Book 0 - The Dark Lord Trilogy

by James Luceno

  The fourth element of an effective Jedi trap is a massively overwhelming force of combat troops who are willing to burn the whole planet, including themselves if necessary, to ensure that the Jedi in question does not escape.

  A textbook example of the ideal Jedi trap is the one that waited on Utapau for Obi-Wan Kenobi.

  As Obi-Wan sent his starfighter spiraling in toward a landing deck that protruded from the sheer sandstone wall of the biggest of Utapau’s sinkhole-cities, he reviewed what he knew of the planet and its inhabitants.

  There wasn’t much.

  He knew that despite its outward appearance, Utapau was not a true desert planet; there was water aplenty in an underground ocean that circled its globe. The erosive action of this buried ocean had undermined vast areas of its surface, and frequent groundquakes collapsed them into sinkholes large enough to land a Victory-class Star Destroyer, where civilization could thrive below reach of the relentless scouring hyperwinds on the surface. He knew that the planet had little in the way of high technology, and that their energy economy was based on wind power; the planet’s limited interstellar trade had begun only a few decades before, when offworld water-mining companies had discovered that the waters of the world-ocean were rich in dissolved trace elements. He knew that the inhabitants were near-human, divided into two distinct species, the tall, lordly, slow-moving Utapauns, nicknamed Ancients for their astonishing longevity, and the stubby Utai, called Shorts, both for their stature and for their brief busy lives.

  And he knew that Grievous was here.

  How he knew, he could not say; so far as he could tell, his conviction had nothing to do with the Force. But within seconds of the Vigilance’s realspace reversion, he was sure. This was it. One way or another, this was the place his hunt for General Grievous would come to a close.

  He felt it in his bones: Utapau was a planet for endings.

  He was going in alone; Commander Cody and three batallions of troopers waited in rapid-deployment vehicles—LAAT/i’s and Jadthu-class landers—just over the horizon. Obi-Wan’s plan was to pinpoint Grievous’s location, then keep the bio-droid general busy until the clones could attack; he would be a one-man diversionary force, holding the attention of what was sure to be thousands or tens of thousands of combat droids directed inward toward him and Grievous, to cover the approach of the clones. Two battallions would strike full-force, with the third in reserve, both to provide reinforcements and to cover possible escape routes.

  “I can keep them distracted for quite some time,” Obi-Wan had told Cody on the flight deck of Vigilance. “Just don’t take too long.”

  “Come on, boss,” Cody had said, smiling out of Jango Fett’s face, “have I ever let you down?”

  “Well—” Obi-Wan had said with a slim answering smile, “Cato Neimoidia, for starters …”

  “That was Anakin’s fault; he was the one who was late …”

  “Oh? And who will you blame it on this time?” Obi-Wan had chuckled as he climbed into his starfighter’s cockpit and strapped himself in. “Very well, then. I’ll try not to destroy all the droids before you get there.”

  “I’m counting on you, boss. Don’t let me down.”

  “Have I ever?”

  “Well,” Cody had said with a broad grin, “there was Cato Neimoidia …”

  Obi-Wan’s fighter bucked through coils of turbulence; the rim of the sinkhole caught enough of the hyperwinds above that the first few levels of city resided in a semipermanent hurricane. Whirling blades of wind-power turbines stuck out from the sinkhole’s sides on generator pods so scoured by the fierce winds that they might themselves have been molded of liquid sandstone. He fought the fighter’s controls to bring it down level after level until the wind had become a mere gale; even after reaching the landing deck in the depths of the sinkhole, R4-G9 had to extend the starfighter’s docking claws to keep it from being blown, skidding, right off the deck.

  A ribbed semitransparent canopy swung out to enfold the landing deck; once it had settled into place around him, the howl of winds dropped to silence and Obi-Wan popped the cockpit.

  A pack of Utai was already scampering toward the starfighter, which stood alone on the deck; they carried a variety of tools and dragged equipment behind them, and Obi-Wan assumed they were some sort of ground crew. Behind them glided the stately form of an Utapaun in a heavy deck-length robe of deep scarlet that had a lapel collar so tall it concealed his vestigial ear-disks. The Utapaun’s glabrous scalp glistened with a sheen of moisture, and he walked with a staff that reminded Obi-Wan vaguely of Yoda’s beloved gimer stick.

  That was quick, Obi-Wan thought. Almost like they’ve been expecting me.

  “Greetings, young Jedi,” the Utapaun said gravely in accented Basic. “I am Tion Medon, master of port administration for this place of peace. What business could bring a Jedi to our remote sanctuary?”

  Obi-Wan sensed no malice in this being, and the Utapaun radiated a palpable aura of fear; Obi-Wan decided to tell the truth. “My business is the war,” he said.

  “There is no war here, unless you have brought it with you,” Medon replied, a mask of serenity concealing what the Force told Obi-Wan was anxiety verging on panic.

  “Very well, then,” Obi-Wan said, playing along. “Please permit me to refuel here, and to use your city as a base to search the surrounding systems.”

  “For what do you search?”

  “Even in the Outer Rim, you must have heard of General Grievous. It is he I seek, and his army of droids.”

  Tion Medon took another step closer and leaned down to bring his face near Obi-Wan’s ear. “He is here!” Medon whispered urgently. “We are hostages—we are being watched!”

  Obi-Wan nodded matter-of-factly. “Thank you, Master Medon,” he said in a thoroughly ordinary voice. “I am grateful for your hospitality, and will depart as soon as your crew refuels my starfighter.”

  “Listen to me, young Jedi!” Medon’s whisper became even more intense. “You must depart in truth! I was ordered to reveal their presence—this is a trap!”

  “Of course it is,” Obi-Wan said equably.

  “The tenth level—thousands of war droids—tens of thousands!”

  “Have your people seek shelter.” Obi-Wan turned casually and scanned upward, counting levels. On the tenth, his eye found a spiny spheroid of metal: a Dreadnaught-sized structure that clearly had not been there for long—its gleaming surface had not yet been scoured to matte by the sand in the constant winds. He nodded absently and spoke softly, as though to himself. “Geenine, take my starfighter back to the Vigilance. Instruct Commander Cody to inform Jedi Command on Coruscant that I have made contact with General Grievous. I am engaging now. Cody is to attack in full force, as planned.”

  The astromech beeped acknowledgment from its forward socket, and Obi-Wan turned once more to Tion Medon. “Tell them I promised to file a report with Republic Intelligence. Tell them I really only wanted fuel enough to leave immediately.”

  “But—but what will you do?”

  “If you have warriors,” Obi-Wan said gravely, “now is the time.”

  In the holocomm center of Jedi Command, within the heart of the Temple on Coruscant, Anakin watched a life-sized holoscan of Clone Commander Cody report that Obi-Wan had made contact with General Grievous.

  “We are beginning our supporting attack as ordered. And—if I may say so, sirs—from my experience working with General Kenobi, I have a suspicion that Grievous does not have long to live.”

  If I were there with him, Anakin thought, it’d be more than a suspicion. Obi-Wan, be careful—

  “Thank you, Commander.” Mace Windu’s face did not betray the slightest hint of the mingled dread and anticipation Anakin was sure he must be feeling; while Anakin himself felt ready to burst, Windu looked calm as a stone. “Keep us apprised of your progress. May the Force be with you, and with Master Kenobi.”

  “I’m sure it will be, sir. Cody out.”

  The
holoscan flickered to nothingness. Mace Windu turned brief but seemingly significant glances upon the other two Masters in attendance, both holoscans themselves: Ki-Adi-Mundi from the fortified command center on Mygeeto, and from a guerrilla outpost on Kashyyyk, Yoda.

  Then he turned to Anakin. “Take this report to the Chancellor.”

  “Of course I will, Master.”

  “And take careful note of his reaction. We will need a full account.”

  “Master?”

  “What he says, Anakin. Who he calls. What he does. Everything. Even his facial expressions. It’s very important.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “You don’t have to. Just do it.”

  “Master—”

  “Anakin, do I have to remind you that you are still a Jedi? You are still subject to the orders of this Council.”

  “Yes, Master Windu. Yes, I am,” he said, and left.

  Once Skywalker was gone, Mace Windu found himself in a chair, staring at the doorway through which the young Jedi Knight had left. “Now we shall see,” he murmured. “At last. The waters will begin to clear.”

  Though he shared the command center with the holoscans of two other Jedi Masters, Mace wasn’t talking to them. He spoke to the grim, clouded future inside his head.

  “Have you considered,” Ki-Adi-Mundi said carefully, from faraway Mygeeto, “that if Palpatine refuses to surrender power, removing him is only a first step?”

  Mace looked at the blue ghost of the Cerean Master. “I am not a politician. Removing a tyrant is enough for me.”

  “But it will not be enough for the Republic,” Ki-Adi-Mundi countered sadly. “Palpatine’s dictatorship has been legitimized—and can be legalized, even enshrined in a revised Constitution—by the supermajority he controls in the Senate.”

  The grim future inside Mace’s head turned even darker. The Cerean was right.

  “Filled with corruption, the Senate is,” Yoda agreed from Kashyyyk. “Controlled, they must be, until replaced the corrupted Senators can be, with Senators honest and—”

  “Do you hear us?” Mace lowered his head into his hands. “How have we come to this? Arresting a Chancellor. Taking over the Senate—! It’s as though Dooku was right—to save the Republic, we’ll have to destroy it …”

  Yoda lifted his head, and his eyes slitted as though he struggled with some inner pain. “Hold on to hope we must; our true enemy, Palpatine is not, nor the Senate; the true enemy is instead the Sith Lord Sidious, who controls them both. Once destroyed Sidious is … all these other concerns, less dire they will instantly become.”

  “Yes.” Mace Windu rose, and moved to the window, hands folded behind his back. “Yes, that is true.”

  Indigo gloom gathered among the towers outside.

  “And we have put the chosen one in play against the last Lord of the Sith,” he said. “In that, we must place our faith, and our hopes for the future of the Republic.”

  The landing deck canopy parted, and the blue-and-white Jedi starfighter blasted upward into the gale. From deep shadows at the rear of the deck, Obi-Wan watched it go.

  “I suppose I am committed, now,” he murmured.

  Through electrobinoculars produced from his equipment belt, he examined that suspiciously shiny spheroid high above on the tenth level. The spray of spines had to be droid-control antennas. That’s where Grievous would be: at the nerve center of his army.

  “Then that’s where I should be, too.” He looked around, frowning. “Never an air taxi when you need one …”

  The reclosing of the deck canopy quieted the howl of the wind outside, and now from deeper within the city Obi-Wan could hear a ragged choir of hoarsely bellowing cries that had the resonance of large animals—they reminded him of something …

  Suubatars, that was it—they sounded vaguely like the calls of the suubatars he and Anakin had ridden on one of their last missions before the war, back when the biggest worry Obi-Wan had was how to keep his promise to Qui-Gon …

  But he had no time for nostalgia. He could practically hear Qui-Gon reminding him to focus on the now, and give himself over to the living Force.

  So he did.

  Mere moments of following the cries through the shadows of deserted hallways carved into the sandstone brought Obi-Wan in sight of an immense, circular arena-like area, where a ring of balcony was joined to a flat lower level by spokes of broad, corrugated ramps; the ceiling above was hung with yellowish lamprods that cast a light the same color as the sunbeams striking through an arc of wide oval archways open to the interior of the sinkhole outside. The winds that whistled through those wide archways also went a long way toward cutting the eye-watering reptile-den stench down from overpowering to merely nauseating.

  Squatting, lying, and milling aimlessly about the lower level were a dozen or so large lizard-like beasts that looked like the product of some mad geneticist’s cross of Tatooine krayt dragons with Haruun Kal ankkoxen: four meters tall at the shoulder, long crooked legs that ended in five-clawed feet clearly designed for scaling rocky cliffs, ten meters of powerful tail ridged with spines and tipped with a horn-bladed mace, a flexible neck leading up to an armor-plated head that sported an impressive cowl of spines of its own—they looked fearsome enough that Obi-Wan might have thought them some sort of dangerous wild predators or vicious watchbeasts, were it not for the docile way they tolerated the team of Utai wranglers who walked among them, hosing them down, scraping muck from their scales, and letting them take bundles of greens from their hands.

  Not far from where Obi-Wan stood, several large racks were hung with an array of high-backed saddles in various styles and degrees of ornamentation, very much indeed like those the Alwari of Ansion had strapped to their suubatars.

  Now he really missed Anakin …

  Anakin disliked living mounts almost as much as Obi-Wan hated to fly. Obi-Wan had long suspected that it was Anakin’s gift with machines that worked against him with suubatar or dew-back or bantha; he could never get entirely comfortable riding anything with a mind of its own. He could vividly imagine Anakin’s complaints as he climbed into one of these saddles.

  It seemed an awfully long time since Obi-Wan had had an opportunity to tease Anakin a bit.

  With a sigh, he brought himself back to business. Moving out of the shadows, he walked down one of the corrugated ramps and made a slight, almost imperceptible hand gesture in the direction of the nearest of the Utai dragonmount wranglers. “I need transportation.”

  The Short’s bulging eyes went distant and a bit glassy, and he responded with a string of burbling glottal hoots that had a decidedly affirmative tone.

  Obi-Wan made another gesture. “Get me a saddle.”

  With another string of affirmative burbles, the Short waddled off.

  While he waited for his saddle, Obi-Wan examined the dragonmounts. He passed up the largest, and the one most heavily muscled; he skipped over the leanest built-for-speed beast, and didn’t even approach the one with the fiercest gleam in its eye. He didn’t actually pay attention to outward signs of strength or health or personality; he was using his hands and eyes and ears purely as focusing channels for the Force. He didn’t know what he was looking for, but he trusted that he would recognize it when he found it.

  Qui-Gon, he reflected with an inward smile, would approve.

  Finally he came to a dragonmount with a clear, steady gleam in its round yellow eyes, and small, close-set scales that felt warm and dry. It neither shied back from his hand nor bent submissively to his touch, but only returned his searching gaze with calm, thoughtful intelligence. Through the Force, he felt in the beast an unshakable commitment to obedience and care for its rider: an almost Jedi-like devotion to service as the ultimate duty.

  This was why Obi-Wan would always prefer a living mount. A speeder is incapable of caring if it crashes.

  “This one,” he said. “I’ll take this one.”

  The Short had returned with a plain, sturdily fu
nctional saddle; as he and the other wranglers undertook the complicated task of tacking up the dragonmount, he nodded at the beast and said, “Boga.”

  “Ah,” Obi-Wan said. “Thank you.”

  He took a sheaf of greens from a nearby bin and offered them to the dragonmount. The great beast bent its head, its wickedly hooked beak delicately withdrew the greens from Obi-Wan’s hand, and it chewed them with fastidious thoroughness.

  “Good girl, Boga. Erm—” Obi-Wan frowned at the Short. “—she is a she, isn’t she?”

  The wrangler frowned back. “Warool noggaggllo?” he said, shrugging, which Obi-Wan took to mean I have no idea what you’re saying to me.

  “Very well, then,” Obi-Wan said with an answering shrug. “She you will have to be, then, Boga. Unless you care to tell me otherwise.”

  Boga made no objection.

  He swung himself up into the saddle and the dragonmount rose, arching her powerful back in a feline stretch that lifted Obi-Wan more than four meters off the floor. Obi-Wan looked down at the Utai wranglers. “I cannot pay you. As compensation, I can only offer the freedom of your planet; I hope that will suffice.”

  Without waiting for a reply that he would not have understood anyway, Obi-Wan touched Boga on the neck. Boga reared straight up and raked the air with her hooked foreclaws as though she were shredding an imaginary hailfire droid, then gathered herself and leapt to the ring-balcony in a single bound. Obi-Wan didn’t need to use the long, hook-tipped goad strapped in a holster alongside the saddle; nor did he do more than lightly hold the reins in one hand. Boga seemed to understand exactly where he wanted to go.

  The dragonmount slipped sinuously through one of the wide oval apertures into the open air of the sinkhole, then turned and seized the sandstone with those hooked claws to carry Obi-Wan straight up the sheer wall.

  Level after level they climbed. The city looked and felt deserted. Nothing moved save the shadows of clouds crossing the sinkhole’s mouth far, far above; even the wind-power turbines had been locked down.