Rogue Planet

Chapter 51

Jabitha walked across the barren field, climbing up and over ribbons of once-molten rock. She breathed in thin, ragged jerks. The air was too thin for her. She was used to the luxurious and rich atmosphere of the northern valleys, not the desolate and dead atmosphere on her father's mountain.

"The palace should be over there," she said, her voice little more than a whisper.

Anakin's vision swam for a moment, and he worked a small Jedi technique on his blood pressure and chemistry to give himself more strength and clarity with less oxygen.

Ke Daiv stood a few steps behind them, lance blade ready. Anakin measured all the distances, estimated the times. The Blood Carver was closer to Jabitha. He could easily kill her before Anakin could reach him, and what would Anakin do to him anyway?

Bank the anger. Bank the frustration. Convert them and store the energy.

Anakin gave a small nod. Jabitha turned. "There's almost nothing left," she said. And then again, "Where's my father? Where are all the others who worked here?"

"They are all dead," Ke Daiv suggested. "Our only concern is fuel."

"There were fuel reserves near the palace," Jabitha said with a strange tone of defiance. "If we can't find the palace, we won't find the fuel!"

Anakin saw a corner of stone masonry jutting from a pile of rocky rubble about a hundred meters away. He turned to Ke Daiv. "Maybe over there," he said.

Jabitha was on the edge of collapse. The Blood Carver seemed to find the thin air no trouble at all. Anakin wondered why they hadn't noticed it when they were first taken here. Surely the palace had been in this condition already. Something had worked an even more startling deception on them.

The girl stumbled, then turned in a daze and walked for the ruin as fast as she could. Anakin and Ke Daiv followed. Anakin made sure he was closest to the Blood Carver. He tracked the motions of the lance, the yellow and red glitter of the blade in the last of the sunset light. The mountain's peak, black and deep brick red at other times, was now a ghastly orange, backed by the cryptic glyphs of the sky mines, endlessly and hungrily searching. Beyond the violently calligraphed sky rose the pinwheel of the distant companion stars, purple against the orange and red and gold.

Anakin looked over his shoulder at their ship. We haven't even given her a name yet, he thought. What would Obi-Wan call her?

Jabitha's shoulders trembled. She was expending her little remaining energy on racking sobs. "The messages were all lies. Nobody came here, he said everything was fine. . But you!" She turned on Anakin. "You came here!"

"We saw the palace," Anakin said. "At least, we thought we did-"

"Fuel, and quickly," Ke Daiv insisted sharply. "The sky mines will drop low enough to find where we've landed. And others may come soon, as well."

"They'll sacrifice you, won't they?" Anakin said. The wall of the building loomed above them. A small door, possibly a service entrance, showed to the right, half- obscured by rubble. "They don't care what happens to you."

Ke Daiv did not dignify this with a response.

"Just what did you do to earn such disgrace?" Anakin asked. Without thinking, he tilted his head to one side, and three fingers on his right hand curled.

"I killed my benefactor's son," Ke Daiv said. "It was prophesied he would die from a severe head wound in battle. So his father beseeched the clan that his son would never fight. The clan agreed, but ordered him to go on a ritual hunt to fulfill his training. I was an orphan brought into their family, and the head of the clan appointed me to protect my benefactor's son. I accompanied him on the hunt. We fought with a wild feragriff in the ritual preserves on a moon over Coruscant." The Blood Carver's nose flaps had spread wide now, a motion Anakin had learned to interpret as uncertainty, questing for sensation, information, confirmation. He's weaker now. His past makes him weak, just like me.

Anakin saw Jabitha enter the doorway. She would not see.

"The prophecy came true. You killed him with a stray shot," Anakin finished the story.

"It was an accident," the Blood Carver murmured. Ke Daiv straightened. His face became sharp again, and he pushed the lance forward, poking at Anakin to get him to go through the door after the girl.

"No," Anakin said.

Sky mines jagged wildly just a few hundred meters overhead, their engines screeching in the thin air. Anakin saw another silhouette at an even greater distance: a droid starfighter. Just one. The invaders were concentrating their forces in the north, but sky mines were cheap. They could be spread everywhere. In time, they might even blanket the planet. Someone might be planning to kill all living things on Zonama Sekot: Jabitha, Gann, Sheekla Farrs, Shappa, Fitch, Vagno, Obi-Wan. And all the others.

"You still have honor," Anakin said. "You can still make up for what you did." But something else built inside, a shadow far thicker than the descending night. It could easily fill his being.

The Blood Carver had hurt Obi-Wan, threatened Jabitha, called Anakin a slave. For these things there was no possible redemption. The banked anger threatened to spill over, unconverted, pure and very raw, hot as a sun's core. Anakin's fingers curled tighter.

"My benefactor cursed me," Ke Daiv said.

Let it be done now. Anakin had made his decision, or it had been made for him. No matter.

Anakin let the fingers go straight.

Ke Daiv closed on the boy, swinging his lance. "Stop that," Anakin said coldly.

"What will you do, slave boy?"

It was the connection Anakin had sought, the link between his anger and his power. Like a switch being thrown, a circuit being connected, he returned full circle to the pit race, to the sting he had felt with the Blood Carver's first insult, with the first unfair and sneaky move that had sent Anakin tumbling off the apron. Then, back farther, to the dingy slave quarters on Tatooine, to the Boonta Eve Podrace and the treachery of the Dug, and to the last sight of Shmi, still in bondage to the disgusting Watto, to all the insults and injuries and shames and night sweats and disgrace piled upon disgrace that he had never asked for, never deserved, and had borne with almost infinite patience.

Call it instinct, animal nature, call it the upwelling of hatred and the dark side-in Anakin Skywalker, all this lay just beneath the surface, at the end of its journey out of a long, deep cave leading down to unimaginable strength.

"No! Stop it, please!" Anakin yelled. "Help me stop it!" The rumbling of his ascending power drowned out this plea for his master to come and prevent a hideous mistake. I am so afraid, so full of hate and anger. I still don't know how to fight.

Jabitha appeared in the doorway, eyes wide, watching the boy crouched low before the Blood Carver. Ke Daiv lifted his lance. What would have once seemed quick as lightning was now, in the eyes of the young Padawan, a slow, curiously protracted swing.

Anakin raised his hands in the twin and supremely graceful gestures of Jedi compulsion. Pure willful self flooded his tissues. The urge to protect and to destroy became one. He straightened and seemed to grow taller. His eyes became black as pitch.

"Stop it, please!" Anakin shouted. "I can't hold it back any longer!"