Before he made his decision, Anakin marveled at a phenomenon he had only heard about from other racers in tones of awe rising circles of plasma spheres, drifting as if imbued with purpose in the void above the first shield. They glowed orange and greenish blue, and he could even hear their fierce sizzle. To touch them was to be instantly fried. He watched a circle of these spheres explode with tinny pops, and through the space where they had been, a particularly fierce bolt of lightning flew like a javelin through a hoop.
This raised his neck hair in a way no static discharge could explain. It was as if he faced the primitive gods of the garbage pit, the real masters of this place, yet to think this even for a moment went against all of his training. The Force is everywhere and demands nothing, neither obeisance nor awe.
But this, of course, was what he needed to experience in order to forget. He needed to strip down to pure savagery, to that place below his name, his memory, his self, where ominous shadows dwelled, and where one could turn in an instant from the light side of the Force to the dark and hardly know they were different.
Anakin, pure instinct, a mote of dust in the game, tucked his wings once more and dropped through the central port in the shield.
He did not notice, fifty meters above him, that the Blood Carver did the same.
The gun carriage sat on its elevated mount two hundred meters below the shield, going through its automated motions. From tracks on all sides it received loaded and charged canisters, each falling into a firing chamber with only a bulbous tip protruding. Each canister bore a specific designation in the carriage program, a specified route through the four shields, with four chances to be accelerated into a specific orbit. The charge beneath the canister would carry it only the first three hundred meters, to the first shield. Thereafter the tractor fields and magnetic-pulse engines took over. It was a sophisticated yet centuries-old design, rugged, durable, duplicated all over Coruscant.
The air above the rotating carriage was almost unbreathable. Fumes from the exploding charges-simple chemical explosives- could not be vented and processed fast enough to prevent a toxic pall forming below the first shield. Added to this perpetual burnt-rubber haze were the miasmic vapors from the silicone-filled basin below the gun carriage.
It was here that the most primitive-not to mention the largest-creatures on Coruscant lived and performed their functions in a perpetual twilight, illuminated only by the fitful glows of work lights hung from the undersides of the gun carriage supports. The largest worms were hundreds of meters long and three or four meters wide.
Anakin glided to one side of the lowest level and alighted on a carriage support. He could feel through his feet the rotation and launching of the chambered canisters. The immense mass of the ferrocarbon structure shuddered under his flight slippers.
He had conserved most of his fuel for this moment. The tractor fields below the carriage were weak, sufficient only to discourage the worms from rising to suck at the supports. Once he had plucked loose a glassy worm scale, he would have to jet upward to the first shield and catch a canister updraft, then be pulled through a port to the void above the first shield.
This would be insanely difficult.
All the better. Anakin, eyes wide open, surveyed the dim, chaotic brew of worms below. He locked one wing briefly, pulled loose an arm, and wrapped a breather mask over his mouth and nose. He then took this opportunity to attach his optical cup and pulled down bubble goggles to protect his eyes from the silicone spray. Then he tensed to leap.
But he had made a Jedi apprentice's first mistake-to direct all one's attention to a single goal or object. Focus was one thing, narrow perception another, and Anakin had ignored everything above him.
He felt a prickle in his senses and looked to one side just in time to catch, with the top of his head, a blow aimed at his temple. The Blood Carver glided past and landed on the next stanchion, watching with satisfaction as the young Jedi tumbled headlong toward the churning worm-mass.
Then the Blood Carver followed, long neck stretched forward, nostril flaps clapped together in a wedge, gliding down to finish his day's work.
Anakin's fall was cushioned by an island of the thick, smelly froth that floated across the lake of worms. He sank slowly into the froth, releasing more noxious gases, until a burst of ammonia jerked him to stunned consciousness. His eyes stung. The blow to his head had knocked his goggles and breather mask awry.
First things first. He spread his wings and unbuckled his harness, then rolled over to distribute his weight evenly along the wings. They acted like snowshoes on the froth, and his rate of sinking slowed. The wings were bent and useless now anyway, even if he could tug them from the foaming mass.
The Blood Carver had just murdered him. That death would take its own sweet time to arrive was no relief from its certainty. The broad island of pale yellow undulated with the rise and fall of worm bodies. A constant crackling noise came from all around bubbles bursting in the froth. And he heard a more sinister sound, if that was possible the slow, low hiss of the worms sliding over and under and around each other.
Anakin could barely see. I'm n goner. Reaching out to put himself in tune with the Force might be soothing, but he had not yet reached the point in his training of being able to levitate, at least not more than a few centimeters.
In truth, Anakin Skywalker felt so mortified by his lack of attention, so ashamed by his actions in being here, in the pit, in the first place, that his death seemed secondary to much larger failures.
He was not made to be a Jedi, whatever Qui-Gon Jinn had thought of him. Yoda and Mace Windu had been correct all along.
But acid awareness of his stupidity did not require that he take further insults in stride. He felt the noiseless flight of the Blood Carver a few meters overhead and almost casually ducked in time to miss a second blow.
A Jedi does not contemplate revenge. But Anakin's brain was in full gear now, his thinking clarified by the ache in his skull and the dull throb in his arm. The Blood Carver knew who he was, where he was from-too much of a coincidence to be called a slave, this far from the lawless fringe systems where slavery was common. Someone was either stalking Anakin personally or Jedi in general.
Anakin doubted he had attracted much attention during his short life, or was worthy of an assassin's interest by himself. Far more likely that the Temple was being watched and that some group or other was hoping to take down the Jedi one by one, picking the weakest and most exposed first.
That would be me.
The Blood Carver was a threat to the people who had freed Anakin from slavery, who had taken him in and given him a new life away from Tatooine. If he was never to be a Jedi, or even live to maturity, he could remove at least one threat against that brave and necessary order.
He pulled up his breather mask, took a lungful of filtered air, and examined his foundering platform. A wing brace could be broken free and swung about as a weapon. He stooped carefully, balancing his weight, and grasped the slender brace. Strong in flight, the brace yielded to his off-center pressure, and he bent it back and forth until it snapped. At the opposite end, where the wings socketed in the rotator, he made another bend, stamping quickly with his booted foot, then jerked the end free and snatched away the flimsy lubricating sheath. The rotator ball made a fair club.
But the entire set of wings weighed less than five kilograms. The club, about a hundred grams. He would have to swing with all his might to give the impact meaning.
The Blood Carver swooped low again, his legs drawn back, triple-jointed arms hanging like the pedipalps on a clawswift on Naboo.
He was focused completely on the Padawan.
Making the same mistake as Anakin had.
With a heart-leap of hope and joy, Anakin saw Obi-Wan winging over the Blood Carver. The boy's master extended the beam on his lightsaber as he dropped with both feet on the assailant's wings and snapped them like straws.
Two swipes of the humming blade and the outer tips of the Blood Car
ver's wings fell away.
The Blood Carver gave a muffled cry and flipped on his back. The fuel in his wingtip tanks caught fire and spun him in a brilliant pinwheel, elevating him almost twenty meters before sputtering out.
He fell without a sound and slipped into the lake a dozen meters away, raising a small, gleaming plume of oily silicone. Ghosts of burning methane swirled briefly above him.
Obi-Wan recovered and raised his wings just in time to end up buried to his waist in the froth. The look on his face as he collapsed the lightsaber was pure Obi-Wan patience and faint exasperation, as if Anakin had just failed a spelling test.
Anakin reached out to help his Master stay upright. "Keep your wings up, keep them high!" he shouted.
"Why?" Obi-Wan said. "I cannot vault the two of us out of this mess."
"I still have fuel!"
"And I have almost none. These are terrible devices, very difficult to control."
"We can combine our fuel!" Anakin said, his upper face and eyes bright in the murk.
The froth rippled alarmingly. At the edge of their insubstantial island of foam, a gleaming silver-gray tube as wide as four arm spans arched above the silicone slurry. Its skin was crusted with stuck-on bits of garbage, and its side was studded with a lateral line of small black eyes trimmed in brilliant blue.
The eyes poked out on small stalks and examined them curiously. The worm seemed to ponder whether they were worth eating.
Even now, Anakin observed the prize scales glittering along the worm's length. The best I've ever seen-us big as my hand!
Obi-Wan was sinking rapidly. He blinked at the haze of silicone mist and noxious gases wafting over them.
Anakin reached down with all the delicacy and balance he could muster and unhooked the fuel cylinders from his wings, taking care to disconnect the feed tubes to the outboard jets and pinch off their nozzles.
Obi-Wan concentrated on keeping himself from sinking any deeper into the sticky foam.
Another arch of worm segment, high and wide as a pedestrian walkway, thrust itself with a liquid squeal from the opposite side of the diminishing patch. More eyes looked them over. The arch quivered as if with anticipation.
"I'll never be this stupid again," Anakin said breathlessly as he attached the tanks to Obi-Wan's wings.
"Tell it to the Council," Obi-Wan said. "I have no doubt that's where we'll both be, if we manage to accomplish six impossible things in the next two minutes."
The two worm segments vibrated in unison and hissed through the silicone like tugged ropes, proving themselves to be one long creature as they rose high overhead. More coils surrounded them other, bigger worms. Obviously, the Jedi-Master and apprentice-looked tasty, and now a competition was under way. The segments whipped back and forth, striking the edges of the island. The froth flew up in hissing puffs, until there was hardly more remaining than an unwieldy plug.
Anakin gripped Obi-Wan's shoulder with one hand. "Obi-Wan, you are the greatest of all the Jedi," he told him earnestly.
Obi-Wan glared at his Padawan.
"Could you give us just a little boost. . . ," Anakin pleaded. "You know, up and out?"
Obi-Wan did, and Anakin lit off their jets at the very same instant.
The jolt did not distract him from reaching out with outstretched fingers, grazing a curve of worm skin, and grabbing a scale. Somehow they lifted to the first shield and slipped into the updraft of a discharged canister. Spinning, knocked almost senseless, they were drawn up through a port.
Obi-Wan felt Anakin's small arms around his waist.
"If that's how it's done . . . ," the boy said, and then something-was it is his Padawan's newfound skill at levitation?- lifted them through the next shield as if they lay in the palm of a giant hand.
Obi-Wan Kenobi had never felt so close to such a powerful connection with the Force, not in Qui-Gon, nor Mace Windu. Not even in Yoda.
"I think we're going to make it!" Anakin said.
Chapter 2
The opportunities are endless," Raith Sienar said as he walked along the factory parapet. Beside him strolled Commander Tarkin of the Republic Outland Regions Security Force. They might have been brothers. Both were in their early thirties. Both were thin and wiry, with high-arching bony brows, piercing blue eyes, aristocratic faces, and attitudes to match. And both wore robes of senator ial favor, showing extraordinary service to the senate over the past decade.
"You're speaking of the Republic?" Tarkin asked with more than a hint of disdain. His training-he came from an old and well-established military family-gave his voice a particular edge, both world-weary and amused.
"Not at all," Sienar said, smiling at his old friend. Beyond and below the parapet, four Advanced Project ships approached completion, black, sleek, smaller than previous models, and very fast indeed. "I haven't received an interesting contract from the Republic for seven years."
"What about these?" Tarkin asked.
"Private contracts with the Trade Federation, several mining firms, others. Very lucrative, so long as I don't sell my very best weapons to the wrong buyers. Every ship I make, I equip with weapons, as you doubtless know. Much more profitable that way, but tricky at times. So I keep the best in reserve ... for my most generous customers."
Tarkin smiled at this answer. "Then I may have useful news for you," he said. "I've just come from a secret meeting. Chancellor Palpatine has finally forced a stand-down over the Naboo incident. The Trade Federation security forces will soon be disbanded. In the next few months, they are to be assimilated into Republic forces and placed at the disposal of the senate. All will comply-even Outland Mining-or face a centralized and much more powerful military response." Tarkin used a small hand scope to look over the details on the new ships. Each was twenty meters wide, with broad, flat cooling vanes terminating their wings. The compartments were compact, spherical, hardly luxurious. "If they are your main source of income, your position now is, shall we say, compromised?"
Sienar tipped his head to one side. He had already caught wind of Chancellor Palpatine's decree. "The Trade Federation had large reserves of money, and granted, they gave me many more interesting contracts than the Republic did, but I've kept my friends in the senate. I will miss Trade Federation patronage, but I don't see a complete collapse of Trade Federation influence for some time. As far as the Republic is concerned . . . their specifications are neither inspired nor inspiring. And when I do take a Republic contract, I'm forced to work with aging engineers the senators trust. I hope that changes."
"I've heard they do not look favorably upon you. You criticize them too freely, Raith. When your present customers pass into history, have you considered subcontracting?" Tarkin asked with a slightly taunting air.
Sienar gestured with his spidery fingers. "I hope you recognize I am versatile. After all, we've known each other for ten years."
Tarkin gave him an oh, please! glance. "I'm still a young man, Raith. Don't make me feel old." They advanced to the end of the parapet and along a suspended walkway leading to an octagonal, transparisteel-walled room suspended thirty meters above the center of the factory floor. "These, pardon me, look like advanced fighters to me. Very pretty they are, too."
Sienar nodded. "Experimental models for protecting freight haulers on the fringe. The Republic no longer polices some of the most lucrative routes. I presume with the Trade Federation forces integrated, they will once more. At any rate, these ships have already been paid for."
"They are storable?"
"Of course. Multistack in spare holds. All to spec. A true surprise for raiders. Now. Enough about my business worries. About our relationship-"
Tarkin rested his hands on the rail. "I've made new contacts," he said. "Very useful contacts. I can tell you very little more."
"You know I'm an ambitious man," Sienar said with a look he hoped seemed both hungry and dignified. Tarkin would not be easy to fool. "I have plans, Tarkin, extraordinary plans, which impress anyone with imagin
ation."
"I know plenty of people with imagination" Tarkin said. Perhaps too much imagination at times ..." They continued walking. Assembly droids bustled beneath them, and a suspended crane hauled three fuselages in a nested carrier just meters away. "In truth, I've come to pick your brains, tell you a remarkable fairy tale, and enlist you in my cause, old friend. But not out here, not out in the open."
Inside the transparisteel-walled design room, closed to all but Sienar and his special guests, Tarkin sat in a comfortable chair of inflatable plastic, one of Sienar's design. Next to him a large dark gray holographic table hummed faintly.
Sienar dropped black security curtains all around the lighted center. The men were absorbed by an eerie silence.
Tarkin tried to speak, but no sound could be heard. Sienar handed him a small, nut-sized silver vocoder connected by a flexible wire to a beautifully machined plasteel mouthpiece. He showed Tarkin how to insert the button into his ear and allow the mouthpiece to float just in front of his lips.
Now they could hear each other.
"I do small favors for certain people," Tarkin said. "I once balanced these favors between opposing sides. Lately, my efforts have become a bit more lopsided. Balance is no longer necessary."
Sienar stood before his old friend and listened intently. His tall, cleanly muscled body seemed to reject repose.
"Some of these people have an appreciation for fingers-not tentacles, my friend, not palps, but human fingers-reaching into a great many stellar soup bowls, testing the temperature to see if they are ready for the eating."
"Why the concern that they be human?"
"Humans are the future, Raith."
"Some of my best designers are not even remotely human."
"Yes, and we employ nonhumans wherever they are useful, for now. But mark my words, Raith. Humans are the future."
Raith noted the tension in Tarkin's voice. "So marked."
"Now listen closely. I'm going to tell you a tale of intrigue, wonderfully ornate, yet at its heart very simple. It involves a kind of spacecraft rare and little-seen, very expensive, of unknown manufacture, supposedly a toy for the wealthy. It may ultimately lead to a lost planet covered by a peculiar kind of forest, very mysterious. And it may soon involve the Jedi."