Lineage VII
Chapter 21
Gallion stared at them, grey eyes and lined face conveying a darkling suspicion of treachery.
"So you have led us to the slaughter," he growled, turning angrily upon Obi-Wan. "You are indeed your master's devoted whelp."
The Padawan's hackles rose, but when he spoke it was with perfect composure. "Your people would have been massacred had you stayed," he reasoned with the agitated leader of the Civilized. "That freighter represents your sole chance of survival. And we will do all in our power to see that you reach it in safety." His eyes flicked toward Siri. "Padawan Tachi will accompany you around the ridge to the northwest-" he pointed –"while I remain here to create a distraction in the valley. I can draw off the majority of the droids, giving you enough time to descend the far slope and board the ship. Tell the pilots to take off as soon as your people are safely within."
"What?" Siri stepped between them. "I don't think so. You're wounded – there is no way you can manage that without help. And Gallion is more than capable of leading his own people along that ridge."
The fur-robed man grunted his agreement, surveying them with a renewed respect. "I regret my harsh words," he said, at last. "This service I will accept, on behalf of the Civilized, as payment for past injustice inflicted upon us by your Order. That debt I will hold paid in full."
The two young apprentices bowed, watching him stalk back up the slope to order a strategic retreat to higher ground, out of the waiting droids' scanner range. His speckled cape of ferrmi pelt melted into the trees' mottled shadows, the darkness swiftly swallowing him up.
They stood awhile in silence, the weight of their mutual promise rooting them to the spot. "You just volunteered to die for that pompous barve," Siri whispered.
"For six hundred lives. For Qui-Gon," he protested. Night moths fluttered about them, faintly luminescent. "I don't know what else to do." And you decided to stay with me, he added, aching heart skipping a beat.
"Hope for a miracle," Siri suggested.
But the Force was never a nursemaid and they both knew it.
"We need to rest," she sighed, at long last, peering up the rocky incline. At the summit, they knew, the Civilized would be pitching a morose camp, taking shelter for the last few hours of night. "Can you …I mean, we should be there. To protect them. Just in case."
He nodded, the thought of hiking back up the slope suddenly overwhelming, far more burdensome than facing off against an army of automated killers at dawn. He leaned heavily against the nearest tree, his injury stabbing mercilessly beneath his pulse, an unexpected burn prickling in the corners of his eyes.
"Come on," Siri gently cajoled. "I need your help."
They labored their way up the steep path, hand in hand.
"Perimeter sensors," Adi breathed. "Motion triggered, superoptic wave frequency, remote control source."
The two Jedi masters crouched lower, as the next security patrol droid hummed overhead.
Qui-Gon pointed to the shielded gates. "The sensors and the doors are powered by the subgenerator on the roof."
"Which we can't reach without crossing the perimeter," his companion sighed. "This is not going to be easy."
The tall man quirked a brow. "You mean it's not going to quiet," he corrected her.
The Tholothian Jedi's features hardened, a tiny glint of amusement in the Force betraying her outward gravity. "Your reputation is well deserved, Jinn. I hope you're as good a swordsman as they say."
His grey eyes slid sideways. "You saw my Padawan in the last tournament … and I taught him everything he knows."
Adi snorted softly. "I'll stay well behind you lest I end decapitated by a showy flourish."
"I didn't teach him that," Qui-Gon conceded.
The patrol buzzed by again on its next circuit. The ensuing silence lasted three heartbeats before the pair sprang into action.
No sooner had their flying feet crossed the invisible boundary-line, than a piercing siren split the night. Flood illuminators spilled over the courtyard outside the government center, and the rumble of reinforcement droids echoed against the chipped granite walls of the building façade.
"Destroyers!" Adi barked, two 'saber blades leaping to life in her hands as she covered Qui-Gon's back. He shot a cable high into the air, sending the line sailing over the rooftop to grapple on a protruding bracket. The spindly droids rolled to a halt and uncurled in a deadly snap, deploying heavy cannon arms and letting loose a volley of destructive blasts. Adi moved in a tight defensive circle, both weapons howling and spinning as she batted away the continuous assault. "Qui-Gon!"
He pulled the cable tight, spun on his heel and thrust one hand outward, a wave of explosive energy knocking the first row of attackers backward into the next. Plasma bolts criss-crossed the skies, cybernetic bleeps and wails screeching harsh against their ears. "You first!"
Adi swung up on the cable, making the ascent in three bounds, laser fire nipping at her heels as she rose. She flipped over the parapet and reeled in the cable, firing the grappling end back down into the pocked pavement where Qui-Gon stood at bay inside a circle of a dozen swarming droidekas. From this vantage point his 'saber seemed to weave an erratic orbit about some dark sun, a line of deadly green light leaving a trail of broken comets and sparking asteroids in its wake. Severed appendages and melted plating spun and skittered over the wide courtyard, the dervish-whirl of the Jedi master carrying the merciless attack in a wide ellipse, an aggressive counter-motion to the killers' own programmed tactics.
She narrowed her eyes, willing him to pay attention and make his escape. And finally, after one last flying backflip that took off two droids' cannon in one fell swoop, he surfaced from his battle-tight focus long enough to notice the cable.
He grasped the end of the line, and she pulled it in, his leap and the launcher's powerful micro-engine bringing him soaring over the ledge to land beside her in a deep crouch, weapon still humming fiercely in his hand.
"Ataru," Adi snorted, with mild disdain.
Her colleague only smiled benignly, his blade snapping back into its hilt. "Let's go."
They wrenched the rooftop maintenance hatch open with a combined Force push, and descended into the cramped tunnel beyond, the full emergency alarm howling in the air and resounding through the building's rafters.
"So much for subtle," the Tholothian grumbled as they entered the shaft.
"I prefer the direct approach," Qui-Gon assured her.
Siri Tachi practically crawled into the flimsy tent provided for their use, and collapsed upon her side with a gasp.
"Siri." Obi-Wan followed, queasy and faint, his own head spinning from the long ascent and his throbbing injury. He sank to his knees beside her, touched her shoulder with his good hand. "Siri, please. Let me help."
She rolled over, skin a ghastly white, perspiration beading her forehead and dampening the strands of gold that pressed damply against one cheekbone. "Getting worse," she grunted. Moisture glossed her eyes, and she blinked it away, furiously. "Damn this entire planet."
He dared to press further. "We are facing a battle. I need you – both of us need to be ready to fight."
She let her head loll backward, considering him from under half-closed eyelids. "You don't look so pretty yourself, Kenobi. We're in a proper mess."
"I know." He tucked his damaged arm closer to his ribs, the makeshift sling chafing against his neck and shoulder. The blaster burn throbbed sharply, protesting even the slight movement. "We both need healing."
Siri reached up, idly grasping the end of his braid. She softly wrapped it around her fingers, letting her eyes slide shut again.
He leaned closer. "Siri. Please."
She let go, her hand dropping to her side, brushing over his saber hilt before falling limply to the hard packed earth. A single tear trickled alongside her nose, tracing a path along cheek to jawline and then across her delicate throat. It landed in the dirt, squalid testament to her exhaustion.
"Can't we try … together?"
"I'm too tired," Siri whispered.
He levered himself down beside her, cautious of his ruined shoulder. One hand reached out to cover hers. "There is no weariness in the Force," he murmured, shuddering with oncoming fever.
"…The limit of our strength is but the shore of the infinite," she finished.
The moons' leering faces were extinguished behind the mountain's high ramparts; the translucent woven walls of their pitiable shelter fading to a sudden opacity. They were weary, weak, defeated already.
He hated giving up. Defiance remained, waving a tattered pennant of hope. "Yes?"
Siri nodded, the tiniest seed of hope and the last inextinguishable ember of her fiery will triumphing briefly over nebulous despair. "All right," she agreed, voice barely above a hoarse whisper. "Yes."
The earth beneath them was ice-cold, but the Force wove however briefly an ephemeral circle of warmth, a surrounding veil, as they closed their eyes, sinking mutually into its welcoming embrace.
Siri reached out tentatively and found the place on his shoulder where the droid's blaster fire had ripped and burned its way through muscle and ligament, searing nerve and bone, blistering skin, reducing cloth to blackened fiber. Her fingers spread over the injury, brushing gently as a moth. Obi-Wan still hissed a little, tensing and then relaxing, letting down mental shields one cautious notch at a time.
Siri pressed against his inward soul, the Force shimmering slightly, her control imperfect. He winced, exhaled slowly, lowered his natural defenses a trifle further, reaching for the healing power of the Light, imagining that she held it out to him, steadily, carefully, with compassion.
The Light, wholeness, strength… Siri's mental touch was blunt, earnest yet painful, raking over deep scars. He heard himself make a strange guttural noise, a pang of distress throttled before it could become an audible cry – strange emotions, buried anxieties, reared their heads and then subsided, past memories appeared as flimsy mirages in the rippled pool of awareness. A sense of apology, of surprise, of embarrassment; the Light wavered, withdrawing even as Siri's doubts weakened her focus.
"No, no- it's all right," he assured her, startled by the raw quality of his own voice. He reached out his own hand, spreading the fingers gently over her belly, the subtle upward sweep of a hipbone beneath his hand, the suggestion of soft skin below the familiar weave of cloth. Illness festered within, injury wrought with deliberate cruelty. The Light gathered, tentative, waiting an invitation to pour its invisible salve into deepest wounds.
Siri hesitated, poised over an infinite drop, a chasm spanned by the narrowest bridge of trust. The Light expanded, diffuse, unfocused, no longer marshaled to a single purpose. "I – I don't know if I can – I'm sorry."
They stood at an impasse, separated by a single infinite step.
"You can." He saw it, though she did not; beneath the Jedi there was a woman; and beneath the woman, more hidden still, there burned a luminous spirit, a beauty which no insult to body or mind could sully, a courage hammered to exquisite purity on the anvil of destiny.
Siri tensed, drawing in a shuddering breath. She lowered her guard, another mental shield dropping away to reveal an aching betrayal. And then she spoke, deepest pain spilling at last over weakening barriers.
"You…You didn't come when I called for you."
His heart bled with it. "I know. I wanted to – I.. Siri, I .." He choked on the words, on the futile apology.
Her hand moved to his face, wiping at his cheek, smoothing the salty trail of regret into a caress, a gentle finger stroking along his softly fringed jaw. On a deep breath, they flattened their defenses yet further, emotion and thought seeping, permeable, between them.
Siri's voice grew husky. "It was… I used to dream… it was supposed to be you. Not like that. Never like that. And now…. "
They had lost that which they had never yet had, a paradox embittered by cold irony.
"We are Jedi." They could not afford to mourn.
She swallowed, blinking away her own regrets, the truth a cold consolation sweeping all grief before the driving wind of duty. Scoured even of melancholy, their inner horizons loomed bleakly, barren as the winter skies outside their frail shelter.
Misery drew them together, closer to the edge of an abyss.
Silence. A vast, sounding note in the Force's tympanum, a bell-tone sweet like falling blossoms, a dizzy entrancing mandate to release.
Siri waited upon him, poised yet watchful, the question unspoken in her eyes.
Let go. Let go.
Obi-Wan leapt from the heights first, throwing himself over the brink into gracious surrender. Siri, not to be outdone, followed him headlong over the edge of absolute trust.
And they fell, hands barely touching the other, yet souls entwined. He opened himself to the effulgent Force and to Siri at once, the sudden influx of Light dizzying, his spirit abruptly saturated with living power, with the touch of another's mind, with the torrent of her anguish, with the spreading flood of limitless peace, with her, with it, the Living Force, Light shining in a single lantern, overflowing the whole universe, burning in her tears, in his shoulder, in the stars and suns and countless moons, in two sapphire stars set in a pale moon, crowned with a pale gold corona like the sun, and then spilling over limitlessly from him back into her, until they were twin basins brimming with liquid radiance, awash in the eternal fountain of Life.
"Siri…" It wasn't healing, exactly – at least, he wasn't sure – but…
"Obi-Wan."
There was nothing to say, no language competent to encompass the giddy unmooring of self into other, no word sufficient but the mere exchange of names.
In the Force, in each other, there was no need. And no time. And no self, or passion, or ignorance, or death.
And when time and location, identity and memory once more took up their rightful places, their wonted thrones, Siri Tachi was in his arms, and he also somehow in hers. His shoulder still throbbed with insistent pain, and yet it was more tolerable. Grime and dirt were crusted in Siri's hair, and yet the outward dross signified nothing. Cruelty lay behind them, destruction ahead, and yet the moment rested tranquil in its own perfection. Fever crawled in both their veins, and yet their heartbeats sang a defiant martial rhythm in unison, one against the other, as they nestled close as a pair of thranctills, completely motionless as they fell through inner heaven in an endless soaring dive, into new and uncharted realms.
And though they were blanketed in nothing but their torn and filthy garments, and the frigid night, they slept deeply and well.