by James Luceno
Anakin grunted. “There’ll come a time come when they’ll have to answer to us personally, and it will be the Force that guides our blades.”
The two starfighters were flying abreast, almost wingtip-to-wingtip, astromech droids R2-D2 and R4-P17 in their respective sockets. Tythe’s rubicund star was at their backs, and the ships that made up the Separatist flotilla were strung menacingly above the planet’s northern hemisphere.
With Tythe’s brood of moons clustered in a two-hundred-degree arc, the Separatists had worked quickly to strew mines at several hyperspace jump points, leaving the Republic ships with only a narrow window in which to revert to realspace. Trade Federation, Techno Union, and Commerce Guild capital ships occupied the apex of that window, deployed from north pole to equator above Tythe’s bright side, with wings of droid fighters boiling into space to the fore of the arrayed vessels.
To minimize their profiles, the Republic ships—widely dispositioned, like a group of predatory fish—had their triangular bows pointed toward the planet. Red and other squadrons were streaking forward, but well short of engaging the vanguard Vultures and tri-fighters.
“Prepare to break hard to starboard,” Anakin said over the net to the entire squadron. “Watch your countdown displays. On my mark, ten seconds to break …”
Obi-Wan kept his eyes on the counter at the bottom of the instrument panel’s tactical display screen. At the zero mark, he yanked the yoke to one side and peeled away for clear space.
Behind the squadrons of V-wings and Jedi and ARC-170 starfighters, the Republic battle group broke to port, drenching the distant Separatist ships with furious broadsides. Blinding pay-loads of spun plasma hurtled through space, detonating against the shields of the enemy vessels, atomizing any droid fighters unlucky enough to have been caught in the way.
The Separatist ships absorbed the first hits without flinching. Vessels that sustained damage began to drift to the rear. Then the battle group responded with an equally ferocious barrage. Turbolasers silenced, the Republic ships had already broken formation. Small suns flared in their midst and blue energy capered over their shielded hulls. No sooner did the barrage end than the starfighter squadrons regrouped, accelerating in an effort to reach the big enemy ships before their cannons or shields could repower.
The droid fighters swooped in to meet them halfway, and the tight formations observed by both sides dissolved into dozens of separate skirmishes. Those Republic starfighters that managed to steal through the chaos drew into tight clusters and continued their fiery advance. The rest became embroiled in swift attacks and evasive maneuvers. Local space became a scrawl of scarlet lines and white spirals, punctuated by expanding explosions. Craft of both camps came apart, tumbling and spinning from the arena, wingless or in flames.
“They’re being shot to pieces,” Red Seven said over the net.
“They know their job,” Anakin responded.
That job was to buy Red Squadron enough time to skirt the main action and race down Tythe’s gravity well.
A burst-transmission from survivors of the assault on the Republic’s small base had confirmed Dooku’s presence on the surface. But on the possibility that Tythe was a calculated diversion, Palpatine’s naval command staff had agreed to committing only a single battle group from the Outer Rim fleet. In the view of those same naval commanders, invasion was senseless; a Base Delta Zero attack, justified. In the end it was decided that saturation bombardment, augmented by limited starfighter engagement, would send Dooku fleeing, in keeping with the Republic’s strategy to force the Separatists deeper into the galaxy’s spiral arms.
The Jedi had insisted nevertheless that an attempt be made to take Dooku alive.
Obi-Wan and Anakin didn’t need to be reminded of what had happened only weeks earlier on Cato Neimoidia when they had gone after Viceroy Gunray, but they were not about to forgo a chance to capture the Sith Lord.
Red Squadron’s intended insertion point was twenty degrees south of Tythe’s north pole, where the Separatist line was most dispersed. With droid fighters still pouring from the curving arms of Trade Federation Lucrehulks, and the recoiling barrels of Commerce Guild cannons filling local space with storms of unleashed energy, Anakin led the starfighters on a weaving course through the heart of the enemy fleet.
“No signature for Grievous’s cruiser,” he said to Obi-Wan. “None of the ships of the Separatist leadership are here.”
Obi-Wan glanced at the wire-frame display of his threat-assessment screen. “All the more reason to believe that Dooku was ordered here by Sidious.”
“Then where’s everyone else?”
Obi-Wan was troubled by the thought, but didn’t admit to it. “Dooku will know,” he started to say, when the starfighter’s proximity scanners stammered a warning. “Techno Union star-ship is veering to intercept us.”
“Droid fighters are away and locking on,” Red Three added.
Obi-Wan acknowledged. “Angle shields. We can outfly them.”
“We’ll end up too far off course,” Anakin said.
“We’re almost at the insertion point,” Obi-Wan said.
“That starship isn’t just going to move aside. Form up on me. We’ll show them how well we improvise.”
There was no time to argue the point. Rolling to port, Obi-Wan fell in behind Anakin and fired his thrusters. Trailing behind, Red Squadron accelerated and banked for the narrowwaisted vessel.
“Ready proton torpedoes,” Anakin said. “Sow them just above the fuel cells.”
Point-defense turbolasers sought the starfighters as they fell on the ship, needling space with outpourings of gaudy energy. Corkscrewing missiles claimed Red Ten and Red Twelve, both of which disappeared in angry blossoms of fire. Sensing its sudden vulnerability, the huge vessel launched additional droid fighters. In the instant it lowered its shields to route power to the sublight drives, Red Squadron attacked.
Tight on Anakin, the ten remaining starfighters yawed for the waist of the ship, just forward of its cluster of cylindrical fuel cells. Dropping his craft to within one hundred meters of the pinched hull, Anakin began to hug the surface, surging onto a course that would whip Red Squadron through a tight circle around the forward ends of the fuel cells.
“Torpedoes away!” he said at the halfway mark.
Obi-Wan triggered the launchers and watched two torpedoes burn toward the target. Behind him, the rest of Red Squadron did the same. Hits began to score, fire and gas fountaining from breaches in the ship’s dark hull.
The disabling run completed, Anakin boosted for Tythe.
“She’s finished!”
In single file, Red Squadron followed.
Almost instantly the punctured vessel exploded, stunning the fleeing starfighters with a wave of force. Red Nine disappeared at the edge of the roiling detonation zone, and Red Seven wheeled off into the void with both wings sheared away.
Obi-Wan regained control of his craft and once more attached himself to Anakin’s six.
“Insertion point in fifteen seconds,” Anakin updated. “Dial inertial compensators to maximum. All power to the ablative shields. Deceleration burn on my mark …”
Obi-Wan clamped his hands on the violently shaking yoke as Red Squadron ripped into Tythe’s plundered atmosphere. He thought his teeth might rattle out of his jaws and drop into his lap; eyes and ears might implode from the pressure; chest might cave in and crush his heart.
Light flashed behind him; streaked past the cockpit.
Half a dozen droid fighters were chasing them down the well.
Not having to concern themselves with endangering living systems, the Vultures should have been able to descend even more rapidly and more acutely than the starfighters. But as the heat of entry built in the ships, survival protocols began to kick in, tasking the fighters to adjust the angle of their descents. For some of the droids it was already too late. Single contrails became particle showers as gravity summoned the broken fighters to their doom.
/> Punching through the blankets of clouds at suicidal velocity, Obi-Wan’s starfighter went into a roll. Pinwheeling before his eyes, Tythe was a kaleidoscopic furor of white and brown, smeared occasionally with striations of blue-green.
Anakin’s voice grew loud in his ears. “Nose up! Nose up!”
With effort, Obi-Wan leveled out of his plummet, his stomach lurching up into his throat. Reaching forward, he engaged the starfighter’s topographic sensors. The ship was dropping toward ice floes and bergs. Then, far below, peninsulas of rocky islands came into view. The surging waves of a dead gray ocean. The denuded shelf of a continent. Barren land fissured by dry, sinuous riverbeds, and mounded by brown hills strewn with toppled trees.
A ruined world.
“Head count,” he said into his helmet microphone.
Five voices responded. Reds Eight and Eleven were lost.
“Locking in target coordinates,” Anakin said.
Red Squadron flew just above the contours of land that had once been as lush as the area surrounding Theed, on Naboo. Now a desert, save for areas where exotic species of vegetation thrived in lakes of red-brown water, their jagged shorelines crusted yellow and black.
Also like Naboo, Tythe had once mined plasma in sufficient quantities to ship offworld. But greed had driven LiMerge Power to experiment with dangerous methods for keeping the ionized gas under adequate heat. A chain reaction set in motion by nuclear fuels had destroyed facilities throughout Tythe’s northern hemisphere and had left the planet uninhabitable for a generation.
“Target facility is ten kilometers west,” Anakin said. “We should be hearing from artillery soon enough.”
Soaring from the edge of a high plateau, the six starfighters dropped into a broad valley, disturbingly reminiscent of Geonosis, right down to the berthed starships and war machines spread across the floor.
Hailfire droids wheeled out to greet them with volleys of surface-to-air missiles. Turbolaser cannons affixed to Trade Federation landing ships cut the gray-yellow sky to ribbons. STAPs lifted into the air, and squads of infantry droids hurried for armed skimmers.
Unequipped to defend itself against the onslaught, tattered Red Squadron banked broadly to the north, evading plasma beams and flak from exploding heat seekers. Anakin and Obi-Wan paid out the last of their proton torpedoes in futile attempts to save Reds Three, Four, and Five. Bursts from their laser cannons crippled two enemy speeders and countless droid fighters, sending them crashing into the contaminated terrain. R4-P17 howled as Obi-Wan twisted the starfighter through violent air-bursts and superheated clouds of billowing smoke.
Red Six vanished.
When they had juked their way through the worst of it, Anakin came alongside Obi-Wan.
It was just the two of them now.
“Point three-oh,” Anakin said. “On the landing platform.”
Obi-Wan gazed out the right side of the cockpit at what had been an enormous plasma-generating facility. Fractured containment domes and adjacent roofless structures revealed toppled extraction shafts, exploded activators, and tumbled walkways. In the center of the complex stood an elevated square of corroded ferrocrete, crowded with enemy fighter craft and bearing a single Geonosian fantail of distinctive design.
“Dooku’s sloop.”
The words had scarcely left Obi-Wan’s mouth when battle droids began to gush from the facility and out onto the landing platform. Bolts from the droids’ blasters clawed at the pair of prowling starfighters.
“I guess we’re not going in through the front door,” Obi-Wan said.
“There’s another way,” Anakin said, as they were emerging from their flyby. “We go in through the north dome.”
Obi-Wan looked over his left shoulder at the partially collapsed hemisphere. The lid that had once topped the plasma containment structure was long gone, and the resultant circular opening was large enough for a starfighter to thread.
Obi-Wan had misgivings, nevertheless.
“What about residual radiation inside the dome?”
“Radiation?” Anakin laughed. “The maneuver alone will probably kill us!”
With its fifty-three skydocks, hundreds of private turbolifts, arrays of hidden security armaments, and towering atria, 500 Republica was a world unto itself. Containing more technology than many Outer Rim worlds and more residents than some, the sky-piercing structure was the unrivaled gem of the Senate District, and the elegant cynosure of the district’s prestigious Ambassadorial Sector.
What had begun as a stately building in the classic style had, over the course of centuries, become a veritable mountain of steps and setbacks—some with flat roofs, others as gently rounded as shoulders, and still others as massive as any structure in the district. Up and up they climbed, profuse, organic, in seeming competition for Coruscant’s sunlight, culminating in a graceful crown, banded with penthouses and topped by a lithe spire. Gilded by the rising sun, its head in the clouds, buttressed by the towers that had allowed it to outgrow all its neighbors, 500 Republica was the lofty vantage from which a privileged few could actually gaze down on Coruscant.
Which was precisely why the building had become the landmark the galaxy’s disenfranchised pointed to when they spoke of Coruscant’s disproportionate wealth and elitism. Why 500 Republica was viewed by many as more emblematic of the bloated, indulgent Senate than the Senate’s own squat mushroom of a home.
Mace could feel the oppressive weight of the structure bearing down on him as the team entered 500 Republica’s level-one sub-basement—square kilometers of supportive ferrocrete and durasteel, crammed with whining, whirring machines that kept the tower stable, aloft, secure, climate-controlled, and supplied with water and power. As deep as it was, the sub-basement was still a hundred meters above Coruscant’s true underground, and twice that above the original surface of the planet.
The team had had to wait hours for Republica security to grant them permission to enter and carry on with the investigation. For a time, Mace had considered appealing to Palpatine for permission, since the Supreme Chancellor had an upper-level suite in the building. For company, the probe droids had scores of custodial and maintenance droids, but the trail to Sidious had gone cold.
Lost among countless footprints that covered the floor.
“Unless we can find prints that say otherwise, there’s no guarantee our quarry gained entrance to the sub-basement from Five Hundred Republica itself,” Dyne pronounced, switching his handheld processor to standby mode. “He may have entered from the tunnels that connect to the east or west skydocks.”
“In other words, he could have arrived here from just about anywhere on Coruscant,” Shaak Ti said.
Dyne nodded. “Presumably.”
Mace gazed down the tunnel the team had taken.
“Could we have missed something along the way?”
“The droids wouldn’t.”
Mace gestured to the smudged and stained ferrocrete floor. “Why would the prints suddenly end right here?”
Dyne compressed his lips and shook his head. “Maybe someone carried him here by repulsorlift. Unless you’re suggesting he levitated across the floor.” He thought about it for a long moment, then said: “All right, for the sake of argument, let’s say that he did levitate here.”
“There’ll be prints at his starting point,” Mace said.
Dyne scanned the sub-basement, pursed his lips, and blew out his breath. “We’re going to need a lot more probe droids.”
“How many more?” Mace said.
“A lot.”
“How long to bring them here and search this entire level?”
“With all this machinery, the skydock access tunnels, the waste and supply turbolifts … I couldn’t begin to guess. What’s more, we’re going to need additional security clearance to search the tunnels.”
“You’ll have whatever clearance you need,” Shaak Ti promised.
Mace glanced around. “You’ll have to run imaging scans of the partitions
and the exterior walls.”
“That could require several weeks,” Dyne said cautiously.
“Then the sooner we begin, the better.”
Dyne took a comlink from his belt and was about to activate it when the floor began to tremble.
“A quake?” Mace asked Shaak Ti.
She shook her head. “I’m not sure—”
A second jolt shook the sub-basement, strong enough to dust the team with loose ferrocrete from the high ceiling.
“Feels like something rammed the building,” Dyne said.
It wouldn’t be the first time an intoxicated or exhausted driver had veered from one of the free-travel skylanes and plowed into the side of a building, Mace told himself. And yet—
The next shudder was accompanied by the distant sound of a powerful explosion. Lights in the sub-basement faded momentarily, then returned to full illumination, sending the custodial and maintenance droids into frantic activity.
Also at a far remove, klaxons and sirens blared.
“My comlink isn’t working,” Dyne said, jabbing at the device’s frequency search control with his forefinger.
“We’re tiers below midlevel,” Shaak Ti said.
Dyne shook his head. “That shouldn’t matter. Not in here.”
Stretching out with the Force, Mace sensed danger, frenzy, pain, and death. “Where’s the nearest exit?”
Dyne pointed to his left. “The tunnel to the east skydock.”
Mace’s thoughts swirled. He turned to Valiant. “Commander, Shaak Ti and I will need half your squad. You and the rest of your team will assist Captain Dyne with the search. Keep me informed of your progress.”
“What about me, sir?”
Mace looked at TC-16, then at Dyne. “The droid stays with you.”
Flanked by commandos, Mace and Shaak Ti raced off. The tunnel to the east skydock shook as they hurried through mixed-species crowds of frightened pedestrians heading toward and away from 500 Republica. Ahead of them loomed a square of dim sunlight, almost aquatic in quality, typical of the lower reaches of Coruscant’s urban canyons.
On the huge quadrangular skydock, humans, humanoids, and aliens were crouched behind parked limos, taxis, and private yachts, or hurrying for the entrance to the upper-level mag-lev platform. Shouts and screams punctuated the drone of overhead traffic. Panic gripped the free-travel skylanes. Taxis and transports were swerving in all directions, careening into one another and the sides of buildings, making desperate rooftop and plaza landings.
