Star Wars fic: Bad Moon Rising (5)
Sep. 24th, 2013 04:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bedlamsbardTitle: Bad Moon Rising (5)
Author:bedlamsbard
Fandom: Star Wars (prequel trilogy)
Rating: PG-13
Content advisory: violence
Summary: Returning to Coruscant from a mission, Obi-Wan Kenobi and her Padawan Anakin Skywalker are reunited with the newly-appointed Naboo Senator Padmé Amidala, who unwittingly draws them into the murky world of Republic politics. Lady!Obi-Wan AU, set six years after the events of TPM and three years before the events of AotC.
Disclaimer: Star Wars and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to George Lucas, LucasFilm, and Disney.
Author's notes: Part of the Oxygen and Rust series.
Previous chapters: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Interlude: Anakin | AO3
Obi-Wan woke up, eventually, to a blistering headache and a feeling that something was horribly, terribly wrong.
It took her a moment to work out whether that was her own common sense or the Force trying to tell her something. She could feel Anakin’s overwhelming panic pounding in her brain, threatening to overwhelm her own mind. But Anakin wasn’t at the party, she thought hazily, and kept her eyes shut while she let that percolate into something resembling the truth. Anakin’s worry was familiar; over the past six years, after their Master-Padawan bond had stabilized, Obi-Wan had gotten so used to it that she thought it would be more notable for its absence than its presence. But this time it was a bit stronger than usual, and it took Obi-Wan several minutes to work the tendrils of his panic out from her own mind, until she could think clearly again. Once that was done, she let her senses roll outwards, thinking firmly of Padmé and the other senators that had still been at the party when the bounty hunters had arrived. The walls of the building that she was being held in were transparent in her mind, bits of mist that meant nothing to the Force. Obi-Wan passed through them as if they weren’t even there, watching her mental tracks so that she could recognize them in the waking world.
Her sense of Padmé in the Force was like the winter rains on Naboo, fierce and deadly, but beautiful in their own way too, cleansing and purifying. Bail Organa was polished durasteel, like the hull of a warship, with a sense of banked coals and a flicker of flame at his heart. She was less familiar with Mon Mothma and Rush Clovis, but she could feel them too, upright in the Force, each with their own personality marker. Her sense of the four senators wasn’t as strong as it would have been had they been Jedi, but it didn’t need to be: all Obi-Wan needed to know was that they were alive. She could sense other beings within the vicinity, vaguely familiar from the party: the bounty hunters that had attacked them. Beyond that, the vast city-planet of Coruscant roiled, so many minds that opening herself up to them would drive even a Jedi Knight mad. No Jedi that she could reach, just Anakin’s steadily increasing panic in the back of her head, and he was too distant and distracted to respond to her mental calls.
They’d have to work on that when she got back to the Temple, Obi-Wan thought, and dropped out of her own head and back into her body.
Her extended Force use had mostly wiped the headache away, but Obi-Wan realized almost immediately that her arms aches, her shoulders twisted in a way that was mostly definitely not natural, and that there was an unwelcome familiar pressure on her wrists.
Oh, not again.
Obi-Wan opened her eyes, blinking in the dimness of the room. She let the Force roll out again, using it the way a bat would use sound: directing the Force-waves to spread out and bounce back, telling her the shape of the room. It was big, probably part of an old warehouse, with loading doors at one end and a second, smaller door at the other, directly across from Obi-Wan. Stretched across half the room was a chain-link fence; Obi-Wan was handcuffed and chained to the top of it, her arms stretched out over her head. Her toes just barely touched the floor, enough that the strain on her arms and shoulders wasn’t completely unbearable.
Obi-Wan flexed her feet gently, trying to see how much give she had, then her wrists, letting the Force flow into the joints to ease the ache. Her current position would have been a major impediment for anyone but a Jedi – and even some of them – but the memory of her captivity on Derith Nahar had gnawed at her since her return to Coruscant. She’d be damned if she’d let it happen again.
Tensing her arms, she wrapped her fingers around the chain on the binders and pulled, pushing herself up off the ground with her toes at the same time. A touch of the Force sent her catapulting upward, landing flatfooted on the top of the chain-link fence. It swayed alarmingly under her weight, but it was made of stronger stuff than it seemed and stabilized after a moment. Obi-Wan stayed crouching, studying the binders that bound her to the fence. Padmé probably had lock picks on her somewhere, she thought ruefully, but the closest that Obi-Wan came to that was –
Hmm.
Tipping forward to try and reach her remaining hairpins made the fence sway again and Obi-Wan nearly lose her balance. She bit her lip hard enough to hurt and shut her eyes, focusing on the hairpins that she could feel pressing against her skull, having shifted from their former position sometime since the party. Some of her hair had fallen out of its former tight twists, lank against her shoulders, but enough of it remained in position that she was certain she could at least manage two hairpins.
With her eyes shut, she could see – for lack of a better word – the Force that pressed close around her. Obi-Wan tugged lightly at it with her mind, flicking her fingers as she drew the hairpins from her hair. Several more twists of her hair fell against her face, but Obi-Wan barely noticed. Opening her eyes, she saw the hairpins hanging in the air in front of her face and sent them on a slow descent until she could grasp them in both hands.
Obi-Wan let the Force release with a sigh and found the lock on the binders. She picked it by touch, made a little clumsy by using hairpins instead of proper picks, and huffed out a soft breath of relief as she felt it click open. The Force caught the binders as they started to fall, floating them back up to her, and Obi-Wan plucked them out of the air. She looped them through her belt; there was no knowing when a pair of binders would come in handy, especially on a day like this.
She dropped lightly down to the permacrete floor, jarring loose another hair twist. Obi-Wan hadn’t exactly done her hair with the intention of fighting in it and while it would have held under normal circumstances, whatever had happened over the past few hours was clearly too much for it. Irritated, she snapped out a hand just to the side of her head, feeling all her remaining hairpins go flying into it. The heavy weight of her long red hair came down all at once; Obi-Wan poured the hairpins into one of her belt-pouches and reached back with both hands to pull her hair into a quick braid the thickness of her wrist, binding it off with a spare hair-tie. Obi-Wan kept her hair long out of un-Jedi-like vanity, as she was self-aware enough to know that it would be more practical cut short, but that didn’t mean she went anywhere without at least a dozen hair-ties in case of situations like this.
She could feel the lump on the back of her head as she pulled at her hair, dried blood flaking off on her fingers. No wonder that she had had a headache when she’d woken up; she must have gone down hard when the stun blast hit her. A blood trail might be a good thing, if the bounty hunters hadn’t been smart enough to clean it up afterwards. Without sunlight – which was a rare thing to come by in some of the worse levels on Coruscant anyway – it was hard to tell how much time had passed, but it had to be at least long enough that the senatorial vote might have started. Not all senators showed up, even for the preliminary votes, so the absence of four might not be missed. The absence of one Jedi might not be missed either, even in the midst of a manhunt for a Jedi killer – except that Obi-Wan had left behind an extremely panic-prone Padawan who had been expecting her home. When she didn’t show up, Anakin would have gone looking for her. After six years, Obi-Wan knew Anakin better than most beings would ever know themselves. He would come and try to find her, and if he found evidence of a fight, then he’d –
Panic, Obi-Wan thought grimly. But after that – or along with that – he’d do what needed to be done. They’d talked about this just a few days ago.
She put her hand to her belt to see if her comlink was there, but of course the bounty hunters had taken that from her along with her lightsaber. Obi-Wan, like Qui-Gon before her, wasn’t the type of Jedi to carry more than a few basic necessities on her at all times; more on away missions, but for an evening out all she had had were her lightsaber and her comlink. She was rather regretting that now.
She stepped forwards towards the nearer door, swiping her hand experimentally over the control. To her surprise it wasn’t even locked, the motion detector flaring briefly amber as the door slid open, creaking. Obi-Wan stepped warily out into the dingy hallway, which was lit by a few flickering chemical lights. There was no one in sight, but she could hear voices coming from the far end of the hallway. She hesitated for a moment, listening to the Force, which told her that Padmé and the other senators were in the opposite direction and a floor above her. There seemed to be several guards with them, which was to be expected. Obi-Wan would deal with that when the time came.
The senators would keep. Obi-Wan turned in the direction of the voices.
She kept to the wall, her hands clenched into fists at her sides, feeling out her way with the Force as she went. A blinking light near the ceiling caught her attention; Obi-Wan flicked her fingers at the security camera, making sure that it didn’t register her passage. Belatedly, she realized that she had forgotten to look for cams back in the loading bay where she had been kept, but if the bounty hunters had noticed her disappearance she would have expected more alarm. As far as they were concerned, she was still out cold.
She passed several other doors in the hallway, but there were no living beings behind them. Obi-Wan stopped in front of one and touched a finger to the control, watching the door swish open. Inside, the room was unused and dusty, a ragged blanket and several empty bottles in one corner where some vagrant must have crashed once upon a time. Broken glass littered the ground in front of a partially-boarded up window. Obi-Wan went over the window and stood up on tip-toe to peer out, hoping that it looked outwards and might give her some idea of where on – or in – Coruscant she was.
No matter how bright the day, sunlight never penetrated the deepest levels of Coruscant. Obi-Wan found herself looking out at once of the city-planet’s many tunnel-like streets, somewhere far from the surface where the Senate and the Jedi Temple were located. Outside the world fell into shadows, penetrated by the few chemlamps that hadn’t been broken and a neon sign of a mostly unclothed Twi’lek woman down the street that blinked from pink to green to blue as Obi-Wan watched. The buildings – if they could be called that, blocky metal or permacrete structures that had seen better days – were all closed up and anonymous. No speeders passed by; the usual noise of the city was muted, lingering in the distance as a dull roar. The only beings in sight were a tough-looking Whiphid thug who disappeared into the building with the neon sign and a skinny Nautolan curled up in front of a boarded-up door, sucking eagerly at something in a brown paper bag. It could have been any of a thousand streets in Coruscant.
Obi-Wan lowered herself back down to the floor and turned even before the Farghul behind her could finish saying, “Hey, what are you – stang! It’s that Jedi bitch!”
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to call names?” Obi-Wan chided, but she was already moving, flinging herself forward into a run. She bounced off the floor, legs coming up to scissor tight around the felinoid’s neck as she slammed him down. His head hit the permacrete floor with a deafening crack, blood pooling out around his skull as Obi-Wan flipped back to her feet. His Twi’lek companion barely had time to get a syllable of protest out before Obi-Wan whipped her right foot into his jaw. There was a satisfying crunch of breaking bone as he crumpled to the floor next to his friend, out cold.
Obi-Wan reached down and removed the matched pair of blasters from his belt. She didn’t like blasters, never had, but like most Jedi she knew how to use one and unlike most Jedi she practiced regularly at the range in the Temple. She checked the charge cartridges quickly – full and clean, just like any good bounty hunter – and flipped the setting from kill to stun. Hopefully if she had to shoot someone, it would be someone who could give the Senate Guard answers.
Blasters in hand, she stepped back out into the hallway. Jedi themselves were living weapons, the most dangerous beings in the galaxy despite their technical status as peacekeepers, but there was something comforting about having a weapon in hand, even if it wasn’t her lightsaber.
Obi-Wan frowned at the thought. Jedi weren’t supposed to think such things.
She paused for a moment to mentally prod at her connection to Anakin and staggered, catching herself on the wall with one hand. If anything, Anakin’s panic had increased since the last time Obi-Wan had attempted to touch her mind. For a moment she had been in serious danger of getting sucked into his Force-presence, overwhelming her own mind and leaving her body a blank shell on the floor of the warehouse. If she was certain that Anakin would have noticed, then she might have risked it to ensure the senators’ safety, but she knew her Padawan well enough to guess that even consuming her mind would have bypassed him entirely in his current state of frenzy. There was a reason that Jedi were cautioned against fear and anger as well as forbidden attachments; not merely because it distracted from their sense of duty, but because it could dangerously hamper their ability to use the Force effectively.
Anakin, Anakin, Anakin, no –
Obi-Wan slammed down a mental barrier between the two of them, which restricted the Master-Padawan bond between to nothing more than an agonizing itch in the back of her head, like a bug bite that she couldn’t quite scratch. She could only hope that Anakin might eventually notice that and realize that something was wrong besides merely the fact that she was missing. She didn’t feel terribly sanguine on the subject, however.
Anakin, when I get back we’re going to have a serious talk about not letting your emotions affect your ability to do your duty, Obi-Wan thought grimly.
She straightened up, frowning as she felt wetness on her upper lip, and wiped a trickle of blood away from her nose with the back of her hand. Master-Padawan bond or not, if Anakin’s distress was affecting her this much from halfway across the planet, there was something seriously wrong. The last time he had managed this they’d been in the same room as each other, though in considerably more dire circumstances.
Fortunately none of the other bounty hunters had entered the hallway during her few minutes of incapacity. Obi-Wan proceeded down the corridor blasters first, heading towards the door marked FOREMAN, from which she could hear the voice of the Twi’lek woman who had shot her. From the tinny quality of the response, Obi-Wan guessed that she was talking to a hologram. A twist of the Force brought the voices to her ear as she lingered hidden behind a corner.
“– release the senators in three hours time. I doubt that they will be able to find their way back to the Senate before nightfall today, if that.”
“Yes, my lord. What about the Jedi? Lot of street cred for topping one of them, especially right now –”
“Give Master Kenobi to me,” the stranger interrupted. Obi-Wan frowned. There was something familiar about his voice, but she couldn’t seem to place it.
“That’ll cost you.”
“Name your price.”
The Twi’lek named a number that made Obi-Wan’s eyebrows rise towards her hairline. She knew that captive Jedi, rare as they were, could sell for a lot on the open market, but this seemed excessive.
All the stranger said, however, was, “Very well. I’ll transmit coordinates to you.”
“Soon,” snapped the bounty hunter. “I want her out of here before she wakes up.”
There was no reply, the hologram apparently having disconnected. A moment later the door swung open and the Twi’lek woman emerged, no longer clothed in her bandsman’s uniform. Obi-Wan’s lightsaber hung from her belt alongside her holstered blaster. Scowling in distaste, Obi-Wan pressed herself back against the wall, counting the breaths until the Force told her that the woman had gone.
She darted forwards across the hallway, waving a hand over the door’s motion sensor and pushing slightly with the Force when it didn’t slide open, tricking the electronic lock into opening for her.
There wasn’t much to see inside the room. Obi-Wan slipped one of her stolen blasters through her belt and tapped a finger against the miniature holocomm that had been left on the desk, hoping that it was an open channel so that she could get through to the Jedi Temple. But there was only one dial available, and her attempt to program in the Temple dial resulted in a series of error messages. A burner holocomm, as they called it on the street.
Obi-Wan hesitated, then shrugged and called the only available dial. Bounty hunters didn’t work without being paid; someone was behind the kidnapping of the senators, someone that the Twi’lek woman had called “my lord.”
There was a moment of blue static before the holocomm began to transmit, then it steadied into a tall humanoid figure, features concealed by the hood it wore. Obi-Wan drew in a sharp breath, clutching at the edge of the table to steady herself, the remaining blaster skidding across the top as she dropped it. Perhaps alone of all the Jedi in the Order, Obi-Wan was aware of the strength of the Dark Side, of the way it felt in her mind, in her bones, the tremors it sent along the Force. Other Jedi had touched it, glanced at it, but only Obi-Wan had looked in the abyss of a Sith Lord and lived to tell of it. She knew what a Sith Lord looked like when she saw one – even through a hologram.
“Who are you?” she rasped out through clenched teeth, making herself straighten up through sheer force of will. She was a Jedi Knight, the only living Jedi Knight to ever slay a Sith Lord in combat, and she would be damned if she showed weakness to another.
“Master Kenobi!” said the Sith Lord, sounding pleased. Sith hells damn it, Obi-Wan was positive that she had heard his voice before, but she didn’t know where. She had spoken to so many beings in her life. “What a delight it is to see you unharmed. I see that our dear Bey’aaan was right to fear your escape, although she seems to have mistimed it somewhat. It’s a pity; I was so hoping that you would be my guest for a few days, but I suppose that seems unlikely now.”
“Who are you?” Obi-Wan demanded. “What do you want with the senators?”
“Surely you can’t blame me for having an interest in the inner workings of the Senate, Master Kenobi,” said the Sith Lord. “After all, it’s my Republic too. I owe it to my planet to ensure that the Senate has only the best intentions for the Republic.”
“The Planetary Sovereignty Bill?” Obi-Wan said. “You want it to pass.”
He made a tutting sound. “Now, now, Master Kenobi, let’s not get hung up on specifics, shall we?”
“And what do you want with me?” Obi-Wan said. “Revenge for Darth Maul?”
“My predecessor was little better than an animal. I ought to thank you for killing him, Master Kenobi. Do you know what some beings say about the Jedi?”
“Enlighten me,” Obi-Wan said. Her hands were white-knuckled on the edge of the table, the metal edge digging into her palms hard enough to leave marks.
“They say that the Jedi are the right hand of the Force,” said the Sith Lord, “and the Sith are the left. Or, well, they don’t say that exactly since that species doesn’t have what we think of as hands and it doesn’t quite translate properly into Basic, but you get the idea. Balance, my dear. The Force is all about balance. Where there are Jedi, there are Sith. Where there are Sith, there are Jedi. I give you a riddle, Master Kenobi: a Sith Lord and a Jedi Knight fell that day on Naboo. An apprentice became a master and a master became an apprentice. Maul died and I sprang into being.”
“There is more than one Sith Lord,” Obi-Wan said slowly, fear settling into certainty. She’d argued the matter with the Jedi Council on and off for the past six years, convinced that Maul hadn’t been working alone despite the Council’s doubt that he’d been anything besides a lone Dark Jedi. But Obi-Wan knew what he had been, deep in her bones. She hadn’t wanted to believe what the Force had kept telling her. She’d wanted to believe it was over. But she knew better. She knew it, and the Force knew it. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You know why I’m telling you, Master Kenobi. You know what I want from you.” The Sith Lord smiled beneath his hood.
“No,” Obi-Wan said flatly. “I don’t.”
The door behind her opened and Obi-Wan spun on her heel. Instinct and training took over; she flung her hands up, the Force flowing through them, and sent the Rodian flying sideways into the doorframe. He crumpled to the floor, winking out of the Force as he passed out.
“Well done, Master Kenobi,” said the Sith Lord.
Obi-Wan turned back to him. She could feel movement in the Force; there was something coming towards the building, maybe a klick away now. But the Dark Side flowed around her, masking her usual senses so that she had no idea what they meant. With any luck, the Senate Guard had worked out where they were. Hopefully Anakin was with them and not back at the Temple causing more distress than her disappearance merited. Normally Obi-Wan would be able to tell, but she didn’t dare open up the Master-Padawan bond again. Anakin’s mind would eat hers whole.
“I am a Jedi, like my master before me,” she said. “The Jedi will crush the Sith, as we have always crushed them before. Think on that, my lord.” She flicked a finger at the holocomm, turning it off, and the Sith’s image flickered out of existence. He was still smiling beneath his hood as he vanished.
Obi-Wan went over to the door, stepping carefully over the unconscious Rodian, and peered out into the corridor. Reassured that no one was coming, she leaned down and grasped the Rodian by his arms, pulling him into the office and out of sight. She couldn’t help wrinkling her nose in distaste; Rodian body odor, unless masked by perfumes or colognes, was offensive to humans, and this one apparently hadn’t bathed in the last month or so. Obi-Wan had been in garbage pits that smelt better than he did. He couldn’t have been at the party last night or every senator in 500 Republica would have known that something was amiss.
She picked the burner holocomm up off the table and slipped it into one of her belt-pouches. When she got back to the Temple, she’d have Anakin or one of the tech analysis droids trace the signal. If the Sith Lord was still on Coruscant, then she would find him. And she’d kill him.
Sith Lords are our specialty, she heard, a whisper in the Force from some unknown past or future. She couldn’t tell who had said it, her or Anakin or someone else entirely, or when.
Obi-Wan pushed the thought away. Either her precog was spiking again or the Force had decided to add retrocognition to her otherwise mostly useless bag of tricks, but there was nothing she could do about it now.
There wasn’t much else in the office except for the table and a few cupboards, but Obi-Wan went through it anyway, hoping to find her comlink or some evidence of who the Sith Lord was. The cupboard proved to be bare aside from a long-forgotten candy bar wrapped and a half-empty case of blaster charges that didn’t fit her stolen blasters; Obi-Wan left them where she found them.
She reached out with the Force, meaning to check that Padmé and the other senators remained unharmed, and found Anakin.
Obi-Wan tipped her head curiously to one side, barely aware that she was doing so. Even with the Master-Padawan bond narrowed to its thinnest width she could feel Anakin fretting through the Force, eclipsing every other presence in his immediate vicinity. Obi-Wan could just barely sense two other Jedi with him; she was familiar enough with Quinlan’s markers in the Force to identify him, which meant that it was almost certainly Aayla with him. The others were just shadows in the Force, although Obi-Wan guessed they were Senate Guard. Somebody had unquestionably done very good police work to find them so quickly, she thought distractedly; it almost certainly wasn’t Anakin.
Obi-Wan could have waited for them to arrive, but the Force had left her with no sense of the distance between them. And Obi-Wan had never been good at waiting anyway, especially when it came to waiting to be rescued by her panicking Padawan. If she didn’t want to listen to Anakin gloating for the next month, she had to rescue the senators and capture the bounty hunters herself.
She picked up the blaster she had dropped on the table, checked the charge again as she had been taught, and stepped out into the corridor.
The silence surprised her. It was never quiet on Coruscant, not completely; even in the deepest meditation chambers at the Temple Obi-Wan had occasionally found herself startled out of a trance by some outside noise. This warehouse wasn’t nearly so quiet as the meditation chambers, which had been built to filter out sound, but even – especially – this deep in the lower levels of Coruscant Obi-Wan expected more background noise. The street outside had been nearly empty; Obi-Wan didn’t have enough experience working on Coruscant to know if that was normal or not. She and Anakin had done all of their assignments off-planet, just as she and Qui-Gon had done; they weren’t the kind of Jedi who functioned exclusively on Coruscant.
Taking a breath, Obi-Wan began to move quickly through the hallway, glancing up from time to time to make sure that she didn’t miss any security cameras. Whenever she spotted one, she reached out with the Force, rubbing out the evidence of her passage from the cam’s digital memory. She kept the transparent mental blueprint of the warehouse that she had constructed earlier at the forefront of her mind, letting the Force guide her passage.
The warehouse struck her as small for its intended purpose. Sense memories of the products that had passed through these halls in the past remained, making Obi-Wan frown in disgust – alcohol and spice and other unsavory things. For now, though, it seemed to be sitting empty aside from the senators and their captors. The security cams looked like they had been installed within the past decade, much newer than the rest of the building. Probably not installed just to keep an eye on four senators and one Jedi Knight – they weren’t that new – but it implied that the building hadn’t just been sitting empty until the bounty hunters strolled in. If they had rented it, then that might have left a paper trail that the Senate Guard could follow.
Obi-Wan found herself standing between a packing elevator and the door to a stairwell. She took one hand off the blaster grip to activate the motion sensor, watching the door slide creakily open. Up or down, she thought, standing on the landing. Down would lead her to street level, up to what passed for the roof this deep in Coruscant. Obi-Wan reached outwards with the Force, searching for Padmé’s familiar bright spark.
Up, then.
She checked the blaster’s charge pack again, more out of nerves than anything else – it wasn’t as though she had shot anyone since the last time she had checked – and began to climb the stairs. Her Jedi boots echoed hollowly in the empty stairwell, but the dust on the steps and the lack of it on the elevator door suggested that no one had used the stairs in a long time. Still, Obi-Wan kept her mind as open as she dared with Anakin’s panic still gnawing at the edges of it. She wanted to know if there was anyone approaching, but she could tell that her attention was badly divided because of the need to keep Anakin’s mind out of hers. She didn’t dare close herself out of the Force entirely – she had trained Forceblind as a Padawan, as all Jedi did, but hadn’t had to use that training in years. And she didn’t dare shut herself off from the Force with a Sith Lord about. He wasn’t here, Obi-Wan was nearly certain of that, but still the Dark Side seemed to hang about her, a stagnant miasma that threatened to take her back to Naboo.
Obi-Wan would almost rather let Anakin’s mind consume hers than go back there, only she knew that her Padawan would never be able to live with the guilt.
As she climbed the stairs, the indistinct sense of several beings in the Force settled out into discrete individuals. Obi-Wan identified Padmé and Bail Organa from memory, and then, less certainly, Mon Mothma and Rush Clovis, which left three strangers. Guards, presumably. Even counting the three men she had incapacitated earlier and the Twi’lek woman, that left at least half a dozen other bounty hunters unaccounted for. It was a large number; most bounty hunters that Obi-Wan had met seldom worked in groups much larger than two or three, if that. The Twi’lek woman – Bey’aaan, the Sith Lord had called her, which didn’t ring any bells in Obi-Wan’s memory – must have assembled them all individually or in pairs, since the majority seemed to be different races.
She stopped on the next landing, using the Force to open the door no wider than necessarily to look out. Up here, the corridor was narrow and dark – the built-in chemlamps didn’t seem to be working, but someone had strung flicker-lights along the walls, illuminating the space with changing flashes of blue, green, and purple light. Numerous doors were spaced at irregular intervals on either side of the hallway; a dormitory, perhaps. The three bounty hunters were sitting on the floor in the rough center of the hallway, playing cards over a glittering pile between them. Padmé’s and Mon Mothma’s jewelry, along with whatever else Bail and Clovis had been wearing that could be fenced on the open market.
Obi-Wan took a deep breath, flicked the door the rest of the way open, and came out shooting.
She might not like blasters, but she knew how to use one; she didn’t even have to reach for the Force to help her the way some Jedi would have had to. Three shots and all three bounty hunters were sprawled on the floor, stunned. They hadn’t even had time to reach for their own weapons.
There was a thump against one of the closed doors. “Obi-Wan!” Padmé shouted. “Master Kenobi! Is that you?”
“It’s me,” Obi-Wan said, stepping towards the door. It was locked, but she held her hand out over the control panel, pushing at it with the Force until it clicked open, the door sliding back. Padmé emerged from the shadows within – the room was lit only by a single bare bulb – and gave the unconscious bounty hunters a dismissive book.
“Are you all right?” she asked, peering at Obi-Wan with concern. “You were bleeding when they took you away.”
“Just a knock on the head,” Obi-Wan said, removing the second blaster from her belt and handing it over. Padmé took it, her eyes lighting up.
There was another thump. “Hey!” Rush Clovis shouted. “Is someone out there? Let us out!”
“Bail and Mon are here somewhere too,” Padmé explained, checking the charge on the blaster. “It would be rude to leave Rush here all on his own.”
Obi-Wan sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”
She could check each door individually, but that would take time that Obi-Wan wasn’t sure they had. Instead she tucked the blaster into her belt and raised her hands, and pulled with the Force, so that every door in the hallways burst open.
“Well done, Master Kenobi,” said Mon Mothma, stepping out from a room several doors down from Padmé. Bail Organa and Rush Clovis emerged from their own cells, Clovis nearly tripping over one of the fallen bounty hunters before Bail stepped quickly sideways and steadied him.
Mon Mothma stooped and picked a necklace out of the glittering pile on the floor, dropping it into a pocket. Obi-Wan could tell that the deliberately casual motion was to cover up the way that her hands were shaking slightly – fury rather than fear, Obi-Wan sensed. Her internal clock, although still mildly karked up from her recent offworld travels, suggested that it was well past dawn – nearly noon, in fact. The Planetary Sovereignty vote had been first on the docket for the morning’s Senate votes. Mothma didn’t say anything, but she, Bail, and Padmé exchanged a series of grim looks. Obi-Wan felt the frustration coming off all three of them.
She cleared her throat. “Is anyone hurt?”
The four senators all shook their heads. Bail Organa reached down and swiftly removed a blaster from one of the bounty hunters, checking the charge. “There’s a landing pad on the roof,” he said. “That’s how they brought us in. The speeders are probably still there.”
Obi-Wan nodded. “My Padawan and two other Jedi are on the way with the Senate Guard,” she said, hoping she wasn’t lying. She could still feel Anakin in the Force, his nerves increasing the closer he got. Hopefully they were headed to the right place. “You ought to get to the roof, bar the door, and make sure that they see you.”
“What about you?” Padmé asked, overriding Clovis’s cry of, “You have to come with us!”
“I’ve got to have a word with the head bounty hunter,” Obi-Wan said, ignoring him. Reminded, she reached into her belt pouch and removed the holocomm she’d taken from the foreman’s office.
Padmé looked at it curiously, but took it without hesitation. “What’s this?”
“The only line we have to the man who hired them to kidnap you,” Obi-Wan said. She glanced at the other three senators, who were all watching, and lowered her voice. “The Blues will ask if you know anything about it, but I need you to tell them that you don’t. You have to take this to the Jedi Council. Straight to the Jedi Council, if you can, but if not, give it to Master Quinlan Vos.”
To her credit, Padmé didn’t ask why. “Not Ani?”
“Anakin doesn’t have the rank to deal with it,” Obi-Wan said. “I’m sorry, Senator, I’d explain if I could, and if I can, I’ll do so later. But we don’t have the time now.”
“I’m going to hold you to that, Obi-Wan,” Padmé said. She slipped the holocomm into a pocket of her gown. “Be careful.”
“Padmé,” Obi-Wan said, feeling the edge of a smile tug at her lips, “when have you ever known me to be careful?”
At that, Padmé’s fine eyebrows arched upwards. She reached out and brushed her fingers across Obi-Wan’s cheek, having had enough experience with Jedi to know that the physical contact would get Obi-Wan’s attention – as if she didn’t have it already. “Try,” she said. “For me.”
Through the Force, Obi-Wan caught a thread of dismay from Rush Clovis, who was watching the display. It made her mouth twitch in amusement, and this time she sensed Padmé’s surprise at the expression.
“No promises, Senator,” Obi-Wan said. “But I’ll do what I can, since you’ll be the one left to explaining it to Anakin if anything goes amiss. And that’s not a fate that I would wish on my worst enemy.”
“Could we maybe get out of here?” Clovis interrupted. “I don’t really want to linger.”
Padmé looked at Obi-Wan.
“Go,” Obi-Wan said. “Remember what I said about the holocomm.”
Once she had seen the senators safely on their way – Obi-Wan was confident in Padmé’s ability to use a blaster, at least, and Bail Organa was almost as good as she was – Obi-Wan went back down to the lower level of the warehouse. By now she expected that the bounty hunters had noticed, if not her disappearance, at least the absence of the first three bounty hunters she had incapacitated. The senators had helped her drag the second trio into their former cells and Obi-Wan had used the Force to jam the doors, since she had broken the locks getting them open the first time.
Get here soon, Anakin, Obi-Wan thought, but after the near-disaster of her last attempt at trying to get through to him, didn’t reach out to find him again. She would work out how to deal with that later, after everyone was safe.
Obi-Wan stopped on the landing, letting her hands curl comfortably around the butt of the blaster she was holding. It was warm from her body heat, but without the bright Force-point that a lightsaber would have had. There was no life in it. A Jedi’s lightsaber, after long use, could nearly become a living thing in itself.
She used the Force to open the door, instead of the motion sensor, and stepped out into a trap.
It wasn’t meant to be a trap. The bounty hunters there, two humanoids in armor and a female Wookiee hurrying down the hallway to join them, had been waiting for the lift to arrive. They turned in surprise to stare at her as the stairwell door slid open, but bounty hunters didn’t live this long by being stupid or having poor reflexes. They were reaching for their own blasters as Obi-Wan fired her first shots.
The stun blasts dissipated uselessly across the armor, which was one of the reasons Obi-Wan didn’t like blasters. She launched herself into a flying kick, booted foot knocking against one of the helmeted humanoids and sending him staggering back. As she did, she flung out her free hand, grabbing at empty air as she used the Force to throw his companion into the wall beside him. The bounty hunter slid unconscious to the floor.
His friend was already straightening up. Obi-Wan snatched the blaster out of his hand with the Force, letting it spin away across the floor. That didn’t stop him; he immediately fell into a fighting stance with his fists raised, and caught Obi-Wan’s heel with both hands as she flung another kick at him, tossing her back. She flipped and landed lightly on the floor, bouncing up into another powerful kick that shattered bone even through his armor when he tried to block it. The Wookiee roared in fury as he screamed, charging down the hallway towards Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan spun a roundhouse kick into the bounty hunter’s neck, where the Force told her there was a weak point between his armor and his helmet. She heard bone crack, felt his spark of life go out of the Force, and turned away without regret.
She sprinted towards the Wookiee, meeting her midway down the hallway. Obi-Wan ran up her chest, snapping a kick off her chin before she flipped back, barely dodging a swipe of her clawed paws. She bounced off her hands and back to her feet, dodging again and sweeping her legs around to knock the Wookiee off her feet. The Wookiee fell – but swung her paw at Obi-Wan as she did. Obi-Wan wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid it entirely, and she screamed as the razor-sharp claws ripped across her abdomen, tearing apart the fabric and gouging open the flesh below.
“Sleep,” she snarled, pain making her voice rough as she flung her hand out towards the Wookiee. For a moment she thought that the Force wasn’t going to cooperate with her – that kind of command usually didn’t work in the heat of battle – then the Wookiee slumped against the floor and went still, her chest rising and falling steadily.
Obi-Wan picked herself up off the floor, pressing her hand to her wound. Blood ran through her fingers, hot and wet; she reached for the Force to heal it and realized that in her current state, she would need to put herself into a healing trance to accomplish anything significant. She couldn’t even stop the bleeding. Wincing, she peeled away the cloth from the wound, peering at it. It didn’t seem to be as deep as she had initially feared, just messy, which made it a little less dire but not by much.
“Stang,” she swore softly, and settled for calling the blaster she’d dropped to her instead. She kept one hand on her wound, channeling the Force through it in tiny increments to dull the pain.
She hoped that she didn’t have to go looking for Bey’aaan. Hopefully the shots and sound of screaming would bring her – if not the security cameras, Obi-Wan thought, looking up at the blinking red light near the ceiling. She leaned against the wall, resisting the urge to reach out with the Force and check on Padmé and the others.
She didn’t have to wait long.
“I thought Jedi didn’t use blasters.”
Obi-Wan looked up. She had felt the Twi’lek woman’s approach through the Force, felt her hesitate when she had seen Obi-Wan, then proceed onwards. “Most of us don’t,” she said. “That doesn’t mean we don’t know how.” She raised the blaster and aimed at Bey’aaan.
Bey’aaan didn’t seem much bothered by having a blaster pointed at her. She stuck her thumbs in her belt and looked Obi-Wan up and down. “Is she dead?” she asked, indicating the Wookiee.
“No,” Obi-Wan said. “Just sleeping. He is, though.” She jerked her chin towards the armored bounty hunter that she had killed.
“I suppose you did for the rest of these idiots too,” said Bey’aaan, her gaze flicking over the hallway. “That’s the last time I outsource. The senators?”
“Gone,” Obi-Wan said. She could see her lightsaber hanging off the Twi’lek’s belt. “Most bounty hunters would have left by now.”
“Most bounty hunters don’t have a payout of a million creds waiting for them.” She gave Obi-Wan another thoughtful onceover, her gaze lingering on Obi-Wan’s abdomen. Obi-Wan resisted the urge to look down, knowing what Bey’aaan saw. It looked worse than it really was.
“How much were you paid to kidnap the senators?” she asked, stalling. She could feel the Force quivering with the approach of more Jedi, overshadowing the Senate Blues accompanying them.
“Three hundred thou,” said Bey’aaan. “Not bad for a day’s work, hmm? We weren’t even supposed to keep them.”
“Why?” The blaster she was holding didn’t waver, but Obi-Wan was aware that she would start doing so, very soon. A few hours of unconsciousness didn’t make up for a concussion and a full day before that, and her control of the Force was fast fraying, since she had had to expend most of her attention on keeping Anakin out of her head.
Bey’aaan shrugged. “Just a job, Master Jedi,” she said. “As delivering you to my employer is going to be. Between this and your lightsaber here, I’m going to make a nice profit. Especially since I don’t have to split it anymore, thanks to you.”
“Your employer,” Obi-Wan said. “What do you know about him? Who is he?”
Annoyance flashed across the Twi’lek’s face. “This isn’t an interrogation, Master Jedi. You’re wounded. If you want to live, you’d better put that blaster down and come with me. My employer isn’t paying a million creds for a dead Jedi.”
There was something niggling at Obi-Wan, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “It will be a cold day on Mustafar before that happens, I’m afraid.”
Bey’aaan put her hand on the butt of her still-holstered blaster. “I like you, Master Jedi,” she said. “It’s too bad you are a Jedi – we might have had some fun otherwise. As it is, right now you’re just a pile of creds that hasn’t been banked yet.” She pulled the blaster out of its holster and fired.
Obi-Wan flung her bloody hand up and caught the blaster bolt in her palm. It glowed for a second with the force of the stun blast as she drew the energy inside the confines of her skin, then the glow vanished. Obi-Wan allowed herself the edge of a smile before she returned her hand to her wound.
Bey’aaan’s eyes had widened slightly, but that was the only sign of surprise that she showed. “Impressive,” she said, then pulled the trigger again.
Obi-Wan dove out of the way, coming up on her knees with both hands clamped tightly around her blaster as she fired. She missed, the stun blast flaring harmlessly on the wall past Bey’aaan as the Twi’lek approached, and was forced to catch another blast on the tips of her fingers. This time her entire arm went numb for a precious few seconds before Obi-Wan could shake it off.
There was nowhere to hide in the narrow corridor, nothing to use for cover, and without her lightsaber Obi-Wan could only hope to repel blaster bolts a handful of times before she was overcome.
Trust in the living Force, my young padawan. You think too much.
It was what Master Qui-Gon would have said, and had said to her too many times to count. Obi-Wan didn’t pause to consider where the thought had come from. She opened herself up to the Force – oh, Anakin’s here, she noted absently; up on the roof above and distracted enough by Padmé that he had forgotten to be worried about Obi-Wan for a precious few seconds – and straightened up. She walked straight towards Bey’aaan, into the Twi’lek’s blasterfire, and felt the blasts brush harmlessly past her, pushed aside by the Force.
She was at point-blank range, close enough that even the Force wouldn’t be able to protect her, when she swung her blaster so hard into Bey’aaan’s face that the other woman spun around, her lekku slapping across Obi-Wan’s cheek before she fell. Her blood dripped down the barrel of Obi-Wan’s blaster.
Obi-Wan flipped the safety on and tossed it aside. “So uncivilized,” she said, calling her lightsaber to her hand. It came away from Bey’aaan’s belt, wavering a little in the air before Obi-Wan caught it.
She sat down on the floor beside the unconscious bounty hunter, pressing her free hand against her wounded abdomen, and waited for Anakin and the others to arrive.
*
Or read this chapter at the AO3.
Author:
bedlamsbardFandom: Star Wars (prequel trilogy)
Rating: PG-13
Content advisory: violence
Summary: Returning to Coruscant from a mission, Obi-Wan Kenobi and her Padawan Anakin Skywalker are reunited with the newly-appointed Naboo Senator Padmé Amidala, who unwittingly draws them into the murky world of Republic politics. Lady!Obi-Wan AU, set six years after the events of TPM and three years before the events of AotC.
Disclaimer: Star Wars and its characters, situations, settings, etc., belong to George Lucas, LucasFilm, and Disney.
Author's notes: Part of the Oxygen and Rust series.
Previous chapters: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Interlude: Anakin | AO3
Obi-Wan woke up, eventually, to a blistering headache and a feeling that something was horribly, terribly wrong.
It took her a moment to work out whether that was her own common sense or the Force trying to tell her something. She could feel Anakin’s overwhelming panic pounding in her brain, threatening to overwhelm her own mind. But Anakin wasn’t at the party, she thought hazily, and kept her eyes shut while she let that percolate into something resembling the truth. Anakin’s worry was familiar; over the past six years, after their Master-Padawan bond had stabilized, Obi-Wan had gotten so used to it that she thought it would be more notable for its absence than its presence. But this time it was a bit stronger than usual, and it took Obi-Wan several minutes to work the tendrils of his panic out from her own mind, until she could think clearly again. Once that was done, she let her senses roll outwards, thinking firmly of Padmé and the other senators that had still been at the party when the bounty hunters had arrived. The walls of the building that she was being held in were transparent in her mind, bits of mist that meant nothing to the Force. Obi-Wan passed through them as if they weren’t even there, watching her mental tracks so that she could recognize them in the waking world.
Her sense of Padmé in the Force was like the winter rains on Naboo, fierce and deadly, but beautiful in their own way too, cleansing and purifying. Bail Organa was polished durasteel, like the hull of a warship, with a sense of banked coals and a flicker of flame at his heart. She was less familiar with Mon Mothma and Rush Clovis, but she could feel them too, upright in the Force, each with their own personality marker. Her sense of the four senators wasn’t as strong as it would have been had they been Jedi, but it didn’t need to be: all Obi-Wan needed to know was that they were alive. She could sense other beings within the vicinity, vaguely familiar from the party: the bounty hunters that had attacked them. Beyond that, the vast city-planet of Coruscant roiled, so many minds that opening herself up to them would drive even a Jedi Knight mad. No Jedi that she could reach, just Anakin’s steadily increasing panic in the back of her head, and he was too distant and distracted to respond to her mental calls.
They’d have to work on that when she got back to the Temple, Obi-Wan thought, and dropped out of her own head and back into her body.
Her extended Force use had mostly wiped the headache away, but Obi-Wan realized almost immediately that her arms aches, her shoulders twisted in a way that was mostly definitely not natural, and that there was an unwelcome familiar pressure on her wrists.
Oh, not again.
Obi-Wan opened her eyes, blinking in the dimness of the room. She let the Force roll out again, using it the way a bat would use sound: directing the Force-waves to spread out and bounce back, telling her the shape of the room. It was big, probably part of an old warehouse, with loading doors at one end and a second, smaller door at the other, directly across from Obi-Wan. Stretched across half the room was a chain-link fence; Obi-Wan was handcuffed and chained to the top of it, her arms stretched out over her head. Her toes just barely touched the floor, enough that the strain on her arms and shoulders wasn’t completely unbearable.
Obi-Wan flexed her feet gently, trying to see how much give she had, then her wrists, letting the Force flow into the joints to ease the ache. Her current position would have been a major impediment for anyone but a Jedi – and even some of them – but the memory of her captivity on Derith Nahar had gnawed at her since her return to Coruscant. She’d be damned if she’d let it happen again.
Tensing her arms, she wrapped her fingers around the chain on the binders and pulled, pushing herself up off the ground with her toes at the same time. A touch of the Force sent her catapulting upward, landing flatfooted on the top of the chain-link fence. It swayed alarmingly under her weight, but it was made of stronger stuff than it seemed and stabilized after a moment. Obi-Wan stayed crouching, studying the binders that bound her to the fence. Padmé probably had lock picks on her somewhere, she thought ruefully, but the closest that Obi-Wan came to that was –
Hmm.
Tipping forward to try and reach her remaining hairpins made the fence sway again and Obi-Wan nearly lose her balance. She bit her lip hard enough to hurt and shut her eyes, focusing on the hairpins that she could feel pressing against her skull, having shifted from their former position sometime since the party. Some of her hair had fallen out of its former tight twists, lank against her shoulders, but enough of it remained in position that she was certain she could at least manage two hairpins.
With her eyes shut, she could see – for lack of a better word – the Force that pressed close around her. Obi-Wan tugged lightly at it with her mind, flicking her fingers as she drew the hairpins from her hair. Several more twists of her hair fell against her face, but Obi-Wan barely noticed. Opening her eyes, she saw the hairpins hanging in the air in front of her face and sent them on a slow descent until she could grasp them in both hands.
Obi-Wan let the Force release with a sigh and found the lock on the binders. She picked it by touch, made a little clumsy by using hairpins instead of proper picks, and huffed out a soft breath of relief as she felt it click open. The Force caught the binders as they started to fall, floating them back up to her, and Obi-Wan plucked them out of the air. She looped them through her belt; there was no knowing when a pair of binders would come in handy, especially on a day like this.
She dropped lightly down to the permacrete floor, jarring loose another hair twist. Obi-Wan hadn’t exactly done her hair with the intention of fighting in it and while it would have held under normal circumstances, whatever had happened over the past few hours was clearly too much for it. Irritated, she snapped out a hand just to the side of her head, feeling all her remaining hairpins go flying into it. The heavy weight of her long red hair came down all at once; Obi-Wan poured the hairpins into one of her belt-pouches and reached back with both hands to pull her hair into a quick braid the thickness of her wrist, binding it off with a spare hair-tie. Obi-Wan kept her hair long out of un-Jedi-like vanity, as she was self-aware enough to know that it would be more practical cut short, but that didn’t mean she went anywhere without at least a dozen hair-ties in case of situations like this.
She could feel the lump on the back of her head as she pulled at her hair, dried blood flaking off on her fingers. No wonder that she had had a headache when she’d woken up; she must have gone down hard when the stun blast hit her. A blood trail might be a good thing, if the bounty hunters hadn’t been smart enough to clean it up afterwards. Without sunlight – which was a rare thing to come by in some of the worse levels on Coruscant anyway – it was hard to tell how much time had passed, but it had to be at least long enough that the senatorial vote might have started. Not all senators showed up, even for the preliminary votes, so the absence of four might not be missed. The absence of one Jedi might not be missed either, even in the midst of a manhunt for a Jedi killer – except that Obi-Wan had left behind an extremely panic-prone Padawan who had been expecting her home. When she didn’t show up, Anakin would have gone looking for her. After six years, Obi-Wan knew Anakin better than most beings would ever know themselves. He would come and try to find her, and if he found evidence of a fight, then he’d –
Panic, Obi-Wan thought grimly. But after that – or along with that – he’d do what needed to be done. They’d talked about this just a few days ago.
She put her hand to her belt to see if her comlink was there, but of course the bounty hunters had taken that from her along with her lightsaber. Obi-Wan, like Qui-Gon before her, wasn’t the type of Jedi to carry more than a few basic necessities on her at all times; more on away missions, but for an evening out all she had had were her lightsaber and her comlink. She was rather regretting that now.
She stepped forwards towards the nearer door, swiping her hand experimentally over the control. To her surprise it wasn’t even locked, the motion detector flaring briefly amber as the door slid open, creaking. Obi-Wan stepped warily out into the dingy hallway, which was lit by a few flickering chemical lights. There was no one in sight, but she could hear voices coming from the far end of the hallway. She hesitated for a moment, listening to the Force, which told her that Padmé and the other senators were in the opposite direction and a floor above her. There seemed to be several guards with them, which was to be expected. Obi-Wan would deal with that when the time came.
The senators would keep. Obi-Wan turned in the direction of the voices.
She kept to the wall, her hands clenched into fists at her sides, feeling out her way with the Force as she went. A blinking light near the ceiling caught her attention; Obi-Wan flicked her fingers at the security camera, making sure that it didn’t register her passage. Belatedly, she realized that she had forgotten to look for cams back in the loading bay where she had been kept, but if the bounty hunters had noticed her disappearance she would have expected more alarm. As far as they were concerned, she was still out cold.
She passed several other doors in the hallway, but there were no living beings behind them. Obi-Wan stopped in front of one and touched a finger to the control, watching the door swish open. Inside, the room was unused and dusty, a ragged blanket and several empty bottles in one corner where some vagrant must have crashed once upon a time. Broken glass littered the ground in front of a partially-boarded up window. Obi-Wan went over the window and stood up on tip-toe to peer out, hoping that it looked outwards and might give her some idea of where on – or in – Coruscant she was.
No matter how bright the day, sunlight never penetrated the deepest levels of Coruscant. Obi-Wan found herself looking out at once of the city-planet’s many tunnel-like streets, somewhere far from the surface where the Senate and the Jedi Temple were located. Outside the world fell into shadows, penetrated by the few chemlamps that hadn’t been broken and a neon sign of a mostly unclothed Twi’lek woman down the street that blinked from pink to green to blue as Obi-Wan watched. The buildings – if they could be called that, blocky metal or permacrete structures that had seen better days – were all closed up and anonymous. No speeders passed by; the usual noise of the city was muted, lingering in the distance as a dull roar. The only beings in sight were a tough-looking Whiphid thug who disappeared into the building with the neon sign and a skinny Nautolan curled up in front of a boarded-up door, sucking eagerly at something in a brown paper bag. It could have been any of a thousand streets in Coruscant.
Obi-Wan lowered herself back down to the floor and turned even before the Farghul behind her could finish saying, “Hey, what are you – stang! It’s that Jedi bitch!”
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you not to call names?” Obi-Wan chided, but she was already moving, flinging herself forward into a run. She bounced off the floor, legs coming up to scissor tight around the felinoid’s neck as she slammed him down. His head hit the permacrete floor with a deafening crack, blood pooling out around his skull as Obi-Wan flipped back to her feet. His Twi’lek companion barely had time to get a syllable of protest out before Obi-Wan whipped her right foot into his jaw. There was a satisfying crunch of breaking bone as he crumpled to the floor next to his friend, out cold.
Obi-Wan reached down and removed the matched pair of blasters from his belt. She didn’t like blasters, never had, but like most Jedi she knew how to use one and unlike most Jedi she practiced regularly at the range in the Temple. She checked the charge cartridges quickly – full and clean, just like any good bounty hunter – and flipped the setting from kill to stun. Hopefully if she had to shoot someone, it would be someone who could give the Senate Guard answers.
Blasters in hand, she stepped back out into the hallway. Jedi themselves were living weapons, the most dangerous beings in the galaxy despite their technical status as peacekeepers, but there was something comforting about having a weapon in hand, even if it wasn’t her lightsaber.
Obi-Wan frowned at the thought. Jedi weren’t supposed to think such things.
She paused for a moment to mentally prod at her connection to Anakin and staggered, catching herself on the wall with one hand. If anything, Anakin’s panic had increased since the last time Obi-Wan had attempted to touch her mind. For a moment she had been in serious danger of getting sucked into his Force-presence, overwhelming her own mind and leaving her body a blank shell on the floor of the warehouse. If she was certain that Anakin would have noticed, then she might have risked it to ensure the senators’ safety, but she knew her Padawan well enough to guess that even consuming her mind would have bypassed him entirely in his current state of frenzy. There was a reason that Jedi were cautioned against fear and anger as well as forbidden attachments; not merely because it distracted from their sense of duty, but because it could dangerously hamper their ability to use the Force effectively.
Anakin, Anakin, Anakin, no –
Obi-Wan slammed down a mental barrier between the two of them, which restricted the Master-Padawan bond between to nothing more than an agonizing itch in the back of her head, like a bug bite that she couldn’t quite scratch. She could only hope that Anakin might eventually notice that and realize that something was wrong besides merely the fact that she was missing. She didn’t feel terribly sanguine on the subject, however.
Anakin, when I get back we’re going to have a serious talk about not letting your emotions affect your ability to do your duty, Obi-Wan thought grimly.
She straightened up, frowning as she felt wetness on her upper lip, and wiped a trickle of blood away from her nose with the back of her hand. Master-Padawan bond or not, if Anakin’s distress was affecting her this much from halfway across the planet, there was something seriously wrong. The last time he had managed this they’d been in the same room as each other, though in considerably more dire circumstances.
Fortunately none of the other bounty hunters had entered the hallway during her few minutes of incapacity. Obi-Wan proceeded down the corridor blasters first, heading towards the door marked FOREMAN, from which she could hear the voice of the Twi’lek woman who had shot her. From the tinny quality of the response, Obi-Wan guessed that she was talking to a hologram. A twist of the Force brought the voices to her ear as she lingered hidden behind a corner.
“– release the senators in three hours time. I doubt that they will be able to find their way back to the Senate before nightfall today, if that.”
“Yes, my lord. What about the Jedi? Lot of street cred for topping one of them, especially right now –”
“Give Master Kenobi to me,” the stranger interrupted. Obi-Wan frowned. There was something familiar about his voice, but she couldn’t seem to place it.
“That’ll cost you.”
“Name your price.”
The Twi’lek named a number that made Obi-Wan’s eyebrows rise towards her hairline. She knew that captive Jedi, rare as they were, could sell for a lot on the open market, but this seemed excessive.
All the stranger said, however, was, “Very well. I’ll transmit coordinates to you.”
“Soon,” snapped the bounty hunter. “I want her out of here before she wakes up.”
There was no reply, the hologram apparently having disconnected. A moment later the door swung open and the Twi’lek woman emerged, no longer clothed in her bandsman’s uniform. Obi-Wan’s lightsaber hung from her belt alongside her holstered blaster. Scowling in distaste, Obi-Wan pressed herself back against the wall, counting the breaths until the Force told her that the woman had gone.
She darted forwards across the hallway, waving a hand over the door’s motion sensor and pushing slightly with the Force when it didn’t slide open, tricking the electronic lock into opening for her.
There wasn’t much to see inside the room. Obi-Wan slipped one of her stolen blasters through her belt and tapped a finger against the miniature holocomm that had been left on the desk, hoping that it was an open channel so that she could get through to the Jedi Temple. But there was only one dial available, and her attempt to program in the Temple dial resulted in a series of error messages. A burner holocomm, as they called it on the street.
Obi-Wan hesitated, then shrugged and called the only available dial. Bounty hunters didn’t work without being paid; someone was behind the kidnapping of the senators, someone that the Twi’lek woman had called “my lord.”
There was a moment of blue static before the holocomm began to transmit, then it steadied into a tall humanoid figure, features concealed by the hood it wore. Obi-Wan drew in a sharp breath, clutching at the edge of the table to steady herself, the remaining blaster skidding across the top as she dropped it. Perhaps alone of all the Jedi in the Order, Obi-Wan was aware of the strength of the Dark Side, of the way it felt in her mind, in her bones, the tremors it sent along the Force. Other Jedi had touched it, glanced at it, but only Obi-Wan had looked in the abyss of a Sith Lord and lived to tell of it. She knew what a Sith Lord looked like when she saw one – even through a hologram.
“Who are you?” she rasped out through clenched teeth, making herself straighten up through sheer force of will. She was a Jedi Knight, the only living Jedi Knight to ever slay a Sith Lord in combat, and she would be damned if she showed weakness to another.
“Master Kenobi!” said the Sith Lord, sounding pleased. Sith hells damn it, Obi-Wan was positive that she had heard his voice before, but she didn’t know where. She had spoken to so many beings in her life. “What a delight it is to see you unharmed. I see that our dear Bey’aaan was right to fear your escape, although she seems to have mistimed it somewhat. It’s a pity; I was so hoping that you would be my guest for a few days, but I suppose that seems unlikely now.”
“Who are you?” Obi-Wan demanded. “What do you want with the senators?”
“Surely you can’t blame me for having an interest in the inner workings of the Senate, Master Kenobi,” said the Sith Lord. “After all, it’s my Republic too. I owe it to my planet to ensure that the Senate has only the best intentions for the Republic.”
“The Planetary Sovereignty Bill?” Obi-Wan said. “You want it to pass.”
He made a tutting sound. “Now, now, Master Kenobi, let’s not get hung up on specifics, shall we?”
“And what do you want with me?” Obi-Wan said. “Revenge for Darth Maul?”
“My predecessor was little better than an animal. I ought to thank you for killing him, Master Kenobi. Do you know what some beings say about the Jedi?”
“Enlighten me,” Obi-Wan said. Her hands were white-knuckled on the edge of the table, the metal edge digging into her palms hard enough to leave marks.
“They say that the Jedi are the right hand of the Force,” said the Sith Lord, “and the Sith are the left. Or, well, they don’t say that exactly since that species doesn’t have what we think of as hands and it doesn’t quite translate properly into Basic, but you get the idea. Balance, my dear. The Force is all about balance. Where there are Jedi, there are Sith. Where there are Sith, there are Jedi. I give you a riddle, Master Kenobi: a Sith Lord and a Jedi Knight fell that day on Naboo. An apprentice became a master and a master became an apprentice. Maul died and I sprang into being.”
“There is more than one Sith Lord,” Obi-Wan said slowly, fear settling into certainty. She’d argued the matter with the Jedi Council on and off for the past six years, convinced that Maul hadn’t been working alone despite the Council’s doubt that he’d been anything besides a lone Dark Jedi. But Obi-Wan knew what he had been, deep in her bones. She hadn’t wanted to believe what the Force had kept telling her. She’d wanted to believe it was over. But she knew better. She knew it, and the Force knew it. “Why are you telling me this?”
“You know why I’m telling you, Master Kenobi. You know what I want from you.” The Sith Lord smiled beneath his hood.
“No,” Obi-Wan said flatly. “I don’t.”
The door behind her opened and Obi-Wan spun on her heel. Instinct and training took over; she flung her hands up, the Force flowing through them, and sent the Rodian flying sideways into the doorframe. He crumpled to the floor, winking out of the Force as he passed out.
“Well done, Master Kenobi,” said the Sith Lord.
Obi-Wan turned back to him. She could feel movement in the Force; there was something coming towards the building, maybe a klick away now. But the Dark Side flowed around her, masking her usual senses so that she had no idea what they meant. With any luck, the Senate Guard had worked out where they were. Hopefully Anakin was with them and not back at the Temple causing more distress than her disappearance merited. Normally Obi-Wan would be able to tell, but she didn’t dare open up the Master-Padawan bond again. Anakin’s mind would eat hers whole.
“I am a Jedi, like my master before me,” she said. “The Jedi will crush the Sith, as we have always crushed them before. Think on that, my lord.” She flicked a finger at the holocomm, turning it off, and the Sith’s image flickered out of existence. He was still smiling beneath his hood as he vanished.
Obi-Wan went over to the door, stepping carefully over the unconscious Rodian, and peered out into the corridor. Reassured that no one was coming, she leaned down and grasped the Rodian by his arms, pulling him into the office and out of sight. She couldn’t help wrinkling her nose in distaste; Rodian body odor, unless masked by perfumes or colognes, was offensive to humans, and this one apparently hadn’t bathed in the last month or so. Obi-Wan had been in garbage pits that smelt better than he did. He couldn’t have been at the party last night or every senator in 500 Republica would have known that something was amiss.
She picked the burner holocomm up off the table and slipped it into one of her belt-pouches. When she got back to the Temple, she’d have Anakin or one of the tech analysis droids trace the signal. If the Sith Lord was still on Coruscant, then she would find him. And she’d kill him.
Sith Lords are our specialty, she heard, a whisper in the Force from some unknown past or future. She couldn’t tell who had said it, her or Anakin or someone else entirely, or when.
Obi-Wan pushed the thought away. Either her precog was spiking again or the Force had decided to add retrocognition to her otherwise mostly useless bag of tricks, but there was nothing she could do about it now.
There wasn’t much else in the office except for the table and a few cupboards, but Obi-Wan went through it anyway, hoping to find her comlink or some evidence of who the Sith Lord was. The cupboard proved to be bare aside from a long-forgotten candy bar wrapped and a half-empty case of blaster charges that didn’t fit her stolen blasters; Obi-Wan left them where she found them.
She reached out with the Force, meaning to check that Padmé and the other senators remained unharmed, and found Anakin.
Obi-Wan tipped her head curiously to one side, barely aware that she was doing so. Even with the Master-Padawan bond narrowed to its thinnest width she could feel Anakin fretting through the Force, eclipsing every other presence in his immediate vicinity. Obi-Wan could just barely sense two other Jedi with him; she was familiar enough with Quinlan’s markers in the Force to identify him, which meant that it was almost certainly Aayla with him. The others were just shadows in the Force, although Obi-Wan guessed they were Senate Guard. Somebody had unquestionably done very good police work to find them so quickly, she thought distractedly; it almost certainly wasn’t Anakin.
Obi-Wan could have waited for them to arrive, but the Force had left her with no sense of the distance between them. And Obi-Wan had never been good at waiting anyway, especially when it came to waiting to be rescued by her panicking Padawan. If she didn’t want to listen to Anakin gloating for the next month, she had to rescue the senators and capture the bounty hunters herself.
She picked up the blaster she had dropped on the table, checked the charge again as she had been taught, and stepped out into the corridor.
The silence surprised her. It was never quiet on Coruscant, not completely; even in the deepest meditation chambers at the Temple Obi-Wan had occasionally found herself startled out of a trance by some outside noise. This warehouse wasn’t nearly so quiet as the meditation chambers, which had been built to filter out sound, but even – especially – this deep in the lower levels of Coruscant Obi-Wan expected more background noise. The street outside had been nearly empty; Obi-Wan didn’t have enough experience working on Coruscant to know if that was normal or not. She and Anakin had done all of their assignments off-planet, just as she and Qui-Gon had done; they weren’t the kind of Jedi who functioned exclusively on Coruscant.
Taking a breath, Obi-Wan began to move quickly through the hallway, glancing up from time to time to make sure that she didn’t miss any security cameras. Whenever she spotted one, she reached out with the Force, rubbing out the evidence of her passage from the cam’s digital memory. She kept the transparent mental blueprint of the warehouse that she had constructed earlier at the forefront of her mind, letting the Force guide her passage.
The warehouse struck her as small for its intended purpose. Sense memories of the products that had passed through these halls in the past remained, making Obi-Wan frown in disgust – alcohol and spice and other unsavory things. For now, though, it seemed to be sitting empty aside from the senators and their captors. The security cams looked like they had been installed within the past decade, much newer than the rest of the building. Probably not installed just to keep an eye on four senators and one Jedi Knight – they weren’t that new – but it implied that the building hadn’t just been sitting empty until the bounty hunters strolled in. If they had rented it, then that might have left a paper trail that the Senate Guard could follow.
Obi-Wan found herself standing between a packing elevator and the door to a stairwell. She took one hand off the blaster grip to activate the motion sensor, watching the door slide creakily open. Up or down, she thought, standing on the landing. Down would lead her to street level, up to what passed for the roof this deep in Coruscant. Obi-Wan reached outwards with the Force, searching for Padmé’s familiar bright spark.
Up, then.
She checked the blaster’s charge pack again, more out of nerves than anything else – it wasn’t as though she had shot anyone since the last time she had checked – and began to climb the stairs. Her Jedi boots echoed hollowly in the empty stairwell, but the dust on the steps and the lack of it on the elevator door suggested that no one had used the stairs in a long time. Still, Obi-Wan kept her mind as open as she dared with Anakin’s panic still gnawing at the edges of it. She wanted to know if there was anyone approaching, but she could tell that her attention was badly divided because of the need to keep Anakin’s mind out of hers. She didn’t dare close herself out of the Force entirely – she had trained Forceblind as a Padawan, as all Jedi did, but hadn’t had to use that training in years. And she didn’t dare shut herself off from the Force with a Sith Lord about. He wasn’t here, Obi-Wan was nearly certain of that, but still the Dark Side seemed to hang about her, a stagnant miasma that threatened to take her back to Naboo.
Obi-Wan would almost rather let Anakin’s mind consume hers than go back there, only she knew that her Padawan would never be able to live with the guilt.
As she climbed the stairs, the indistinct sense of several beings in the Force settled out into discrete individuals. Obi-Wan identified Padmé and Bail Organa from memory, and then, less certainly, Mon Mothma and Rush Clovis, which left three strangers. Guards, presumably. Even counting the three men she had incapacitated earlier and the Twi’lek woman, that left at least half a dozen other bounty hunters unaccounted for. It was a large number; most bounty hunters that Obi-Wan had met seldom worked in groups much larger than two or three, if that. The Twi’lek woman – Bey’aaan, the Sith Lord had called her, which didn’t ring any bells in Obi-Wan’s memory – must have assembled them all individually or in pairs, since the majority seemed to be different races.
She stopped on the next landing, using the Force to open the door no wider than necessarily to look out. Up here, the corridor was narrow and dark – the built-in chemlamps didn’t seem to be working, but someone had strung flicker-lights along the walls, illuminating the space with changing flashes of blue, green, and purple light. Numerous doors were spaced at irregular intervals on either side of the hallway; a dormitory, perhaps. The three bounty hunters were sitting on the floor in the rough center of the hallway, playing cards over a glittering pile between them. Padmé’s and Mon Mothma’s jewelry, along with whatever else Bail and Clovis had been wearing that could be fenced on the open market.
Obi-Wan took a deep breath, flicked the door the rest of the way open, and came out shooting.
She might not like blasters, but she knew how to use one; she didn’t even have to reach for the Force to help her the way some Jedi would have had to. Three shots and all three bounty hunters were sprawled on the floor, stunned. They hadn’t even had time to reach for their own weapons.
There was a thump against one of the closed doors. “Obi-Wan!” Padmé shouted. “Master Kenobi! Is that you?”
“It’s me,” Obi-Wan said, stepping towards the door. It was locked, but she held her hand out over the control panel, pushing at it with the Force until it clicked open, the door sliding back. Padmé emerged from the shadows within – the room was lit only by a single bare bulb – and gave the unconscious bounty hunters a dismissive book.
“Are you all right?” she asked, peering at Obi-Wan with concern. “You were bleeding when they took you away.”
“Just a knock on the head,” Obi-Wan said, removing the second blaster from her belt and handing it over. Padmé took it, her eyes lighting up.
There was another thump. “Hey!” Rush Clovis shouted. “Is someone out there? Let us out!”
“Bail and Mon are here somewhere too,” Padmé explained, checking the charge on the blaster. “It would be rude to leave Rush here all on his own.”
Obi-Wan sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”
She could check each door individually, but that would take time that Obi-Wan wasn’t sure they had. Instead she tucked the blaster into her belt and raised her hands, and pulled with the Force, so that every door in the hallways burst open.
“Well done, Master Kenobi,” said Mon Mothma, stepping out from a room several doors down from Padmé. Bail Organa and Rush Clovis emerged from their own cells, Clovis nearly tripping over one of the fallen bounty hunters before Bail stepped quickly sideways and steadied him.
Mon Mothma stooped and picked a necklace out of the glittering pile on the floor, dropping it into a pocket. Obi-Wan could tell that the deliberately casual motion was to cover up the way that her hands were shaking slightly – fury rather than fear, Obi-Wan sensed. Her internal clock, although still mildly karked up from her recent offworld travels, suggested that it was well past dawn – nearly noon, in fact. The Planetary Sovereignty vote had been first on the docket for the morning’s Senate votes. Mothma didn’t say anything, but she, Bail, and Padmé exchanged a series of grim looks. Obi-Wan felt the frustration coming off all three of them.
She cleared her throat. “Is anyone hurt?”
The four senators all shook their heads. Bail Organa reached down and swiftly removed a blaster from one of the bounty hunters, checking the charge. “There’s a landing pad on the roof,” he said. “That’s how they brought us in. The speeders are probably still there.”
Obi-Wan nodded. “My Padawan and two other Jedi are on the way with the Senate Guard,” she said, hoping she wasn’t lying. She could still feel Anakin in the Force, his nerves increasing the closer he got. Hopefully they were headed to the right place. “You ought to get to the roof, bar the door, and make sure that they see you.”
“What about you?” Padmé asked, overriding Clovis’s cry of, “You have to come with us!”
“I’ve got to have a word with the head bounty hunter,” Obi-Wan said, ignoring him. Reminded, she reached into her belt pouch and removed the holocomm she’d taken from the foreman’s office.
Padmé looked at it curiously, but took it without hesitation. “What’s this?”
“The only line we have to the man who hired them to kidnap you,” Obi-Wan said. She glanced at the other three senators, who were all watching, and lowered her voice. “The Blues will ask if you know anything about it, but I need you to tell them that you don’t. You have to take this to the Jedi Council. Straight to the Jedi Council, if you can, but if not, give it to Master Quinlan Vos.”
To her credit, Padmé didn’t ask why. “Not Ani?”
“Anakin doesn’t have the rank to deal with it,” Obi-Wan said. “I’m sorry, Senator, I’d explain if I could, and if I can, I’ll do so later. But we don’t have the time now.”
“I’m going to hold you to that, Obi-Wan,” Padmé said. She slipped the holocomm into a pocket of her gown. “Be careful.”
“Padmé,” Obi-Wan said, feeling the edge of a smile tug at her lips, “when have you ever known me to be careful?”
At that, Padmé’s fine eyebrows arched upwards. She reached out and brushed her fingers across Obi-Wan’s cheek, having had enough experience with Jedi to know that the physical contact would get Obi-Wan’s attention – as if she didn’t have it already. “Try,” she said. “For me.”
Through the Force, Obi-Wan caught a thread of dismay from Rush Clovis, who was watching the display. It made her mouth twitch in amusement, and this time she sensed Padmé’s surprise at the expression.
“No promises, Senator,” Obi-Wan said. “But I’ll do what I can, since you’ll be the one left to explaining it to Anakin if anything goes amiss. And that’s not a fate that I would wish on my worst enemy.”
“Could we maybe get out of here?” Clovis interrupted. “I don’t really want to linger.”
Padmé looked at Obi-Wan.
“Go,” Obi-Wan said. “Remember what I said about the holocomm.”
Once she had seen the senators safely on their way – Obi-Wan was confident in Padmé’s ability to use a blaster, at least, and Bail Organa was almost as good as she was – Obi-Wan went back down to the lower level of the warehouse. By now she expected that the bounty hunters had noticed, if not her disappearance, at least the absence of the first three bounty hunters she had incapacitated. The senators had helped her drag the second trio into their former cells and Obi-Wan had used the Force to jam the doors, since she had broken the locks getting them open the first time.
Get here soon, Anakin, Obi-Wan thought, but after the near-disaster of her last attempt at trying to get through to him, didn’t reach out to find him again. She would work out how to deal with that later, after everyone was safe.
Obi-Wan stopped on the landing, letting her hands curl comfortably around the butt of the blaster she was holding. It was warm from her body heat, but without the bright Force-point that a lightsaber would have had. There was no life in it. A Jedi’s lightsaber, after long use, could nearly become a living thing in itself.
She used the Force to open the door, instead of the motion sensor, and stepped out into a trap.
It wasn’t meant to be a trap. The bounty hunters there, two humanoids in armor and a female Wookiee hurrying down the hallway to join them, had been waiting for the lift to arrive. They turned in surprise to stare at her as the stairwell door slid open, but bounty hunters didn’t live this long by being stupid or having poor reflexes. They were reaching for their own blasters as Obi-Wan fired her first shots.
The stun blasts dissipated uselessly across the armor, which was one of the reasons Obi-Wan didn’t like blasters. She launched herself into a flying kick, booted foot knocking against one of the helmeted humanoids and sending him staggering back. As she did, she flung out her free hand, grabbing at empty air as she used the Force to throw his companion into the wall beside him. The bounty hunter slid unconscious to the floor.
His friend was already straightening up. Obi-Wan snatched the blaster out of his hand with the Force, letting it spin away across the floor. That didn’t stop him; he immediately fell into a fighting stance with his fists raised, and caught Obi-Wan’s heel with both hands as she flung another kick at him, tossing her back. She flipped and landed lightly on the floor, bouncing up into another powerful kick that shattered bone even through his armor when he tried to block it. The Wookiee roared in fury as he screamed, charging down the hallway towards Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan spun a roundhouse kick into the bounty hunter’s neck, where the Force told her there was a weak point between his armor and his helmet. She heard bone crack, felt his spark of life go out of the Force, and turned away without regret.
She sprinted towards the Wookiee, meeting her midway down the hallway. Obi-Wan ran up her chest, snapping a kick off her chin before she flipped back, barely dodging a swipe of her clawed paws. She bounced off her hands and back to her feet, dodging again and sweeping her legs around to knock the Wookiee off her feet. The Wookiee fell – but swung her paw at Obi-Wan as she did. Obi-Wan wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid it entirely, and she screamed as the razor-sharp claws ripped across her abdomen, tearing apart the fabric and gouging open the flesh below.
“Sleep,” she snarled, pain making her voice rough as she flung her hand out towards the Wookiee. For a moment she thought that the Force wasn’t going to cooperate with her – that kind of command usually didn’t work in the heat of battle – then the Wookiee slumped against the floor and went still, her chest rising and falling steadily.
Obi-Wan picked herself up off the floor, pressing her hand to her wound. Blood ran through her fingers, hot and wet; she reached for the Force to heal it and realized that in her current state, she would need to put herself into a healing trance to accomplish anything significant. She couldn’t even stop the bleeding. Wincing, she peeled away the cloth from the wound, peering at it. It didn’t seem to be as deep as she had initially feared, just messy, which made it a little less dire but not by much.
“Stang,” she swore softly, and settled for calling the blaster she’d dropped to her instead. She kept one hand on her wound, channeling the Force through it in tiny increments to dull the pain.
She hoped that she didn’t have to go looking for Bey’aaan. Hopefully the shots and sound of screaming would bring her – if not the security cameras, Obi-Wan thought, looking up at the blinking red light near the ceiling. She leaned against the wall, resisting the urge to reach out with the Force and check on Padmé and the others.
She didn’t have to wait long.
“I thought Jedi didn’t use blasters.”
Obi-Wan looked up. She had felt the Twi’lek woman’s approach through the Force, felt her hesitate when she had seen Obi-Wan, then proceed onwards. “Most of us don’t,” she said. “That doesn’t mean we don’t know how.” She raised the blaster and aimed at Bey’aaan.
Bey’aaan didn’t seem much bothered by having a blaster pointed at her. She stuck her thumbs in her belt and looked Obi-Wan up and down. “Is she dead?” she asked, indicating the Wookiee.
“No,” Obi-Wan said. “Just sleeping. He is, though.” She jerked her chin towards the armored bounty hunter that she had killed.
“I suppose you did for the rest of these idiots too,” said Bey’aaan, her gaze flicking over the hallway. “That’s the last time I outsource. The senators?”
“Gone,” Obi-Wan said. She could see her lightsaber hanging off the Twi’lek’s belt. “Most bounty hunters would have left by now.”
“Most bounty hunters don’t have a payout of a million creds waiting for them.” She gave Obi-Wan another thoughtful onceover, her gaze lingering on Obi-Wan’s abdomen. Obi-Wan resisted the urge to look down, knowing what Bey’aaan saw. It looked worse than it really was.
“How much were you paid to kidnap the senators?” she asked, stalling. She could feel the Force quivering with the approach of more Jedi, overshadowing the Senate Blues accompanying them.
“Three hundred thou,” said Bey’aaan. “Not bad for a day’s work, hmm? We weren’t even supposed to keep them.”
“Why?” The blaster she was holding didn’t waver, but Obi-Wan was aware that she would start doing so, very soon. A few hours of unconsciousness didn’t make up for a concussion and a full day before that, and her control of the Force was fast fraying, since she had had to expend most of her attention on keeping Anakin out of her head.
Bey’aaan shrugged. “Just a job, Master Jedi,” she said. “As delivering you to my employer is going to be. Between this and your lightsaber here, I’m going to make a nice profit. Especially since I don’t have to split it anymore, thanks to you.”
“Your employer,” Obi-Wan said. “What do you know about him? Who is he?”
Annoyance flashed across the Twi’lek’s face. “This isn’t an interrogation, Master Jedi. You’re wounded. If you want to live, you’d better put that blaster down and come with me. My employer isn’t paying a million creds for a dead Jedi.”
There was something niggling at Obi-Wan, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. “It will be a cold day on Mustafar before that happens, I’m afraid.”
Bey’aaan put her hand on the butt of her still-holstered blaster. “I like you, Master Jedi,” she said. “It’s too bad you are a Jedi – we might have had some fun otherwise. As it is, right now you’re just a pile of creds that hasn’t been banked yet.” She pulled the blaster out of its holster and fired.
Obi-Wan flung her bloody hand up and caught the blaster bolt in her palm. It glowed for a second with the force of the stun blast as she drew the energy inside the confines of her skin, then the glow vanished. Obi-Wan allowed herself the edge of a smile before she returned her hand to her wound.
Bey’aaan’s eyes had widened slightly, but that was the only sign of surprise that she showed. “Impressive,” she said, then pulled the trigger again.
Obi-Wan dove out of the way, coming up on her knees with both hands clamped tightly around her blaster as she fired. She missed, the stun blast flaring harmlessly on the wall past Bey’aaan as the Twi’lek approached, and was forced to catch another blast on the tips of her fingers. This time her entire arm went numb for a precious few seconds before Obi-Wan could shake it off.
There was nowhere to hide in the narrow corridor, nothing to use for cover, and without her lightsaber Obi-Wan could only hope to repel blaster bolts a handful of times before she was overcome.
Trust in the living Force, my young padawan. You think too much.
It was what Master Qui-Gon would have said, and had said to her too many times to count. Obi-Wan didn’t pause to consider where the thought had come from. She opened herself up to the Force – oh, Anakin’s here, she noted absently; up on the roof above and distracted enough by Padmé that he had forgotten to be worried about Obi-Wan for a precious few seconds – and straightened up. She walked straight towards Bey’aaan, into the Twi’lek’s blasterfire, and felt the blasts brush harmlessly past her, pushed aside by the Force.
She was at point-blank range, close enough that even the Force wouldn’t be able to protect her, when she swung her blaster so hard into Bey’aaan’s face that the other woman spun around, her lekku slapping across Obi-Wan’s cheek before she fell. Her blood dripped down the barrel of Obi-Wan’s blaster.
Obi-Wan flipped the safety on and tossed it aside. “So uncivilized,” she said, calling her lightsaber to her hand. It came away from Bey’aaan’s belt, wavering a little in the air before Obi-Wan caught it.
She sat down on the floor beside the unconscious bounty hunter, pressing her free hand against her wounded abdomen, and waited for Anakin and the others to arrive.
*
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