“So have you,” Anakin said sheepishly, then hastily added, “Grown more beautiful, I mean.”
Obi-Wan glanced at his awkward apprentice, whose gaze was hopelessly locked onto Padmé’s eyes. Anakin continued, “Well, f-for a Senator, I mean.”
Padmé laughed. “Ani, you’ll always be that little boy I knew on Tatooine.”
As the group proceeded to discuss the recent attempt on Padmé’s life, Anakin was hardly cooperative. Although he and Obi-Wan had been instructed merely to protect Padmé, he openly promised to find the assassins who had tried to kill her. When Anakin questioned the logic of the Jedi Council’s directives to watch over Padmé, Obi-Wan was compelled to reprimand his apprentice before the group, which prompted Anakin to glower.
He’s not thinking like a Jedi, Obi-Wan thought ruefully. He’s letting his emotions interfere with our assignment.
Obi-Wan wondered if the Jedi Council had made a mistake when they had assigned him and Anakin to protect Padmé, but then it hadn’t been entirely the Council’s decision. It had been Supreme Chancellor Palpatine’s idea.
In recent months, numerous former-member worlds of the Republic had allied with the Separatist movement. The Separatists were led by a former Jedi, the charismatic Count Dooku. Dooku expounded that the Galactic Senate was corrupt beyond repair, and promised a new unified government throughout the galaxy. Because many Senators from the remaining Republic worlds believed they would soon be vulnerable to the Separatists, they endorsed the creation of an army to defend the Republic. The reason that Padmé Amidala had traveled to Coruscant was to cast her vote against the Military Creation Act because she knew that the formation of an army would almost certainly lead to civil war.
R2-D2 had remained with Padmé since the Battle of Naboo, and the astromech droid had accompanied her to Coruscant. As events turned out, R2-D2’s presence in Padmé’s suite was most fortunate, for while Obi-Wan and Anakin argued about their orders and the best way to protect Padmé, it was the R2-D2 who alerted them that the suite had been infiltrated.
A mysterious assassin had released a pair of small, deadly arthropods into Padmé’s bedroom. Using his lightsaber, Anakin swiftly killed the creatures, and then both he and Obi-Wan raced out into the night to pursue the assassin.
The Jedi became separated and Anakin dropped his lightsaber during the dizzying, perilous chase that carried them across and through multiple levels of Galactic City. Obi-Wan was able to recover his apprentice’s weapon, and caught up with Anakin outside a gambling club called the Outlander. Pointing into the Outlander’s wide, brightly illuminated doorway, Anakin said, “She went into the club, Master.”
“Patience,” Obi-Wan said. “Use the Force. Think.”
“Sorry, Master.”
“He went in there to hide, not to run.”
“Yes, Master.”
Obi-Wan held up Anakin’s lightsaber and said, “Next time, try not to lose it.”
“Yes, Master.”
“This weapon is your life.”
Anakin took the weapon and said, “I try, Master.”
As Anakin followed him into the Outlander, Obi-Wan muttered, “Why do I get the feeling you’re going to be the death of me? ”
“Don’t say that, Master. You’re the closest thing I have to a father.”
Anakin’s words did not make Obi-Wan sympathetic. Without breaking his stride into the crowded club, he said, “Then why don’t you listen to me? ”
“I am trying.”
They stopped to survey the crowd. The patrons were talking and drinking, gambling and playing hologames. Obi-Wan asked, “Can you see him? ”
“I think he is a she, and I think she is a changeling.”
“In that case, be extra careful.” Then Obi-Wan tilted his head to Anakin and added, “Go and find her.”
“Where are you going, Master?”
“For a drink,” Obi-Wan replied. Leaving Anakin, he stepped over to the bar and signaled the bartender. A moment later, the bartender placed a small glass filled with luminescent blue liquid in front of Obi-Wan, who said, “Thank you.”
A young humanoid, a Balosar with flexible antene-palps that extended from his stylishly filthy hair, edged up beside Obi-Wan and rapidly stammered, “You wanna buy some death sticks?”
To any respectable person, the Balosar would have been an annoyance. To Obi-Wan, he was only a slight distraction, but hardly a welcome one. Obi-Wan did not want to endanger the Balosar by allowing him to remain by his side, nor encourage him to peddle his wares elsewhere. Obi-Wan kept his eyes forward, but made a slight gesture with his right hand as he replied, “You don’t want to sell me death sticks.”
The Balosar was unaware that Obi-Wan was manipulating his mind. He looked slightly confused, then thoughtful as he answered, “I don’t want to sell you death sticks.”
“You want to go home and rethink your life.”
“I want to go home and rethink my life.” The Balosar stepped away from the bar, leaving his unfinished drink behind. As he walked away, Obi-Wan’s eyes flicked over the patrons in front of him, and left his back exposed. He did this deliberately. Let her think I can’t see her coming.
Despite the noise, the crowd, the lights, the strange mix of smells in the air, and every other distraction, Obi-Wan sensed the danger that approached him from behind. He drew his lightsaber and activated its blade as he spun, neatly cleaving through the assassin’s right arm before she even had the chance to fire her blaster. Her forearm, still holding the blaster, sailed to the floor as she cried out and fell back against the game table.
Anakin moved fast to Obi-Wan’s side and leveled his gaze at the astonished patrons. “Easy,” he said. “Jedi business. Go back to your drinks.”
The assassin wore a visored helmet and a dark violet form-fitting bodysuit with a flexible armorweave jerkin. She appeared to be a human female. Anakin opened a back door that led to an alley and Obi-Wan hauled her through the doorway and outside. Anakin glanced up and down the alley as Obi-Wan eased the woman’s body onto the hard ground. Obi-Wan asked, “Do you know who it was you were trying to kill?”
The woman groaned, then said, “It was a Senator from Naboo.”
“And who hired you?”
“It was just a job. ”
Anakin leaned down and said in a gentle, soothing tone, “Who hired you? Tell us. ” But when the woman did not immediately reply, Anakin’s face contorted with anger and he snarled, “Tell us now!”
She said, “It was a bounty hunter called…”
Before she could finish, a small, dart-like projectile buried itself suddenly into her neck. Obi-Wan and Anakin turned their heads to gaze up in the direction of the projectile’s trajectory. They saw an armored figure, a man wearing a jetpack, launching up and away from a distant rooftop before he vanished into the night sky of the city.
The bounty hunter?
Obi-Wan returned his gaze to the woman he held, and saw that Anakin was right: she wasn’t human. She was a changeling, a shape-shifting Clawdite. Her face reverted to its relaxed state, revealing somewhat lumpy, heavily scarred features. She gasped, “Wee shahnit… sleemo.” Her wide, heavy-lidded eyes fell closed and she died in Obi-Wan’s arms.
Obi-Wan pulled the projectile from her neck and held it out so Anakin could examine it, too. It was a nasty piece of work, an injector-needle tip with stabilizing fins for long-range shots and embedding prongs to anchor into the target. “Toxic dart,” Obi-Wan said. He looked back toward the distant rooftop that had served as a launch pad for the Clawdite’s killer, and he thought, He could have shot us, too - if he’d wanted.
Obi-Wan turned to Anakin and said, “Her last words. Did you understand them?”
“She spoke in Huttese,” Anakin said. “She said, ‘Bounty hunter slimeball.’”
Obi-Wan had no idea of the armored bounty hunter’s identity, but he did not question the fact that the man was very, very dangerous.
Obi-Wan was not surprised when th
e Jedi Council instructed him to track down the bounty hunter and identify his employers. However, their decision to have Anakin escort Senator Amidala back to her homeworld, for her own safety, did cause him some concern. It would be Anakin’s first assignment without his Master, and despite all of his abilities, he was also arrogant, and Obi-Wan didn’t think he was ready. But the Council was confident in their decision, and Obi-Wan personally escorted Anakin, Padmé, and R2-D2 to the Coruscant spaceport and waiting freighter that would take them to Naboo.
Obi-Wan began his investigation by trying to identify the toxic dart that he had removed from the Clawdite’s neck. After the analysis droids in the Jedi Archives failed to provide any useful information about the dart, he realized he would have to consult a different sort of expert.
Obi-Wan had kept in touch with Dexter Jettster over the years, and he was fortunate in that he did not have to go far to find the well-traveled Besalisk. Dexter was currently the proprietor and head cook at Dex’s Diner in CoCo Town, a commercial district in the upper levels of Galactic City on Coruscant. Dexter greeted his old friend with a big hug. After they settled down in a diner booth that looked out on a busy street, Obi-Wan placed the dart on the table in front of Dexter.
“Well, whattaya know!” Dexter exclaimed as he picked up the dart. “I ain’t seen one of these since I was prospectin’ on Subterrel, beyond the Outer Rim.”
“Can you tell me where it came from?”
“This baby belongs to them cloners. What you got here is a Kamino saberdart.”
Obi-Wan had always been amazed by Dexter’s powers of observation as well as his keen memory. He said, “I wonder why it didn’t show up in the analysis archives.”
Brushing his thick fingers along the dart’s stabilizing fins, Dexter said, “It’s these funny little cuts on the side that give it away. Those analysis droids only focus on symbols. Huh ! I should think that you Jedi would have more respect for the difference between knowledge and… ” Dexter chuckled before he finished, ” …wisdom.”
Obi-Wan grinned and replied, “Well, if droids could think, there’d be none of us here, would there?” Taking the dart back from Dexter, he continued, “Kamino. I’m not familiar with it. Is it in the Republic?”
“No, no. It’s beyond the Outer Rim. I’d say about, uh, twelve parsecs, outside the Rishi Maze. Should be easy to find. Even for those droids in your archives.”
But Dexter was wrong about Kamino being easy to find. After Obi-Wan left Dex’s Diner, he returned to the Jedi Archives and quickly ascertained that there were no records for Kamino at all. However, when he examined holographic star charts to find the location that Dexter had described, he did detect an apparently invisible source of gravity where a solar system should have been.
But solar systems don’t just disappear. What happened to it?
Obi-Wan decided to consult Yoda. He found Yoda teaching a class of young Jedi initiates. They were learning how to use the Force, testing their developing skills with lightsabers against hovering remotes. After Obi-Wan explained his dilemma about the missing solar system and planet to Yoda, Yoda encouraged him to display the holographic star chart on a map reader for the entire class to see.
Obi-Wan placed a small, silver ball on the map reader, and a three-dimensional view of hundreds of stars filled the central area of the room. He pointed out the approximate location of the missing solar system. Yoda said, “Hmm. Gravity’s silhouette remains, but the star and all the planets… disappeared they have.” Facing his students, he asked, “How can this be? Hmm? ”
It was one of Yoda’s pupils, a little boy, who answered. “Master? Because someone erased it from the archive memory.”
Obi-Wan smiled. The boy had arrived at the most logical solution, but it was one that Obi-Wan hadn’t even entertained. Only a Jedi could have erased the memory. Who would have done such a thing? And why?
Obi-Wan used a Delta-7 starfighter to travel to the “missing” solar system, where he found the water-world of Kamino. He landed his starfighter on a rain-spattered platform close to the administrative center of Tipoca City, a cluster of enormous domed structures that were elevated by massive stilts above the constantly stormy sea.
The Kaminoans were long-necked amphibians. Obi-Wan was surprised when he was told that Kamino’s prime minister, Lama Su, had been expecting a Jedi to arrive. He was led to Lama Su, who revealed that ten years earlier, the Jedi Master Sifo-Dyas had commissioned the Kaminoans to produce, train, and outfit a clone army for the Republic. According to Lama Su, the Kaminoans had been waiting for the Jedi to take delivery of Sifo-Dyas’s order ever since.
Obi-Wan found this information baffling. He recalled that Sifo-Dyas had been killed almost a decade ago, and could not imagine why Sifo-Dyas or any other Jedi would have made such an arrangement with the Kaminoans. Even if Sifo-Dyas had anticipated the threat of the Separatist movement, he certainly didn’t have the resources to finance a clone army! But Obi-Wan also sensed it was best to play along for the time being, and pretended that he had indeed arrived on Kamino to inspect the clones.
As Lama Su guided Obi-Wan on a tour of the vast, multi-level cloning facility, Obi-Wan saw thousands of clones. All of them appeared to be identical dark-haired human males, at various stages of growth up through age twenty. Lama Su explained that growth acceleration allowed the clones to mature faster while genetic modifications made them less independent than the original host, the man who had served as the clones’ template.
“And who was the original host?” Obi-Wan asked.
“A bounty hunter called Jango Fett,” Lama Su replied.
Believing that he was closing in on the man who’d fired the saberdart on Coruscant, Obi-Wan asked casually, “And where is this bounty hunter now?”
“Oh, we keep him here.”
Obi-Wan readily accepted the offer to meet Jango Fett. Although he knew it was highly probable that Fett was the same bounty hunter behind the attempted assassinations on Coruscant, he did not believe he would require any reinforcements.
A few standard days after his first encounter with Jango Fett, and many light-years away from Kamino, Obi-Wan found himself suspended in the air, trapped within a force field chamber of a droid factory on the planet Geonosis. He thought, Now would be a good time for some reinforcements to arrive!
On Kamino, Obi-Wan had met Jango Fett as well as the man’s “son,” an unmodified ten-year-old clone named Boba. Obi-Wan had quickly determined that Fett was indeed the armored bounty hunter he’d seen on Coruscant, but had been unable to stop the Fetts from escaping Kamino. Fortunately, he had secured a tracer beacon onto Fett’s starship, a Kuat Systems Firespray-class interceptor, which enabled him to follow the ship to Geonosis.
A red, rocky planet ringed by asteroids, Geonosis was inhabited by the semi-insectoid Geonosians. Obi-Wan had stealthily infiltrated a towering Geonosian hive to discover the Separatist leader Count Dooku engaged in a secret meeting with officials from various worlds. He learned that the Neimoidian Trade Federation was behind the assassination attempts on Padmé Amidala, and that the Commerce Guilds and the Corporate Alliance had pledged their armies to Dooku. He had also learned that the Trade Federation would soon take delivery of a massive droid army from a Geonosian factory. He had even managed to send a transmission with most of this information to Anakin, who - for reasons unknown to Obi-Wan - had left Naboo and gone to Tatooine.
But then Obi-Wan had been attacked by droids and was captured.
Now, suspended in a force field with energy binders wrapped around his wrists and ankles, Obi-Wan wondered if Anakin had managed to relay his transmission to the Jedi Council. As he hung in the air of the hive chamber, all he could do was wait.
Little did he know that within a few short hours, the Jedi would arrive with clone troops from Kamino, and the Clone Wars would begin.
INTERLUDE
Ben Kenobi had told Luke Skywalker that he had served with Luke’s father, Anakin, during the Clone Wars, so
when Luke finally found an entry about the Clone Wars in Ben’s journal, he became so excited he almost forgot about the furnace he had set up inside Ben’s hut. He was using the furnace to create the gem for his new lightsaber, and really couldn’t hurry the process, so he had been reading Ben’s journal while waiting for the furnace to reach its full temperature.
Luke’s knowledge of the Clone Wars was relatively limited. Most of the “facts” came from old datatapes, but only those that had been authorized by the Empire. Still, he knew that the Jedi Knights had led clone armies on behalf of the Galactic Republic against the Confederacy of Independent Systems. In the end, the Confederacy lost, the Jedi were accused of attempting to take over the Republic, and the Republic’s leader, Palpatine, was proclaimed Emperor. According to Ben, it was Darth Vader who helped the Empire hunt down and destroy the Jedi.
After checking the furnace, Luke returned his attention to the journal and the entry he had found, and started reading it from the beginning. Ben had made a notation that indicated the entry was almost twenty years old.
Officially, the Clone Wars began at the Battle of Geonosis, for it was there that the Jedi Knights first utilized the clone troops that had been commissioned to fight on behalf of the Republic against the Separatists’ droid militia. Although the Separatists were defeated at Geonosis, they quickly regrouped as the Confederacy of Independent Systems. The galaxy plunged into a civil war that would last over three terrible years.
My fellow Jedi and I were conscripted as generals for the Grand Army of the Republic. Like the worlds of the Republic, the Jedi were also soon divided, as some refused to fight and abandoned the Jedi Order.
Unofficially, the Clone Wars began at least ten years before the Battle of Geonosis, when - I eventually realized - the Sith Lords began taking measures to ensure that the Republic would one day have reason to require an army. The Sith Lords engineered every aspect of the Clone Wars, controlling both the Republic and the Confederacy and pitting them against each other, all in an effort to annihilate the Republic and the Jedi Order and claim galactic conquest.
Star Wars - Life and Legend of Obi-Wan Kenobi Page 5
