Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [128]
Day is the illusion.
Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of its own self.
With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.
ANAKIN AND OBI-WAN
Antifighter flak flashed on all sides. Even louder than the clatter of shrapnel and the snarl of his sublight drives, his cockpit hummed and rang with near hits from the turbolaser fire of the capital ships crowding space around him. Sometimes his whirling spinning dive through the cloud of battle skimmed bursts so closely that the energy-scatter would slam his starfighter hard enough to bounce his head off the supports of his pilot’s chair.
Right now Obi-Wan Kenobi envied the clones: at least they had helmets.
“Arfour,” he said on internal comm, “can’t you do something with the inertials?”
The droid ganged into the socket on his starfighter’s left wing whistled something that sounded suspiciously like a human apology. Obi-Wan’s frown deepened. R4-P17 had been spending too much time with Anakin’s eccentric astromech; it was picking up R2-D2’s bad habits.
New bursts of flak bracketed his path. He reached into the Force, feeling for a safe channel through the swarms of shrapnel and sizzling nets of particle beams.
There wasn’t one.
He locked a snarl behind his teeth, twisting his starfighter around another explosion that could have peeled its armor like an overripe Ithorian starfruit. He hated this part. Hated it.
Flying’s for droids.
His cockpit speakers crackled. “There isn’t a droid made that can outfly you, Master.”
He could still be surprised by the new depth of that voice. The calm confidence. The maturity. It seemed that only last week Anakin had been a ten-year-old who wouldn’t stop pestering him about Form I lightsaber combat.
“Sorry,” he muttered, kicking into a dive that slipped a turbolaser burst by no more than a meter. “Was that out loud?”
“Wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t. I know what you’re thinking.”
“Do you?” He looked up through the cockpit canopy to find his onetime Padawan flying inverted, mirroring him so closely that but for the transparisteel between them, they might have shaken hands. Obi-Wan smiled up at him. “Some new gift of the Force?”
“Not the Force, Master. Experience. That’s what you’re always thinking.”
Obi-Wan kept hoping to hear some of Anakin’s old cocky grin in his tone, but he never did. Not since Jabiim. Perhaps not since Geonosis.
The war had burned it out of him.
Obi-Wan still tried, now and again, to spark a real smile in his former Padawan. And Anakin still tried to answer.
They both still tried to pretend the war hadn’t changed them.
“Ah.” Obi-Wan took a hand from the starfighter’s control yoke to direct his upside-down friend’s attention forward. Dead ahead, a blue-white point of light splintered into four laser-straight trails of ion drives. “And what does experience tell you we should do about those incoming tri-fighters?”
“That we should break—right.”
Obi-Wan was already making that exact move as Anakin spoke. But they were inverted to each other: breaking right shot him one way while Anakin whipped the other. The tri-fighters’ cannons ripped space between them, tracking faster than their starfighters could slip.
His onboard threat display chimed a warning: two of the droids had remote sensor locks on him. The others must have lit up his partner. “Anakin! Slip-jaws!”
“My thought exactly.”
They blew past the tri-fighters, looping in evasive spirals. The droid ships wrenched themselves into pursuit maneuvers that would have killed any living pilot.
The slip-jaws maneuver was named for the scissorlike mandibles of the Kashyyyk slash-spider. Droids closing rapidly on their tails, cannonfire stitching space