by James Luceno
But Mace would make it his business to find the time later.
Briefly, he wondered what had become of Captain Dyne’s team. Surmising that Dyne had called off the search for Sidious shortly after the attack had commenced, Intelligence hadn’t dispatched a second search team—aimed at locating Dyne and Valiant—until neither of them had been heard from, even after communications had been restored to the Senate District.
Shaak Ti hadn’t seen them when she and Palpatine’s protectors had whisked the Supreme Chancellor through 500 Republica’s sub-basement.
So had Dyne and the commandos fallen victim to Grievous’s attack? Were they trapped somewhere under a crashed cargo ship or tons of ferrocrete rubble?
Yet another ill-timed concern, Mace thought.
The mag-lev’s other cars were packed cheek-to-jowl with Coruscanti attempting to flee the Senate and Financial Districts. Palpatine’s guards would have commandeered the entire train if Palpatine hadn’t intervened, refusing to allow it. Shaak Ti had told Mace and Kit about the Supreme Chancellor’s earlier reluctance to leave his suite. Mace didn’t know what to make of it. But now at least they were on the way to the bunker. The mag-lev line didn’t run past the complex, but the first stop in Sah’c was close to a system of skyways and turbolifts that did.
Light filtering into the car through the tinted windows dimmed.
The mag-lev was entering the Heorem Skytunnel, a broad burrow that accommodated not only the speeding train, but also opposing lanes of autonavigation and free-travel traffic, passing through several of the Senate District’s largest buildings. Lanes leading south—away from the district, and off to the right side of the mag-lev—were crawling with public transports and air taxis. By contrast, the northbound lanes were almost empty, the result of traffic having been rerouted well before it reached the Senate District.
A blur of light off to the left-hand side of the car caught Mace’s eye, and he hurried to the closest window. Streaking southbound in the northbound free-travel lane, two droid fighters were trying to overtake the train. Before Mace could utter a word of warning, cannon fire from one of the twin-winged ships stitched a broken line of holes across the blunt nose of a transport in the autonavigation lane. Instantly the transport exploded, savaging nearby vehicles with shrapnel and nearly rocking the mag-lev from its elevated guide rails.
Screams issued from Coruscanti wedged into the cars to the front and rear of Palpatine’s.
“Vulture fighters!” Mace told the Jedi and Red Guards.
Leaning low at the window, he saw one of the droids climb over the mag-lev, only to descend on the opposite side of the train in the midst of the free-travel lane, initiating a succession of collisions that flung speeders, taxis, and buses all over the skytunnel. Two vehicles careened into the train, only to rebound back into the travel lane, starting a second series of fatal crashes. Racing alongside Palpatine’s car, the same droid responsible for the collisions surged into a steep climb and disappeared from view.
Not a moment later an earsplitting sound reached Mace from somewhere in the rear of the train and overhead. Behind the tinted glass, sparks showered down the rounded sides of the car, and the smell of molten metal wafted from the ventilation grilles. A tumult of terrified cries rose from the car directly behind Palpatine’s, and hands and feet began to pound against the passageway door.
Part of a group of mag-lev security personnel stationed there, a Weequay looked to Mace.
“We won’t be able to hold them back!”
In turn, Mace whirled to Shaak Ti and Allie. “Move the Chancellor into the forward car!”
Shaak Ti regarded him as if he had lost his mind. “It’s packed, Mace!”
“I know that. Find a way!”
He gestured for Kit Fisto, and the two of them shouldered through the cluster of security personnel at the rear of the car and activated their lightsabers. Faced with the purple and blue blades, passengers on the far side of the door’s window began to retreat into the vestibule, battling with those behind them who were attempting to press into the forward car.
When there was space enough in the vestibule, Mace instructed the Weequay to unlock the door. Without hesitation he and Kit dashed through the vestibule and on into the rear car, where most of the mixed-species passengers were heaped atop seats to both sides of the wide aisle. Wind howled through the car from a jagged rend that had been opened in the roof, and through which had dropped half a dozen infantry droids.
Mace allowed himself a moment of bewilderment. Since the battle droids couldn’t have been delivered by the droid fighters, there had to be a third Separatist craft racing alongside the train.
The battle droids opened fire.
To many of the passengers all but fused to the tinted windows, the situation must have seemed hopeless. Not because the two Jedi couldn’t deflect the hail of blaster bolts aimed at them, but because they couldn’t deflect them without sending some into or through people in the car. But those passengers failed to recognize that one of the Jedi was Mace Windu—rumored to have single-handedly destroyed a seismic tank on Dantooine—and that the other was Kit Fisto, Nautolan hero of the Battle of Mon Calamari.
Together they returned some of the sizzling bolts into the advancing droids. Others they sent whizzing through the opening in the roof, managing in the process to catch one of the Vultures in the belly and send it spiraling to its death somewhere below the mag-lev line. Sparks and smoke whirled through the car, and parts of spindly arms and legs flew about unavoidably, but Mace and Kit called on the Force to control even those. A few Coruscanti were struck, but, against all odds, the Jedi saw to it that none was critically injured.
No sooner had the final droid dropped than Mace leapt straight up through the rend, landing in a crouch on the roof of the next car down the line, holding himself in place by the Force with the wind whipping at the back of his shaved skull and coarse tunic. Senses on alert, he saw a Separatist craft drop down behind the final car in the line. Farther away, but quickly making up the distance, flew two Republic gunships.
Instinctively he glanced to the right just as the second Vulture droid was rocketing into view. Seeing him, the droid sprayed the roof of the car with cannon fire. Mace turned into the powerful wind and focused all his intention on a front flip that carried him back through the rend. The Vulture veered, positioning itself directly over the laceration its partner had opened, and reorienting its wing cannons.
In what would surely have been a futile act, Mace raised his lightsaber.
But the expected cannon blast never arrived. Wings clipped and repulsors damaged by missiles fired from the gunships, the Vulture slammed down onto the roof of the speeding train, then rolled out of sight.
Deactivating their blades, Mace and Kit rushed into the forward car, which was now filled with Palpatine’s advisers and those passengers the Jedi women and Red Guards had relocated from the train’s lead car. Mace and Kit continued to squirm forward, arriving in the Supreme Chancellor’s car just as the maglev was emerging from the skytunnel. The sun was going down, and the tall buildings that rose to the west cast enormous shadows across the city canyon and the busy thoroughfares far below the cantilevered mag-lev line.
In the middle of the car, Palpatine stood at the center of the cordon the Red Guards had formed around him. And at a fixed-pane window they had deliberately shattered, Shaak Ti and Stass Allie were gazing toward the rear of the train.
“Those fighters could easily have derailed us with a torpedo,” Shaak Ti said as Mace and Kit approached.
Mace leaned partway out the window, eyes searching the canyon. “And battle droids don’t just drop from the sky. There’s a third craft.”
Kit’s bulging black eyes indicated Palpatine. “They want to take him alive.”
The words had scarcely left his mouth when something hit the train with sufficient force to whip everyone from one side of the car to the other, then back again. The Red Guards were just regaining their b
alance when the roof began to resound with the cadence of heavy, clanging footfalls, advancing from the rear of the train.
“Grievous,” Mace grumbled.
Kit glanced at him. “Here we go again.”
Hurrying into the vestibule between the two lead cars, they launched themselves to the roof. Three cars distant marched General Grievous and two of his elite droids, their capes snapping behind them in the wind, pulse-tipped batons angled across their barrel chests.
Farther back, clamped by animal-like claws to the roof of the train, was the gunboat from which the frightful trio had been released.
Without pausing, Grievous drew two lightsabers from inside his billowing cloak. By the time they were ignited, Mace was already on and all over the cyborg, batting away at the two blades, swinging low at Grievous’s artificial legs, thrusting at his skeletal face.
The lightsabers thrummed and hissed, meeting one another in bursts of dazzling light. In a corner of Mace’s mind he wondered to which Jedi Grievous’s blades had belonged. Just as the Force was keeping Mace from being blown from the mag-lev’s roof, magnetism of some sort was keeping the general fastened in place. For the cyborg, though, the coherence hindered as much as it helped, whereas Mace never remained in one place for very long. Again and again the three blades joined, in snarling attacks and parries.
As Mace already knew from Ki-Adi-Mundi and Shaak Ti, Grievous was well trained in the Jedi arts. He could recognize the hand of Dooku in the general’s training and technique. His strikes were as forceful as any Mace had ever had to counter, and his speed was astonishing.
But he didn’t know Vaapad—the technique of dark flirtation in which Mace excelled.
To the rear of the car, where Grievous’s pair of MagnaGuards had made the mistake of pitting themselves against Kit Fisto, the Nautolan’s blade was a cyclone of blazing blue light. Resistant to the energy outpourings of a lightsaber, the phrik alloy staffs were potent weapons, but like any weapon they needed to find their target, and Kit simply wasn’t allowing that. In moves a Twi’lek dancer might envy, he spun around the guards, claiming a limb from both with each rotation: left legs, right arms, right legs …
The speed of the train saw to the rest, ultimately whisking the droids into the canyon like insects blown from the windscreen of a speeder bike.
The loss of his confederates was noted by whatever computers were slaved to Grievous’s organic brain, but the loss neither distracted nor slowed him. His sole setting was attack. Successful at analyzing Mace’s lightsaber style, those same computers suggested that Grievous alter his stance and posture, along with the angle of his parries, ripostes, and thrusts.
The result wasn’t Vaapad, but it was close enough, and Mace wasn’t interested in prolonging the contest any longer than necessary.
Crouching low, he angled the blade downward and slashed, guiding it through the roof of the car, perpendicular to Grievous’s stalwart advance. Mace saw by the surprised look in the cyborg’s reptilian eyes that, for all his strength, dexterity, and resolve, the living part of him wasn’t always in perfect sync with his alloy servos. Clearly, Grievous—onetime courageous commander of sentient troops—realized what Mace had done and wanted to sidestep, where General Grievous—current commander of droids and other war machines—wanted nothing more than to impale Mace with lunging thrusts of the paired blades.
Slipping into the gap made by Mace’s saber, Grievous’s left talon lost magnetic purchase on the roof, and the general faltered. Mace came out of his crouch prepared to drive his sword into Grievous’s guts, but some last-instant firing of the general’s cybersynapses compelled the cyborg’s torso through a swift half twist that would have sent Mace’s head hurtling into the canyon had the maneuver prevailed. Instead Mace leapt backward, out of the range of the slicing blades, and Force-pushed outward, just at the instant of Grievous’s single misstep.
Off the side of the car the general went, twisting and turning as he fell, Mace trying to track the general’s contorted plunge, but unsuccessfully.
Had he fallen into the canyon? Had he managed to dig his duranium claws into the side of the car or grab hold of the maglev rail itself?
Mace couldn’t take the time to puzzle it out. One hundred meters away, the gunboat retracted its landing gear and rose from the roof on repulsorlift power. Reckless shots from one of the pursuing gunships obliged the Separatist craft to skew, then dive, with the gunship following close behind.
Mace and Kit watched in awe as the two ships began to helix forward around the speeding mag-lev, exchanging constant fire. Climbing away from the train’s sharp nose, within which the magnetic controls were housed, the gunboat made as if to bank west, only to bank east at the last instant.
By then, however, the gunship—leading its target west—had already fired.
Drilled by a swarm of deadly hyphens, the mag-lev’s control system blew apart, and the entire train began to drop.
In the darkness, buried alive, Anakin stretched out with his feelings.
In his mind’s eye he saw Padmé stalked by a dark, towering creature with a mechanical head, poised at the edge of a deep abyss, her world turned upside down. A surprise attack. Opponents locked in combat. Ground and sky filled with fire, smoke billowing in the air, clouding everything.
Death, destruction, deceit … A labyrinth of lies. His world turned upside down.
He shuddered, as if plunged into liquid gas. One touch would break him into a million shards.
His fear for Padmé expanded until he couldn’t see past it. Yoda’s voice in his ear: Fear leads to anger; anger to hated; hatred to the dark side …
He was as afraid to lose her as he was to hold on to her, and the pain of that contradiction made him wish he had never been born. There was no solace, even in the Force. As Qui-Gon had told him, he needed to make his focus his reality. But how?
How?
Qui-Gon, who had died—even though, to his young mind, Jedi weren’t supposed to …
Beside him, Obi-Wan stirred and coughed.
“You’re getting awfully good at destroying things,” he said. “On Vjun, you needed a grenade to do this much damage.”
Anakin shook the vision from his mind. “I told you I was becoming more powerful.”
“Then do us both a favor by getting us out from under all this.”
They used the Force, their hands and backs to extricate themselves. Getting to their feet, they stood staring at each other, dusted white head-to-toe from the debris.
“Go ahead,” Anakin said. “If you don’t say it, I will.”
“If you insist.” Obi-Wan snorted dust from his nose. “Almost makes me nostalgic for Naos Three.”
“Once more, with feeling.”
“Some other time. Dooku, first.”
Scampering over the remains of the dome, droid parts, buried pieces of furniture, overturned shelves of holodocuments, they raced for the landing platform, arriving in time to see Dooku’s sloop, one among dozens of Separatist vessels, streaking for space.
“Coward,” Obi-Wan said. “He flees.”
Anakin watched the sloop for a moment longer, then looked at Obi-Wan. “That’s not the reason, Master. We’ve been tricked. Tythe was never the target. We were.”
Bleeding speed and loft, the mag-lev settled hard onto the guide rail that projected from the skyscraper-lined rim of Sah’c Canyon. Counterpoint to the sobs and moans of the passengers, the two dozen cars—two now with slashed-open roofs—pinged and creaked.
Balanced on the balls of their feet, Mace and Kit hooked their lightsabers to their belts and drifted back down into the vestibule, as gently as the Force allowed. As if buffeted by thermals, the train swayed lazily from side to side. But with traffic halted in both directions, the air at midlevel should have been unruffled.
A quick glance out the right side of the vestibule supplied Mace with the explanation.
The aged, cantilevered supports anchored to the sides of the buildings were beginn
ing to bend under the weight of the train.
In the distance, sirens wailed and dopplered as emergency craft hurried to render aid. Left of the stricken mag-lev, two enormous repulsorlift platforms were making a careful approach. Waiting for the train to quiet, Mace and Kit stood like statues in the vestibule. When the rocking motion had subsided somewhat, they pressed the release stud for the passageway door and eased themselves into the lead car.
The train continued to protest its peculiar circumstance with an assortment of stressful sounds, but the sagging supports held.
Held for a few seconds more.
Then, with explosive reports, the rail supports beneath the center of the train tore away from the canyon rim, taking a lengthy portion of the rail with them. The train V’ed into the sudden gap, and would have plunged completely but for the fact that enough forward and rear cars remained clasped to the rail to support the few that now formed an inverted triangle. Even so, Coruscanti in the rear were propelled forward by the collapse, while those in the lead cars were jerked violently backward.
Steps into Palpatine’s car, Mace and Kit called on the Force to prevent everyone from flailing toward the vestibule door. Farther forward in the car, Shaak Ti and Stass Allie were keeping the Supreme Chancellor on his feet.
Strident sounds issued from the guide rail. The mag-lev lurched, and another two cars slipped into the V-notch, their motion adding a sudden twist to the train that turned some of the cars onto their sides, and sent passengers sliding and tumbling toward the tinted windows. Coruscanti screamed in terror, bracing themselves as best they could, or clawing at one another for support.
Centered in the Force, Mace directed all his energy toward keeping the Red Guards and others rooted in place. He wondered if he, Kit, Shaak Ti, and Allie—acting in concert—could support the entire train, but dismissed the idea immediately.
They would need Yoda.
Perhaps five Yodas.
Unexpectedly, a feeling of relief flowed through him.
