Chapter Eighty Eight

Anakin was thrilled as he and Master Windu stepped out onto the planet of Taanab. This was the first mission Anakin had been on that had taken him away from the Jedi Temple, and he was eager to prove himself in the field. He had been on a few missions on Coruscant and had even met some senators and chancellors, but despite that, Anakin felt this was his first real mission as a Jedi.

"Jedi padawan, Anakin," Mace said from behind him, reaching down and grabbing Anakin's shoulder lightly and steering him to one side so they were no longer in the way of the other passengers getting off the liner the two of them had taken from Coruscant to Sullust. "You are projecting your thoughts again."

"Sorry, master, but keeping my thoughts to myself is somehow harder to do than not looking into other people's emotions."

"It is, but it is a necessary skill," Mace replied, both acknowledging the difficulty and pointing out the necessity in one sentence. "Now come, Cloak yourself and follow me."

Anakin nodded. Concentrating, he pulled the Force around him in such a way that normal people wouldn't be able to see him. The technique made him grumble, since he had heard several times there was another, subtler version of the technique, but Mace had yet to teach it to him. Shaking that thought off, he quickly raced to catch up to the taller man, whose long strides had already taken him away from the rest of the passengers.

He had been with Master Mace for over two years now. And in that time Anakin had grown, both in height and power, he knew it. He knew he was strong for his age, yet his master continually proved that he still had a lot to learn. And the way he did made that fact seem so simple and obvious, Anakin could only feel awe at how far he had to go rather than irritation at that fact.

The two of them swiftly exited through the spaceport's local office, heading into the city beyond. As they walked, Mace ordered, "Tell us about our mission here in your own words."

Anakin paused as Mace said the phrase, 'in his own words.' That meant Mace wanted more than a simple precis on their mission: he wanted Anakin to think about what it meant. Anakin was being tested once more. That was fine. Anakin had gotten used to being tested, learning quickly not to simply blurt out the first thing that came to his mind, whatever his belief that the Force guided such thoughts.

"We are to look into an allegation against the sector senator from the local planetary governor," he said slowly. "However, the governor did not come to us in person; rather, he sent an intermediary. That intermediary himself did not feel trustworthy through the Force. It feels more as if someone is trying to use the Jedi Order here, master. To remove a local opponent, perhaps?"

"Very good," Mace said. "That matches with my own reading of this mission as well as the High Council's. But what will that mean for us?"

Again Anakin paused before replying. "We will need to continually use the Force to discern whether or not we are being led? It's hard to explain, master. The evidence we will find… I have no doubt we will find evidence, but we will need to make certain it was not planted, that it matches reality…"

"Close enough. Your meaning comes through, Anakin, and as you grow up you will become better at expressing yourself. But do you think you are up to that task?" Mace asked, his face blank as he looked down at his padawan.

"I aim to do my best, master," Anakin said, wondering if this was another moment where his master was going to try to burst his ego. He couldn't tell one way or the other just yet.

Mace often did this, attempting to humble Anakin, though it rarely took. Anakin knew himself too well to not have realized this. Instead, Anakin took his words and acted on them because he knew the more he learned the better, more powerful Jedi he would be. And power was the thing, Anakin thought. The more powerful a Jedi he became the more things Anakin could change.

That was why he respected his master so much: he was truly a powerful Jedi and one of the greatest lightsaber duelists to ever live. He had seen Master Mace take on several other well-known lightsaber duelists all at the same time and beat them, although Master Mace had refused to teach him Vaapad until he was older.

"Stretch out your Force senses, Anakin," Mace said, taking the boy by the shoulder and leaping up with him to a nearby building. There they hid in a small alcove for a moment, with Mace on the lookout. "Tell me what you can sense here. I want to know if it matches what I can sense."

Complying, Anakin closed his eyes for a few more minutes before opening them in looking at his master. "…A sense of danger? A sense of danger towards the two of us in particular?"

"Indeed. Hence my earlier question. I did not sense that before coming to this planet, but it is here now. I cannot tell any more about it then you can, which is worrisome," Mace replied.

"So we'll just have to be ready for anything, master," Anakin replied confidently.

Mace smiled at that and, for once, made no move to burst his young padawan's bubble. The Force was not giving them anything specific to act upon, and there was precious little they could do at the moment other than be ready for anything.

"Come," he said instead, turning away and leaping towards the next rooftop over. "Let us move on and start our investigation."

The two of them, using their Force powers, stayed hidden for the most part, watching the comings and goings of the sector senator's mansion, seeing what kind of people he surrounded himself with when he was not on Coruscant. Before this he had been lauded as one of very few Sector senators who remained in touch with their roots, heading home for at least a week out of every month. But there was a sinister ulterior motive behind that seeming largess.

They quickly learned that the man was indeed crooked. He had numerous contacts they traced to the local underworld, especially the local drug dealers. On top of that he had four personal slaves, girls taken from the planet's population and who had been given to him as presents by the underworld gangs.

While Mace was dismayed that the man's perfidy had gone so long unnoticed, the sight of the four slaves through his range finder made Anakin's blood boil. Indeed, it did so to such a degree that his master looked at him sharply, his narrowed eyes and harshly denunciatory face ordering Anakin to control his emotions better far more easily than any words could.

Anakin did so, though he did not do so in a manner that most Jedi would have. Instead of simply bottling them up and forgetting about them, Anakin stuffed the images he was seeing through his rangefinder into the back of his mind with the anger that accompanied them, vowing to himself that he would make every person who owned a slave in the universe pay.

Power, I need more power to change things like that! My mother's work with her charity group is just not enough! The universe must be made to know the evils of slavery, and if they do not understand, then they will be made to pay! Still, he kept those thoughts off his face, not willing to deal with another lecture about how a Jedi should not let his desires drive him or blind him to reality.

After a few days spent on planet they had more than enough evidence of the senator's wrongdoings to remove him. "With the chancellor's push to hold the senators accountable and his anti-corruption campaign, we could easily see him behind bars right now, master, so why haven't we gone back to Coruscant to do that? Or are we going to wait and ambush him here?" he added, his face lighting up eagerly. "That way we could also free his slaves at the same time."

"Remember what I asked you when we first arrived, padawan," Mace said, sighing sadly. Again his padawan allowed the now to cloud his ability to discern the future, allowed his anger to get the better of him. That anger against all things slavery was still with the boy, despite Mace's best efforts to wean him out of it. "We must look into the Shadows at all times, although the idea of an ambush is indeed a good one. A man such as the senator has too many resources to give him even a chance to run."

Anakin was about to say something there, but then at Mace's raised eyebrow paused, trying to remember that conversation. "We need to investigate the whistleblower as well?" he asked.

"Is that a question or a statement?"

"A statement, master," Anakin replied firmly.

"Indeed. And this will allow us to go with your plan of ambushing the senator upon his return," Mace said, throwing the boy a bone.

That didn't even take as long as investigating the governor had. It turned out that the whistleblower was almost as corrupt as the governor in question, though he didn't keep slaves. Instead, his vice was being a part-time owner in a local blood sport. After watching a match, Anakin could only shake his head. It was like pod racing and city combat rolled into one horrible, and very bloody, game.

"Well, we have all the evidence we need. Now we must find a local individual in the political and on the police side of things who is both not corrupted and who is capable of doing the job," Mace said with sigh.

Anakin actually let loose a groan at that, and Mace chuckled, patting him on the shoulder. "Now, now. Missions like these are the bread-and-butter of the Order. We can't have combat missions all the time. Even Guardians don't."

"Doesn't make me any happier, master," Anakin replied cheekily.

"A Jedi does not need to feel happy when doing his duty," Mace said, his lips quirked into a faint smile. "Although it is to be hoped that this should not take long. We can rely solely on the Force for this, rather than gathering physical evidence as well as that from the Force itself, after all."

They had turned their attention to this task for barely a few hours before Anakin's wish for excitement came true.

The two of them were moving through a crowd in the planet's capital city when there was a flicker of movement behind them. Anakin turned as someone grabbed his shoulder, twisting him around. Shocked at someone actually noticing him through his Force Cloak enough to do so, Anakin halted his immediate reaction, and the next thing he knew his master had grabbed him by the back of the cloak and pulled him away from the person who had initially grabbed him.

A blaster bolt went off, the blast passing through the space where Anakin had just been standing, impacting Master Mace's lightsaber as he interposed it between them. The snap-hiss of the blade activating merged with the crackle of the bolt being deflected. Then suddenly everything was all cries and shouts as over a dozen blaster bolts opened up from above the Jedi and the crowd around them.

Mace hastily threw up a Force Shield over the surrounding people. One of the techniques which had now spread throughout the Order, it once more proved its worth, saving the lives of the local citizens caught in the crossfire. "Everyone, run!" Mace shouted, hoping to keep that from changing.

The locals needed no second urging, racing away from the fighting. The attackers had come from above and behind the two Jedi, so this allowed the crowd an egress. Soon, even over the continued light of the attacker's blasters hitting Mace's Force Shield, they could see their attackers.

There seemed to be four main groups of attackers, three of whom had rushed forward to close with the Jedi first. Seven were on the roofs above them, firing down with heavy rifles. Two groups of six came in from either side. Now, with the crowd of the way, they rushed forward, their blasters firing, while another group came up behind the Jedi, too late to save their more eager fellows, but also the closest portion of the ambush.

And all of them were Yinchorri warrior caste: green and pale gray scales, a heavy, reptilian head with a forward thrusting snout, and deep-set eyes protected by heavy ridge bones. Mace had not seen any Yinchorri since the mission against them, and now, here they were, attacking him and his padawan out of the blue. What are they doing here? he thought, even as he slipped into a defensive lightsaber style, pushing Anakin slightly away from them.

Seeing his apprentice still looking a little shocky thanks to his near brush with death, Mace barked, "Anakin, snap out of it!" even as he dealt with the last of the trio of Yinchorri who had already closed with the Jedi.

Anakin did so quickly, activating his own lightsaber, a bright blue blade to Master Mace's purple. "What are they, master?"

"Yinchorri. A shade out of the past, dealing with one of my missions from before we met. I have no idea why they are here, but do not hold back. They have killed Jedi before," Mace warned.

Nodding, Anakin brought his lightsaber up and began to deflect bolts back or to the side, taking some of the pressure off Mace. He also threw up his own Force Shield, a solid bubble of Force blocking the leftmost attackers.

No longer needing to cover them both, Mace, while continuing to use his lightsaber with one hand to deflect blaster bolts, reached out with the Force with one of his own signature moves. A Force Crush caught the Yinchorri on the right before moving along in a line, crushing each Yinchorri's chests in turn like someone had just smashed them all with a log to the chest.

That Jedi power was a little too close to outright aggression for most Jedi to use, but Mace could do so without fear of falling to the Dark Side. Anakin blanched at seeing it used on flesh and blood opponents for the first time, but he quickly followed up, twisting around his master and leaping in the direction of the attackers coming at them from behind. His lightsaber flashed, protecting his body in midair from the blaster bolts, of which he deflected many back into the attackers, until he landed in among a few more of the Yinchorri, hacking this way and that.

At the same time Mace leaped upwards, attacking the ten Yinchorri on the rooftops, canceling his Force Shield to do it. In the process of trying to get down from the roofs in order to get around the shield, the ten Yinchorri were caught flatfooted, and the first two died before the others could even raise their weapons.

Below on the street, Anakin's lightsaber failed him against a cortosis vambrace, but Anakin had actually seen that coming through the Force, such was his ability with Force Precognition. He ducked underneath a bayonet stab from the owner of the vambrace and reached up to grab its blaster. Using that touch, the ten year old powered a Force Push that hurled the reptilian sentient away to land face first into a nearby building with bone crushing momentum.

He then leaped away quickly, his lightsaber coming back to life just in time for him to cut another Yinchorri in half. His lightsaber then deflected two near pointblank blaster bolts back into the shooters, leaving him facing four Yinchorri. They didn't retreat, however, racing to grapple, their bayonets raised or forgotten. At the same time, behind him Anakin felt his Force Shield crumble, letting in the leftmost wing of the attackers.

Before Anakin could be flanked and overcome, Mace finished with the Yinchorri on the roofs. He landed in among the new attackers, lightsaber flashing. Mace finished all of them off within seconds thanks to how tightly they were packed as they raced forward, but left one of them alive even as he cut through its legs. Behind him, Anakin finished off the last of the attackers there.

Staring dispassionately down at the Yinchorri, Mace pointed his lightsaber's end directly between the Yinchorri's eyes, the hum loud in the sudden silence as the battle ended. As Anakin moved to join him, Mace asked, "Why were you after us? Speak, and I will give you an honorable death. If not, I will simply leave you crippled."

Mace knew that that threat would get through to the warrior, where an actual normal threat would never have. To continue to live crippled as he was would be the ultimate dishonor. And though he would take no pleasure in it, they needed to know if there was something more behind this attack other than bad luck.

"We will have revenge, Jedi! Revenge on you and the others who beat us! Revenge for our species' subjugation!" the Yinchorri gurgled.

"That is all?" Mace asked, surprised and disconcerted. He had thought, perhaps, that this was a sign that the local senator had noticed them somehow. After all, Yinchorri were not the only species which could see through Jedi mind tricks like the Cloak. To hear that this was for revenge was troubling. "Revenge for your species' being forced to give up space, revenge for the Jedi beating you when you tried to expand?"

"Revenge! We will prove the Yinchorri are still strong!" the Yinchorri shouted, then actually lunged forward using only its stomach muscles to raise its upper body, impaling its own forehead on the end of Mace's lightsaber before he could pull it back. Staring in shock, Mace didn't try to move until Anakin reached out with the Force, hurling them both away as his Force senses finally screamed out a warning.

The Yinchorri's body exploded, hidden thermal detonators going off with its death. Only a hasty Force Shield from Mace saved both of them from being badly wounded. "Thank you, Anakin," Mace said. He had been so astonished at the Yinchorri's suicide that he hadn't felt the sense of danger in the Force.

"You're welcome, Master Windu," Anakin said, nodding at the Force Shield. "I think we're even. I didn't feel any aggression from that first one until he touched me either," he confided. "I suppose I still have much to learn."

"Of course you do, but do not blame your lack of foreknowledge on a mistake on your part, not for this, at any rate," Mace said. At Anakin's quizzical look, Mace explained. "The Yinchorri are blind to the Force, Anakin. They are able to ignore mental techniques, and this spreads to our ability to sense them through the Force. That makes them very dangerous."

"Are we liable to run into more of them, master? The way that one was speaking…" Anakin trailed off, staring at the bodies of the Yinchorri all around them. "And well, the way they kept coming. Their fanaticism is disturbing."

"I am rather afraid we will, Anakin. The Yinchorri were nothing if not fanatic about their race's superior strength to others," Mace said. "Although where they came from is beyond me.

"Still, our presence here is now known to the locals, Anakin," Mace went on with a gesture towards a few of the civilians who were slinking back into sight. They could also hear the sound of sirens in the distance. "That means that the time for hiding has passed. We will need to move quickly against the planetary governor. I will also contact the Temple and have the sector senator taken under arrest. We will move first to his palace, free his slaves, and search for more evidence against him immediately."

Even as Anakin grinned, Mace's mind was still on the sudden ambush by the Yinchorri. How did the Yinchorri know we were on Sullust in the first place? On the other hand, we were not covering ourselves during the trip on the liner, and I suppose my features are rather memorable. Someone could have spotted us and sold that information to further criminal types. Still, that is something to look into later.

Finishing their task did not take over long, and later that day the two of them were once more in the local Hypercom array, speaking to the Chancellor and Master Ranicisis both. The Chancellor, who had been brought in when the Jedi arrested the sector senator, listened intently, then congratulated both Anakin and Mace for their speedy and evenhanded handling of a delicate issue. "You have both my thanks and the thanks of the Senate. With another corrupt official removed, we are that much closer to cleaning up the Senate permanently."

Even as they nodded at that and the young padawan grinned, the two Jedi Masters hid wan smiles. While Palpatine had continued his work to revamp and try to streamline the moribund Senate bureaucracy, his efforts to drain the swamp that was the Senate itself had failed to yield results just yet. Still, this particular case of corruption was clear cut enough that even the Senate wouldn't be able to complain.

"Although this attack on you concerns me. We have had several instances of Yinchorri like that being found in pirate gangs or other underworld groups, but this is the first that has come to my attention in which a Jedi was attacked this brazenly," Palpatine went on, his face grave. "I've been in touch with the quarantine forces, and it is the opinion of them and my military advisers that these groups are survivors of bands the Yinchorri had sent out to cause trouble while they were preparing their main expansion forces. They have thrown off their species' normal indoctrination to obey the Leader caste, which you forced to surrender during that campaign, and struck out on their own."

"The Order agrees with that analysis, though this is not the first attack on a Jedi," Ranicisis said sadly. "Three days ago another such attack occurred. Master Choi and his padawan are both dead. They were on a simple show the flag type diplomatic mission and had no opportunity to even defend themselves."

"I am sorry to hear that. Any death is a sad one, a Jedi's even more so given their service to the Republic," the Chancellor said, shaking his head. "I could wish Chancellor Valorum had moved against them more forcefully and more quickly so that they did not have time to spread these little spoiling groups. But if they are after the Masters who were involved in that mission, you may be targeted further, Master Windu."

"Now that the threat is known to me, both my padawan and I will be on the lookout for more such," Mace said simply. "I will not retreat to the Temple with my proverbial tail between my legs. If the Yinchorri wish to find me, I will simply be ready for them. The main question will be how they are able to prepare such ambushes in the first place."

"I'm sorry I can't be of more help, but my own sources in the underworld are very limited. A downside to my anticorruption campaign, I suppose you could say," Palpatine finished drolly.

"We can only take what comes as the Force wills it," Mace said philosophically.

Next to him Anakin grinned. "Hey, if this means our missions will be more interesting, I'm all for it."

Mace rolled his eyes, but the Chancellor chuckled at that, exchanging a nod with the young padawan. "I said I'd watch your career as a Jedi with interest, young man. Just see to it that it is not a short tale, hmm?"