The Art of Surrender

It was supposed to be a routine mission.

Vashka was one of the many neutral planets joining the Republic that year, one more small blue dot on the Senate’s map, scrambling to get under the Republic’s wing before the Mandalorian Empire swallowed it whole. Two Jedi to see the treaty signed. A handshake, a dinner, a speech, home within the week. Nobody was supposed to get hurt. Nobody was supposed to get taken.

That morning, the last unresolved question in the galaxy, as far as Obi-Wan Kenobi was concerned, was the import duty on spring barley.

“It’s two percent,” Anakin said, from the window. “We’ve been in this room for four days over two percent.”

“Two point four.” Obi-Wan turned a page of the tariff schedule. He was enjoying himself enormously, and was aware this was a character flaw. “And it’s not the percentage, it’s the precedent. If the Agrarian Bloc concedes barley, the millers will want rye, and then we’ll be here until your knighting.”

“I’d be knighted faster if I jumped out of this window.”

“You’d be dead faster. It’s the sixth floor.” He made a note in the margin. “Possibly knighted posthumously. The Council does love a gesture.”

Through the bond came a flash of exasperation so bright it was nearly a color. Obi-Wan didn’t look up. Master and Padawan always felt each other a little, the way you feel someone breathing beside you in the dark: stronger when they stood close, a hum when they were across a city, a faint warmth across a system. Obi-Wan kept his own side of it folded and shuttered, as he had been taught. Anakin’s side had never once in nine years been quiet. This morning it was mostly boredom, with something warmer and more secretive running underneath it whenever his comlink chimed. Obi-Wan had decided, for the sake of his own peace, not to ask.

Outside, Vel Annat was dressing itself for a party. Blue Republic bunting hung from the bridges over the canal; someone had painted the old customs house the color of a Coruscant sky. In the square below the Assembly Hall, a schoolteacher in a green coat was drilling twenty children through the song they’d sing and dance at the signing, and losing gracefully to the youngest, who wanted to do the actions twice as large as anyone else.

The Senate Security Committee had asked the Order for mediators, which had struck Obi-Wan as faintly odd at the time. Security committees did not usually take an interest in barley. But Vashka sat two jumps from the Mandalorian border, and everyone took an interest in the border these days.

He rubbed his left wrist without thinking. Under the worn leather bracer, the skin was quiet. It always was. Five words in a script almost nobody in the Temple could read, and he had stopped expecting them to mean anything a long time ago.

“Master.” Anakin had gone still at the window. “Do you feel that?”

Obi-Wan put down his stylus.

Above the bunting, above the painted roofs, the faint shimmer of the planetary shield flickered once, like an eye closing. Then it went out.

***

Shields did not simply go out. Obi-Wan had seen shields fail under bombardment, and fail from sabotage, and once fail because a technician on Ord Mantell had leaned on the wrong switch. They flickered, they guttered, they screamed. This one closed as neatly as a door someone had been given the key to.

The sirens started a full minute later, which told him everything about how little Vashka had expected this.

By the time he and Anakin reached the square, the sky to the north was full of dropships, and the first of them was already over the outer districts. Gray-and-red silhouettes. Mandalorian. The First Speaker of the Agrarian Bloc was standing on the Assembly steps in his signing robes with his mouth open, and Obi-Wan felt a flash of absurd sympathy for him. They had all come here to argue about barley.

“They’ll go for the Republic families first,” said the schoolteacher in the green coat. She had her twenty children in two lines behind her, holding hands, and her voice was perfectly steady. “Everyone who voted yes. Everyone whose name was on the petitions. They’ll have lists.” The steadiness slipped, just for a word. “And whoever’s on them goes to the Halls.”

Obi-Wan had read the Senate reports. The Integration Halls at Keldabe, where the Empire took the people it conquered and gave them back as Mandalorians. Nobody in the Republic knew exactly what happened inside, but everyone had heard a story.

“Then we get them out before anyone can read the lists.” Obi-Wan was already reaching for his comlink. “How many shuttles at the civic port?”

The answer was four. It was not enough, and then it was three, and then they were cramming families into the holds of cargo haulers and grain barges and anything with a working hyperdrive, while the Mandalorian drop zones crept inward street by street. Anakin was everywhere: lifting crates out of hatchways, hot-wiring a barge whose owner had fled with the key, flying the first shuttle out and coming back for more. He moved like he’d been built for exactly this, and through the bond Obi-Wan felt him burning with it: fear, fury and joy at being useful, all bright as a struck match.

Within an hour there was one shuttle left, and one road to it.

The civic port sat at the far end of the Avenue of the Nine Bridges, a long durasteel skyway of nine linked spans, slung high over the canal on repulsor pylons. Every other route was already in Mandalorian hands. Obi-Wan stood at the head of the avenue with the last of the families streaming past him: grandparents, toddlers on hips, a man carrying a birdcage, the schoolteacher and her twenty children still holding hands. He could hear jetpacks somewhere behind the customs house.

“You’re flying,” he said to Anakin.

"We’re flying.” Anakin was counting heads. “There’s room. I saved you a seat behind the copilot, it’s the one with the broken —”

“Someone has to hold the avenue until you lift. If they reach the bridges before you’re off the ground, they’ll have the port, and the shuttle with it.”

Anakin went very still. Through the bond came something sharp and cold.

“Then I’ll hold it. You fly.”

“You are the better pilot,” Obi-Wan said, which was true, “and I am the better defensive duellist,” which was also true, “and we do not have time to have this argument.” He put a hand on Anakin’s shoulder. “Listen to me. A Jedi doesn’t stay for someone. A Jedi stays for what is right. Right now, what is right is two hundred people on that shuttle.”

For a moment Anakin’s face did something complicated. Obi-Wan would remember that later, and the private, guilty flare under it, as if the words had landed somewhere Obi-Wan hadn’t aimed them.

“That’s a terrible rule,” Anakin said.

“Then you may write a strongly worded complaint to the Council. From Coruscant. Go.”

Anakin went. At the shuttle ramp, the schoolteacher was counting her children aboard one by one. When the last of them was up the ramp, she stepped back down onto the tarmac and shook her head at Anakin’s outstretched hand. Obi-Wan was too far away to hear what she said. He saw Anakin argue, and lose, and slam the hatch.

Obi-Wan turned to face the avenue, and lit his saber.