Chapter Fourteen: Dead Man's Switch
Another Sluissi body crumpled against the deck, and Anakin let out a great exhalation of relief. The serpentine aliens were heavier than they looked—six feet of pure muscle, a scaled coil of a tail making up the entirety of their body below the waist. They'd gone down quickly—Amina's marksmanship had seen to that—but dragging the corpses to a place they wouldn't be found had proved rather laborious. Especially when the pair constantly had to keep an eye out to make sure they weren't spotted.
"I bet you miss the Peacekeeping Corps right about now," Anakin huffed, poking a wall panel to shut the door behind him. They'd pulled the two dead Sluissi into a maintenance corridor—one that would eventually lead them to a place where they could knock out the warship's repulsor coils. Unlike the stark, angular hallways of the upper decks they'd first traversed, the maintenance corridor was an organic, snaking hall of gentle curves and textured walls. Quicker to navigate, Anakin realized, if one were a Sluissi engineer. Efficiently moving two humans and a speeder bike through these halls would prove a bit more challenging.
"That's funny," Amina said, rubbing her hands together as if to dust them off. "Things in the Peacekeeping Corps only ever got interesting once, and I didn't even get to see it. Was stationed at the wrong post that night." She shrugged. "Manik was there, though. You'd have to ask him for details."
"Boat chases are only interesting if you don't fall in the water, Amina," Manik's voice crackled into their earpieces. "You lose your excitement after that."
Smirking as he stepped over a body, Anakin moved past Amina, tugging on the handlebars of the speeder as he walked. It drifted above the ground, coasting gently with each tweak of the throttle.
"Anyway," Amina said, "I wouldn't trade this for any day back on Naboo."
"It's gotta be quite a change of pace," Anakin replied, glancing over his shoulder—she walked behind him, explosives pack slung over one shoulder and blaster rifle over the other. "Palpatine hand-picked all of the Arbiter's crew, right?"
She nodded silently.
He threw another look forward, then lowered his voice. "What was it like, getting that recruitment letter?"
Amina paused, turning her helmeted head upward as if pondering the question. "It was everything I ever wanted." Then, shifting her obscured gaze back to Anakin: "I met him before, you know."
"Really?"
"He was still provincial governor back then. He was the keynote speaker at some dinner for the Legislative Youth Program."
Anakin couldn't keep himself from snorting—freezing in his tracks, he turned to glance at the armored ranger behind him. "You're kidding. Legislative Youth—"
"I know, I know," she interrupted before he could finish echoing her words, waving a dismissive hand. Her voice was laced with embarrassment and annoyance. "It was either that or the Junior Wine Club. I was just there to make friends, really."
"Whatever you say," he said with a chuckle, turning to face forward again and goosing the speeder bike's throttle. It lurched forward a little farther than he expected, nearly dragging him off his feet—behind him he could hear a modulated laugh escape Amina's helmet.
The laugh quickly choked itself quiet when a faint vibration started in the ceiling above them—someone traveling the upper deck, reptilian body rumbling against the deck in one sinuous motion. Anakin squeezed his eyes shut and listened—it didn't sound like the alien was hesitating over them, but there was no way to be sure.
"We wait," he said. For the next two minutes, they did just that.
After those two minutes, there was no way to be sure that they were alone—Not like there used to be, his brain nagged at him—but they wouldn't do themselves any good staying still. "Let's go," Anakin hissed, pointing forward.
Amina raised her hand in acknowledgment. As they started forward again, she whispered, "Like I was saying, Palpatine spoke at this dinner event, and then spent a few minutes talking one-on-one with everyone afterwards. He was . . . nice. I really felt like he knew me, even though we'd just met."
"How do you get from legislative youth dinners to the Peacekeeping Corps, though?" Anakin asked without looking back at her.
"Oh, easy. After university I joined the queen's royal guard."
Royal guard, Anakin thought, Amina's words reverberating in his head. Like Cody. And the Sawsharks. And Padmé.
And Obi-Wan.
"Enrollment went way up when the war started," Amina continued, yanking his thoughts back into the present. "That first battle hit us different out in the Mid Rim, I think. There was this feeling that the Confederacy was coming for Naboo next. That we had to be ready to protect our own."
Anakin nodded slowly, but said nothing. The Mid Rim. He found his eyes wandering to the speeder bike beside him, then to the rippling, cavern-like corridor walls that surrounded them both.
"Most of the first wave of Peacekeeping Corps troops was pulled from the queen's guard, and of course we all ended up in the Grand Army. It was amazing, actually—when the chancellor's letter arrived inviting me to join the Arbiter's crew, to work for you, he still remembered who I was, all the way back from the Legislative Youth Program."
"That doesn't surprise me," Anakin said. "That's just the kind of man he is."
"Yeah," Amina said—the word left her helmet in a hushed hiss of static. "I think he sees things in people."
Anakin heard her words, but he didn't process their meaning—he was too busy staring down the winding length of maintenance corridor that lay before them both. An acute uneasiness scratched at the back of his skull—something was wrong, very wrong, but he couldn't put his finger on it.
Stretch out with your feelings, he heard a voice say—that Core accent, so polished, so obnoxiously perfect and right all the damn time—
He swatted the voice aside. Now was not the time. He didn't need the Force. Intuition and luck had gotten him this far.
"Are you all right, sir?"
"Huh?" he asked, whirling to face Amina—she'd once again managed to snap him out of a reverie.
"You have your hand on your holster. Expecting something to jump out at us?"
Anakin glanced down at his hand—he hadn't realized his fingers were resting against the grip of his blaster. Pulling them back, he nodded slowly, glancing from side to side. "We should have run into more opposition by now."
Amina shrugged. "The ship's almost finished, maybe there aren't many construction crew members left working on it."
"Not crew," Anakin said. "Security. Guards. Where the hell are they? I've just got a bad feeling about this. It's too quiet for being this deep into enemy territory."
"Well, they don't know we made it this far, remember?" she replied. "Besides, I think you can relax. We're here."
He hadn't noticed it, but she was right. To an untrained eye, the unassuming cluster of wires and conduits looked no different from anything else on the engineering deck of any other warship. Anakin Skywalker's eye was anything but untrained.
The conduits, several centimeter thick pipes that held bundles of electrical wire, supplied power to the warship's repulsor coils. Slow, steady trickles of power that came from a set of generators with several layers of redundancy. If one died, the next would kick in, each with enough backup power to keep the ship aloft in a standard gravity environment for several days.
Cut off the conduits, however, and the whole system would fail. Not for long, of course. There were backup power routes, too—if Sluissi ships were anything like the ones the Republic made at Kuat or Fondor or Rendili, there would be more than one conduit meant to supply power. But rerouting the load along a different line took more time than booting up a generator. Precious time, time where gravity would take hold and tear the ship out of the air.
His earpiece gave a crackle, and Manik's voice joined them once more. "Sir, we've arrived. Going to start planting charges now—we'll blow ours once we're clear, then you blow yours and bring the Arbiter to get us out of here."
A smile crossed Anakin's face, and he turned to Amina. "Do your thing." Stepping back, he leaned against the speeder bike and watched her go to work.
"That speeder drop maneuver," Amina asked, shaking her head as she went about her work. "I never thought I'd get to see anything like it in person. How did you know the repulsorgrip would stick to the canyon wall?"
Anakin couldn't help but let loose a nervous laugh. He was perched atop the floating speeder bike in the middle of the maintenance corridor, looking on as Amina mounted explosives to the repulsor power conduits. The corridor moved in pulses and waves, flowing in gentle curves as though nature had constructed it. "I didn't. I just . . . went for it."
"Amazing," he heard Amina mutter through her helmet. "You do something like that once, I suppose you might as well try it again."
"Speeder bikes in caves," Anakin muttered to himself. Then, louder: "Wait, what?"
"You mean Had Abbadon, right?" she asked as she continued to wire explosives together along the electrical conduit.
He shook his head in disbelief. "How do you know about that?"
Amina paused to glance back at him, then reached back into her pack for the next component. "It was in your file."
"My file?"
Amina shrugged. "The chancellor gave you dossiers on all of us, right? We got one on you. I don't know if everyone else read it, but I like to know who I'm working for."
"Hm," Anakin hummed through clenched lips, picturing all the other things that had happened in those caves. That had happened in the years since. "I'm almost afraid to ask: what else was in it?"
Before she could answer, Thorn's voice suddenly shot through their earpieces. "We're blown, I repeat, we're bl—"
The warning was cut off with a gurgle.
At the same instant, a scaly tendril of pure muscle wrapped itself around Anakin's neck.
He froze as he felt the snake-like appendage twist and squeeze his throat, and though he made a great effort to gasp for air, none came. Even as he pulled, his attention was pulled in several directions at once.
To his neck, and the Sluissi tail wrapped around it—could he wedge his mechanical hand between his flesh and his assailant's, wrenching himself free of the serpent's grasp? To the blaster on his hip—was his best option to go for his gun? To Amina—though his vision was fluttering toward darkness as the scaly noose around his neck began to tighten, he could see the ranger had been attacked just as he had. She was wrestling on the ground with another slithering alien, and she was losing.
The tail tightened further around his throat, forcing what little air remained in him out through his mouth. Gun it is, he thought—but before his mechanical appendage could reach the blaster, his opponent sealed it in an iron grip.
The Sluissi's arm looked somewhat like a lizard's—long, bony, with a nimble hand at its end. Though Anakin put all his natural muscle and every ounce of servomotor strength into twisting his wrist away, he couldn't reach his weapon—the muscle beneath the scales had to be immense. The mechanical hand strained, audibly creaking, but the gap between it and the gun was too great.
Anakin knew this, and yet he kept pulling even as the dull grey of unconsciousness started creeping into the edges of his vision. He had to keep the Sluissi's attention for just a few—more—seconds—
Metal hand serving as the diversion, the bait, Anakin's flesh hand crept toward the speeder bike's throttle. One finger danced along it. Then two. Then a full grip.
He twisted, and the speeder bike shot down the hall.
The motion caught him off guard as much as it seemed to startle the Sluissi; the alien lurched its weight backward in an apparent attempt to throw them both off the speeder bike.
It was precisely what Anakin had hoped would happen. The motion sent the speeder bike careening sideways until it slammed against the wall—or rather, slammed Anakin's Sluissi assailant against the wall. The sudden and forceful impact made the alien lessen its grip on Anakin's neck and arm, if only for a moment—but a moment was all he needed.
His mechanical hand free, it shot down toward the blaster pistol set against his hip and drew. In a single motion he brought the gun up behind his head and fired three shots into the Sluissi's skull.
The holes in the alien's head were still smoking as it dropped to the floor, but Anakin didn't pay it any mind. There was only one thought in his head, a single word. A name.
Amina.
He tried to repeat it aloud, but couldn't find his voice. Inhaling a sharp and raspy breath, he sprinted down the corridor toward where the ranger was tangling with her own serpentine attacker. Human and Sluissi writhed about on the ground in a violent dance, and Anakin raised his blaster in preparation to shoot the alien.
Then he saw it. The dead man's switch.
The lightbox on Amina's chest, formerly green, now pulsed yellow as the Sluissi choked the life out of her. Anakin's hands lost all semblance of steadiness as he tried to find his mark. Let the Sluissi choke Amina, and they'd all blow up. Try to shoot the Sluissi, miss, and hit Amina . . . and they'd all blow up.
The light turned orange, and though he couldn't see her face, Anakin knew by the way Amina's body slumped that she was losing her grip on consciousness. It was why it took him precious seconds to notice the strangely distinct rhythm of her thumping her open palm against the deck. Was it a cry for help? A plea for the Sluissi to spare her?
Then it clicked with him. Adjusting his grip on the blaster in his hand, Anakin knelt down and slid the gun along the deck.
The timing couldn't have been more perfect. Just as Amina's hand thumped down again, the pistol slid beneath it. Snatching the weapon off the floor, the ranger reached up and planted a single shot beneath the Sluissi's scaly chin.
Going limp with death, the alien relaxed its grip on Amina's neck. She dropped the blaster to the deck and tore her helmet from her head, taking in desperate gulps of air. Anakin ran to her, reaching down and helping her to her feet. A brief glance down revealed the lightbox on her chest—the dead man's switch—had returned to a steady glow of green.
"Bomb," Amina gasped between deep breaths—her voice was raspy, broken. "The bomb." She pointed to the device on the front of her armor.
"I know," Anakin said with a nod. "We could have been vaporized."
"Not ours," she said, choking on her words. "The other one."
The realization slammed into him like a cargo truck.
"Thorm and Manik," he said, wincing through the words—talking was going to hurt for a while. "Maybe we can make it to them before—"
The sound of a distant explosion cut him short. Then, even louder, came the sound of one kilometer's worth of metal slamming into another. Anakin felt the sound in his teeth; the horrible grinding coming from outside the hull of the warship tickled his ear canals. The other stack is collapsing, he thought.
Thorm and Manik's bomb had gone off.
Grabbing Amina by the wrist, Anakin hauled her toward the speeder bike. "We've got to go!"
"Wait," she said, though she did not pull away from him. "I wasn't done rigging the bomb."
"Will it blow up when we hit the detonator?" Anakin asked, stepping over the Sluissi corpse on the floor and throwing himself onto the speeder bike.
"Well, yes, but—"
"Then you're done. Let's move!"
Recycled air rushed past Anakin as the speeder bike shot down the Sluissi warship's central cargo corridor. Boxes of foodstuffs and ship parts and munitions lined the walls, while confused engineers looked on as two humans on a speeder bike flew by. Lucky they didn't build a lot of right angles into this place, he thought as they narrowly avoided running one of the bystanders into the deck. If they had we'd be paste on a wall.
"Where were all these guys before?" he wondered aloud.
Amina ignored the question. She sat behind him, her arms wrapped tightly around his waist, her grip just loose enough to fit a remote detonator. "We're at minimum safe distance!" she shouted in his ear.
He nodded. "Okay, no time to wait. Trigger it."
She barked an affirmative, and the world around him turned to chaos.
Glancing over his shoulder just in time, Anakin watched as fire sprouted from the wall several meters behind them. He could feel the heat radiating from the blast; seconds later, the shockwave of sound thumped against the back of the bike.
"Nicely done, Ranger," he offered Amina before turning to face forward and kicking the bike into full gear. "Captain's waiting for that second explosion to take off; our ride out of here should be meeting us up at the nose of the ship."
Well, he thought, the dull thump of a distant explosion playing in his memory. Meeting half of us there.
He felt Amina shake her head behind him. "I just hope it works," she said. "I didn't get all the charges placed right where I wanted them."
"So?"
"It's probably fine. The whole repulsor coil network should fail in just a moment."
In retrospect, Anakin thought he should have seen it coming. Nothing had gone right up to this point. Why should it have started now?
If the repulsor coils had failed as he expected them to, the entire ship would have fallen straight down, collapsing on top of its nearest neighbor in the stack in an even, ordered fashion—at least as ordered as a ship crash could be.
Instead, Anakin felt forward become up as the back half of the vessel lurched downward and the capital ship's bow began to rise into the air.
"Oh gods," he muttered. "This is bad."
"What's wrong?" Amina asked, tightening her grip on Anakin's waist as gravity began to tug her toward the back of the bike. "You drove down a wall to get here, why not drive up one to escape?"
"I don't think it works that way," he answered through gritted teeth, willing the bike to move faster as the incline of the ship continued to pitch. The repulsorgrip will hold, sure, but we'll just slide down unless there's something to propel us upward. And I'm not sure this engine will cut it."
"Better hurry, then."
No kidding, he thought. But it was easier said than done, and the nose of the ship pitching forward meant they were getting out even slower than he would have liked. By the time they made it to the outside of the hull, its descent would have taken it even further down than they already were.
Anakin glanced sideways to check the wall of the cargo corridor—it was lined with numbers meant to mark the distance from one end of the ship to another. They were over halfway to the nose. Whether that was enough progress, he had no idea. The floor was now pitched at a forty-five degree angle; the speeder bike engine whined in protest as he pushed it to climb the metal mountain before it.
Then an even more horrid sound echoed throughout the ship. It was the whine of an upset speeder bike engine multiplied a thousand times, and accompanying it was a twisting feeling in Anakin's stomach—and a distinct sense that the wall was about to become the new floor.
The crashing capital ship was rolling onto its side.
You are not going to get everyone killed here, he thought furiously to himself. Two is bad enough, you and Amina are getting out of here now.
He tugged on the throttle, but it didn't move—the bike was going as fast as it would ever go. He shifted his weight forward, begging the universe to grant the speeder bike just an ounce more speed.
Their exit was in sight now—the cargo hatch that made up the forward end of the corridor. It sat wide open, its gaping maw home to all manner of crates and cargo haulers—most of which were still strapped down to the surface formerly known as the floor. Anakin knew he couldn't afford to slow the bike; they had no time left to lose. The ship was falling apart now, shears in the metal snaking their way through the walls. But driving full speed felt crazy.
And there was a bigger problem. The space through the hatch was empty. The Arbiter was nowhere to be found. When he and Amina reached the exit, they would shoot off into the abyss and end up dead.
Anakin narrowed his eyes and stayed fully on the throttle. It was now or never. He gritted his teeth and closed his eyes.
And sailed out into the open.
The bike went blissfully quiet for a moment as he loosed his iron grip on the throttle. The chilled night air sent hundreds of goosebumps across his skin as it whipped past his face. It was, in a way, almost peaceful. He looked up—beyond the rising walls of the canyon, he could see the stars. Reality hung in a state of stillness as Anakin stared upward.
Then it came roaring back to life as a blur of shadow shot toward them.
In an instant he engaged the speeder bike's airbrakes; Anakin felt them pass through the envelope of air at the precipice of the Arbiter's hangar. Harsh artificial lighting seared his eyes as the night sky was replaced with the interior of a Republic strike corvette.
Smoke rose in curls from the speeder bike's engine as Anakin dismounted the vehicle. He didn't stop to check on Amina, didn't pause to greet the rest of the crew. He simply walked to the edge of the hangar opening and, basking in the light cast by its rectangular border, looked down into the canyon on Sluis Van as a dozen capital ships crumbled like a sandcastle in a storm.
The adrenaline pumping through his bloodstream spiked into something else as he watched prow plow into prow like a blade shearing through cloth. The shriek of metal on metal was audible all the way up here, miles of the stuff tearing itself apart. An entire fleet closing in on itself, its own weight dragging it into an abyss.
The shipyard that had crafted the Lancer station. That had been preparing to go head to head with the Republic fleet with a flotilla of capital ships. Reduced to twisted metal at the bottom of a canyon.
Anakin remembered the sight of city platforms falling to crush depth, sent there by the weapon this place had prototyped. Watching the former heart of the CIS's navy topple now, helpless to save itself . . .
In that moment, it was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.
"Sir!" a harsh voice barked.
Whirling around, Anakin saw the medic—Weston—half-running toward him and Amina, brandishing a diagnostic tool. "Are you both all right?"
"We're fine," Anakin replied, realizing in a rush that it was true—in fact, he was better than fine. His mouth curled into a lopsided grin before he could stop it. This was the best he'd felt in years. You did it you did it you gods-damned DID it—
"And Thorm? Manik?"
The names thudded him back to reality, endorphins curdling into something sour. Weston asked as if he already knew—and, of course, he did, Anakin realized. The ship would have registered the dead man's switches triggering. They just wanted official confirmation.
Amina spoke softly. "They didn't make it."
There was a moment where nothing happened—scout, medic, and commander just stood there, swaying back and forth with the ship's motion. Then Weston nodded, said, "Right then," and saluted.
Anakin just stood there like an idiot for a moment. Then he wrenched his mechanical hand upright to return the gesture, just before Weston turned and headed back inside.
"You should follow him, sir," Amina told him, though it seemed she wasn't looking at him but past him to the newly made graveyard below. "You must have done a number on your arms, he can see to that."
She was right, Anakin knew. But he wasn't yet feeling any pain. His body was still on the high of survival, of luck, of defying the odds. The names flashed through his mind again—Manik, Thorm—but the only picture he had of them was their helmets. Nothing more to mourn.
That deep, physical sense of loss that came with the death of someone you cared about was nowhere. Everywhere but in his mind, Anakin Skywalker still felt great.
And he didn't know how to stop it.
Republic Archives: Repulsorgrip
The repulsorgrip is a specialized component found on land-based hovering vehicles. It works in tandem with the repulsorlift to provide traction as vehicles float above the ground, "grabbing" the same surface that the repulsorlift pushes against. Without a repulsorgrip, hovering vehicles would drift about as though they were on a low friction surface. Repulsorgrips are not typically a part of the repulsorlift coil array found in airspeeers or starships.
The most standard repulsorgrips are designed to go a vehicle's entire lifespan without being adjusted. However, for specialized applications, "tuning" a repulsorgrip is a necessity. Racing landspeeders feature repulsorgrips that can be adjusted on the fly to allow for "drifting," and repulsorgrips also require adjustment before being used over water, mud, or ice.