'The Jentari!' Vidge shouted. All the shapers waved their blades in unison. 'The makers of Sekot!'
'Hang on!' Obi-Wan shouted. It was their turn now. The limbs dropped, lifted them along with the frames, and passed them from one Jentari to the next, along with stacks of forged and painted seed-disks. Other limbs slapped the disks around the frames, almost jolting the passengers loose. Instantly, the seeds began to join and grow, to mold and shape.
The two frames were jammed together. Engines were slipped into their fairings. Seed-disks slipped purple-edged tissues on the joints, and sparks flew as the points of lasers darted all around. Their journey began.
They were passed limb to limb down the cleft, the frames groaning, the fluid tissues of the seeds and the treatment juices flopping and slopping around them, deeper into the realm of the Jentari. Their eyes could hardly follow the process.
Every second, a thousand moves and assemblies were carried out on the joined frames. Around Obi-Wan and Anakin, the ship began to take shape as if by magic. The giants flung them even more quickly from limb to limb, hand to hand as it were, making sounds like hundreds of voices singing deep geological chants.
'The Jentari are composites! Cybernetic organisms!' Obi- Wan shouted. 'The Magisters must have bred them, made them, and put them here to work for them!'
Anakin was lost to any rational explanation. His seed- disks, the former seed-partners, were asking him what he wanted. They offered him up Shappa's catalog of designs, plans for past ships, dreams of what future ships might be like in a century of more development and learning. Shappa's design was not final; Sekot would have its input, as well.
Anakin Skywalker was in a very special heaven. After a while, in his own time and in his own way, Obi-Wan joined him, and together they listened to the seed-disks, to the Jentari.
In the blur of speed and questions, they lost all sense of time.
The frame and the new ship-owners sped down the cleft, surrounded by sparks and vapors and flying tissues and trimmed bits of metal and plastic.
Within less than ten minutes, they were over twenty kilometers from the warehouse and the shapers, and the finishing was upon them.
The passage through the Jentari slowed.
Their numbness passed. Perception slowly returned.
'Wow!' Anakin said when he could breathe again. 'That was unbelievably rugged!'
'Wow,' Obi-Wan agreed.
Anakin was filled with an unadulterated, primal delight. He could think of nothing but the Sekotan ship. Obi-Wan could see it in the boy's eyes as they roamed over the smooth, iridescent lines of the ship's interior. Green and blue and red, gleaming like a coat of ruby and emerald mineral enamel, yet not just a dead brilliance, but a pulsing quality of light that signified youth and life.
'Ferocious!' Anakin cried out in approval. 'It's here! I can't believe it's really here.'
'It doesn't look quite finished,' Obi-Wan observed.
Anakin's face wrinkled into a brief frown. 'Some little stuff, that's all,' he said. 'Then it will fly. And did you see that hyper-drive core? I can't wait to find out what they did to it-how they modified it!'
Chapter 41
Raith Sienar's first foreboding came with a mechanical shiver of his E-5. The battle droid sentinel loomed large in one corner of the commander's cabin, its senses tuned to all the cabin's ports of entry.
He entered the viewing area in a tight-cinched sleep gown, wondering what the subdued whirring and clinking was all about.
'Stand down,' he commanded the droid when he saw it was having difficulty. The droid dropped to a position of rest, relieving some tension from its vibrating limbs. Still, the droid remained a sad, shivering hulk.
He returned to his personal effects in their cases in the sleeping quarters and brought out a small holo- analyzer. The device could find nothing wrong with the droid's external mechanisms. Still, whenever the E-5 tried to return to an ac tive posture, it clanked like an old iron wind chime in a stiff breeze.
'Self-analysis,' he commanded. 'What's wrong?'
The droid returned a series of beeps and whines, too high- pitched and too fast for Sienar's instrument to understand. 'Again, reanalyze.'
The droid responded and the analyzer once again failed. It was as if the droid were speaking another set of languages entirely-a near impossibility. No one else had tampered with it-and he had programmed this droid himself. Sienar was very knowledgeable about such things and adept at small engineering tasks.
He also had a sixth sense about ships, and the sudden small series of vibrations he felt through the soles of his slippers felt distinctive and wrong. Before he could demand a report from the bridge, Captain Kett's image appeared in the middle of the viewing room, full-sized and tinted alarm red.
'Commander, five battle droids have unexpectedly departed from the weapons bay. Did you order a drill. . without my knowledge?'
'I've ordered no such thing.'
Kett seemed to listen to someone. He turned to Sienar- whom he could still not see-Sienar had his room projectors covered for the evening-and said, his voice shaking with anger, 'Sir, passive detection reports-we have a visual sighting, actually- that five starfighter droids have exited through the Admiral Korvin's starboard loading hatch and are flying directly toward Zonama Sekot. I have already locked down all other droids and sent my
