Two days after Anakin, Ahsoka, and the Open Circle Fleet ship out for the Outer Rim, unbeknownst to Anakin, his worst nightmare comes true.
Well, not his worst nightmare. That's probably something about his wife dying, everyone who's important to him dying, and the whole Republic falling because of him. The works. This isn't quite on that level. What happens is this: It turns out that a paparazzo managed to get some pictures of him, halfway to his second meeting at Dex's with Barriss. Accordingly, three standard cycles later, one of Coruscant's trashiest gossip rags publishes an unconscionably lengthy article, interspersed with blurry, distant holoimages from various awkward angles, speculating on the Hero With No Fear's bold new fashion choice.
It goes viral.
Suddenly, on every Core world and some of the Mid Rim as well, sentients are taking grinning selfies in all-black outfits and makeshift wrap-around sun goggles. The arbiters of fast fashion catch onto this almost instantly, and soon the markets are flooded with cheap—and some expensive!—variations on some little backwater planet's traditional eyewear. The trend balloons. The original clickbait article spawns a hundred, then ten thousand imitators in a plethora of tongues, all parading forth badly edited copies of the original pictures (copyright blithely ignored). Within a Corellian tenday, you can't walk down the street of a major galactic metropolis without seeing at least eight pairs of wrap-around sunglasses, modified for various species physiognomies.
It's not entirely clear whether this is ironic or not, especially among the younger fans. A number of Twixter accounts pop up personifying Anakin's sunglasses themselves, as well as a few personifying Anakin's (suffering) dignity. But statistically, a good number of the later adopters have to be, painfully, in earnest.
Luckily, Anakin doesn't learn of this until much later, because Anakin has a war to fight. Some of the 501st do learn about it, even though they have a war to fight. They don't inform the General because it's funnier not to, but they do begin to discreetly buy up the cheapest of these new crimes against fashion over the Holonet. In bulk.
A thousand years from now, confused historians will record it as one of the strangest pieces of wartime propaganda the Republic has ever known.
/B/
"What's your take, Rex?" Anakin crosses his arms and widens his stance to level a more effective baleful glare at the holomap.
Rex smiles. "He could be malfunctioning."
"Ha. We can hope."
The huge holomap that dominates the strategy room of the Resolute is currently zoomed in on an unassuming sector, where they've gotten word of Grievous' flagship and an unknown portion of his fleet lurking after a successfully repulsed siege near Ryloth. (Mace Windu is quickly becoming the Order's best at defensive siege tactics. Anakin prefers the offensive side of that particular situation. Lanteeb was…well.) Their best information has Grievous in orbit over Arami, seemingly making preparations to land. Unfortunately, their best information is based on long-distance signal interceptions that had to be triangulated taking into account the gravity well of two nearby stars. He's certainly in the system, or at least he was 16 hours ago, but precise location is a total unknown.
"The only real objective I can think of is to set a trap, General," Rex settles, reaching up to zoom the map out. "There's just nothing in this sector. No high-value targets—Arami isn't even inhabited, and Gamorr is Gamorr. Sure, our factories on Rothana are more or less close"—Rothana being the all-important seat of Republic military engineering—"if you consider 16 parsecs close."
"And Rothanan security has made that entire zone pretty much impassable, anyway," Anakin finishes the thought. He reaches up to rotate the hologram and fails twice to produce any effect. Irritated, he tugs off the glove on his flesh hand and succeeds in moving the stars up and back, exposing the underside of the galaxy. "Arami has some natural reserves of Man'Telani acid, which used to be used in hyperdrives, but that's obsolete technology now. I could see some sort of attempt to establish inroads into the Core here, by ducking through Hutt space where it's thinnest underneath the disk. But he doesn't have the forces to do anything with that route at present, and there are better ways anyway. So I agree, a trap is the most likely option." He frowns. "We must be missing something."
"Because the Seps've been so squeamish about sneaking around in the past?"
Anakin snorts. "Because they're usually better at it."
"What's General Kenobi saying?"
Anakin's scowl deepens. "Not much." Rex feigns a look of exaggerated surprise, and Anakin chuckles a little despite himself. "He thinks maybe they're going for Syrvis instead of Arami, it's got some mineral resources that Grievous could use. But really not enough to justify a personal visit."
Ahsoka chooses this moment to burst into the strategy room, looking slightly disheveled with her beads falling forward over one montral. "I'm here! Sorry. What did I miss?"
"Nothing, Commander, we're pretty much just going in circles here," Rex reassures her while Anakin tugs the beads back into place.
She whacks at his hand in mock offense. "What's Obi-Wan's take?"
Anakin isn't sure what his face does in response, but Rex looks between them awkwardly. "Ah. I should really be debriefing the nav team now, actually. General. Commander." He nods to each of them in turn and hoofs it out of there.
Ahsoka waits about two seconds in deference to his discomfort before the interrogation begins. "Okay, what's up with you and Obi-Wan, is this why he's bunking on the Negotiator instead of with us? Are you still fighting?" She has the nerve to look exasperated, which is completely unfair. He'd like to see her deal with the man for eleven whole years; she's barely even been alive that long.
"I let him in on what happened with our mutual fishy friend," Anakin says shortly. "He disapproves."
Ahsoka looks more confused than sympathetic. "What, Dex?"
What? Oh. "Not—I was being sarcastic."
"...Master Fisto?"
"Ahsoka." He levels her with a meaningful look, flicks his eyes to the nearest security camera.
"Then—oohhhh." Ahsoka's face clears to understanding, then a touch of embarrassment. "Well, what's he disapprove of? We saved a lot of lives with that."
"That's what I said too. He doesn't like the method."
"What, because it's—" Two fingers draw the frame of a pair of sunglasses under her eyes.
"Basically." Something needles at the back of his mind; that wasn't all, and he knows it. He shoves it back under. "I talked to our other mutual friend, by the way. Sh—they agreed to think about finding a new home nearby. They've got the same idea as us about the, ah. Underlying principles of their research."
Ahsoka grins. "Figures. You know, I am a teenager. If all my friends are buying sunglasses, maybe I should be doing it too…."
Anakin's heart skips a beat. "Don't even think about it." She laughs—she doesn't get it. He puts his hands on her shoulders, forces her to meet his eyes. "No, seriously. I mean it, Ahsoka, this is dangerous. You are not messing with it."
Ahsoka rolls her eyes and brushes off his flesh hand. "Yeah, no shit, Skyguy." When he doesn't move, she huffs and meets his eyes again, all sincerity. "I'm joking. Promise."
Anakin's heart rate begins to settle. "Okay. Okay." He drops his other hand, turns back with effort to the holomap. "Alright, what's your opinion on Grievous' objective here? Why Syrvis or Arami?"
She considers it for a long moment, rotating the map this way and that. Her brow furrows. Finally, she hazards, "...It's a trap?"
"That's our best guess too."
She grins, proud of this assessment. "Good thing we know what to do with those."
Anakin smiles back fiercely, a familiar battle rhythm beginning to pound on the edges of his consciousness. "We do indeed."
/B/
They emerge from hyperspace and conceal the fleet behind the asteroid belt above Arami before Anakin sends a squad of 501st stealth pilots for recon. The results come in a few hours later. No, Grievous has not hared off for Syrvis, as Obi-Wan expected. His capital ships are arrayed above Arami: seven in all, outnumbering the current Open Circle Fleet by two. (That would have been nice to know in advance, Anakin reflects darkly.) And, more ominously, two of those huge vessels are reported to look…odd.
The holoimage in front of Anakin now is frustratingly grainy, so he can't see much beyond the broader shape of the ships in question. Unlike the typical wedge-shaped destroyer, both ships have an odd voluminous teardrop shape more appropriate to a lander, with a huge, clumsy rounded front narrowing to a more typical, flattened stern behind. He would almost be inclined to think the rounded end was the back, except that in the holoimage only one of these monstrosities is in profile and the other, the closer one, is facing away, allowing him to see the huge engines mounted on the fairly traditional snub end of the rear. He can't see enough details to be sure, but he'd say there's something almost thrown-together about these ships, as if someone took an outdated destroyer and hastily welded this completely illogical, clumsy bludgeoning instrument onto the front of it. They'd be fine in hyperspace, but he doubts they could achieve any sort of speed in a realspace race, with their poor maneuverability and the certainty of their catching every piece of space debris in the area on those huge noses.
Maybe that's the point, and they're meant to clear a path through some sort of debris field? But there's nothing like that nearby, and they would only slow down Grievous' fleet and ensure its destruction in any forward charge involving real opposition.
Anakin hears a low whine of servos and looks down to realize he's clenching his metal hand hard enough to strain it. With effort, he spreads his fingers. Whatever purpose these ships were built for won't matter if he can turn them into scrap metal before Grievous can use them.
Ahsoka pushes into the strategy room with a grim focus in the set of her jaw—on time now, when it matters—and a moment later the holographic images of Obi-Wan, Cody, Yularen, and a few other major navy officers appear around the round standing conference table, with the regional map displayed in the center once again. The room is dimmed to make holomap viewing easier. Anakin shares his pilots' findings quickly and efficiently: seven capital ships in a reinforced wedge formation above the planet (with the two odd ones occupying the protected inner position), and approximately thirty smaller craft along with a few vulture droids swarming in the area between capital ships and surface. Around half of these small ships seem to be landers, the other half gunships. Due to the spread of their swarm, his recon team wasn't able to get any images of the planet's surface, but it seemed likely from the activity of the landers and the density of comm chatter readings that a significant portion of Grievous' forces were landside now.
This gives them some options. Grievous doesn't actually have the numbers to blockade the planet, just enough to make it hard to land anywhere near his own ground troops. They could potentially enter atmosphere just outside the Seps' surveillance range (behind the curve of the planet, realistically) and send a slew of bombers in larties around to strafe Grievous' ground forces without ever entering combat on foot—as long as the fleet could engage Grievous in space at the same time to prevent the atmosphere LAATs' being sandwiched and cut down by heavy artillery. (Grievous has been known to consider hitting his own droids below with a plasma cannon an acceptable loss.) It's a decent plan, and makes some use of Anakin, Obi-Wan, and Yularen's respective strengths. They could also take the more cautious route of putting boots on the ground and assessing Grievous' ground forces from there before committing to an actual attack. This is Obi-Wan's inclination, landlubber that he is. And then there's the most aggressive route: Theoretically, with the way Grievous' capital ships are concentrated with all his forces beneath them, they could launch a narrow and devastating attack from above the capital formation, attempting to push one or more capital ships into the planet's gravitational field and, hopefully, crush some proportion of his forces beneath them. Once, and once only, Anakin succeeded in breaking a minor siege this way, and it was absolutely glorious. But in this situation, with so many unknowns, he's inclined to think it's too risky. He's in favor of the in-atmosphere bomber run himself.
"If we land ground troops before bombing, we lose the element of surprise," he reasons, eyeing Obi-Wan's side of the table.
"Yes, but if we're all in agreement that it's a trap, the element of surprise is minimal anyways," Obi-Wan clips out, narrowing his holographic eyes.
"That's exactly why we need to take fast and devastating action!" Anakin grits out. "If it is a trap, we need to break it, not walk slowly into it with our gundarks tethered."
"With our…what?" Yularen, who has been watching the back-and-forth with pursed lips, pinches the bridge of his nose. "Gentlemen, this is unproductive. We have other options, we can find a compromise."
One of the newer high officers raises her hand, then looks a little embarrassed and lowers it to unmute herself. "Is there any reason we can't land ground forces and use a half-strength bombing run as a recon opportunity? That would also reserve more pilots for the space battle, in case of unexpected developments." They all glance distrustfully at the two strange ships on the holo.
Anakin shakes his head. "I like the idea of using bombers as recon, but sending less than sixty pilots for the initial strafe could be suicide when we don't know what ground artillery they have."
Yularen hums. "Perhaps, but they outnumber us in space. Can we afford to send sixty of our best pilots to the ground under these conditions?"
"Precisely," Obi-Wan agrees. "Whereas landing the 212th preserves our resources out of atmosphere and could resolve many of these unknowns. Suicide would be potentially stranding our best bombers between two layers of the enemy while any potential reinforcements in space are overwhelmed."
Obi-Wan is being particularly acidic today, and it's beginning to drive Anakin up the wall. Despite his resolution to be totally professional, he's having trouble wrestling down his temper. "We don't actually know that they have overwhelming numbers in space. We know that they took heavy aerial casualties in their last engagement, and we believe that a large proportion of their troops are on the ground," he says, poking a finger into the table. "And those bludgeon-nosed ships likely don't contain full contingents of fighters. It looks like the hammer thing they've stuck on the front is covering a lot of their hangar exits."
"Do we know that?" Obi-Wan's hologram says with a sigh.
Of all the insulting—! "We'll take that into consideration, General," Yularen interjects smoothly. "My proposal is this: We open with a feint. Three of our capital ships pretend they're trying to open a long-term space battle by grounding one of their capital ships, in order to draw out their forces and thereby assess their numbers both in space and on the ground. If those numbers are manageable, we follow through on preparations to land the 212th and all of its pilots, reinforcing them with 20 pilots of the 501st for a two-phase bombing run. If not, we focus all of our resources on a space battle, since Arami is uninhabited. Is this an acceptable compromise?"
Well, it's not terrible. Simple but open to more complex adjustments, prudent but not overly cautious. Anakin would like to get a closer look at those hammer-headed ships before committing too many pilots in atmosphere, and it somewhat preserves the land bombers' element of surprise. "It's good. I approve," he says after a moment of consideration, the burning in his chest subsiding.
"General Kenobi?"
Obi-Wan hesitates longer, looking inscrutable; since this plan reveals their presence before landing, it could potentially expose his ground troops to more aggression on the way down. If he exercises his veto power now Anakin may punch something. But he just strokes his beard for a moment before lowering his hand to the table. "I approve."
/B/
Anakin holds down both triggers until the enemy explodes in front of him, and buzzes through the wreckage, grinning at the slight impacts on his hull. Around him, his men and the other fighters of the Open Circle Fleet wheel and circle in dizzying patterns, vortices of action and emotion. Lights wink out, in the back of his mind, but the centrifugal forces pull more strongly on his attention as he banks around another fighter and takes out his tail just in time to pull up over the wing of one of Grievous' capital ships.
So far, the space battle is going surprisingly well. Their feint managed to do some real damage to the right backmost capital ship and one of the blunt-nosed ships, while the advantageous positioning of their own destroyers—all in profile or nose-on—has saved them from taking too many hits. Honestly, it seems like their estimates of the enemy's numbers were actually way over. Anakin is almost certain it can be attributed to the blunt-nosed ships, but he hasn't yet had time to verify. It's both great and extremely suspicious.
Around him, stars blur against velvety black as he takes his fighter into a roll over the vast gray surface of a capital ship, evading fire.
Their goal, at this stage, is to draw as many of Grievous' small fighting craft as possible up above the capital wedge, so that they're no longer concentrated between it and the planet. Not only does this make it easier to estimate numbers and interrupt whatever operation Grievous is landing for, but also, establishing the theater up here from the start will be a boon if they do decide to land forces accompanied by an in-atmosphere bombing run. So far, the small-craft battlefield has broken into five swarms (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say giant dogfight zones): two primary swarms close together at the back of the capital wedge, between the two destroyers forming the wedge's broad tail; two secondary swarms centering over the two middle destroyers in the wedge and the odd, rounded ships tucked in between them; and one smaller, tertiary swarm over the lead ship in the wedge. These swarms tend to be mobile, within a certain range. Drawing them apart or collapsing them together is half of strategy at this level of a space battle.
He buzzes in close past another vulture droid and nails it with his rear cannon when it swerves automatically in his wake, not even looking as it explodes behind him, because there's less than no time to think. There's no memory, only the present and the very immediate future overlapping each other on separate axes, as he throws himself into a left-hand roll this time to dodge a wedge of vultures and comes out of it perfectly positioned to fill the empty space in Gold Squadron's gathering nine-fighter egg-and-blade. "Good of you to join us, General!" Bammer cracks over the comms, and Anakin laughs a little giddily, before the enemy finishes closing this unwise pocket in its secondary left-wing defensive swarm. Gold's whole formation tilts 90 degrees in unison and transitions into a rolling egg, laying down the omnidirectional strafing fire all egg formations are known for. Starbursts all around them. Then Anakin barks, "Break three!" and the formation dissolves as quickly as it came into three tailed wedges, already moving because most of these men are seasoned enough pilots to recognize the three best windows they've created without him telling them, and the rookies just follow whoever's most purposeful-looking. Two of them take their newly created corridor to the engines of the second-from-leftmost capital ship (judging "left" by the noses of these enemy juggernauts). Anakin's group of three turns back toward the dead zone at the nose of the leftmost destroyer, so Anakin peels off above the capital wedge to join the reinforcements Green Squadron's lieutenant has been screaming for for the last three and a half seconds.
But they beep the all-clear before he can even see the primary right-wing swarm through the primary left-wing swarm, which has drifted upwards, so he takes advantage of the momentary lull in the battle to turn and dive down into a crack in the dense middle of the capital wedge, near the nose of one of the odd hammerhead ships, determined to finally get a look at one of these aberrations from the side.
The narrow (comparatively narrow; it's probably about an eighth of a mile) space between two destroyers in formation both is and isn't one of the safest places to be in a space battle—the destroyers won't fire for fear of hitting each other, but vultures love to chase you down into the restrictive area. They especially love to push you out below the destroyers, since beneath a dense, horizontally aligned capital formation in the act of landing troops is a very bad place to be. Anakin acquires a tail almost immediately as he descends (for a given definition of descending; it is space). In the absence of Artoo's targeting assistance, he hits his rear guns without looking and is gratified to see an explosion behind him. There's no sound, of course, but the blood pumping in his arteries and the Force singing in his ears provide a lovely accompaniment.
Ducking in close to the left-hand side and absently performing a little wing-waggle that nearly crashes his overcompensating pursuers, Anakin realizes that his hodgepodge theory was right. These are old ships, really old, and attaching the reinforced nose actually sealed off most of the hangar exits. He zooms past panel after panel of gray metal and machinery and sleeping turrets, growing more and more excited as blank metal continues to extend where hangar exits should be.
He's zipping full-speed toward the engine end of the blank-nosed ship now, but his remaining tail decides to risk opening fire, and he has to shift his focus to avoid it, juking and spinning tightly over his right wing. Losing patience, he cuts his right engines and floors the left, executing an abrupt and extremely dangerous about-face while his momentum keeps him hurtling backwards. The craft creaks and shudders and volubly threatens to tear itself apart—fighters were not designed to drift—but he grits his teeth until his jaws ache and holds it together with the Force. Even before the two vultures come into view in front of him, he's shooting, and they both explode into so much debris. The ship keeps spinning around, finishes its wild mid-flight turn, and he guns his right engines again at just the right moment. The ship holds together, the metal quiets. His heart settles in his chest as he resists the urge to laugh out loud. It's a good thing Artoo isn't with him for this battle—the little droid is a daredevil of the highest order, but even he would not have been happy about that particular maneuver.
Just in time, he glances back at his original objective and sees it, clear as day, as he hurtles past at reduced speed.
What?!
The one remaining hangar exit on this side, the only one not rendered unusable by the mysterious nose addition, is welded shut. Not even nicely: The huge bubbly snail trail of metal extends all the way across the horizontal crack between the closed doors, messy and winding.
Then Anakin is shooting out past the destroyer's engines and pulling up sharply into the dogfighting mess that is the left primary defensive swarm. Almost instantly, he's clipped twice from the right and all thought of strategic intel takes a backseat to the heady blaze of precognition and his personal most frequently employed Jedi mantra of fuck, fuck, sithspit, fuck, e chu ta, these motherfuckers—
His guys are being cut to pieces up here, numbers depleted, and he ends up dawdling among them for twenty minutes or so, getting them organized and shouting redistribution orders. Finally, the situation stabilizes enough for him to wheel toward the swarm's calmer exterior and key in a certain frequency. "Admiral!" Anakin shouts into his comm, exulting in the moment. "The weird ships don't carry small craft!"
The line crackles as Yularen presumably rushes to hit the button. "None of them?"
"Only two hatches to let them out, and those are literally weldedshut!" He doesn't technically know that, hasn't seen the other side or the other ship, but as he says it, he feels its truth.
"Stars and nebulas," Yularen says faintly to himself. And then: "Open the bays, get the 212th landing! Yes, now, officer! Connect me to—" and the connection is cut.
And then it's back to spinning and juking and dodging and surviving by the skin of his teeth and the flickering of the stars. Anakin is grinning like a madman, though he doesn't have the presence of mind to notice it. The Force purrs all around him like a contented cat, or a million-cylinder engine. It feels like moving faster than thought. He ducks playfully across Diesel's path to a loud "Hey!" over comms and shoots once—twice—thrice in the space of the universe's long, slow blink.
This is where Anakin excels: absolutely dominating a space with nothing else in it but the enemy. No husbanding scarce resources and brainstorming tricks and traps to eke out an advantage from preexisting features of the environment. In space, you don't have to deal with those things; the playing field is entirely yours to create. Anakin's gift lies in magicking up formations to counter other formations, choosing the least expected angle out of infinite possible angles, creating something out of absolutely nothing, or at least nothing but what he brought in. There's no up or down in space; directions are all relative to something, so there are no directions except the arbitrary ones they assign based on capital ship orientations. Absolutely no restrictions, from a certain perspective. It's chaos, constantly shifting faster than the mind can process, and rather than try to counter that, impose order onto it, he leans into the chaos by reacting to changes faster than the enemy.
On a few levels, there is order, of course. There's an overall strategy, dictating what zone of the battlefield he wants his men in and what zone he wants the enemy in. There's also the set of tactical formations they assume on a dime in order to penetrate and pummel and defend. But that type of order responds to and arises from the chaos of a space battle, without denying or negating it. That order emerges from freedom, rather than restricting it. It's not equilibrium, it's paradox, and it makes his blood hum with liquid epiphany, igniting the web of capillaries just beneath his skin.
/B/
Minutes or hours later—a bit less than two standard hours, his chronometer tells him—his comm beeps a formal transmission request. He nearly takes a hit reaching for the button, but recovers by using the Force to jerk the throttle; the force of it presses him back in his seat. "Skywalker here."
"Are you in combat? There's been a development," Obi-Wan's Core accent clips out tersely.
And Anakin's picked up another three-man tail. He curses quietly. "Hang on," he says, and pulls into a dive that lets him come up behind them and blast them to bits. There's something beautiful about the moment a fighter explodes, trapped oxygen releasing in a white cloud like sea spray. Anakin likes the sea. "Almost ready."
The Force abruptly screams a warning and Anakin hits the accelerator and pulls up on pure instinct, just in time to avoid being hit from behind by a suicide run. A moment later, his own blinding, firecracker death screams through him in the Force, a disorienting instant of post-cognition. He shakes his head to clear it, banks sharply right to dip around one last dogfight. And then he's soaring out of the thick of it and leaving the battle mostly behind him, making a beeline across open space until he's finally able to take refuge under Yularen's engines. Another light winks out in his wake: one of Heavy's friends. Cupid.
"Alright, make it quick," he snaps out. Instantly, he winces at his tone, feels dread pool in his stomach and smother some adrenaline, but for once, Obi-Wan says nothing. Nothing except:
"There's a Shadow on-planet."
"A Shadow?" That's the last thing Anakin expected. "Why didn't the Council tell us? And why are they here in the middle of nowhere?"
"I was surprised too. It's a knight and padawan; the knight says they were finishing up a classified operation on Rothana and sensed a Force-sensitive child in distress on their way back to Coruscant. Since they weren't privy to the intel that Grievous was in the area, they didn't have any reason to inform the Council."
"Are we sure…?"
"Her codes check out," Obi-Wan replies grimly. In the background, he hears the clanking of tanks and a choked-off scream. "And her information seems good."
"Information?"
"They hid in the mountains when Grievous showed up, and have had time to familiarize themselves with the topography and run surveillance from above. Apparently there's an artificial chemical lake from a failed terraforming project, if I can—well, that's not important. If the information is legitimate, I should be able to win the land battle within two standard hours."
Anakin whistles. "Kriff, there's no way we got this lucky. What's the catch?"
"I also have confirmed reports that Grievous is on-planet."
Hope swells like a bubble rising to the surface of a Mon Cal ocean. "But that's fantastic news! We can actually pin him down, without risk of civilian casualties. We can—or, shit, I guess we can't just bombard him if this Shadow is in range." He pauses, considers that. "You don't think…."
"It's certainly not his whole reason—we've destroyed three tankers full of that hyperdrive acid you noted as obsolete. But if he knows they're here, they may be secondary targets. The knight is a Shadow coming from Rothana; she certainly has information the Seps would value."
"And Grievous has a thing about padawans," Anakin finishes grimly. "Do they have transportation? Could they fly out of range of a full-strength bombardment by the time we could get in position to launch one?"
"They have a ship." Obi-Wan pauses. "Is the space battle going that well? Do you think we could push or lure their capital formation out of the way long enough for a planetary barrage?"
"Well, yeah, if we pushed." He chews his lip.
"That would mean heavy casualties, wouldn't it." Obi-Wan sounds accusing all of the sudden, and Anakin bristles.
"Yes, but it's Grievous!" Isn't Obi-Wan the one always pushing for considering the long term over the short term, strategy over getting too attached to individual lives? It would kill Anakin to lose men unnecessarily, but this is war, and he knows Rex and his brothers will be right behind him if it means Grievous dies bad.
But the thought quells the bubbling in his blood. The 501st, despite its famed aggression, has low casualty numbers for a reason; he and Rex aren't in the habit of throwing away lives if there's another good option. "Okay, you're on the verge of winning the ground battle, you said. These 'sprites are atmo-rated for short periods, what if we bring half of our pilots down to reinforce you? Prevent any ships from taking off while you hunt him down. What do you think are your chances of finding him before his capital ships get their breath back and start picking us off?"
Obi-Wan considers this good and long, his raspy breathing ever-so-slightly audible over the commlink. "I think we could do it," he finally answers, cool and professional. "And there may be a way to improve our chances."
/B/
Anakin and his pilots—all 501st men, 42 total—end up exchanging their Aethersprites for more atmo-friendly vessels before heading to the planet. They don't know how long they'll need to be down there, and they need to be fast and fuel-efficient in the face of air resistance because getting to the surface around Grievous' blockade means entering the atmosphere hundreds of klicks away from their actual target.
It's a tense 20 minutes getting to the planet, and an even tenser 35 or so flying over the endlessly rolling horizon before the battlefield is even in sight. The journey does provide an opportunity to surveil Arami's ecology (and shoot the shit over comms). It's a relatively diverse planet, more so than a lot of the small Outer Rim worlds that were subjected to terraforming and ecological seeding tens of thousands of years ago, in the murkiest ages of the galaxy's history. The vista that opens itself up to them is breathtakingly verdant in the bright sunlight of an afternoon. They fly over dense forests of green and yellow trees, broken by large expanses of meadowland clothed in a multitude of colors and a few large, barren patches of exposed grimy rock face. The only man-made structures to be seen are two enormous coral-red obelisks with rounded tips—a few miles tall, and no telling how deep they extend—that stick out at odd angles from the earth like paralyzed fingers, one a good fifteen miles to their left and another silhouetted against the horizon behind them. Ancient terraforming equipment, abandoned millennia ago by unknown actors. The area they're flying over is hilly, in the sense of many very small, steep hills on flat land rather than larger, rolling hills that might lead up to a mountain range. There is a mountain range in the distance, however, becoming more and more distinct from the horizon as they approach it. Obi-Wan's battlefield is supposedly a valley within a valley, carved out in odd, steep dips and pools by an ancient, long-dried acidic lake.
When that battlefield finally comes into view over a forested ridge, Anakin does a double take and momentarily questions whether he came to the wrong coordinates, because there is a lake. A good portion of the valley within the valley is flooded with what would look like normal dirty water if not for the warnings his dashboard starts beeping at him about airborne gas content as they fly over. Circling closer, he can make out the carnage—hundreds of inert droids sticking out of the muck in the shallow areas, looking forlorn and corroded. There are also a number of felled trees, and a handful of clone bodies. Anakin forces himself not to look away from what the chemicals are doing to them.
The new lake only really fills the bottom of the valley, a bit more than a mile in diameter. The wreckage of a cliff face on the far side of the valley is still spitting out a merry stream of water and spray, evidently the last dregs from some sort of underground reservoir. In the trees around its edges, he can see the 212th at a doll-like scale, busy with various tasks in their air-filtering helmets. A good 40 members of Torrent Company should be down there too, accompanying Ahsoka; Rex has never been one for space battles, or sitting around when there's action to be taken. There's no blue to be seen around the lake, though. Anakin casts out his awareness and feels Rex's steady glow near Ahsoka's brighter signature somewhere outside the rim of the valley, to the south, along with a number of other familiar signatures. So Torrent is shirking on cleanup. Typical. Many of the 212th clones stop to wave their arms and cheer when their 501st brothers pass overhead.
Anakin hesitates for a moment before keying in Obi-Wan's frequency. "We're passing over the battlefield now." He almost adds You really did a number on 'em, and then remembers himself and clears his throat. "Three minutes to the rendezvous. Any eyes on Grievous? I don't want to tip him off."
Obi-Wan's side of the comm crackles slightly, and when he speaks he sounds out of breath. "He's taken the bait. We managed to shoot him down on a plateau to the east, and since then two scouts have reported him making for the western mountains on a landspeeder. I'm in pursuit with a squadron, ETA 15. If you circle around low behind the rim of the next valley in this chain, on the northern side, you should be able to get there before him without his knowledge."
Anakin bites off a retort—Obi-Wan didn't have to tell him where to fly—and confirms understanding before relaying the orders back to his men. All but twelve of them break off to begin patrol patterns in the middle atmosphere, a task made easier by the fact that the flow of landers between Grievous' destroyers and the ground has dried up completely. The twelve bombers who remain in line behind him waggle their wings at their brothers once more before wheeling around to the north, ducking low behind a rising ridge, and then turning west.
This low, they can see more clearly the devastation wrought by the earlier bombing run, a mad splattering of violent impact craters and uprooted trees scarring the forest below. Scratch, the fourth pilot in line behind him, whistles tinnily into the shared comm channel, and his batchmate Pyrrhic snickers. Evidently, the battle started on the foothills outside the valley they just left, and shifted when Obi-Wan learned from the Shadow about the reservoir concealed in the nearby hill. The worst of the initial bombers' signature is probably hidden under the dark surface of the acid lake, back on the battlefield proper.
Taking advantage of the moment of respite, Anakin comms Yularen's second lieutenant. "Lieutenant Quellin, how are things looking up there?"
"Not great, sir," Quellin replies tinnily after a moment's hesitation. There's some weird interference on the connection; Anakin prays to the Force with all he's worth that the Seps haven't found a new way to cut their comms. Oh wait, no, that's just Quellin's breathing. He must be holding the comm way too close to his mouth. "We're holding out, but we're feeling the loss of numbers. Both primary swarms have collapsed; we're looking at a tight-knit dogfight over the nose, and it's freed up a lot more of their small craft to come hassle us. And their back two destroyers are beginning to move out of formation. We may have to reposition."
Anakin resists the urge to curse, since Quellin is a bit jumpy for a naval officer. "Got it. Tell Yularen we shouldn't be more than 30, barring unforeseen circumstances." The overwhelming likelihood of unforeseen circumstances doesn't really need explaining.
He can hear Quellin lick his lips over the comm, which is unpleasant. "Understood, sir. Over and out."
The engines purr as he pulls the joystick a few degrees further back. The land they're flying over keeps sloping upward and upward, until he registers that they're about midway up into the mountain range they saw on the horizon flying in. Soon, they should be coming into view of the rendezvous coordinates, as indicated by the glowing dots on his HUD.
It drops open suddenly before them: a large open meadow, extending a good thirty yards in every direction before hitting the sharp cliff face behind it. He's disoriented for a moment, before he puts together how its comparatively gentle slope renders it all but invisible when approached from below. It's beautiful, actually, a lush carpet of green grass starred with white and yellow wildflowers that nearly glow in the afternoon sun. The only interruption to its smooth satiny sweep is an abrupt little plateau—no, wait, it's the roof of a bunker of some kind, built right into the meadow with a cap of grass over it, made of that same coral-colored material as the defunct terraforming spires they flew past earlier. This must be the Shadow's listening post. A moment later, two small figures climb out of a hatch in the exposed sliver of red metal wall and turn to watch the bombers expectantly, hands clasped placidly over their dark robes. Anakin dips a wing in acknowledgment and pushes the joystick smoothly to the right, curving around to find a concealed landing spot on the northern edge of the meadow.
His ship's comm system beeps, and then an unfamiliar voice is filling the cockpit. "Knight Skywalker? This is Knight Kallist." Her voice is smooth and low in a way he wouldn't associate with females in most species; Bothan sex differentiation is a little different from the humanoid evolutionary standard. "Master Kenobi mentioned you just got to the surface, did he have time to brief you fully?"
Right to business, this one. "More or less, yes. Good to meet you, Knight Kallist. We'll be establishing our ambush screen immediately, since Obi-Wan thinks Grievous is only ten minutes behind us. He intercepted your signal, as planned."
"We look forward to meeting you both, after finishing this."
Oh right, "we." "Obi—Master Kenobi said you have kids with you?"
"Yes." A slight heaviness weighs down her serene Jedi tone. "My new padawan, Woto'e, is twelve-equivalent, and we've picked up a human youngling. Seven, we think. So I may not be able to help much in the fight to come."
Shit, the padawan is twelve? They just keep sending them out here younger. "Understood. Keep them in the lookout post, and we'll do our best to pin him down out here."
"If he does get in, it might not be so bad," she answers in a thoughtful tone, with perhaps a…hint of indecision? Interesting. He spots a clearing in the forest fringing the meadow, and he and his pilots shift into a vertical descent. "The architecture inside might serve well for an ambush site. But may the Force will it does not come to that."
"We can hope. Over and out." A moment after the call crackles to an end, he is rocked by the gentle jolt of a successful landing. He keys back into the pilots' shared frequency. "Alright, boys, you know the plan. Stealth screen, radio silence; we want him a good distance into the open and trapped against the cliff face before he has any idea we're here. You wait for my signal, and then, and only then, do we fill this chuff-sucking mudcrutch with holes."
"Yes, sir!" the men chorus, with varying degrees of suppressed enthusiasm. He cuts comms and pops the hatch on his fighter, swinging himself over the lip and onto the ground in one motion. He stumbles a little on the landing, right knee twinging unexpectedly. It's been bothering him on and off ever since he twisted it on that one moon near Florrum, and then had to keep running on it for a good four days without rest. They had lost a lot of good men in the initial ambush—bad intel, which he's starting to believe is the only kind of intel—and the medics were too busy hauling the injured across half the moon to make a proper brace, so he just tore a sleeve off one of his filthy tunics and hoped for the best. It seems that his best was not enough.
He hurriedly straightens as Wingspan and Scratch jog past him. Scratch offers a quick salute and a wide, feral grin that Anakin makes himself return, while shy, serious Wingspan just nods, looking focused. And then he's alone in the clearing, breathing deep to suppress the sudden queasiness in his stomach. He hopes he doesn't get either of them killed today. Anakin tests his weight on his right leg once more for good measure and then jogs out after them. His boots crunch in the leaf litter as he leaves the clearing and enters the sun-dappled forest. Around him, thick gray trunks soar up solidly, gracefully, standing silent and innocent of what is to come.
/B/
Anakin lays on his stomach in the dirt and breathes slowly. Between the spiky leaves of the bush in front of him, the meadow lays deserted. He can feel Knight Kallist's calm signature beneath the ground, dampening the nervous energy of two younglings that makes him slightly dizzy.
Twelve clones can't do much to ambush Grievous by themselves. They're here to hold him until Obi-Wan and his men can catch up, and if they can't kill him, then they'll all have to be ready to run, because Anakin's airborne patrols will converge on this location in under 30 seconds and turn the meadow into a burning wasteland. But it'll be better if they can take Grievous down the hard way—no uncertainties. And to stall for time so that they can take him down the hard way, Anakin has twelve good men with strong wills but breakable bones, a Shadow preoccupied with maintaining fake comm chatter and protecting the future of the Order, and—as a last resort—two children. Only one of them trained.
Out of the corner of his eye, about forty feet away, he can just see Wingspan's foot and the tip of his blaster, peeking out from behind the trunk of a thick tree. Anakin breathes out again, shifts so his left hip isn't pressed into a rock. The spiky leaves flutter.
The droning of a speeder enters the clearing.
Grievous bursts into the meadow and stops his speeder bike perfectly in the center of Anakin's field of vision. Lamentably, he looks a bit scorched but otherwise unharmed. He hops off to stand beside the speeder—a leather and metal GAR design, Anakin notes darkly—looking around with slow, predatory movements and bleeding malevolent confusion into the Force. He's wary of the open space, the sheer wall—he knows as well as they do that he is weak to flat open terrain on which his mobility offers little advantage, along with ranged fire that he doesn't have the Force aptitude to consistently deflect.
Grievous takes a step away from the speeder. Wingspan has gone perfectly still in Anakin's peripherals. It's now or never.
Anakin narrows his eyes and reaches forward in the Force, toward the fuel tank of the speeder. Hidden from sight, it begins to churn.
Two months ago, he would not have been confident in his ability to do this, but he's been experimenting. Heating things up comes naturally to him: He just reaches down into his chest, to where the heat of the twin suns is always smoldering, ready to ignite to a steady burn the moment he dwells too long on the war, or the clones, or the Council, or Obi-Wan's judgmental eyebrow, or the indolence of the Republic, or what happened to his mother.
Anakin grits his teeth, reaches out, and feels the phantom pressure of Watto's boot on his neck.
The fuel tank explodes with a bang. A huge fireball blooms in the clearing; smoking debris rains on the grass. The frame of the speeder groans and collapses as Grievous is thrown off his clawed feet.
Signal received, Anakin's men leap forward like anoobas loosed from their chains. They don't break cover, but come to the very edge of it, pelting Grievous with whirring blaster bolts from all directions. Grievous roars and stumbles, struggling to get to his feet under the barrage, struggling to draw a saber to deflect. Anakin gives him a Force shove to the legs just as he's about to regain his footing, sending him to the ground again. "Kenobi!" Grievous growls in a voice of pure rage, and Anakin has to stifle a laugh. No, not this time.
Wingspan jumps down from his tree branch and moves closer, aim steady. His men should be moving through the trees all over, firing intermittently, making it seem as if there are many more clones firing on Grievous than just twelve. Grievous' armor is tough, they're firing from a good distance away, and he's managed to draw a saber now, so much of it just bounces off or misses, but Anakin sees four canny shots spark off joints and faceplate and make Grievous flinch.
And then Grievous ducks abruptly to the side, rolls to his feet, and barrels like a steam engine towards the trees on the right side of the clearing, where Pyrrhic and Ballast are scrambling for better cover.
Not fucking today. Anakin shoves himself to his feet and sprints to intercept.
Grievous turns to meet him. Twin blue lightsabers ignite: Now Grievous is wielding one blue and one green. With his first strike, all his momentum and the Force behind him, he manages to shove Grievous off balance. Grievous parries sloppily, and has to drop and dodge to recover from it.
Then Grievous strikes back, and the tables turn. Force, he's strong. And wickedly fast—Anakin puts one foot wrong, has to duck to avoid getting his skull sliced in half. And then all of a sudden he's on the back foot and can't seem to recover his momentum. Parry! Parry! Dodge! Fall back! Parry! Fall back! Duck!—and he has just narrowly avoided death six times in the span of two seconds. His knee twinges. His breathing picks up as if he's been running laps for the last ten minutes. He tries to dart in under Grievous' guard and gets a sharp metal elbow to the kidney as Grievous twists unnaturally and leaps over him. Grits his teeth against a cry as he whirls and forces himself back into form.
Parry! Parry! Parry! Dodge! It feels like fighting off an army, lightsabers on every side at once. And he's getting exceedingly frustrated with just defending. He tries a Force push, to make some breathing room; Grievous braces and doesn't budge. Anakin growls, ducks, swipes for the head, tries again; this time, Grievous slides back a few paces, ripping furrows in the grass beneath one foot and one hand. Anakin closes: Parry, twist, swipe for the waist. He can smell Grievous' fetid breath as he growls out some grandstanding Anakin's too in the zone to hear. He comes so close to severing Grievous' chassis from his hips—and then he nearly loses an arm and he's on the back foot again, defending, defending.
He's panting in earnest now. Grievous doesn't even look winded. He grits his teeth, pushes himself deeper into the ocean of precognition. Just when he's thinking he needs to risk some more Ataru acrobatics to end this horizontal stalemate, Grievous unexpectedly vaults over him. He deflects two rapid downward slashes as he whirls to keep him in sight, and then all of the sudden Grievous is on the other side. The cyborg does an odd half-twist to the left and then he's stabbing low at Anakin's left side and slashing high at his right shoulder simultaneously with his two left arms, counting on Anakin missing the high blade while he is momentarily blinded by the noontime sun.
Only Anakin isn't blinded by the sun.
He's wearing sunglasses.
And in the split second before Grievous can recover his balance, Anakin deflects the lower saber downwards, ducks inward out of the way of the shoulder slash, shoves his opponent further off balance with his left shoulder, and switches his grip in the air between them (thanks, Snips) in order to stab straight down into Grievous' extended left leg. A twitch severs it cleanly at the knee.
Grievous recoils with a mechanical roar of rage, falling into an unnatural backwards crabwalk that drops him beneath Anakin's follow-up swipe to the head. Then he's surging away spider-style too quickly to follow, narrowing clouded yellow eyes at his opponent from a safer distance, and Anakin is left coiled tense and panting in his ready position, a little stunned that he actually got a hit in. Somewhere in the treeline, a clone—Scratch or Pyrrhic—gives a little shout of disbelieving encouragement.
The moment of triumph is short-lived. Because Grievous surges forward again on all fours—fives?—and the movement is so unnatural that he can barely follow it. He snaps his saber up on pure precognition, and grunts when the force of the blow rattles him down to his heels. Grievous growls, blowing stale air in his face. Another saber—left. Right? His hips—Anakin missteps, trying to predict the movement. A blue saber whirrs past his head. His own narrowly avoided decapitation flows through him in the Force. Grievous strikes again and again, and then palm-strikes him in the diaphragm while he's still struggling to track the lightsabers. He flies backward and rolls over twice, all the breath knocked out of him. Makes it to his knees just in time to roll again, avoid ending up in chunks. He wheezes, sees spots. Parries, staggers back. Parry. Back. Manages to knock the blue saber out of Grievous' grip, but he's already drawn another with his other right hand. But now Grievous is slowing, marginally. He could win this, maybe, if he could just catch his breath—
He's sunk so deep in the roiling ocean that he barely hears the shout. "The General!"
Thank the Force and the Rain-Bringer himself, their reinforcements have arrived.
He risks a glance as the battle pivots so that he's facing them, glimpses helmets cresting the ridge, many blue-striped—huh?—clones and a ginger on speeders, and then he glimpses the blue tips of montrals over Obi-Wan's shoulders and fuck, Obi-Wan brought Ahsoka with him?! Why couldn't he leave her to command the cleanup in his absence? He almost lost Ahsoka to Grievous once, he won't—he won't—
But there is no time to lose his head (heh), because Grievous nearly severs his remaining hand and then a full squadron is raising their blasters behind him and Anakin sprints away from Grievous and throws himself into a roll. "Open fire!" Obi-Wan shouts.
It's as if the very air explodes.
Red bolts whizz and crackle and fill the air with heat as all 40 of the Torrent members who accompanied Ahsoka, along with a scattering of 212th CTs and his own twelve pilots, lay down a blanket of fire. Grievous gets hit—once, twice. Most of the bolts bounce off his sabers or armor, but they cause him to stumble back, losing his predatory grace. And then, on a dime, the cyborg about-faces and spider-crawls obscenely fast toward the exposed side of the bunker, one of his right arms dangling uselessly as the joint sparks.
The mixed squadron sprints after him, though Obi-Wan hangs back—injured, Anakin registers with a twinge in his gut. Ahsoka jogs past on the left as Anakin levers himself to his feet, followed closely by Rex, Fives, and Oz; their familiar signatures warm the Force. "Come on, Master!" He shakes his head clear—maybe he should take a stim—and runs to catch up.
He and Ahsoka draw ahead of the clones with Force-assisted speed, and Grievous is twenty yards ahead of them, then fifteen—but he's reached the side of the bunker and cuts his way in with two lightsabers, disappears into the hole. Anakin's heart rate spikes in time with that of the two barely-shielded younglings inside. Ahsoka stumbles with it. "There's kids in there?!"
"Yep," he answers, and of one mind, they throw themselves into the hole.
/B/
They immediately have to arrest their forward momentum, nearly tripping over heaps of black cables. The second thing they notice is: Where the hell is Grievous? The inside of the bunker is dark, lit only by the light coming in through this hole and a few oddly soft-hued bulbs tracking out a winding path on the ceiling. He has to squint more than he should. Damn sunglasses. The space is low-ceilinged and mostly open, a huge rectangular room maybe forty yards by fifty, with big pieces of rusty machinery in mounds forming half-walls that divide the space without much rhyme or reason. It would be more open if it weren't absolutely stuffed with thick cables of indeterminate purpose. The walls are obscured by bundles of crisscrossing cables extending diagonally from the ceiling down through holes in the floor, the ceiling itself is adorned with black cables dangling in loopy arcs like streamers, and there are cables dropping straight down from the ceiling through open space and snaking along the ground in all directions. These hanging cables significantly obscure their vision. Rex swings a leg over the rim of the hole behind them, and Anakin signals him to wait, scanning suspiciously. This is not the ideal environment to fight Grievous in.
There's a breath at Anakin's right, and he jolts and almost takes Knight Kallist's head off where she has managed to appear next to him. Damn Shadows. Up close, she's a Bothan with rusty brown fur and a boxy, blunt snout, dressed in dark brown robes belted at the waist and a raised hood. She points to a large piece of machinery toward the middle of the room, a good thirty yards away, and then indicates the faint outline of an Aethersprite-sized circle in the ceiling. "He's trying to open the hatch," she breathes.
"The children?" Ahsoka whispers past him.
Hidden, she hand-signs, tilting her head toward the right side of the room.
"Ahsoka," Anakin whispers, and motions her back to the hole as calmly as he can manage. She pretends she doesn't understand him. Sithspit. Dread pools in his lungs, but there's no time.
Turning back to Rex, he whispers a quick order to advance cautiously, certain it will be quickly relayed to the rest through helmet comms. Then they split up, Ahsoka advancing along the left wall, Kallist fading away to his right, and Anakin advancing up the middle. A stream of clones begins to flow through the hole behind them, advancing into the space with blasters raised.
The bunker ripples with the sounds of subtle movement: The tap-rustle of plasteel armor, the light thud-scrape of boots on metal, a tenor humming from the walls. Metallic claws tap-tap at the edge of Anakin's hearing. He can feel Grievous' awareness of them, his awareness of their awareness of him, as they close in slowly on his hiding spot. They're about two thirds of the way to their objective—or he is, he's lost track of Kallist—when he feels a stab of cruel victory from Grievous' signature. With a clunk and a grinding, mechanical roar, a shaft of sunlight blazes down into the twilight of the bunker as the circular hatch in the ceiling above Grievous begins to open outward.
His heart seizes, and a few clones gasp behind him—they're going to lose him! Anakin scrambles up onto the nearest piece of machinery—maybe if he leaps from obstacle and obstacle, he can get there faster than trying to pick his way through the cables on the ground. This gives him a perfect, increasingly well-lit view as Grievous straightens up from behind his cover—and a tiny red Zabrak in brown robes bursts out of a maintenance hatch in the machinery eight yards away, dashing at Grievous' looming bulk with a lightsaber drawn and horrid determination on his face. Visible in the cupboard he has left behind is an even tinier human, dark-complexioned, their terrified little face covered in tears and snot.
"Woto-e, no!" Kallist screams, voice cracking at the center, forced to give away her ambush position behind Grievous. The Zabrak padawan startles and stumbles in his attempt to break his momentum, just as Grievous swings. The ensuing fall saves his life. And then he is backpedaling away from the looming cyborg as Kallist vaults an engine block to throw herself between them and Anakin sprints over tripping hazards with Force-aided dexterity to join them.
Knight Kallist catches both of Grievous' lightsabers on her own, her blade dipping with the force of it. One of them goes for her side, and she has to twist to deflect it. In that moment, Grievous unexpectedly darts past her for the Zabrak padawan still on the ground—
And jerks to a halt, awkwardly, slashing wildly at nothing. It takes a moment to identify the cause: Ahsoka snuck up behind him. She's managed to get a loose cable hooked around his lower right wrist with the Force.
Quick as a striking nexu, he turns on her, and Anakin's heart jolts again—but Oz, one of Torrent's oldest, darts forward around Kallist to grab his empty left hand by the wrist, slip a noose of cable around it, and book it the other direction as fast as he can.
Grievous screeches, pulled in two directions, and tugs mightily at the cables. Ahsoka and Oz strain, begin to slide towards him, but then Kallist has grabbed onto the cable behind Oz, then another clone, and two clones grab on behind Ahsoka, and the cables pull outward again.
Anakin shakes himself into action, running with the surge of clones all around him into the now-sunlit center of the room. With the Force, he tugs on a cable dangling free from the ceiling, floats it over to just the right position to tangle around Grievous' neck as he struggles. Denal catches on, grabs the other end of the cable and pulls backward. Grievous regains the presence of mind to bring down his right saber to slice through Ahsoka's cable around his lower right wrist, but then Kallist ducks out of her own tug-of-war team to knock his left saber out of his upper hand, and two of the 212th guys snag that with another cable Anakin pulled down from the ceiling. It's bedlam, deafening: the room is full of clones and jedi shouting over each other and over the mechanical grinding. A lone clone gets a floor cable around Grievous' remaining, thrashing foot, and Anakin leaps to reinforce him; together, they give it a firm tug that pulls the writhing cyborg off his feet and jolts the whole straining, heaving network of cables around them. Anakin has to duck as a bunch of the guys start running around the whole scene with cables stretched between them, sparking with disbelieving glee in the Force. They manage to tangle Grievous' torso and hips, nearly catching a number of their own brothers in the process. The cables are stacking up faster than Grievous can cut them!
Anakin feels a few more guys grab hold of the leg cable behind him, so he drops it to lunge for Grievous' last saber, but Ahsoka beats him to it, leaping up and kicking off Grievous' frantically twisting chest to knock his blade out of his hand and jerk the hand down with her behind his back, practically dislocating the mechanical joint. Grievous screeches again, but this time it sounds less like anger and more like pain. Or fear. His writhing against his bonds is getting weaker and weaker as he scrabbles for traction with his one foot.
Then one of the guys holding his upper left arm gets the bright idea to climb atop of the convenient defunct machinery around them, and soon Grievous' heaving ceases entirely as he is hoisted into the air, helplessly pinioned in his own personal spiderweb. Just in time, as the loud mechanical grinding noise finally stops. The whole frantically moving scene stills and goes silent, leaving Grievous suspended uselessly in the middle of a perfect circle of bright afternoon sunlight from the open hatch, his tethers stretching out in all directions into shadow.
/B/
For a moment, no one is sure what to do.
The thirty or so clones not actively holding cables spread out throughout the vicinity, blasters trained on the immobilized cyborg. They bleed deadly purpose into the Force. Knight Kallist is looking at Anakin, he notices with a start; she must be more recently knighted at him, if only by a few months. When it becomes clear that he will not take the lead on what must come next, she drops her cable and walks over to stand in the circle of light before Grievous. Her hood has fallen back to expose sharp, twitching ears, all her attention trained on the abomination before her. "General Grievous. You are under arrest for crimes against sentient life and sedition against the Republic. Surrender, and we will show you mercy."
Grievous stares down at her for a moment with wide yellow eyes. It's unusual to be able to see him so clearly, thrown into high contrast. Abruptly, he wheezes with what Anakin struggles to recognize as laughter, the liver-spotted skin around his eyes crumpling in his mirth. "Mercy?" he ponders in his staticky voice, drawing out the word like a delectable piece of steak. "You think to offer me mercy?"
"You will be dealt with on Coruscant in accordance with Republic law," Knight Kallist responds with admirable calm, a stable brown pillar in the pitiless light.
Grievous shakes silently with the last dregs of his laughter. The gut-churning mixture of amusement and hate in the Force makes Anakin wrinkle his nose. "And what do you think will happen if you take me there?"
"You will be given a fair trial and receive a just sentence. If you offer information, you may escape execution."
Grievous considers for a moment, then shakes his great, masked head, slowly and deliberately. "My master will free me. He has not failed me yet." A sly smile crawls through his vowels, becoming more audible through the static of the vocoder. "And then—he will give me an army. A better army, and set me at their head. Pry the doors to your Temple open, and let me in. And then I will descend deep into the bowels of your Temple until I find the warm dark cubbies where you keep your young."
"Shut up," Anakin growls suddenly from the shadows in front of the display, an odd feeling overtaking him. His stomach turns over, ice locks his joints, and there is an odd trembling in his hands.
Grievous' lamplight yellow eyes bore into his. "I will draw the weapons I took from their older siblings. I will block the doors and break the locks, so they cannot run. At least at first, it probably will not occur to them to run."
"Shut up." Anakin hears himself say, louder, through clenched teeth. His whole body is shaking. His voice rings oddly in his ears.
"And then…?" Grievous says softly, almost sweetly, only for him. "...I will slice them open like ripe fruits, one by one. I will spill them, like bursting fruits, in your Temple's sacred dark places." In the Force, he smiles.
Anakin sees red; his vision blurs. Almost without conscious thought, he reaches out with both hands and pulls. An invisible force torques the plasteel, then slowly, with an aching screech, pries open a narrow gap in Grievous' armored chassis, exposing hints of something squirming in darkness. Some small part clatters out and onto the floor, and Anakin hears the little youngling make a vomiting noise behind him.
Grievous lets out a mechanical roar and writhes. Blaster shots from the squad behind Anakin bounce off his armor but just miss the gap, as the cables restraining his arms and leg strain. A cable snaps, then another, and then with a yelp the two clones holding his lower right arm are pulled off their feet and dragged forward.
Ahsoka darts forward to help them.
A cable snaps.
The rage is instantly replaced by an ice-cold shock of fear.
Grievous' huge, neck-breaking hand darts out, like a striking snake, toward Ahsoka's vulnerable head, and his body's not going to get there in time. He's not going to get there in time. Between milliseconds, Anakin throws himself forward in the Force.
Time stops. For a single endless instant, he is narrowed to a point, to a line; he is nothing but pure intent; he is a crackling channel of adrenaline and terror.
/B/
Anakin snaps back to himself as Grievous makes a garbled noise and slumps to the cheerfully lit ground, smoking. The last flickers of electricity crackle over the corpse. What was inside the chassis is thoroughly cooked. In the absence of normal reasoning, Anakin's mind produces a first, involuntary thought: At least it doesn't really smell this time.
The room is silent.
He looks up. Around him, familiar sets of armor are frozen in their ready positions, helmets turned toward him, fear in the air. No, wait—they're not looking at him. He turns around, following Ahsoka's horrified gaze. Barely four yards away at his 4:00, two wide-eyed younglings and one Jedi Knight are standing in a little huddle, staring at him.
Oh, shit. Oh shit, oh shit, think fast, think fast—!
"Ouch!" Anakin exclaims loudly to the room at large. "That hurt! I really shouldn't have, um"—quick scan of his surroundings—"stepped on those live electrical cables! Good thing my metal arm conducts electricity so well, or I'd be toast!" He holds the arm up for emphasis, smiling winningly.
A pause. The little youngling, wide eyes blinking up at Anakin, speaks despite the padawan's aborted attempts to shush them. "But wasn't it the other arm, Master?"
Anakin's smile twitches. "Was it? I'm pretty sure it was this one! Although it's hard to remember because it did hurt so bad, you know?"
There's another awkward silence, broken when Ahsoka leaves off silently gaping and rushes to his side. "Oh, no, Master, are you hurt?" she enthuses very convincingly. "I saw you get electrocuted! By that live wire! You really need to be more careful, this happens so often already!" She stands on her tiptoes to rest her elbow on Anakin's shoulder—it's still a few inches too high, even when he leans down to compensate—and joins him in smiling guilelessly at their audience. Or possibly threateningly, given the two older Jedi's increasingly intimidated expressions.
"Haha, yeah, me and electricity, you know, not a great combo! But hey, Grievous is dead. Uh. Yay?"
Fives takes that as his cue to snap out of it next and turns to the bulk of their men, still kneeling next to a dropped cable with his blaster out. "Oh yeah! Hey everybody, Grievous is dead!"
Still no response. From behind him, Rex snaps out two crisp signals with his hands.
"YEAHHHHHH!" As one, the clones break into raucous, unanimous celebration. There's whistling, loud cheering, clones running everywhere, tripping over cables, men are chest-bumping in full armor and clapping each other on the back, it's chaos as all of the exuberance of winning a battle against one of the Republic's worst enemies hits them at once, and it's only a little bit forced.
Anakin's wrist comm beeps, too quiet in all the ruckus. Luckily, he notices the blinking light and quickly walks to the threshold of the bunker to answer it, shouting over the sounds of celebration. "Admiral?"
"Generals! The droids' defense just completely fell apart, I think we've managed to take out three of their main destroyers! What happened down there, did you succeed in killing Grievous?"
Anakin feels a real smile begin to tug at the corner of his mouth. "We did indeed, Admiral."
"Excellent." Yularen is struggling to be professional, but there's a childlike brightness in his tiny blue face that Anakin has never seen before. The admiral clears his throat: "Ahem. We may not need your men up here after all. There's…not that much to do, really—they haven't fired on us in four minutes now, and their small craft appear to be almost wiped out. It's…a fairly unambiguous victory, generals."
Anakin nods acknowledgement, and then a staggering clone jostles him from behind, and he accidentally snaps the comm closed, ending the call. But it's okay, Obi-Wan can handle the rest of the details. A kind of disbelieving joy bubbles up to the top of Anakin's skull, and he starts grinning for real. Then suddenly Ahsoka tackles Anakin around the shoulders from the side, whooping like a madwoman, and he almost falls, swinging her around to bleed off energy. He adds in one more spin just for fun. She's laughing, and it's infectious, and all of a sudden it's not about distraction anymore because holy kriff, holy kriff, they've been fighting Grievous for two years now.
He's so excited to tell Padme! He wants to be the first, if at all possible—wants to see that huge smile she gets when something big and genuinely good happens in the galaxy. Grievous was a key player out of only a few actual key players on the Separatist side. His death? It means hope. More hope than they've felt in a long time.
(In the chaos, the small recorder droid that was previously hidden in Grievous' chassis scuttles inconspicuously away, in search of a Republic lander with a hijack-able long-range signal.)
/B/
Outside, Obi-Wan stands in the blaster-scorched, sunlit meadow with the remainder of the 212th squadron who came with him. He's clutching his side and surrounded by a good thirty dead battle droids. Ah, so that's why he didn't come in to help. Watching their backs, as always.
Anakin jogs up, leaving Ahsoka being carried around on the shoulders of several clones in giddily unprofessional celebration. Anakin is so ecstatic that he doesn't even feel angry at the sight of his old master standing there, shouting orders so confidently, like the perfect Jedi he is. In the moment, it doesn't feel so important. When are he and Obi-Wan not mad at each other, in some way? But in the end, this man is his—closest friend. (And Obi-Wan didn't see what he did in there. He doesn't know. He doesn't need to.)
"You hear Yularen, Obi-Wan? The Seps are down to one fucking competent general!" And overwhelming numbers, but that's beside the point. "This time next month, you could be sipping Correllian brandy in your pajamas on Coruscant. I'll even make you that tea you like—the Ryloth blend? That we can't import anymore?" Feeling warm all over and a little dizzy, he goes to throw an arm around Obi-Wan's shoulders. "Whaddya say to that, Master?"
Obi-Wan moves away, wards him off with a strained smile. Okay, maybe Obi-Wan can still put a damper on his happiness. "I heard. It would have been better to apprehend Grievous, but given his propensity for escape, maybe this is the best option."
"You know it was the best damn option," Anakin responds, trying to maintain a joking tone. It comes out too flat. "And he wasn't exactly unarmed. Totally up to Code."
"Hmm." Obi-Wan isn't meeting his eyes. And then, after a pause: "It still bothers me that we don't know what the acid was for."
Anakin startles. In the wake of killing Grievous, he had completely forgotten about all of the remaining unknowns from this operation. An uneasy feeling starts to creep in around the edges of the lingering excitement. "Oh, right, it's for the two round-nosed ships. I got close enough to see during the fighting: The modifications are built onto really antique ship models, maybe 150 or 200 years old. Their hyperdrives would be compatible with Man'Telani acid."
Obi-Wan nods thoughtfully. Then: "What happens when a ship tries to leave its hyperlane, but stay in hyperspace?"
Anakin frowns, struggling to switch gears. To think engineering instead of war, to think around the wave of hope that buoyed him out of the bunker. "Well, the software isn't really set up to handle that kind of transition, and if you accidentally drop into realspace at the wrong moment, there's a pretty significant risk of getting spaghettified. You can end up in a million tiny parts hurtling at high speed in completely different parts of the universe, which is…not good. If you do successfully get out of the lane, eventually—usually within seconds—you hit the mass shadow of some realspace object and it rips you out of hyperspace, kills you instantly. Same thing that happens when you try to skip the lanes, you know about that. If you have really, really good computers, you might avoid that for awhile, but every course adjustment you make is going to slow you down, eventually drop you back into realspace automatically."
"What if you were going in more or less a straight line, continuing along the trajectory of the lane?"
Anakin considers. "You'd still have to make some course corrections to avoid things, but yeah, sure, it'd be a lot less? And there's less out here on the Rim to avoid, too."
Obi-Wan chews his lip. "Say you do have a really good computer. Best we can currently make, no expense spared, and you're out here on the Rim. How far do you think you make it before you drop back into realspace?"
"Uhh, 1400, 1500 parsecs? Maybe?"
"Hmm." Obi-Wan has progressed to the beard-stroking stage, which is never a good sign. "And theoretically, what would happen if a very well-reinforced ship exited hyperspace without decreasing its speed? If it wasn't instantly, ah, spaghettified?"
"Well, it wouldn't be torn apart across dimensions, but it would still be torn apart in the regular sense. Physically."
"Sure, but how much momentum could it maintain?"
Anakin is beginning to see the trajectory of these questions, and his gut very much does not like it. "Well—I mean, dimensional physics isn't really my thing, but given our own experiences getting pulled out of hyperspace, I want to say a lot."
"And if it were aimed at something." It's not a question.
"...It would be torn apart, but not before hitting the obstacle. I would…have to do some math—"
"Anakin."
"—but I'd say planet-level threat."
They look at each other with wide eyes for an instant. And then Obi-Wan is whipping out his wrist comm, entering the frequency with frantic speed as they both break into a sprint towards Anakin's thirteen parked bombers. "Admiral! Admiral, you have to destroy the two blunt-nosed ships! Ram them if you have to! They're going to launch a suicide run on Rothana!"
/B/
The Second Mantra of the Aurelian Reform Sith Code, c. 21 BBY
(translated from the Huttese)
From emotion, ambiguity.
From ignorance, growth.
From passion, autonomy.
From chaos, multiplicity.
From death, possibility.¹
2. The Force arises ceaselessly from the Force.²
Editor's notes:
There is some debate among scholars regarding this line, as the Low Huttese word dukkra could, in this era, be translated as either "death" or "freedom." Given the Aurelian Sith attitude toward ambiguity, this scholar finds the intention fairly obvious.
Additional lightpen annotations have been recovered from a copy of what is believed to be the original file. I have reproduced them below for the reader's convenience; a reproduction of the original document can be found in Appendix F.
[in neat but plain handwriting] This is plagiarism, Barriss
[in a dignified cursive] (a) The Jedi Code is not copyrighted. (b) We are Sith.
[in original hand] Fair point
[authorship subject to debate, but most handwriting experts agree that it matches a third, different hand found in other annotations] hehe :)