Jedi Trial (3 page)

Tonith did not present a very warlike figure. His height—he was over two meters tall—and his painfully thin physique and sallow complexion gave him a corpselike appearance; his long, equine face and blazing black eyes set in a skull-like head heightened this cadaverous aspect so that meeting him suddenly in a darkened companionway aboard the
Corpulentus
, his flagship, often gave his crew quite a start.

Count Dooku had picked Tonith to lead the force against Praesitlyn because of his proven ability as a planner. Commanding an army of droids was more like playing a game than engaging in actual combat. Living soldiers bled and died, had to be fed, experienced morale problems, knew fear and all the other emotions common to beings who could think. And though some might feel that using a droid army to inflict pain and death on a force composed of sentient beings was another matter, Tonith not only looked upon a battlefield dry-eyed, but found sustenance, meaning, and sublime purpose in the destruction of his enemies.

Pors Tonith not only looked like a corpse, but deep down inside him, where other beings had consciences, he was dead.

N
ejaa Halcyon was doing stretching exercises when Anakin Skywalker walked into the training area.

“I hope you’re ready for a workout,” Halcyon said in greeting.

“After the workout I’ve been giving my brain, I’m more than ready for a physical workout, Master Halcyon,” Anakin replied. “I feel the need to take it out on somebody.”

Halcyon laughed and gave a last stretch before drawing his lightsaber from his belt. “Before you try to take anything out on anybody, you’d better loosen up, or you’re going to be in too much pain to defend yourself.” He grinned. “Or maybe that’s what you want, to be too uncomfortable tomorrow to go back to the library.”

“I did my stretching on the way here,” Anakin said as he put his cloak aside and drew his lightsaber.

Halcyon sparred better than he had the first day, but so did Anakin. In the end, the Jedi Master bowed to the Padawan.

“You do very well. I need a sparring partner even more than I’d realized.” He shook his head sadly.
“Who would have believed that a mere Padawan could best me with a lightsaber?” Then he smiled. “Shall we do it again tomorrow?”

“I look forward to it even more than I looked forward to today,” Anakin answered with a broad grin.

They sparred again the next day, and the next, and the day after that. Each day, each improved, and each surprised the other with new moves and tricks.

After the first few days they didn’t immediately part company when their sparring was over, but sat and talked. The next day they talked for a longer time. And the day after that, they dined together.

“Obi-Wan speaks highly of you, you know,” Halcyon commented as they were relaxing over dessert.

“You know Obi-Wan?” Anakin asked, surprised.

“We’re old friends,” Halcyon said, nodding. “He’s a great one, Obi-Wan is. And very powerful in the Force. I believe he’ll become a member of the Jedi Council one day. You’re fortunate to have him as your Master.”

Anakin’s chest swelled with pride, then deflated just as quickly. “Maybe he’s too great.”

Halcyon cocked his head. “What do you mean?”

“He thinks my progress sometimes seems to be slow. Perhaps he’s too great, too busy to properly train me.”

Halcyon barked out a laugh that made nearby diners turn to look—but when they saw that he was a Jedi, their expressions of disapproval vanished and they returned to their own meals and conversations.

“Maybe you’re too impatient. But mostly, your progress isn’t as fast as it might be because you’re too busy fighting in a war. What you need is for this war
to end. Then you’ll be surprised at how rapidly your progress is recognized.”

“Do you really think so?”

“As sure as I know that nobody has ever impressed Obi-Wan with their potential as much as you have.”

Anakin shook his head. “Then why am I still a Padawan? We’re fighting a major war, and I could do more to help win it! I’m good enough to go on small missions, I’m good enough to fight under someone else’s command, but they think I’m not good enough to handle my own command!”

“Oh, you’re good enough,” Halcyon said. “I’ve watched you and listened to you these past few days, and I definitely think you’re good enough.”

Anakin reached out with his prosthetic hand and clamped onto Halcyon’s forearm. “Would you speak to the Council for me, Master Halcyon?” he asked earnestly.

Halcyon’s shoulders slumped. “Anakin, right now, the only way the Council would listen to me is to decide against whatever I recommend.” He shook his head again. “No, having me speak to them for you would be counterproductive.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sure the Council is aware of your abilities. You’ll begin your Trials when you are ready, Anakin.”

“We’ll see,” Anakin Skywalker replied, unconvinced.

L
uck, good or bad, is the great unknown factor in war. Often the outcome of battles, the fate of entire worlds, is determined by luck.

It was luck of one sort or the other that placed Lieutenant Erk H’Arman of the Praesitlyn defense force and his Torpil T-19 starfighter on patrol along the southern coast of the continent on which the Intergalactic Communications Center was located, about 150 kilometers from the center itself, when the invasion began. He and his wingmate were cruising at a leisurely 650 kilometers per hour at twenty thousand meters. For the Torpil T-19, 650 kph was almost standing still.

“Looks like a big sandstorm down there,” Erk’s wingmate, Ensign Pleth Strom, commented. Neither pilot bothered to scan the terrain beneath the raging storm with his onboard surveillance suite. A storm is a storm is a storm—nothing they hadn’t seen many times before. “Hate to have to do a forced landing in that stuff.”

Starfighter pilots considered atmospheric flying the worst possible waste of their skills, and both men
claimed at every possible opportunity that their tour with the Praesitlyn defense force was a form of punishment for some unspecified transgression. It wasn’t, of course, but rather the luck of the assignment system: their numbers had come up, that was all, as they knew perfectly well. But if hotshots like Erk and Pleth weren’t showing what they could do by taking on the entire Separatist fleet, they complained about being misused by their commanders.

Flying a high-performance fighter in an atmospheric environment was a lot different from piloting the same machine in the vacuum of space and, in truth, required a range of skills no less impressive. In an atmosphere, a pilot was subjected to g forces, air drag on his or her machine, and fatal malfunctions caused by high-flying creatures that got sucked into a fighter’s power system and gummed it up, not to mention what would happen if a flock of the things penetrated a cockpit while the craft was traveling at a thousand kph.

The worst aspect of combat in an atmospheric environment was that the great speed and maneuverability of their craft often could not be used, because most of their combat missions would be in a close air-support role for ground forces. Even the gaudy paint jobs that aces tended to affect on their craft had to be abandoned for ground-support missions. While all kinds of stealth measures were available for use in space, in an atmosphere the fighters had to be invisible to the naked eye; they were coated with a self-camouflaging substance so that to ground observers or fliers at higher altitudes they blended in with the sky above or the ground below.

Erk and Pleth were more than just good pilots who could fly in all conditions. Others might also be good pilots, able to master the
science
of flight, make the same number of landings as takeoffs, exercise good reflexes, and remain in touch with their ships while in flight, attuned to every nuance of their onboard systems. But pilots like Erk and Pleth were great pilots who “wore” their ships like comfortable old boots, or a second skin, using their machines as an extension of their own bodies and wills. In short, they had mastered the
art
of flight.

“I hate to land anywhere on this blasted rock,” Erk said with a laugh. He consulted his planetary navigational chart. “Nothing here even has a name! That’s ‘Area Sixty-two, South Continent.’ You’d think someone would have taken the trouble to give the places names. Now down there could be ‘Desert Delite,’ and back at base it could be—”

“Jenth Grek Five One, cut the chatter. This is a combat patrol. And please, get off the guard channel! Go to eight-point-six-four.” A thousand kilometers away, high over the ocean—another geographic feature that had no name—“Waterboy,” the petite ensign on board JG51’s airborne control ship, smiled. She knew both Erk and Pleth well and knew they were talking over the open channel just so she would butt in. Channel 8.64 was the discreet encrypted frequency, a scrambled freq that hopefully no potential enemy could intercept. Regulations strictly forbade pilots to go to an open channel when on a combat mission, except in an emergency, but there never were any emergencies, because nothing ever happened on Praesitlyn. And because duty
there was so boring, commanders turned a deaf ear to the shenanigans of hotshots like Erk and his wingmate when they violated military protocol.

“Copy, switching to eight-point-six-four,” Erk said laconically, “and begging you to have a beer with us tonight, Waterboy.”

“She said, cut the chatter, JG Five One,” a strong male voice interrupted.

“Copy that, sir,” Erk replied, trying—and failing—to inject the appropriate inflection of contrition into his voice.

“… approaching!” the female voice shouted in the next instant.

“Waterboy, repeat that transmission,” Erk requested, frowning. In switching channels he had missed the first part of her message, but he thought he’d heard a note of panic in the controller’s voice.

“Marks, lots of them!” Pleth shouted at the same instant Erk’s warning system buzzed.

Now Erk saw them, a swarm of tri-droids emerging at great speed from that cloud of “dust” on the surface. Instantly Erk became a functioning component of his fighter. “Arming,” he reported casually. “Break to starboard,” he ordered Pleth. He put his machine into a half roll and commenced a steep dive to port. The T-19 could reach a top velocity of twenty thousand kph, but he knew he would not need that much speed to perform the maneuver that instantly came to mind.

Erk’s fighter flashed through the approaching formation of enemy ships. Several fired at him as he roared groundward. At two thousand meters, with the enemy ships now far above him and no targets in his sights,
Erk threw his ship into a steep climb. His anti-g couch successfully protected him from losing consciousness. As soon as his target acquisition system ranged in on the enemy fighters, his blaster cannons began pumping lethal bolts into their underbellies as he approached from astern. He had less than a second to acquire and fire at a target, and still enemy ships exploded all around him as he flew through their formation and soared far above it. He rolled his ship to starboard and plummeted through the fighters again, blossoming several into bright balls of flame. He had lost sight of Pleth.

Confused by Erk’s lightning attack, the tri-droids quickly formed a protective circle at fifteen thousand meters. Erk laughed out loud. He came up under them again, firing at very close range as the first target vanished beneath the nose of his fighter. He continued his climb, rolled inverted, and came down behind another target, which also disappeared in a ball of flame.

“Your six!” Pleth warned suddenly. High-energy bolts lanced past Erk’s cockpit from astern. Either some fighters had broken away from the defensive circle, or another flight had come up to join the first. Erk instantly went into an inverted roll, pulled hard into a vertical dive, and pulled out in the opposite direction from his attackers. He climbed back up and took them from astern. Both exploded.

“Too many of them!” Pleth shouted.

“Copy that,” Erk replied calmly.

“… break … Waterboy …”

“Say again, Waterboy,” Erk said in response to the garbled call from the controller aircraft. He switched
to the guard channel. “Waterboy, say again your last transmission on guard.” He knew someone on the ship would be monitoring the guard channel.

“… going in,” a female voice replied calmly, and then there was nothing but static.

Erk switched back to the scrambled frequency. “Head for home, Pleth. Waterboy is down, repeat, Waterboy is down.”

Since they were only 150 kilometers from base, Erk descended to within meters of the surface, where the enemy craft would have difficulty tracking them against the ground clutter, and gave his engines power. They would be back at base in less than sixty seconds, muster the rest of the squadron, and return to do permanent damage to the invaders’ fighter screen and the landing party. At last, something was happening on Praesitlyn!

Erk had accounted for ten of the enemy fighters in a dogfight that lasted only one minute from beginning to end, an impressive score for any pilot. But Lieutenant H’Arman was bold when he had to be and cautious when caution was called for, and now caution was being called for loud and clear. It was time to head back to the farm, rearm, and return in force. He had been so involved in the dogfight, however, that he’d had no time to gather useful intelligence on the strength of the enemy force or its intentions.

“Bad luck about Waterboy,” Pleth said. They were both thinking of that young ensign.

Yeah
, Erk thought,
very bad luck
.

*    *    *

Skill, not luck, had brought Odie Subu and her speeder bike undetected to a spot just behind the crest of a ridge where she could observe the enemy landing force deploying on the plain below. She was a member of a reconnaissance platoon General Khamar had spread out before his army to develop intelligence about the enemy landing force. The orbital surveillance system had been destroyed or was being electronically jammed, and the recon drones the defense force had sent out earlier had failed to report. Even communications with the army’s main force were being successfully jammed—only short-range, line-of-sight transmissions via tactical communications nets were possible. So General Khamar was forced to rely exclusively on his living recon detachments.