to the Emperor and his new right hand.
Anakin swore on his wife's and his mother's graves that he would not let the latter happen.
TBC
Well? How was that? Eh eh eh, what is Ani planning now ;P Any thoughts? Did anyone see Karrde's decision, and his motive, coming? ;P How did you like those? And how did you like the irony of Karrde not knowing that he was talking with his savior ;P I just couldn't resist that one :) And who could resist asking him the hard questions right off the bat? Not Karrde, that's for sure :) As for the means to prevent their escape, what did you think of them? Cool? Tough? Not realistic? Who do you think is behind that plan? And now, what do you think will happen to them ;P Will they or won't they make it past the blockade? The bets are open till next post! Anything else to share with me?
Have a great week-end everyone, and remember, reviews are very precious gifts at any time of the year or the week :) They are also a great incentive to post more and faster than I might otherwise ;P (hint hint ? ;P) Given my busy schedule, it will probably not be soon, but with the proper encouragements… miracles can happen and give me more time to write faster ;P