Star Wars - Kenobi

someone in authority, oblivious to the fact that no such power existed here.
    It didn’t make sense.
    “Fifteen clicks to Kenobi’s hut,” the goggle-wearing Mullen said, guiding the vehicle.
    Orrin nodded. Holstering the blaster, he looked around in awe. His USV-5 rode at the apex of a flying wing of hovercraft, rocketing to the southwest. Every vehicle the Settlers’ Call Fund operated was here, plus Ulbreck’s teams. Orrin doubted there had ever been so many vehicles traversing the desert at once.
    He chuckled in spite of himself. Yep, Orrin, some pull you’ve got indeed. Maybe farming wasn’t his calling. Tatooine didn’t offer many chances for a career politician, but with that new Empire on the rise, who knew?
    Whatever. Ben wouldn’t know what hit him. Orrin lifted his macrobinoculars to scan the nothingness ahead.
    From the backseat, Veeka pointed ahead, to the left. “There!”
    In the middle of the desert, Ben stood brazenly astride a speeder bike. One of Orrin’s speeder bikes, Orrin saw as he focused in: the one Jabe had ridden to the Ulbrecks’.
    Mullen pointed. “Everyone’s spotted him. Dad, I think we should turn back now.”
    Orrin looked up, startled. “What did you say?”
    “I said if we turn and double back, the left flank will follow us,” his son said. “We’ll catch him between and herd him like a bantha.”
    “Oh, okay,” Orrin said, fishing inside the jacket for a handkerchief. He wiped the sweat from his brow. The landspeeder lurched and wheeled, and a dozen-plus repulsorcraft followed.
    Orrin trained the viewfinder on Ben again, still almost a kilometer away. The man simply looked back, serenely, as if aware Orrin’s eyes were on him. Finally, Ben activated the bike and turned.
    “That’s right,” Orrin said, grinning. “ You turn back now.”
    Kenobi was zigzagging across the open sand. West, back to his place, was barred to him by one line of landspeeders; north, and the open range, by the other. Orrin had thought for a moment that the man might make for the great gap in the Jundland, the pathway the Jawas took to reach the Western Dune Sea. But he seemed to be heading instead for the branch of the Jundland highlands farther east.
    Orrin figured it out immediately. “Cute,” he said. “He’s trying to get us into Hanter’s Gorge.” Annileen had said she and Ben had witnessed the Tusken massacre there. Orrin didn’t know whether Ben had a soft spot for Sand People or not, but all the same, he wasn’t going to be led into a trap. “Cut him off,” he said over the comm system. “Send him into the rift!”
    The Roiya Rift had always looked to Orrin like a wall that a child had built out of blocks—and then knocked half of it down. Here, the Jundland Wastes bowed inward, a semicircle of flat desert terrain at the mouth of a half ring of jagged, towering teeth. The wide passageways between the teeth twisted south into the wastes, climbing and subdividing into smaller corridors; the Tuskens loved to hide here. The oasis attackers had been making for the rift when they’d wound up in Hanter’s Gorge, kilometers to the east, by mistake. But with the rift, there was no prospect of those on high ground sniping at the posse. The pillars of stone climbed too high, and the paths between rose too gradually, twisting and bending as they went.
    The landspeeder lines held, and Ben veered into the gap. Without pause, his speeder bike rocketed for one of the narrower, rubble-strewn ramps. Within seconds, he was gone from sight. Orrin knew then that it was all over for Kenobi. Vigilante vehicles streamed into the semicircle, taking up station in front of all the apertures, not just the one Ben had taken. There was no escape.
    Mullen brought the Gault landspeeder to a stop. “Are we going up after him?”
    “Not sure we’ll have to,” Orrin said. “He’s a tourist. He’ll find out there’s Tuskens up there and will turn right back around.”
    “What if he’s pals with the Tuskies, like you said?” Mullen asked.
    Orrin rolled his eyes. “That was for the crowd, Mullen!” He smirked. “But so what if he is? They’ll see we’ve brought an army and kill him all the same.”
    Orrin stepped out of the vehicle and straightened his jacket. He nodded for his kids to approach. “Now, remember,” he said quietly. “If Kenobi comes out, don’t give him a chance to say a word. You cut him down fast and the others will follow.”
    Veeka looked at her father.