Chapter 20: Finding Nemonus
The meetings with the Rebels had gone well. Almost thirty people, some called from other planets by Lando, had met Master Luke's group at dawn of the next day on Dorin. They represented humans, Bothans and Kel Dor, and brought with them two medium-sized ships hastily outfitted with probably black-market weaponry. The departure had been quick, and now they were en route to the world called Hoth, where, Luke said, the Jedi could resurrect a ruined base.
Now Kit Fisto stood at the forward viewport of the Falcon, the only outward-looking window in the ship. The others; Luke, Han, Chewie and the most motivated of the Rebels, were in the common room holding a sort of conference. Kit was feeling a bit sick, so he had declined to join the debate he could hear in the other room.
His skin felt dry, probably not just from lack of hydration. He felt confused, spaced out, unable to concentrate, not to mention out of shape because of all the riding around in space.
He found his mind casting back to the days before his world had fallen apart more than it ever he thought it could. He had resisted looking back before, because it was too confusing and harsh, but now he rested his long-fingered hands on the console as if for some kind of basis for reality, and then he went back and remembered.
The Jedi Temple was ruined, the Order dying. The government had changed hands, and somewhere this news just washed over the citizens of a planet too far away to care. Glee Anselm was like that, but Coruscant was not, and Glee Anselm was as far away as Kit's Jedi starfighter crushed beneath the Temple.
Kit splashed through a layer of oily water over the ferrocrete street between gray Coruscant rains. The rain turned everything gray, a melodramatic precisely scheduled downpour that nearly drowned out the running footsteps behind him. He paused for a moment under an overhang and shook his head, and raindrops slid between his head-tails.
There was the sound of clone troopers' boots on sidewalk and the barks of vornskrs behind him, and another squad ahead. Between them and Kit there stood an open reservoir from the Manarai Mountains, and there Kit hoped to escape. Where to he didn't know. He could stay in the ugly waterways of lower Coruscant forever. And so he continued on.
The reservoir was not public; it was not much more than a pit that used to have a force field over it until it had cost to much to keep up. Memory tinged the blue-black water and rusting gray metal with fear and disgust. At the surface of the water, halfway down the tank walls now, a metal jetty extended to the midpoint. The second group of "Imperial" clones and leashed vornskrs stood there, the beasts craning their black heads upward.
The troopers below saw a figure, someone, throw himself from a ledge higher up and splash into the water many meters below. The vornskrs brayed and strained toward the stilling pool, and lasers from the other group of Imperials flashed down to where the water had plumed.
Below, Kit plunged through a column of bubbles to nearly the bottom of the reservoir. The water was cold, and smelled of rust and pungent purifiers.
A laser bolt boiled through the water far above him where sunlight brightened the blue. Confidence regained, Kit swam for the center of the pit and the grated pipe that there descended out of it. His lightsaber would be a mechanical energy to pinpoint; so the Force pulled the bolts from the grate.
The moment of concentration required kept him from the material aspects of the Force just long enough that the warning came late and he felt the pressure of the water and heard the roar before danger was in his mind. Kit pushed himself from the bottom of the pit and swam a stroke, then a missile of some kind impacted on the floor, and metal screamed. When the white bubbles cleared the grate was buckled and twisted back into the shaft; the way was blocked, and a second missile coming down.
'Like shooting fish in a barrel!' Kit laughed morbidly. There was a second explosion and wash of heat not far away. Kit's options were fading--he could stay down here indefinitely, for days or until the troopers ran out of missiles, but maybe he would be shot before then. Maybe those troops had resonance imagery or guidance systems, something smart that could find him in these depths.
Kit took a deep breath and circled the pit looking for any cracks or hiding places, dissipating his once-rising fear with the familiar ache of stressed muscles and the beating of his hearts. There was joy in these things, much joy, but as he paused by a riveted seam and wondered about pulling it apart another missile thundered down behind him, and the deep fear of death was for a moment upon him. Then he flung a Force shield out in front of him, and for a moment Kit was silhouetted and splashed with light as the thing exploded. He was pressed against the hard wall, and there was a fierce ache at the back of his head.
Maybe Master Fisto felt the same as Master Skywalker then as they were both being hunted, maybe they heard that same music, or maybe it was just random like so many things are, and the flux forty years later just happened to save a life in the past. It propelled Kit to the future, and he found himself in a few feet of water and beside a pack of vornskrs.
To the Kit of the future, who stood at the helm of the Millennium Falcon, it made no sense. He knew that he was alive now because of that fluke or Force, but the world he knew was dead. The Jedi, the Temple, the sparks of life. What omnipotent Force would save one being to live with that knowledge? He knew that thinking this over and over again would only dull his mind.
There is no death, there is the Force.
Kit felt the Force--I have been chosen for a reason--and grinned and shook his head because thinking about these things was so useless when there was life to be living. He turned and walked out into the curving corridor, to join the others. From the common room, a Bothan laughed.