XXIX
4000 BBY
"Be careful, flyboy," Mira counseled. She stood on the ramp of her starship as it hovered over the whipping grasses of M'rytlil, within the circle of hills where the Force flowed so smoothly.
Below her Atton Rand stood on the ground next to Jedi Master Fnaa, the alien whose homeworld this was and whose brother had suggested that the ruins here might be connected to the Rakatan crystals crucial to Anna's recovery. For a moment Atton watched the way the sun crimsoned Mira's red hair, and then he raised a hand in a relaxed-looking salute. "Don't worry. The Force is so peaceful here...I doubt I'll step on a myrmin."
"The careesa is in fact the smallest native insect," Fnaa said casually as he walked away from the departing ship, his Reera accent turning the double 'e' sound into a squeaky scream. Atton followed him. "We have no myrmins heere."
"Whatever." Atton switched his gaze forwards, to where he could see the dark mouth of a cave marking the side of the ring of mountains opposite from the entrance. That was where master Fnaa was headed. That was where the two men needed to go to investigate the mysterious power–what the Reeras called 'the magic' and what Atton suspected was the Force–that might have something to do with Anna's appearance to him.
Her imminent return after their rough parting, as well as his uncertainty about what he was going to find in the cave, would have bothered him, probably prompting him to set a hand on his blaster or lightsaber, but the Force here seemed to whisper of calm. It was unsettling that he should feel so peaceful, as if he were lying calmly by a river instead of accompanying a Jedi he half-trusted onto a planet he knew little-to-nothing about. He wanted to shake off the Force, like a dog would shake off water, but this river forced itself inside him and he exulted in the drowning. He had never felt the Force with such clarity, and the only thing he knew to compare its strength to was the height of the dark side–or the beacon that Anna had been compared to the darkness of Kreia and Malachor. Because this was pure lightside, and it came as easily to his fingertips as the dark ever had–but he did not want to use it to strike. He wanted–because it wanted him to–to heal and save, like Anna had taught, even if that power was more challenging to master, and less euphoric.
But the dark was not more euphoric than the light. Certainly not here, anyway.
The Force only barely allowed him to think about his long days divorced from it entirely. It felt like a natural part of him now, not like a tool for torture.
If the light side could feel like this, he thought, maybe he should accept the offers of the many people who wanted to see him join the Jedi Order.
They had almost reached the shadowy entrance to the cave, which, Atton saw, was in fact a tunnel, too round to be natural. "Do you see?" The Reera Master said, spreading his blue hands and leaning back comfortably, settling his weight on the limb that was sometimes like a tail and sometimes like a third leg. "This vale is special to the Force. It shows that, even when useless, the Force is majestic and potent. Remember this, and your meditations will be deeper..."
"Useless?" Atton questioned, peering into the shadows of the tunnel. Had he seen movement? He did not sense any danger...
"Yes," Master Fnaa said slowly, nodding. "There is nothing to challenge us here, and yet without the war which we Jedi have become so used to, the Force is at its most powerful..."
"I don't think there's nothing to fight here," Atton said warily.
Figures lurched out of the darkness. They wore armor and tattered cloaks like something out of a history vid, and scarlet helmets, their crests molded into the shapes of stylized horns. Their gauntleted arms and gloved hands swung glimmering vibroblades, the weapons buzzing as if the internal mechanisms had atrophied from disuse. Silently but for the clicking of the armor, the newcomers–entirely devoid of Force sense, unless, Atton thought, all this lightside-ness really is malicious and has been blocking them from our view this whole time –approached the two, weapons raised. As the sunlight swept over the armored forms, they broke into a run.
At that moment, Master Fnaa proved that, even with all that talk of peace, he deserved the title of Jedi. He launched himself into the air, head-tails spinning, and somehow didn't cut himself with the two lightsabers that came to life in his hands and, gyroscoping with his body, slashed into the nearest armored figure. It fell in two, and the others hesitated in their lurching progression toward Atton.
Atton drew his favored blaster, a carbine as long as his forearm, and was about to say something snarky about Jedi not being supposed to slash first and ask questions later before beginning his own attack, but then he caught sight of what was inside the armor that Fnaa had bisected.
Nothing. There was no once-living body inside the armor. Atton could see the rust-colored, curving interior of the chest plate.
He flung up a hand, wearing a perplexed expression but focused enough to Force-push the helmet up and away from the foe closest to him. It came off easily, and flew back into the tunnel to clatter on the rocky ground.
The rest of the suit of armor, headless and empty, continued walking toward him.
4 ABY
Bao-Dur broke into a run after Gwen and Anna did. He focused on the dark tunnel ahead, and on the backs of the two women who angled like starfighters toward it. He felt that it would be effortless to heal here, but any other aspect of the Force felt alien to him–just as he would be afraid of surrendering himself too much to the Force in an area strong with the dark side, he was wary of it here as well. It did not match his own emotions and life experiences enough to be easily harnessed.
The group reached the shadow of a cave that plunged straight back into the hillside–more of a tunnel, really–just as finned starships broke the clouds and released a flurry of repelling stormtroopers. Bao-Dur had learned that one or two of the white-armored minions usually did not pose a problem to a Jedi, but now there were hundreds, descending like a plague, lines dropping them from the ships to the peaks of the ring of mountains. The troopers started to clamber or drop down to the ground, running toward the tunnel entrance with blasters ready in their hands. It looked like war in miniature, more than any of the other battles he had fought in this present time so far–
a flash of red alerted him to one person in a controlled fall down a line to the grass who was not identical to the other stormtroopers. A flapping, red cloak was clinched around the waist of an unarmed woman who was descending in the midst of the Imperials. Bao-Dur could not tell from where he stood what species she was, but despite her physical structure he hesitated to call her humanoid; her mind was alien in the extreme, offering him a landscape of new kinds of thoughts and emotions. Overwhelmingly, though, was the very recognizable sensation of hunger–
Was she, after all this time, a follower of Nihilus?
His attention was dragged away from the incoming Imperials when spikes of danger in the Force returned it to Anna and Gwen.
Things were sluggishly walking out of the tunnel mouth, humanoid forms armored in red plates that looked like they were old enough to have been made from bone instead of plasteel. But Bao-Dur could sense nothing living within them at all, just more of the powerful Force miasma that permeated this place. His concerns were proved founded when Gwen launched a preemptive strike, her green lightsaber darting forward while the purple shoto blade sprouted to guard her shoulder and face from the vibroblade the armored form wielded. The afterimages of a neon slash showed one fluted helmet shorn in two.
There was no head inside, and the suit of armor continued to lurch forward until Gwen sunk her lightsaber to the hilt in its chest plate.
Before Bao-Dur could do any more than accept the phenomenon before him, more mundane but no less deadly foes, the stormtroopers, were upon the group as well. An overwhelming pincer movement of white-shelled forms forced him to turn and begin deflecting blaster bolts, Luke doing the same thing a few meters away, as the others carved into the red armor and blasterbolts dove toward them in swarms. Bao-Dur's orange lightsaber spun and turned away swaths of green, shrieking lasers. His eyes darted around, searching for that alien woman. She was a different sort of danger than these numbers, more important to look out for–as HK-47 gleefully unleashed a flamethrower on a cadre of stormtroopers at Bao-Dur's left–
There she was, climbing like a spider on the rocks above the tunnel, splashing through a stream. Her red cloak draped her feminine form, and could as easily have been concealing a weapon. For now, though, she was unarmed, but there was something wrong with her face. The smooth, tan skin of her cheeks right next to her nose bulged, as if she breathed through there, but no–she ate through there. The fanatic hunger increased as the Imperial woman climbed like a spider toward the top of the tunnel, directly above Anna, who was in a battle with a suit of armor and a stormtrooper.
Bao-Dur batted away another flurry of lasers, stepped backwards, extended a hand, and threw the Imperial woman off the roof of the tunnel and onto the ground at his feet.
Thin, moving tendrils peeked out of the pouches at her cheeks. Her eyes burned black as she scrambled to her feet. Out of the corner of his eyes, Bao-Dur saw a suit of armor impale a stormtrooper. Luke and HK-47 were driving the first wave of distant Imperials back with the flamethrower and deflected blasterbolts. So the space around them was clear of combat as the woman looked at Bao-Dur and started to hypnotize him.
Gwen ducked a slash from a rusty vibroblade, cut the knees out from under the rest of the red armor, and stabbed the thing through the throat as she rose. She and Anna were completely under the roof of the tunnel now, the sandy ground littered with pieces of armor and with stormtrooper's bodies, as many marked by vibroblades as by lightsabers. It was obvious to the former Dark Lord that these suits of armor possessed by only the Force were guardians for whatever lay ahead. It surprised her, though, that such a vale inhabited by the light side would have violence as its guard–
more figures were coming from further down the tunnel, eclipsing the small circle of light Gwen could see at its end. A second group of six, identical to the first.
"This isn't right," Gwen thought out loud. Anna brushed against her as the former Exile stepped forward, ready to swing her staff lightsaber at the first foe that approached them .Gwen got a questioning look from the younger woman's bright eyes.
"Violence can't be the answer this place wants." Gwen sucked in an enervating breath. "Turn off your lightsaber."
"What?" Anna exclaimed.
The green and violet blades died. A moment later, the blue ones did too. When Anna set a hand on the blaster at her hip, Gwen waved at her to relax.
The suits of armor approached as quickly and steadily as they had before, vibroblades held ready in gloved and gauntleted hands, but when they reached the two tense, peace-offering Jedi, they split like water flowing around a rock and continued toward the entrance of the cave.
Bao-Dur did not want to stop looking at the alien woman's eyes. They were contact-scarlet, not Sith-crimson; beautiful like the soft petals of a flower. He could smell her now, a musk as unlike Anna's scent as an electrical fire was from one fueled by a forest. Her hunger, her need to be closer to him, became his own–
A jet of real flame flew between them, and suddenly HK-47 was standing next to Bao-Dur, stepping prissily over the bodies of charred stormtroopers. "Surprised statement:", said the droid, sounding very bemused and looking at the woman, "I have never before been privileged to see an Anzat up close. Avoid her stare, Iridonian, and as much of her as you can, or else she'll eat your brain."
On that pleasant note, HK-47 turned away to spray fire across a group of stormtroopers who had been sneaking around behind him, headed for the tunnel.
Bao-Dur moved backwards into a solid fighting stance, lightsaber between him and the woman whose thoughts seemed to be withdrawing tendrils from his own, watching her elbows and legs instead of her face so that he would know if she were about to attack. Indeed she drew two hand-length knives from her belt and advanced, holding them high so that to watch the blades he would have to risk her stare. He cut at her legs, and the knives skittered and crackled along the orange blade. Cortosis-laced, unlike all but a very few bladed weapons of this era–this woman, Bao-Dur surmised, must specialize in fighting Force-users. That did not prevent him from using the Force to predict her movements as he allowed her to drive him back, away from the route the majority of stormtroopers were taking toward the tunnel. Luke and HK-47 had corralled a group of them, and every once in a while out of the corner of his eye he saw a white-armored form or two go flying over the low mountains. The Anzat knew what she was doing, though, and he needed to focus so as not to get pulled into her hypnotism every time his gaze grazed her face.
Once a strike meant to cleave her shoulder missed, and as he recovered she darted in and slashed at his face. He stepped back and hit her with a kick that she folded over. As he stepped back again she coughed and straightened up, the madness in her eyes as well as her recovery convincing him further that these Anzati possessed strength beyond most Zabraks.
He stretched out the Force and threw her into a spin that held, a whirlwind that trapped her. Each time he stabbed into it toward her, though, those knives were somehow there, blocking, turning his strikes aside, and when his energy failed and he had to release the Force she rolled to her feet and slashed at his ankles. One blade drew blood; the other he stamped down on.
Crushing hands, attacking legs–these were not techniques the Jedi had taught him. The Mandalorian Wars had. Although he had been an engineer, not a soldier per se, he had gone through requisite basic training and had needed to retreat under fire, going hand-to-hand with Mandalorians and, once, a spy he had trusted, at least twice. He could fight, even though the lightsaber in his hands was not yet as natural as a zhaboka or vibroblade.
He just couldn't fight like a Jedi, with the calm and honor that Anna had taught and that, on Iridonia, Anna had lost. Not in a raw, ruleless battle like this. It was not, memory told him, the effective way to go up against foes in large numbers or ones significantly stronger than oneself.
Which the Anzati was. Except he stamped on her hand, drove it into the ground. She screamed, and he swung his lightsaber behind him to gain momentum needed to slice forward and take off her head.
The Force warned him of danger a second before a laserbolt, thicker than that shot from a blaster, dug a furrow into the ground right where he was standing. He leapt backwards. The Anzat leapt the opposite way, and Bao-Dur looked up to see a two-legged, square-headed machine stalking toward him on thudding durasteel legs. Luke had never told him that the Empire had anything like this, but inside the dark eye-holes of the mechanical beast Bao-Dur could see a stormtrooper and a oval-helmeted, human pilot. Smoke had oozed into the vale, and now he could see why; more walking machines were climbing the mountains and wading into the one-on-one fights, seeking out the Empire's very few foes.
This particular walker had its sights set on Bao-Dur.
"Sorry General," he sighed, fear paling his skin beneath tattoos, "I'm not a fighter. I'm an engineer."
