watched empty escape pods blast free of the Hand's bridge and streak away.
All of them.
Well: all but one.
No trick of the Force would spring Kenobi and Skywalker out of this one. It was a shame he didn't have a spy probe handy to leave on the bridge; he would have enjoyed watching the Republic's greatest heroes burn.
The ion streaks of the escape pods spiraled through the battle that still flashed and flared silently in the void, pursued by starfighters and armed retrieval ships. Grievous nodded to himself; that should occupy them long enough for his command pod to make the run to his escape ship.
As he entered his customized pod, he reflected that he was, for the first time in his career, violating orders: though he was under strict orders to leave the Chancellor unharmed, Palpatine was about to die alongside his precious Jedi.
Then Grievous shrugged, and sighed. What more could he have done? There was a war on, after all.
He was sure Lord Sidious would forgive him.
On the bridge, a blast shield had closed over the destroyed transparisteel window, and every last surviving combat-model droid had been cut to pieces even before the atmosphere had had a chance to stabilize.
But there was a more serious problem.
The bucking of the ship had become continuous. White-hot sparks outside streamed backward past the view wall windows. Those sparks, according to the three different kinds of alarms that were all screaming through the bridge at once, were what was left of the ablative shielding on the nose of the disabled cruiser.
Anakin stared grimly down at a console readout. "All the escape pods are gone. Not one left on the whole ship." He looked cape at Obi-Wan. "We're trapped."
Obi-Wan appeared more interested than actually concerned. "Well. Here's a chance to display your legendary piloting skills, my young friend. You can fly this cruiser, can't you?"
"Flying's no problem. The trick is landing, which, ah..." Anakin gave a slightly shaky laugh. "Which, you know, this cruiser is not exactly designed to do. Even when it's in one piece."
Obi-Wan looked unimpressed. "And so?"
Anakin unsnapped the crash webbing that held the pilot's corpse and pulled the body from its chair. "And so you'd better strap in," he said, settling into the chair, his fingers sliding over the unfamiliar controls.
The cruiser bounced even harder, and its attitude began to skew as a new klaxon joined the blare of the other alarms. "That wasn't me!" Anakin jerked his hands away from the board. "I haven't even done anything yet!"
"It certainly wasn't." Palpatine's voice was unnaturally calm. "It seems someone is shooting at us."
"Wonderful," Anakin muttered. "Could this day get any better?"
"Perhaps we can talk with them." Obi-Wan moved over to the comm station and began working the screen. "Let them know we've captured the ship."
"All right, take the comm," Anakin said. He pointed at the copilot's station. "Artoo: second chair. Chancellor?"
"Yes?"
"Strap in. Now. We're going in hot." Anakin grimaced at the scraps of burning hull flashing past the view wall. "In more ways than one."
The vast space battle that had ripped and battered Coruscant space all this long, long day, finally began to flicker out. The shimmering canopy of ion trails and turbolaser bursts was fading into streaks of ships achieving jump as the Separatist strike force fled in full retreat. The light of Coruscant's distant star splintered through iridescent clouds of gas crystals that were the remains of starfighters, and of pilots. Damaged cruisers limped toward spaceyards, passing shattered hulks that hung dead in the infinite day that is interplanetary space. Prize crews took command of surrendered ships, imprisoning the living among their crews and affixing restraining bolts to the droids.
The dayside surface of the capital planet was shrouded in smoke from a million fires touched off by meteorite impacts of ship fragments; far too many had fallen to be tracked and destroyed by the planet's surface-defense umbrella. The nightside's sheet of artificial lights faded behind the red-white glow from craters of burning steel; each impact left a caldera of unimaginable death. In the skies of Coruscant now, the important vessels were no longer warships, but were instead the fire-suppression and rescue craft that crisscrossed the planet.
Now one last fragmentary ship screamed into the atmosphere, coming in too fast, too steep, pieces breaking off to spread apart and stream their own contrails of superheated vapor; banks of turbolasers on the surface-defense towers isolated their signature, and starfighters whipped onto interception courses to thin out whatever fragments the SD towers might miss, and far above, beyond the atmosphere, on the bridge of RSS Integrity, Lieutenant Commander Lorth Needa spoke urgently to a knee-high blue ghost scanned into existence by the phased-array lasers in a holocomm: an alien in Jedi robes, with bulging eyes set in a wrinkled face and long, pointed, oddly flexible ears.
"You have to stand down the surface-defense system, sir! It's General Kenobi!" Needa insisted. "His code verifies, Skywalker is with him—and they have Chancellor Palpatine!"
"Heard and understood this is," the Jedi responded calmly.
"Tell me what they require."
Needa glanced down at the boil of hull plating that was burning off the falling cruiser, and even as he looked, the ship broke in half at the hangar deck; the rear half tumbled, exploding in sections, but whoever was flying the front half must have been one of the greatest pilots Needa had ever even heard of: the front half wobbled and slewed but somehow righted itself using nothing but a bank of thrusters and its atmospheric drag fins.
"First, a flight of fireships," Needa said, more calmly now. "If they don't get the burnoff under control, there won't be enough hull left to make the surface. And a hardened docking platform, the strongest available; they won't be able to set it down. This won't be a landing, it will be a controlled crash. Repeat: a controlled crash."
"Heard and understood this is," the hologrammic Jedi repeated. "Crossload their transponder signature." When this was done, the Jedi nodded grave approval. "Thank you, Lieutenant Commander. Valiant service for the Republic you have done today—and the gratitude of the Jedi Order you have earned. Yoda out."
On the bridge of Integrity, Lorth Needa now could only stand, and watch, hands clasped behind his back. Military discipline kept him expressionless, but pale bands began at his knuckles and spread whiteness nearly to his wrists.
Every bone in his body ached with helplessness. Because he knew: that fragment of a ship was a death trap. No one could land such a hulk, not even Skywalker. Each second that passed before its final breakup and burn was a miracle in itself, a testament to the gifts of a pilot who was justly legendary— but when each second is a miracle, how many of them can be strung together in a row?
Lorth Needa was not religious, nor was he a philosopher or metaphysician; he knew of the Force only by reputation, but nonetheless now he found himself asking the Force, in his heart that when the fiery end came for the men in that scrap of a ship it might as least come quickly.
His eyes stung. The irony of it burned the back of his throat The Home Fleet had fought brilliantly, and the Jedi had done their superhuman part; against all odds, the Republic had won the day.
Yet this battle had been fought to save Supreme Chancellor Palpatine.
They had won the battle, but now, as Needa stood watching helplessly, he couldn't help feeling that they were about to lose the war.
This is Anakin Skywalker's masterpiece:
Many people say he is the best star pilot in the galaxy, but that's merely talk, born of the constant HoloNet references to his unmatched string of kills in starfighter combat. Blowing up vulture droids and tri-fighters is simply a matter of superior reflexes and trust in the Force; he has spent so many hours in the cockpit that he wears a Jedi starfighter like clothes. It's his own body, with thrusters for legs and cannons for fists.
What he is doing right now transcends mere flying the way Jedi comba
t transcends a schoolyard scuffle.
He sits in a blood-spattered, blaster-chopped chair behind a console he's never seen before, a console with controls designed for alien fingers. The ship he's in is not only bucking like a maddened dewback through brutal coils of clear-air turbulence, it's on fire and breaking up like a comet ripping apart as it crashes into a gas giant. He has only seconds to learn how to maneuver an alien craft that not only has no aft control cells, but has no aft at all.
This is, put simply, impossible. It can't be done.
He's going to do it anyway.
Because he is Anakin Skywalker, and he doesn't believe in impossible.
He extends his hands and for one long, long moment he merely strokes controls, feeling their shape under his fingers, listening to the shivers his soft touch brings to each remaining control surface of the disintegrating ship, allowing their resonances to join inside his head until they resolve into harmony like a Ferroan joy-harp virtuoso checking the tuning of his instrument.
And at the same time, he draws power from the Force. He gathers perception, and luck, and sucks into himself the instinctive, preconscious what-will-happen-in-the-next-ten-seconds intuition that has always been the core of his talent. And then he begins.
On the downbeat, atmospheric drag fins deploy; as he tweaks their angles and cycles them in and out to slow the ship's descent without burning them off altogether, their contrabass roar takes on a punctuated rhythm like a heart that skips an occasional beat. The forward attitude thrusters, damaged in the ship-to-ship battle, now fire in random directions, but he can feel where they're raking him and he strokes them in sequence, making their song the theme of his impromptu concerto.
And the true inspiration, the sparkling grace note of genius that brings his masterpiece to life, is the soprano counterpoint: a syncopated sequence of exterior hatches in the outer hull sliding open and closed and open again, subtly altering the aerodynamics of the ship to give it just exactly the amount of sideslip or lift or yaw to bring the huge half cruiser into the approach cone of a pinpoint target an eighth of the planet away.
It is the Force that makes this possible, and more than the Force. Anakin has no interest in serene acceptance of what the Force will bring. Not here. Not now. Not with the lives of Palpatine and Obi-Wan at stake. It's just the opposite: he seizes upon the Force with a stark refusal to fail.
He will land this ship.
He will save his friends.
Between his will and the will of the Force, there is no contest
=Part Two=
SEDUCTION
The dark is generous, and it is patient.
It is the dark that seeds cruelty into justice, that drips contempt into compassion, that poisons love with grains of doubt.
The dark can be patient, because the slightest drop of rain will cause those seeds to sprout.
The rain will come, and the seeds will sprout, for the dark is the soil in which they grow, and it is the clouds above them, and it waits behind the star that gives them light.
The dark's patience is infinite.
Eventually, even stars burn out.
=8=
FAULT LINES
Mace Windu hung on to the corrugated hatch grip beside the gunship's open troop bay with one hand, squinting into the wind that whipped his overcloak behind him. His other hand shaded his eyes against the glare from one of the orbital mirrors that concentrated the capital planet's daylight. The mirror was slowly turning aside now, allowing a band of twilight to approach the gunship's destination.
That destination, a kilometer-thick landing platform in the planet's vast industrial zone, was marked with a steeply slanting tower of smoke and vapor that stretched from the planet's surface to the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere, a tower that only now was beginning to spread and coil from its tiny source point to a horizon-spanning smear across the stratospheric winds.
The gunship roared over the bottomless canyons of durasteel and permacrete that formed the landscape of Coruscant, arrowing straight for the industrial zone without regard for the rigid traffic laws that governed flight on the galactic planet; until martial law was officially lifted by the Senate, the darkening skies would be traveled only by Republic military craft, Jedi transports, and emergency vehicles.
The gunship qualified as all three.
Mace could see the ship now—what was left of it—resting on the scorched platform far ahead: a piece of a ship, a fragment less than a third of what once had been the Trade Federation flagship, still burning despite the gouts of fire-suppression foam raining down on it from five different ships and the emergency-support clone troops who surrounded it on the platform.
Mace shook his head. Skywalker again. The chosen one.
Who else could have brought in this hulk? Who else could have even come close?
The gunship swung into a hot landing, repulsors howling; Mace hopped out before it could settle, and gave the pilot an open-palm gesture to signal him to wait. The pilot, faceless within his helmet, responded with a closed fist.
Though, of course, the pilot wasn't faceless at all. Under his armored helmet, that clone pilot had a face that Mace Windu remembered all too well. That face would always remind him that he had once held Dooku within his grasp, and had let him slip away.
Across the platform, an escape pod hatch cycled open. Emergency crews scrambled with an escape slide, and a moment later the Supreme Chancellor, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Anakin Skywalker were all on the deck beside the burning ship, closely followed by a somewhat battered R2 unit that lifted itself down on customized maneuvering rockets.
Mace strode swiftly out to meet them.
Palpatine's robes were scorched and tattered at the hem, and he seemed weak; he leaned a bit on Skywalker's shoulder as they moved away from the ship. On Skywalker's other side, Master Kenobi seemed a touch the worse for wear himself: caked with dust and leaking a trickle of blood from a scalp wound.
Skywalker, by contrast, looked every bit the HoloNet hero he was supposed to be. He seemed to tower over his companions, as though he had somehow gotten even taller in the months since Mace had seen him last. His hair was tousled, his color was high, and his walk still had the grounded grace of a natural fighter, but there was something new in his physicality: in the way he moved his head, perhaps, or the way the weight of Palpatine's arm on his shoulder seemed somehow to belong there... or something less definable. Some new ease, new confidence. An aura of inner power.
Presence.
Skywalker was not the same young man the Council had sent off to the Outer Rim five standard months ago.
"Chancellor," Mace said as he met them. "Are you well? Do you need medical attention?" He gestured over his shoulder at the waiting gunship. "I have a fully equipped field surgery—"
"No, no, no need," Palpatine said, rather faintly. "Thank you, Master Windu, but I am well. Quite well, thanks to these two."
Mace nodded. "Master Kenobi? Anakin?"
"Never better," Skywalker replied, looking as if he meant it, and Kenobi only shrugged, with a slight wince as he touched his scalp wound.
"Only a bump on the head. That field surgery must be needed elsewhere."
"It is." Mace looked grim. "We don't have even a preliminary estimate of civilian casualties."
He waved off the gunship, and it roared away toward the countless fires that painted red the approach of night.
"A shuttle is on its way. Chancellor, we'll have you on the Senate floor within the hour. The HoloNet has already been notified that you will want to make a statement."
"I will. I will, indeed." Palpatine touched Mace on the arm.
"You have always been of great value to me, Master Windu Thank you."
"The Jedi are honored to serve the Senate, sir." There might have been the slightest emphasis on the word Senate. Mace remained expressionless as he subtly moved his arm away from the Chancellor's hand. He looked at Obi-Wan. "Is there anything else to report, Master Kenobi? What of
General Grievous?"
"Count Dooku was there," Skywalker interjected. He had a look on his face that Mace couldn't decipher, proud yet wary—even unhappy. "He's dead now."
"Dead?" He looked from Anakin to Obi-Wan and back again. "Is this true? You killed Count Dooku?"
"My young friend is too modest; he killed Count Dooku." Smiling, Kenobi touched the lump on his head. "I was... taking a nap."
"But..." Mace blinked. Dooku was to the Separatists what Palpatine was to the Republic: the center of gravity binding together a spiral galaxy of special interests. With Dooku gone, the Confederacy of Independent Systems would no longer really be a confederacy at all. They'd fly to pieces within weeks.
Within days.
Mace said again, "But..."
And, in the end, he couldn't think of a but.
This was all so astonishing that he very nearly—almost, but not quite—cracked a smile.
"That is," he said, "the best news I've heard since..." He shook his head. "Since I can't remember. Anakin—how did you do it?"
Inexplicably, young Skywalker looked distinctly uncomfortable; that newly confident presence of his collapsed as suddenly as an overloaded deflector, and instead of meeting Mace's eyes, his gaze flicked to Palpatine. Somehow Mace didn't think this was modesty. He looked to the Chancellor as well, his elation sinking, becoming puzzlement tinged with suspicion.
"It was... entirely extraordinary," Palpatine said blandly, oblivious to Mace's narrowing stare. "I know next to nothing of swordplay, of course; to my amateur's eye, it seemed that Count Dooku may have been... a trace overconfident. Especially after having disposed of Master Kenobi so neatly."
Obi-Wan flushed, just a bit—and Anakin flushed considerably more deeply.
"Perhaps young Anakin was simply more... highly motivated," Palpatine said, turning a fond smile upon him. "After all, Dooku was fighting only to slay an enemy; Anakin was fighting to save—if I may presume the honor—a friend."
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