XXVII: Price of Success
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They ate, they patched up bruises and cuts and scrapes, they changed into clothes provided by the Imperials, and then they all passed out.
Anakin awoke in the dark, stared up at the ceiling and wondered just where in the Corellian hells he was. He felt faintly the subsonic rumbling of a starship in motion, so not on Yavin or Coruscant or elsewhere. His dreams, formless and meaningless and fading, clung to him and he knuckled them away until he remembered Samothrace and Obroa-skai and right, he was in the private quarters given over to the Republic team.
Blearily, he rolled over, untangling himself from unexpectedly cool and silken sheets, squinting at where he’d left his datapad, propped up with the clock left active. Sithspawn, fourteen hours! He hadn’t been that tired, had he?
Sitting up, his back and legs and shoulders screamed at him and yes, yes he had been that tired and wow, that hurt. Taking slow breaths he eased into meditation, sitting up, cross-legged, sheets mussed around him. He drew on the Force, gently and wholly, soothing away muscles sore from hours and hours of running and fighting without pause. First he rolled his right shoulder, digging fingers into his deltoid as knots eased. Then his left, joint popping. Interlacing his fingers he stretched, yawning, and let the Force go, feeling more awake.
Outside his quarters, as the Imperials gave them a suite with enough rooms for everyone to have one to themselves, he found his uncle hunched over a datapad, brows drawn, plate of something left forgotten at his elbow. Several platters, covered, took up the center of a round table, ringed with comfortable cushioned stools.
“Anakin!” Luke’s expression melted away to happiness and he waved his nephew over. “They brought breakfast for us an hour or so ago. Hungry?”
Anakin’s stomach informed the room and possibly half the ship the answer was a strong yes.
“I think so.”
He helped himself, peeking under each lid. There were rolls, fried strips of meat, seasoned rices, smoked fish, cereals, nuts, fruits. He took a little of each onto a plate, sliding onto a stool across from his uncle. After downing a roll, surprised at how warm and fluffy it still was, he couldn’t wait any longer.
“Is Mei okay?”
The problem with being a Jedi is that it was hard to lie. Anakin felt his uncle’s sorrow and concern, even before he spoke.
“She’s a fighter, Anakin.”
He reached for a pitcher of water, mouth suddenly dry as he saw Mei’s arm fly through the arm once, twice, thrice.
“The Force is with her. Captain Altuzer told me personally that their best surgeons are working on Mei. She’ll pull through.”
Anakin nodded, not sure of what else to say. He wished he was a healer, like Cilghal, so that he could do something instead of just hope. Luke pushed aside his datapad, shutting it off, giving Anakin his full attention.
“Face and I were able to contact NRI with Samothrace’s new holocomm. The Navy is sending a cruiser to pick us up as soon as we’re out of occupied space. Doctors are standing by on Coruscant, when we get there. How are you feeling?”
“Sore, mostly. I can’t believe I slept that long.”
“It was a long day, Anakin. I’m so proud of you - and I’m sorry.”
Anakin sat back, frowning. Idly, he toyed with his fork, running it through leftover sauces on his plate.
“Sorry? Why?”
His uncle grimaced and ran a hand over his face.
“This wasn’t supposed to be - everything that happened. NRI swore up and down that the Yuuzhan Vong would have no idea we were coming. I had hoped…I wanted something simple. You’ve been through so much in the past few months, Anakin.”
“You have too, Uncle Luke. I guess I accept your apology but it’s not like these kinds of things have gone all that well so far, right?” First, Jacen’s attempt to rescue Danni and Miko, when Miko Reglia had died. Then there was Jacen and Luke’s investigation of Belkadan, when Jacen was captured. Then Master Horn’s mission to Bimmiel, and the whole thing with Dantooine, and then Garqi. Pretty much every time the Jedi tangled with the vong, something went bad. It was predictable at this point.
“I can’t argue that. After this - we’re going back to Yavin. I made that promise and I want to keep it. I need to check on Cilghal and meet with Kam and it’ll be good for you to see your friends again.”
“Last week I probably would’ve been disappointed.” Anakin shrugged, putting his fork aside. “Disappointed to step away from the war, I mean!” His uncle smiled and waved off his clarification.
“I understand, no offense taken. Not too disappointed now, though?”
I’m writing from an Imperial battleship. We just left Obroa-skai. It wasn’t good. Mei is hurt and one of the Wraiths died. Rhonabeq too. One of the Imperials sacrificed himself for us.
His hands wrote what his heart didn’t want to say. Every time he’d start a letter back to Tahiri, he’d read over what he’d written and delete it in immediate disgust. She didn’t need to hear about the war, she didn’t need to hear about all the people dying and his problems. He couldn’t put that on her, not on Tahiri. So he kept trying and deleting and trying again, all while she kept sending him bright and sunny new messages, chatting about this and that and each time he read her words he could hear her breathless voice and he just couldn’t write back. Not when he had nothing good to say.
I miss you Tahiri. I miss our adventures. I miss when people didn’t die.
“I think a break would be nice,” he said neutrally. Uncle Luke opened his mouth to say something, but one of the other doors swung open, Face wandering out with a jaw-cracking yawn.
“Morning’,” the Colonel groaned, and sniffed. “Dead sith, do I smell food?”
Anakin gestured to all the covered platters and the pilot dove in, piling food onto a plate with gusto.
“I’m eating for Zev, here,” Face announced, tucking in. “Any time we could manage catering on NRI’s dime, he went for it. You have no idea how good I got at rephrasing reimbursement requests. If you’ve never seen him, he doesn’t eat, he feeds.”
“Did he still try to get Allegiance painted on his x-wing?”
Face put down his utensils, holding his head in his hands a moment.
“Every single time,” he said, muffled. “Every single time. The worst part is, I could never really think of a good reason to deny it. Blow up one super star destroyer and it’s like you saved the whole New Republic.”
“Lando said he gave him permission to paint it on the side of his console” his uncle laughed.
“I kicked Wedge out of Wraith Squadron so that no one could outshine me,” Face groused, tearing a roll in half and soaking up sauce. “You try flying next to a guy who gets to paint Death Stars under his canopy.”
“I couldn’t imagine,” Luke said around a smile.
“Ha ha.” Face turned serious, looking between Anakin and Luke both. “Good news from Bhindi. She stayed up way too long doing some indexing, but it looks like we got a haul out of the archives.”
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
Not a waste, then. Anakin let out a breath, shaking his head, reaching for another buttered roll.
“I’m sure it's too soon to tell if it has what the Imperials were hoping for.”
Face aimed a finger at Luke.
“Right in one. Bhindi did a raw dump, so it’s going to take droids a lot of processing to get it all organized. She says it looks like she got at least a third of the astroarcheological database, at least from what the Director indicated. Even if it doesn’t have what we were after, we still saved irreplaceable records.”
“At a high cost,” Luke sighed.
“Always too high.” Face was quiet a moment, eyes hard when he looked back at the two jedi. “You killed that monster though, right? I heard you tell the Sergeant.”
“The yammosk?” Anakin felt his uncle’s discomfort. What had happened, in the end, with the yammosk he couldn’t put a finger on. He remembered hearing Uncle Luke’s voice, calling for him. He remembered reaching out through the Force, feeling like he was pulled down, into…something. And then it was flashes, more like feelings, emotions. Nothing concrete, nothing he could pin down with words or metaphor. Familiar, like the lyrics of a song you know the tune to, but not the words. You can hum along, but the refrain is just at the tip of your tongue.
“We did. I held it in place and Anakin - Anakin was able to finish it.”
That rocked him. He thought Luke had. He remembered light, a golden Light that filled up everything right before he was thrown back into himself and he just assumed, naturally, that it had been his uncle.
“Me?”
“You didn’t know?”
“It was really confusing. I thought that it was you.”
His uncle shook his head. “The yammosk pulled me into some kind of mental construction. I broke out of it, but it was all I could do to keep it focused on just me and unable to command the slaves. That’s why I needed you.”
“But I didn’t do anything? I…I felt the yammosk and it was like it was attacking me, so I pushed back. I think I pushed back.” Anakin hunched down on his stool, trying and failing to find words to describe the feeling. He had felt the war coordinator’s mental pressure almost like a physical one, like it was attacking his body, which of course wasn’t right, so it had to mean something else but he couldn’t imagine what it was. It definitely didn’t feel like any kind of communication he’d had in the Force. When he and Jacen and Jaina melded in Lando’s Folly to run the asteroids, it was like they shared bodies. Saw out of each other’s eyes, heard out of each other’s ears. With Tahiri, it was almost like just talking to each other. Like finishing sentences with jokes so old you didn’t have to think of them.
Uncle Luke studied him, eyes flicking back and forth across Anakin’s face, like he was really seeing his nephew for the first time.
“I saw you like a lightning bolt,” the Jedi Master said. “I could see the yammosk in my mind’s eye and it was straining against me. We were in the darkness, cut off from whatever telepathic sense it used so that it couldn’t command anyone. When I called you, I wasn’t sure you would hear me. Then there was a lightning bolt, but gold instead of blue, and the yammosk faded away.”
“It felt like hours. It felt like it got me, until the end.”
Face looked between the two Jedi.
“But it’s dead?”
“Absolutely,” Luke confirmed and Anakin mutely nodded, trying to process what he heard, what his uncle saw. On his end, he wished it was that decisive. It was only watching Vomar and the other slaves turn on the warriors and chazrach that he even could guess at what happened. Whatever he did, when he just pushed back at the yammosk worked, but if he hadn’t even the slightest clue what that was, how could he do it again?
“NRI will love to hear that. We’ve been trying to kill war coordinators when we can figure out when they show up, but so far, I’m pretty sure Helska is the only confirmed time. Hopefully, the vong don’t have a lot. This might end up being worth more than all the data Bhindi could’ve pulled out of the archives.”
“But I don’t know what I did?” Anakin hated how he sounded almost whiny and blushed.
“I barely know how I managed to reach the yammosk’s mind. Everything about the yuuzhan vong strains belief. Whatever telepathic sense they have - the yammosks, I mean - it isn’t the Force. I’m pretty sure about that, but at the same time, you and I both could reach it through the Force. What that means, I don’t know yet. We’ll investigate it together.”
“And let us know if you figure out ways to blow up their squidbrains with mind bullets,” Face added, shrugging and back to his breakfast.
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Much to his surprise, in contrast to the explosions of baroque ornamentation elsewhere, the inside of the Imperial medbay - apothecarion - was clinical, stark, and functional. The machines looked abstruse and unrecognizable and he couldn’t understand anything the surgeons and doctors were saying as they worked, but Luke had been in far, far too many medbays in his life. Mei was in good hands. Or the next best thing, considering the Imperial magos that was working on her. Her robes were crisp and red, trimmed in white, and she bent over the comatose Jensaarai as six hands worked so quickly they were a metallic blur.
Luke watched from an observation room. Samothrace was still a day out from rendezvous, but time was up. Zalthis translated for the surgeon, who regretfully informed the Jedi Master that while they had done all they could, the injuries were so traumatic and severe that they could not continue to support Mei. She would die, and soon, unless she was properly treated. In short - she needed extensive cybernetic rebuild on that side of her torso, before scarring ruined nerves, blood vessels and bone. He’d hoped they could get Mei to the state-of-the-art hospital waiting on Coruscant. Idly, reflexively, he flexed the fingers of his right hand. Sometimes weeks, or even months would go by before he remembered it was a facsimile. On Coruscant, with the right doctors, the right treatment, the right prosthetics, Mei might make a full recovery.
The Imperials claimed their medical expertise was far greater than the New Republic, but Luke saw that as the boastful arrogance it was.
He didn’t even know what Mei’s opinion would be. Prosthetics? Cybernetics? Nothing? Tenel Ka was proud of her truncated arm, turning down even the simplest of replacements. All he could do was act as he saw best, as ever.
So he gave his approval, and in the magos went.
She worked fast. Tentacled tools whirred and buzzed and below her orchard of telescopic lenses that encrusted her entire upper face, the magos’ bloodless lips were pursed in focus. Leads were punctured into Mei’s chest and neck, grim-looking metal woven into the ragged edges of her flesh. Whatever Sergeant Ascratus’ blood had done, it lingered, very little leaking even as the magos worked to debride and clip back scabs and dead flesh. Luke couldn’t see much and was glad for it. He kept close focus on Mei’s presence in the Force. Muted, as she was in a coma, but still bright and alive. She was a candle behind a screen, not one guttering out. He wouldn’t lose another.
Like a timelapse, a chunky, blocky facsimile of a human’s shoulder joint and clavicle came together and Mei’s presence grew firmer, clearer. Lifesign readouts calmed and smoothed.
Anakin would be over the moon. His nephew and the Jensaarai had found a surprising rapport, since the conference. Considering it, Luke wondered why he hadn’t thought of it before. Mei came from a background tainted by the Sith. She dealt with the weight of expectations of family and bloodline daily. She’d had loss, personal loss, in just as unexpected and shocking a way as Anakin. Luke tried to reach his nephew, knowing how much his name weighed on him, but like with his sister, he always found himself on the edge of an insurmountable gulf.
When Anakin Skywalker was spoken of, Luke thought “father”. Everyone else thought “Darth Vader”. Leia wanted nothing to do with even the ghost of the memory of the man. Anakin struggled under the sins of the name, never having known his grandfather as anything but a specter of the past. How strange it was, when for so short a time, and across such few moments, that Darth Vader had morphed into something else. As if yesterday, he could smell the aromatic sap and earthy ferns of Endor, mixed with the sharp ozone tinge of active repulsorlifts and the staleness of recycled air. He could still feel the pressure of the cuffs around his wrists.
Still feel the domineering, stifling presence of his father, at his side.
Strange to think he hadn’t feared the man that killed his teacher, that maimed him.
Anakin feared Anakin. In his younger years and explorations with Tahiri, his nephew had made some manner of peace, but as Luke knew best, peace never lasted. It painted over the world and it tamped down the hardest edges, but turmoil still strained the weave until one day, the fabric of peace split. The job was to stitch it back together, not lament at its ruin.
So Mei and Anakin had common ground and he rejoiced to see his nephew speaking more, emerging a bit by bit from the shell that had only been reinforced by the nonstop hits of the invasion. Red in the face, Anakin even admitted that he had finally sent mail back to Tahiri.
Even if it pained him that it hadn’t been him that had helped his nephew, he was grateful that Anakin had found someone to talk to. Chalco was another, that strange smuggler who’d helped Anakin track down the rogue Daeshara’cor. Luke didn’t miss how now Anakin kept training and spending time with the Ultramarine Zalthis and smiled. For a kid who Han had joked ‘needed a gravity tug to draw two words out of’, Anakin never realized how easily he could make friends, if he let himself.
Luke was tugged from his thoughts by a gentle rapping. Startled, he saw the magos standing right before the window of the observation room, one long, tentacle-like arm extended. She gestured toward Mei, fully covered again by a clean white sheet and Luke extended his sense. The Jensaarai felt centered, no longer ebbing. She even looked healthier, her face regaining a little color from how grey and drawn she had been. The Imperial bowed at the waist and trundled away on triple-jointed legs.
Full of relief, Luke slumped back. He wouldn’t be adding another name to memory today.