Fallout
Chapter 7
Anakin was the first one on deck. In fact, he was sitting in his Delta's cockpit, all systems online and ready, when Obi Wan finally appeared through the interior doors, eyes bright with vexation, a thin furrow of distaste between his brows, and a subtle but definite crimp in his customary swagger.
Anakin tried (there is no try) to keep a straight face. "It's not that uncomfortable, master. It just takes some getting used to." He absentmindedly tugged at the black micromesh covering his own person, pulled his tunics back into place over the flexible energy-dispersal suit. The innovative material also doubled as radiation protection, an absolute must-have on the ravaged surface of Rhellis Massa. "And it's a heck of a lot better than the usual biohazard monkey-lizard-suit."
"True enough," Obi Wan grumped amicably as he stepped onto his fighter's wing and slipped down into the cockpit. His astromech whistled a melodic greeting and swiveled its dome as he quickly brought the ship's systems online.
"I tossed your helmet in there," Anakin added, closing his canopy before his friend could offer any comment.
Through the soundproof transparisteel he could still see Obi Wan glance down at his feet as though somebody had deposited a stinking womprat carcass in the limited storage space there.
A moment later the ship-to-ship comm kicked in. "…little point trying to avoid brain damage." The Jedi master's voice came in clearly over the headset.
Anakin grinned, lifted his fighter off the deck on repulsors, signaled for the bay doors to open. "What are you talking about, master? Flying is a highly intellectual endeavor."
The massive panels parted, revealing endless star-spangled night beyond. "If flying is a mental game, Anakin, then you must be in a perpetual coma." And just like that, Obi Wan shot out of the hangar ahead of his young counterpart, speeding out of the bay and even flipping his fighter over once, in what amounted to a mild taunt.
Anakin's answering bark of laughter was lost in Artoo's exhilarated scream as they streaked in hot pursuit, corkscrewing past the hangar doors and plunging wildly into glorious open space, intoxicating freedom.
They cruised – at a blazing, frictionless speed, their tiny craft continually accelerating through the void, the engines which comprised half the fighters' weight not even breaking a metaphorical sweat – along the orbital path calculated by their nav computers. Curving around the star side-by-side, it was easy to forget that war had engulfed the galaxy, that duty anchored them to other planes and spheres, that this beautiful feeling of soaring through the limitless field of stars with elegant power beneath him and his best friend, his brother, by his side, would ever end. For a moment he even forgot about Padme, about home. Flying, Anakin was so close to the Force that he outstripped even his fear and attachments.
"What's that?" Obi Wan snapped over the comm..
Anakin peered ahead, to where a glimmering diaspora swarmed toward them, a distant dust cloud of menace drawing rapidly closer as they streaked along their trajectory. "Uh… not a choir of Iegan angels, master."
"Hm. Animal, vegetable, or mineral?"
"Nasty, whatever they are." The Force's strident warning shrilled fiercely in both their veins. There was no need to point this out; they were yoked together in its Light.
"Let's take a detour." Obi Wan abruptly veered off course, diving inside the curve of their initial flight and sweeping into a skewing, irregular loop which carried them well inside the gravity-driven centrifuge of the star.
The odd miasma of silver objects re-grouped and began altering their own course.
"Definitely not inanimate," Anakin muttered, noting this self-correcting feature.
"And self-powered," Obi Wan added, as the swarm approached, pushing inward toward them, against the current of the solar winds, upstream in the river of radiant energy pouring off the star. Only spacecraft did that; even nebula-dwellers and other weird phenomena did not violate the laws of physics so egregiously.
"So…. accuracy or power?" Anakin politely inquired. "Mind you, I don't fly Soresu."
"I don't think we need enter the aggressive negotiation stage yet, Anakin. We have the advantage of speed."
"Run away?" the young Jedi scoffed. "I don't' run away, either."
"Think of it as podracing." Before Anakin could muster a retort, Obi Wan's Delta had surged forward – on full thrusters, no less – in a straight drive for the distant and just-now-visible orb of Rhellis Massa.
The young Knight snorted. He might still be branded like a nerf from his last unfortunate contest with Obi Wan in the dojo; but this was a whole other arena. In the realm of piloting, there was no possible question who was the master. That would be Master Skywalker, thank you very much.
He opened the throttle so wide that the resulting breakaway set Artoo's head to spinning in place, and the Delta's drives trying to buck free of the featherweight chassis. Anakin held the ship together with the Force through the initial acceleration, not quite trusting the bolts and welding. His little surgical operation on the stabilizers – a quick excision of a few cumbersome safety overrides – had made this glorious feat possible. His forward charge felt like a jump into hyperspace.
He gained on Obi Wan so fast that within seconds he was pretty much right up his tailpipe and still coming on strong. He felt his friend's jolt of alarm as a bright flash in the Force. "Get outta my way, old man," he threatened, grinning ear to ear, "Or I'll have to ride your rump all the way down to the surface."
"Anakin!"
Obi Wan was blissfully unaware of his own ship's improved capability. Anakin's smile stayed plastered on his face. "This is a race, master. Not afternoon promenade at the old folks' home."
R4 decided to join the fun; he bleeped something rude over the droid interface. Artoo replied in kind – only in a much crasser vein, because Anakin had stripped off some of his astromech's overrides, too.
"For the love of… Anakin, I'm at maximum thrust, and you're practically on top of me!"
It was difficult not to chuckle over the comm. Obi Wan really, really hated flying. "Just close your eyes and think of the Force, master!"
"Anakin!"
Self control abandoned with all pretense of respect, Anakin finally laughed aloud, whooping gleefully as he clipped his fighter right over his mentor's, barely clearing the cockpit canopy before dropping down in front with an impudent waggle of his tail.
They sped onward – with Anakin in the much coveted alpha position – all the way to Rhellis Massa's vapor wreathed horizon, leaving the glinting swarm of pursuers far behind.
Descending through the devastated planet's upper atmosphere was like falling slowly into a soft netherworld of nebulous light and diaphanous veils, funerary curtains drawn discreetly over a long-desiccated corpse. Reckless speed reduced to a cautious downward glide, the two starfighters pierced layer after layer of toxic, shifting vapor.
Obi Wan kept an eye on the string of data scrolling across the Delta's active scanner display. "The atmosphere appears to be breathable, but those clouds promise nasty precipitation."
"Yeah… and did you look at those radiation levels?" Anakin replied over the comm..
"I'm trying not to," he muttered.
"So what were those things that followed us, do you suppose? Some kind of new probe droid?"
"Hunter-killers, more likely," Obi Wan decided. "An entire fleet of them. Dooku has finally succumbed the lure of raw power and opted for quantity over quality." He could hear Anakn's sharp hissing intake of breath at the mention of the Dark Jedi's name. Not enough months had passed since his maiming at Dooku's hands. Obi Wan felt a sympathetic twinge in his own shoulder and thigh, and swiftly changed the topic. "Let's try to find a settlement – or the remains of one. Most the major cities were located in the southern hemisphere at the time of the civil war."
"Right."
They plunged below the final drifting curtain of sickly yellow, into the diffuse ambience of late afternoon. The sun was a bleary eye smeared behind the tainted backdrop, its baleful gaze resting upon a dark shoreline and a harsh jutting of mountains, a citadel wall thrown up against invasion. They followed the dull glitter of dying light upon the chippy waters, the flickering finger pointing inland over the rocks beyond. Together they rose, skimmed over barren peaks, hungry valleys, naked plateaus, fighting the inevitable turbulence, silent as they drove their way inland.
The Force was heavy with echoes. For a moment Obi Wan thought the cabin atmospherics were faulty; he swallowed several times to ease the pressure building behind his eardrums, before he realized that it was a more primal Force-borne warning that he felt.
The mountains fell away.
His heart plummeted with his ship.
The Force howled in memorial, still resounding with a ghastly wound. Below them, sprawled like the grisly body of a fallen giant, the bones and crumbling armor of a vast city lay lifeless, bleached and dead beneath the shadow of the hills. Spreading like a flood of death, the gridwork of its architecture carved a solemn tracery over the barren earth. Here was nothing, emptiness, where once there had been millions of lives. He heard Anakin echo his own stifled gasp of pain. They both should be used to it, immune to it, able to withstand the initial shock. But they weren't. Perhaps they never would be.
Keep going, a voice soundlessly whispered, borne to him within the heart of the Force's keening sigh.
"Are you all right, master?"
Anakin was perceptive, and he hadn't been shielding. His pulse gentled back into its wonted rhythm; he took a deep centering breath of the cockpit's scrubbed and 'cycled air. "Yes. We need to keep going. There is another city further on. The capitol, Rhe Bhattu."
Mercifully, the young Jedi did not ask how he knew this, why he was so insistent upon it. They soared over the shattered remnants of the first metropolis, the blasted out skeletons of its towers, the crumpled detritus of bridges, landing pads, pedestrian arcades. A gutted market. An ampitheater, weirdly intact, but no less scoured of life. Dust lay thickly, in mounds so great they were visible from this altitude. In all the dreary parade of decades, no life had yet made ingress upon the desolation.
Like a klaxon never silenced, the Force sounded a long wavering note of utter despair. The Dark coiled up off the fossil-city in heavy tendrils, claws rising to meet the tattered, poison-laden sky.
Obi Wan closed his eyes, narrowed his focus to the bright flame that was Anakin, to his own kindling hearthfire of Light, to the luminous connection between them. They sped onward, obedient to the mysterious command, each cocooned within his cockpit's bubble, each armored by his own hard-won control, yet hearts bleeding together into the mourning Force. There was a strange measure of peace in that, he thought.
Desert plains – agricultural land, once? – and a deep canyon scarred across the continent's face; then another undulating rise, more rumpled geological formations, a higher stretch of land rolling to the skirts of another mountain range. Nestled in the foothill's stony arms, a greater city, this one half-sheltered by a crushed protective dome, a delicate curve of durasteel and massive buttresses, torn asunder and rent into fragments like an eggshell. Beneath its gaping ribs, death sprawled in stark geometry: towers, tiers, arches, soaring cathedrals of emptiness, crumbling dust, petrified flowers rising amid a colossal snowdrift of black rubble.
"Set down… outside the dome," Obi Wan rasped out. The radiation gauge on his console was spewing nonsensically high numbers. His memory flashed back to that moment so many years ago when he had first taken Anakin's midichlorian count … he no longer believed in impossible measures. But this clear indication of danger was nothing compared to the hurricane of malice in the Force, an echo of death that had not faded with passing time. Here, in a world void of life, there was no other signature to blend, dull, absorb, join and remold it. The ultimate event in Rhellis Massa's planetary history remained inscribed perpetually in the Force like a doomsday epitaph etched in marble.
He set his fighter down in the shadow of this abomination and breathed out slowly. Anakin's ship landed nearby. Silence claimed them for a full minute. Even the astromechs were quiet, unmoving in their sockets.
But they had a job to do here. Pushing all emotion aside, he retrieved the helmet and pulled it down over his head, sighing distastefully. The clones' headwear had an inset comm.., and an array of other hypertrophied gadgets and displays built into the visor. It took him a moment to deactivate these distracting features. He almost took another deep breath, but then stopped, lip curling in disgust as the sensation of being muffled, smothered, walled in - armored against reality.
He clambered over the Delta's wing and onto the dusty surface of Rhellis Massa. Just wonderful. Flying and a helmet. Now all he needed was for Asaaj Ventress to show up, perhaps bearing a serving platter of freshly hatched live quanta worms on toast, and his perfect day would be complete.
"You're projecting some awfully weird images there. Master," Anakin grunted, stepping down off his own Delta's wing. The young Jedi's expression was completely masked by the obscuring clone helmet.
"Yes, well." He had no jest to offer. Not now, not in the presence of such… blasphemy.
They gazed at the ruins rising dark before them. The sun sank low on the horizon, lengthening both their shadows toward the blasted-out city like twin pathways, the legendary rivers running into the Nine Hells, beneath the Gates of Destiny.
"Now what?" Anakin asked.
Was there really any question? "Let's go," he said, leading the way. The broken portals of Rhe Bhattu gaped wide, marking their arrival with a fanfare of morbid silence.