The Blood Carver was not helping. His irritation at the delay was apparently being channeled into ragging the human boy at his side, and Anakin was soon going to have to put up some sort of defense to show he was not just a stage prop.
"I hate the smell of a slave," the Blood Carver said.
"I wish you'd stop saying that," Anakin said. The closest thing he had to a weapon was his small welder, pitiful under the circumstances. The Blood Carver outmassed him by many tens of kilos.
"I refuse to compete with a lower order of being, a slave. It brings disgrace upon my people, and upon we."
"What makes you think I'm a slave?" Anakin asked as mildly as he could manage and not appear even more vulnerable.
The Blood Carver's nose flaps drew together to make an impressive fleshy blade in front of his face. "You bought your wings from an injured Lemmer. I recognize them. Or someone bought them for you ... a tout, I would guess, slipping you into the race to make someone else look good."
"You, maybe?" Anakin said, and then regretted the flippancy.
The Blood Carver swung a folded wing around, and Anakin ducked just in time. The breeze lifted his hair. Even with the wings on his own back, he quickly assumed a defensive posture, as Obi-Wan had taught him, prepared for another move.
The bad smell abruptly grew more intense. Anakin sensed the Naplousean right behind him. "A duel before a race? Maybe a holocam is needed here, to amuse our loyal fans?"
The Blood Carver suddenly appeared entirely innocent, his nostril wings folded back, his expressio n one of faint surprise.
The long curved corridor circumnavigating the pit was filled with old machinery, rusting and filthy hulks stored centuries ago by long-dead pit maintenance crews old launch sleds, empty canisters big enough to stand up in, and the tarnished plasteel tracks that had once guided them down to the loading tunnels.
It was in this jumble that Obi-Wan found a thriving trade in race paraphernalia.
"Flight starting soon!" cried a little lump of a boy even younger than Anakin. The boy had obviously come from off-world, born on a high-gravity planet, strong, stout, fearless, and almost unbelievably grimy. "Wagers here for the Greeter? Fifty-to-one max, go home rich!"
"I'm looking for a young human racer," Obi-Wan said, bending down before the boy. "Sandy brown hair cut short, slender, older than you."
"You bet on him?" the stout boy asked, face wrinkled in speculation. This child's life was guided by money and nothing more.
So much distortion, Obi-Wan thought. Not even Qui-Gon could save all the children.
"I'll wager, but first I want to have a look at him," Obi-Wan said. He waved his hand slightly, like a magician. "To observe his racing points."
The stout boy watched the hand, but no scarf appeared. He smirked. "Come to the Greeter," the boy said. "He'll tell you what you want to know. Hurry! The race starts in seconds!"
Obi-Wan was sure he could sense Anakin somewhere near, on this level. And he could also sense that the boy was preparing for something strenuous, but whether for a fight or the competition he could not tell.
"And where will I buy a set of race wings?" Obi-Wan asked, aware there was no time for niceties.
"You, a racer?" The stout boy broke into howls of laughter. "The Greeter! He sells wings, too!"
Something was wrong. Anakin should have been aware of any anomalies earlier, but he had been focused on preparing for the race, and what confronted him now was another matter entirely.
The Naplousean tunnel master had been alerted by an accomplice that the maintenance droid had dropped to the next level, and that had distracted it from Anakin. In that instant, the Blood Carver withdrew one arm from a wing and reached into his tunic.
That made no sense. Anakin suddenly realized the Blood Carver's primary mission was not to race.
He knows I was a slave. He knows who I am, and that means he knows where I am from.
The Blood Carver swung out a twister knife. His arm seemed to telescope, all the joints going straight at once, then doubling back into a neat U.
"Padawan!" he hissed, and the spinning tips of the three blades glittered like a pretty gem.
Anakin, hampered by the bulk of the wings, could not move fast enough to completely avoid the thrust. He bent sideways, and the knife missed his face, but one blade gouged his wrist and the other two blades jammed against the left main strut. Pain shot up Anakin's arm. Quick as a snake, the Blood Carver drew his arm back and aimed another thrust.
Anakin had no choice.
He kicked away from the tunnel, skidded down the sloping apron, and spread the race wings to their full width.
Without hesitating, the Blood Carver followed.
"Race not yet!" the tunnel master husked, and a dense plume of stink shot from the tunnel, leaving the other contestants gagging.
Obi-Wan had only seconds to grasp the main points of this new piece of equipment he had purchased. He hefted the wings onto one shoulder and ran down the long tunnel, the loose and rattling struts scraping the ceiling. He hoped this was the tunnel from which the racers were flying, but found himself at the end, standing alone on the apron, staring across the vast lens-shaped space of the pit between two acceleration shields.
His newly purchased wings did not fit. Fortunately they were larger, not smaller, and the Greeter had not cheated him too badly, selling him wings intended for a biped with two arms. He cinched the thorax straps as tight as the buckles would allow, then ratcheted the arm clamps until the struts threatened to bend. Whether the wings were charged and fueled, he did not know until he swung up a little transparent optical cup and attached it over his eye.
The red and blue lines in his field of vision showed one-quarter charge in the small fuel tank. Hardly enough for a controlled fall.
Dying in a stupid garbage pit race, tangled in antique race wings, was not what Obi-Wan had hoped for as a Jedi.
He looked to his left, saw a blank space of wall, then turned right, grabbing a broken metal bar to lean out. The wings nearly pulled him out of balance, and he hung precariously for a moment. Recovering his footing, his race wings rattling ominously, Obi-Wan saw Anakin standing on the apron of the tunnel to his immediate right, about fifty meters away. He was just in time to witness the confused tangle of limbs and the flash of a weapon.
Obi-Wan leapt just as Anakin fell or jumped, and barely had time to observe a Blood Carver, Anakin's assailant, leap after.
His wings spread wide with almost no effort, and the tiny motors at their tips coughed and whined to life. Sensors on the struts searched for the intense tractor fields that permeated the space between the huge, curved shields. By themselves, the wings could not have supported a boy, much less a man, but by using the stray fields from the accelerator ports, a flyer could perform all sorts of aerobatics.
The first maneuver that Obi-Wan mastered, however, was to fall straight down.
Almost three hundred meters.
Anakin's confusion and pain quickly re-formed into a clarity he had not experienced in many years-three years, to be precise, since his final Podrace on Tatooine, when he had last been so close to death.
It took him almost three seconds to roll to a proper position, feet angled slightly down, wings folded by his side, head tilted back against the brace. Like diving into an immense pool. Then, slowly, the wings seemed to spread without his conscious volition. The motors coughed and sputtered to a sharp, well-tuned whine, like the skirling of two large insects. He felt the sensors twirling just beyond his fingertips, perceived the faint vibrating signal in the palms of both hands that a gradient field was available.
He had fallen less than a hundred meters. The wings, spread to their full width of five arm spans, quivered and shuddered like living things as they caught the air and the fields, and as the motors responded to subtle jerks of his arms, he gained complete control-and soared!
The optical cup that gave him fuel and other readings flopped uselessly below his chin, but he could
get along without it.
Not bad, he thought, for someone so close to dying! The clarity became a rush of energy throughout his small frame. For an instant he forgot the race, the pain in his arm, the fear, and felt a thrill of complete victory over matter, over the awkward bundle of metal and fiber on his back, over the space between the huge curving shields.
And, of course, over the Blood Carver who had wanted to kill him.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw what he thought might be the Blood Carver, twirling like a falling leaf below and to his left. He saw the figure scrape the wall of the pit and tumble, catch a gust and go right again.
But this hapless flier was not the Blood Carver. With another spin of sharp emotion, he realized his assailant had leapt from the apron after him and was now soaring on a parallel, about twenty meters to his right.
No doubt their status as contestants had been canceled by the tunnel master. Very well, Anakin thought. He never cared much for the formalities of victory. If this was a contest solely between him and the murderous Blood Carver, so be it.
The prize would be survival.
No worse than Podracing against a Dug.
* * *
Obi-Wan did not fear dying, but he resented what this kind of death implied a failure of technique, a lack of elegance, a certain foolhardy recklessness that he had always tried to eliminate from his character.
The first step to avoiding this unhappy result was relaxation. After the first glancing contact with the wall, he went completely limp and tuned all his senses to how the air, the tractor fields, and the wings interacted. As Qui-Gon had once advised him when training with a lightsaber, he let the equipment teach him.
But such a process could take hours, and he had only a few seconds before he smacked himself flat on the lower shield. Best to make do with what he had learned so far.
And follow the apprentice's example.
Obi-Wan looked right and saw Anakin assume his flight position. Obi-Wan spread the wings and let his feet drop below the level of his head. He knew enough about lift-wing racing to catch the vibrations in his palms, to understand what they implied, to grab the strongest gradient field available to him, and to soar out across the shield like a leveret pulling out of a stoop.
The sensation was exhilarating, but Obi-Wan ignored that and focused instead on the tiniest indications from the wings, from the excruciating bind of the straps around his chest where he hung in their loose embrace. He had gained just a little more time.
The buzz in his palms ceased. The sensors rotated noisily, and again he started to drop. The increased thrust of the wingtip engines at this point in the race was more for control than for lift, but with the wings spread to maximum-nearly pulling his arms from their sockets-the toes of his boots came within scant centimeters of grazing the shield.
Then the buzz in his palms became frantic. He saw a ten-meter-wide hole, passed over it, felt the tractor field strengthen near the next port, and swerved to one side just in time to avoid the ear-stunning bellow of a garbage canister.
The updraft and roil of air in the canister's wake pulled him up like a fly caught in a dust devil. Deafened by the noise, wings shuddering uncontrollably, his palms hot with the frantic buzz of the sensors, he wrapped the wings tightly to his sides to break loose from the strongest part of the field, fell for some distance, caught the field gradient at a usable intensity, and spread the wings once again. The result at least an illusion of control.
Across the pit, another canister roared through a port in the lower shield and was shunted by the tractor fields to its next port. And another. A volley was under way.
Obi-Wan had no idea where Anakin was, or whether he was still alive. And until he gained more than just rudimentary control of the wings, with less reliance on luck, his Padawan's circumstance mattered little.
The goal of the garbage pit race was to fly across the convex surface of the lower shield, drop through a port not currently fully charged with an acceleration field or filled with a rising canister, and then do it all again for the next two shields below that, until one arrived at the bottom of the pit.
Once at the bottom, all a contestant had to do was grab a scale from a garbage worm, while still airborne, stuff the prize into a pouch, and then ascend through the shields and fly into another tunnel to present the scale to the judge-that is, to the Greeter, who controlled nearly all the action in these affairs.
Garbage not packaged for export into space was gathered from the pit's municipal territory, mixed into a slurry of silicone oils, spewed from the lowest ring of outfall tunnels, and processed by the worms. The worms took this less-toxic garbage and chewed it down to tiny pellets, removing any last bits of organics, plastic, or recoverable metal.
Garbage worms were huge, unfriendly, and essential to the efficient operation of the pit. The garbage worms had natural ancestors on other worlds, but Coruscant technicians, masters of the vital arts, had long since bred these monsters away from the limits of their origins. Arrayed in the silicone slurry like jumbled nests of thick cable, the slowly writhing worms reduced millions of tons of preprocessed pellets to carbon dioxide, methane, and other organics that floated in thick islands of pale yellow froth on the roiled surface of the silicone lake. Discarded metals and minerals and glasses sank and were scraped from the bottom of the basin by ponderous submerged droids.
It was said a garbage worm could actually eat a defunct hyperdrive core and survive . . . for a few seconds. But that was seldom expected of them.
There were a great many worms in the lake of silicone at the bottom of the pit. Their scales were large and loose, glittered like diamonds, and were prized by the Greeter, who sold them to a small but select market of collectors as sports memorabilia.
Anakin performed a roll and looked up. The Blood Carver was on his left now. The other contestants had leapt after them, so the race was on after all. The tunnel master must have decided that the disruption only added to the sport.
Anakin could think of no better plan than to win the race by staying far from the reach of the Blood Carver, present a worm scale to the Greeter, and return to the Temple before anyone noticed he was missing. He could be back in training with Obi-Wan inside of an hour, and he would sleep well tonight, with no bad dreams, exhausted and justified on a deep level not yet penetrated by Jedi discipline.
He would have to disguise his wrist wound, of course. It did not appear too bad, on cursory inspection, all he could manage in flight.
Time to pick his port, tuck, and drop like a stone once again-a stone in complete control.
Which is where Anakin always wanted to be.
Obi-Wan picked himself up from the broad curved surface of the shield and quickly, with Jedi expertise, assessed his physical condition. He was bruised, frustrated-he quickly damped that, for frustration could easily lead to self-defeating anger-but he had avoided breaking any bones. He was also winded, but he recovered even as he looked for the other racers.
Anakin circled in a slowly ascending spiral over the center of the shield and about a hundred meters above it. A second golden figure performed a quick, leaflike downward spiral about a hundred meters above Anakin. A third and fourth were ascribing broad arcs around the perimeter.
Obi-Wan focused on Anakin. He prepared his wings for another liftoff, just as he saw his Padawan tuck like a diver and drop out of sight through the shield's central hole.
Obi-Wan ran to the lip of the nearest port, about twenty meters distant. He made sure his wings were properly folded and could be easily swept out and expanded. His feet broke through gluey tractor fields on the shield's curved surface. The air sizzled around him. His insides felt as if he were marching through the worst thunderstorm on the most violent gas-giant planet.
Drifts of frozen moisture flurried around him in the wake of a canister as it screamed through a port less than fifty meters to his right. The cyclonic updraft nearly lifted him from his feet, and he did not know if he could muster
the strength to stand upright once more against the local field lines.
Obi-Wan Kenobi, like Qui-Gon Jinn, was no supporter of training by punishment. Recognition of mistakes by the apprentice was almost always sufficient. Still, with shame, he saw in a dark part of his thoughts that he was planning harsh words, extreme trials, and many, many extra chores for Anakin Skywalker, and not just to improve his Padawan's perspective on life.
Anakin felt a pure kind of joy as he spread his wings and caught a field on the next lower level. The beauty of the ion trails, the lightning that played continuously between plumes of discharge smoke and brightened the distant walls of the pit, the drumbeat roar every five seconds of ascending canisters was beautiful, but more important, they all, with one almost-living voice, called out a challenge greater than anything he had experienced on Tatooine, including the Boonta Eve Podrace.
This was a place most would find terrifying, where most beings would certainly die, yet he was only a boy, a mere child, a former slave, relying not on Jedi training so much as raw native courage. He was alone, happy to be alone! He would gladly live out the rest of his life in this kind of immediate peril if he could simply forget the past failures that haunted him at night, whenever he tried to sleep. The failures-and the terrifying sense of carrying something beyond his power to control.
The dark empty boots that trod the worst of his nightmares.
Again, he picked out his port, near the shield center, where few canisters were launched. He could feel the pulse of the huge gun carriage beneath this lowest shield. His senses were tuned to the rhythm of that rotating launcher, bigger than the entire Jedi Temple. Anakin listened for the hesitation, the brief silence followed by a bass grind and chuff before a ring of canisters was chambered and fired. Best, of course, to drop through a port during a lull between discharges, and away from a port where a canister had recently passed, with its flux of gases, updrafts, lightning, and blue ion trails.