Chapter 7
"Get away from the ship!" Anakin yelled, shoving his way through the crowd. "Get away!"
His voice was just one in the hundreds, and the rest were howling for revenge. The freed Prhei surrounded the ship. They hammered at it, rocked it side to side in hopes of upending it.
Make a diversion, Sabeeth had said. Improvise, she'd said.
Well, he had ... but it might have gotten a little out of control.
They weren't listening to him. All he could do was try not to get cooked with the rest of them when the Sith Lord's ship took off.
"Chicken!" he shouted, waving his fist in a rude gesture.
He'd seen the Sith emerge from a tower just as he'd led the throng of Prhei into the courtyard and knew him for what he was. Snooty, aristocratic- looking, angular, a far cry from the savage visage of Darth Maul, but Anakin had instantly recognized the stench of evil.
In the excitement of freeing the prisoners from the dungeons, he'd stopped worrying about keeping a low mental profile. The Force in him drew the Sith Lord's gaze like a magnet. Their eyes locked, and he'd felt the most terrible lusting hungry greed roiling toward him.
Everything was suddenly open to Anakin. He knew exactly what had happened, not only to Obi-Wan but to the five men surrounding Darth Tepes.
"Take him alive!" Tepes pointed his lightsaber at Anakin. His voice rang over the din of the alarms, and the Prhei turned like a flock of birds in flight. At the sight of their hated captor, they loosed a collective roar and surged forward, carrying Anakin with them like a twig caught in floodwaters.
The ex-Jedi had moved as one to defend Tepes, but even their skill couldn't hold back the press of the enraged throng. Tepes, who had been anticipating a straightforward battle, fled before he could be torn limb from limb. He left his bodyguards behind, doomed to fall but certain to take a score or more Prhei apiece with them.
Anakin had tried to fight through to him, but the Sith reached his ship and leaped-flipped inside. He slammed the hatch on the hands of his pursuers.
Now he could see Tepes through the windshield. The engines roared. The guns began to mow through the Prhei.
It instantly turned them to panic, and now they were stampeding away from the ship as ardently as they'd been trying to reach it. Trampling, lashing out in urgency.
Tepes lifted off, out of their reach, and the Prhei vented their frustration in a single mass shriek before falling on each other in their wrath.
Realizing he was going to get ripped to bits if he lingered, Anakin got out of there as fast as he could. He raced for the entrance through which Tepes had come, suspecting he'd find Obi-Wan still within.
He scrambled over a section of fallen wall and was almost to the doorway when a fist closed on the scruff of his neck and hoisted him off the ground.
"You!"
Uh-oh ... it was the big one, the one who'd seen him letting the prisoners out of their cells.
"Let me go!" Anakin put all the power of the Force behind it.
The command was immediately obeyed. Down he went, landing in the rubble and bruising his tailbone.
He mentally snatched up a hunk of debris and propelled it at the big man's head. Anakin heard a noise reminiscent of whopping an under-ripe melon hard with the haft of a knife, and the man keeled over.
"Three cheers for the Force," he said, and dashed into the darkness.
He still couldn't sense Obi-Wan, but he sensed Sabeeth and could tell it wasn't good news. They were too late ... they'd failed, they'd blown it ... all for nothing!
XXX
"You've failed me," the hologram said, only twelve inches high on the projection disk but towering with presence. "You ran like a coward."
Darth Tepes glowered smolderingly but kept his head deferentially bowed. "I had to escape, or they vould have destroyed me."
"Yes," Darth Sidious said flatly. "As they killed your wife."
"I felt her dying scream ... the Jedi haff taken my voman from me." His knuckles were dead-white around the ship's controls.
"Do you take me for a fool? The only Jedi there were the ones you left behind! You were outdone by a boy and a maverick."
"No! They vere Jedi! I sensed the Force in them! And I vill see to it that all the Jedi pay for vat they haff done!"
"While I am normally in favor of my apprentices giving in to their darker emotions," Sidious said, interlacing his fingers, "you cannot afford to rush off in a hate-filled fog."
"Vat is it to you?" Tepes snapped. "You said how I disappoint you; ve shall see how disappointink you find it ven I haff personally dealt vith the Jedi Council!"
"You don't mean to go to Coruscant! I cannot permit this."
He sneered. "Vat vould you do? Dismiss me?"
"I thought I'd made it clear that I will tolerate no impertinence. Your first duty is to me, apprentice. You will do as I say."
"I vill make them pay! I haff powers now even greater than yours, Master! Perhaps it is you who are unvorthy of me!"
He slapped the controls, causing the bluish image of Sidious to contort and then vanish in a snarl of static.
XXX
Jumping over part of a dismembered sentry, Anakin skidded to a halt just inside the room where Sabeeth knelt by Obi-Wan.
She spun and drew, then saw it was him and let her lightsaber drop. Her eyes were haunted. "I found him," she said softly.
Anakin came closer, taking in the entire scene -- medical kit, medi-droid, all of it. "He's dead, isn't he?"
"He's breathing."
"Sabeeth..."
"He's –breathing--!"
He wouldn't back down, though his voice was near to breaking and he was fighting off hot tears. "The machine's breathing for him, Sabeeth. That's no way to be. Who'd want to live like that, dependent on a machine to breathe? We... we have to let him go."
"You mean unhook it?"
"We can't leave him like this." He reached for the droid, then cried out as she seized his wrist in a crushing grip.
"It's not your day to kill him," she said. "He... he has to live, don't you understand? He has to live!"
"There's nothing we can do!" He told her what he believed had been done to Obi-Wan. Warbles and beeps from the amiable medi-droid confirmed it.
"You can communicate with that thing?"
"Yeah. It was just following orders."
"That's what they all say."
"This syringe would have done something else, I don't know what, only that it's bad!" He flung it against the wall, where it shattered and leaked black-red fluid down the stones.
Sabeeth sat with her head down, tendrils of hair that had come loose from her braid falling around her face. "Can't we get back what they took from him?"
"The Sith Lord got away. Even if we could catch up, we'd have to capture him alive ... we don't have a ship ... there's no way we could find him in time."
She pressed her hand against Obi-Wan's chest, raised his chin. His eyes were closed, he looked twenty years older than he had when he'd left Sylvar.
Anakin bit his lip. "I know, Sabeeth... I wish there was something I could do..."
"Can you work this machine?"
"Yeah, sure, but Sabeeth, like I was saying --"
"Take it from me."
"What?"
"My blood, Anakin. Take it, and give him what he needs."
"No! This is crazy! I can't... I couldn't..." "You can and you will!" She took his head between her hands and fixed him with her shining eyes. "It has to be this way. I'm the only one."
"I'm --"
"Needed to operate the machine," she interrupted. "And if he and his mentor were right, you're too important to risk. You need him to guide and teach you. That leaves me. It's what I choose."
"But ... but ..."
Whatever he might have said was forgotten as a man appeared in the doorway and pointed a blaster on them both. It was the big one, the one that Anakin had dropped with a chunk of debris. Now he was mad.
Anakin grabbed for his lightsaber, but Sabeeth just shifted her intense gaze to him and reached out, curling her fingers.
The blaster clattered to the floor. The man clutched at his throat and made a hideous strangling gurgle. A tide of purple flooded his skin.
Sabeeth's eyes narrowed and she tightened her grip.
He fell down, tearing at his neck now, desperate for air. His heels drummed on the floor.
Her fist clenched.
His back arched. His larynx crunched, the small vertebrae cracked in rapid succession like a chain of fireworks. He went limp.
Anakin sucked in a deep breath of his own to assure himself he still could. "You ... wow!"
Sabeeth relaxed her hand. As if the events of the previous minute had never taken place, she turned her attention back on him.
"We have to save him, Ani. No matter the cost to me. I can't do it alone ... but I'll try if I have to."
"The first thing we'll need to do is warm him up," Anakin said slowly. "The droid's got a thermal ray that should counteract the chill in his blood."
She examined the restraints, found them locked, and rather than look for a key just wrenched them open with her will.
Obi-Wan slid forward and nearly fell, but she caught him and carefully lowered him to the floor, making sure the breathing tube didn't become kinked or stretched.
Anakin told the droid to activate the thermal ray. A cone of orange light beamed over Obi-Wan.
Sabeeth brought his motionless hand to her face, rubbing her cheek along the back of it. She kissed it, placed it across his waist, and leaned to brush another kiss on his brow.
"All right," she said, seating herself in the chair. "Let's get it over with."
The droid obligingly extended twin arms. Its internal cleaning and sterilization systems had removed every trace of Obi-Wan's blood from the crystal needles and clear tubes.
Sabeeth withdrew a short, slim knife that had been hidden in her braid, and Anakin's eyebrows went up in surprise.
"Smuggler's trick," she said, using the knife to make two cuts in the black fabric that sheathed her legs.
He started to point out that the droid lacked a second breathing apparatus, but she already knew that. Instead, he gave her a quick and awkward kiss on the cheek. "Is there anything you want me to do?"
"All I'd ask is to be avenged, and I don't want to put that burden on you." She smiled, a sad and familiar sort of smile.
It took Anakin back four years and halfway across the galaxy, to his last glimpse of his mother. Grieving but knowing she was doing the right thing, the only thing...
"I'll do it, though. I'll find him, I promise."
Sabeeth nodded, then closed her eyes and held onto the arms of the chair as the medi-droid rolled into position.
Continued in the next chapter.
"Get away from the ship!" Anakin yelled, shoving his way through the crowd. "Get away!"
His voice was just one in the hundreds, and the rest were howling for revenge. The freed Prhei surrounded the ship. They hammered at it, rocked it side to side in hopes of upending it.
Make a diversion, Sabeeth had said. Improvise, she'd said.
Well, he had ... but it might have gotten a little out of control.
They weren't listening to him. All he could do was try not to get cooked with the rest of them when the Sith Lord's ship took off.
"Chicken!" he shouted, waving his fist in a rude gesture.
He'd seen the Sith emerge from a tower just as he'd led the throng of Prhei into the courtyard and knew him for what he was. Snooty, aristocratic- looking, angular, a far cry from the savage visage of Darth Maul, but Anakin had instantly recognized the stench of evil.
In the excitement of freeing the prisoners from the dungeons, he'd stopped worrying about keeping a low mental profile. The Force in him drew the Sith Lord's gaze like a magnet. Their eyes locked, and he'd felt the most terrible lusting hungry greed roiling toward him.
Everything was suddenly open to Anakin. He knew exactly what had happened, not only to Obi-Wan but to the five men surrounding Darth Tepes.
"Take him alive!" Tepes pointed his lightsaber at Anakin. His voice rang over the din of the alarms, and the Prhei turned like a flock of birds in flight. At the sight of their hated captor, they loosed a collective roar and surged forward, carrying Anakin with them like a twig caught in floodwaters.
The ex-Jedi had moved as one to defend Tepes, but even their skill couldn't hold back the press of the enraged throng. Tepes, who had been anticipating a straightforward battle, fled before he could be torn limb from limb. He left his bodyguards behind, doomed to fall but certain to take a score or more Prhei apiece with them.
Anakin had tried to fight through to him, but the Sith reached his ship and leaped-flipped inside. He slammed the hatch on the hands of his pursuers.
Now he could see Tepes through the windshield. The engines roared. The guns began to mow through the Prhei.
It instantly turned them to panic, and now they were stampeding away from the ship as ardently as they'd been trying to reach it. Trampling, lashing out in urgency.
Tepes lifted off, out of their reach, and the Prhei vented their frustration in a single mass shriek before falling on each other in their wrath.
Realizing he was going to get ripped to bits if he lingered, Anakin got out of there as fast as he could. He raced for the entrance through which Tepes had come, suspecting he'd find Obi-Wan still within.
He scrambled over a section of fallen wall and was almost to the doorway when a fist closed on the scruff of his neck and hoisted him off the ground.
"You!"
Uh-oh ... it was the big one, the one who'd seen him letting the prisoners out of their cells.
"Let me go!" Anakin put all the power of the Force behind it.
The command was immediately obeyed. Down he went, landing in the rubble and bruising his tailbone.
He mentally snatched up a hunk of debris and propelled it at the big man's head. Anakin heard a noise reminiscent of whopping an under-ripe melon hard with the haft of a knife, and the man keeled over.
"Three cheers for the Force," he said, and dashed into the darkness.
He still couldn't sense Obi-Wan, but he sensed Sabeeth and could tell it wasn't good news. They were too late ... they'd failed, they'd blown it ... all for nothing!
XXX
"You've failed me," the hologram said, only twelve inches high on the projection disk but towering with presence. "You ran like a coward."
Darth Tepes glowered smolderingly but kept his head deferentially bowed. "I had to escape, or they vould have destroyed me."
"Yes," Darth Sidious said flatly. "As they killed your wife."
"I felt her dying scream ... the Jedi haff taken my voman from me." His knuckles were dead-white around the ship's controls.
"Do you take me for a fool? The only Jedi there were the ones you left behind! You were outdone by a boy and a maverick."
"No! They vere Jedi! I sensed the Force in them! And I vill see to it that all the Jedi pay for vat they haff done!"
"While I am normally in favor of my apprentices giving in to their darker emotions," Sidious said, interlacing his fingers, "you cannot afford to rush off in a hate-filled fog."
"Vat is it to you?" Tepes snapped. "You said how I disappoint you; ve shall see how disappointink you find it ven I haff personally dealt vith the Jedi Council!"
"You don't mean to go to Coruscant! I cannot permit this."
He sneered. "Vat vould you do? Dismiss me?"
"I thought I'd made it clear that I will tolerate no impertinence. Your first duty is to me, apprentice. You will do as I say."
"I vill make them pay! I haff powers now even greater than yours, Master! Perhaps it is you who are unvorthy of me!"
He slapped the controls, causing the bluish image of Sidious to contort and then vanish in a snarl of static.
XXX
Jumping over part of a dismembered sentry, Anakin skidded to a halt just inside the room where Sabeeth knelt by Obi-Wan.
She spun and drew, then saw it was him and let her lightsaber drop. Her eyes were haunted. "I found him," she said softly.
Anakin came closer, taking in the entire scene -- medical kit, medi-droid, all of it. "He's dead, isn't he?"
"He's breathing."
"Sabeeth..."
"He's –breathing--!"
He wouldn't back down, though his voice was near to breaking and he was fighting off hot tears. "The machine's breathing for him, Sabeeth. That's no way to be. Who'd want to live like that, dependent on a machine to breathe? We... we have to let him go."
"You mean unhook it?"
"We can't leave him like this." He reached for the droid, then cried out as she seized his wrist in a crushing grip.
"It's not your day to kill him," she said. "He... he has to live, don't you understand? He has to live!"
"There's nothing we can do!" He told her what he believed had been done to Obi-Wan. Warbles and beeps from the amiable medi-droid confirmed it.
"You can communicate with that thing?"
"Yeah. It was just following orders."
"That's what they all say."
"This syringe would have done something else, I don't know what, only that it's bad!" He flung it against the wall, where it shattered and leaked black-red fluid down the stones.
Sabeeth sat with her head down, tendrils of hair that had come loose from her braid falling around her face. "Can't we get back what they took from him?"
"The Sith Lord got away. Even if we could catch up, we'd have to capture him alive ... we don't have a ship ... there's no way we could find him in time."
She pressed her hand against Obi-Wan's chest, raised his chin. His eyes were closed, he looked twenty years older than he had when he'd left Sylvar.
Anakin bit his lip. "I know, Sabeeth... I wish there was something I could do..."
"Can you work this machine?"
"Yeah, sure, but Sabeeth, like I was saying --"
"Take it from me."
"What?"
"My blood, Anakin. Take it, and give him what he needs."
"No! This is crazy! I can't... I couldn't..." "You can and you will!" She took his head between her hands and fixed him with her shining eyes. "It has to be this way. I'm the only one."
"I'm --"
"Needed to operate the machine," she interrupted. "And if he and his mentor were right, you're too important to risk. You need him to guide and teach you. That leaves me. It's what I choose."
"But ... but ..."
Whatever he might have said was forgotten as a man appeared in the doorway and pointed a blaster on them both. It was the big one, the one that Anakin had dropped with a chunk of debris. Now he was mad.
Anakin grabbed for his lightsaber, but Sabeeth just shifted her intense gaze to him and reached out, curling her fingers.
The blaster clattered to the floor. The man clutched at his throat and made a hideous strangling gurgle. A tide of purple flooded his skin.
Sabeeth's eyes narrowed and she tightened her grip.
He fell down, tearing at his neck now, desperate for air. His heels drummed on the floor.
Her fist clenched.
His back arched. His larynx crunched, the small vertebrae cracked in rapid succession like a chain of fireworks. He went limp.
Anakin sucked in a deep breath of his own to assure himself he still could. "You ... wow!"
Sabeeth relaxed her hand. As if the events of the previous minute had never taken place, she turned her attention back on him.
"We have to save him, Ani. No matter the cost to me. I can't do it alone ... but I'll try if I have to."
"The first thing we'll need to do is warm him up," Anakin said slowly. "The droid's got a thermal ray that should counteract the chill in his blood."
She examined the restraints, found them locked, and rather than look for a key just wrenched them open with her will.
Obi-Wan slid forward and nearly fell, but she caught him and carefully lowered him to the floor, making sure the breathing tube didn't become kinked or stretched.
Anakin told the droid to activate the thermal ray. A cone of orange light beamed over Obi-Wan.
Sabeeth brought his motionless hand to her face, rubbing her cheek along the back of it. She kissed it, placed it across his waist, and leaned to brush another kiss on his brow.
"All right," she said, seating herself in the chair. "Let's get it over with."
The droid obligingly extended twin arms. Its internal cleaning and sterilization systems had removed every trace of Obi-Wan's blood from the crystal needles and clear tubes.
Sabeeth withdrew a short, slim knife that had been hidden in her braid, and Anakin's eyebrows went up in surprise.
"Smuggler's trick," she said, using the knife to make two cuts in the black fabric that sheathed her legs.
He started to point out that the droid lacked a second breathing apparatus, but she already knew that. Instead, he gave her a quick and awkward kiss on the cheek. "Is there anything you want me to do?"
"All I'd ask is to be avenged, and I don't want to put that burden on you." She smiled, a sad and familiar sort of smile.
It took Anakin back four years and halfway across the galaxy, to his last glimpse of his mother. Grieving but knowing she was doing the right thing, the only thing...
"I'll do it, though. I'll find him, I promise."
Sabeeth nodded, then closed her eyes and held onto the arms of the chair as the medi-droid rolled into position.
Continued in the next chapter.