FicWad

Pau City is a cauldron of battle.

From his observation post just off the landing ramp of the command lander on the tenth level, Clone Commander Cody sweeps the sinkhole with his electrobinoculars. The droid control center lies in ruins only a few meters away, but the Separatists have learned the lesson of Naboo: their next-generation combat droids are equipped with sophisticated self-motivators that kick in automatically whenever the control signals are cut off, delivering a program of standing orders.

And Standing Order Number One is, apparently, Kill Everything That Moves.

And they're doing a fairly good job of it, too.

Half the city has been reduced to rubble (thank the Force the Utapauns at least had sense enough to have already quietly evacuated a good half of the city, even before the battle began, because he would hate to have to deal with the civilian casualties, otherwise), and the rest is a firestorm of droids and clones and Utapaun dragon cavalry. Generals Kenobi and Skywalker alone have managed to take out something in the vicinity of twenty-five thousand droids, in the storage hive hidden away in that command center, but with something like at least twice as many functional units in various strategic positions scattered throughout the sinkhole city, it's been a struggle just to get all of his assigned troops on the ground, much less in positions from which they can effectively start sweeping the droids from the rest of the city. Just when Commander Cody is beginning to think about how he really wishes that he could have a Jedi or two show back up right now, several metric tons of dragonmount hurtle down from the sky and hits the roof of the command lander hard enough to buckle the deck beneath it. Not that it does the ship any real harm: /Jadthu/-class landers are basically flying bunkers, and this particular one is triple-armored and equipped with internal shock buffers and inertial dampeners powerful enough for a fleet corvette, to protect the sophisticated command-and-control equipment inside. Still, the jolt shocks him, and Cody's eyes are wider than normal as he looks up at the dragonmount and her unmistakably Jedi rider.

"General Kenobi," he blinks, momentarily at a loss for words at the sight of the General. Who is, without a doubt, an absolute /sight/: the normally impeccably groomed Jedi Master, who often manages to walk away from battle with no more proof that he has been fighting for his life than a bit of added color in his face and a slight ruffling of his hair, looks as if he's been drug through a sewer. By his braid. And then lit on fire. Staring, aware that his jaw is hanging open but unable to bring himself to close it, Cody finally manages to blurt, "Glad you could join us."

"Commander Cody," the Jedi Master answers with a slight nod, not bothering to look down at him. Instead, he begins to scan the city around them, taking in the state of the battle. "Did you contact Coruscant with the news of the General's death?"

At that, the rattled clone commander snaps to attention and delivers a crisp salute. "As ordered, sir. Erm, sir?" Kenobi looks down at him at that, his attention caught either by Cody's hesitancy or the sudden softening of his voice. "Are you all right, sir? You're a bit of a mess."

The Jedi Master raises a considering eyebrow before wiping away some of the dust and gore and unidentifiable yellowish-green muck smearing his face with the sleeve of his robe - which is charred, and only leaves a black smear across his left cheek. "Ah. Well, yes. It has been a . . . stressful day." Then, with a slight shrug, he waves out at Pau City. "But we still have a battle to win."

After a few moments of silence, in which he scrutinizes the waiting General with hard eyes (attempting to gauge whether or not the Jedi Master is actually hurt under any of the evidence of his supposedly merely "stressful" day,), Cody shrugs too, saying, "Then I suppose you'll be wanting this." He holds up the lightsaber his men have recovered from one of the many traffic tunnels. "I believe you dropped it earlier, sir. You'll be needing it again now."

"Ah. Ah, yes." The weapon floats gently up into Kenobi's hand, and when he smiles down at the clone commander again, Cody would swear that the Jedi Master is blushing, just a barest bit. "No, ah, need to mention this to, erm, Anakin, is there, Cody?"

Cody grins then, understanding. "Is that an order, sir?"

Kenobi only shakes his head, chuckling tiredly. "You know it's not. Come on. Let's go. You'll have noticed I did manage to leave a few droids for you . . . "

"Yes, sir," Cody merely grins, unrepentantly, back up at the obviously tired but in one piece and ready and willing to go on fighting Jedi Master.

Shaking his head slightly, Kenobi looks away before asking, "Speaking of Anakin, have you seen him lately?"

"Not up close and personal, General. Sorry," Cody admits, shaking his head. "The men said he caused some kind of Force-explosion that wiped out what was left of the droids in that storage hive, just after you went chasing off after Grievous, and then they said he got on his dragonmount and went after you. He's been spotted several times in the lower levels, taking out entire units of droid fighters. He's pretty well cleared out all of the lowest ten or twelve levels by himself. It was my understanding that he was trying to catch up with you. You haven't seen him, following behind?"

With another slight shake of his head, Kenobi admits, "I have felt him behind me, but not yet seen him, not since I left the storage hive." For a long moment afterwards, the Jedi Master is silent, his eyes fixed upon the distances, as though reading the future there. Then, with a slight shrug, Kenobi's eyes come back to Cody's face and he says, "Well, no matter. He will catch up when he catches up. In the meantime, Cody, I need you to contact your troops. Tell them to move to the higher levels."

"At once, sir!" Cody acknowledges, snapping off another salute and reaching for his comlink. "Go on ahead, General. We'll be right behind you."

"Good! We need to get a move on. We've still got a battle to win, after all!" Kenobi flashes him a smile that is almost as wide and wild as a smile from Skywalker, and then leans down to speak something to his mount, his words so hushed that Cody cannot make them out. Then the great beast overleaps the clone commander, plunging up the wall of the city, racing its way back into the battle.

Smiling and shaking his head, Cody withdraws the comlink from his armor and triggers it.

Kenobi is right, as he almost always is. Skywalker will catch up whenever he can. And in the meantime, there are orders to give and droids to kill and Utapauns to save.

Grievous may be gone, but that doesn't mean that they don't still have a battle to win.

And thank the Force, he and his men no longer have to worry about that accursed Order Sixty-Six ever breaking into the midst of such battle, ever again!

Grinning fiercely, Cody begins speaking into the comlink.

***

Nearly three hours after he has departed the storage hive in the droid command center and no closer to Obi-Wan than when he was still inside that blasted structure, Anakin finds himself issuing a constant low stream of vicious invective as he calls upon the Force to mimic the effect of yet another proton grenade and so blast himself a way through the mass of droids blocking the tunnel Seera is trying to carry him up, in his effort to track down Obi-Wan. He has lost track of how many knots of droids he has had to blast apart, to win Seera enough room to continue on the hunt for Obi-Wan. He knows it's been a considerable number, just as he knows that his actions have often resulted in preserving the lives of many clone troopers who might otherwise have been cut down, but it's a dim, distant sort of knowledge. Far more immediate is the sense of the Force, its power raging in him like the winds of a firestorm, giving him more than enough strength to keep producing a sometimes seemingly endless stream of stupendously destructive Force-blasts, to help hurry them on their way back to Obi-Wan's side. Even more immediate is the feel of Obi-Wan's presence within the Force, tantalizingly nearer than he has been since the first hour of the chase, when Anakin managed to catch an all too fleeting glimpse of his former Master just as he and Boga were vanishing within the gaping mouth of yet another one of the many tunnels carved into the sides of this vast sinkhole complex. Anakin can tell that he's within less than an eighth of a kilometer from Obi-Wan, given a route following a straight line between him and Obi-Wan. But he also knows that, given the labyrinthine maze of tunnels and side-tunnels and sinkholes within sinkholes that makes up the greater part of Pau City, he could easy still be separated from Obi-Wan by a ride of many kilometers.

It is bitter, galling knowledge, and fills him with a fury of thwarted protectiveness that makes the Force crackle angrily around him, crawling along the edges of his robes like a corona of white fire - or a nimbus from the discharge of some kind of electrically charged weapon, like the electrostaffs of the vanquished MagnaGuards. The small snakes of Force lightning don't hurt him, but they do set Anakin's teeth on edge, even more than his own anger has already managed to. They cling to him tenaciously and keep him from releasing his building anger into the Force, as he knows Obi-Wan would want him too, for how can he possibly release his own fury, with the Force itself snarling and crackling with anger all around him? So instead of trying to fight against the growing fury - fueled as it is with every new and damningly frustrating obstacle that appears between him and Obi-Wan, in an apparently endless array of hindrances, thwarting Anakin's desire to rejoin his former Master and stand with him, covering him and protecting his back as he is supposed to - Anakin does the only thing that he can.

He embraces both the fury and the snarling corona of furious Force energy.

So when Seera plunges down into yet another lightless tunnel, the figure she bears on her back blazes with the brilliance of a burning sun. Again and again, droids rush out against them, drawn by the light, their weapons firing indiscriminately. And in answer, Anakin's lightsaber weaves a blinding symphony of light and destruction, parrying the bolts effortlessly, sending some ripping through the walls and roof of the tunnel, bringing down chunks of rock to crush the larger and more dangerous of the still functional droids, and deflecting others back into the very droids that have fired them. Though, by the time Seera reaches the end of the tunnel, there are clone troopers following behind them - hugging the ground and crawling painfully onward while their leader, the Hero With No Fear, sits bolt upright on the high back of a charging dragonmount, running unscathed through the burning trajectories of death - by that point Anakin is no longer defending. Instead, he is attacking, attacking with such fury and destructiveness that nothing can stop him or even stand long against him. When Seera finds another hive storage structure, hidden away in the depths of the third level, Anakin pulls on the Force until it whirls around him with a blaze more bright and painful than the sight of an unshielded star when gazed at head on, and the blast that tears through that structure rains a hailstorm of droplets of molten durasteel and slagged fragments from almost fifteen thousand droid units. When the rapidly expanding blast radius reaches a distance roughly twenty meters from Seera's beaked nose, it slams into a glowing wall of incandescent light and bounces back as if it has collided with the expanding front of a second, much larger shockwave. The clone troopers, faithfully following behind, are dazzled blind for almost an entire minute, but otherwise unharmed. By the time they can recover their bearings, though, Seera and her rider have already vanished.

Anakin, unwilling to wait even for his allies, has already pushed on, riding Seera up across the relatively undamaged roof of the tunnel to avoid the vast crater blasted into the floor of the passageway. Speed is too much of the essence now to brook any unnecessary delay, and the clones should, by all rights, be safe enough where they are, even without Anakin to help shield them. After all, the way back up the passageway has already been thoroughly cleared. And in any case, the crater isn't quite deep enough to have broken through the ceiling of the level below. If the clone troopers are that determined to press on rather than turn back, the tunnel will still be passable in that direction, once the remnants of that rain of rubble has had time to settle and the scoured rock itself has managed to cool off. The deeply gouged and pitted floor of the tunnel will be traversable. Eventually, anyway. Anakin, unfortunately, just doesn't have time to wait for that eventuality. The sense of Obi-Wan in the Force has begun to leak pain, which means that Obi-Wan must be serious danger, since he certainly would not be so careless as to allow himself to be hurt, not if there were anything he could do to prevent it from happening. Obi-Wan is in danger and Anakin is not there to protect him. No, of course Anakin doesn't have the time to spare to wait for the clone troopers behind him. He needs to catch up with Obi-Wan. He needs to catch up with him now, if not ten minutes ago. The clone troopers can wait. Obi-Wan, though, is in pain now, and that means that Obi-Wan most assuredly can/not/ wait.

Seizing more of the Force, Anakin draws down energy, and strength, and funnels it directly into the leanly muscled form of the dragonmount beneath him. Seera may indeed by a swift mount, but she is slightly smaller than Boga, while Anakin is, conversely, taller than Obi-Wan. He has been running her, in fits and starts, for over three hours. She is, understandably, tired enough to be starting to flag. But Anakin can't afford to have her strength or her speed give out or even lessen on him now. The pain sense coming from Obi-Wan is increasing, not decreasing. He can't afford the delay that Seera's weariness would ensue. So he calls on the Force until he blazes with its power, and then he pours that power down into Seera, instinctively washing away the many toxins building up in her blood and clogging her lungs, flushing her system and flooding her full of energy until the flagging mount is once again belling with joy and tearing along the tunnel at a velocity that could put even a speeder (although not one that Anakin has ever had his hands on long enough to tinker with and modify overly much, granted) in the dust. Anakin has no idea whatsoever just what it is that he has done to accomplish this or how it has worked. It is not Anakin's conscious mind that has worked this miracle. But then, there is not much of Anakin's conscious mind left, in the flood of power that is the Force, surging through him and crackling in a radiant aureole all around him. His conscious mind may have recognized the need, but it is the Force itself that has answered, the Force itself that has bled some of its power down into the dragonmount and refreshed her tiring body, flushing her full of new energy and strength and allowing her to continue on her way swiftly, faithfully following after Obi-Wan's trail.

When Seera at last emerges from the tunnel, out into open air, the high flaring pain sense pouring off of Obi-Wan has ebbed away into a dull, distant throbbing, and Anakin is blazing on her back like a fallen star with the unfulfilled desire to protect him, in a fury of need to find Obi-Wan that lights up the depths of the sinkhole city as if a second sun truly has come to rest there, nestled within its depths. A swarm of thirty-seven vulture droids - the remains of a unit of fifty, launched less than half an hour previously from the hanger of a Separatist /Diamond/-class cruiser that is far too damaged to fly and which has already deployed its (thankfully) few remaining homing and dwarf spider droids - attacks them almost immediately, apparently attracted by the brightness of the light mantling Anakin, quite possibly fooled into mistaking the energy seething around him for the drive-signature of an enemy ship, since Seera is moving with him with such rapidity. The Force, sensing the attack even before Anakin does, shocks him into snapping his head upwards. Seeing them coming, Anakin surrenders to the Force and allows it to fill him, riding his body like a spirit possessing him, using him to seize hold of more of itself and then lash out with that energy, expanding outward in a visible shockwave of light and power that catches all thirty-seven droids, mid-manoeuver, and blasts them out of existence as if they have each been hit, simultaneously, with the kind of starfighter-sized gouts of spun plasma that the conning towers of a capital ship the size of a Republic attack cruiser can and will fire. The vulture droids are so utterly annihilated that there's not even enough left of them to constitute shrapnel, just expanding clouds of superheated particulates and gas vapors.

And in the midst of the chaos of battle - which, thanks to Anakin and the Force, has just become even more shocked and confused - no one and nothing (save for the computerized brain of the ship in question, which soon afterwards ceases to exist) notices that the already somewhat depleted hyperdrive generators and gun batteries of the same damaged/ Diamond/-class cruiser that so recently launched the now utterly destroyed vulture droids in the first place have all suddenly and mysteriously been drained wholly dry. Someone might, perhaps, have been able to notice it later . . . if not for the fact that an imperfectly aimed cannon shot from a company of clone troopers meant to target a unit of ten battle droids seeking to shelter within the shadow of that cruiser rather spectacularly manages to take out both the now utterly inert and unshielded ship and the unit of droids, mere heartbeats after the vulture droids have all ceased to exist and the whole cruiser has, impossible though it may seem, become entirely devoid of power. Anakin, of course, doesn't notice a thing, because he's sunk so deep within the Force's embrace that when the Force tells him he needs to pull on more power, it simply doesn't occur to him to wonder just where he might be pulling some of that power from. All that matters to him is that the power is there and that it answers him when he calls on it and it does what the Force tells it to do, using his body as a channel to let the power flow as it must, as the Force wishes it to. Besides, the part of Anakin that is still wholly conscious of what's going on around him is entirely preoccupied with something else.

Obi-Wan Kenobi.

A familiar looking green and blue dragonmount is leading a charge of clone troopers up on the fifteenth level. Anakin can just make out the shine of a sky-blue blade, dancing in the hands of the man riding that mount, deflecting enemy shots as rapidly as the droids can fire, felling droids by the score with the deflected bolts.

He can also see, up on the sixteenth level, in a ledge roughly halfway across the sinkhole, the flash of reflected light from a cannon-like weapon large enough and definitely nasty looking enough - it looks vaguely like a single turbolaser, though there are slender spires set all around the barrel of the weapon, and the entire system is mounted on a large circular platform that has been moved out into the open from a gaping cavern mouth on what looks like an enormous repulsorlift - to be able to approximate the damage a capital ship's turbolasers could inflict.

He would be lashing out with the Force already, but the Force tells him that the weapon, whatever it is, has only just begun to charge, and that it will be several minutes before it's built up enough charge to actually fire. And in all honesty, Anakin's not at all sure that he could hit the blasted thing from where he is (only the third level, Force take it!), no matter what the Force may think on the subject. So instead of trying and possibly failing to be able to reach that monstrosity of a weapon from where he is, Anakin turns Seera's head up towards the fifteenth level and Obi-Wan, and shouts for her to run like she's never run before.

***

Obi-Wan Kenobi is leading an attack against the encampment of droids on the fifteenth level when what feels like the equivalent of a supernova explodes through the Force at a distance he would guess to be roughly ten to twelve levels below him. Immediately, a tension that has been building at the base of his spine for most of the past hour - ever since his defeat of General Grievous - uncoils and dissipates to nothingness. After all, that explosion of power in the Force can only be Anakin, and if Anakin is using that much of the Force, he must still be well.

Obi-Wan is so relieved at what he feels to be confirmation of Anakin's safety and relative health that he doesn't bother to look to see what has prompted such a furiously bright flow of energy in the Force to begin with. After all, he is in the midst of leading a charge against a rather thoroughly entrenched group of droids, and Commander Cody and the other clones are without a doubt in definite need of his immediate protection, whereas Anakin rather obviously is not in desperate need of aid, not when he's using the Force in a way that would doubtlessly make most of the former members of the Jedi High Council blanche and gape slack-jawed with shock and then turn green with envy . . .

Which is precisely why he never sees the attack coming, much less senses it, at least not until it is almost too late to do anything about it.

Twelve figures in the droid control center, waiting for Jedi to walk into their trap.

An even dozen: eleven MagnaGuards plus General Grievous himself.

On any other day, under any other set of circumstances, in any other surroundings, Obi-Wan would have been less pressed and had more time to think, rather than just enough time in which to react, and therefore would have been able to truly notice that unmatched guard and puzzle out the fact that someone was missing from that little welcoming party in the storage hive.

The MagnaGuards of General Grievous are purposefully modeled after the Izvoshra warrior bodyguards that the Kaleesh warlord and demigod of his people, Qymaen jai Sheelal, allowed the great honor of entered into battle at his side. The Izvoshra were ever a band of eight, that being a number sacred to the Kaleesh. After Qymaen jai Sheelal lost the other half of his soul, Ronderu lij Kummar, in battle against the Huk, Sheelal cast off his old identity, adopting a name more appropriate to a being destined to grieve forever and determined that he would not do so alone: Grievous. Though it was Sidious and the Separatists who remade the Kaleesh warlord into the bio-droid General, Grievous still kept many of his Kaleesh customs, holding on to what he could of his living heritage. The MagnaGuards he commissioned and garbed after the manner of his Izvoshra have, for example, ever been issued and received and sent forth into battle either by eights or, in the very least, by twos, two being a number sacred to his memory (two being the number of beings to manifest the Kaleesh parable of the Dreamer/the Dreamt One, as Qymaen jai Sheelal and Ronderu lij Kummar once did). Hence, the attendance of IG-101 and IG-102 aboard Invisible Hand. And hence, the very obviously wrong arrangement of eleven MagnaGuards as a shield between Grievous and the Jedi come to spring the trap set for them on Utapau by Sidious.

The twelfth MagnaGuard - absent from the droid command center because of an earlier order to see to it that all of Grievous tracks, in his execution of a certain abandoned pet project of Raith Sienar, were either safely erased or else so throughly obscured that none should be able to trace their path to its vengeful outcome - is loyal to his General and master, in the way that only a droid not only programmed for what amounts to hero-worship of a specific individual but also closely patterned after that individual's mind and will can be. Although its earlier order has, due to its challenging and therefore time-consuming nature, kept it from being present in the battle against the Jedi and, therefore, has also seen to it that it has utterly failed in its primary order (to protect General Grievous at all costs), not even the certain death of its master is sufficient to keep it from seeking to fulfill its secondary order (to kill all Jedi and Jedi young not already personally claimed by its master or the Sith Lords), especially not when carrying out that secondary order will also allow it to see to it that its master's death is properly avenged. Thus it is that IG-138 has spent the majority of the past few hours carefully planning out certain death for the Jedi and making absolutely sure that the prototype of the mobile defense turbolaser actually will work, when it is finally fired upon the hated Jedi.

Luckily for Obi-Wan, Anakin sees the weapon just after it has been rolled out to the exact spot where careful calculations assures the highest probability of a clean killing blow.

Unluckily for IG-138, since Grievous had been told that only one Jedi - namely, Obi-Wan Kenobi - would be coming to Utapau after him, the MagnaGuards were told only to watch for the Negotiator, and so it doesn't even occur to the lone surviving bodyguard droid that he should be on the lookout for a second Jedi.

Things come to a head, as they so often do in battle, with shocking swiftness.

One moment, all is going well. Obi-Wan is heading the charge on the droid emplacement and letting the Force move his lightsaber so that it forms a moving but ever present shield between the enemy fire and the stalwart clone troopers marshaled for the attack by Commander Cody, who has made it his personal mission to guard Obi-Wan's (and therefore Boga's) back in Anakin's absence and so is following extremely close behind them.

In the next moment, it all falls to pieces.

A native Pau'an, obviously very young given that the being is barely half as tall as the clone troopers, falls tumbling from a precarious perch on a dactillion dive-bombing the front lines of the droids and rolls to a jouncing, painful looking stop midway between Boga and the droids. The Pau'au gives a low, distressed cry and immediately begins to try to scramble up, only to fall back against the stone floor of the ledge with a thin, reedy cry of anguish.

Cody's response is instinctual. He sees a civilian, and a youngling at that, in pain and down in the no man's land between his soldiers and the enemy lines. And, rather than wait to see if the droids can fire more quickly than even General Kenobi can use the Force to snatch the youngling back to safely, he lunges forward, rushing past Boga to throw himself between the youngling and the droids, so that any fire from the enemies will literally have to go through him first before it can strike the civilian youngling.

Obi-Wan, suddenly distracted by what he can feel is an almost impossibly rapid approach of that boiling sunburst of power in the Force that is Anakin, cannot react in time to keep Cody from his brave and foolishly dangerous act. Anyone else, even another Jedi, might have hesitated to put himself in obvious danger just for a clone, but not Obi-Wan. Cody has served under Obi-Wan Kenobi in more than a dozen operations since the beginning of the Outer Rim Sieges, and Obi-Wan considers the Commander with the somewhat quirky sense of humor as much one of his brothers-in-arms as he might consider another Jedi. Caught off-guard though he is, his instinct is to immediately throw himself beyond both Cody and the youngling, and so place his body between them and the enemy lines.

Boga, sensing that her rider's mood echoes her own instinct, leaps so that she lands in a protective crouch that is half in front of and half over the supine forms of both Commander Cody and the Pau'an yougling.

And in the next instant the blue-green leanly muscled form of Seera boils up over the ledge of the vast sinkhole that encircles the fifteenth level, Anakin on her back and blazing like a rising sun.

"Obi-Wan! Shield, now!"

Things seem at once to happen then both very slowly and very quickly.

Obi-Wan is already turning towards Anakin and that shout, a shield of Force-energy snapping into place in front of Boga (and therefore also Cody, the youngling, and, incidentally, himself and the clone troopers beyond his dragonmount's sheltering bulk), when the far-sight vision overtakes him and he tumbles up out of himself, the most probable of the possible pathways of the future opening before him in a swift, inexorable cascade of information.

He can see that Anakin is about to strike out at the droids, out of fear that Obi-Wan will not be able to establish a shield between himself and the others before they can fire upon them.

He can see that Anakin's strike will inevitably wipe out the entire force of droids.

He can also see the massive experimental weapon that is already aimed squarely upon the fifteenth-level plateau that now holds both of the highest-priority targets of the Separatist troops (namely, Jedi Masters Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker), at a target area that not only also incidentally presently holds many secondary clone targets but is, even in the instant that Obi-Wan perceives it, only a few hundreds of a second away from being fired upon, IG-138's finger only waiting for the weapon's reader display to flash its readiness to depress the firing mechanism.

More, he can see that Anakin, after spending the bulk of his currently gathered power in the Force upon the droids, will not be able to gather up enough strength afterwards to turn about quickly enough to throw up a shield of sufficient strength to turn the massive energy bolt that will be coming out of that weapon.

Perhaps most importantly, though, Obi-Wan can plainly see that if he were to take the most obvious course of action and attempt to drop the shield between himself and the droids in order to throw another, much stronger shield between that weapon and Anakin's back, there are so many other, smaller, but no less deadly weapons that have already been fired or else are being fired or are about to be fired by the many droids facing them that he simply would not be able to stop some of those bolts from getting past his lightsaber - meaning that several blasts would inevitably end up striking Boga, Cody, and many of the other clone troopers behind them. And that is something that Obi-Wan cannot allow to come to pass.

So Obi-Wan does the only thing that he can see to do that will lend itself to a result that both he and Anakin should be able to live with.

Determinedly, Obi-Wan holds the shield of Force-energy he has thrown up before Boga, Commander Cody, and the younglng intact, a Force-powered force-field able to turn aside all of the many blasts and bolts that the droids will be casting against it. Then, sighing resignedly, he kicks free of his stirrups, pushing himself upright until he is standing on top of Boga, balancing effortlessly on the seat of the saddle. By the time it becomes evident what Obi-Wan is doing, there is not enough time left for Anakin (who has already begun to unleash the raging storm of power he has gathered up around and into himself through the Force) to try to recall the strike of Force-energy that is already beginning to arc out away from him into the hordes of battle droids and support mechanicals arrayed against the Jedi and the clone soldiers. The Separatist droids are already disintegrating beneath that unleashed barrage of furious energy, more than strong enough to reduce them to clouds of particulate matter and boiling vapors, by the time Obi-Wan gains his full height upon the saddle and is able to launch himself upwards, using the seat of the saddle as a platform from which to thrust himself straight up into the air. IG-138, having fired the modified experimental turbolaser just as soon as the ready light flashed on, can only watch helplessly, not even his extraordinarily quick reflexes, with their near lightspeed operational parameters, able to recall an action made mere microseconds before Obi-Wan's spectacular launch upwards. Obi-Wan, shooting into the air and gaining altitude with the kind of swiftness and rapidity more common to a canon-fired shot, has plenty of time to observe the bolt of energy rushing towards him, blazing in an arc like a falling meteor strike. While stretching his arms wide, as if to make of himself a larger and more inviting target, Obi-Wan also stretches out into the Force, feeling his way out along the rapidly narrowing pathways of the future probabilities, and, once again catching sight of the possibility that prompted him to push up out of the saddle in the first place, surrenders himself utterly to the Force's guidance.

Obi-Wan has no idea how to safely absorb such a ridiculously large amount of energy. The most he has ever had to safely deal with is the equivalent of a half a dozen blaster bolts at once. But that's all right. Obi-Wan doesn't have to know how to safely absorb the equivalent of a dead-on turbolaser blast from the conning spire of a capital ship as least as large and powerful as a /Procurator/-class Star Battlecruiser. The Force, being in essence an enormous and expanding energy field, can easily absorb more power into itself without causing or taking harm. And the Force also intimately understands the limits of those who act as vessels for it. Given complete control over the vessel that is Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Force acts on both sources of knowledge, drawing on skills strikingly similar to those unconsciously exercised by Anakin, in draining all of the remaining power away from that Separatist /Diamond-/class cruiser too damaged to fly and then using that power to blast droids into fragments so small and superheated that most of those pieces could not even be classified as physically solid matter. Reaching out to the vast store of energy contained within that blast, the Force, through Obi-Wan, draws on that power to create a shield that will reflect a comparatively small amount of that salvo - just enough power to blow the modified turbolaser to component parts, none of which will be any larger than the size of a young humanoid child's small fist - while also absorbing the remainder of that powerful blast into itself, into both Obi-Wan and the far greater sea of energy that is the Force. Jolted by a burst of power that surrounds him with an aura so bright that his body is thrown into stark relief against the sky, the light flaring to life around him actually intense enough to be painful to look at head-on, Obi-Wan hangs in the air for a long moment, suspended from the heights as though buoyed up on an invisible wave. Commander Cody, turning away from the conflagration of energy and light that is the Force-power being directed against the CIS war droids arrayed against them on level fifteen by Anakin, is only able to catch one flickering glimpse of motion as Obi-Wan throws himself up away from Boga before he is blinded, not even the visual polarizers in his helmet (which are strong enough to be able to cut the glare by almost half) able to shield his vision enough to allow him to see through what appears to him to be a raging holocaust of blue-tinged white fire. Thus, seen clearly by none but Anakin (whose pained squint is too stubborn to turn away once he realizes what has happened and just what, and who, he is looking upon), Obi-Wan Kenobi hangs suspended in mid air, blazing. And while he hangs there, apparently dangling from and upon nothingness, the Force continues to move through him.

There is a certain . . . well, not feel/, not precisely, since a surprisingly large number of droid units actually lack the programming necessary to convincingly mimic true sentiency and many other more complexly programmed droids also contain so many deliberate hindrances upon their elaborate programming that, practically speaking, their AI represents tools for other sentient beings to use or direct more than the flowering of consciously self-aware, learning, and adaptable individualities. So really, it's less like the /feel of a living and moving mind and more like a faint and localized energy resonance that surrounds the presence of an active droid, in the Force. This resonance (for lack of a better word) is so completely different from the active and flowing feel of a sentient mind and (given that droids generally exist side-by-side with their numerous sentient owners/operators) usually so difficult to separate out from the much more obvious and generally overwhelming bright presence of living beings within the living current of the Force that most Jedi never learn how to sense droids within the Force, much less develop the control necessary to touch their inner workings through the Force. The Clone Wars, with its proliferation of battle droids and droid-operated fighter crafts, has changed this somewhat, as Jedi have been forced to adapt and learn or perish beneath the overwhelming numbers of droids programmed to hunt them down and destroy them. Obi-Wan Kenobi, though, is one of the rare Jedi who has known how to sense and touch active droid units through the Force since before the outbreak of the war.

The reason Obi-Wan has known how to do this, however, is not because of any desire on his own part to more thoroughly understand droids. It is, instead, the result of a simple wish to be able to stay on top of or ahead of a wide and sometimes bewildering array of Force-powers and Force-assisted abilities being manifested by a certain extremely strong (and sometimes even more headstrong) Padawan by the name of Anakin Skywalker, a Padawan who has a marked interest in and aptitude for all things mechanical, including droids. Obi-Wan has painstakingly (with much trial and error) taught himself to be able to automatically sense active droids through the odd resonance they touch off in the Force, just as easily and naturally as he might sense the flowing feel of the minds of living sentient beings. Obi-Wan has even, through dint of sheer determination and repetitive practice, mastered the almost impossible ability of using the Force to touch (and therefore to fox) the inner workings of droids. Since he has taught himself these things due to a very different kind of impulse than simple self-preservation, his need and his motivation, being both more complex and more personal than that of those few Jedi who have forced themselves to learn how to (at least mostly) sense active droid units since the start of the war, have resulted in a startlingly strong ability to sway mechanicals to his will. The Force, recognizing the strength and flexibility of that talent, acts by taking advantage of it. There is, after all, more than one way to take out a droid opponent, and as effective as reducing such an enemy to what amounts to a fine rain of dust and superheated vapor may be, there are other, far more energy-efficient methods available for those who, like Obi-Wan Kenobi, have a finer range of control and lighter touch upon the Force. Methods such as searching out the systems of an operational unit and introducing into the midst of those systems an unshielded, ungrounded current of power, one just sufficiently strong to disrupt the relaying and firing of certain key code commands and to essentially fry a few of the most vital systems, without which the unit as a whole will not and cannot function . . .

The Force, given direction by Obi-Wan's talent, uses the remaining vast stores of energy generated by the blast of the experimental turbolaser to flow into and through Obi-Wan to search out and find all of the droid units active on the planet of Utapau. It is not an unduly difficult task. After finding one resonance, it is merely a matter of spreading outwards from that disturbance in an expanding ring until all such sources of resonance have been caught within the web of his awareness. On almost any other planet, on a more heavily industrialized world, it would have been far more difficult, for then there would have been no easy way to tell the difference between the regular droid units in service to the local populace and the battle units in service to the Separatists. But Utapau has no mechanicals complex enough to qualify (and therefore register within the Force) as droids. And the only droid units attached to the forces that have been sent with Obi-Wan and Anakin to Utapau are all in ships that are still well above the surface of the planet - far above where the war droids of the CIS are ranged across the face of the world, out of the sphere of Obi-Wan's attention and therefore beyond the range of his reach. A hundred thousand tiny tongues of energy, in the form of radiant white light, explode out from Obi-Wan's suspended form in a net of rapidly spreading and multiplying feelers, like forking and splitting and redoubling tongues of lightning or of fire, flowing outward from him in all directions. Though those feelers of energy often pass very near to the clone troopers, the humanoid inhabitants of Utapau, and their reptilian mounts - and indeed, there are so many of the tiny curls of energy, all crawling so thick through the air, that is seems nigh onto impossible that some of those tongues of power would not brush up against an organic being - they seek out their droid targets ceaselessly and unerringly, until all have been touched with their power and the vast majority of the remaining power from the blast of that modified turbolaser has been spent, grounding itself in the most vital systems of every last working droid upon the planet and effectively removing all of those units from the battle.

When that task has been accomplished, enough remains of the power from the enormous influx of energy into the Force from the now thoroughly annihilated and never to be more than experimental Separatist designed mobile planetary turbolaser that a corona of light continues to surround Obi-Wan in an envelope of bright blue-white energy, a Force-generated force-field that wraps his body in a strong cocoon, cradling him safely within its grasp and protecting him from all possible harm as gravity finally begins to catch up with him and his suspended body begins to fall, plummeting straight down though the open space hollowed out of the center of the Pau City sinkhole. There is more than enough power left over to easily generate a force-field that is plenty strong enough to be able to shield Obi-Wan and prevent him from taking any damage whatsoever, as his rapidly accelerating body falls straight down into the sinkhole, plunging him down towards the subterranean world-sea of Utapau -

- or so it could have protected him, if only that would have been the sole task that the remaining power would be turned towards accomplishing. Unfortunately, it is not the only thing that Obi-Wan ends up having to ask the Force to try to accomplish, since Anakin (having seen Obi-Wan kick free of Boga's saddle, propel himself recklessly upward into the path of the mobile turbolaser's enormously destructive bolt, absorb and disperse most of the energy from that hugely powerful blast, and then begin to fall, apparently helplessly and out of control, down towards the bottom of the sinkhole) has responded with foolhardy courage and a desperate need to join Obi-Wan, to catch him and perhaps help him, by kicking free of Seera's saddle and flinging himself heedlessly out into the abyss, purposefully diving headlong after Obi-Wan's plummeting form, pushing off powerfully with his legs, shedding the bulky layer of his outer robe, and tucking his arms back tight against his body, all in an effort to drive himself downwards with more rapidity and give the winds whipping past him the least amount of material to catch upon and drag at, making himself like a sleekly arrowing missile, knifing his way as swiftly and purposefully after Obi-Wan as the shape of a diving, striking bird of prey.

Anakin is so wrapped up in his need to follow and catch Obi-Wan that he doesn't even attempt to reach out to the Force for guidance or protection. His own stores of "borrowed" and converted energy are so depleted by the blasting of the droids ranged against Obi-Wan, Cody, and his men and the following furious strike against IG-138, only bare milliseconds after the sole remaining MagnaGuard's finger depressed the firing button on the modified turbolaser, that Anakin couldn't have shielded himself with what little raw power remains within his grasp even if it would have occurred to him to try it. Which would not represent such a potential problem if the fall were not quite so far or if the amount of power wrapped around Obi-Wan were only a little bit greater. But the fall is far enough that it could potentially hurt even a fully trained, fully relaxed, unshielded Jedi, perhaps even badly enough to kill. And the force-field wrapped around Obi-Wan, powerful as it is when required to enclose only one body, is not quite great enough to hold and fully shield two bodies within its limits. Not alone, anyway. The amount of raw Force-energy shimmering idly around Anakin and the discrete quantity of Force-energy contained in the full-body shield protecting Obi-Wan might, in combination, contain enough power to protect them both, though.

Might. Perhaps. Just possibly. If, that is, Anakin thinks to reach out to Obi-Wan with the Force as well as his hands, before they can strike the surface of the water, towards which they are now both accelerating with the rapidity and dead-on aim of projectiles fired straight down at terminal velocities . . .

***

There is just enough time between explosions of light and power (which, contained in some way by the two Jedi who have called them into existence, touch not a one of the clones, the Utapauns, or their mounts) for Commander Cody to scramble back up to his feet and rush (mostly entirely blindly) to the edge of level fifteen . . . where he is just able to catch sight of the tail end of what looks like a twinned star being swallowed whole by the dark waters of the Utapauian subterranean world-sea, followed by a fiery trail of twisted hunks and blazing bits of destroyed turbolaser, raining down into the ocean mouth glimmering at the bottom of the sinkhole.

"Damn it, Warrior! Why must you both always be going where I and my brothers cannot follow?" The question is entirely the reflex of a long held and deep-seated frustration, a rhetorical response to yet another less than ideal set of circumstances, one in which he has found himself once more being left behind by his apparently fearless Jedi leaders. But an answer comes from behind him anyway, given voice by another trooper who has gone on and survived his share of missions with both General Kenobi and General Skywalker.

"It's their nature, Commander. They're always going where others can't - or won't. Or daren't. The Jedi beat Jango: the Warrior of the Infinite beat the Jedi and bent them to their will. They'll be alright. Just give them a chance to get out and dry off. You'll see. They'll be blasting out of here and leaving us behind to clean up, gathering up the droids they put out of commission. Just wait. Bet you anything it'll be so."

Forry is only a trooper, not a Commander, but he's nearly smart enough to have been a Commander, even without the extra training. And Cody considers him a friend. Plus, the battle they've been fighting has apparently come to an abrupt and undisputable end. So he allows the comment to stand unchallenged, though others might find it disrespectful of Cody's higher rank. "Could be you're right," Cody acknowledges, nodding his head slightly. "And since your mind's on cleanup, Forry . . . "

Rolling his eyes behind his helmet, where Cody can't see, Forry merely listens to his new orders, uncomplainingly letting himself serve as a much needed distraction, until their Warrior of the Infinite can shake off the latest round of impossibility and take away Cody's cause for both worry and guilt, for not being able to go after them and protect them on the way down the hole.

***

Anakin Skywalker is an extremely strong swimmer, having gotten over his near-disastrous first attempt at mastering the skill (with a lot of patient help and encouragement from Obi-Wan) by growing genuinely fond of the activity during his first year living in the Temple on Coruscant, with the long period of confinement indoors necessitated by the surprisingly bitterly cold winter months. Unfortunately, though, a person's strength at swimming tends to count for very little when that person has been knocked unconscious by the violence of collision with the water he might otherwise be swimming within. Thankfully, Obi-Wan's collision with the water is not quite so violent as Anakin's, since the energy still mostly wrapped around his body (it having occurred to Anakin to reach out to Obi-Wan in the Force only at literally the last possible instant before impact) at the moment of contact can and does serve as a buffer between him and water. Even more thankfully, the mostly humorous reminder for the two Jedi to remember to bring some extra rebreathers with them (issued by Commander Cody and passed along by the Grand Masters on the day before their departure from Coruscant to Utapau) has been taken seriously enough that both have two rebreathers tucked away in two different but secure locations on their utility belts.

Obi-Wan, shocked by the iciness of the salt water, loses hold of the state of oneness with the Force that comes from willing surrender and finds himself hanging in absolute blackness, a limp and oddly familiar weight tangled around his legs. There is no telling how far underwater he might be, nor even which direction might be up. His lungs are choked, half full of water from the sheer rushing press of it during the last meters of his descent, but Obi-Wan doesn't panic or even particularly worry; mostly, he's too busy being pleased to discover that, even in his only partially self-aware fall, he'd still managed to hang on to his lightsaber. And, even better, that the weight knocking against his legs is familiar because it is the limp form of an unconscious but alive (and, from the strength of his presence within the Force, largely unharmed) Anakin Skywalker. With a relieved smile, Obi-Wan latches onto that relaxed form with one hand while using the other to clip his (deactivated, though he can't remember thumbing off the switch) lightsaber back to his belt by feel before, with the aide of a minor exercise of Jedi discipline to suppress any convulsive coughing, deliberately contracting his diaphragm, forcing as much water from his lungs as he can.

Quickly and efficiently, but unhurriedly, Obi-Wan fishes out of his equipment belt both the two rebreathers he has packed and their small compressed-air canisters, intended for use only in emergencies, when the breathable environment is not adequate to sustain human life. Though his current situation is not nearly so terrible as it might have been, under other circumstances (and the Force gives him flashes of Boga in a wrenching leap, twisting in the air, the shock of impacts, multiple detonations blasting both of them farther and farther out from the sinkhole wall, the faithful dragonmount all the while unhesitatingly using her massive body to shield Obi-Wan from the fire of his own troops, to reinforce this fact), he's still fairly certain that it qualifies as an emergency. Besides, if it's not an emergency yet, it likely will be once they resurface, if Cody and the dragonmounts have anything to say about it. After all, under these circumstances, Obi-Wan finds it hard to believe that either the abandoned dragonmounts or the left behind Clone Commander will be very happy with either Obi-Wan or Anakin . . . With a slight shrug of his shoulders, Obi-Wan discards the canisters and then stretches out with the Force to compresses Anakin's diaphragm and force the water (quite a bit more than the amount Obi-Wan had inhaled) out before swiftly snugging first Anakin's and then his own rebreather securely into place. Better that the dragonmounts and Cody have reason to be upset than that they should have been claimed either by death or by the evil of the Sith Lord and Master's final insidious command. Yes. Much better, better by far, this way.

Obi-Wan doesn't try to swim, after that. He seems to be hanging motionless, suspended in infinite night, with Anakin's still unconscious but mostly unharmed and now breathing easily body cradled in his arms. It's not entirely unpleasant, now that he's had enough time to adjust to the cold of the water. So Obi-Wan simply relaxes, regulates his breathing, and allows the water to carry them whither it would. Some undefinable time later, Obi-Wan feels his head and shoulders breach the surface of the lightless ocean. Making sure his left arm is snug around Anakin's waist, he unclips his lightsaber and raises it over his head. In its blue glow, Obi-Wan can see that they have come up in a cavernous grotto of uncertain (other than large, a vague but otherwise obvious impression) size. Holding the lightsaber high, well away from both him and Anakin, Obi-Wan snugs Anakin a bit closer, until his head lolls back, well out of the water, upon Obi-Wan's left shoulder. Then, with a careful current of the Force, he retrieves first his own and then Anakin's rebreather, tucking them away in a pocket on Anakin's belt, where he can get to them again quickly if the need arises. Afterwards, Obi-Wan begins a slow but steady sidestroke across the current to a rock outcropping that appears rugged enough to offer handholds. Once there, he pulls both himself and Anakin up out of the water, maneuvering until Anakin's limp form is draped across his shoulders in a position that makes Obi-Wan smile briefly, imaging that when Anakin had first picked up his unconscious form on Invisible Hand that he also must have slung Obi-Wan across his shoulders lengthwise, just so.

The walls of the grotto above the waterline are pocked with openings of various shapes and sizes. After carefully inspecting the mouths of several caves, Obi-Wan finally comes upon one where he can feel a faint breath of moving air. It has a distinctly unpleasant smell - one that reminds him of the dragonmount pen, though this scent is also mixed with a distinct odor of mold and what he rather imagines is decaying fish - but when he douses his lightsaber for a moment and listens very closely, he can hear the faint rumble of what might have been distant wheels and repulsorlifts passing over sandstone . . . and what is that? An air horn? Or possibly a disturbed and therefore extremely unhappy dragon . . . at any rate, this seems to be the appropriate path, malodorous as it may be. So, with a mental shrug (so as to avoid jostling Anakin unduly) Obi-Wan continues on his chosen path. He has picked his way across only a few hundred meters, though (his pace slower than it might have otherwise been, to avoid jarring Anakin), before the gloom ahead is suddenly pierced by the white glare of high-intensity searchlights. Smiling, Obi-Wan allows his to blade shrink away as a pair of seeker droids come floating along behind that searching light. Commander Cody, it seems, has neither given up on them nor even so much as apparently doubted for a moment their ability to survive such a fall intact. With a slight rueful shake of his head, Obi-Wan resigns himself to another round of jokes about rebreathers and the need to always keep a few handy.

Unfortunately, their searchlights illuminate - and, apparently, awaken - some sort of immense amphibian cousin of the dragonmounts, the presence of which Obi-Wan should have remembered from his far-sight vision but for some reason (distraction, perhaps?) has failed to recall. This creature blinks sleepily at them as it lifts its slickly glistening starfighter-sized head. Oh, Obi-Wan thinks, startled. That's right. That explains the smell. Instinctively, out of a need to protect Anakin, he slides into a nearby narrow crevice in the left wall of the tunnel and breathes into the Force a suggestion that the two small bobbing spheroids of circuitry and durasteel are actually, contrary to smell and appearance, some unexpected variety of a practically immorally delicious confection sent down from the heavens by the kindly gods of all Huge Slimy Cave-Monsters. The Huge Slimy Cave-Monster in question promptly opens jaws that could have just as easily engulfed a bantha and snaps one of the seekers out of the air, chewing it into slivers with every evidence of an immense satisfaction. The second seeker immediately emits a startled and thoroughly alarmed sounding wheeep wheep wheep before shooting rapidly away back into the darkness, with the creature in hot pursuit. Reigniting his lightsaber and moving cautiously back out into the main cavern, Obi-Wan almost immediately comes upon a nest of what must have been infant Huge Slimy Cave-Monsters. Hoisting Anakin's still unconscious form up a bit higher on his shoulders, he commences picking his way carefully but swiftly around the nest as its inhabitants all lunge and snap and squall at him, all the while reflecting absently that these particular infants are proof positive that sentient beings who believe that all babies are cute should really get out more. Afterwards, away from the nesting grounds of the creatures, Obi-Wan is able to walk at a more relaxed pace, only occasionally having to climb or slide or leap to get over or across or down around some obstacle or another before he can continue strolling along his way, Anakin draped across his shoulders like a prize of battle.

Soon enough, the darkness in the cavern gives way to the pale glow of Utapaun traffic lighting, and Obi-Wan finds himself standing in a smallish side tunnel branching off of one of the major thoroughfares - one that is clearly very little traveled, for the sandy dust on its floor is so thick it practically resembles a beach. In fact, he can clearly see the tracks of the last vehicle to pass this way, the shape of broad parallel tracks pocked with divots: the markings that a blade-wheeler would leave. And beside them stretches the long splay-clawed prints of a running dragon. Obi-Wan blinks in mild astonishment then. Despite having seen this possibility quite clearly in at least one of his far-sight visions, the reality of having arrived back upon the trail of his chase for Grievous is still startling. Still, even though he has not yet grown quite entirely accustomed to the way that these Force-gifted visions come through for him, neither is Obi-Wan reluctant to accept such gifts. Frowning thoughtfully, he follows the tracks a short distance around a curve, until the tunnel gave way to the small landing platform. Grievous's starfighter is still there. As, less fortunately, are the remains of Grievous, since apparently not even the local rock-vultures can stomach him. With a slight moue of distaste, Obi-Wan skirts around those disgusting remains and carries Anakin over to the starfighter, carefully shifting his still unconscious form around until he can bend down and lay Anakin across the floor with his back against the edge of the starfighter.

Crouching down in front of him, Obi-Wan lays a hand gently against Anakin's left cheek and, reaching out into the Force, encouragingly whispers, "Come on now, Anakin. You've been unconscious for quite long enough. We have things we need to do and places to go, young one. I would prefer not to have to carry you up to a medical bay, in the meantime." Then, acting on impulse, he leans forward and brushes a soft kiss against Anakin's slightly slack mouth, slowly increasing pressure as that slackness gradually closes and the soft unresistance firms almost infinitesimally into an equal returned pressure, as Anakin responds to Obi-Wan's rousing touch in the Force and the soft, seductive brush of his lips, wakening gradually but entirely, as evidenced by the eventually twining of his arms up around Obi-Wan's neck.

Several long moments later, when Obi-Wan finally pulls away, he is met with a fiercely implacable glare. "You," Anakin tells him, his voice as immovable as his expression, "will not ever leave me behind like that again."

"It wasn't deliberate, Anakin."

"I don't care. You about gave me heart failure, when you kicked off into the air like that."

"Hmm," Obi-Wan make a small noncommital noise as he helps Anakin up to his feet, but his expression sharpens and a familiar half-smile begins playing around the edges of his mouth as Anakin continues to stare at him angrily. "Yes. Well. Perhaps you'll think about that, the next time it enters your head to go diving out of a moving air speeder."

His angry stare softening into a half-petulant frown, Anakin sighs, "You would bring that up again. I didn't want her to get away! And it wasn't that dangerous. Not like what you just did!"

"I was perfectly safe, Anakin. There was more than enough power left from where the Force absorbed the weapon's energy blast to wrap me in a force-field and shield me from harm. You, however . . . "

Back on more familiar territory, the two open up the starfighter - an obviously modified Belbullab-22, a heavy fighter and Confederacy strike bomber emblazoned with the name Soulless One - and duck inside, bickering happily all the while, too relieved over each other's safety to take much notice of their extremely wet and cold clothes, though Obi-Wan does peel out of his outer robe to keep from dripping on the controls as he makes his way forward with Anakin, digging his comm unit out of one of the waterproof pouches on his belt and absently activating it, to check in and let Cody know that they're both alright and are about to bring up a little discovery they've made, one that will allow them to make use of an alternative mode of transportation, when the cleanup is over with and the time comes to depart, so that they can go ahead and head for Naboo while the clones and their transport return to Coruscant . . .

***