Legacy IV
Chapter 17
The caves' mouths yawned wide, beckoning the intruding legions into their upper vestibules and corridors. The pirate troupe's footfalls skittered and shied down passages and across domed roofs, a flock of startled avians rousted into flight by some slight movement, a flash of bright color. The Force trilled with their excitement, with expectation, with the bated breath of those who waited within their time-smoothed arcades.
"A little further," Torbb Bakk'ile murmured, knuckles whitening as her broad hand closed about her 'saber's hilt. "They're nearly in the antechamber."
Beside her, Obi-Wan pressed his back against the time-smoothed stone of his chosen eyrie, a jutting shelf just above the last narrow gap, a lookout's nest nestled near the cave dome' s apex. He breathed out, in, loosening the bands of sensory perception, the narrow ruts of instinctual thinking, I-and-thou. A bead of perspiration trickled down his collar, slid along his taut spine. It had been years since he'd practiced this skill, much less deployed it in the course of a mission – but lessons learned at Master Dooku's feet were unlikely to be forgotten, having been imparted and received amidst blood, sweat, and tears.
When the first of the motley crew wriggled his way past the tight barrier, a heavy blaster followed by one arm, one leg, a torso and a horned Iktotchi head wrapped in a dark bandana, he let himself go entirely, sliding into the interstices between appearance and fact, solidity and expectation, where the Force coiled like diaphanous smoke, gusting on the winds of sentient mind. The pirates squeezed in one after another – a second, then a third and fourth….
Torbb ignited her blade, eliciting a series of guttural curses and a half-dozen ill-aimed blaster bolts. This initial volley of shots she parried into the high ceiling, blowing chunks out of the living rock. A shower of alabaster dust cascaded around her, a moving veil; on this signal, three dozen hooded figurines – diminutive warriors, an army of stunted allies – appeared from the encircling shadows, every one bearing an upraised glowstick.
"Jedi!" one of the more astute villains bellowed, ending a series of derogatory adjectives to the warning. His mates took up the cry, jostling as they regrouped, as they squinted through the smearing, backlit gloom at the opponents aligned against them.
Obi-Wan raised both hands, unshutteirng his mind, making of himself a conduit – a prism. Fear, suspicion, alarm: these lanced thorugh the plenum, surged through him, were refracted into delusion, into the nightmare phantoms projected by the intruders' own anxiety. Under the shaping influence of similfuturus, the Force-user's power of illusion, every Jawa in the echoing cave appeared another towering copy of Torbb, hooded and armed with blinding light, the hazy realm of perception warped into a hall of mirrors in which the imposing Knight was multiplied into the dozens.
Uticus' minions were undoubtedly weak-minded – but they were not bereft of vital instinct. Faced with a surreal legion of Jedi foes, they fled. Shouts and foul curses boomed and broke in the networks beyond as they retreated, regrouped. Subterranean thunder shook more dust from the cave dome, set the limpid pool's surface to agitated rippling.
"Ha!" Torbb barked, leaping into the narrow gap on the heels of the trespassers, her eager Jawa minions jabbering and gesticulating like a frenetic bezzil hive. "Run while you can, pizzmahi." Her weapon flashed ferociously as she shoved her frame through the gap, eager for battle.
Screams of dismay resounded up the labyrinth's byways as primitive booby-traps were triggered, as ceilings collapsed, as floors crumbled, as escape routes ended in sudden drops. The Jawas knew this place intimately, its every perilous turning mapped in their consciousness like the calligraphy of some beloved poem. Panic stricken, drunk on shared conviction, on an illusion perpetuated and fueled by collective madness, the pirates stumbled into death traps, were herded into endless mazes, buried alive beneath the pitiless desert. Those who turned back found Torbb hounding them; those that fought, lost the battle.
The Force soon thrummed with deafening cacophony, a tuning fork resonant to a hundred dissonant tones.
Obi-Wan's concentration dissolved, and with it the illusion – but for most their foes, it was too late. He gasped, sucking in deep breaths to center himself again, to mesh self and place back into unity. A moment later he leapt from his perch, 'saber in hand, just as a bolder, unfazed party of raiders shoved their way into this inner sanctum.
"Oi!" the foremost of these less gullible brigands shouted. "Stand fast, mates!" his compatriots unholstered their own weapons, fell into aggressive stances in a practiced semi-circle. "No grenades down here, Vork you kark-head. Just get past 'im and get the stuff."
The young Jedi's blade swept in a dangerous arc. "Surrender now and you will not be harmed."
Anakin wracked his brains for an expletive sufficiently extreme and obscene enough to describe the present state of affairs, but his frantically whirling imagination could only supply him with the standard Huttese default.
"E'chuta!" he gritted out, because Shmi was not here to overhear his foray into adult imprecation, and because his pod, his wonderful incomparable peerless pod, the Fastest Ever Built, was presently sitting behind the start line – full minutes after the other contestants had roared away on the first lap of the Boonta Classic – refusing flat out to start.
He'd been over every circuit, every connection, every valve … how could this be? How could this happen? His mother's freedom, his future, everything depended on this race. It was like the universe was mocking him, taunting him with the inexorablility of bondage, bending the sure staright strokes of his destiny into a gargoylish caricature, into failure. He clenched his teeth and cursed a bit more, just like the spacers in the cantinta did when they were angry or deep in their cups…
And then it hit him.
Fingers flying, he ripped out the grav compression decompensator and cross-wired it into the ignition coupler. It was just a safety feature, not something you really needed anyway unless you were a clutz pilot or you wanted to stop, and he was not the first and had no intention of doing the second. With a deafening whine he revved his twin thrusters, rammed the accelerator forward and shot down the central alley, the tiered coliseum-style stands blurring into a nauseating blur as his beauty, his Dawnrunner, his fleet lightning bolt gathered momentum like a class three ion storm breaking in high heaven. The cheers of the crowd were consumed by the wild chorus of his engines, the triumphant war-cry of power, speed, utter obliterating glory!
Soon he was rocketing into the desert so fast he couldn't breathe. It was wizard.
At such speed, he wasn't even sure where the desert ended and his pod began; machine and space melded into a unity, a blinding, blurring one that flowed about him like molten light. He unraveled into it, until his pulse was the rhythm of the intake fans, until his blood was the fusion combustion of the drives, his breath the howl of wind past the viewport, his skin and bones the featherlight hull of his chariot. He was the pod, he was the desert, he was speed itself.
Landforms rose and fell about him, caressing him as they whizzed past a centimeter to either side. Dunes abased themselves before him, cliffs parted to allow him passage, the scorching sand carried him like a wave carries its own foaming froth. The sky itself, the dazzling suns, filled the invisible sails of his ambition. He melted into the race, into his creation, and he did not merely fly. He plummeted through infinite abysses, warping here and there into an ecstatic union.
Within minutes, he had the stragglers in his view. Unleashing another cry of exhilaration, he cut the stabilizer array and streaked toward the pack, his craft wobbling wildly as it hit the pressure differentials left in their wake. Another pilot might have capsized, but he was not another pilot. He was the champion. He rode the turbulence, owned it, ruled it, soared into it, overtaking the slowest of his competitors in one blazing comet-tail of raw audacity.
"Whoooooooooopppppeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!" he laughed, shrieking out his delight unto the Force itself.
Qui-Gon swatted a fly off his earlobe and grunted in vexation. Maintaining a decent comm signal on Tatooine was harder than counting the individual grains of sand in the Temple's meditation rock garden – a grueling and ultimately futile endeavor he had once been set to complete as punishment for rebellion against his Master's dictates. Like any good lesson, its memory endured far past the recollection of what particulars occasioned it.
At last, his vigil was rewarded with a faint sputter of recognizable sound.
"Jinn," he growled, straining to decipher the jumble of interference and frazzled syllables coming through the tenuous 'link.
"… Compromised sample…." Senior Healer Ben To Li's voice came through, in a terse spurt of clarity.
The tall man's spine stiffened. "I assure you it was not. I took that blood sample myself, and ran a control on my own to calibrate the analyzer bands. It's legitimate."
There followed another burst of interstellar static, then, "…Impossible."
"Who is to say what is possible with the Force?" the Jedi master demanded of his obstreperous colleague. "What was the reading?"
Ben To's next reply was lost in transmission, except the most salient piece of information. "…ten thousand," the healer scoffed. "Off the scale."
Qui-Gon smiled, grimly. He was right about the boy, though what it meant, he had no well-defined notion. "The Force is strong with him. He should be brought back to the Temple, if at all possible. You can retest yourself, Ben To, but believe me, that reading is no mistake."
A dubious muttering was his only answer for several long seconds. The revered healer ended his unheard diatribe with a question ending in "…Obi-Wan?"
"He's here, too. I'll haul him home so soon as we are finished with our business in this system."
Master Li's parting words were completely obliterated by atmospheric disturbances and ion degradation. Qui-Gon closed the link with a curt gesture and stuffed his device back into its belt pouch. However skeptically the discovery might be received by his peers, it spoke volumes to him. Anakin, for better or for worse, was far more than a talented street urchin from a backwater world. He was… unique. Special. And for those reasons, he was wanted.
There could be no question of leaving him obscurity, only of determining which side of the eternal conflict seized him for its own. The fate of the galaxy might hinge upon that one portentous act. And since he had been appointed by the Force to identify the child, it fell upon him to insure his future safety, the integrity of his future self.
Anakin should be trained. He should be taught. It was the Will of the Force, his appointed path. And on that fateful road, the boy would need the best and wisest guide, the most cunning and courageous of teachers. The Force was no nursemaid, but neither was it a miser ; surely it had appointed a Chosen one to that role as well.
His heart skipped a beat, the simple, the obvious truth reeling in his inward heavens like the dizzying double corona of the suns overhead. Of course. It explained everything. It was meant to be, a vergence in the Force itself – subtle, delicate, exquisite. It was perfect.
But it was going to be infernally difficult to make Obi-Wan see his point of view.
The Watcher presided over the opening ceremonies from a distance, aloof from the petty butchery wrought by those below. The inept moisture farmers had arrived first, supposing themselves inviolate in their superiority of numbers, in their possession of firearms; they had picked off a few of the larger scavenging creatures, poked at the festering krayt's flesh, and then – imbecilic beasts that they were – one or two of their brash younger members had defiled the bodies of the fallen Tuskens yet further by touching the exposed flesh with the butts of their weapons.
Retribution had been swift and brutal. The ambush caught its victims unaware, felling four of them before the stricken interlopers knew what had hit them. The Sand People were veteran warriors, every one of them, merciless and accurate. They preferred the long, weighted staves of their ancestral tradition to the long-range blaster rifles. The Watcher observed impassively as they caved in the skulls of the men they had executed, defiling their bodies as those of their brethren had been made unclean.
The resulting firefight – a nasty, undisciplined guerilla scuffle erupting about the dragon's rotting bones – had left a half dozen dead upon either side. The remaining farmers huddled in a quivering knot to one side, while the irate Tuskens regrouped for a final and devastating assault.
But that would not serve the Watcher's purposes, and he grew weary of his passive role.
Death was greedy, greedy like an animal, but the Dark: the Dark's voracity was of another order, one more demanding. This impromptu abbatoir was not enough, not cruel enough a vise in which to trap a servant of the puking, mewling Light. He hefted his weapons' hilts and strode serenely down the ridge, intent upon the hateful spectacle unfolding upon the stage below.
And took matters into his own hands, shaping the massacre into something worthy of his calling, transforming the unbridled wrath of these ignorant novices into a high and holy ritual of hate.
Author's Note: thanks to a sudden proliferation of anonymous votes pleading the case of Long Hair, the debate is once again locked in an even stalemate! I note that Cerasi and Jar Jar Binks have proffered opinions on the matter, and I suspect that at least one diehard enthusiast has submitted multiple ballots under the moniker "Guest" - a subterfuge worthy of the Negotiator and therefore legitimate. In short, it seems that we must resort to aggressive negotiations to bring this to a resolution. I look forward to the fracas. -rb