"I—no. No, I'm all right." Anakin sank gratefully into a dangerously comfortable chair. "I'm just—a little tired, that's all."
"Not sleeping well?"
"No." Anakin offered an exhausted chuckle. "I haven't been sleeping well for a few years, now."
"I quite understand, my boy. Quite." Palpatine rose and rounded his desk, sitting casually on its front edge. "Anakin, we must stop pretending. The final crisis is approaching, and our only hope to survive it is to be completely, absolutely, ruthlessly honest with each other. And with ourselves. You must understand that what is at stake here is nothing less than the fate of the galaxy."
"I don't know—"
"Don't be afraid, Anakin. What is said between us here need never pass beyond these walls. Anakin, think: think how hard it has been to hold all your secrets inside. Have you ever needed to keep a secret from me?"
He ticked his fingers one by one. "I have kept the secret of your marriage all these years. The slaughter at the Tusken camp, you shared with me. I was there when you executed Count Dooku. And I know where you got the power to defeat him. You see? You have never needed to pretend with me, the way you must with your Jedi comrades. Do you understand that you need never hide anything from me? That I accept you exactly as you are?"
He spread his hands as though offering a hug. "Share with me the truth. Your absolute truth. Let yourself out, Anakin."
"I—" Anakin shook his head. How many times had he dreamed of not having to pretend to be the perfect Jedi? But what else could he be? "I wouldn't even know how to begin."
"It's quite simple, in the end: tell me what you want."
Anakin squinted up at him. "I don't understand."
"Of course you don't." The last of the sunset haloed his ice-white hair and threw his face into shadow. "You've been trained to never think about that. The Jedi never ask what you want. They simply tell you what you're supposed to want. They never give you a choice at all. That's why they take their students— their victims—at an age so young that choice is meaningless. By the time a Padawan is old enough to choose, he has been so indoctrinated—so brainwashed—that he is incapable of even considering the question. But you're different, Anakin. You had a real life, outside the Jedi Temple. You can break through the fog of lies the Jedi have pumped into your brain. I ask you again: what do you want?"
"I still don't understand."
"I am offering you... anything," Palpatine said. "Ask, and it is yours. A glass of water? It's yours. A bag full of Corusca gems? Yours. Look out the window behind me, Anakin. Pick something, and it's yours."
"Is this some kind of joke?"
"The time for jokes is past, Anakin. I have never been more serious." Within the shadow that cloaked Palpatine's face, Anakin could only just see the twin gleams of the Chancellor's eves. "Pick something. Anything."
"All right..." Shrugging, frowning, still not understanding, Anakin looked out the window, looking for the most ridiculously expensive thing he could spot. "How about one of those new SoroSuub custom speeders—"
"Done."
"Are you serious? You know how much one of those costs? You could practically outfit a battle cruiser—"
"Would you prefer a battle cruiser?"
Anakin went still. A cold void opened in his chest. In a small, cautious voice, he said, "How about the Senatorial Apartments?"
"A private apartment?"
Anakin shook his head, staring up at the twin gleams in the darkness on Palpatine's face. "The whole building." Palpatine did not so much as blink.
"Done."
"It's privately owned—"
"Not anymore."
"You can't just—"
"Yes, I can. It's yours. Is there anything else? Name it." Anakin gazed blankly out into the gathering darkness. Stars began to shimmer through the haze of twilight. A constellation he recognized hung above the spires of the Jedi Temple.
"All right," Anakin said softly. "Corellia. I'll take Corellia."
"The planet, or the whole system?"
Anakin stared.
"Anakin?"
"I just—" He shook his head blankly. "I can't figure out if you're kidding, or completely insane."
"I am neither, Anakin. I am trying to impress upon you a fundamental truth of our relationship. A fundamental truth of yourself'."
"What if I really wanted the Corellian system? The whole Five Brothers—all of it?"
"Then it would be yours. You can have the whole sector, if you like." The twin gleams within the shadow sharpened. "Do you understand, now? I will give you anything you want.''''
The concept left him dizzy. "What if I wanted—what if I went along with Padme and her friends? What if I want the war to end?"
"Would tomorrow be too soon?"
"How—" Anakin couldn't seem to get his breath. "How can you do that?"
"Right now, we are only discussing what. How is a different issue; we'll come to that presently."
Anakin sank deeper into the chair while he let everything sink deeper into his brain. If only his head would stop spinning—why did Palpatine have to start all this now! This would all be easier to comprehend if the nightmares of Padme didn't keep screaming inside his head.
"And in exchange?" he asked, finally. "What do I have to do?"
"You have to do what you want."
"What I want?"
"Yes, Anakin. Yes. Exactly that. Only that. Do the one thing that the Jedi fear most: make up your own mind. Follow your own conscience. Do what you think is right. I know that you have been longing for a life greater than that of an ordinary Jedi. Commit to that life. I know you burn for greater power than any Jedi can wield; give yourself permission to gain that power, and allow yourself license to use it. You have dreamed of leaving the Jedi Order, having a family of your own—one that is based on love, not on enforced rules of self-denial."
"I—can't... I can't just... leave..."
"But you can."
Anakin couldn't breathe. He couldn't blink.
He sat frozen. Even thought was impossible. "You can have every one of your dreams. Turn aside from the lies of the Jedi, and follow the truth of yourself. Leave them. Join me on the path of true power. Be my friend, Anakin. Be my student. My apprentice."
Anakin's vision tunneled again, but this time there was no light at the far end. He pulled back his hand, and it was shaking as he brought it up to support his face.
"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm sorry, but—but as much as I want those things—as much as I care for you, sir—I can't. I just can't. Not yet. Because there's only one thing I really want, right now. Everything else will just have to wait."
"I know what you truly want," the shadow said. "I have only been waiting for you to admit it to yourself." A hand—a human hand, warm with compassion—settled onto his shoulder. "Listen to me: I can help you save her?''
"You—" Anakin blinked blindly. "How can you help?"
"Do you remember that myth I told you of, The Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise?" the shadow whispered. The myth—directly influence the midi-chlorians to create life; with such knowledge, to maintain life in someone already living would seem a small matter...
"Yes," Anakin said. "Yes, I remember."
The shadow leaned so close that it seemed to fill the world.
"Anakin, it's no mere myth."
Anakin swallowed.
"Darth Plagueis was real."
Anakin could force out only a strangled whisper. "Real... ?"
"Darth Plagueis was my Master. He taught me the key to his power," the shadow said, dryly matter-of-fact, "before I killed him."
Without understanding how he had moved, without even intending to move, without any transition of realization or dawning understanding, Anakin found himself on his feet. A blue bar of sizzling energy terminated a centimeter from Palpatine's chin its glow casting red-edged shadows up his face and across the ceiling. Only gradually did Anakin come to understand that this was his lightsaber, and that it was in his hand.
"You," he said. Suddenly he was neither dizzy nor tired.
Suddenly everything made sense.
"It's you. It's been you all along!"
In the clean blue light of his blade he stared into the face of a man whose features were as familiar to him as his own, but now seemed as alien as an extragalactic comet—because now he finally understood that those familiar features were only a mask.
He had never seen this man's real face.
"I should kill you," he said. "I will kill you!"
Palpatine gave him that wise, kindly-uncle smile Anakin had been seeing since the age of nine. "For what?"
"You're a Sith Lord!"
"I am," he said simply. "I am also your friend."
The blue bar of energy wavered, just a bit.
"I am also the man who has always been here for you. I am the man you have never needed to lie to. I am the man who wants nothing from you but that you follow your conscience. If that conscience requires you to commit murder, simply over a... philosophical difference... I will not resist." His hands opened, still at his sides. "Anakin, when I told you that you can have anything you want, did you think I was excluding my life?"
The floor seemed to soften beneath Anakin's feet, and the room started to swirl darkness and ooze confusion. "You—you won't even fight— ?"
"Fight you?" In the blue glow that cast shadows up from Palpatine's chin, the Chancellor looked astonished that he would suggest such a thing. "But what will happen when you kill me? What will happen to the Republic?" His tone was gently reasonable. "What will happen to Padme?"
"Padme..."
Her name was a gasp of anguish.
"When I die," Palpatine said with the air of a man reminding a child of something he ought to already know, "my knowledge dies with me."
The sizzling blade trembled.
"Unless, that is, I have the opportunity to teach it... to my apprentice..."
His vision swam.
"I..." A whisper of naked pain, and despair. "I don't know what to do..."
Palpatine gazed upon him, loving and gentle as he had ever been, though only a whisker shy of a lightsaber's terminal curve. And what if this face was not a mask? What if the true face of the Sith was exactly what he saw before him: a man who had cared for him, had helped him, had been his loyal friend when he'd thought he had no other? What then? "Anakin," Palpatine said kindly, "let's talk."
The four bodyguard droids spread out in a shallow arc between Obi-Wan and Grievous, raising their electrostaffs. Obi-Wan stopped a respectful distance away; he still carried bruises from one of those electrostaffs, and he felt no particular urge to add to his collection.
"General Grievous," he said, "you're under arrest."
The bio-droid general stalked toward him, passing through his screen of bodyguards without the slightest hint of reluctance. "Kenobi. Don't tell me, let me guess: this is the part where you give me the chance to surrender."
"It can be," Obi-Wan allowed equably. "Or, if you like, it can be the part where I dismantle your exoskeleton and ship you back to Coruscant in a cargo hopper."
"I'll take option three." Grievous lifted his hand, and the bodyguards moved to box Obi-Wan between them. "That's the one where I watch you die."
Another gesture, and the droids in the ceiling hive came to life.
They uncoiled from their sockets heads-downward, with a rising chorus of whirring and buzzing and clicking that thickened until Obi-Wan might as well have stumbled into a colony of Corellian raptor-wasps. They began to drop free of the ceiling, first only a few, then many, like the opening drops of a summer cloudburst; finally they fell in a downpour that shook the stone-mounted durasteel of the deck and left Obi-Wan's ears ringing. Hundreds of them landed and rolled to standing; as many more stayed attached to the overhead hive, hanging upside down by their magnapeds, weapons trained so that Obi-Wan now stood at the focus of a dome of blasters.
Through it all, Obi-Wan never moved.
"I'm sorry, was I not clear?" he said. "There is no option three.'"
Grievous shook his head. "Do you never tire of this pathetic banter?"
"I rarely tire at all," Obi-Wan said mildly, "and I have no better way to pass the time while I wait for you to either decide to surrender, or choose to die."
"That choice was made long before I ever met you.'' Grievous turned away. "Kill him."
Instantly the box of bodyguards around Obi-Wan filled with crackling electrostaffs whipping faster than the human eye could see—which was less troublesome than it might have been, for that box was already empty of Jedi.
The Force had let him collapse as though he'd suddenly fainted, then it brought his lightsaber from his belt to his hand and ignited it while he turned his fall into a roll; that roll carried his lightsaber through a crisp arc that severed the leg of one of the bodyguards, and as the Force brought Obi-Wan back to his feet, the Force also nudged the crippled bodyguard to topple sideways into the path of the blade and sent it clanging to the floor in two smoking, sparking pieces. One down.
The remaining three pressed the attack, but more cautiously; their weapons were longer than his, and they struck from beyond the reach of his blade. He gave way before them, his defensive velocities barely keeping their crackling discharge blades at bay.
Three MagnaGuards, each with a double-ended weapon that generated an energy field impervious to lightsabers, each with reflexes that operated near lightspeed, each with hypersophisticated heuristic combat algorithms that enabled it to learn from experience and adapt its tactics instantly to any situation, were certainly beyond Obi-Wan's ability to defeat, but it was not Obi-Wan who would defeat them; Obi-Wan wasn't even fighting. He was only a vessel, emptied of self. The Force, shaped by his skill and guided by his clarity of mind, fought through him.
In the Force, he felt their destruction: it was somewhere above and behind him, and only seconds away.
He went to meet it with a backflipping leap that the Force used to lift him neatly to an empty droid socket in the ceiling hive. The MagnaGuards sprang after him but he was gone by the time they arrived, leaping higher into the maze of girders and cables and room-sized cargo containers that was the control center's superstructure.
Here, said the Force within him, and Obi-Wan stopped, balancing on a girder, frowning back at the oncoming killer droids that leapt from beam to beam below him like malevolent dura-steel primates. Though he could feel its close approach, he had no idea from where their destruction might come... until the Force showed him a support beam within reach of his blade and whispered, Now.
His blade flicked out and the durasteel beam parted, fresh-cut edges glowing white hot, and a great hulk of ship-sized cargo container that the beam had been supporting tore free of its other supports with shrieks of anguished metal and crashed down upon all three MagnaGuards with the finality of a meteor strike.
Two, three, and four.
Oh, thought Obi-Wan with detached approval. That worked out rather well.
Only ten thousand to go. Give or take. An instant later the Force had him hurtling through a storm of blasterfire as every combat droid in the control center opened up on him at once.
Letting go of intention, letting go of desire, letting go of life, Obi-Wan fixed his entire attention on a thread of the Force that pulled him toward Grievous: not where Grievous was, but where Grievous would be when Obi-Wan got there...
Leaping girder to girder, slashing cables on which to swing through swarms of ricocheting particle beams, blade flickering so fast it became a deflector shield that splattered blaster bolts in all directions, his presence alone became a weapon: as he spun and whirled through the control center's superstructure, the blasts of particle cannons from power droids destroyed equipment and shattered girders and unleashed a torrent of red-hot debris that crashed to the deck, crushing droids on all sides. By the time he flipped down through the air to land catfooted on the deck once more, nearly half the droids between him and Grievous
had been destroyed by their own not-so-friendly fire.
He cut his way into the mob of remaining troops as smoothly as if it were no more than a canebrake near some sunlit beach; his steady pace left behind a trail of smoking slices of droid.
"Keep firing!" Grievous roared to the spider droids that Flanked him. "Blast him!"
Obi-Wan felt the massive shoulder cannon of a spider droid track him, and he felt it fire a bolt as powerful as a proton grenade, and he let the Force nudge him into a leap that carried him just far enough toward the fringe of the bolt's blast radius so that instead of shattering his bones it merely gave him a very strong, very hot push—that sent him whirling over the rest of the droids to land directly in front of Grievous.
A single slash of his lightsaber amputated the shoulder cannon of one power droid and continued into a spinning Force-assisted kick that brought his boot heel to the point of the other power droid's duranium chin, snapping the droid's head back hard enough to sever its cervical sensor cables. Blind and deaf, the power droid could only continue to obey its last order; it staggered in a wild circle, its convulsively firing cannon blasting random holes in droids and walls alike, until Obi-Wan deactivated it with a precise thrust that burned a thumb-sized hole through its thoracic braincase.
"General," Obi-Wan said with blandly polite smile as though unexpectedly greeting, on the street, someone he privately disliked. "My offer is still open."
Droid guns throughout the control center fell silent; Obi-Wan stood so close to Grievous that the general was in the line of fire.
Grievous threw back his cloak imperiously. "Do you believe that I would surrender to you now?"
"I am still willing to take you alive." Obi-Wan's nod took in the smoking, sparking wreckage that filled the control center. "So far, no one has been hurt."
Grievous tilted his head so that he could squint down into Obi-Wan's face. "I have thousands of troops. You cannot defeat them all."
"I don't have to."
"This is your chance to surrender, General Kenobi." Grievous swept a duranium hand toward the sinkhole-city behind him. "Pau City is in my grip; lay down your blade, or I will squeeze... until this entire sinkhole brims over with innocent blood."
Revenge of the Sith Page 25
