Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. This story is purely a work of fan fiction, and I am not making any profit from it.
Author's note: Special thanks to the four incredible people who reviewed last time! Kelaria, pronker, estora, and what-ansketil-did-next, this chapter is for you!
CHAPTER TEN:
The Chiss Commander peered at the read-out a moment longer. "Still no response from the planet, I assume?"
"No, sir."
He nodded decisively. "Fall back to base. I want to speak with the prisoner."
"Sir, our orders -"
"Are to monitor activity on the planet they call Loreth. Which we cannot do if it tears itself to space dust. Set course for base camp."
"Yes, sir."
The commander rubbed his upper lip thoughtfully. "We'll see what Orun has to say now that we are not his homeworld's most immediate danger."
"Ryn? Psst! Ryn."
Ryn dragged her face out of the dirt and shot Anakin a questioning look. "Yeah?"
Crouched behind a sparse-looking bit of scrub, Anakin frowned at her and shifted his weight. "You really think this will work? We'll find Obi-Wan?"
You'd know as much about it as I do. "I hope so," Ryn answered cautiously. Anakin felt ... anxious, fretful, so she pulled back from the ridgeline a little and added, "All we can do is try."
"There is no -"
"What do you think we're doing here?"
It almost made him smile. He's changed so much. We all have.
Anakin's next works were so quiet she almost didn't catch them. "I guess this isn't exactly the homecoming you imagined."
The only answers Ryn had for that were strewn with pitfalls. She tried the easiest one: "I've never had much imagination, anyway."
"I just -" Anakin stopped, and she caught the hitch in his breathing when he remembered not to clear his throat, lest they draw attention from the ghovhlain camp below them - servants of Khalî, like the Bolg, but possessed of a cruel intelligence and therefore far more dangerous. "I know you're doing this for me, and I -"
"Hey." Ryn shot him a quick, stern glance. "I'm doing it for Obi-Wan, all right? Don't get all overwrought."
It was hard to tell whether Anakin's presence was relieved or chagrined. Maybe a little of both. "Oh. Well. Okay, then."
Ryn wriggled back a few more inches, just far enough to punch him lightly on the arm. "I can think of some things I'd like to do to you ..."
"Yeah, yeah, okay. I get it."
They both deserved better, but on scout duty was not the time to try and sort out all their issues. And some of them could probably never be really sorted out, anyway. Some things stayed with you forever. "Come on," Ryn said instead. "Let's go play heroes."
Somebody has to.
:Help me.:
Obi-Wan sat up, his head clearing a little, unexpectedly. "Help you how?"
:The Empty One. He is ... wrong.:
The entity's expression of wrong was like a cancer: something twisted, unnatural.
"I thought you wanted death."
:Death. Yes.: A curious sense of memory, years of slaughter and tears and ... Ryn, standing in a cold stone chamber, saying, "I will go." :Death brings life. Sacrifice.:
"I don't understand."
Cold laughter, cold but not unkind. :Neither does he. The Empty One.:
And he had no idea what that meant. "How do you know Ryn?"
Momentary perplexity. :Daughter.: Hesitantly.
"She's your daughter?"
:All my daughters.: Even more hesitantly: :Long-children.: A rush of images, those pale Lorethan faces with sharp features and dark hair. All dying, one way or another. And at the end three women, impossibly beautiful, torn apart. :Our ... ending. Also a beginning.:
It made too much sense, and not enough. These people were clearly Ryn's ancestors, but what had happened to them? And more important: what was happening on Loreth now?
:Help me. Help them.:
"How?" Obi-Wan asked the empty room.
:All things die.: Pause, and he could feel the entity's effort to search for the right words. :The Way of Sacrifice.:
"Greetings. I am Count Dooku of Serenno."
"Why are you here?"
'I am exploring the far reaches of our galaxy to -"
"You have entered Lorethan sovereign space. Turn back and you will not be harmed."
"If I might speak with a representative -"
"I represent my home planet." The voice on the other end was not hostile, but sure. "Stand by for jump coordinates and escort."
"Thank you, but I do not require -"
"Stand by," the voice repeated, and cut the channel.
They rode through empty wastelands where no one lived, not even birds and beats. Their steps were dogged by the Bolg, but that was to be expected: they had known this wouldn't be easy. They kept scouts, outriders with a sharp eye for trouble, and avoided fighting when they could.
They still lost hands.
They were still maybe two days out from the place they sought - by their best estimates, which were none too certain - when Ryn, who was scouting ahead to try and find a way between ghovhlain territories, sneaking her way along a ridge with her face pressed to the ground, smelled something that brought her up short.
For a second, it smelled exactly like Anakin's favorite workspace in the Temple, and Ryn was sure she was hallucinating - finally losing it for real, after skirting the edge for all these months. But then reality hit her like a hammer - a very cold hammer, up here in the tundra - and she drew in a breath.
"Evinne," she called, very softly.
Five meters away, Evinne shifted in her frog-like pose, the widespread all-fours crouch scouts used for crawling quick an quiet, and twisted around enough to raise an eyebrow at her.
"Smells like Anakin's tinkerings," Ryn whispered hoarsely, tapping the ground for emphasis. "Engine grease, hyperdrive fuel."
Evinne eased closer to her position. "Omega?"
"That'd be my guess."
"Hell."
Ryn was shaking so hard she could see it, a shudder in her vision as she moved, out of sync with the slow spin of her home planet on its axis. "He'll be close."
"Yeah." Evinne sounded hoarse; Ryn watched her wet her chapped lips, feeling as though everything were happening in slow motion. "Maybe we're closer to the Womb of Death than we thought."
Ryn frowned. "It's supposed to be at the top of the world," she said. That'd be the Pole. Which has ice, not tundra."
The look Evinne gave her said she was putting up with Ryn's laboriously unnecessary explanation only because she was a very patient person. "Maybe 'top of the world' was poetic exaggeration," she suggested. "Anyway, if Omega's ship has been here, we have to find it. And destroy it, before he can get away."
"You think escape is his plan?" Ryn asked, forehead wrinkling under the frost.
"I think we'd better not take the chance," Evinne answered. "Besides, a guy like Omega wouldn't be caught too far from his escape route."
"Right." Ryn had been so focused on finding Obi-Wan, she had almost forgotten their original mission in this system. "So he's in the area."
"You read it differently?"
Right now, I don't read anything at all. Ryn shook her head and backed slowly down the ridge into the brush. "Let's go tell Anakin."
Skywalker took the news about as well as a rock flies, which is to say: not very. Evinne clenched her jaw and tried to remember hat he was a kid, whose father-figure was missing, on a strange planet. Plus whatever he had going on with Ryn, the severed bond thing that they were only maybe on their way to getting over and Evinne didn't want to understand.
But he was a kid who was older than Ryn, and when Evinne was his age she'd been racketing around the Outer Rim as a mercenary - because she could, because it was exciting, because it beat the hell out of her other options.
"Okay, look," she said, holding up a hand to stave off Skywalker's burgeoning panic. He fell silent, uncharacteristically docile, and in the quiet that was left Evinne slowly realized that Skywalker and Ryn were both watching her expectantly, two pairs of eyes wide and waiting.
Oh, fuck them anyway. She opened her mouth to tell them so, but what came out was, "Skywalker. Get a grip, here. You'd have felt it if anything had happened to your master, right? The bond thing?"
"I can't feel him at all," Anakin said, shifting nervously from foot to foot.
"But the bond is still there?"
"Yeah."
"So Obi-Wan is still alive, which means our job is still to find him," Evinne pointed out. "The only thing that's changed is that now we know we're on the right track." She paused. "In case you hadn't noticed, that's good news."
"Right," said Anakin, his face clearing a little.
"Ryn," she went on, turning to the younger girl. "If Omega had ships just wandering around the surface, the defense scanners would have picked that up. He's got a hiding place."
"Like maybe in the cave we we're looking for," said Orun, her reaction deadpan.
What went on behind Ryn's still mask of a face was her own business. "As for example," Evinne said.
"So we need scouts," Ryn concluded. "More of them, I mean. Unless ... this close, Anakin might be able to sense Khalî as a disturbance in the Force."
The boy looked worried. "The Dark Side -"
"Is what we're looking for," said Ryn. "If you stopped fighting it for a minute, could you feel the direction?"
"If I stop fighting it," Anakin said, and stopped to wet his lips, "If I stop fighting it, I don't know if I can ... come back."
Ryn frowned at him, and Evinne wondered whether she were making any more sense of this than Evinne was. It sounded like so much Jedi nonsense, to her: they weren't asking Skywalker to go anywhere, just to delve into the Force enough to sense the center of the disturbance. One would think Jedi must do that sort of thing all the time - although, if they couldn't, that would certainly explain how the Sith had been able to escape so many times.
Probably another thing Orun would say she wasn't supposed to know about. Too bad.
"Let me be your anchor," Ryn was saying to Anakin. "I've offered before, but ..."
Evinne didn't know but what, but evidently Skywalker did, because he met her eyes and slowly nodded.
"I trust you," he said - which, given their recent history, sounded like recklessness to Evinne. But she wasn't privy to the subtexts of their interactions, so she kept her thoughts to herself and hoped for the best.
It was all she could handle right now, anyway.
Anakin reached for Ryn, who was doing a good job of looking like a fairy-tale princess, all beautifully vulnerable with her heart in her green eyes, and Ryn was just reaching back to let him take her hands, when a shriek like an angry demon shredded the air above them and Chiss fighters swept down through the sky.