Kenobi, Rex, and the troops wouldn’t get a second chance if Ahsoka didn’t get it right the first time.
The Force was with him: the droids were pretty dim. They responded to his provocation rather than identifying Ahsoka as the priority threat. More of them erupted from the ground, massing around him and driving him back toward a single crumbling wall on the perimeter, the last remnant of a bombed building. His focus was on Ahsoka. Would she make it? If she didn’t, that was too bad, but he had to kill that generator one way or another.
I can think that so easily. I can think that I might have to die.
The odd thing was that it was happening to another Anakin, not him, and he carried on regardless, drawing the droids away from his Padawan. He disconnected, trance-like.
Who’s expendable? All of us? None?
He batted away an orange droid, kicked another off its legs and cut it in half as it fell. He was pressed against the wall now. Anyone who thought Jedi never got themselves in tight corners—well, he was human, Force abilities or not.
And I can die like any man.
“Ready!” Ahsoka yelled. “All primed!”
Anakin looked away from the droids for a second. The mass of charges he and Ahsoka had carried all this way, much of that distance on their hands and knees, formed a mesh of lights blinking in synchrony. A faint beep-beep-beep carried on the air.
Whatever happened now, the shield would—had to—be destroyed. The moment of triumph was slapped down hard by a different kind of adrenal rush, the realization that he now had to get them both out of there alive. The droids were relatively compact, not hulking SBDs, but in these numbers their persistence would eventually overwhelm even a Jedi who wanted very badly to live.
Ahsoka cut and slashed her way toward him. He wanted to tell her to save herself, to run and not stop running until she was back with Kenobi and Rex. And he’d have expected her to run just as he told her; not because she’d follow orders, but because he felt that, in the end, nobody would save him in the way he so desperately wanted to save them.
But he didn’t get a chance to find out. She stopped dead in the crowd of droids and stared up past him at the wall.
It wasn’t until she reached out her hand and he felt what she was doing that his stomach lurched.
She was Force-pulling the wall down on top of him.
“Don’t move, Skyguy . . .”
“Don’t!”
“Trust me. Don’t move a muscle.”
“No! No!”
He was plunged into rumbling shadow. His instinct made him duck and cover his head, still clutching his lightsaber. A whump like an explosion hit him and he couldn’t breathe; he was sucking in choking dust. Something hit him in the leg. Grit peppered his face. He spat and coughed, trying to gulp in clean air, but there wasn’t any. The sun had vanished. He struggled in a gray, smothering fog.
I’m dead, I’m dead, what a stupid way to go—
It took him a few moments to realize that the wall hadn’t crushed him. He found himself squatting in a well of clear ground a little wider than his shoulders, surrounded by rubble and metal. A droid’s arm was flailing, making a repetitive urr-urr-urr noise as its servos struggled. He spat and gasped. He felt as if he’d inhaled every scrap of pulverized permacrete on the planet.
“Are you okay, Master? Come on, we can’t hang around.”
Anakin looked up to see an outline of a small figure with head-tails. His eyelashes were caked with dust. Something scratched his eyeball. He spat on his finger instinctively to wipe his eye clear, but doing that just ground more debris into it.
But he wasn’t dead. The kinetic force of the collapsing wall had effectively detonated a small bomb in his face, but he was alive. And the droids weren’t.
“How the—”
“Window,” she said. “I could see there was a gap where a window had been. Come on.”
“You could have killed me!”
“No, I knew exactly what I was doing.” Her tone was faintly offended—Anakin could hear it despite the ringing in his ears. “I’m a Togruta. We’ve got much better visuospatial awareness than humans. I knew the window gap would clear you . . . as long as you stood still, anyway.” She peered down at him. He could see her better now. His eyes were running with tears from the irritating grit. “We’ve got to get clear before I can detonate the charges.”
Anakin felt both angry and churlishly ungrateful at once. She’d saved his life. How many times had he calculated a lightsaber sweep so finely that it almost shaved an ally to take out an enemy?
Did he really need rescuing by a green Padawan who’d landed only a few hours ago?
She reached down into the pit and extended an arm. “Come on, Skyguy,” she said. “Rex is counting on us.”
GRAND ARMY CANNON BATTERY, CRYSTAL CITY
Rex hadn’t ordered the gunners to open fire with the main cannon yet, but he couldn’t leave it much longer.
Men were falling around him. The medics were at full stretch. The last platoons of troopers had dragged twisted railings into place to block the droid advance, filling the gaps with chunks of SBD casings and anything they could lay their hands on. They’d excavated a crude trench in front of it with grenades, wide and deep enough to stop the clankers from overrunning them for a few more minutes, and filled it with liquid fuel before setting it alight.
And that was all they had left. Rex stared through the flames and the shimmering heat haze at an approaching wall of droids and tanks that simply would not stop.
“I’m out of ideas, sir,” said Sergeant Coric. He gestured to one of the artillery pieces behind them. “Other than making them come and get it.”
Rex calculated a final firing solution that would cause maximum destruction of the armored column and droids. If they placed a few rounds just so, set them to cook off at chest height rather than on impact, the explosion would flatten anything standing and the shrapnel from the droids would kill any organics standing in the blast radius.
“Let’s do that, Sergeant,” he said. “Because I don’t do surrenders.”
He looked up at the orange glow of the shield overhead and reloaded. It was too late. Where the stang was Kenobi? Rex hadn’t given up, but it was a close-run thing, and he never counted on holovid-style miracles. Just his Deece—his DC-15 rifle—and his buddies.
In the end, that was all any soldier had.
“Sir, sir, comlink! Sep channel!” One of the troopers tapped urgently on the side of his own helmet to indicate to Rex to switch channels. “Kenobi!”
Rex stopped dead, forgetting the plasma bolts scorching the air above his head for a moment. He cut into the Sep chatter and listened.
“Surrender . . . Kenobi wants to talk terms . . .”
No, not the general.
“. . . having a drink with Loathsom . . .”
Definitely not. Kenobi wouldn’t surrender, at least not without warning Rex, but if he’d been captured . . . no, Kenobi was pulling a stunt on Loathsom, stalling for time.
He obviously wasn’t dead. And that meant he was still reassuringly dangerous.
“You reckon that’s genuine, sir, or a Sep trick to demoralize us?”
Rex indicated the chaos and destruction all around them with a jerk of his thumb. “No, that’s the demoralizing stuff.” He turned to his handful of troopers. “And has it worked?”
“No, sir!”
“Come on then, tinny boys, do your worst,” Rex muttered, and reloaded for a final stand before resorting to the cannon barrage. But he really didn’t want to die just yet. “And bring your Kerko buddies, too.”
He raised the rifle. In a way, it didn’t matter any longer where he aimed, but he sighted up on a Kerkoiden tank commander with his head sticking out the top turret. The reticle settled on the Kerkoiden’s face. Rex’s finger contracted slowly on the trigger, he held his breath for a moment, and—
He heard the explosion from clear across the city. It was a distant boomp more than
a bang; and then the sky changed color.
It was smoke-smeared blue again, not orange.
“Shield down!” Coric yelled. “They’ve lost their shields.”
Thank you thank you thank you . . .
Rex squeezed off one shot anyway, from sheer relief, just as the tank commander looked up in horror at the absence of a shield. He was an ex–tank commander now. “Gunner? Take take take!”
The battered remnant of the 501st contingent was more ludicrously outnumbered than ever, but it had cannon, and the tide had turned. Fire ripped into the droid ranks and blew the hatches off tanks. Flame ripped from every weld, seam, and aperture. Rex allowed himself to feel it personally now, all his dead men, all the lives snuffed out, and he jumped through the flames billowing from the defensive trench to empty clip after clip into the stalled Separatist advance.
For a moment he couldn’t work out why an army that still outnumbered them hundreds to one didn’t just roll over their position, shield or no shield, but then the static and crackle in his helmet comlink gave him the answer. Republic ships, inbound; he heard Admiral Yularen trying to raise Kenobi. LAAT/i gunships were coming. He could hear them now, and so could the Seps. The distinctive sound of the larty’s drive meant life and hope.
A pilot’s voice interrupted their helmet comm circuit. “Five-oh-first, keep your heads down while we do some housecleaning . . .”
“Loathsom’s ordered a surrender,” said the trooper monitoring the Sep voice traffic. “The blockade’s broken, sir. General Yoda’s here.”
“And there was I thinking it was our persuasive artillery and manly demeanor.” Rex waved his men out of the larty’s path. Two skimmed overhead and a staccato burst of fire sent a line of pluming smoke and flame ripping through the droid tanks. “Hey, we’ve got at least two men still alive out there. Check your HUDs.”
Despite the warning from the pilot, Rex and Coric picked their way through the rubble, responding to the lifesigns transmitted automatically by each man’s armor-mounted monitors. It took some time. One set of lifesigns stopped while they were moving rubble.
If only you’d showed up an hour or two earlier, Admiral.
Rex shook away the resentful thought as soon as it formed. This was the reality of the victory, if a victory was what this was.
SEVEN
Yes, I did sit down and talk surrender terms with Loathsom, over a cup of tarine tea. He became most ungentlemanly when he realized it was his surrender we were talking about. Have these people no manners? He didn’t even offer me a sweet-sand cookie.
GENERAL KENOBI, explaining his “surrender”
HANGAR DECK, JEDI CRUISER
AHSOKA STOOD IN front of a group of clone troopers, making expressive arm movements, head-tails bobbing as she talked. They sat on the ammo crates, helmets stacked on the deck, watching her with studied concentration.
Anakin caught only the words wall and droids as he crossed the deck. The troopers burst out laughing.
“You never, ma’am,” one of them said. “That must have made the general’s day.”
Anakin sighed. “Rex, I’m never going to live that down, am I?”
“Give her a moment to enjoy it, sir.” The captain strode beside him. “It’s all part of winding down after you’ve been scared witless and survived to tell the tale. The boys know that. She did pretty well, you have to admit.”
Ahsoka didn’t seem to sense him coming up behind her. The clone troopers saw him, though, and stood to attention. She paused in midsentence and turned.
“Humility is a requirement for a Jedi,” Anakin said quietly.
She looked stricken. “I was—”
One of the troopers interrupted. “Apologies, sir, but we asked questions. Padawan Tano was debriefing, not bragging.”
There was a telling second as Anakin saw Ahsoka’s eye movement to her impromptu audience, a kind of surprised gratitude. Rex slapped his gloves together with a clap that made her flinch.
“Come on, you lot,” he barked at the troopers. “You haven’t got time to warm those crates with your backsides. What are you trying to do, hatch something? Get back to work.”
They scattered. Face was saved; Rex was good at that kind of thing. Anakin seized the respite and steered Ahsoka to one side, while Rex stood a tactful five paces from the conversation, both there and not there.
“I was just keeping up their morale,” Ahsoka said. “They need to know we take the same risks that they do. That we’ll sit down and talk to them, and know their names, instead of just snapping our fingers and calling them clone. Nobody likes being treated as if they don’t matter.”
For all her bluster, she had her very adult, perceptive moments. Anakin knew how it felt not to matter. “Well . . . they seem to like you. That’s good.”
“They’ve lost so many of their friends. Can’t you feel their pain?”
“They’re soldiers,” Anakin said. “It’s the job.”
“It’s yours, too, but you hurt all the time.”
Anakin didn’t look at Rex, and Rex didn’t look at him, but the captain took a few slow paces and put a little more distance between them, appearing engrossed in something via his helmet comlink. He was obviously anxious to avoid hanging around for what threatened to be a very personal exchange.
“You’re right, Padawan,” Anakin said. She was, and he didn’t want to discuss it; agreeing with her served both purposes. “We all handle our loss in our own way. Thank you for thinking of the men’s welfare.”
Ahsoka had been looking directly into his face, but then her gaze darted again to something behind him. She didn’t just have keen focus. Her peripheral vision was exceptional too. Anakin turned to see Kenobi walking slowly toward him, deep in conversation with Master Yoda. He decided to meet them halfway.
“Master Obi-Wan,” he said, bowing. “Master Yoda.”
Yoda fixed him with a critical stare. “Trouble you have with your new Padawan, I hear.”
“I was explaining the situation to Master Yoda,” Kenobi said.
“If not ready for the responsibility of a Padawan you are, then perhaps to Obi-Wan she should go . . .”
Anakin didn’t take kindly to those kinds of psychological games, not even from Master Yoda—especially from him.
Remember me, Master? The Chosen One? The one you didn’t want to train?
“There are no problems, Master,” he said calmly. “Who could possibly make such a far-reaching judgment about a youngling’s future in such a short time, anyway? That would be rash. Unfair, even. It’s our duty to nurture talent and support it.”
If Yoda felt the barbs in Anakin’s comment, he didn’t show any reaction. “Mature your judgment is becoming. Perhaps teach you she will, as much as you teach her.”
Anakin bit back a riposte, because he would not rise to the bait. He bowed instead. “I shall do my utmost, Master.”
“Then go with you she will, to the Teth system.”
Anakin felt he was walking into something set up for him. Did you know this was coming, Obi-Wan? No, he wouldn’t show dissent. “Has the fighting spread that far? I didn’t think the Separatist army had any presence there.”
“No army. But kidnapped, Jabba the Hutt’s son has been.”
It took a couple of seconds to sink in. He couldn’t hide his disgust, not completely anyway. “You want me to rescue a Hutt?”
It was a test. It had to be. However much it rankled, Anakin was determined to pass it.
Kenobi dived in immediately. “We need Jabba’s backing to fight this war, Anakin. If we can’t use Hutt-controlled routes, we can’t fight in the Outer Rim. It’s that simple. I’m going to negotiate with Jabba while you retrieve the hostage.”
“Hostage . . .”
“His baby son. Rotta.”
Anakin wondered whether it was expedience, simple logic—both he and Kenobi spoke Huttese and were experienced in covert missions—or some exercise in character building. Yoda knew Anakin’s past, that he
and his mother had been slaves of a Hutt. Jabba raked off a cut from the slave trade, too, so he was personally connected to Anakin’s boyhood misery, and even his mother’s ultimate fate. Callous didn’t begin to cover it.
Anakin’s instinctive reaction would have been to tell Jabba that it was too bad and that people you loved got killed all the time.
But the bit about the need to get Jabba on their side—that made sense. Anakin swallowed his hatred and did what he knew he had to, because he had to be better than this.
Ahsoka seemed to realize the tension wasn’t about her. She took a pace back and stood beside Rex, who’d followed discreetly. “I’ll get the troops organized,” she said. “Ready when you are, Master.”
“I’d better get under way,” Kenobi said. “Mustn’t keep Jabba waiting.”
Anakin bowed and walked away with as much serenity as he could muster. He didn’t want the Masters knowing the task had hit a raw nerve. He slipped into a machinery space off the docking bay for a little privacy, sent a message to Padmé to let her know he was fine and that he missed her—no mention of close calls with collapsing walls, or crazy Padawans—and centered himself again.
I’m not a kid. I shouldn’t be feeling like this. It’s not the Jedi way. Maybe Yoda was right; I was too old to train. I can’t be like them, all serene and unfeeling.
He was the Chosen One, they told him. He was supposed to bring balance to the Force. Anakin thought that some little extra support might go with being the Chosen One, a helping hand or at least some understanding from the Jedi Council, but instead he was passed around like an unwelcome burden, ending up with Qui-Gon Jinn and then Kenobi because nobody else would have him.