Fallout

Chapter 2

A deep healing trance was a tricky thing. Not exactly unpleasant; that would be a misnomer - but certainly involving a disquieting sensation of vulnerability in its aftermath. One felt disconnected, almost adrift.

Obi Wan had never got used to it, though you would think he'd had more than enough practice in the course of his career. He concentrated on waking up, pushing past the idle, lethargic heaviness toward full awareness, out of the soft netherworld into harsh sensation – but something kept pulling him back.

Come here, Padawan. You need to see this.

Not that there was a voice – not precisely. That would be an exaggeration. But certainly there was a concrete sense of intention, of command. It was unexpected, almost confusing. He tried to throw up a mental wall, but found that this persistent sense of command was woven of the same Light as his defenses, and passed through them as sunlight filters through glass.

Stop fighting. There is something you must see.

The Force flowed warm and golden around him, and there was no sense of threat – much the opposite. Yet reluctance tinged his response. This was something foreign and yet undiscovered, and on the whole, the tranquil lassitude that had preceded it was preferable. He was immensely tired, still. He withdrew, edging toward wakefulness again, unsure what to make of this odd experience. He could have sworn he heard the Force sigh in exasperation - which was completely absurd -and he hesitated fractionally.

Two names impressed themselves upon him with stunning clarity, as though inscribed in burning light. Rhellis Massa. Sen Sen Xerxes. And then he was released, with a subtle caress of light, and left to float slowly back into consciousness.

For a while he just blinked and breathed, and sorted out the abrupt shift of scenery, slotting fragments of memory back into a temporal sequence. Ah, yes. Kaion. Mud, rain, sky-shaking explosions, blaster bolts, clones shouting screaming dying running, and the tactical base. Oh. The tactical base. Yes, that hurt. Anakin had showed up at some point, distressed and not in control of his emotions. Then there had been the cruiser and the clone medics. And then…. well, here he was. This was the Temple's healing ward, so it was a fair guess that he was currently a prisoner at the healers' mercies.

He shifted a bit and sought the places where super-heated metal shards had punctured his flesh. He seemed to be more or less intact, though hellishly sore and wrapped up in bandages in quite a few places. That was good. It implied that the bacta part of this dreary routine had already been completed. He might be able to effect his escape sooner than anticipated. It was a cheering thought.

Force-flicking the pile of blankets off, he levered himself upright and slid his feet to the cold floor. Three cleansing breaths to shake off the remnants of vertigo and weakness. Maybe four or five. Better. Had Anakin already made the Council report? Most likely. Hopefully he had refrained from undue boasting, and not presented the tactical base exploit in a melodramatic fashion. Where had the blasted healers stowed his clothing, and more importantly, his lightsaber? Hm. The jailers were getting cleverer with passing time.

Speaking of which, two absurdly young apprentice healers poked their heads through the doorway and squeaked in indignation.

"Master Kenobi!" the bolder of the two accosted him. "Master Li says you should not be up yet!"

He skewered the youngling with his gaze. "As you can, see, he is mistaken. I should like a word with him, however, Padawan."

They scampered away to fetch the senior healer, too intimidated even to cross the threshold.

Ben To Li played multiple roles in the Halls of Healing. He was warden, chief inquisitor, captain of security, and executioner all at once. It was a heavy burden of responsibility; surely it weighed cruelly upon his aging shoulders.

The senior healer cocked one bushy eyebrow at him as he entered. "Your thoughts betray you," he chided, waving the door closed behind him. He was not intimidated in the least.

Obi Wan crossed his arms over his chest. "I'm here to negotiate the terms of my release."

Ben To snorted. "You are here until I say you can go. No parole, no plea bargaining, no hostage exchange and none of your krayt-oil-salesman diplomacy. On the Council's explicit authority. Now lie back down or I'll have you confined in solitary."

Master Li was not the nurturing type. Obi Wan released a long-suffering sigh and decided to cooperate, for the time being. He could be patient. He had extricated himself from worse situations. A show of docility now might lull the crafty healer into a false sense of security.

"You're not fooling me," Ben To quipped, checking the biomonitor and making entries into the datachart. "Though I suppose this is a very positive sign of improvement. Now: Master Skywalker has been pestering me for hours to let him see you. Shall I let him know you are entertaining visitors?"

Anakin. "Yes, master, I would be most grateful. Thank you."

The healer favored him with a suspicious glare, but said nothing. He merely nodded once and left, presumably to contact Anakin.

Obi Wan settled back against the pillows and mused upon the strange Force…vision? No. It hadn't been a vision. It had been more like an…encounter. A communication. It was the strangest thing he had ever felt in a meditative state. Perhaps it hadn't been from the Force at all, and was merely an injury induced hallucination. But this possibility, though marginally attractive, did not have the ring of truth to it. Deep down, in the realm of instinctual knowledge, he knew that the bizarre experience had been quite objective and real. It had been saturated in Light. And yet he still couldn't dispel an uneasy feeling about it. He turned the memory of it over and over in his mind, brooding upon its possible meanings until Anakin finally arrived to distract him.

"So," Anakin gloated, Force-pulling a chair over to the bedside and straddling it, "You don't have to thank me profusely for saving your neck."

Obi Wan thought about it. "No," he agreed. "I don't. I think the debt still stands at forty-three or so in my favor."

"Forty-two," Anakin mumbled. "That business on the Conquistador when I was sixteen doesn't really count."

The older man raised an eyebrow. "Yes, I would rather like to forget about that incident, too, Anakin. But you must accept that all our tribulations are the will of the Force, and meant to teach a lesson."

"Really." The chair rocked back, balancing precariously on the edge of its torus- shaped base. "And what lesson did the famous Master Kenobi learn from this last engagement?"

Obi Wan dismissed this with a wave.. "Check your explosives' timing devices before setting them. Of course, I would have, had not my hands been lamentably full of battle droids."

"So what really happened out there, master?"

At this point, an apprentice healer stuck his head through the doorway, squinting balefully at the patient, who graced him with a beatific smile of innocence and held up his hands in a gesture of peace. "You can report that the prisoner is still secure and there has been no sign of an escape attempt," he said.

The Padawan's mouth thinned, but he nodded curtly and withdrew.

"You're plotting your escape right now," Anakin snorted.

"Of course I am, but he doesn't need to know that. What were we talking about?"

"You getting blown to bits on Kaion."

"Oh…yes. Well, we managed to infiltrate their forward defenses and the automatic security without any real difficulty. But when we reached the power generator there was a bit of a …ah… complication."

"Ambush."

Obi Wan shrugged. "So naturally I sent the clones on ahead to get the job done while I stayed and chatted with Dooku's battle droids. It wasn't a very intelligent ambush, really – one hallway, low ceiling, limited mobility." He paused, frowning. "I would have planned the attack in the actual core chamber – much more strategic possibility."

"Maybe. But you got hit."

Now Master Obi Wan looked outraged.. "I can accomplish basic tasks without your assistance," he griped. "Of course I didn't get hit. There were only forty or fifty of them, for star's sake. It did slow down the retreat a bit – we had to climb back over the mess. But we made it almost to the perimeter before the detonator signaled a malfunction."

Anakin rolled his eyes. "So instead of taking cover like a sane person, you use the Force to throw all your men out of harm's reach and then what? Try to block the debris from hitting them?"

There might have been some color rising into Obi Wan's cheeks, but it was hard to tell in the muted lighting. "It seemed like a good idea at the time," he admitted. "They would have been seriously injured."

"Huh. I seem to remember enduring a lot of lectures about overestimating my own abilities and the dangers of hubris blah blah blah."

Obi Wan's eyes narrowed, dangerously. "I don't think you quite do justice to my eloquence, Anakin."

"Forgive me, my master." The chair's base snapped back down to the floor. Anakin leaned forward. "You could easily have been killed. You were half-dead when I found you," he accused.

"This is a war, my young friend. In case you haven't noticed. And we must do our duty, no matter the cost."

"Some people would say that a commanding officer's job is to minimize casualties and make pragmatic decisions, not absurdly self-endangering heroic gestures."

"We are Jedi, Anakin. Not some people."

"Okay, okay." He could see that this wasn't the time to push his point. A full frontal assault never worked on Obi Wan anyway, either in the dojo or an argument. You had to be sneaky, take him off guard. Which wasn't easy to do, either. But Anakin had more than a decade of practice.

They were silent for a moment. Obi Wan kept a stern eye fixed on his younger counterpart, as though he suspected something. He probably could feel it in the Force. Anakin just returned the gaze steadily, not flinching. One thing his master had taught him was: never give up. And he might be a slow learner, but he was a good learner too. He decided to dial it back a bit, take another diplomatic tack.

"Look, master, I've been working on something. I'd like your opinion on it, once you're out of here."

The Jedi master squinted at him dubiously. "You want my opinion on your latest engineering atrocity?"

Testy, testy…a half-starved akk vetch didn't bite as much as Obi Wan on the mend. Which, in Anakin's mind, was another point in favor of preventive measures. "Not exactly…I mean, it's not a machine. I'd like your opinion…just promise me you'll keep an open mind."

"Why do I have a bad feeling about this?"

Anakin pressed a hand to his heart. "That cuts to the quick, master. I'm wounded."

"Oh, I'm sure." Obi Wan scoffed. "Very well: I shall honor your request, in exchange for your valuable services in another regard."

Uh oh. Maybe he shouldn't have tried negotiating with the Negotiator. Anakin knew that smug expression all too well. "What ?"

Obi Wan snapped back into his authoritative masterly mode, as though no time had passed, as though his former Padawan had never been Knighted. "Go to the Archives," he ordered. "You are familiar with them in theory if not in practice, I am sure. They have a thing there called a database – which is a machine designed to organize information rather than to be recklessly piloted and crashed."

"You know you're an obnoxious convalescent, right? No wonder the healers always want to sedate you."

"That has no relevance to my point, Anakin. You must be more mindful. Your task is to find every scrap of information you can about a Jedi named Sen-Sen Xerxes, or a planet called Rhellis Massa."

The young Jedi stood. "All right," he agreed, holding up a warning finger. "But I'm holding you to your end of the bargain." He paused. "And where did those two names come from?"

"Perhaps they were revealed to me in a Force vision."

Anakin could usually tell where the jest ended and the truth began, but there were occasions when his former master still utterly confounded him. "I'm not sure I believe you."

"Now who's not open minded?"

On his way out, Anakin brushed shoulders with the same healer who had made an appearance earlier. "May the Force be with you," he muttered to the next unfortunate victim of Obi Wan's edgy mood, and dutifully made his way toward the Archives.