Chapter 32: A Courtesy Point of View
to Zachariah Jensen
The beings monitoring the Rebel command bunker heard the danger first. On computer screens and glass-supported tactical displays the battles on the plains and in space filled their emotions. Out beyond the walls of Echo Base, Captain Solo would occasionally report to say; "They're breathing down our necks here," or "These Imperials can't shoot straight!" or "We're out of the canyons now...there's a lotta snow coming down," all generally indicating that things were going well with his team and the snowspeeders. Above, Patra was vastly outnumbered. Commander Skywalker had seemingly disappeared. No matter the individual, though, they were all surprised, afraid, when the clashes and mechanical hums some of them knew as the sound-signature of a lightsaber echoed down the narrow corridor from the hangers.
The she-Sith's Form was something switching between II and IV, but more outside Forms, a different school of Jedi training, something easy to react to so closely were her moves linked to her emotions. Kit could nearly see as well as smell her excitement and controlled fears. If a movement caught her off guard she would snap back and regain her composure before coming into the fight with brief furious speed, and if she gained an advantage in the web of green and red and bright, bright light, she would fall into a regular pattern of battering attacks that Kit could easily turn away. They were well matched.
At their arrival in the control room its previous occupants had left an open floor among the machine, some of them looking around corners-become -barricades. The consoles and workstations made all the bare avenues and floor each less than a meter wide. The only exit was another corridor similar to their own, but narrower.
This, thought Kit Fisto, would add red around his eyes.
He knew her style now, and the whirl of Form I was beginning in the back of his mind. A lock; momentary, both lightsabers up and leaning right and held in doubly straining grips.
"No Jedi can defeat Mara Jade, the Hand of the Emperor." The human said, her voice raised against the hissing crackle of the lightsabers. Kit grinned, finding his greatest amusement in misplaced drama and confidence in the midst of the excitement and wonder of death-play, and Mara Jade broke the lock with a tight, quick flip that brought her to stand on the control surfaces of the nearest bank of computers, crushing beneath her feet levers and exposed wire.
The information about his opponent's name came to Kit's mind and flashed out again; too quick for pondering did the resuming combat wipe it away. Names for some meant one thing; personalization of a victim. They would say it is harder to take the life of a being whose name if nothing else is known to you. A warrior of the Jedi way would disagree, because it is hard to kill at all times, all situations when the taught-instinct is to preserve life. But at times it must be done, and their lives have taught them that the greatest strength is to do what must be done. And Kit Fisto enjoyed the challenge to much to detract from it in nearly any way.
Mara Jade's lightsaber swept down from the higher ground. In the Force, where even here/now it is a close and powerful thing Kit knew the precise strike that would flow into the right place, and so after one slash had showered sparks on his head as he stepped back and away, then the dark Jedi struck again and Kit took his blade into an overhead block and twisted. Behind and below became before and above and Kit jumped, leapt, landed on the top of the console a metal tier above Mara Jade. Without taking a hand from the saber hilt the Force was harnessed and threw her from the console. She landed in a clatter on her back, knocking over two chairs and a dark-plaited deactivated droid. The cylindrical body of the droid fell over her, and the lightsaber died in her empty hand. Kit jumped down and landed on the white floor, resettling the tendrils about his shoulders. Shark's eyes watched.
Mara Jade threw out a hand and chairs and droid were flung away, folding against walls of magnet-shielded ice. She got to her feet and paced forward, and the lightsaber flew to her hand. Kit held his own blade in a low guard in his right hand.
The first energy-exchange forced the woman's lightsaber into an arc through the computer console beside her, and Kit stepped around her furious recovery for a slice that seared a shallow cut across her side. She aimed a dipping back-kick that missed, and then the lightsaber was up again and Kit carefully began to drive her backwards.
He could have cut her in half there with that restrained swipe, but hadn't. Because the Force had told him, as slowly it controlled him, they still had a place to go. A time to meet.
They moved out of the control room, down a hallway where the meter-length laser swords nicked sparks from the walls and showered them down from head-height. Kit let the battle flow, feeling his opponent's strength and subtle weakness.
Mara Jade broke out into the cavern with a full-out roll, standing again a few meters away beside a great round pit set into the rough and now unshielded ice and snow walls of the cave.
Kit stood at the entrance to the open space and looked at it for a moment, just let the Force and physical perception wash over him for precious seconds. This was not one of the rooms he, or as far as he knew Skywalker, had excavated. It looked, except for the lighted entrance, too natural to be something the rebels created, yet it looked and smelled familiar. Had the setting been spires of rusting metal instead of blue-white ice this would be the Coruscant reservoir where it all began.
Mara Jade came at him again with an overhead lightsaber strike that turned into a Force push that Kit anticipated and drew into himself, bolstering his physical stamina that was ever so obviously leaking away. He caught two strikes low to each side, fast Form I flips of the hands, then caught an overhead attack horizontal and Force-pushed.
She rode it, twisting in the air, landing at the rim of the mysterious pit. Red durasteel morphed into ice on the far wall, the materials locking together like puzzle pieces, all of it flickering out of the corner of his eyes like it was not quite there, or not quite somewhere else. Heat from air inside melted stalactites into drips from the ceiling . Kit moved forward, lightsaber out of the lines of defense.
"Jedi are never to attack." Mara Jade said in her clear voice. She held her hands her head, her red lightsaber droning. Chunks of rock and ice fell from above and did not move from the natural affectations of gravity. Mara Jade threw shards and hunks of this materiel at Kit and he deflected them back or away closing all the time. her saber was held only in her left hand now so its swing down began in an obvious jerk, and Kit didn't bother to deflect it because her free hand was curling into a fist, and the Force said now!
Lightning erupted from her fingertips. Bedrock cracked with noise like a handclap, and loose rock and drops of water rained down for just a second, a second in which Kit saw she expected him to go for her open side.
He flipped forward, to her right, and now gravity did the work and her pause had doomed Mara Jade, because it took her longer for her victory-clouded mind to register surprise than it took for the first great piece of ceiling to come down and bring an entire section of the cavern roof with it. The lightning died in a shattering fall of rock and smoky detritus.
Kit saw the pit beneath him now, burnished smooth wall stained green and blue and rust, with smooth, dark water below and she shadow-reality of a catwalk and clone troopers above him. Kit felt a gut-wrenching fear, his hearts out of rhythm as he fell, but in his mind there was only blankness, and conditioning.
He caught the edge of an intake pipe an inch around and locked both hands to it, and the blur of vertigo ended with his knees thumping against the wall and the muscles in his shoulders and the back of his arms burning like fire. The Force eased the fire, and Kit looked down and knew that to drop to the water below was to drop into the past. Reality had lines in it, cracks from a great white hole centering herenow far away, and one of these cracks was between the realities separated in Kit Fisto's mind on one far, far away Empire Day.
This is what the Force had been leading him into all this time.
This choice; to remain and live, or return and die.