XIV: Be At Ease
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When breaking for refreshments, Pomt pulled Senator Shesh aside, both ducking out of the main chamber for an adjoining one. Aides on both sides were mingling and chatting, framing out the structure of a tentative, cordial agreement. Anakin leaned forward, chin resting on his palm, already thinking ahead. A mission to Obroa Skai. He offered without even thinking about it, something telling him it was the thing to do. The Force, maybe? He’d been passive, letting it flow around and through him, just like Aunt Mara and talked to him about. Maybe he was starting to hear its quiet voice.
He still wasn’t sure what that meant. She talked about shouting out the Force, overriding it, stifling it, but he couldn’t imagine what that would feel like. The Force was with him, around him, always. A blanket he couldn’t see, wrapped around him at all times. He breathed and it was in his lungs, he slept and it was in his heart. Maybe Aunt Mara had another perspective, from her own teaching under the Empire. It didn’t make her advice bad though, just different.
Obroa-skai! Part of him was excited. It was something to do, something he could get into and feel like he was helping again. Dantooine - he shivered, taking a deep breath - Dantooine had been horrible but at least they had been able to help the refugees. Ithor had been worse. He was sick of fighting on the back foot. He was sick of waiting for the vong to come to them.
Uncle Luke talked about how the Jedi were defenders, that they should never attack, that to go on the offensive was wrong and Anakin knew he was right, he knew that was what Obi-wan Kenobi taught and Master Yoda taught but…
Daeshara’cor died. Miko Reglia died. Chewbacca died. Sernpidal died and Ithor died and they were always on the defensive.
Anakin didn’t want to be aggressive, he didn’t want to tempt the Dark side but all he could think about at Ithor was the herdship they fought on. It was someone’s home. It was a work of art and the love the Ithorians had for their planet was poured into it. And it was destroyed, all around them as they fought.
If you wait to fight until you have to defend, then innocents get caught in it.
Uncle Luke had to understand that, so Anakin knew there had to be some reason to make it work but he just couldn’t find it.
Going to Obroa-skai, though. Then he would fight were the vong were. If he hurt anyone, it would be them. They could free people too, help them escape. It would be good. It had to be good. It -
Anakin coughed, choking and sputtering on a mouthful of water.
“Whoa,” Mei said, “you okay?”
He covered his mouth, wheezing around half a lungful of water as his eyes watered. He wanted to say yes, he was fine, just a mistake but why had he choked on it, why had he, why had-
Aunt Mara!
He felt Uncle Luke like he was right next to him, he felt it all at once, shock and surprise and horror and hope and joy and love and Aunt Mara was shining too, intertwined with his Uncle, both of them like flaring stars in the Force from halfway across the Galaxy and Aunt Mara felt better.
Everyone could sense her sickness, even at a distance. Everyone could feel the pall drawn around her, that pulled her downwards, that exhausted her, drained her. Master Cilghal was metaphorically pulling her hair out, at her wit’s end about the mysterious illness.
But Aunt Mara, at that moment, gleamed like polished durasteel. Vibrant, bright, beaming and he felt her shock too, her joy, her wonder and Anakin laughed around his choking and Mei frowned and then her jaw dropped in surprise as she sensed it, funneled through Anakin.
“Kyp!” she cried, but Anakin could only think about his Aunt and Uncle.
Aunt Mara was going to be okay! She was going to be alright!
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Still nearly bouncing in his seat, Anakin watched and tried to listen as the final accommodations of the day were put into place. Originally, the allowance was made for five days of negotiations. Two days had been spent, with the unfortunate arrival of Rhonabeq, Harlan Ysanna and the Plooriod squadron cutting short the second day. Then the third day passed, quiet and tense, until the next morning the Imperium reached out again. That made today the fourth day, with one more allowed for, but Senator Shesh was eager to get matters underway. It seemed that despite how close the Imperium came to attacking them, they too were anxious to get past it as well, and didn’t argue when Senator Shesh recommended she return to Coruscant for final approval from the Senate and Chief of State. Iterator Noskaur, along with the skittish Colonel Lurense, would tag along on Malaghi Shesh, with a small group of Imperial Armsmen and their staff.
According to the Iterator, it was what he did best, and was his original job, after all. Talking to and educating others on the Imperium was his life’s work and the chance to do it for an entire Galaxy, all at once, must have been tempting.
Uncle Luke and the other Jedi would want to have a say in who went on this planned mission to Obroa Skai, and Anakin momentarily felt a stab of worry that Uncle Luke might not let him go. Which wouldn’t make any sense, since Jaina was flying with Rogue Squadron. She was in a lot more danger then he would be, and he fought at Ithor, too.
Still feeling his Uncle’s joy and wonder washing through the Force, he hoped some of the less savory things they’d learned about the Imperium wouldn’t put too much of a shadow over the good news, whatever it was, with Aunt Mara. They both needed the win so much. Everyone did. He hoped Mom knew, and Dad, wherever he was. And he hoped that it was better than he guessed. That Mara was healed, finally, and that whatever was - whatever she was sick with was finally, permanently, gone.
Still thinking about his Aunt, Anakin almost missed Noskaur’s nonchalant announcement.
“The Primarch wishes to meet with you, Senator, before you depart. He has newly found time in his schedule, and feels it important to deliver his own regards to the representative of the New Republic.”
Anakin’s eyes widened, noticing how Lieutenant Thiel, if it were possible, seemed to draw himself even taller, more perfectly erect. All of the Imperials did, each one of them tugging on uniforms and brushing off invisible lint. Like the Primarch’s title was enough to suddenly refocus every single one and he felt - Anakin reached out and felt the sheer loyalty that radiated off of them all like the baking heat of a desert. A complex emotion, filled with love and wonder and pride and fear and all of them, even Lieutenant Thiel, felt it as one.
Senator Shesh seemed delighted. She had complained, Anakin heard, about how this ‘Primarch’ was only ever talked about and that he seemed like the most reasonable one around and how if only they could just talk with him directly, there’d be a lot less of a hassle here and other things like that. To Anakin, the Primarch sounded kind of like a figurehead. He was too busy with ‘affairs of state’ and ‘critical logistics’ to spare a moment to meet with a Senator? After the Chief of State, Senators were the most important people in the New Republic.
He’d know, his mom had been both.
“Of course, I would be honored to make the Primarch’s acquaintance. I’m sure in the future Chief of State Feyl’ya would look forward to meeting him as well.” Given how the Imperials felt about nonhumans, Anakin felt the Senator was probably making a point there, but the Iterator didn’t seem to care.
“It would be the logical result, certainly,” the man allowed.
“Shall we meet privately?” Senator Shesh asked.
“No, the Primarch wishes to meet all who speak for the New Republic.”
“I’d like to meet the man too,” Durron chimed in. “You’ve all spoken so much about him, after all.” Anakin felt Kyp’s curiosity, burning under the surface. The Imperials several times had made allusions to how the Primarch was the one that wanted them to find a way to come to agreement today, that he had been the one to order the overreacting military to stand down. He had to be quite the man indeed to command that kind of instant and unquestioning loyalty.
Harlan said last night that after a single broadcast from the inner system, every Imperial ship slammed on the brakes immediately. Whoever the Primarch was, when he spoke, everyone listened.
“He will be here shortly,” Thiel confirmed, peering at something embedded in the broad collar of his armor. “The Primarch was planetside to handle matters in the Redoubt.”
Again, Anakin was struck by how the Imperials reacted. All of them were sitting ramrod straight, taking deep breaths. He saw one of their stenographers surreptitiously wipe her brow with her robe’s sleeve. Anakin felt Kyp’s presence in the Force whisper past him, expanding through and out of the room and then Kyp frowned, narrowed his eyes, and Anakin sensed even more clearly the older Jedi’s focus in the Force. Mei was leaning back in her chair, legs crossed at the ankle, fingers woven in her lap. Catching Anakin’s eye, she winked.
Noskaur cleared his throat as white-robed servants hurried to the wide double doors of the chamber, securely shuttered. Anakin was sorely tempted to extend a tendril of the Force beyond, to get a sense of the man, but held back. Listen to the Force, don’t shove it around.
“I would advise focusing on his feet,” he said.
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“Excuse me?” Senator Shesh asked, confusion in her voice. Anakin frowned at the non-sequitor.
“The Primarch,” he clarified. “Try to focus on his feet. It’ll help.”
“What are you-”
The broad double doors, plain and polished metal, swung inward on silent hinges, each hauled by a servant that Anakin realized, for a split second, were weeping.
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Noskaur bows his head, more familiar than most of the others, taking a moment to gather his thoughts that scatter immediately like terrified doves as they always do at first sight. Beside him, he envies how steadily Katryna Vaul remains outwardly relaxed and composed. But he still notes her white knuckles and the way color flees her face. Even the Shipmistress, hardened by the void and some exposure to the Primarch, is only human. Thiel sinks to one knee. Magos Nalt’s mechadendrites are curled in entirely, spooled tight to his back and his augmetic eye clicks rapidly as it refreshes. Colonel Lurense is slackjawed. Half the adepts have wet cheeks and trembling lips.
All have been in the Primarch’s presence at least once.
For those without a sense of the Force, what lay behind the doors was as if an airlock wrenched open, sucking out all air at once, leaving lungs frozen, minds blank, mouths agape. There is a feeling like heat, like the sun on a cloudless day that prickles skin and ruffles fur. Bowels twinge. Bladders tremble. Hindbrains in human and nonhuman alike scream wordless, clambering up the brainstem to pummel the hippocampus. Tears burn from eyes, unnoticed.
For Victor Pomt, he thinks of pulsars. So much wrapped into so tiny of a star, churning with explosive power, held on the brink of unimaginable havoc. He thinks of the blinding jets that blast from the poles, giving a hint of the chained potential. They can be seen from across galaxies, from across hyperclusters, from across the universe. He is staring down a polar radio pulse now and he is spellbound.
Tresk Im’nel is struck by a migraine like he has never had before. Auras dance in his vision. Half of his sight goes static and grey, vertigo sweeping him and he swallows down his lunch. The Force is - he has no words for it. He wants to say it is raging, he wants to say it is a storm, but it is none, and all. The Force is bent out of shape, it is twisting so that one and one equals three, so that rain falls up and suns shine darkness. It is inversed, polarity swapped, yellow-becomes blue, green-sears-into-red and he is in awe that this thing could be so close and none of them even notice.
Mei claps a hand over her mouth, spittle and stomach acid squeezing between her fingers. She does not notice. She sees a man, or the shape of a human, rippling and warping whose head is that of an animal, sleek and furred and then stern and feathered, then horned and braying. Behind it she can almost make out the more mundane shape of a broad, tall man, beyond hope of scale, but the doubling of her vision sends her eyes out of focus, pressure building behind her temples.
Kyp Durron’s fingers are so tight about his lightsaber that the metal cuts him. Blood beads on silvered metal. In moments before, his sense was rebuffed, sliding around like a zurl seed in his fingers. But with the doors flung open: in front of him is the single Darkest thing he has ever witnessed. He smells cooking flesh, he tastes gamma radiation, he chokes on the fist of Exar Kun around his throat. The Force bends and falls past an event horizon, choked out, suffocated, annihilated, devoured. He realizes it was not his inability to sense this man before. It was because the Force refuses to have anything to do with this abomination. He will kill this thing, this monster, this, this…this…
Viqi Shesh sees God. She is an obligate atheist. Belief in greater powers was never even a consideration. Some hold with the Force in this new age. Other places follow their own faiths. She never cared or noticed. Higher powers like such meant places unattainable for her and were discarded. Viqi Shesh believes in herself and she believes in power. Heat fills her chest, pushing through every limb, trembling nerves and twitching fingers. She looks on the face of God and there is Rapture. Enthneogenic ecstasy.
Anakin Solo watches the Force crystallize. He sees the invisible become visible, threads in the air, dust motes dancing in light, tangles and streams and wafting clouds. He could reach his fingers out and run them through this newfound sight, if he could imagine commanding his limbs. At the center of this, this lens that shocks his sense, he sees a man. A tall man, a stern man, handsome like a king on an old coin. A man in simple robes of white, robes of state, with a laurel at his brow. He looks at this man and sees Thiel’s father, then sees the father each of the handful Astartes they had met. It is so obvious. How had anyone missed it? The familial connection is like fetters, linking the man and his son. Like Thiel is the man, too, in some pinched off, smaller form. Anakin cannot blink, because if he blinks, he will lose this sight, the sight of the Force, physical, tangible, breathing, all around him. For just a moment, he has seen beyond the rainbow, past violet, below red, and glimpsed all wave-patterns. In later, mundane moments, he tries to explain it as beautiful, but no spoken word can capture the rippling, infinite ocean of the Force that expands around him, as deep as the seas of Dac and as wondrous as the storm-bands of Yavin.
Roboute Guilliman clears his throat, taking in the room, half-filled with rigid, rapturous, shell-shocked diplomats and ambassadors who are the pinnacle of their craft. He adopts a chagrined expression, raising one hand gently, sleeve of his toga sliding over his massive forearm.
“Be at ease,” he murmurs, voice ringing in every corner of the chamber.
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Malaghi Shesh was underway. Following like a chastened child, held tight to their mother, was the Plooriod Self Defense Force Star Destroyer Glgthurn. Commodore Fthiss languished under arrest in his own quarters, the XO left in command under stern observation of Family Shesh armsmen. Beqi Shesh, radiant in a complex drapery of violet, white, green and yellow stood beside her older cousin, the lesser partner of a binary star system sidling up to its primary. Viqi Shesh, by contrast, wore pressed pants and a simple pale purple tunic, though her fingers and ears dripped with gold and gemstones. Beyond the transparisteel viewport of the bridge was the white-violet dagger of Temerity, keeping pace with her grander sibling. Samothrace soared to port, a bar of glinting gold and oceanic blue, itself flanked by two naked blades of Imperial destroyer-escorts.
They cruised past Mantallikes and Viqi Shesh winced at the horrific damage slashed across the massive star dreadnought. Sparking light caught the eye, bursting and vanishing across the beam of the warship as crews scour the surface, feverishly effecting repairs.
Idly, she imagined towing such a vessel into the grand ring over Kuat. It would take months to even begin work on so alien a vessel, but she knew Shesh engineers and savants were up to it. Ebcoracum rolls away beneath them as the Mandator cruises out of its mass shadow. Hyperspace awaits, an agonizingly long trip bouncing back and forth until reaching the greater paved ways of the spacelanes, then on to Coruscant. Down in the depths of Malaghi Mei Taral and young Anakin Solo are helping Sorvenos Noskaur and his retinue settle into the sumptuous rooms set aside for them. Kyp Durron sequestered himself away in the Jedi’s own quarters, refusing to speak with Viqi or anyone else.
And the why…
She tried everything she could, every mnemonic and trick she had picked up, either taught or discovered. Try as she might, Viqi could not recall the specific words the Primarch spoke. Just thinking the title sent a frisson of electricity up her spine and she shivered in the perfectly maintained air. Roboute Guilliman. She remembered his name, the way the syllables rolled like thunder from his chest, filling the air, filling her head, almost physical, tangible, like she held the words in her hands even as they took up her world.
There had to be something going on. He was Force-sensitive. He had to be. She saw the reactions. Later, after he said a few words and departed, when Viqi could string her thoughts together gain. When her heart stopped racing. When her skin stopped tingling.
She saw how the Jedi reacted, like no one else. Tresk immediately excused himself to find a medical droid, claiming a migraine. Taral looked humiliated, stinking of bile and ducking her head. Kyp Durron was even bleeding, his fist bunched in his robe. None of them would talk about what happened. What they felt. What they saw. Everything wrapped up as if in a daze. Even the Imperials were slightly out of it. One moment Viqi was emptily shaking hands, then next she was walking through the corridors, out onto the tarmac of the Redoubt, then she was in the shuttle, then she was staring through the environment shields of Malaghi Shesh’s hangar.
A blur. She remembered Noskaur quietly apologizing. Saying something about how all the Primarchs had this effect, the first time. That it was normal, and that he should’ve warned them more. That he hoped it did not sour relations.
Sour relations.
Viqi Shesh wanted to be angry. This Primarch, this Roboute Guilliman, had done something to her head, to her mind. The feeling - but she could not stay irritated. When she recalled the doors swinging open, she couldn’t find the space to be affronted. How could she?
He had to be Force-sensitive, that was it. Viqi wasn’t, of course, but everyone knew Jedi could make people feel certain ways. They could link minds and share emotions and Viqi had seen it first hand, when Solo learned something about his Aunt. That’s what it had to be. Pomt agreed when they spoke on it. Victor was more disquieted, but he too agreed that he hadn’t felt anything wrong in that moment.
If anything, Victor considered, it felt like his first memory of looking up in the night sky and seeing the arc of the great Shipyards around Kuat and being old enough to understood exactly what it meant. The awe, the wonder, the shock of it.
To Viqi, it reminded her of the first time she stood in the Senate chamber. It was nothing like the austere, imposing structure of the Old Republic, but it was enormous and it was drenched in meaning. She had come early to her first session, very early, and no one else was present aside from a handful of security. The place was ringing silent and she padded out in soft-soled shoes, craning her neck up and looking around.
Wonder. Joy.
But it paled, it paled to how she felt when the doors opened.
When Roboute Guilliman spoke.
She set her teeth, exhaling hard through her nose and forcibly taking hold of the thoughts with both hands, shoving them aside. She owned nothing but herself and power. The Galaxy turned on the fulcrum of merit. Viqi worshiped nothing but potential.
She’d talk to the Jedi, even if they didn’t want to, and she’d be ready for next time. Roboute Guilliman, Primarch, whatever that meant, was another man in a Galaxy that made men small. Kuat knew what to do with small men. She knew. She cracked her neck, smiling over at Beqi, who gave the order. Stars leapt. Hyperspace crackled around them.
She would wield this Imperium in Exile and the Galaxy would know her name.
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Anakin, after showing the old Iterator to his quarters, return to the ones set aside for the Jedi. He unclipped his lightsaber, hanging it from a hook beside the door. He toed off his boots, neatly placing them side by side and then shrugged off his outer robes. Taking a moment to decide, he changed entirely into a lightweight jumpsuit, laying down on his bed. Not a bunk, not here, not on Malaghi Shesh, where each Jedi had a room to themselves. He gazed up the ceiling, lit by flickering blue from the whorl of hyperspace outside his datapad-sized porthole.
Anakin lifted his arm, his hand tinted the same rippling blues as the white-washed durasteel above, and let his eyes unfocus. He imagined the way the Force was. He imagined the way it wove and rippled and swirled around him, around Kyp, around Mei and Tresk and knotted and tied and tangled, how it filled the room, luminous, how it breathed and swelled and swayed.
He lay in bed for hours, imagining it, reaching for it, trying to find it again, to see it again. He dreamt and he imagined and he pushed, he pressed, he bent every fiber of his young being to seeing, just for a moment, a second, that beautiful infinity again.
Many hundreds of parsecs away, a tangled bundle of blonde hair was caught by pale fingers and swept away from green eyes, muzzy with sleep.
“Anakin?” Tahiri whispered into the dark of Yavin’s true night, gooseflesh prickling.