Legacy IV
Chapter 20
He was just blazing past the outskirts of Hell's Gauntlet, giving the narrow canyon a wide berth and sticking to the flat plateau to its eastern side, when things sorta went bottom-up.
The grav decompensator had been his own idea, mostly, if you could call eleventh-hour autosabotage an idea really… but this was something much worse, as in an actual bona fide malfunction. It occurred to Anakin with perfect clarity and far too late that his pod's failure to start had been the result of malicious tampering, probably the handiwork (footiwork?) of that sleemo Sebulba. And that would also explain why his engine couplings were now gradually but surely ratcheting loose.
If his pod separated from its propulsion system at this uncontrolled speed, he would be total bugsquat.
Teeth gritted, something akin to fear – not that he was afraid, just really super mad- roaring behind his ears, he gripped the yoke and swerved out, taking an erratic detour. His mind outraced the hurtling pod, a map of the desert unfurling in his imagination. He knew it like the back of his hand, every bump and dip, every jutting rock ridge, every obstacle whereon he might be smashed to a fiery pulp. He had to get clear, out into the open waste where if he was lucky – if he was good- he might make a relatively intact landing.
The magneto-bindings rattled ominously, heralding the imminent separation of chassis and engines. There wasn't time to think, only to choose. He veered south again, the twin suns glaring down on him in dismay, a cockeyed witness to his plight. The desert sped by, a continuous blur, faster and faster; he angled his intakes and cut the rear repulsors, causing the pod's aft to drop. Hunkering behind the viewsheild, he held a steady course, counting the seconds, the long minute…..
And then the tenuous connections snapped, sending his engines rocketing out into utter emptiness like a pair of missiles. They disappeared over a crest and exploded with a deafening boom. The pod, abruptly loosed, dropped with a sickening lurch, hit the sand and ploughed across the desert floor at breakneck speed. Its pilot yelled aloud, a defiant shout of effort, holding the wildly skidding chariot steady, don't flip don't flip don't flip don't don't don't—
Until he came to a spinning, jerking, sick-making stop in the middle of nowhere.
The sky circled drunkenly overhead. A dark speck sailed high in the bottomless blue, and another. Carrion seekers wailed and ranted. Anakin's heart rate slowly, slowly settled. He took a breath. He was alive.
Chucking the crash helmet aside, he clambered out of the battered chassis and looked around. The Black Hills stretched out a single ragged arm in this direction, encircling the westward rim of the world. To the other side, there was nothing but foreign valleys and hills of sand, endless sand. He swallowed a mouthful of sticky spit and licked his chapped lips. There was an emergency canteen of water tucked beneath the controls, and he quickly emptied it.
But that was all he had, by way of survival gear. Things didn't look too good for him.
Another scavenging creature appeared in the sky, calling to its mates, tracing a lazy circle over some unseen thing beyond the next dune. Probably a bantha that had expired of heat exhaustion. It happened, sometimes. The old and the weak did not linger long on Tatooine; life ended with the waning of strength, most often in violence.
He leaned against the wrecked pod and watched the spiraling progress of several sand vultures. They dipped and wheeled, soared and skimmed.. but did not descend. There was something else down there, something fierce. He squinted up at the suns, beating their merciless double rhythm against his skin – heat and excoriating radiance, scorching the sand beneath his soft-wrap boots, hammering down upon his exposed head. Walls of liquid fire seemed to rise about him, waterfalls pouring upward into the ocean-blue vault.
Anakin had never seen an ocean, only sky – he imagined they were alike, both fathomless and wide, pulsing with their own secrets. The too-bright heavens yawned on all sides, inviting him to fall upward with the heat, beckoning him as speed sometimes did, melting him into their own boundless expanse.
In that moment, when Anakin and sky and sun and wind were one thing, one heat-addled miasma, he felt it, a strangely compelling current drawing him toward the thing over that last dune-top. He reeled with the scavengers, stared with the suns, stumbled forward with the shuddering, hot breeze. He was drawn inward toward a dark center, a singular point of fascination, enmeshed in a snare like the hunting pit of a mighty sarlaac… slipping, slipping…
He whimpered in terror, but trudged on, obeying a power far beyond his ken, needing to see, needing to know –
-crawling on hands and knees past the crumbling apex of a dune, peering over its edge –
Oh no. He dropped to his belly, pressing himself against the burning sand, staring in appalled silence at the hellish spectacle below.
This was not good.
Cliegg found her beneath the stadium's outer wall, speaking with one of the toothless market vendors who plied honey-breads and other local delicacies. The sight of her – clad in fraying and faded garments, her hair bound back in a simple knot, her skin freckled and lined, her hands calloused and bony – set his pulse to racing, closed his throat with a strange and melting emotion.
"Shmi," he choked out. "Shmi. Darling."
Weary eyes turned upward to him, despair written in patient depths. A bittersweet smile fluttered across her face and dissolved in the desert's heat.
But Cliegg grasped both her hands between his. "Shmi," he breathed. The words stuck in his throat, their meaning so momentous, so pregnant with unspeakable bliss, that he could barely force them out. "You – you are free. I've … Watto sold you. And , and, …" his hand fumbled in an interior pocket. Shaking, he withdrew the transmitter box, the wicked device linked to a hidden implant in her body. "This piece of…." He clenched his jaw, blinked away moisture from his inexplicably burning eyes. The transmitter box clattered to the trampled earth and was crushed beneath his boot, its delicate innards spilling onto the dust in a heap of sparking wire and circuitry.
Shmi gasped, hand pressed against her heart.
A second transmitter met the same fate. Cliegg ground it beneath his heel. "And that's your boy, too. Both of you, darling. Free."
"But…. How? How…..?" the poor woman stammered.
He hemmed and hawed, shifting on the spot. But now – now he owed her complete honesty. Nothing would come between them ever again. He swore it before all the divine powers he didn't believe in. "I bet my life savings on Anakin," he confessed.
"Cliegg!" Shmi's exclamation was almost a rebuke. "Your whole savings! Oh…. That was brash, foolish…" Her tirade broke off as realization sank in, as invisible shackles fell from her wrists and neck. "I, I… I have no way to thank you…. I cannot….."
He dropped to one knee, the way they did in Core world holo-dramas. A few passers-by flicked him a curious glance, but bustled on without stopping. The suns stayed in their courses, glaring in astonishment. "Shmi Skywalker," the moisture farmer rasped out. "Grant this humble man a share of happiness he does not deserve … and consent to be my wife."
She was in his arms the next moment, sobbing in unison with him, her weight a quivering bundle of warmth, of comfort, of earth and sky and water, pouring rain, monsoon buckets and buckets of inestimable wealth, limitless grace. He hauled her to her feet, running leathery hands through her silver-fretted curls.
"What about Ani?" she hiccupped, wilting against him. "Master Jinn went to find him.. I don't know where he is…"
Lars gripped her hand in his own. "I've got my speeder. Let's go."
The boy was not difficult to track – his progress across the barren desert left a luminous comet-tail thorugh the plenum, a flawless imprint he could follow like a shooting star.
Qui-Gon powered the gravbike to maximum and shot out into the oven-blast of Tatooine's midafternoon. As the settlement and its celebratory intoxication fell behind, the deafening clamor in the Force faded into more insidious roaring, a subliminal thunder like that of a vast cataract. He opened his senses further, questing for the source of this new disturbance, and then caught his breath.
Ahead, in the same direction Anakin seemed to be fleeing, a churning pit yawned wide, a black hole in the universal energy, a nexus about which life and light warped, toward which they fell, tipping over the event horizon into nameless oblivion. To him, attuned as he was to the Living Force, it manifested itself as a pulsing, throbbing heart. A hunger compacted into flesh, a flame cloaked in muscle and sinew, a mind burning with lusts no being should feel, with passions too grandiose, too perverse, too…. Dark.
The Sith.
He slowed a trifle, risked taking one hand from the steering bar. His comlink showed only the weakest signal capacity, but he tried anyway. Obi-Wan… where are you? Pick up, blast it.
No answer.
He shoved the useless device back in its pouch with a muffled curse and sped onward. Alone or not, he must prevent Anakin from falling into the creature's grasp. That was all that mattered, the absolute crux of existence in this time and place, this singular vergence in the galaxy's unfolding destiny.
The Dark was reaching for the boy, this unique and dangerous child, this conundrum and contradiction in terms. The Dark was here, in the form of a surreal, demonic servant – and it fell upon him, oath-bound servant of Light, to stand against it.
At any cost.
Outside the caves, Obi-Wan stumbled blindly in a sea of overwhelming light.
Squinting hard, eyes shaded with one hand, he strained to make out the silhouettes and blurs directly before him. The two suns melted the world into a marbleized smear, colors and shapes running together in radiance so intense it hurt.
Straight ahead, his smarting eyes traced the outline of a mangled wreck… a starship smashed flat like a grain-cake, the hull crushed and crumpled like a paper lantern, fuel core a blackened mass of slag, viewports and bulkheads shattered upon the sand like festival confetti. He blinked and stared. What in stars' name…..?
Distantly, a sand crawler shrank into a wavering speck on the horizon. He wiped a fresh sheening of sweat from his face with one wide sleeve and exhaled, slowly. The Jawas had exacted their vengeance… and Torbb her justice. He was free to return to Coruscant, there to face the Council's censure, and interrogation. It had been an eternity since he'd set foot in the Temple, a sixmonth like few others, encompassing turmoil and upheaval, unwelcome discovery and the near-loss of two dear friends.
His thoughts strayed to Garen, and Feld, unleashing a flood of renewed anxiety, one swiftly dammed by iron discipline.
They needed to leave this dustball, with or without Qui-Gon's newest pathetic life form. The recently discovered presence of his SIth stalker gnawed a small hole of worry in his psychic bulwarks – would the creature make some dramatic final gesture, attempt to impede their departure? Perhaps they should take the boy with them, for his own sake… which would certainly require some additional negotiation. The sooner they concluded this affair the better. He fished his comlink out of its pouch and tried to raise the Jedi master – to no avail.
Tatooine's comm infrastructure was as reliable as its yearly rainfall. It was just Qui-Gon's sort of place: completely uncivilized. Still, a Jedi did not depend upon technology, though he might use it. He closed his eyes, blocking out the steady lamentation in the Force, the quiet susurration of Torbb's grief. The matter was personal to her, and one she would have to bring before the Council in due time, to what consequence he could not say. It was not his place to pass down judgment, nor to guess at a fellow Jedi's motives and machinations.
He allowed his mind to unfurl into the desert waste, this place where the Force rang clear and true, a tympanum note of ….
He frowned, a deep furrow appearing between contracted brows.
Qui-Gon?
Something was amiss, the invisible currents disturbed. He could sense the Jedi master's perturbation clearly, a sharp dissonance raking across his own nerves, a cold pit wrenching at his own gut. He sank to his knees, blotting out the glare of the suns – visible even behind tightly shuttered eyelids – the buffeting heat of the sands, the vertiginous sky.
Qui-Gon!
But there was only that lingering, pervasive sense of wrongness, of nightmare made real, of a pit opening at their feet, ready to swallow them whole. Danger danger danger danger danger beat his heart. Go. Go. Go now.
The desert chimed with a ringing silence, an indrawn breath shaped into soundless syllables by wraithlike whispers, by ghastly echoes of a bygone war. Korah. Matah. Yoodah.
He sprang to his feet, casting out for a vehicle – any vehcicle at all besides the plodding eopie. An overturned gravsled lay half-buried in a sand drift a few meters away, a victim of the frantic melee outside the caves. He heaved it onto its side, kicked the compensators into life, blew a cloud of grit out the intakes and revved the sputtering conveyance into life.
Hold on, Master. Wait for me.