PART FIVE: BACK ON COURSE

Chapter Twenty-One: Out of Control

The trill of a proximity alarm ringing throughout the cramped cockpit, threatening to burst his eardrums.

The massive expanse of transparisteel just a few meters away flaring white with the glow of his floodlights, obscuring what lay on the other side.

The psychic, near-physical weight of the knowledge that an entire world of water was pressing down upon his submersible.

These were the last details to flit through Anakin's mind before the nose of his ship rammed into the observatory window.

Had he been riding a rogue wave, he would have been out of luck—the structure was designed to withstand widely distributed force with the strength of Mandalorian iron. But the concentrated thrust of a submersible's nose ramming into a single point—well, that wasn't something the Kaminoans had figured on having to deal with. There was a rending shriek of metal on metal, the nose of Anakin's ship tearing and buckling but continuing doggedly forward, and then the white sheet of his reflected floodlights shattered into pieces as he went roaring into the Tipoca Cloning Facility's main observation deck.

Even as he fired the emergency bolts on the cockpit and leapt clear, blast shielding was slamming shut over the breach. Nonetheless, a battering ram of water smashed into Anakin mid-jump, crushing the breath from his lungs and propelling him onward. He sucked in air, hard, angling his legs forward so that if he hit something it would hopefully connect with them rather than his head.

The roar of salty liquid whooshing through the room was doubled by another, sharper sound of fire tearing outward—Anakin's ship hurtling into an obstacle and blowing itself to bits. He himself was luckier—throwing himself clear of the sub and being smacked into by the onrushing wave had taken him on a different trajectory, one that seemed to be free of any impediment. And as the water surged onward, it drained from a wall into something shallower—he felt his mechanical hand, then his boots glance off the deck. Reaching downward, he ground the metal of his hand into the metal of the floor, feeling it in his teeth but grimacing through it as he arrested his momentum.

When he stood, slogging through water that now lapped against his knees, his head rang with the alarms that were going off across the deck. Blinking furiously to clear liquid from his eyes, he saw unconscious bodies scattered across the space around him—other long-necked inhabitants of the observation deck had remained upright, and were staring at him with perfect, emotionless eyes.

And further back, silhouetted in front of the massive slab of blast shielding that was lowering itself across the primary exit, were a cluster of faces Anakin recognized all too well.

The same face, in fact.

Here we go, he thought, lowering his flesh hand to his belt to tug free the blaster holstered there. As his lips pulled back from his teeth and he snapped the pistol into firing position, watching the clones do the same with their rifles, he felt a moment of odd, profound gratitude.

For the first time in days, he wasn't thinking of anything besides his job.

The Kaminoans, when building their civilization, hadn't tried to rise above the roiling mass of water that covered the entire world from pole to pole. They had buried themselves under it.

Cloning at any scale took power. The Kaminoans' masterstroke—clone armies, millions of the same face bred for war—required massive amounts of energy to produce. Fortunately for them, they'd already come upon the perfect solution thousands of years prior. Every single subaquatic structure on Kamino—every city, every cloning facility, every fortress—was a hydroelectric plant, drawing in its power from the waves that ceaselessly buffeted it night and day. They had come as close as any species in the galaxy would to perpetual motion. All they'd had to exchange for it was freedom—freedom of movement, freedom of opening a hatch and taking a breath, freedom from constant fear of the one failure that would instantly drown their livelihoods with an infinity of ocean.

Anakin Skywalker was here to find that failure.

Exhaling sharply, he inched forward through the vent as quickly as his elbows could scrabble. He'd killed the clones on the observation deck, knocked out the Kaminoan scientists who'd still been conscious after his unceremonious entrance, only to run straight into his first big obstacle—the double-thick barrier of metal that had dropped down to seal the passage between the observation deck and the rest of the facility. The cloners were very, very careful about compartmentalizing—any flooding detected in a discrete area of the facility triggered instant shutdown, its connections to the broader structure pinched closed to ensure the ocean didn't make it past the room it had broken into. If Anakin had his lightsaber, he might have been able to cut through the barrier, but he didn't, nor did he have time to remain in one place too long. He had no backup—if he didn't keep moving, he would be caught, and that would be it.

Fortunately, the vent he'd discovered near the floor had had substantially less protection than the main door.

Gods, it was hot in here, he thought, rubbing impatiently at the rivulet of sweat running down his forehead and returning his attention to the datapad clutched in his flesh hand. The Republic, of course, had no detailed schematics of the cloning facility's interior, only the exterior shots their probe drones had managed to snap before being detected and neutralized by Kaminoan water patrol. But the datapad could monitor power readings throughout the place, and that was all he needed to do—lock onto the strongest source and get there come hell or high water.

The Kaminoans' own generator would do the rest. A simple problem, just as simple a solution, two pieces clicking into place.

Crawling all the way there would take too long, Anakin mused, wincing as his mechanical hand scraped at the vent with a loud rasp—besides, if they cornered him in here he'd have no room to do anything but die. But there was light up ahead—if he could just make it out at the next junction, and keep to an unobtrusive route . . .

Boom.

Anakin frowned—the light was suddenly shrinking, a shadow rising upward to chase it away. Even as he sped up his forward crawl, the light was half gone, then gone entirely. Had they detected him? Were they sealing off the vents, then flooding them with something that would take care of him quietly?

Then the shadow continued its ascent, passing out of sight, and he understood. Turbolift shaft.

Hopefully the next one would be empty.

As he neared the opening, a muffled whoosh sped by, darkness once again briefly eclipsing the view. This time, Anakin was close enough to see what made the shadow—a transparisteel cylinder rocketing downward. It was a pneumatic lift system, he realized, not a boxy mechanical one—the compartments shot down the tube on a rush of air rather than using mechanical parts.

A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. He could work with this.

Another thirty meters, and he'd arrived at the mouth of the vent. There was no sound of whooshing tubes, so he risked a peek, sticking his head out into the shaft and craning to look upward. It stretched upward for a few hundred feet, terminating in a smooth, rounded ceiling of polished white. Looking down, however, was another matter. A brief wave of vertigo washed over him—the tube stretched downward for thousands of meters, presumably all the way to the base of the facility. He'd seen the structure from outside—a skyscraper in reverse, towering metal plummeting straight downward to its anchors in the seabed—but being inside all that depth was considerably more overwhelming.

Above him, a low, hollow breath sounded. A lift was beginning its descent.

Hastily pulling his head back inside, Anakin closed his eyes and began to count. At the speed these things were going, he couldn't afford to time this wrong—drop too soon and he'd plunge a very long way down, too late and he'd plunge a much shorter but still fatal distance. Velocity and momentum. Puzzle pieces.

Metal and fleshy fingers alike gripped the very lip of the vent, ready to push off. Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .

Transparisteel rocketed by, and Anakin moved.

He let his forward momentum turn into a somersault, bringing his legs up and over his head as he fell. For an excruciating moment, he felt nothing but the rush of air past his face—he'd timed it wrong, he hadn't gone soon enough, he was going to fall wrong and break his goddamn neck—

Then, with an impact that brought his jaws together with a grinding clack and shuddered through his knees, he slammed into the lift.

Swearing through his teeth, the sound swallowed by the pneumatic surge, he pushed himself upward with his flesh arm, bracing himself against the transparisteel roof. His collision with the tube hadn't done much damage, but he could see a faint spiderweb of stress splits running through the glass.

Rearing back, he brought his mechanical hand down on the roof with all the force he could muster.

Several strikes later, he'd landed on the floor of the lift, shattered bits of transparisteel crunching under his boots. There were no occupants, but Anakin knew he couldn't wait long—the lift had been called by someone, and he had to move now.

There was a holographic directory a good two feet above his eye level, designed for a species with a much longer neck. Craning upward, he hastily scanned the layout, searching for his destination. Gene-splicing wing . . . embryo housing . . .

There it was, reactor control, a pulsing red light about a dozen stories down and a kilometer inward. It looked like cutting through the embryo wing would be the best way to make it there.

It would have helped, of course, if he had any idea what kind of security the embryo wing possessed.

No time to think. What was it Obi-Wan had liked saying? Do or don't, my master liked to tell me. No time for trying.

Anakin exhaled, counted to ten, and then punched the emergency stop button.

The transparisteel turbolift, it turned out, was almost a miniature of the main path through the embryo wing. A single tube of polished glass worked its way in sinuous curves across the chamber, providing its occupants with an unobstructed look at the goings-on below.

The massive space below was in its turn filled with cylinder after cylinder—these did not possess the limpid clarity of the observation corridor. They were filled with murky liquid, though not so murky that one couldn't see what was inside. Anakin paused, squinted, and felt a jolt of revulsion pass through his stomach.

Fetal humans, thousands of them, each suspended in its own jar. Peppered among them, he knew, would be the other perfect copies of the Kaminoans' templates—Givin pilots. Trandoshan berserkers. All miniatures right now, their destructive power mere potential.

Each transparent tube lit up with periodic gleams, reflections from a sea of indicator lights running up and down the columns that formed central hubs for the embryos. Optical reassurance that everything was in its right place—temperature, chemical balance, nutrient levels, fetal vital signs. As far as the lights were concerned, it didn't matter that a hostile ship of unknown origin had breached the observation deck, that an enemy was loose in the facility—its most precious contents remained safe, unaffected.

If he could make it across, that would change.

Slowly, carefully, Anakin lowered himself onto the top of the observation corridor.

He hadn't stopped the turbolift at a proper set of doors—he'd clambered out through the hole in the roof he'd made and crawled through another vent system, this time knowing roughly where it would lead. It came out just above the glass tunnel he now perched atop, stock still, doing his very best not to sway.

He couldn't afford to take his time. Within moments, he knew, a security camera would spot him, sound the alarm, calling the hive home to defend the nest. Go slowly, and he'd be dead before he'd taken a dozen steps.

Exhaling in a fierce hissing rush, he braced himself and began to run.

A moment later, the klaxons began to blare.

One step, two steps, three, and already he was in trouble. If the observation corridor had been a boxy shape, its ceiling flat and even, this kind of run wouldn't have been any harder than a particularly hasty journey across a balance beam in the Temple gymnasium—easier, in fact, the surface easily two meters across. But like everything else inside the facility's walls, it was curved, sinuous, and slick. Very slick. On the third step, Anakin felt himself tilt left, and in a panicked overcorrection almost slid off to the right. Just as he recovered and took another loping step forward, a whine of blasterfire sped past his left ear, and his instinctive duck nearly pitched him forward into a fall.

His mind shot back to Junkfort Station, a flash-memory of one of his many escapades gone wrong—one that had ended with a gang pursuing him, forcing him to run across a narrow length of piping to escape. In one of countless little things he hadn't been able to explain til he met Obi-Wan, his feet had seemed to know exactly where to fall, his body reacting to changes in balance and momentum before they'd even happened, holding him steady. Sprinting across a length of tube no more than half a foot across had been child's play.

So far away, that seemed now.

Another shot hissed past him, and another, this one close enough that he felt the heat burn the back of his legs and almost rip him from his perch once more. Just do it, something in him roared, you're going to die here you idiot, you know it's there just reach out—

Snarling, he tried to sink back into the perfect clarity that had gripped him less than an hour ago. Just get out of your head and get to the next part of the job.

He broke into a full sprint.

Plasma spattered at his heels as he ran, his arms windmilled as he fought to keep his balance, and oh god he'd just looked down, past the startled Kaminoans looking up at him from inside the tube, down to the floor a few dozen stories below him. Flying into Sluis Van had been different—the Force was gone but the reflexes hadn't been, the pilot's intuitive number-crunching had still been there. Here, though, there was no speeder, no intermediary between him and death. There were only his feet, and the path before him, and the ground below. And if he slipped, there was nothing to save him.

Halfway.

He fought a wild urge to draw his blaster pistol and fire in the general direction of whoever was shooting at him—the shots were coming from all directions now, and Anakin suspected the only reason he was still alive was that the Kaminoan security would rather miss and let an intruder continue forward than risk the embryo cylinders coming to harm. Good thing I didn't just take the tunnel, he thought with a shaky mental laugh, otherwise they'd have a bigger target to shoot at—

SHIT.

Propelling himself even faster, he ground his teeth together and prayed that whoever was shooting at him hadn't had the same idea.

He was about ten meters from the far side of the chamber when they did.

A fusillade of superheated plasma bolts tore not through the air all around Anakin but into the transparisteel below him, about three meters up ahead. The transparisteel shrieked, flared white, pieces of it flying into the air.

Anakin screamed, and leapt.

It wasn't the kind of leap he'd routinely made in his old life—something outside him catching him up and propelling him forward, carrying him twenty feet within an eyeblink as though he'd somehow caught hold of an air current that had been waiting for him to use it. The kind of leap that had vaulted him from platform to platform on Serenno, let him get to the cockpit of a starfighter without using a ladder, once or twice carried him up and over Padmé's head only to land laughing on the other side as she did her best not to kill him.

This one was a terrified amalgam of flesh and metal pushing itself into the air with muscles that suddenly seemed far too weak, the adrenaline coursing through its veins serving only to heighten its own sense of the inevitable. Searing heat rose from the shattering observation corridor below, and shards of transparisteel tore at his face like hornets. The force of the blast was too much, it was going to knock him back, send him sliding to the depths below—

And then, with a thwack that set his chest on fire, he crashed into the other side of the breach.

Scrabbling with his mechanical hand, ignoring the burns he could feel forming all over him, Anakin roared and pulled himself upward, boots desperately seeking purchase on the tube. Another vent, the mirror image of its sister, was just a few meters away, but one wrong move and he would slide off, and they were still shooting at him.

Finally, he felt his feet connect with something solid. Hauling himself to stand, he took one last tottering jump for the vent.

The feeling of solid, flat metal beneath his prone body was enough to make him want to cry.

Arm over arm, he moved as fast as he possibly could. Once he'd put about ten meters between the mouth of the vent and himself, he reached down for his belt and plucked two tiny cylinders from it. He couldn't have anyone following from behind.

He thumbed a red button on each cylinder, then rolled them both backward, listening to the clacking as they tumbled end over end back toward the light behind him.

A few seconds later, they detonated with a concussive roar, sealing off any way he had but forward.

In a way, the conflagration in the embryo chamber had been a blessing. They'd most likely assume that had been Vader's objective—after all, it was the easiest target of the whole facility. And between the near miss on his final sprint across the observation corridor and his own explosion several moments later, there was every chance they thought he was already dead.

Still. Best to get things done quickly just in case. Not least because he had a feeling his luck wouldn't last another fall.

Inhaling deeply, he looked down on Reactor Control.

It was a comparatively tiny part of the facility; one long, narrow strip of room whose far wall was a series of transparisteel panels overlooking the hydroelectric core. Just below that transparisteel, a row of consoles ran from end to end, their blinking not all that dissimilar from the constantly shifting displays on the embryo preservation columns. The two were connected, after all; these consoles flowed into the reactor, which flowed outward into every aspect of the facility.

The hole that would cause the ship to sink.

Five Kaminoans stood at their stations, heads swaying gently back and forth atop their rigid necks. Anakin studied them as best he could from his cramped position—none of them appeared to be carrying any weapons, nor did they seem to be aware that anyone was sitting just above them, motionless. The longer he sat here, though, the likelier that was to change—his breathing still wasn't completely under control after his brush with death, and it was getting hotter in his hiding place.

With his flesh hand, he drew his blaster from its holster and thumbed the safety off. His mechanical hand drove forward, punching the vent grate from the wall.

The Kaminoans weren't physically capable of turning their heads; instead, as Anakin dropped to the floor, they had to shuffle their bodies in a semicircle to see who'd intruded. It was almost funny, but there was no time to savor the moment. He needed to get things done and get the hell out, now. "Get away from the consoles, all of you," he barked, feeling vaguely silly himself as he angled the blaster pistol upward toward the aliens' faces.

Slowly, with the half-swimming way they had of moving, the five backed away from their stations. The one nearest Anakin brought its eyelids halfway down across its eyes, then back up. Anakin thought it might signify anxiety, but the alien's voice was flat when it said, "You should know that your plan won't work."

"I'm sure you're just itching to be helpful," Anakin said with a sneer, waving the pistol again to send all five a couple meters further back. Without looking down, he placed his mechanical hand on the nearest console and started moving every lever he could as far forward as it would go.

"You work for the Republic, yes?" the Kaminoan spoke again, its voice soft but clear above the noise. When Anakin didn't dignify that with a reply, the alien continued: "The population of this facility is near-entirely civilians and immature clones. Destruction of us would constitute a war crime—"

Anakin lifted his hand from the console, whose lights had all gone scarlet. He could feel his face flush as he raised his head to meet the alien's gaze and looked into the perfectly inscrutable eyes. "War crime, huh?"

You don't have time for this, he told himself, they're trying to stall you, just finish and go—

Rather than listen, he took a single step closer. "I was at Had Abbadon, you know. And Serenno. And about a dozen other places. So you need to shut up about war crimes right. Now." He wondered if what he'd done had already begun to set the reactor going—a hollow roaring sound was gathering in his ears.

"We were not party to the events you speak of," the Kaminoan said, its eyelids fluttering twice over the chalk-white irises. "Kamino is a world of researchers. We do not make war, we simply supply—"

Anakin shot him.

He'd aimed too low—the bolt went not through the Kaminoan's head but the top of its ridiculous throat. The eyes widened, the closest to humanoid emotion the alien had displayed the whole time. Then, with a gurgle, the scientist slumped to the ground.

The other four followed the corpse's descent with their eyes, heads and necks remaining perfectly still. Otherwise, they gave no indication they'd seen anything happen.

Anakin kept himself from looking downward, looking at the puppetlike mass of neck and limbs whose strings he'd cut. There'd be time to think about it later, time to add it to the number of bodies he'd made. Looking at each alien's face in turn, moving his blaster in an arc to point at each of them, he said, "Tell me why it won't work."

For several seconds, the four were silent. Then, from the very back, a female voice answered him. "You plan to overload the reactor, yes? And cause a power spike throughout the facility."

It was, Anakin supposed, a rather obvious plan.

One pulse through every single piece of connected tech in the facility. Genetic data wiped. Embryos killed outright or left floating in nutrient tanks no longer carefully maintained. Entrances and exits sealed, no way in or out. The Kaminoan scientists, bodies extremely sensitive to electrical impulses, burnt to death from the inside out.

Of course, it wouldn't end the Kaminoans' ability to clone. There were backup facilities, data was stored elsewhere. But starting over would take time. Time they didn't have.

By the time they had their operation back up and running, the Republic fleet would be through the Rishi Maze and knocking at the door.

Simple. Two pieces clicking into place. Another problem solved by Vader's hand.

Or that's how it was supposed to go.

When Anakin didn't reply, the rearmost scientist bobbed her head once, slowly. "I'm afraid we've thought of that. You can kill us if you like"—she inclined her gaze toward her fallen colleague, then back up at the man pointing a gun in her direction—"but it won't matter. Do you really think we've never had a reactor power spike before?"

Without thinking, he let his eyes stray to the console, lights now a screaming crimson, then back to her. He gripped the blaster tighter, fingers digging into the grip hard enough to hurt.

"The surge will most likely kill a great many of the Kaminoans in this facility," she acknowledged, eyelids unfolding downward and then returning up. "But our product is housed with the greatest care. The instant a surge is detected, all nutrient chambers' connection to the reactor will be severed. Backup power will maintain the specimens long enough for our replacements to arrive. The full-grown specimens aboard the facility will know what has happened, and will hunt you down."

She blinked once more, hard. "You're going to die. Having accomplished nothing."

Anakin's finger hovered over the trigger. She was going to die either way. Shooting her now wouldn't change anything.

So why did he want to do it? And why was he screaming at himself not to?

Before he could move, the lights in the room went dead.

A second later, they sprang back, the same burning crimson as the control board. A slow, droning klaxon blared, and Anakin realized far too late that this Kaminoan had been doing the same thing her superior had been when he died.

Buying time for the cavalry.

"You may kill us, if you like," she said, her skin cast red and her irises glowing scarlet. "It won't make a difference."

Anakin ran.

Republic Archives: Emergency Containment Shutter System

"Emergency Containment Shutter System" is a generic term for any number of quick-deploying blast door networks designed to safely sequester a structure or vessel's sentient occupants from a dangerous situation. They are most commonly thought of as the shutters that seal off starship sections exposed to the vacuum of space due to hull breach, but this is far from their only use.

An emergency containment shutter system consists of blast doors connected to explosive bolt deployment pistons, along with a rudimentary droid brain and a series of sensors. The sensors can be directed to detect anything—the absence of breathable air, moisture, fire, unwanted intruders. If the sensors are tripped, the droid brain determines which blast doors must be sealed to contain the emergency.

Only a small amount of voltage is required to power the system's sensors and droid brain, and the explosive bolts are activated with a very brief electrical charge. Emergency shutter systems are typically equipped with their own power supply so they will still function in case of a wider power outage on a ship or in a building. However, this power supply does not provide enough energy to re-open the blast doors if the emergency situation is resolved. The doors must be hand-cranked back open—a laborious and intensive process, but a small price to pay for an otherwise low-maintenance emergency system.