1Anakin and Obi-WanAntifighter 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 on all sides, the two Jedi pulled their ships through perfectly mirrored rolls that sent them streaking head-on for each other from opposite ends of a vast Republic cruiser.
For merely human pilots, this would be suicide. By the time you can see your partner’s starfighter streaking toward you at a respectable fraction of lightspeed, it’s already too late for your merely human reflexes to react.
But these particular pilots were far from merely human.
The Force nudged hands on control yokes and the Jedi starfighters twisted and flashed past each other belly-to-belly, close enough to scorch each other’s paint. Tri-fighters were the Trade Federation’s latest space-superiority droid. But even the electronic reflexes of the tri-fighters’ droid brains were too slow for this: one of his pursuers met one of Anakin’s head-on. Both vanished in a blossom of flame.
The shock wave of debris and expanding gas rocked Obi-Wan; he fought the control yoke, barely keeping his starfighter out of a tumble that would have smeared him across the cruiser’s ventral hull. Before he could straighten out, his threat display chimed again.
“Oh, marvelous,” he muttered under his breath. Anakin’s surviving pursuer had switched targets. “Why is it always me?”
“Perfect.” Through the cockpit speakers, Anakin’s voice carried grim satisfaction. “Both of them are on your tail.”
“Perfect is not the word I’d use.” Obi-Wan twisted his yoke, juking madly as space around him flared scarlet. “We have to split them up!”
“Break left.” Anakin sounded calm as a stone. “The turbolaser tower off your port bow: thread its guns. I’ll take things from there.”
“Easy for you to say.” Obi-Wan whipped sideways along the cruiser’s superstructure. Fire from the pursuing tri-fighters blasted burning chunks from the cruiser’s armor. “Why am I always the bait?”
“I’m right behind you. Artoo, lock on.”
Obi-Wan spun his starfighter between the recoiling turbocannons close enough that energy-scatter made his cockpit clang like a gong, but still cannonfire flashed past him from the tri-fighters behind. “Anakin, they’re all over me!”
“Dead ahead. Move right to clear my shot. Now!”
Obi-Wan flared his port jets and the starfighter kicked to the right. One of the tri-fighters behind him decided it couldn’t follow and went for a ventral slip that took it directly into the blasts from Anakin’s cannons.
It vanished in a boil of superheated gas.
“Good shooting, Artoo.” Anakin’s dry chuckle in the cockpit’s speakers vanished behind the clang of lasers blasting ablative shielding off Obi-Wan’s left wing.
“I’m running out of tricks here—”
Clearing the vast Republic cruiser put him on course for the curving hull of one of the Trade Federation’s battleships; space between the two capital ships blazed with turbolaser exchanges. Some of those flashing energy blasts were as big around as his entire ship; the merest graze would blow him to atoms.
Obi-Wan dived right in.
He had the Force to guide him through, and the tri-fighter had only its electronic reflexes—but those electronic reflexes operated at roughly the speed of light. It stayed on his tail as if he were dragging it by a tow cable.
When Obi-Wan went left and Anakin right, the tri-fighter would swing halfway through the difference. The same with up and down. It was averaging his movements with Anakin’s; somehow its droid brain had realized that as long as it stayed between the two Jedi, Anakin couldn’t fire on it without hitting his partner. The tri-fighter was under no similiar restraint: Obi-Wan flew through a storm of scarlet needles.
“No wonder we’re losing the war,” he muttered. “They’re getting smarter.”
“What was that, Master? I didn’t copy.”
Obi-Wan kicked his starfighter into a tight spiral toward the Federation cruiser. “I’m taking the deck!”
“Good idea. I need some room to maneuver.”
Cannonfire tracked closer. Obi-Wan’s cockpit speakers buzzed. “Cut right, Obi-Wan! Hard right! Don’t let him get a handle on you! Artoo, lock on!”
Obi-Wan’s starfighter streaked along the curve of the Separatist cruiser’s dorsal hull. Antifighter flak burst on all sides as the cruiser’s guns tried to pick him up. He rolled a right wingover into the service trench that stretched the length of the cruiser’s hull. This low and close to the deck, the cruiser’s antifighter guns couldn’t depress their angle of fire enough to get a shot, but the tri-fighter stayed right on his tail.
At the far end of the service trench, the massive support buttresses of the cruiser’s towering bridge left no room for even Obi-Wan’s small craft. He kicked his starfighter into a half roll that whipped him out of the trench and shot him straight up the tower’s angled leading edge. One burst of his underjets jerked him past the forward viewports of the bridge with only meters to spare—and the tri-fighter followed his path exactly.
Copyright © 2025 by Matthew Stover. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
