For an instant, I'd thought the explosions were meant to bring the chamber's roof down on our heads. The deafening roars and swirling gray dust created by pulverized stone which blinded me even as it obstructed my already abused airway did nothing to immediately disabuse me of this notion. Not in those first two or three seconds after Ventress's escape and the subsequent detonations, anyways. It wasn't until I felt Yaddle's tiny three-fingered hand on the side of my neck as I stood bent over with hands on knees while hacking up dampened dust that it really registered we hadn't been buried by tons of duracrete ceiling. The unbroken ringing whine in my ears kept me from hearing anything else, but the still-worsening ache in my throat, and a throbbing "blade-burn" across the ball of my right shoulder felt like plenty to focus on in that instant. The very tip of one of Asajj's sabers had been drawn across the skin there for a couple of inches. A continuing reminder of just how dangerous Bulq's new apprentice was, I supposed.
Hearing returned to me in a wash of sudden yet gentle warmth which suffused first the sides of my head, then the interior of my throat. It wasn't a particularly pronounced sensation, but the immediate cessation of my coughing, and the fact I could truthfully respond in the affirmative when Yaddle asked whether I could hear her told me the Jedi Master was exercising her considerable talent for Force Healing. With a final cough precipitated by a last gob of spit-soaked stone dust, I straightened then expressed my thanks and respect to the little green Jedi. My shoulder still burned, a little, but after a moment's consideration, I decided I deserved the uncomfortable calling-card the Sith's minion had left me. Clearly, I'd underestimated Asajj, and not done much better with my initial assessment of her now-dead comrades. If I'd come down here in the company of Ferus or one of the other Knights rather than with Yaddle, I would likely be dead now.
"Mites in the tunnels beyond this chamber, I sense. Collapses in the mouths of those tunnels, barring our way, they are. The southern collapse, you should assess. Assess the northern and eastern collapses, I will" Yaddle directed in about as concise a manner as I'd ever heard her speak. I'd seen her glance more than once at the ruin I'd made of Karoc's body at least twice now. A reaction which left me feeling the need to explain myself to this Jedi whose good opinion of me I valued so much. Unfortunately, after bowing and acknowledging her directive, that explanation came out sounding much more defensive than I would have liked.
"He was choking me with the Force, Master. I couldn't breathe, and the pressure was still increasing. I clearly remember thinking He's going to crush my windpipe, then I simply, reacted. It all happened so very, very fast. I don't remember being afraid, but I probably was." It was the truth, and I damned well knew that never in any reality had there been a more clear-cut case of self-defense. Which did nothing to explain why I suddenly felt so self-conscious and shitty about Karoc's death, when beheading Vinoc didn't trouble me one little bit.
Yaddle looked up at me, frowned, then answered in a grave tone which nevertheless seemed to me free of any condemnation. "Using the Force to kill. A terrible thing, this is. Yet terrible and wrong, the same, these are not. For knowledge and defense, the Force a Jedi uses. Defend yourself, you did, Padawan. The southern tunnel collapse, now you should search."
It was a clear dismissal. One emphasized by her turning away from me and beginning to walk over to where the northernmost tunnel was choked with rubble. Why, then, could I not simply leave it at that?
"If what I did wasn't wrong, then why did you keep looking at the remains of the two Dark Siders, Master Yaddle?" I called out as if seeking absolution.
Without turning in my direction, the Jedi Master responded in a colder manner than I'd ever heard from her before. "The end of their Dark Path, I was considering. About you, not all things are."
I considered disagreeing with Yaddle as to my outlook, but ultimately decided to simply accept the implicit criticism. She'd often spoken up for me against Councilor Even Piell/Legends , and refuted Cin Drallig/Legends omnipresent "concerns" about me. (Having outdone the favored Padawans of both men had apparently been cause enough to make both develop an intense dislike for me. My Master had even said Piell considered me an "Arrogant, prideful, grasping fighter. One that anyone free of bias should be able to see is a likely candidate to turn.)
Antagonizing the normally understanding and easygoing Jedi Master was most definitely not in my best interests. Not when Mace Windu allowed any disciplinary action Piell or Drallig wanted to levy against me on the thinnest, most ridiculous of pretexts. Anything that wasn't spoken against by another Councilor, basically. Sometimes newly re-appointed High Councilor Micah Giiett (Who I still had no damned idea how I'd accidentally saved from dying during the Yinchorri Uprising, because I wasn't even five at the time and hadn't made any deliberate timeline changes by that point) would speak up for me if Piell and his bottom-bitch Oppo Rancisis were being blatantly unfair to me, but Yaddle had always been my chief proponent on the High Council.
Turning away from the Jedi Master's steady gaze, I went to do as I was told. What else was there to say, after all? It wasn't as if I were filled with remorse about killing either Dark Sider. Maybe that was the problem, as far as the venerable Jedi was concerned?
My half of the room was riddled with mature stone mites. Approaching the walls they even now tunneled through was like being confronted with sheets of dry-rotted wood completely crawling with termites. The second I drew near to the blocked tunnel, I could feel the things chewing their irregular little pathways through the duracrete. When I'd volunteered to use my rare Force-talent against this bizarre example of biological warfare, I'd retained an unspoken reservation about creating one Force Breach after another inside of living things. Now, I realized that had been wasted moralizing on my part. Stone mites felt just as unnatural as the macro-virus like creations actually were. They were so vividly abnormal, the things actually left faint pathways of wrongness behind as they moved and consumed. Sensing them as they did their thing set my teeth on edge. Spurring me to reach out, and "How do I, ahh, there!"
One hundred and four of the three part, vaguely triangular little eating machines suddenly died. Their most integral inner connections simply severed, as my will flicked out and sent a disruptive shock through a pattern so simple it made lichen and paramecia seem complex. The madwoman who'd created the stone mites couldn't possibly know this as someone with no idea how the Shatterpoints of living things worked, but making it so every last stone mite was identical to every other stone mite down to the atomic level apparently meant once you'd grasped how to cause mite to come apart, it became nothing but a lather-rinse-repeat phenomena. A profound weakness in these horrific macro-virii, albeit one only a tiny handful of individuals in the entire galaxy could ever leverage.
A brief wave of fatigue caused me to stumble as another one hundred and one mites in the ceiling, then a hundred and seven more in the floor throughout my half of the chamber perished. I caught myself before I could bump into the beginning of the pile of broken duracrete piled to the top of this southern passageway, then my breath hitched in surprise as the awareness I was extending into and beyond the stone collapse in search of stone mites detected something else.
It was faint enough I'd have missed it if I weren't straining my Force Sense, or the ability wasn't one I'd spent a great deal of time honing as a foundational Sense ability. The tangibility of this life-presence, this Force-presence was so slight, so ephemeral, that-
"MASTER YADDLE! Over here! I think I've found Knight Swan or Tassu, but they're on the other side of this collapse and must be badly hurt!" I cried out with urgency. Totally lacking the calm self-control I was supposed to be exhibiting in my desperation to get to one of our own. A desperation made worse by the fact that Jedi Knight Bultar Swan was Knight Tutso Mara's very-against-the-Jedi Code lover. Tutso had been my first, and remained my best friend in the Temple. If there was anything I could do to prevent his and Bultar's story from ending in tears, I was going to do it, period.
Yaddle was beside me by the time I finished saying "hurt." She stood with eyes closed and her tiny, three-fingered hands pressed tight to the intervening rocks. A half-dozen expressions flitting across, then disappearing from her lightly wrinkled green features in the next few seconds. Until she finally reported "Her energy, I recognize. Jedi Swan, this is. Grave, her injuries are. Deep within the healing-trance, she lies. Yet something more, I sense."
Jerking her hands from the rock-pile as if they'd suddenly grown red-hot, I could sense the deep and abiding sadness coming off the Jedi Master in waves as easily as I could see the couple of tears she swiftly blinked away. Yaddle's voice was somber, low, and yet very controlled, as she declared "One with the Force, Knight Nacanas Tassu has become. The last of his energy, to the stability of Jedi Swan's trance, he gave."
For one moment, the ever compassionate Jedi bowed her head in respect. Then she looked at me with a troubled expression, and explained "Alone, on her rescue, must you labor. Stopped, the stone mites still must be. Their extermination, I cannot abandon. If a path to her, you make. Assistance, I can then offer. If contravention of the mission, assistance would not constitute."
I didn't want to believe what I was hearing. If I thought about the situation as if I were an emotionless robot entirely lacking a soul, then I could see Yaddle's point. In the dim recesses of my memory, I could hear Mister Fucking Spock. Declaring with all the cold utility of pure logic "The needs of the many, outweigh the needs of the few, or the one."
I wanted to demand her help, or at least make some grim, dramatic, and ultimately idiotic declaration about how I wouldn't forgive her if Swan died because she prioritized the mission. Even knowing one good Jedi had already died trying to prevent the death of another. What stopped me from doing something so self-defeating and asinine were two things. The first being the same cold calculus presently dictating Yaddle's present course of action. The sort of icy reasoning telling me alienating one of my most powerful allies only decreased my chances of stopping Palpatine from ravaging the entire galaxy. That would have been enough to keep me in line, but it wouldn't have preserved the affection and abiding respect I'd long held for Yaddle. Not if my best friend's lady died because I had to go it alone in trying to rescue her.
What did that was the realization that, by all rights, the Jedi Master should be ordering me to continue with the stone mite extermination. If the Tynnan Government Building collapsed, Yaddle would be the one the High Council held responsible for decreasing the extermination-resources by 50% for the sake of maybe saving one Jedi Knight. Chancellor Organa was trying to keep the Loyalists and Secessionists from turning the Secessionist Crisis into an outright shooting war the Republic was much more poorly prepared for than the Secessionists as we spoke.
Anger at the situation flooded through me, but I retained the presence of mind to realize that soft spot for me or not, Yaddle would rat me out to the High Council if I tried to resort to the Dark Side for the oomph to get through the ten or fifteen tons of compacted duracrete in my way. Which was such a bunch of B.S, given that the Master of the Order, High Councilor Depa Billaba, and soon-to-be Master Siri Tachi were all using the Dark Side each and every damned day. As a non-member of the Windu Club, I didn't get a spiffy Dark Side Dispensantion decoder-ring, of course.
A hundred pound chunk of duracrete was compacted to powder as I stared at the collapse. When another seventy-five or eighty pound chunk was turned to dust as I clenched my fist, I stopped and took several deep breaths. Defying the sense of urgency beating at me, because I just couldn't. "You start reaching for the Dark Side for the best of reasons. You'll keep reaching for good reasons. Until your each and every response to adversity becomes reaching for the Dark Side. You know this, so breathe and work the problem."
Watching more duracrete settle down atop the couple hundred pounds of the stuff I'd crushed with a not-inconsequential expenditure of energy, I realized there was no way I could brute-force this. While moving the ten of fifteen tons presently in my path was doable in an incremental manner, I wasn't simply obstructed by ten or fifteen tons. When I crushed or removed a given quantity of duracrete, more stone fell down from the compromised tunnel ceiling to take it's place. A single glance made the idea of digging with my own hands laughable if telekinesis wasn't proving effective. Leaving what other options, exactly?
I looked around the chamber and frowned intently as I worked the problem. Ventress hadn't been able to collapse the tunnel we'd entered by, because she hadn't considered the possibility of needing to. She'd collapsed the other three tunnels to try and stop us from reaching all the places where stone mites had been released down here. Yaddle had already finished driving the rest of the stone mites in the other half of this chamber into a hibernation from which they'd never awaken with Morichro, and now she was jumping over the inert pair of-
Droids. A grin widened on my face, as I pulled out Slicer-R1 my dragonfly-nautilus droid. Quickly, I dashed to the presently-inert IG-100s. I had the tool-kit from the bottom of my pack out even as I slid to my knees before the first Magna-Guard. Flipping the droid with the Force to reveal the back of it's skull, I commanded Slicer-R1 to interface with the offline droid. Peeling the phrik-cortosis service panel open, I didn't even pause over the obvious revelation that my extra power-cells weren't strictly compatible with an entirely different classification of droid.
I was Anakin Skywalker, mechanical genius. These otherwise substantial difficulties simply meant I'd be forced to cannibalize ion-blasted Magna-Guard #2, plus Yaddle-dismembered IG-100 #3 for the parts to recondition ion-blasted IG-100-#1. While my fingers flew over the improvisations required to recharge the IG-100's dead power-cell with my power-cells, Slicer-R1 was hard at work running a low-grade current from it's own power-cell into the Magna-Guard's main processor. Once it had the primary CPU sequestered, it began running top-tier subversion sub-routines I had bartered for with a Mirialan slicer from Coruscant's Under-City. The Mirialan had been happy to provide me with some of her best work. After I'd made it clear to her rather obsessive ex-boyfriend Larissaina was now under the protection of a Jedi who considered a broken hand reasonable recompense for the black eye and split lip said Twi'lek mongrel had given her. Now, we were going to see if her work outshone whatever technician the Geonosians employed to program these damned things.
Hands continuing to dance over the connections I was wiring as Slicer-R1 continued to report "Working..Working..Working." I suppressed the desire to crow with triumph as my improvised power-cell recharging device began feeding the power it drained from my spare cells smoothly into the only structurally intact power-cell remaining among the three ex-Jedi-killers. It's cobbled-together readout showing 80%-88.5%-96.25%-98%, then the device gave up the ghost as the two power-cells ran dry. It's insufficiently insulated wiring half-melting, half igniting, as I quickly tossed the thing.
"Firewalls successfully breached, previous biometric profiles wiped, preexisting directory of behavioral objectives truncated. Proffer new voice sample and prepare for replacement biometric-scan in three, two, one" Slicer-R1's tinny voice reported.
The intact Magna-Guard sat up and pointed it's right arm at me as if it were going to activate it's concealed blaster-mounting and kill me. The only thing which prevented me from getting quite a scare was the Force's calm quiescence during this admittedly troubling visual. A blue laser-light effect fanned over my head and shoulders, as the Magna-Guard spoke in a voice which made Slicer-R1's vocal routine seem state-of-the art. "Priority User: Biometric profile established. Please provide voice sample for security-redundancy." The droid's demand was as flat as it was perfunctory, but my smartass streak couldn't be denied in my moment of triumph.
"My name is Anakin Skywalker, and I'm the Jedi who just droid-napped you" I sassed the impassive killing machine.
"State current tactical objective" IG-100-#1's monotone replied. The hulking droid having sat up meanwhile. It's menacing red photoreceptors scanning the area, before eventually fixing on me.
"Search and rescue, IG-100. The southernmost tunnel from your present position has collapsed. Preventing me from reaching an allied unit in need of medical attention. You are the only viable means of shifting the duracrete available. Comply" I ordered the droid. Keeping it simple, because it was running on only the most elementary portions of it's CPU.
"Unit IG-100-009 is not optimized for construction, demolition, or search-and-rescue functions. Error #321-031, Applicable command sub-directory not found. Routing verbal command to motive-basic subroutine. Working..Working..Complying" IG-100-009 eventually agreed. It's clambering to it's feet lacked the fluid grace the synthetic Jedi-killers had all possessed previously, but I wasn't looking for a sparring partner. I just needed those strong, strong arms, and that untiring back to move stone as swiftly and efficiently as possible.
Yaddle was long gone by now. Leading me to wonder how the mission was going. I was acutely conscious of the fact that an Asajj Ventress capable of Dark Side illusions could still be down here, somewhere. Not to mention my having just learned my new droid had apparently been commissioned as part of a nine-droid set. The idea that there might be six more of these nightmares on-planet was, unsettling, to say the least. Especially now that I was operating on my own.
Now that IG-100-009 was trundling toward the collapsed tunnel, I returned Slicer-R1 to it's secure place in my pack. The droid was far too fragile to leave laying about, and I needed to focus on keeping it's handiwork on-task.
Impressed, I watched the two meter-plus droid shift and rid itself of duracrete chunks with impressive speed. It took more than three minutes of observation before I realized what I'd initially taken for harmless tiny errors in it's movements were actually pauses the droid was taking to study it's results to date. I hadn't realized the machine had retained this much problem-solving power in it's present stripped down, ultra-basic computing condition, but the droid was actually shifting stone where it could to brace against further collapse. It didn't always work, and it ran counter to the possibility of clearing the collapse completely, but I swiftly came to understand the droid's approach was the only one with any chance of success. The best I could possibly hope for would be a briefly maintained opening in the collapse. One I could pull Bultar through by whatever means possible, and stuff the risk of my getting squashed flat.
I wasn't thrilled about the possibility of being crushed to death, but it didn't require any second thoughts for me to know Tutso wouldn't hesitate to risk getting squished. Not if it was him here, and my lady-love desperately in need of his help. "If I'm not the kind of man whose friends can count on him, then I am not the Jedi to stop Palpatine and his crew."
While I breathed, felt my fear, then released it into the Force as I watched that narrow tunnel-within-a-tunnel slowly being carved out by my relentlessly repurposed droid, I realized this was a principle which applied to everything big and small. I was either the master of my fear whenever I needed to step up and do what I believed to be right, or Palpatine and his ilk had already won as far as I was concerned.
"The only thing necessary for the triumph of Evil, is that good men should do nothing." I'd always believed in these sage words, and never had a problem living by them in my first life. Why then, when I was so much more talented and powerful in this life, could it sometimes seem like my dreads were fifteen feet high and insurmountable?
"Maybe it's precisely because you're so much more powerful and talented, this time around? It feels like more to lose, eh?" The thought flitted across my mind, then refused to leave as I recognized the truth inherent to it.
Shaking my head to clear it of errant tangents, I saw the droid had fashioned a sort of funnel through the collapse. It was leaning forward up to it's shoulders in the stone to brace it's work, and I could tell now was as good as it was going to get. A burst of Force Speed in conjunction with Force Sense let me rip off Palpatine's "It's treason, then" corkscrew. Shooting through the gap, and as the Force trilled a spiky warning at me I drew my legs up as fast as I could while falling forward. My ribs ground painfully against the uneven pile of duracrete I landed on, as the breath was blasted from my lungs by the stone I came to rest atop. Yet looking back, I realized I'd been wise to heed the Force at the cost of some pain. The tunnel had collapsed as I'd shot through. Nearly crushing both my legs from the knees down in the process. Only my drawing them up at the cost of lost aerodynamics mid-corkscrew had prevented my getting a good start on ending up as much machine as Vader had.
The dismembered dead bodies of Tynnan soldiers lay everywhere. Some of the hapless aliens had been bludgeoned, crushes, or ripped apart by what were clearly some very Dark applications of TK. While others had been beaten to a pulp and violated with the excessive mechanical strength of the Magna-Guards. More than half had simply been taken completely apart with lightsabers. There were so very many severed limbs, spilled and splattered gore, and crushed chunks of viscera that it took me a few moments to realize there were considerably more corpses than the eight-Tynnan patrol which had accompanied Knights Swan and Tassu. From the looks of the literally blood-coated corridor, there were enough bodies to account for two separate eight-soldier squads. Obviously, doomed reinforcements which had come to the aid of their fellow before the communications jamming began. Only to pay for their valor by dying to the last in a hopeless cause.
Well, as I moved among the bodies and searched, I amended that initial assessment. Knight Tassu lay propped against the wall with a blackened hole through his right lung, and two more lightsaber-thrusts through both sides of his abdomen. Beneath a section of ceiling he'd obviously brought down himself lay a pair of mostly pulverized Magna-Guards. The sheer amount of stone he'd torn free and dropped on them was incredibly impressive for a Jedi I happened to know was among the weakest in the Force to pass the Trials in a generation. When I finally spotted Bultar lying a bit further up the hallway and laid out straight with Nacanas's one good hand still on the one-armed Jedi Knight's leg just above a deep slash burned from the knee nearly to the right hip by a lightsaber, I realized it had been Knight Tassu's last offensive gasp. Having already fallen, with the ceiling coming down and an undoubtedly great amount of stone dust swirling about them, Nacanas had succeeded in creating the illusion that Knight Swan was already dead.
Looking at the terribly injured woman, I realized there was no way she could have managed the unbroken concentration on her own to put herself this deeply into healing-trance. Yaddle had been right, of course. Unable to save himself with most of his organs cooked by sustained contact with penetrating lightsabers, Nacanas Tassu had somehow managed something akin to a Force Meld with his critically injured partner. Helping her find trance, and stabilizing it at a deep enough level it would both sustain her and give her the appearance of death to anyone not paying a great deal of attention. The still-groaning, unstable nature of the ceiling likely would have been reason enough for the Dark Siders to move along.
I scooped up the lightsabers of both Jedi, then took both of the bacta-patches which were the last items in my pack except for a pair of medical stims and my grapnel projector/retractor and got to work. Placing one patch in such a way it drew together the slash up her leg, and wrapping the other over the stump of her (thankfully) non-dominant right arm below the elbow. Cinching it in place with the accompanying band. Finally, I found a vein in her good arm, then injected Swan with one of my medical stims. Designed to temporarily strengthen a patient and stave off shock during transport, it put me on the clock because the adrenaline-like chemicals in the stim might well disrupt her healing-trance. I did not like Bultar's odds if that broke while we were away from Yaddle, or my Master, in a pinch.
Hefting her as carefully as I could in both arms, I had to wait impatiently for IG-100-009 to finish tunneling to us once more. Once I saw proverbial daylight, I had no choice except doing my best to float Bultar through the gap with TK. If I tried to push and shove her through over the broken and irregular rocks, I might as well take my own lightsaber to her.
It was a nerve-wracking experience, but by the grace of the Force, nothing fell on the comatose Jedi as I floated her unsteadily through the narrower-than-last-time tunnel. I had to expose myself to the peril of being squished without a chance to react once more. Crawling far enough into the unsteady tunnel I could see to navigate Bultar to clear ground, then set her down without killing her.
The groan of the rock was my only warning. I didn't think, I ramped my Force-augmentation to maximum-stupid and kicked off from where I was half-in/half-out. Using something akin to a bastardized Force Leap, I screamed as the stone gouged right through the side of my boot and scraped most of the skin off the ball of the inside of my right ankle. Feeling the bone trying to break, as my temporarily increased sturdiness via the Force compromised with a hundred pounds of stone to leave me with a bad sprain as I flopped out of the hole. Somehow, by the grace of the Ashla, nothing was crushed, crippled, or splattered.
Despite my badly sprained ankle and need to carry out a forced-march while carrying a five foot ten, one hundred fifty pound human female, I had an ace in the hole. If there was one single Force-technique I had absolutely mastered beyond any possibility of improvement, it was Control Pain. I knew I was doing my ankle no favors, but with the Force as my ally I marched back through the tunnel we'd entered by. Checking my wrist-unit every fifteen or twenty paces for signs the comm-jamming had ended.
In my arms, Bultar had begun to stir. Meaning I was just about out of time, so I gritted my teeth and started to run. Either I'd find Yaddle, or the pathway back to the lift and Dark Woman.
I didn't really care either way, but I'd be damned if Bultar was going to die on me after all that!