Legacy

Book I


Chapter 4

"Once again, old age and treachery trump youth and beauty," Qui-Gon smugly decreed, tossing his seventh full sabaac down upon the table and leaning back against the padded inset bench. "It would appear the onerous task of piloting falls upon your reluctant shoulders."

His companion's mouth twisted slightly as he tidied the battered flimsiplast card deck into a single dog-eared pile. "Fine."

"I was going to say…. it will make a perfect training exercise."

Obi-Wan cocked a sardonic brow at him. "There are days when I wonder how I ever survived my apprenticeship."

"The sentiment is mutual," Qui-Gon assured him, moustache twitching as he fought down his chuckle of amusement.


A half-hour before the freighter's scheduled reversion at its first port-of-call, the Jedi sallied out of their interim quarters onto the lounge deck, where the more restless passengers milled about and helped themselves to mediocre fare purchased from the ship's vending droids.

"I'll find the transport officer and see whether our shuttle is cleared for launch in the lower bay," Obi-Wan said, striding off in search of a uniformed crewmember.

Qui-Gon stretched his legs, traversing the length of the blast-sheilded viewport wall on the starboard side. His presence was sufficiently intmidating to ward off the attention of most other occupants – but an elderly Dressalian couple shuffled forward to eagerly accost him mid-way through his perambulations.

"Ah! Master Jedi! Master Jedi!"

He inclined his head, curiously. The wife of the aged pair clasped her wrinkled hands to her bosom. "Are you with that young man? The one who just went forward to the bridge?"

"Yes, we are traveling together."

"Oh!" The crone's rumpled face melted into an expression of relief. "I wanted to tell him… we've found my husband's purse. It wasn't stolen at all- he simply forgot that he had packed it in the other valise. A silly mistake! Isn't that good news?" She leaned forward, lowering her voice. "It would be dreadful to think there was a thief aboard, now wouldn't it? I'm sure he'll be so happy there's no real villain."

The Jedi master maintained a strictly courteous affability. "I shall convey your message."

"Oh, thank you," the woman wheezed. "Come along, Dothby, let's not bother this gentleman anymore."

Her husband blinked and nodded, and hobbled away leaning upon his cane and his wife's arm. They were quickly swallowed up in the tightly packed swell of travelers preparing to disembark.


"I sensed no deception in them," Obi-Wan muttered, as they made a final inspection of the shuttle's radiation dampers and secondary thrusters.

Qui-Gon slammed the shield generator access hatch closed. "You wouldn't have. They genuinely believed themselves to have been victimized."

They proceeded up the open ramp and through the short storage compartment into the cockpit. The younger Jedi sighed. "I'm sure there's a lesson in this," he ruefully observed.

"I'll let you muddle it out for yourself." The tall man took up position in the righthand seat and brought all systems online.

Obi-Wan ran his hands over the yoke and console controls. "I'll put that high on my personal agenda… right after attempt suicidal piloting stunt."

The copilot grimly secured his crash restraints.


Their shuttle dropped from the freighter's belly just outside the Meruu subsector space-station, where the lumbering vessel docked for refueling and to take on goods and extra passengers. The star cluster for which the sector was named shone balefully in the near-viewport, a bouquet of dying red giants, none of them supporting inhabitable life but their combined luminance making a striking navigational marker.

Obi-Wan arced away in sublights at a conservative speed, wordlessly eyeing the instruments and the navcomp readout until a small chime alerted them that they had crossed into the gravitational well of the nearest star, Niffren.

"Passengers are advised to expect mild turbulence," he intoned ominously, locking course on the fourth satellite and decompensating speed as their trajectory smoothly melded into a centripetal counter-orbit.

"Do not center on your anxieties," Qui-Gon admonished. "It may not be storm season."


"…Or it may very well be," Obi-Wan dryly observed, as the planet's tumultuous horizon loomed before them. Even at such a height, the fantastic marbled patterns of swirling atmospheric storms and the frenetic blasts of ion lightning carved a hypnotic moving spectacle across the entire visible hemisphere.

"Ah."

The young Knight glanced sideways, mouth thinning. "Why is it that we must always encounter complications? Why is it never easy?"

"We are sent to deal with trouble," Qui-Gon replied, reasonably.

"Yes, but meteorological trouble?" Obi-Wan thrust a hand at the nightmarish scene just below. "It's like a cheap plot device in a serial holo-novel."

"I will leave the comparison to your superior expertise in the literary realm," the older man murmured. "…And perhaps you should focus upon the technical aspects of piloting."

His companion nearly rolled his eyes. "Yes, Master."

They dropped cautiously into the topmost layer of atmosphere, the black of night paling into vibrant indigo as refracted light swelled within the horizon's wide basin. The shuttle bucked and shuddered, all manner of console alarms bleeping for attention.

"Lovely," the pilot grumbled as the sensor fields shorted out. Then, as a bright afterthought, "I should have brought a blindfold. To add an element of challenge."

Of course, it was hardly funny, as they were now plunging into unpredictable primordial chaos without benefit of natural or artificial sight.

"Relax," the Jedi master advised. "You're sweating. I haven't seen you this on edge since-"

His fond reminiscence was abruptly cur short by a severe pressure differential that sent them plummeting at least two hundred meters in one fell swoop. The ship thrashed and jerked, keeled wildly in the buffeting wind at this new level, and then evened out. Obi-Wan's knuckles stood out white as he wrestled the yoke into submission and routed more power to the stabilizers.

"I have a very bad feeling abou-"

A gust of something sent them spinning into a violent corkscrew. The shuttle's drives whined and howled in protest, the gravity compensator hiccupped badly enough to wreak havoc on their inner ears, scattering all innate sense of direction to the four winds, and the portside wing creaked ominously as they were thrown willy-nilly through Niffrendi's angry skies.

Somehow Obi-Wan pulled them through it, teeth gritted and forehead glistening with perspiration now as he fought for control, the Force taut as he called upon it to enhance concentration and reflexes, and to effect not a little gross physical manipulation of the ship's mass. They plunged lower, hit a steady current and sailed in a sickening loop along the edge of destruction.

"Have I ever mentioned that I hate flying?" the young Jedi inquired, conversationally, sending them into a nosedive as the colossal storm front collided with a frenetic pillar of wind and cloud, shattering into deafening sound and immeasurable furor.

Qui-Gon unclenched his hands from the console's edge. "You may have dropped a hint or two."

Whereupon the heavens erupted into excoriating brilliance, sheet lightning cleaving the world into skewed planes, bright white blades sweeping like giant scythes through cloud and wind, shattering vision into black after-image, sound into empty thunder, space into scattered and whirling confusion.

"Get us out of here!" Qui-Gon barked.

Obi-Wan didn't need telling twice – the shuttle veered wildly downward, careening in a jagged spiral as intersecting blasts of fire cut the atmosphere to shreds, to blinding pennants of flame. The ship's electromagnetic compass blew out in a shower of sparks; the drives groaned in agony, the hull rattled uncontrollably. Lightning seemed to reign triumphant, horizon to horizon, the entire globe haloed in a nimbus of angry light, death raining down from on high as they dodged and dived, spun and dropped at a desperate, Force-guided speed, hurtling thorugh certain obliteration toward the unforgiving peaks of a mountain range below.

"Pull up," Qui-Gon growled. "Pull up- the compensators, Padawan!"

"I'm trying!" the pilot snarled. They rolled wildly as a jagged finger of lightning thrust down at them, splintering the mountaintop far below.

An updraft seized them in its claws and whirled the ship high, tossed upon an invisible geyser spout of roaring wind. The console screamed, displays blacking out as the power cells overloaded.

"Flying is for droids," Obi-Wan hissed, through clenched teeth. He shut down auxiliaries, diverted emergency power to the thrusters, and battled heroically with the helm – but the hurricane would not relinquish its grip. "Blast blast blast blast blast -"

"Don't fight it," the Jedi Master advised, tension simmering in his voice.

Obi-Wan's temper overflowed its high levees. "You were quite eager to delegate this task to me!" he snapped. "Would you like to take over the piloting?"

They hit a pressure pocket and grunted in unison as the ship collided headlong with nothing, jerking them painfully forward against the crash restraints.

"In the name of -!"

Heaven's Scythe blasted through the vortex, slicing diagonally across the twisted skein of cloud and wind; the Jedi cried out as the Force's warning set their blood afire, as the ship was hurtled straight down the storm's funnel-shaped eye, as a secondary current smashed into them and sent them careening upward again, the drives at maximum but powerless to counter the power of the cataclysm.

"Force's sake!" the young Knight spat, hair plastered to his forehead, mouth hardening into a line of sheerest battle-fury. He flipped the vessel upside down, cut all thrusters and ramped the repulsors to their highest setting.

The gravity-inverters bucked like an untamed nerf and then kicked in, blasting them down again in a long sailing arc, like a stone skipped violently across a raging sea. The shuttle bounced, underbelly pointing heavenward, fuselage blackened and scorched by a dozen near-brushes with death, and plowed upside down into a mountain valley, shearing off a kilometer's worth of bushy tree-tops before wedging itself in the boughs of a monstrous native seequoo with a squealing crash to rival the surrounding thunder.


Suspended in their crash harnesses, the Jedi neither moved nor spoke for a long minute. The double hammering of their hearts, the deep panting of their breath, the bitter adrenaline tang in the Force slowly subsided.

"Well. That was good," Obi-Wan decided, voice twisting with sarcasm.

Beside him, long mane hanging down in a comical curtain, Qui-Gon released a long centering exhalation. "You executed that with typical panache," he observed.

His companion drew a tunic sleeve across his face and wrenched at the release mechanism for the crash netting. Liberated, he flipped elegantly onto his feet upon the inverted cockpit canopy. Wide green leaves and broken branches pressed against the viewport, obscuring their view. A gentle pattering on the hull heralded the advent of rain. "Wonderful." He craned his head round and pried open the console access hatch. "Circuits are fried – but reparable, I think."

"We need to amend your docking position first," Qui-Gon told him, slipping out of his own tangled harness and gingerly testing the ship's balance in its high eyrie. "We'll exit through the ramp."

A few minutes later, two brown-cloaked figures scrambled out of the inverted ship's hold and vaulted to the sequoo tree's gnarled roots fifty meters below, springing from branch to branch and dropping the last ten meters in a graceful controlled fall. The light rain did not penetrate far past the forest canopy; a light spattering of moisture freckled their hoods and dusted the knee-high bracken underfoot.

The ship lay cradled in the interlocking boughs of the tree and its two closest neighbors, the gleaming alloy of its hull glinting dully where moisture trailed along its contours. Obi-Wan gazed through the tight-packed colonnade of the surrounding forest, a cathedral extending in all directions. "There's a clearing – just beyond that ridge."

Qui-Gon's thumbs hooked through his belt. He gauged the distance with narrowed eyes, squinting up at the massive bulk of the ship overhead. "Do you have it in you?" he asked, warily.

His counterpart stiffened. "We can manage it. Together."

But a slip would prove disastrous. The older man hesitated. "Obi-Wan," he admonished. "There is no need to push limits – "

The young Knight's brows shot up. "Oh... yes. I'll be sure to limit my activities to moderate exertion, such as piloting through a class three atmospheric storm."

They faced off, the drizzle gathering in damp pools among the folds of their cloaks.

"This is not about proving yourself. Moving that ship," – the Jedi master jerked one hand at the massive object suspended in the trees –"to that clearing is not a minor feat of Force manipulation. You need not feign omnipotence simply because you've attained rank."

A muscle in Obi-Wan's jaw twitched. He glanced away, fuming. Silver droplets cascaded to the hushed forest floor; the wind's susurration rose and fell, texturing the silence with a rhythmless chant.

At last, the younger man dropped his eyes. "You are right," he agreed, flatly. "We'll wait."

Qui-Gon nodded. "A wise choice."

"I'll reconnoiter," the younger Jedi decided. A moment later, he turned on his heel and stalked off into the forest, tugging his cowl far forward over his face.

Qui-Gon frowned after him, bemused. For someone whom he knew so very, intimately well, Obi-Wan could still on occasion prove difficult to understand – and had always been difficult to talk to. He sighed, and set about preparing a makeshift camp beneath the sheltering boughs of the sequoo, consoling himself with his fundamental faith that the Force would present a solution, to this as to every other difficulty along the path.