Fallout

Chapter 8

Their boots left two solemn scars across the wind-blown sweep of dust piling in Rhe Bhattu's main thoroughfare. To left and right, forming a long canyon of ruins, the disintegrating walls of once mighty structures stood sentinel, watched them with thousands of blasted-out eye sockets: windows, doors, balcony arches, docking hatches. Anakin trudged doggedly along beside Obi Wan, as they processed down this central aisle for the inspection of the capitol's ghosts.

Not that Anakin believed in ghosts. He'd always enjoyed stories of them, back in the slave quarters on Tatooine – especially those about Ben Attur-Yavi, the Wizard of the Black Hills – but as a young child he had discovered soon enough that such dangerous frivolity and superstition was strictly frowned upon in the Temple. The other initiates had shunned him for days after his first attempt to regale them with a real hair-raiser, and only Obi Wan's timely intervention and diplomatic skill had restored him to his new peers' good graces. But now, walking through a city which was nothing but cemetery, its every monument and structure a mausoleum, its every paving block a gravestone, he was tempted to believe in the spirits of the dead. Whispers hung in the air, in the very Force.

It was as though a million voices had cried out at once – and been suddenly silenced.

And their final scream of terror preserved indelibly in this place, to seep into the bones of any who dared intrude upon its timeless lament.

"Master…?"

"I feel it, too." He could make out nothing of Obi Wan's expression behind the blank helmet visor, and he could feel very little of the other Jedi's thoughts or reactions. They had both tightened their mental shields into solid armor, protection against the onslaught. Had they not, creepy would have been magnified to tormenting. They walked on.

The street eventually gave way to a ragged pile of slabs, what might once have been a grand ceremonial staircase. A great heap of rubble and twisted girders lay at the summit of this jumbled rise.

"This must have been the government building. Rhe Bhattu was one of the only places on the planet inhabited by members of both warring factions. It was declared a neutral zone toward the end of the war, but it was destroyed in the final confrontation." Obi Wan waved a gloved hand to the west. "I think the spaceport lies that way. Evacuation ships had been blocked weeks before the last bombings."

Anakin stared up at the littered remnants of the Rhellis Massan capitol, this place where many came together to create a fragile peace. It lay shattered as easily as a wine glass dropped to the hard floor; and he could not help but wonder if Coruscant's own fragile shell of political harmony might itself someday lay in similar fragments. The Republic was at war, for the first time in a thousand years. And this was the consummation of war, its ecstasy and its firstborn child.

"The people who were left behind never stood a chance," he muttered. "There was no way out. Even the ones who sued for peace. They got fried just the same."

There was a heartbeat's pause, a tiny lull in which the words hung like the ghosts of the past between them.

"But that does not invalidate their desires, or the rightness of their actions," Obi Wan said, a thread of challenge twisting in his voice, tautening the Force.

Anakin tasted bitterness on his tongue. Didn't it? "They should have stopped this war before it got so far. Why didn't the Jedi involve themselves? This is abominable."

That was a hard question. He watched Obi Wan take a few more paces forward. You can't walk away from that question, though, can you, master? It travels with us. "I don't know," the older man said, at last. It was humble, and true, and …unsatisfying. Anakin pushed the question and the hardening pit in his stomach to the back of his attention.

"Well, what do you know?" he asked instead. "You're supposed to be the leader here."

The taunt was delivered with just sufficient boldness to alleviate their melancholy. Obi Wan gladly rose to the bait, as a sinking man grasps at a piece of flotsam. "I'm glad you remember your place, Anakin."

"Yeah," the young Jedi snorted. "Always a step behind you – so I can haul your rear out of trouble when you lead us into it."

Obi Wan turned his back and began clambering over the wrecked stairway. "I believe the trouble is generally of your making, my friend."

"What? What about that nest of gundarks on –"

"We are not discussing gundarks, Anakin."

They climbed up the disorderly pile of cracked marble slabs, threading their way among their jutting angles, through the rivulets of cascading gray sand. "Fine. Who's the chosski who almost got himself blown sky-high on Kaion?" Anakin riposted.

"That was a technical difficulty," Obi Wan blithely replied. They reached the summit, and stood at the foot of the collapsed capitol building. Fallen and mangled statuary lay scattered at their feet, looming grotesquely out of the dull monotonic masonry. Half a sculpted face peered up at them, blank-eyed, to one side. "Lovely," the Jedi master added, sotto voce.

"Technical difficulty?" Anakin repeated slyly. "I thought the Force was our ally, and that we had no need of any other?"

"Well," Obi Wan shrugged. "With friends like you, I certainly have no other."

"Ow, master. I'm wounded. Careful – emotionally abused youth like me take to crime and vandalism easily."

"Just don't touch my starfighter again," Obi Wan shot back. "And don't think your little stunt with the stabilizer override went unnoticed." He gazed up at the monstrous ruins, arms folded against his chest.

"What? How'd you –"

"I ordered R4 to notify me of any impending, ah, technical difficulties."

Anakin reeled backward a pace, at least on the inside. Damn. Obi Wan never played fair. He was on the point of defending his actions when a disturbance jolted through the already keening Force, jerking their attention skywards.

A meteor shower of silver blurs erupted on the far horizon, a silent and glowing carillon of descending lights, streaking through the upper atmosphere and just as quickly disappearing again behind the thick and sullen clouds. "Meteors?" Anakin guessed, although he knew already that these were not natural phenomena. The Force twisted yet further, ratcheting his tension up another infinitesimal notch.

Obi Wan's soft indrawn breath was audible over the helmet comm.. "No. We've been followed. You'd better tell the droids to move the ships."

"Better yet: I'll do it myself. Maybe I can find some high ground to take a macrobinocular scan. We need to know what we're dealing with here."

"Yes," the older Jedi agreed, somewhat reluctantly. "And why. I'll stay here. Report back as soon as you're able. Let's not risk contacting the frigate until we know what their comm interception capability is."

Anakin nodded in terse agreement. Yeah, that would be bad. Chances were the things following them were just recon units, sent to scout ahead. A transmission, and the tracking signal it established, might do more harm than good. He jogged his way back through the abandoned highways of the capitol, running the gauntlet of its long-dead ghosts, and headed back to the fighters. Whatever trouble was lurking on the horizon, he would take care of it.

Left alone beneath the ruined government building's arched threshold, Obi Wan was keenly aware of his own presence – as though he were the sole island of life in an oceanic expanse of void and hollow memory. The Force lapped against his shores, laden with unwelcome recollection, frothing with present danger. He didn't need the helmet's deactivated tox scanning register to tell him that the world outside his fragile shell of armor was a poisonous soup of radiated particles, bomb effluvia still wafting in the dead air. He admitted to himself that the thin layer of mesh seemed a paltry protection against such excoriating destructive power; but a Jedi drew his strength – and his safety – from the Force itself.

Still, when the first spattering droplets of acid rain rattled against his visor, he quickly moved into the broken shelter offered by the blasted walls of the ruins. Here, in the center of the building, had once stood a mighty domed chamber. Fragments of mosaic tile were visible among the heaps of rubble. Overhead, the rounded ceiling was punctured and fretted with massive cracks promising further disintegration at the slightest provocation. A caustic waterfall dribbled through the ragged skylight, pooled in an indentation worn deep by a century of similar downpours. He threaded his way around this column of glittering poison, eyes following the pattern of the supporting pillars. Beauty had transformed to unseemly nakedness, as though the radiation blast had stripped the skin and muscle off these bare bones of architecture, leaving a hot and skeletal corpse behind, just as it had instantly flayed every living body of its flesh and blood…

He closed his eyes, sank onto a chunk of masonry. Focus. Mental shields reinforced, again impenetrable, he sat and gazed at the scene, the tainted rainfall dripping through the roof. He armored his heart until he could feel nothing of this place at all, until he was Jedi only in name. The relief this provided was seductive, and welcome. He relished it, just for a moment. Who used such dirty weapons anymore? Even a century ago, atomics had been hopelessly outdated and primitive. Ion cannon, plasma beams, biospecific weaponry, disintegration and sonic disruptors – one had a wide variety of advanced tools to choose from. Death could be meted out in so many ways… why choose this one? He would never know, of course. It was simply how history had played itself out. Perhaps some ambitious and unscrupulous entrepreneur had offered the two warring factions a discount on nuclear armaments, some leftover stockpile he could not unload on any other victims. Sales would have skyrocketed as both sides amassed supplies, escalating the unspoken threat to breaking point. The clever businessman likely had made a hefty profit and taken the first evacuation ship off world. That was how these things worked. He knew. Qui Gon had taught him young, and bitter experience had confirmed the lesson.

More disturbing than the theoretical charlatan of long-ago, however, was the very real and present appearance of Separatist scout droids, and the lurking warship in this same system. What was Dooku doing out here? There were no other remotely inhabitable planets circling Rhellis Massa's star, and this world was useless to either side of the galactic conflict. Wasn't it? Or would a radiation saturated world make an ideal base for a droid-operated outpost? But the system was not strategically located…and a single prowling cruiser suggested a more stealthy and sinister purpose. His instincts told him that he and Anakin had been expected. That the interlopers were morbidly curious about his intentions and doings here. And that was a highly unsettling thought, because the only people who knew of this mission were the Jedi Council and the Supreme Chancellor's office, both above reproach.

Had Dooku perhaps received a mysterious mandate from the Force itself, just as he had?

And what would that imply? That the voice speaking to him was Dark? It hadn't felt that way…not at all. Or that the Force was playing a dejarik game, with Jedi and Sith as its pawns? Was he the witless tool of some gladiatorial amusement arranged by high destiny? That was a despairing, and a unworthy thought, one that spat in the face of Jedi doctrine. He pushed it aside, and snorted. If he was the victim of anything, it was surely a practical joke. For he still had no idea what in stars' name he was doing here, besides growing cold in the damp and the lengthening twilight shadows.

How he longed to rip the helmet off his head, so he could breathe… but that was impossible.

"Brooding again," he chastised himself, and lowered his shields a trifle, abandoning the not-quite-blissful solitude in favor of painful reality. The echoes returned in full measure, but so did the strengthening Force; they came together here, and he should not complain of it. "I'm here. Now what?" he said aloud.

Look deeper, the uninvited, unbidden voice spoke to him, out of the silence between the echoes, out of the space between thought and awareness.

Deeper? Had he not researched every possible scrap of information, every restricted access file, every tidbit of history imaginable? Had he not meditated on this day and night? What else was he to do?

Behind the echoes of horror in this place, there was the warmth of a deep chuckle. The Living Force does not speak in such riddles as the Unifying. I meant what I said.

Even the knowledge that it was his own imagination and emotions which colored and shaped this voice, that the peculiar timbre and pitch of it were entirely of his own fabrication, could not smother the pang of irritated longing. He supposed, vaguely, that he would do well to look deeper into the services of a mind healer when this mission was complete. Indeed, it was only Yoda's insistence that he simply trust and move forward that prevented him from abandoning the whole endeavor as the fruit of rarefied delusion.

Obi Wan.

For Force's sake… it was just too real, too convincing. It even felt the same… He sighed.

Look deeper.

And then in a flash of intuition, he blinked, and looked down at the rock jumbled beneath his feet. And wondered, for the first time since their arrival, what lay under the surface of Rhellis Massa.

The Force seemed to smile in quiet approval.