Chapter 5
Obi-Wan moaned and tried to raise a hand to massage his aching head. His arm moved a fraction of an inch and then jerked to a stop, held by hard pressure around his wrist.
He blinked a few times to clear the dark blur from his vision before realizing the dark blur was all there was to see.
Taking slow, even breaths to focus his thoughts past the pain, he made a quick assessment of his condition.
His head was the worst. Without even touching it, he knew there was a swollen lump above his ear, and when he moved that side of his face he could feel crusted blood crinkling on his skin.
Nothing broken. No serious injuries. Battered and bruised, to be certain, but alive.
Alive and strapped down in what felt like a chair of smooth duraplast. In addition to the bands around his wrists, his ankles were secure, and three wide metal belts cinched him at chest, waist, and across the upper thighs.
He was unarmed, barefoot, missing his robe. His tunic and trousers were smoke-blackened and smelled of laser scoring.
It brought back his memory of the last few minutes of consciousness. The Vigilant had come out of light speed beyond Coruscant's system and begun its final approach toward the inner planets. All was going fine. Jefin was telling a long, involved, and fairly obscene joke about a two-headed Pwillian who'd been courting two sisters.
No premonitions, no warning, nothing. Hindsight let him look back on the faint tremor of apprehension he'd felt as being an indication of trouble, but at the time he'd dismissed it as worries about Uri-Tan and what the meeting of the Jedi was going to bring.
And then another ship, firing with precise aim to gravely damage the Vigilant, cripple and seize her. Jefin's shout of pirates, raiders. A console spewing sparks, sending one of the crew lifeless to the deck. The ship being tossed and batted around.
He remembered starting for Jefin, and then a wave of pure cold malice roared out of nowhere and swamped his awareness. He'd stumbled, heard a solid crack that seemed to reverberate down his spine, and had time to clinically note that he'd just landed on his head.
Then nothing ... until awakening in this place of dark blur and metal bonds and distant sounds that might have been echoed screams.
He cast outward with the Force, trying to get an impression of his surroundings. Square room, little more than a cell. One door. Triply- locked. Presences nearby ... coming closer.
A peculiar noise, a rolling mechanical rumble, brought him back to his current state. He also heard the clunk of locks disengaging.
The door slid sideways into the wall, and that cold malicious wave washed over him again.
"He's avake," a woman's voice said from behind a lamp.
"So soon?" a man replied curiously. "Goot ... this vun is strong. Just vat ve need."
They appeared, the man coming in first, the woman behind him. Two others, guards by their bearing, flanked the door.
The man was tall and commanding, with sharply angular features and long white hair pulled back from a pronounced widow's peak. His red clothes and black cape contrasted with pale blue skin. He smiled when he saw Obi-Wan looking at him, showing plentiful, pointed teeth.
The woman greatly resembled him, her beauty that of a merciless goddess carved from glacial ice. As she set the lamp on a niche in the wall, Obi- Wan noticed her hands, six long fingers to each. She smoothed her crimson gown with a distracted ladylike gesture and beckoned to the droid that waited in the hall.
"Velcome, Jedi," the man said. "Do you know who I am?"
"You are a Bram, that much is obvious," Obi-Wan said, willing his mind to be serene. As well as he could with his wrists held down, he moved one hand and added, "and you will unbind me at once."
The Bram threw back his head and laughed. "Do you believe it, Eliry? He tries to use that old trick on me!"
She joined him in his soulless mirth. "Spirited creature, isn't he?"
"Let me explain," the Bram said. He flipped his cape over his shoulder and rested his many fingers on the black-ridged cylinder at his belt. "I am --"
"Sith." The word hung like a death sentence between them.
"And you are the vun called Kenobi. I haff you to thank for my elevation in status; you killed my predecessor and cleared the vay for my advancement."
A mental probe lanced against the barriers and was repelled, but left Obi- Wan alarmed at how weak and scattered he felt.
"Ah," Eliry said, closely observing his reaction. "The drug is beginnink to take effect."
He would not give them the pleasure of asking any of the questions they were waiting to hear. Instead, he shut his eyes to block out the sight of both of them and their odd medi-droid, if that's what it was.
Hear me, he tried to reach out and touch the minds of the Council members. --Jedi Masters, hear me...
Sluggish, fuzzy ... as if he were trying to speak through wadded fabric.
"It is t'shal," the Sith warrior said, with a click at the front of the word. "A contact agent, absorbed through the skin. It ... how to say ... puts your little friends to sleep for a vile."
Eliry coaxed the medi-droid to a spot in front of Obi-Wan. "Shall I begin, Tepes my sveet?"
"Do ... I am eager to add this vun's strength to my own."
Obi-Wan twitched at a touch on his leg. He opened his eyes and the woman was bending over his lap. She cut a slit in the cloth of his trousers, just below the restraint that held him in the chair. Then a second, on the other leg.
He pushed out at her with the Force, but might as well have tried to blow her away with a puff of breath. A creeping lassitude was spreading through his limbs.
"Femoral arteries," Eliry said. "Here, and here. Buried deep in the flesh, vell-protected."
He still would not ask, knowing they would either tell him or demonstrate.
Anakin ... Sabeeth ... warn the Council ...
"Oh, stop," Tepes snapped. "It von't help. Ve've done this before, you know."
Two narrow segmented arms extended from the front of the droid. Each held a glass needle affixed to a length of tubing, which snaked into the droid's inner workings. A third arm rose from its top, holding a clear cuplike mask with another tube retracted inside.
Obi-Wan strained against the bonds. Tepes grabbed him by the top of the head, fingers settling over his scalp like a bony skullcap.
"You don't need to move," he intoned, a weight of power in the words.
He –felt-- his will bend, was unable to resist it. Tepes was right ... he didn't need to move ... it wouldn't do any good...
The first of the glass needles pierced his leg. His throat constricted against a shriek as it drove through muscle and into the artery. That pain had not even begun to dim when Eliry thrust the second needle unerringly to the mark in his other leg. A strangled cry escaped him.
A steady red tide advanced up the first tube, but not the other. He watched in horrified fascination as his blood flowed into the droid.
Eliry adjusted a dial, and the droid began pulsing with a rhythmic 'whrrm' noise as a cycle of lights chased themselves across its control panel.
Seeping away... draining ...
What he'd experienced second-hand from Uri-Tan was now happening to him. The terrible helplessness, the encompassing dread...
Darker liquid, purple-maroon, appeared in the second tube. It moved downward and back into his leg, rejoining him. He could feel it entering, cooler than it should be, oozing back into his bloodstream.
"In case you're vonderink," Tepes said, leaning over Obi-Wan with a predator's grin, "ve're extractink chemicals from your blood. The very chemicals that the midichlorians need to survive."
Now he had to ask... "Why are you doing this?"
"See here." The Sith tapped a fogged glass dome bulging from the top of the droid. "The chemical vill collect here, and then I shall inject it into myself. The more bountiful their environment, the faster the midichlorians breed... and the more powerful the host becomes."
"It is the beginnink of a new era," Eliry said, gazing with adoration at Tepes. "Ve shall decide who rules the galaxy."
"It shall become a great empire," Tepes said, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. They made a dry rasping sound. "My Master and I vill determine vere to bestow the gift. In time, all the Force vill serve our purpose."
"That will not happen," Obi-Wan said. Yet bit by bit, drop by drop, he could feel his strength being leeched from him...
They acted as if they hadn't heard. Eliry consulted a gauge on the collecting unit and nodded to Tepes.
"Soon now," she said.
Cycling, cycling, his blood leaving him, wending its way through whatever intestinal path lay hidden in the droid, and then returning. He began to shiver from a cold that permeated him from the inside.
Eliry brought the mouthpiece cup to his face. He turned his head away.
"You vill use it or die," she told him bluntly. "Your body is already beginnink to fail."
His heart was slowing, pumping listlessly the cooling, thickened blood. Looking down at his hands, he saw they were no longer clenched in defiant fists but limp on the arms of the chair. Dissociated from him somehow, as if they were stuffed gloves attached to his wrists. The skin had gone a pallid greyish hue.
She deftly inserted the mouthpiece. A tube snaked from it, making him gag as it slid into his throat. A pair of bellows on the sides of the droid began to whoosh in and out, inflating his lungs.
"Vell," Tepes said cheerily, "you –are-- going to die anyway ... for a short vile. But it vould be a shame to vaste your skills ... thanks to your trainink, the physical reflexes vill remain even ven the livink Force has been stripped from you. So ve'll convert you."
"At the moment of death," Eliry said, "I shall introduce another substance directly into your heart. It vill avaken you to your new existence."
Tepes beckoned to one of the guards. The man stalked forward and paused, the snarling draconian mask of his helmet tilting impassively down at Obi- Wan.
"Best of all," Tepes said, "you'll still be recognizable, for long enough to make our foes neglect their defenses. Ve shall haff even the Jedi Masters at our mercy."
The guard removed his helm.
Obi-Wan stared in shock. "Uri-Tan ..."
XXX
Sabeeth and Anakin looked from the viewscreen to each other, and she saw her own dismay mirrored in the youth's expression.
"Two of us, against –that-- thing?" he said.
"We have to," she replied. "He's there."
"How can you be sure? Didn't you feel --"
"I felt it!" she barked. "Of course I did! I felt what was happening to him, before he faded so that I couldn't sense him at all."
"He's probably --"
"Don't say it!"
"But, Sabeeth! What good is it going to do if we just get ourselves killed? We might not be able to help him!"
"I won't leave without knowing one way or the other!"
"Even if we could get in there, how would we find him? We lost him! I've called, and there's nothing!"
Ahead of them, the main city of Bram sparkled with lights. Most of the buildings were low, crowded along streets laid out like the spokes of a spider's web.
At the center of that web, a single structure reared hundreds of feet in the air. It was bleached-white and made of six curved spires that jutted up from a central walled courtyard, the whole thing giving the impression of a skeletal, clawed hand thrusting up from the earth as if to rend the sky.
The ship they'd encountered at Festri's moons was parked in the middle of the courtyard. Enough other craft were flying and hovering above the city to make them as inconspicuous as they could be in a flashy star cruiser with go-faster stripes and outlandish lines. If any of the crew of the enemy ship saw them, they were sure to be noticed.
"We don't have time, Anakin. He needs us. And we need him... if he does die, what'll happen to you?"
He recoiled as if slapped. "No other Jedi would train me. I'd lose everything."
"We –have-- to do this." She stood and headed for the back of the ship. "Take us in fast and low, every gun blazing. Open the side hatch long enough for me to jump out. Then make a diversion."
"Then what?"
"Improvise."
"Okay." He settled his blast-goggles securely on his face. "Ready."
"Go!" The Vance's Pride shot into motion. Even prepared for it, Sabeeth was almost thrown off her feet by the sudden burst of speed. She made her way to the side hatch and held on as Anakin caromed between the bone-white spires. The guns spat meek little bolts of energy.
They dipped steeply, then the door in front of her open. She saw the courtyard fifty feet below, heard the alarm claxons and shouts and the heavier thump of laser cannons returning fire. Anakin swerved to avoid one of these, and Sabeeth leaped.
She dropped lithely and landed in a crouch. For once, her choice of fashion served her well; the guards racing for strategic posts and the rest scattering for cover all wore black, or black and crimson.
One of the guards saw her and realized where she'd come from, but never had time to raise the hue-and-cry. She was on him in a flash, not daring to draw attention with a lightsaber here in the open, a kick to the gut and lightning-quick a second kick that caught him square in the face as he bent double.
Before he even hit the ground, she was running for the nearest doorway. Mouth-like arch lined with metal blades, portcullis, closing as whirling beacons lit up the courtyard.
She dove headfirst through the dwindling opening. One of the pointed blades snagged her cloak and she tore it free. The door clashed shut, plunging her into a darkness that would have blinded anyone who hadn't grown up on a sunless prison moon.
Guard, yawning.
Amethyst flare, slicing.
Sabeeth jumped over the body, lightsaber in one hand, and ran down the passageway. At the sounds of many voices, she ducked into an alcove and doused the beam.
Guards, wide awake. A lot of them. Armed.
She tensed, ready.
Impact and explosion, shaking the entire building.
The guards changed course, taking a branch of the corridor that did not lead them past Sabeeth's hiding place.
With a moment of relative safety to use, she summoned the Force as best she could and tried to reach Obi-Wan.
Nothing ... hollow empty used-up nothing.
Dead?
No!
She wouldn't allow it!
I know you're here! she thought furiously. Answer me!
The faintest of flutters, the dimmest of sparks, there and then gone but it was good enough for her. He lived, and while maybe she couldn't consciously find him, fate or Force or even the Soulfire of Noct would lead her to him.
Continued in the next chapter
Continued in the next chapter.