Watching Heir To The Empire

Chapter 11

"Are you alright, Anakin?" Obi-Wan asked cautiously. Him having trouble keeping his emotions was nothing new, in all the years he spent with the boy, Obi-Wan knew exactly what would push Anakin's buttons. And now he was almost certain that he wasn't the only one with that knowledge.

"Yes," he said and sat back in to his seat. He turned away and put his eyes back on the screen.

"What happened before-"

"Nothing happened," he sharply interrupted.

"Anakin-"

"It won't happen again. Let's watch the holofilm."

Obi-Wan sighed and nodded. He would talk to him sooner or later. But what mattered right now is how Luke and Leia would handle the situation.

"Hang on, Artoo," Luke called as the first guests
of atmospheric turbulence began to bounce the X wing around. «We're coming in. Scanners all working okay?"

There was an affirmative twitter from the rear, the translation appearing across his computer scope.

"Good," Luke said, and turned his attention back to the cloud-shrouded planet rushing up to meet them.

It was odd, Obi-Wan thought, how it had only been on that first trip in to Dagobah that the sensors had so totally failed on approach.
Or perhaps not so odd. Perhaps that had been Yoda, deliberately suppressing his instruments so as to be able to guide him unsuspectingly to the proper landing site.
And now Yoda was gone. He hoped Luke had put that thought out of his mind. Mourning the loss of a friend and teacher was both fitting and honorable, but to divell unnecessarily on that loss was to give the past too much power over the present.

The X-wing dropped into the lower atmosphere, and within seconds was completely enveloped by thick white douds. Luke watched the instruments, taking the approach slow and easy. The last time he'd come here, before the Battle of Endor, he'd made the landing without incident; but just the same, he had no intention of pushing his luck. The landing sensors had Yoda's old homestead pinpointed now.

"Artoo?" he called. "Find me a good level spot to set down, will you?"

In response, a red rectangle appeared on the forward scope, a ways east of the house but within walking distance of it. "Thanks," Luke told the droid, and keyed in the landing cycle. A moment later, with one last mad flurry of displaced tree branches, they were down.

Slipping off his helmet, Luke popped the canopy. The rich odors of the Dagobah swamp flooded in on him, a strange combination of sweet and decay that sent a hundred memories flashing through his mind. That slow twitch of Yoda's ears--the strange but tasty stew he'd often made the way that wispy hair of his had tickled Luke's ears whenever he rode on Luke's back during training. The training itself: the long hours, the physical and mental fatigue, the gradually increasing sense of images- and confidence in the Force, the cave and its dark side.

The cave.

Abruptly, Luke stood up in the cockpit, hand going reflexively to his lightsaber as he peered through the haze.

"Surely he hadn't brought his X-wing down by the cave," Mace said.

"He did," Obi-Wan said.

There, no more than fifty meters away, was the tree that grew from just above that evil place, its huge blackened shape jutting upward through the surrounding trees. Beneath and between its tangled roots, just visible hrough the mists and shorter vegetation, he could see the dark entrance to the cave itself.

«Wonderful," he muttered. "Just wonderful."
From behind him came an interrogative set of beeps.
"Never mind, Artoo," he called over his shoulder, dropping his helmet back onto the seat. "It's all right. Why don't you stay here, and I'll-"