She moved more quietly than the smoky breeze, but he felt her approach.
She took a place beside him at the railing and laid her soft human hand along the back of his hard mechanical one. And she simply stood with him, staring silently out across the city that had become her second home. Waiting patiently for him to tell her what was wrong. Trusting that he would.
He could feel her patience, and her trust, and he was so grateful for both that tears welled once more. He had to blink out at the burning night, and blink again, to keep those fresh tears from spilling over onto his cheeks. He put his flesh hand on top of hers and held it gently until he could let himself speak. "It was a dream," he said finally. She accepted this with a slow, serious nod.
"Bad?"
"It was—like the ones I used to have." He couldn't look at her. "About my mother."
Again, a nod, but even slower, and more serious. "And?"
"And—" He looked down at her small, slim fingers, and he slipped his between them, clasping their two hands into a knot of prayer. "It was about you."
Now she turned aside, leaning once more upon the rail, staring out into the night, and in the slowly pulsing rose-glow of the distant fires she was more beautiful than he had ever seen her. "All right," she said softly. "It was about me."
Then she simply waited, still trusting.
When Anakin could finally make himself tell her, his voice was raw and hoarse as though he'd been shouting all day. "It was... about you dying," he said. "I couldn't stand it. I can't stand it."
He couldn't look at her. He looked at the city, at the deck, at the stars, and he found no place he could bear to see.
All he could do was close his eyes. "You're going to die in childbirth."
"Oh," she said. That was all.
She had only a few months left to live. They had only a few months left to love each other. She would never see their child. And all she said was, "Oh."
After a moment, the touch of her hand to his cheek brought his eyes open again, and he found her gazing up at him calmly. "And the baby?"
He shook his head. "I don't know."
She nodded and pulled away, drifting toward one of the veranda chairs. She lowered herself into it and stared down at her hands, clasped together in her lap. He couldn't take it. He couldn't watch her be calm and accepting about her own death. He came to her side and knelt.
"It won't happen, Padme. I won't let it. I could have saved my mother—a day earlier, an hour—I..." He bit down on the rising pain inside him, and spoke through clenched teeth. "This dream will not become real."
She nodded. "I didn't think it would." He blinked.
"You didn't?"
"This is Coruscant, Annie, not Tatooine. Women don't die in childbirth on Coruscant—not even the twilighters in the downlevels. And I have a top-flight medical droid, who assures me I am in perfect health. Your dream must have been... some kind of metaphor, or something."
"I—my dreams are literal, Padme. I wouldn't know a metaphor if it bit me. And I couldn't see the place you were in you might not even be on Coruscant..."
She looked away. "I had been thinking—about going somewhere... somewhere else. Having the baby in secret, to protect you. So you can stay in the Order."
"I don't want to stay in the Order!" He took her face between his palms so that she had to look into his eyes, so that she had to see how much he meant every word he said. "Don't protect me. I don't need it. We have to start thinking, right now, bout how we can protect you. Because all I want is for us to be together."
"And we will be," she said. "But there must be more to your dream than death in childbirth. That doesn't make any sense."
"I know. But I can't begin to guess what it might be. It's too—I can't even think about it, Padme. I'll go crazy. What are we going to do?"
She kissed the palm of his hand of flesh. "We're going to do what you told me, when I asked you the same question this afternoon. We're going to be happy together."
"But we—we can't just... wait. I can't. I have to do something."
"Of course you do." She smiled fondly. "That's who you are. That's what being a hero is. What about Obi-Wan?" He frowned.
"What about him?"
"You told me once that he is as wise as Yoda and as powerful as Mace Windu. Couldn't he help us?"
"No." Anakin's chest clenched like a fist squeezing his heart. "I can't—I'd have to tell him..."
"He's your best friend, Annie. He must suspect already."
"It's one thing to have him suspect. It's something else to shove it in his face. He's still on the Council. He'd have to report me. And..."
"And what? Is there something you haven't told me?" He turned away.
"I'm not sure he's on my side."
"Your side? Anakin, what are you saying?"
"He's on the Jedi Council, Padme. I know my name has come up for Mastery—I'm more powerful than any Jedi Master alive. But someone is blocking me. Obi-Wan could tell me who, and why... but he doesn't. I'm not sure he even stands up for me with them."
"I can't believe that."
"It has nothing to do with believing," he murmured, softly bitter. "It's the truth."
"There must be some reason, then. Anakin, he's your best friend. He loves you."
"Maybe he does. But I don't think he trusts me." His eyes went as bleak as the empty night. "And I'm not sure we can trust him."
"Anakin!" She clutched at his arm. "What would make you say that?"
"None of them trust me, Padme. None of them. You know what I feel, when they look at me?"
"Anakin—"
He turned to her, and everything in him ached. He wanted to cry and he wanted to rage and he wanted to make his rage a weapon that would cut himself free forever. "Fear," he said. "I feel their fear. And for nothing?"
He could show them something, though. He could show them a reason for their fear. He could show them what he'd discovered within himself in the General's Quarters on Invisible Hand.
Something of it must have risen on his face, because he saw a flicker of doubt shadow her eyes, just for a second, just a flash, but still it burned into him like a lightsaber and he shuddered, and his shudder turned into a shiver that became shaking, and he gathered her to his chest and buried his face in her hair, and the strong sweet warmth of her cooled him, just enough.
"Padme," he murmured, "oh, Padme, I'm so sorry. Forget I said anything. None of that matters now. I'll be gone from the Order soon—because I will not let you go away to have our baby in some alien place. I will not let you face my dream alone. I will be there for you, Padme. Always. No matter what."
"I know it, Annie. I know." She pulled gently away and looked up at him. Tears sparkled like red gems in the firelight. Red as the synthetic bloodshine of Dooku's lightsaber.
He closed his eyes.
She said, "Come upstairs, Anakin. The night's getting cold.
Come up to our bed."
"All right. All right." He found that he could breathe again, and his shaking had stilled. "Just—"
He put his arm around her shoulders so that he didn't have to meet her eyes. "Just don't say anything to Obi-Wan, all right?"
=10=
MASTERS
Obi-Wan sat beside Mace Windu while they watched Yoda scan the report. Here in Yoda's simple living space within the Jedi Temple, every softly curving pod chair and knurled organiform table hummed with gentle, comforting power: the same warm strength that Obi-Wan remembered enfolding him even as an infant. These chambers had been Yoda's home for more than eight hundred years. Everything within them echoed with the harmonic resonance of Yoda's calm wisdom, tuned through centuries of his touch. To sit within Yoda's chambers was to inhale serenity; to Obi-Wan, this was a great gift in these troubled times.
But when Yoda looked at them through the translucent shimmer of the holoprojected report on the contents of the latest amendment to the Security Act, his eyes were anything but calm: they had gone narrow and co
ld, and his ears had flattened back along his skull.
"This report—from where does it come?"
"The Jedi still have friends in the Senate," Mace Windu replied in his grim monotone, "for now."
"When presented this amendment is, passed it will be?"
Mace nodded. "My source expects passage by acclamation. Overwhelming passage. Perhaps as early as this afternoon."
"The Chancellor's goal in this—unclear to me it is," Yoda said slowly. "Though nominally in command of the Council, the Senate may place him, the Jedi he cannot control. Moral, our authority has always been; much more than merely legal. Simply follow orders, Jedi do not!"
"I don't think he intends to control the Jedi," Mace said. "By placing the Jedi Council under the control of the Office of the Supreme Chancellor, this amendment will give him the constitutional authority to disband the Order itself."
"Surely you cannot believe this is his intention."
"His intention?" Mace said darkly. "Perhaps not. But his intentions are irrelevant; all that matters now is the intent of the Sith Lord who has our government in his grip. And the Jedi Order may be all that stands between him and galactic domination. What do you think he will do?"
"Authority to disband the Jedi, the Senate would never grant."
"The Senate will vote to grant exactly that. This afternoon."
"The implications of this, they must not comprehend!"
"It no longer matters what they comprehend," Mace said. "They know where the power is."
"But even disbanded, even without legal authority, still Jedi we would be. Jedi Knights served the Force long before there was a Galactic Republic, and serve it we will when this Republic is but dust."
"Master Yoda, that day may be coming sooner than any of us think. That day may be today." Mace shot a frustrated look at Obi-Wan, who picked up his cue smoothly.
"We don't know what the Sith Lord's plans may be," Obi-Wan said, "but we can be certain that Palpatine is not to be trusted. Not anymore. This draft resolution is not the product of some overzealous Senator; we may be sure Palpatine wrote it himself and passed it along to someone he controls—to make it look like the Senate is once more 'forcing him to reluctantly accept extra powers in the name of security.' We are afraid that they will continue to do so until one day he's 'forced to reluctantly accept' dictatorship for life!"
"I am convinced this is the next step in a plot aimed directly at the heart of the Jedi," Mace said. "This is a move toward our destruction. The dark side of the Force surrounds the Chancellor."
Obi-Wan added, "As it has surrounded and cloaked the Separatists since even before the war began. If the Chancellor is being influenced through the dark side, this whole war may have been, from the beginning, a plot by the Sith to destroy the Jedi Order."
"Speculation!" Yoda thumped the floor with his gimer stick, making his hoverchair bob gently. "On theories such as these we cannot rely. Proof' we need. Proof!"
"Proof may be a luxury we cannot afford." A dangerous light had entered Mace Windu's eyes. "We must be ready to act!"
"Act?" Obi-Wan asked mildly.
"He cannot be allowed to move against the Order. He cannot be allowed to prolong the war needlessly. Too many Jedi have died already. He is dismantling the Republic itself! I have seen life outside the Republic; so have you, Obi-Wan. Slavery. Torture. Endless war."
Mace's face darkened with the same distant, haunted shadow Obi-Wan had seen him wear the day before. "I have seen it in Nar Shaddaa, and I saw it on Haruun Kal. I saw what it did to Depa, and to Sora Bulq. Whatever its flaws, the Republic is our sole hope for justice, and for peace. It is our only defense against the dark. Palpatine may be about to do what the Separatists cannot: bring down the Republic. If he tries, he must be removed from office."
"Removed?" Obi-Wan said. "You mean, arrested?"
Yoda shook his head. "To a dark place, this line of thought will lead us. Great care, we must take."
"The Republic is civilization. It's the only one we have." Mace looked deeply into Yoda's eyes, and into Obi-Wan's, and Obi-Wan could feel the heat in the Korun Master's gaze. "We must be prepared for radical action. It is our duty."
"But," Obi-Wan protested numbly, "you're talking about treason..."
"I'm not afraid of words, Obi-Wan! If it's treason, then so be it. I would do this right now, if I had the Council's support. The real treason," Mace said, "would be failure to act!"
"Such an act, destroy the Jedi Order it could," Yoda said. "Lost the trust of the public, we have already—"
"No disrespect, Master Yoda," Mace interrupted, "but that's a politician's argument. We can't let public opinion stop us from doing what's right.''
"Convinced it is right, I am not," Yoda said severely. "Working behind the scenes we should be, to uncover Lord Sidious! To move against Palpatine while the Sith still exist—this may be part of the Sith plan itself, to turn the Senate and the public against the Jedi! So that we are not only disbanded, but outlawed."
Mace was half out of his pod. "To wait gives the Sith the advantage—"
"Have the advantage already, they do!" Yoda jabbed at him with his gimer stick. "Increase their advantage we will, if in haste we act!"
"Masters, Masters, please," Obi-Wan said. He looked from one to the other and inclined his head respectfully. "Perhaps there is a middle way."
"Ah, of course: Kenobi the Negotiator." Mace Windu settled back into his seating pod. "I should have guessed. That is why you asked for this meeting, isn't it? To mediate our differences. If you can."
"So sure of your skills you are?" Yoda folded his fists around the head of his stick. "Easy to negotiate, this matter is not!"
Obi-Wan kept his head down. "It seems to me," he said carefully, "that Palpatine himself has given us an opening. He has said—both to you, Master Windu, and in the HoloNet address he gave following his rescue—that General Grievous is the true obstacle to peace. Let us forget about the rest of the Separatist leadership, for now. Let Nute Gunray and San Hill and the rest run wherever they like, while we put every available Jedi and all of our agents—the whole of Republic Intelligence, if we can—to work on locating Grievous himself. This will force the hand of the Sith Lord; he will know that Grievous cannot elude our full efforts for long, once we devote ourselves exclusively to his capture. It will draw Sidious out; he will have to make some sort of move, if he wishes the war to continue."
"If?" Mace said. "The war has been a Sith operation from the beginning, with Dooku on one side and Sidious on the other— it has always been a plot aimed at us. At the Jedi. To bleed us dry of our youngest and best. To make us into something we were never intended to be."
He shook his head bitterly. "I had the truth in ray hands years ago—back on Haruun Kal, in the first months of the war. I had it, but I did not understand how right I was."
"Seen glimpses of this truth, we all have," Yoda said sadly. "Our arrogance it is, which has stopped us from fully opening our eyes."
"Until now," Obi-Wan put in gently. "We understand now the goal of the Sith Lord, we know his tactics, and we know where to look for him. His actions will reveal him. He cannot escape us. He will not escape us."
Yoda and Mace frowned at each other for one long moment, then both of them turned to Obi-Wan and inclined their heads in mirrors of his respectful bow.
"Seen to the heart of the matter, young Kenobi has."
Mace nodded. "Yoda and I will remain on Coruscant, monitoring Palpatine's advisers and lackeys; we'll move against Sidious the instant he is revealed. But who will capture Grievous? I have fought him blade-to-blade. He is more than a match for most Jedi."
"We'll worry about that once we find him," Obi-Wan said. A slight, wistful smile crept over his face. "If I listen hard enough, I can almost hear Qui-Gon reminding me that until the possible becomes actual, it is only a distraction."
General Grievous stood wide-legged, hands folded behind him, as he stared out through the reinforced viewport
at the towering sphere of the Geonosian Dreadnaught. The immense ship looked small, though, against the scale of the vast sinkhole that rose around it.
This was Utapau, a remote backworld on the fringe of the Outer Rim. At ground level—far above where Grievous stood now—the planet appeared to be a featureless ball of barren rock, scoured flat by endless hyperwinds. From orbit, though, its cities and factories and spaceports could be seen as the planet's rotation brought its cavernous sinkholes one at a time into view. These sinkholes were the size of inverted mountains, and every available square meter of their interior walls was packed with city. And every square meter of every city was under the guns of Separatist war droids, making sure that the Utapauns behaved themselves.
Utapau had no interest in the Clone Wars; it had never been a member of the Republic, and had carefully maintained a stance of quiet neutrality.
Right up until Grievous had conquered it.
Neutrality, in these times, was a joke; a planet was neutral only so long as neither the Republic nor the Confederacy wanted it. If Grievous could laugh, he would have.
The members of the Separatist leadership scurried across the permacrete landing platform like the alley rats they were-—scampering for the ship that would take them to the safety of the newly constructed base on Mustafar.
But one alley rat was missing from the scuttle.
Grievous shifted his gaze fractionally and found the reflection of Nute Gunray in the transparisteel. The Neimoidian viceroy stood dithering in the control center's doorway. Grievous regarded the reflection of the bulbous, cold-blooded eyes below the tall peaked miter.
"Gunray." He made no other motion. "Why are you still here?"
"Some things should be said privately, General." The viceroy's reflection cast glances either way along the hallway beyond the door. "I am disturbed by this new move. You told us that Utapau would be safe for us. Why is the Leadership Council being moved now to Mustafar?"
Grievous sighed. He had no time for lengthy explanations; he was expecting a secret transmission from Sidious himself. He could not take the transmission with Gunray in the room, nor could he follow his natural inclinations and boot the Neimoidian viceroy so high he'd burn up on reentry. Grievous still hoped, every day, that Lord Sidious would give him leave to smash the skulls of Gunray and his toady, Rune Haako. Repulsive sniveling grub-greedy scum, both of them. And the rest of the Separatist leadership was every bit as vile.
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