Pillars of brilliant light rose into the sky, three to the north, one to the south. The air all down the valley pulsed with an immense pressure wave. Starfighters overhead were blown high into the stratosphere and churned as if with a giant paddle. Only by staying within a few meters of the valley floor did their ship maintain her course.
The terminator between day and night was sweeping toward them, brightening one wall of the valley with what, in other circumstances, would have been a lovely yellow dawn glow. Clouds rushed to fill in the wake of the pressure wave, and they, also, caught the dawn glow, which painted them with an uncanny purple and gold aura.
Yet to the north, the dawn was interrupted by what looked at first like steep mountain peaks shooting up from the planet's crust. They were too regular and smooth to be mountains, however.
They were vanes of some sort, and they looked oddly familiar to both Anakin and Obi-Wan.
'The ship says if we don't want to go with them, we'd better get out of here,' Anakin said. 'We'd better find some way to go into a solar orbit. And fast.'
Obi-Wan, using all the new sources of vision, examined the vanes from many angles. They're hyper drive field guides-and they're over three hundred kilometers high! And the shafts of light- those are the plasma cones of engines. Huge engines.
He looked across the console at his Padawan.
Another pressure wave shot down the valley and shook the ship. Boras all along the rim were being uprooted and tossed to the bottom of the valley.
'This is insane,' Obi-Wan said. 'We don't know where they'll go.'
'Or if they can survive,' Anakin said.
'Let's take our chances up there.'
The starfighters were in disarray, their sensors blinded by the sudden shafts of light rising beyond the valley. Cracks formed in the valley floor, and magma rose sluggishly. The entire crust was strained by the force of the huge new engines.
'We'll have to maneuver through a lot of mines,' Anakin said.
'Do it.' Obi-Wan frowned in concentration, trying to see where all the pathways were going, where their tiny path might converge with much greater events in the immediate future. But nothing was clear.
Anakin brought the Sekotan ship up above the valley walls just as another funnel of searing brilliance scorched a hole through the atmosphere a hundred kilometers north, incinerating all in its path, friend and foe alike. The light seemed to blossom at its base, then darkened to smoky orange and went out, and a wall of debris pushed outward. If that was an engine, it had just failed, but it had cleared a path for them into space.
Anakin bared his teeth, expecting to die at any moment-
'Never give up!' Obi-Wan reminded him.
— And drove them straight up through boiling atmosphere, through fragments of ruined engine and flaming wreaths of fuel.
The stars gleamed clear in a black spot at the end of the tunnel of ionized air. The black spot closed rapidly.
The little ship cleared the atmosphere and climbed with unbelievable speed into space, reaching orbital velocity in seconds. Starfighters gathered on all sides to pursue.
The YT-1150 of Charza Kwinn pushed up from behind. Charza had followed them down the valley floor but could not keep up with them now, so he fell back and drew away the droid ships, spiraling higher and higher, finally achieving orbit. The last they saw of him, he was engaging a defense escort ship.
Then, from the Rim Merchant Einem, just visible over the limb of Zonama Sekot, came a concentrated bolt of turbolaser fire, expertly aimed. It caught their little ship broadside and blinded them for a moment, crisping one lobe.
Anakin felt the ship's high-pitched, bone-grating signal of pain.
Obi-Wan looked behind, using the senses still supplied by Sekot, and saw engines flare to life across the planet's northern hemisphere, their intense plasma cones pushing Zonama Sekot slowly, majestically, out of its own orbit. All the renegade ships surrounding the planet had to scramble to keep clear of both the flares and the planet's new vector through space.
Zonama Sekot had never been more beautiful. She shimmered against the backdrop of the pinwheel and the far, rippling sheets of stars. Her clouds and vast tampasi faded beneath a sunrise that could not compete with Sekot's own, self- generated energies.
'She's leaving!' Obi-Wan cried out. He reached out to grab hold of something, an instinctive reaction, completely futile.
All the stars around the planet's circumference seemed to suck inward and then bounce back. In the pit of his stomach, Obi-Wan could feel a huge emptiness in space and time, unlike anything he had ever experienced.
He lost his extra senses, his connection with Sekot. Only a brief farewell lingered, the last touch of a far- reaching tendril, ancient and young at once.
Anakin was still lost in their ship's pain. Behind them, Tarkin's confused fleet scattered as if caught in a great wind. All the ships' orbits had changed unexpectedly, and the navigational systems could not compensate. Mines collided with mines and Starfighters, delivery ships smashed into defense escorts, and at least two escorts rammed the Rim Merchant Einem.
Not his concern. Anakin knew they had only a short time to go where they needed to go. Take us, he told their ship.
He entered a state where he understood the ways of the higher spaces. The vastness of the universe no
