
rotating launcher, bigger than the entire Jedi Temple. Anakin listened for the hesitation, the brief silence
followed by a bass grind and chuff before a ring of canisters was chambered and fired. Best, of course,
to drop through a port during a lull between discharges, and away from a port where a canister had
recently passed, with its flux of gases, updrafts, lightning, and blue ion trails.
Before he made his decision, Anakin marveled at a phenomenon he had only heard about from other
racers in tones of awe rising circles of plasma spheres, drifting as if imbued with purpose in the void
above the first shield. They glowed orange and greenish blue, and he could even hear their fierce sizzle.
To touch them was to be instantly fried. He watched a circle of these spheres explode with tinny pops,
and through the space where they had been, a particularly fierce bolt of lightning flew like a javelin
through a hoop.
This raised his neck hair in a way no static discharge could explain. It was as if he faced the primitive
gods of the garbage pit, the real masters of this place, yet to think this even for a moment went against all
of his training. The Force is everywhere and demands nothing, neither obeisance nor awe.
But this, of course, was what he needed to experience in order to forget. He needed to strip down to
pure savagery, to that place below his name, his memory, his self, where ominous shadows dwelled, and
where one could turn in an instant from the light side of the Force to the dark and hardly know they were
different.
Anakin, pure instinct, a mote of dust in the game, tucked his wings once more and dropped through the
central port in the shield.
He did not notice, fifty meters above him, that the Blood Carver did the same.
The gun carriage sat on its elevated mount two hundred meters below the shield, going through its
automated motions. From tracks on all sides it received loaded and charged canisters, each falling into a
firing chamber with only a bulbous tip protruding. Each canister bore a specific designation in the carriage
program, a specified route through the four shields, with four chances to be accelerated into a specific
orbit. The charge beneath the canister would carry it only the first three hundred meters, to the first shield.
Thereafter the tractor fields and magnetic-pulse engines took over. It was a sophisticated yet
centuries-old design, rugged, durable, duplicated all over Coruscant.
The air above the rotating carriage was almost unbreathable. Fumes from the exploding charges-simple
chemical explosives- could not be vented and processed fast enough to prevent a toxic pall forming
below the first shield. Added to this perpetual burnt-rubber haze were the miasmic vapors from the
silicone-filled basin below the gun carriage.
It was here that the most primitive-not to mention the largest-creatures on Coruscant lived and performed
their functions in a perpetual twilight, illuminated only by the fitful glows of work lights hung from the
undersides of the gun carriage supports. The largest worms were hundreds of meters long and three or
four meters wide.
Anakin glided to one side of the lowest level and alighted on a carriage support. He could feel through his
feet the rotation and launching of the chambered canisters. The immense mass of the ferrocarbon
structure shuddered under his flight slippers.
He had conserved most of his fuel for this moment. The tractor fields below the carriage were weak,
sufficient only to discourage the worms from rising to suck at the supports. Once he had plucked loose a
glassy worm scale, he would have to jet upward to the first shield and catch a canister updraft, then be
pulled through a port to the void above the first shield.
This would be insanely difficult.
All the better. Anakin, eyes wide open, surveyed the dim, chaotic brew of worms below. He locked one
wing briefly, pulled loose an arm, and wrapped a breather mask over his mouth and nose. He then took
this opportunity to attach his optical cup and pulled down bubble goggles to protect his eyes from the
silicone spray. Then he tensed to leap.
But he had made a Jedi apprentice's first mistake-to direct all one's attention to a single goal or object.
Focus was one thing, narrow perception another, and Anakin had ignored everything above him.
He felt a prickle in his senses and looked to one side just in time to catch, with the top of his head, a
blow aimed at his temple. The Blood Carver glided past and landed on the next stanchion, watching with