CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Pursuit
The matched pair of Jedi starfighters pierced the heavy clouds of Muunilinst and soared down to catch their first glimpse of the tattered surface below. Gusts of foul exhaust belched from the factories, and no scopes were needed to guess the locations of the battles. They were everywhere, marked in dazzling flashes, and the Deltas had to constantly change course to avoid being spotted. The blasts kicked up dust and rubble, making steering in and of itself a challenge. Obi-Wan gritted his teeth. This was the part of flying that he hated.
"Hard left, hard left, sensor bank dead ahead," Anakin crackled. "Quick snap-roll ought to scramble them nicely..."
As if pulled by the power of his words, Anakin's Delta executed a perfect inverted roll, and the sensors bleeped futilely as their linear-align mechanism lost track of which wing was which – and therefore, the entire infrastructure of the ship. While it was thusly confused, Obi-Wan followed suit, tracking midair exactly where Anakin had just been. The eye-banks swiveled, but could not readjust in time to get a proper fix. By then, the two Jedi were already gone.
Anakin and Obi-Wan swept low over the Muunilinst landscape, flying closely side by side. Their wings almost touched as they pulled up to avoid errant turbolasers or dove down to avoid troopships lumbering overhead. Their running lights were off, and the thick cloud cover served them well. The only way they knew where the other was flying was through the Force, and this also served to identify other landmarks to them as well. Well, at least in theory.
"Problem. Massive rock outcropping ahead. Full throttle up," Obi-Wan transmitted, sounding, to Anakin's ears at any rate, just a touch panicked.
The starfighters ascended in graceful unison, shearing identical vectors through the turbulent air. Both Anakin and Obi-Wan bounced in their seats, heads jarring against reassuringly and unfortunately solid transparisteel. "Got a knock there," Obi-Wan informed Anakin. "Where is she?"
"Obviously, I'm not entirely sure, Master. Artoo, increase landscape scanning."
Obi-Wan heard, faintly, what was presumably a tweedle of assent. A second later, the results flashed onto his own screen, which was remotely linked to Anakin's. "No, no good, we're going in the wrong direction."
"Cities are scattered here. I'm not using the scanner so much. I'm searching in the Force."
"Oh, wonderful." Obi-Wan gritted his teeth again as his disobedient starfighter bounced and writhed through an unexpected updraft. "Try not to set Ventress off on us before we even land – "
"I'm trying not to, Master. I could use a little help, though."
Obi-Wan extended a tendril of energy, taking as much concentration away from steering as he dared. The modicum of power threaded low, scouring the surface, trying to lock on anything living and Force-sensitive. "Found anything?" he asked.
"Sure, something like a giant womp-rat that's stalking some of the clones. No go on Ventress, though."
Obi-Wan sighed, but without true bite. Anakin's impertinence irritated him, yet somewhere along the line, he had grown used to it. "Well, blast it then."
"Can't. Hard to get a lock on a target at these speeds, and I bet Artoo can't calibrate the guns from this high up – " Anakin was interrupted by an affronted warble from the astromech. "All right, I've been reprimanded. He's trying." That was a habit he had fallen into recently, talking to the little mechanic as if it were a human, not just a roughly cylindrical hunk of sensors and gadgetry with three locomotion legs and various upgrades, most installed by Anakin himself.
All Obi-Wan could see was the thin, fiery edge where sky and ground split. He was entirely dependent on the Force to sense obstacles in his flight path. "Is he mad?"
"No, Master, I am." Despite the gravity of this, Anakin was laughing.
As Obi-Wan concentrated on not crashing, Anakin was bantering light-heartedly with Artoo. A second later, the echo of gunfire came over Obi-Wan's comm, accompanied something that sounded decidedly like smugness from the droid.
"I stand corrected. Good job, Artoo," Anakin enthused.
Obi-Wan shook his head. That was the thing about Anakin. While he was sitting here with white knuckles, barely daring to breathe as the starfighter rattled through the heavens, Anakin could make a joke of it, enjoy himself. He was, after all, possibly the best pilot in the galaxy. There was nothing Anakin had met that he couldn't fly, including some things which hadn't been meant to fly in the first place.
There was a long silence on the comm channels. Once or twice, Obi-Wan heard the sharp report of Anakin's guns, and decided against asking what he was taking potshots at. At last, the darkness was leavened by a cracked flurry of light from above, burning through the pitted clouds. "Might have found something," Anakin crackled. "Just a few klicks more."
"Good." Obi-Wan kept tight on Anakin's wing, oddly hyperaware of everything outside him but not inside the starfighter, as if he was the dream within the real world. The Force was swallowing him, spilling through him, and his hands moved of their own accord to skirt rock columns and sprays of laser blasts.
"Whatever it is, it's definitely Force-sensitive. Unless Jango Fett had a secret no one told us about, I think it may be Ventress," Anakin added.
Obi-Wan exhaled, possibly for the first time all mission. "All right. We can't come straight in – we have to land distant and sneak in."
"Just what I love," Anakin returned wryly. "Sightseeing jaunts through a war zone."
The Deltas slid back beneath a protective veneer of cloud, this one so thick that it completely sieved out any light from above. Thick raindrops pelted Obi-Wan's windscreen, and all he could hear was the erratic, coughing whine in his exhausted sublights. He fought the throttle to keep the starfighter on a manageable course.
"It's a better path up a bit higher," Anakin offered.
Obi-Wan veered sharply upwards, and sure enough, the rough flight eased a bit. "Why is it I always find these things out the hard way?"
"No idea." Anakin sounded positively fiendish.
"Just below...a small plain. It'll do for now."
"Agreed."
Both starfighters dove, smoothing their plunges into graceful, skimming landings, and the engines cut out with relief. Both Obi-Wan and Anakin waited several seconds to make sure they hadn't been detected, then pulled their hoods up and stepped out onto the cold, dust-deviled ground of Muunilinst.
Obi-Wan winced in agony as cramps in both legs made themselves known. Gingerly, he took a few steps, shaking out red-hot pins and needles, attempting to infuse some pliability back into his body. "I hate flying."
"You may have mentioned that." Anakin was a tall, hooded shadow next to him, but he could hear the smile in his voice. "Let's go."
"Yes, let's," Obi-Wan agreed faintly, as blood rushed to his previously numb extremities. Not telling Anakin of this – and he probably knew already – he led the way into the forbidding land, his partner and best friend at his side.
Asajj was very good at tracking. Keeping low to the ground, she navigated the speeder in concentric circles, widening her range with each pass, keeping an eye on the scanners and peering into the opaque murk. The Jedi had to be nearby, since she'd seen their starfighters fly overhead not long ago. She did not want to engage them here, as her Master had told her that she must always choose the grounds for confrontation. "Force them to meet you on your terms," he had said.
Something moved ahead in the gloom and Asajj instinctively cut her engines and slid to a halt, but it was just a lost clone, separated from his battalion. She debated on taking him out, but it might attract the Jedi. She wanted to lure them in, and that did not include being caught off guard. After a few moments, when nothing else had materialized, she kicked the speeder back into gear and resumed the pursuit.
Her mind fell into a strange detachment. Although he had not said so in so many words, she knew that Lord Tyranus was concerned that this mission might reawaken her long-dead Jedi sympathies. Master Kenobi, in particular, had a confounded habit of offering a truce and the choice to return to the light side.
Well, that's his fatal flaw, isn't it? While he's preaching his platitudes, I'll stick it in his throat. Somewhat comforted, Asajj gunned the speeder. Lord Tyranus would see, once and for all, that she was fully loyal to the Sith. The Jedi had had their chance, and now they were nothing to her, less than nothing.
After a very long time, two faint, tiny silhouettes came into view at the uttermost edge of the horizon. Asajj immediately drew to a halt, and hung motionless, her heart pounding, just long enough to be certain they had sensed her. Then she turned around and shot back the way she had come.
Obi-Wan and Anakin had been trudging through sand, rock, and mud for what felt like eons, usually in poor light. A perpetual acrid stench hung in the air, burning their eyes and throats, and they had to duck whenever patrols passed overhead. One particularly horrible time, the only shelter available had been a muddy hole, so Anakin had pushed Obi-Wan in first and jumped in after him. Obi-Wan lay flat on his back in three inches of soupy muck, Anakin's weight crushing him, trying very hard to keep his mind on the importance of the mission and not the unpleasantness of the current situation.
He had been spluttering after that, as Anakin hauled him out. "Padawan!" he snapped.
He saw the brief, icy distance in Anakin's eyes that came with the use of the word, and corrected himself. "Anakin. Next time our presence must be masked with inventive use of mud, you go on the bottom." His robe was soaked and filthy, and the rest of him wasn't much better off.
"Fair enough," said Anakin, brushing murky globules of mud off his own head and shoulders. The two of them looked like some feral raiders from the desert, and certainly not Jedi Knights. Obi-Wan reflected that this might be an improvement.
Obi-Wan cleaned the mud out from his lightsaber, eyed the sky warily for any patrols that might have approached during this fiasco, and said, "All right. Let's go."
They renewed their march across the desert. With Anakin's preternaturally sharp sense of direction and, of course, the Force, Obi-Wan had no worries about finding the Deltas again. He did, however, worry about surviving long enough to get back.
"How much farther?" Anakin asked. The mud was drying like a carapace over their bodies, cracking as it did so, giving them both the appearance of walking rocks.
Obi-Wan clawed a particularly large chunk out of his hair. "I don't know. It didn't seem that far from the air."
"And there's the trouble," Anakin muttered, but quietly. However, after several more minutes of concentrated stumbling, he pointed, and with a sudden sharp note in his voice, said, "Look, there's something up there."
Sure enough, a small, stationary dot was visible on the horizon. Both Obi-Wan and Anakin could feel the Force-sensitivity, and the unfriendliness, of the thing watching.
"Ventress," said Anakin. "It has to be."
"You may be right," Obi-Wan muttered. "Hurry up, she's turning around!"
The speeder, sure enough, was whirling around and arrowing off, farther away from them. Obi-Wan and Anakin picked up their pace, calling on the Force for aid, and began to run. When they wanted to, Jedi could move extraordinarily quickly, but even they could not overtake a speeder on full throttle.
Obi-Wan willed away physical exhaustion through the Force, coaxing more from his legs. He was careful not to draw too close, in case she was hoping to catch a trace of their presence. In fact, it had occurred to him more than once that she could be trapping them, and a part of him found that he did not care. Ventress, Palpatine, the Council, and no doubt everyone else associated with Muunilinst had been manipulating them from the start, and he was tired of it.
If it was a trap, he was walking into it with his eyes wide open. They had been sent after a Sith, for the Maker's sake. The traps and tricks would be everywhere. Obi-Wan was used to them by now. In this war, avoid one, and you'd step into the next.
The trek was long and arduous. Obi-Wan's mud-soaked clothes clung to him, chill and damp, and soon enough, it seeped into his bones. Daylight flickered in and out, and the rainstorms seemed to stop and start by the minute. The bright side was that it washed the armorplates of mud off them. Obi-Wan decided that being soaked by rain instead was an improvement, if only a very slight one.
What felt like days later, the rain subsided, and two very bedraggled Jedi found themselves standing before an enormous bunker, built into a massive, overhanging shelf of rock. One or two security beacons flashed, but the place seemed deserted.
Obi-Wan assumed it was therefore crawling with battle droids, along with a full complement of sentries with very large cannons attuned precisely to utterly eradicate anything organic and Republic-sympathizing that happened along. As it was, he and Anakin fell under that definition, and although they had scarcely had light for the duration of the trek, night was now falling. The sky was streaked in fragmented, unnatural colors, both from turbolasers and the diffracted gamma-rays.
"Interesting," said Anakin, concisely.
Obi-Wan looked for a hidden platform, door, or other place that Ventress might have entered. A steam column was in evidence to the right, belching hot white plumes, and there was a shield generator to the left. Otherwise, it was locked down.
"We'll have to hijack our way in, then," said Anakin. A ghost of a smile touched his lips. "Who do we want to be, Master, Separatists or Separatist-loyal Muun rebels?"
Instead of answering, Obi-Wan just looked at him. "Why do you still call me that?"
Anakin seemed taken aback. "Because that's what I've always called you. It's the only thing I've ever known you as, that's why."
"You are under no obligation, you know. If you want to address me as Obi-Wan, I promise it wouldn't shock me." A teasing inflection crept into his voice.
Anakin's blue gaze focused sharply on him. "You never used to do that."
"Do what?" said Obi-Wan, now the puzzled one.
"Joke," said Anakin simply.
"Oh. Well." Obi-Wan turned back to the task at hand. "This reminiscing is all very well and good, but we have a fortress to storm."
"With two of us? Are you sure it isn't just a squall?"
Obi-Wan turned in exasperation, only to be confronted by a glowing, sincere smile. Not for the first time, Obi-Wan realized that while he might obsessively analyze and become clinically detached, treating the mission as a puzzle to be solved, Anakin vested himself emotionally in everything he did. Whether it was fury at Ventress, indignation at the Council, or daring to kid him here, of all places, it was simply impossible for Anakin to remain unattached to the situation at hand.
This worried Obi-Wan, but he decided not to mention it. Instead he said, "I think the leftover mud and the excessive amount of water will do for disguises. Remember, Anakin, we are here to fight Ventress, not half the droids in the fortress."
"Yes, Master," Anakin echoed. "Now let's find a way to crash this."
"If you say so," Obi-Wan muttered. Extremely mistrustful, he took a deep breath and followed Anakin into the shadow of the cliffs.
Once they had removed themselves from the final, sputtering light, the air became black as pitch. Obi-Wan reached out blindly, his hands grazing rough stone, and once the cloth of Anakin's robe. Then quite by accident, she tumbled over something.
"Anakin?" he said warily.
"Yes, Master?"
"There's something here."
A second later, a blue radiance suffused the damp darkness. Its source was Anakin's lightsaber, held outthrust in his durasteel hand. "What is it?"
Obi-Wan looked down. The source of the pain in his right calf was a round access port, wide enough to admit a man, studded with a circular crown of rivets and welded shut. The metal had rusted, and a faint whistling breathed up through it.
"What is that?" Anakin knelt beside him. "Can you get it open?"
"I don't know that that's the wisest idea – " Obi-Wan began.
Ignoring him, Anakin flicked out his multitool, and carefully wedged the flat blade into the edge of one of the rivets. "Come on, you," he muttered, swearing under his breath as the rivet crumbled into dust.
"It could be an exhaust port, or something worse," Obi-Wan cautioned. "I don't fancy a leap into poisonous gas, thank you very – "
"Stop worrying, Master." Anakin looked up from his work long enough to give Obi-Wan a crooked smile. "If it was exhaust, it'd probably smell worse."
"Hmmph."
"Here, hold this." Anakin let go of the lightsaber and waved it into the air with the Force; it sailed over Obi-Wan's head close enough to singe his hair and then descended. Obi-Wan sighed, but took hold of the hilt.
At that moment, something definitely moved in the deep darkness that surrounded them – the lightsaber's glow could pierce no farther than a few meters – and Anakin was instantly on his guard. "Who's there?"
No answer.
"I wish we'd risked the Deltas," Obi-Wan whispered. "If we need to make a fast escape, it's going to be a challenge on foot."
Anakin rolled his eyes. "Now you tell me this." Then he returned his attention to the unknown, lurking thing. "Show yourself, or you will be destroyed."
Obi-Wan frowned. With a quick, smooth motion, he passed the lightsaber back to Anakin and put his hand on the hilt of his own, just in case.
Nothing appeared. Anakin swore again and stood up, extending his blade in a quick, spark-throwing slash. It hummed as he swept it back and forth, casting light on the pitted ground. "Show yourself!" Anakin shouted at the unheeding darkness.
"Anakin, stop this." Obi-Wan rose just far enough to pull him back down. "All you're doing is revealing our position. Didn't you think? Stretch out with the Force."
"It could be a droid. Let go of me." Anakin wrenched out of Obi-Wan's grip and took two brusque strides forward, raising his lightsaber into a fighting stance. Obi-Wan shook his head, wondering where he had gone so wrong in Anakin's training, or if he had nursed this defiant core since before he had been a Jedi.
Obi-Wan had lived in the Temple since he was a baby; he had never known his parents or even what planet he had been born on. The Jedi had sensed his Force talent early, and taken him away for training. Anakin, in contrast, had been born on rough-and-tumble Tatooine as a slave, the only child of a loving mother, experiencing firsthand the injustices of the galaxy until Qui-Gon had rescued him at the age of nine. Previously, the latest any Jedi had started the training was at three.
Perhaps, Obi-Wan thought, even as he stood tense, looking out for the attacker, it was nothing he had done. Perhaps the knowledge of evil had been instilled in Anakin's mind long before they had become Master and Padawan.
Anakin's lightsaber cast glittering shards of light. Obi-Wan stood very still, stretching out through the Force. It was strangely impossible to determine what it was. Droids were harder to sense, but they did cause a noticeable presence. What was there?
There was silence, so quiet that Obi-Wan could hear his own heart beating. When nothing came forth, Anakin shook his head and turned away slightly, but didn't lower his guard. He bent down again and began to determinedly chip at the stubborn rivets.
Obi-Wan, too nervous to be still, tracked a wary circle around Anakin, eyes flicking out into the blackness. Every so often, a turbolaser blast would light up the horizon, and he thought he saw something, but the flashes were too brief to be sure. Either way, he felt terribly exposed. At his feet, Anakin worked steadily, muttering a constant stream of encouragements and profanities, until a sudden, ice-cold blast took them both quite off guard.
Anakin leapt backwards, landing awkwardly, as the durasteel cover popped free and clattered away down the steam-slicked rocks. Glittering drops of condensation hung thick on the air, frosting faces and hands with an icy sheen.
"Crude, but effective." Obi-Wan looked down at the vent. By now, it had stopped spewing and gaped silently, and nothing but cold air could be sensed beyond it. "I d-don't think this is the best w-way in," he added. The spume of frigid mist had left him soaked and shivering, and it was already freezing onto the rocks.
"What do you suggest, Master? This place is locked up tighter than Huttese treasure." The use of Tatooine slang suggested that Anakin was getting frustrated.
"There has to be another way in," Obi-Wan insisted.
"Yes, if you care to lock yourself in the targeting scopes of half a dozen sentries that have been waiting for this particular moment, and get spotted by anything flying overhead, and announce your presence to Ventress clean as you please – "
" – As if you hadn't already done that – "
"This is a very interesting conversation, Master. I hope we get a chance to finish it."
Obi-Wan opened his mouth furiously, but it was too late. Anakin stood, wrapped his robe tightly around his body, and stepped forward into the small exhaust port. In a second, he was gone, and a glacially cold blast jetted up in his place.
"I hate it when he does that," Obi-Wan muttered helplessly.