Book 0 - The Dark Lord Trilogy

by James Luceno

  A gasp of relief: the troopers seem to beat back the attack. There are hugs and even some quiet cheers in living rooms across the galaxy as the Separatist forces retreat to their landers and streak for orbit—

  We won! beings tell each other. We held them off!

  But then new reports trickle in—only rumors at first—that the attack wasn’t an invasion at all. That the Separatists weren’t trying to take the planet. That this was a lightning raid on the Senate itself.

  The nightmare gets worse: the Supreme Chancellor is missing.

  Palpatine of Naboo, the most admired man in the galaxy, whose unmatched political skills have held the Republic together. Whose personal integrity and courage prove that the Separatist propaganda of corruption in the Senate is nothing but lies. Whose charismatic leadership gives the whole Republic the will to fight on.

  Palpatine is more than respected. He is loved.

  Even the rumor of his disappearance strikes a dagger to the heart of every friend of the Republic. Every one of them knows it in her heart, in his gut, in its very bones—

  Without Palpatine, the Republic will fall.

  And now confirmation comes through, and the news is worse than anyone could have imagined. Supreme Chancellor Palpatine has been captured by the Separatists—and not just the Separatists.

  He’s in the hands of General Grievous.

  Grievous is not like other leaders of the Separatists. Nute Gunray is treacherous and venal, but he’s Neimoidian: venality and treachery are expected, and in the Chancellor of the Trade Federation they’re even virtues. Poggle the Lesser is Archduke of the weapon masters of Geonosis, where the war began: he is analytical and pitiless, but also pragmatic. Reasonable. The political heart of the Separatist Confederacy, Count Dooku, is known for his integrity, his principled stand against what he sees as corruption in the Senate. Though they believe he’s wrong, many respect him for the courage of his mistaken convictions.

  These are hard beings. Dangerous beings. Ruthless and aggressive.

  General Grievous, though—

  Grievous is a monster.

  The Separatist Supreme Commander is an abomination of nature, a fusion of flesh and droid—and his droid parts have more compassion than what remains of his alien flesh. This half-living creature is a slaughterer of billions. Whole planets have burned at his command. He is the evil genius of the Confederacy. The architect of their victories.

  The author of their atrocities.

  And his durasteel grip has closed upon Palpatine. He confirms the capture personally in a wideband transmission from his command cruiser in the midst of the orbital battle. Beings across the galaxy watch, and shudder, and pray that they might wake up from this awful dream.

  Because they know that what they’re watching, live on the HoloNet, is the death of the Republic.

  Many among these beings break into tears; many more reach out to comfort their husbands or wives, their crèche-mates or kin-triads, and their younglings of all descriptions, from children to cubs to spawn-fry.

  But here is a strange thing: few of the younglings need comfort. It is instead the younglings who offer comfort to their elders. Across the Republic—in words or pheromones, in magnetic pulses, tentacle-braids, or mental telepathy—the message from the younglings is the same: Don’t worry. It’ll be all right.

  Anakin and Obi-Wan will be there any minute.

  They say this as though these names can conjure miracles.

  Anakin and Obi-Wan. Kenobi and Skywalker. From the beginning of the Clone Wars, the phrase Kenobi and Skywalker has become a single word. They are everywhere. HoloNet features of their operations against the Separatist enemy have made them the most famous Jedi in the galaxy.

  Younglings across the galaxy know their names, know everything about them, follow their exploits as though they are sports heroes instead of warriors in a desperate battle to save civilization. Even grown-ups are not immune; it’s not uncommon for an exasperated parent to ask, when faced with offspring who have just tried to pull off one of the spectacularly dangerous bits of foolishness that are the stock-in-trade of high-spirited younglings everywhere, So which were you supposed to be, Kenobi or Skywalker?

  Kenobi would rather talk than fight, but when there is fighting to be done, few can match him. Skywalker is the master of audacity; his intensity, boldness, and sheer jaw-dropping luck are the perfect complement to Kenobi’s deliberate, balanced steadiness. Together, they are a Jedi hammer that has crushed Separatist infestations on scores of worlds.

  All the younglings watching the battle in Coruscant’s sky know it: when Anakin and Obi-Wan get there, those dirty Seppers are going to wish they’d stayed in bed today.

  The adults know better, of course. That’s part of what being a grown-up is: understanding that heroes are created by the HoloNet, and that the real-life Kenobi and Skywalker are only human beings, after all.

  Even if they really are everything the legends say they are, who’s to say they’ll show up in time? Who knows where they are right now? They might be trapped on some Separatist backwater. They might be captured, or wounded. Even dead.

  Some of the adults even whisper to themselves, They might have fallen.

  Because the stories are out there. Not on the HoloNet, of course—the HoloNet news is under the control of the Office of the Supreme Chancellor, and not even Palpatine’s renowned candor would allow tales like these to be told—but people hear whispers. Whispers of names that the Jedi would like to pretend never existed.

  Sora Bulq. Depa Billaba. Jedi who have fallen to the dark. Who have joined the Separatists, or worse: who have massacred civilians, or even murdered their comrades. The adults have a sickening suspicion that Jedi cannot be trusted. Not anymore. That even the greatest of them can suddenly just … snap.

  The adults know that legendary heroes are merely legends, and not heroes at all.

  These adults can take no comfort from their younglings. Palpatine is captured. Grievous will escape. The Republic will fall. No mere human beings can turn this tide. No mere human beings would even try. Not even Kenobi and Skywalker.

  And so it is that these adults across the galaxy watch the HoloNet with ashes where their hearts should be.

  Ashes because they can’t see two prismatic bursts of realspace reversion, far out beyond the planet’s gravity well; because they can’t see a pair of starfighters crisply jettison hyperdrive rings and streak into the storm of Separatist vulture fighters with all guns blazing.

  A pair of starfighters. Jedi starfighters. Only two.

  Two is enough.

  Two is enough because the adults are wrong, and their younglings are right.

  Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved its best for last.

  VICTORY

  The dark is generous.

  Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain shadowed deeper still. But the greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding from us the truths of others.

  The dark protects us from what we dare not know.

  Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentle dreams in night’s embrace, the beauty that imagination brings to what would repel in day’s harsh light. But the greatest of its comforts is the illusion that the dark is temporary: that every night brings a new day. Because it is day that is temporary.

  Day is the illusion.

  Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nights that divide them, as stars are defined by the infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of its own self.

  With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.

  ANAKIN AND OBI-WAN

  Antifighter flak flashed on all sides. Even louder than the clatter of shrapnel and the snarl of his sublight drives, his cockpit hummed and rang with near hits from the turbolaser fire of the capital ships crowding space aro
und him. Sometimes his whirling spinning dive through the cloud of battle skimmed bursts so closely that the energy-scatter would slam his starfighter hard enough to bounce his head off the supports of his pilot’s chair.

  Right now Obi-Wan Kenobi envied the clones: at least they had helmets.

  “Arfour,” he said on internal comm, “can’t you do something with the inertials?”

  The droid ganged into the socket on his starfighter’s left wing whistled something that sounded suspiciously like a human apology. Obi-Wan’s frown deepened. R4-P17 had been spending too much time with Anakin’s eccentric astromech; it was picking up R2-D2’s bad habits.

  New bursts of flak bracketed his path. He reached into the Force, feeling for a safe channel through the swarms of shrapnel and sizzling nets of particle beams.

  There wasn’t one.

  He locked a snarl behind his teeth, twisting his starfighter around another explosion that could have peeled its armor like an overripe Ithorian starfruit. He hated this part. Hated it.

  Flying’s for droids.

  His cockpit speakers crackled. “There isn’t a droid made that can outfly you, Master.”

  He could still be surprised by the new depth of that voice. The calm confidence. The maturity. It seemed that only last week Anakin had been a ten-year-old who wouldn’t stop pestering him about Form I lightsaber combat.

  “Sorry,” he muttered, kicking into a dive that slipped a turbolaser burst by no more than a meter. “Was that out loud?”

  “Wouldn’t matter if it wasn’t. I know what you’re thinking.”

  “Do you?” He looked up through the cockpit canopy to find his onetime Padawan flying inverted, mirroring him so closely that but for the transparisteel between them, they might have shaken hands. Obi-Wan smiled up at him. “Some new gift of the Force?”

  “Not the Force, Master. Experience. That’s what you’re always thinking.”

  Obi-Wan kept hoping to hear some of Anakin’s old cocky grin in his tone, but he never did. Not since Jabiim. Perhaps not since Geonosis.

  The war had burned it out of him.

  Obi-Wan still tried, now and again, to spark a real smile in his former Padawan. And Anakin still tried to answer.

  They both still tried to pretend the war hadn’t changed them.

  “Ah.” Obi-Wan took a hand from the starfighter’s control yoke to direct his upside-down friend’s attention forward. Dead ahead, a blue-white point of light splintered into four laser-straight trails of ion drives. “And what does experience tell you we should do about those incoming tri-fighters?”

  “That we should break—right.”

  Obi-Wan was already making that exact move as Anakin spoke. But they were inverted to each other: breaking right shot him one way while Anakin whipped the other. The tri-fighters’ cannons ripped space between them, tracking faster than their starfighters could slip.

  His onboard threat display chimed a warning: two of the droids had remote sensor locks on him. The others must have lit up his partner. “Anakin! Slip-jaws!”

  “My thought exactly.”

  They blew past the tri-fighters, looping in evasive spirals. The droid ships wrenched themselves into pursuit maneuvers that would have killed any living pilot.

  The slip-jaws maneuver was named for the scissorlike mandibles of the Kashyyyk slash-spider. Droids closing rapidly on their tails, cannonfire stitching space on all sides, the two Jedi pulled their ships through perfectly mirrored rolls that sent them streaking head-on for each other from opposite ends of a vast Republic cruiser.

  For merely human pilots, this would be suicide. By the time you can see your partner’s starfighter streaking toward you at a respectable fraction of lightspeed, it’s already too late for your merely human reflexes to react.

  But these particular pilots were far from merely human.

  The Force nudged hands on control yokes and the Jedi starfighters twisted and flashed past each other belly-to-belly, close enough to scorch each other’s paint. Tri-fighters were the Trade Federation’s latest space-superiority droid. But even the electronic reflexes of the tri-fighters’ droid brains were too slow for this: one of his pursuers met one of Anakin’s head-on. Both vanished in a blossom of flame.

  The shock wave of debris and expanding gas rocked Obi-Wan; he fought the control yoke, barely keeping his starfighter out of a tumble that would have smeared him across the cruiser’s ventral hull. Before he could straighten out, his threat display chimed again.

  “Oh, marvelous,” he muttered under his breath. Anakin’s surviving pursuer had switched targets. “Why is it always me?”

  “Perfect.” Through the cockpit speakers, Anakin’s voice carried grim satisfaction. “Both of them are on your tail.”

  “Perfect is not the word I’d use.” Obi-Wan twisted his yoke, juking madly as space around him flared scarlet. “We have to split them up!”

  “Break left.” Anakin sounded calm as a stone. “The turbolaser tower off your port bow: thread its guns. I’ll take things from there.”

  “Easy for you to say.” Obi-Wan whipped sideways along the cruiser’s superstructure. Fire from the pursuing tri-fighters blasted burning chunks from the cruiser’s armor. “Why am I always the bait?”

  “I’m right behind you. Artoo, lock on.”

  Obi-Wan spun his starfighter between the recoiling turbo-cannons close enough that energy-scatter made his cockpit clang like a gong, but still cannonfire flashed past him from the tri-fighters behind. “Anakin, they’re all over me!”

  “Dead ahead. Move right to clear my shot. Now!”

  Obi-Wan flared his port jets and the starfighter kicked to the right. One of the tri-fighters behind him decided it couldn’t follow and went for a ventral slip that took it directly into the blasts from Anakin’s cannons.

  It vanished in a boil of superheated gas.

  “Good shooting, Artoo.” Anakin’s dry chuckle in the cockpit’s speakers vanished behind the clang of lasers blasting ablative shielding off Obi-Wan’s left wing.

  “I’m running out of tricks here—”

  Clearing the vast Republic cruiser put him on course for the curving hull of one of the Trade Federation’s battleships; space between the two capital ships blazed with turbolaser exchanges. Some of those flashing energy blasts were as big around as his entire ship; the merest graze would blow him to atoms.

  Obi-Wan dived right in.

  He had the Force to guide him through, and the tri-fighter had only its electronic reflexes—but those electronic reflexes operated at roughly the speed of light. It stayed on his tail as if he were dragging it by a tow cable.

  When Obi-Wan went left and Anakin right, the tri-fighter would swing halfway through the difference. The same with up and down. It was averaging his movements with Anakin’s; somehow its droid brain had realized that as long as it stayed between the two Jedi, Anakin couldn’t fire on it without hitting his partner. The tri-fighter was under no similiar restraint: Obi-Wan flew through a storm of scarlet needles.

  “No wonder we’re losing the war,” he muttered. “They’re getting smarter.”

  “What was that, Master? I didn’t copy.”

  Obi-Wan kicked his starfighter into a tight spiral toward the Federation cruiser. “I’m taking the deck!”

  “Good idea. I need some room to maneuver.”

  Cannonfire tracked closer. Obi-Wan’s cockpit speakers buzzed. “Cut right, Obi-Wan! Hard right! Don’t let him get a handle on you! Artoo, lock on!”

  Obi-Wan’s starfighter streaked along the curve of the Separatist cruiser’s dorsal hull. Antifighter flak burst on all sides as the cruiser’s guns tried to pick him up. He rolled a right wingover into the service trench that stretched the length of the cruiser’s hull. This low and close to the deck, the cruiser’s antifighter guns couldn’t depress their angle of fire enough to get a shot, but the tri-fighter stayed right on his tail.

  At the far end of the service trench, the massive support buttres
ses of the cruiser’s towering bridge left no room for even Obi-Wan’s small craft. He kicked his starfighter into a half roll that whipped him out of the trench and shot him straight up the tower’s angled leading edge. One burst of his underjets jerked him past the forward viewports of the bridge with only meters to spare—and the tri-fighter followed his path exactly.

  “Of course,” he muttered. “That would have been too easy. Anakin, where are you?”

  One of the control surfaces on his left wing shattered in a burst of plasma. It felt like being shot in the arm. He toggled switches, fighting the yoke. R4-P17 shrilled at him. Obi-Wan keyed internal comm. “Don’t try to fix it, Arfour. I’ve shut it down.”

  “I have the lock!” Anakin said. “Go! Firing—now!”

  Obi-Wan hit maximum drag on his intact wing, and his starfighter shot into a barely controlled arc high and right as Anakin’s cannons vaporized the last tri-fighter.

  Obi-Wan fired retros to stall his starfighter in the blind spot behind the Separatist cruiser’s bridge. He hung there for a few seconds to get his breathing and heart under control. “Thanks, Anakin. That was—thanks. That’s all.”

  “Don’t thank me. It was Artoo’s shooting.”

  “Yes. I suppose, if you like, you can thank your droid for me as well. And, Anakin—?”

  “Yes, Master?”

  “Next time, you’re the bait.”

  This is Obi-Wan Kenobi:

  A phenomenal pilot who doesn’t like to fly. A devastating warrior who’d rather not fight. A negotiator without peer who frankly prefers to sit alone in a quiet cave and meditate.

  Jedi Master. General in the Grand Army of the Republic. Member of the Jedi Council. And yet, inside, he feels like he’s none of these things.

  Inside, he still feels like a Padawan.

  It is a truism of the Jedi Order that a Jedi Knight’s education truly begins only when he becomes a Master: that everything important about being a Master is learned from one’s student. Obi-Wan feels the truth of this every day.