Star Wars: Rogue Planet (2 page)

“Of course, Master!” Obi-Wan did not disguise his haste. Few could hide concern or intent from Mace Windu.

Mace smiled. “He will bring you wisdom!” he called out as Obi-Wan ran down the hall toward the turbolift and the Temple’s sky transport exit.

Obi-Wan was not in the least irritated by the jibe. He quite agreed. Wisdom, or insanity. It
was
ridiculous for a Jedi to always be chasing after a troublesome Padawan. But Anakin was no ordinary Padawan. He had been
bequeathed to Obi-Wan by Obi-Wan’s own beloved Master, Qui-Gon Jinn.

Yoda had put the situation to Obi-Wan with some style a few months back, as they squatted over a glowing charcoal fire and cooked shoo bread and wurr in his small, low-ceilinged quarters. Yoda had been about to leave Coruscant on business that did not concern Obi-Wan. He had ended a long, contemplative silence by saying, “A very interesting problem you face, and so we all face, Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Obi-Wan, ever the polite one, had tilted his head as if he were not acquainted with any particular problem.

“The chosen one Qui-Gon gave to us all, not proven, full of fear, and
yours to save. And if you do not save him …
”

Yoda had said nothing more to Obi-Wan about Anakin thereafter. His words echoed in Obi-Wan’s thoughts as he took an express taxi to the outskirts of the Senate District. Travel time—mere minutes, with wrenching twists and turns through hundreds of slower, cheaper lanes and levels of traffic.

Obi-Wan was concerned it would not be nearly fast enough.

The pit spread before Anakin as he stepped out on the apron below the tunnel. The three other contestants in this flight jostled for a view. The Blood Carver was particularly rough with Anakin, who had hoped to save all his energy for the flight.

What’s eating him?
the boy wondered.

The pit was two kilometers wide and three deep from the top of the last accelerator shield to the dark bottom. This old maintenance tunnel overlooked the second accelerator shield. Squinting up, Anakin saw the bottom of the first shield, a huge concave roof cut through with an
orderly pattern of hundreds of holes, like an overturned colander in Shmi’s kitchen on Tatooine. Each hole in this colander, however, was ten meters wide. Hundreds of shafts of sunlight dropped from the ports to pierce the gloom, acting like sundials to tell the time in the open world, high above the tunnel. It was well past meridian.

There were over five thousand such garbage pits on Coruscant. The city-planet produced a trillion tons of garbage every hour. Waste that was too dangerous to recycle—fusion shields, worn-out hyperdrive cores, and a thousand other by-products of a rich and highly advanced world—was delivered to the district pit. Here, the waste was sealed into canisters, and the canisters were conveyed along magnetic rails to a huge circular gun carriage below the lowest shield. Every five seconds, a volley of canisters was propelled from the gun by chemical charges. The shields then guided the trajectory of the canisters through their holes, gave them an extra tractor-field boost, and sent them into tightly controlled orbits around Coruscant.

Hour after hour, garbage ships in orbit collected the canisters and transported them to outlying moons for storage. Some of the most dangerous loads were actually shot off into the large, dim yellow sun, where they would vanish like dust motes cast into a volcano.

It was a precise and necessary operation, carried out like clockwork day after day, year after year.

Perhaps a century before, someone had thought of turning the pits into an illegal sport center, where aspiring young toughs from Coruscant’s rougher neighborhoods, deep below the glittering upper city, could prove their mettle. The sport had become surprisingly popular in the pirate entertainment channels that fed into elite apartments, high in the star-scrubbing towers that rose everywhere on the capital world. Enough money was
generated that some pit officials could be persuaded to turn a blind eye, so long as the contestants were the only ones at risk.

A garbage canister, hurled through the accelerator shields, could easily swat a dozen racers aside without damage to itself. The last shield would supply it with the corrective boost necessary to compensate for a few small lives.

Anakin watched the flickering jump light on the tunnel ceiling with focused concentration, lips tight, eyes wide, a little dew of sweat on his cheeks. The tunnel was hot. He could hear the roar of canisters, see their silver specks shoot through the shield ports to the next higher level, leaving behind blue streaks of ionized air.

The pit atmosphere smelled like a bad shop generator, thick with ozone and the burnt-rubber odor of gun discharge.

The tunnel master twirled up to the exit to encourage the next team.

“Glory and destiny!” the Naplousean enthused, and slapped Anakin across the brace between his wings. Anakin stayed focused, trying to sense where the currents would be at this level, where the little vortices of lift and plunge would accumulate as they formed and rotated between the shields. Ozone would always be in highest concentration in the areas where the winds would be strongest and most dangerous. And for every volley of canisters, following a prearranged formation through the shields, another volley would soon follow, taking a precisely determined series of alternate routes.

Easy. Like flying between a storm of steel raindrops
.

Anakin’s fellow racers took their places in the tunnel’s exit, jockeying for the best position on the apron. The Blood Carver gave Anakin a jab with his jet-tipped right wing. Anakin pushed it aside and kept his focus.

The Naplousean tunnel master lifted its ribbon-limb, the tip curling and uncurling in anticipation.

The Blood Carver stood to Anakin’s left and closed his eyes to slits. His nostril flaps pulsed and flared, filled with tiny sensory cavities, sweeping the air for clues.

The Naplousean made a thick whickering noise—its way of cursing—and ordered the contestants to hold. A flying maintenance droid was making a sweep of this level. From where they waited, the droid appeared as a flyspeck, a tiny dot buzzing its way around the wide gray circumference of the pit, issuing little musical tones between the roar and swoosh of canisters.

Managers could be bribed, but droids could not. They would have to wait until this one dropped to the level below.

Another volley of canisters shot through the shields with an ear-stunning bellow. Blue ion trails curled like phantom serpents between the concave lower shield and the convex upper shield.

“Longer for you to live,” the Blood Carver whispered to Anakin. “Little human boy who smells like a slave.”

Obi-Wan, against all his personal inclinations, had made it his duty to know the ins and outs of anything having to do with illegal racing, anywhere within a hundred kilometers of the Jedi Temple. Anakin Skywalker, his charge, his responsibility, was one of the best Padawans in the Temple—easily fulfilling the promise sensed by Qui-Gon Jinn—but as if to compensate for this promise, to bring a kind of balance to the boy’s lopsided brace of abilities, Anakin had an equal brace of faults.

His quest for speed and victory was easily the most aggravating and dangerous. Qui-Gon Jinn had perhaps encouraged this in the boy by allowing him to race for his own freedom, three years before, on Tatooine.

But Qui-Gon could not justify his actions now.

How Obi-Wan missed the unpredictable liveliness of his Master! Qui-Gon had spurred him to great effort by what appeared at first to be whimsical japes and always turned out to be profound readings of their situation.

Under Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan had become one of the most capable and steady-tempered Jedi Knights in the Temple. Obi-Wan, for all his talents, had been not just a little like Anakin as a boy: rough-edged and prone to anger. Obi-Wan had soon come to find the quiet center of his place in the Force. He now preferred an orderly existence. He hated conflict within his personal relations. In time, he had become the stable center and Qui-Gon had become the unpredictable goad. How often it had struck him that this topsy-turvy relationship with Qui-Gon had once more been neatly reversed—with Anakin!

There were always two, Master and Padawan. And it was sometimes said in the Temple that the best pairs were those who complemented each other.

He had once vowed, after a particularly trying moment, that he would reward himself with a year of isolation on a desert planet, far from Coruscant and any Padawans he might be assigned, once he was free of Anakin. But this did not stop him from carrying out his duties to the boy with an exacting passion.

There were two garbage pits inside Anakin’s radius of potential mischief, and one was infamous for its competition pit dives. Obi-Wan searched for guidance from the Force. It was never too difficult to sense Anakin’s presence. He chose the nearest pit and climbed a set of maintenance stairs to the upper citizen-observation walkway at the top.

Obi-Wan ran along the balustrade, empty at this hour of the day—the middle of the afternoon bureaucrat work period. He paid little attention to the roaring whine of the
canisters as they soared through the air into space. Sonic booms rang out every few seconds, quite loud on the balustrade, but damped by sloping barriers before they reached the outlying buildings. He was looking for the right turbolift to take him to the lower levels, to the abandoned feed chambers and maintenance tunnels where the races would be staged.

Air traffic was forbidden over the pit. The lanes of craft that constantly hummed over Coruscant like many layers of fishnet were diverted around the launch corridor, leaving an obvious pathway to the upper atmosphere, and to space above that. But within this vacant cylinder of air, occupied only by swiftly rising canisters of toxic garbage, Obi-Wan’s keen eyes spotted a hovering observation droid.

Not a city droid, but a ’caster model, not more than ten or twenty centimeters in diameter, of the kind used by entertainment crews. The droid was flying in high circles around the perimeter, vigilant for enforcement droids or officers. Obi-Wan looked for, and found, six more small droids, standing watch over the upper shield.

Three flew in formation above a cupola less than a hundred meters from where Obi-Wan stood.

These droids were guarding a likely exit point for the crews should metropolitan officials decide, for whatever reason, to ignore their bribes and shut down the races.

And no doubt they were marking the turbolift Obi-Wan would have to take to find Anakin.

The next dive had been postponed until the observers were certain that the pit watch droid had passed to the next lower level. The tunnel master was very upset by the delay. The air was thick with its nauseating odor.

Anakin drew on his Padawan discipline and tried to ignore the stench and keep his focus on the space between
the shields. They could dive at any moment, and he had to know the air currents and sense the pattern of the canisters, still flying through the accelerator ports in endless procession, up and out into space.

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 out-massed 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
me
.”

“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 expression 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 offworld, 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.