DEATH ON UTAPAU
When constructing an effective Jedi trap—as opposed to the sort that results in nothing more than an embarrassingly brief entry in the Temple archives—there are several design features that one should include for best results.
The first is an irresistible bait. The commanding general of an outlaw nation, personally responsible for billions of deaths across the galaxy, is ideal.
The second is a remote, nearly inaccessible location, one that is easily taken and easily fortified, with a sharply restricted field of action. It should also, ideally, belong to someone else, preferably an enemy; the locations used for Jedi traps never survive the operation unscathed, and many don’t survive it at all. An excellent choice would be an impoverished desert planet in the Outer Rim, with unwarlike natives, whose few cities are built in a cluster of sinkholes on a vast arid plateau. A city in a sinkhole is virtually a giant kill-jar; once a Jedi flies in, all one need do is seal the lid.
Third, since it is always a good idea to remain well out of reach when plotting against a Jedi’s life—on the far side of the galaxy is considered best—one should have a reliable proxy to do the actual murder. The exemplar of a reliable proxy would be, for example, the most prolific living Jedi killer, backed up by a squad of advanced combat droids designed, built, and armed specifically to fight Jedi. Making one’s proxy double as the bait is an impressively elegant stroke, if it can be managed, since it ensures that the Jedi victim will voluntarily place himself in contact with the Jedi killer—and will continue to do so even after he realizes the extent of the trap, out of a combination of devotion to duty and a not-entirely-unjustified arrogance.
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 Al-wari 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 dewback 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 functional 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.
The first sign of life he saw came on the tenth level itself; a handful of other dragonmounts lay basking in the midday sun, not far from the durasteel barnacle of the droid-control center. Obi-Wan rode Boga right up to the control center’s open archway, then jumped down from the saddle.
The archway led into a towering vaulted hall, its durasteel decking bare of furnishing. Deep within the shadows that gathered in the hall stood a cluster of five figures. Their faces were the color of bleached bone. Or ivory armorplast.
They looked like they might, just possibly, be waiting for him.
Obi-Wan nodded to himself.
“You’d best find your way home, girl,” he said, patting Boga’s scaled neck. “One way or another, I doubt I’ll have further need of your assistance.”
Boga gave a soft, almost regretful honk of acknowledgment, then bent a sharper curve into her long flexible neck to place her beak gently against Obi-Wan’s chest.
“It’s all right, Boga. I thank you for your help, but to stay here will be dangerous. This area is about to become a free-fire zone. Please. Go home.”
The dragonmount honked again and moved back, and Obi-Wan stepped from the sun into the shadow.
A wave-front of cool passed over him with the shade’s embrace. He walked without haste, without urgency. The Force layered connections upon connections, and brought them all to life within him: the chill deck plates beneath his boots, and the stone beneath those, and far below that the smooth lightless currents of the world-ocean. He became the turbulent swirl of wind whistling through the towering vaulted hall; he became the sunlight outside and the shadow within. His human heart in its cage of bone echoed the beat of an alien one in a casket of armorplast, and his mind whirred with the electronic signal cascades that passed for thought in Jedi-killer droids.
And when the Force layered into his consciousness the awareness of the structure of the great hall itself, he became aware, without surprise and without distress, that the entire expanse of vaulted ceiling above his head was actually a storage hive.
Filled with combat droids.
Which made him also aware, again without surprise and without distress, that he would very likely die here.
Contemplation of death brought only one slight sting of regret, and more than a bit of puzzlement. Until this very moment, he had never realized he’d always expected, for no discernible reason—
That when he died, Anakin would be with him.
How curious, he thought, and then he turned his mind to business.
Anakin had a feeling Master Windu was going to be disappointed.
Palpatine had hardly reacted at all.
The Supreme Chancellor of the Republic sat at the small desk in his private office, staring distractedly at an abstract twist of neuranium that Anakin had always assumed was supposed to be some kind of sculpture, and merely sighed, as though he had matters of much greater importance on his mind.
“I’m sorry, sir,” Anakin said, shifting his weight in front of Palpatine’s desk. “Perhaps you didn’t hear me. Obi-Wan has made contact with General Grievous. His attack is already under way—they’re fighting right now, sir!”
“Yes, yes, of course, Anakin. Yes, quite.” Palpatine still looked as if he was barely paying attention. “I entirely understand your concern for your friend. Let us hope he is up to the task.”
“It’s not just concern for Obi-Wan, sir; taking General Grievous will be the final victory for the Republic—!”
“Will it?” He turned to Anakin, and a distinctly troubled frown chased the distraction from his face. “I’m afraid, my boy, that our situation is a great deal more grave than even I had feared. Perhaps you should sit down.”
Anakin didn’t move. “What do you mean?”
“Grievous is no longer the real enemy. Even the Clone Wars themselves are now only … a distraction.”
“What?”
“The Council is about to make its move,” Palpatine said, grim and certain. “If we don’t stop them, by this time tomorrow the Jedi may very well have taken over the Republic.”
Anakin burst into astonished laughter. “But sir—please, you can’t possibly believe that—”
“Anakin, I know. I will be the first to be arrested—the first to be executed—but I will be far from the last.”
Anakin could only shake his head in disbelief. “Sir, I know that the Council and you have … disagreements, but—”
“This is far beyond any personal dispute between me and the members of the Council. This is a plot generations in the making—a plot to take over the Republic itself. Anakin, think—you know they don’t trust you. They never have. You know they have been keeping things from you. You know they have made plans behind your back—you know that even your great friend Obi-Wan has not told you what their true intentions are … It’s because you’re not like them, Anakin—you’re a man, not just a Jedi.”
Anakin’s head drew down toward his shoulders as though he found himself under enemy fire. “I don’t—they wouldn’t—”
“Ask yourself: why did they send you to me with this news? Why? Why not simply notify me through normal channels?”
And take careful note of his reaction. We will need a full account
“Sir, I—ah—”
“No need to fumble for an explanation,” he said gently. “You’ve already as much as admitted they’ve ordered you to spy upon me. Don’t you understand that anything you tell them tonight—whatever it may be—will be used as an excuse to order my execution?”
“That’s impossible—” Anakin sought desperately for an argument. “The Senate—the Senate would never allow it—”
“The Senate will be powerless to stop it. I told you this is bigger than any personal dislike between the Council and myself. I am only one man, Anakin. My authority is granted by the Senate; it is the Senate that is the true government of the Republic. Killing me is nothing; to control the Republic, the Jedi will have to take over the Senate first.”
“But the Jedi—the Jedi serve the Senate—!”
“Do they?” Palpatine asked mildly. “Or do they serve certain Senators?”
“This is all—I’m sorry, Chancellor, please, you have to understand how this sounds …”
“Here—” The Chancellor rummaged around within his desk for a moment, then brought forth a document reader. “Do you know what this is?”
Anakin recognized the seal Padmé had placed on it. “Yes, sir—that’s the Petition of the Two Thousand—”
“No, Anakin! No!” Palpatine slammed the document reader on his desktop hard enough to make Anakin jump. “It is a roll of traitors.”
Anakin went absolutely still. “What?”
“There are, now, only two kinds of Senators in our government, Anakin. Those whose names are on this so-called petition,” Palpatine said, “and those whom the Jedi are about to arrest.”
Anakin could only stare.
He couldn’t argue. He couldn’t even make himself disbelieve.
He had only one thought.
Padmé …?
How much trouble was she in?
“Didn’t I warn you, Anakin? Didn’t I tell you what Obi-Wan was up to? Why do you think he was meeting with the leaders of this … delegation … behind your back?”
“But—but, sir, please, surely, all they asked for is an end to the war. It’s what the Jedi want, too. I mean, it’s what we all want, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”
“Perhaps. Though how that end comes about may be the single most important thing about the war. More important, even, than who wins.”
Oh, Padmé, Anakin moaned inside his head. Padmé, what have you gotten yourself into?
“Their … sincerity … may be much to be admired,” Palpatine said. “Or it would be, were it not that there was much more to that meeting than met the eye.”
Anakin frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Their … petition … was nothing of the sort. It was, in fact, a not-so-veiled threat.” Palpatine sighed regretfully. “It was a show of force, Anakin. A demonstration of the political power the Jedi will be able to muster in support of their rebellion.”
Anakin blinked. “But—but surely—” he stammered, rounding Palpatine’s desk, “surely Senator Amidala, at least, can be trusted …”
“I understand how badly you need to believe that,” the Chancellor said. “But Senator Amidala is hiding something. Surely you sensed it.”
“If she is—” Anakin swayed; the floor seemed to be tilting under his feet like the deck of Invisible Hand. “Even if she is,” he said, his voice flat, overcontrolled, “it doesn’t mean that what she is hiding is treason.”
Palpatine’s brows drew together. “I’m surprised your Jedi insights are not more sensitive to such things.”
“I simply don’t sense betrayal in Senator Amidala,” Anakin insisted.
Palpatine leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers, studying Anakin skeptically. “Yes, you do,” he said after a moment. “Though you don’t want to admit it. Perhaps it is because neither you nor she yet understands that by betraying me, she is also betraying you.”
“She couldn’t—” Anakin pressed a hand to his forehead; his dizziness was getting worse. When had he last eaten? He couldn’t remember. It might have been before the last time he’d slept. “She could never …”
“Of course she could,” Palpatine said. “That is the nature of politics, my boy. Don’t take it too personally. It doesn’t mean the two of you can’t be happy together.”
“What—?” The room seemed to darken around him. “What do you mean?”
“Please, Anakin. Are we not past the point of playing childish games with one another? I know, do you understand? I have always known. I have pretended ignorance only to spare you discomfort.”
Anakin had to lean on the desk. “What—what do you know?”
“Anakin, Padmé was my Queen; I was her ambassador to the Senate. Naboo is my home. You of all people know how I value loyalty and friendship; do you think I have no friends among the civil clergy in Theed? Your secret ceremony has never been secret. Not from me, at any rate. I have always been very happy for you both.”
“You—” Words whirled through Anakin’s mind, and none of them made sense. “But if she’s going to betray us—”
“That, my boy,” Palpatine said, “is entirely up to you.”
The fog inside Anakin’s head seemed to solidify into a long, dark tunnel. The point of light at the end was Palpatine’s face. “I don’t—I don’t understand …”
“Oh yes, that’s very clear.” The Chancellor’s voice seemed to be coming from very far away. “Please sit, my boy. You’re looking rather unwell. May I offer you something to drink?”
“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 eyes. “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 Padmé 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 Padmé 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 Padmé?”
“Padmé …”
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 durasteel 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 Forceassisted 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 a 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.”
“That’s not what it’s about to brim with,” Obi-Wan said. “You should pay more attention to the weather.”
Yellow eyes narrowed behind a mask of armorplast. “What?”
“Have a look outside.” He pointed his lightsaber toward the archway. “It’s about to start raining clones.”
Grievous said again, turning to look, “What?”
A shadow had passed over the sun as though one of the towering thunderheads on the horizon had caught a stray current in the hyperwinds and settled above Pau City. But it wasn’t a cloud.
It was the Vigilance.
While twilight enfolded the sinkhole, over the bright desert above assault craft skimmed the dunes in a tightening ring centered on the city. Hailfire droids rolled out from caves in the wind-scoured mesas, unleashing firestorms of missiles toward the oncoming craft for exactly 2.5 seconds apiece, which was how long it took for the Vigilance’s sensor operators to transfer data to its turbolaser batteries.
Thunderbolts roared down through the atmosphere, and hailfire droids disintegrated. Pinpoint counterfire from the bubble turrets of LAAT/i’s met missiles in blossoming fireballs that were ripped to shreds of smoke as the oncoming craft blasted through them.
LAAT/i’s streaked over the rim of the sinkhole and spiraled downward with all guns blazing, crabbing outward to keep their forward batteries raking on the sinkhole’s wall, while at the rim above, Jadthu-class armored landers hovered with bay doors wide, trailing sprays of polyplast cables like immense ice-white tassels that looped all the way to the ocean mouths that gaped at the lowest level of the city. Down those tassels, rappelling so fast they seemed to be simply falling, came endless streams of armored troopers, already firing on the combat droids that marched out to meet them.
Streamers of cables brushed the outer balcony of the control center, and down them slid white-armored troopers, each with one hand on his mechanized line-brake and the other full of DC-15 blaster rifle on full auto, spraying continuous chains of packeted particle beams. Droids wheeled and dropped and leapt into the air and burst to fragments. Surviving droids opened up on the clones as though grateful for something to shoot at, blasting holes in armor, cooking flesh with superheated steam from deep-tissue hits, blowing some troopers entirely off their cables to tumble toward a messy final landing ten levels below.
When the survivors of the first wave of clones hit the deck, the next wave was right behind them.
Grievous turned back to Obi-Wan. He lowered his head like an angry bantha, yellow glare fixed on the Jedi Master. “To the death, then.”
Obi-Wan sighed. “If you insist.”
The bio-droid general cast back his cloak, revealing the four lightsabers pocketed there. He stepped back, spreading wide his duranium arms. “You will not be the first Jedi I have killed, nor will you be the last.”
Obi-Wan’s only reply was to subtly shift the angle of his lightsaber up and forward.
The general’s wide-spread arms now split along their lengths, dividing in half—even his hands split in half—
Now he had four arms. And four hands.
And each hand took a lightsaber as his cloak dropped to the floor.
They snarled to life and Grievous spun all four of them in a flourishing velocity so fast and so seamlessly integrated that he seemed to stand within a pulsing sphere of blue and green energy.
“Come on, then, Kenobi! Come for me!” he said. “I have been trained in your Jedi arts by Lord Tyranus himself!”
“Do you mean Count Dooku? What a curious coincidence,” Obi-Wan said with a deceptively pleasant smile. “I trained the man who killed him.”
With a convulsive snarl, Grievous lunged.
The sphere of blue lightsaber energy around him bulged toward Obi-Wan and opened like a mouth to bite him in half. Obi-Wan stood his ground, his blade still.
Chain-lightning teeth closed upon him.
This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, right now:
You don’t remember putting away your lightsaber.
You don’t remember moving from Palpatine’s private office to his larger public one; you don’t remember collapsing in the chair where you now sit, nor do you remember drinking water from the half-empty glass that you find in your mechanical hand.
You remember only that the last man in the galaxy you still thought you could trust has been lying to you since the day you met.
And you’re not even angry about it.
Only stunned.
“After all, Anakin, you are the last man who has a right to be angry at someone for keeping a secret. What else was I to do?”
Palpatine sits in his familiar tall oval chair behind his familiar desk; the lampdisks are full on, the office eerily bright.
Ordinary.
As though this is merely another one of your friendly conversations, the casual evening chats you’ve enjoyed together for so many years.
As though nothing has happened.
As though nothing has changed.
“Corruption had made the Republic a cancer in the body of the galaxy, and no one could burn it out; not the judicials, not the Senate, not even the Jedi Order itself. I was the only man strong and skilled enough for this task; I was the only man who dared even attempt it. Without my small deception, how should I have cured the Republic? Had I revealed myself to you, or to anyone else, the Jedi would have hunted me down and murdered me without trial—very much as you nearly did, only a moment ago.”
You can’t argue. Words are beyond you.
He rises, moving around his desk, taking one of the small chairs and drawing it close to yours.
“If only you could know how I have longed to tell you, Anakin. All these years—since the very day we met, my boy. I have watched over you, waiting as you grew in strength and wisdom, biding my time until now, today, when you are finally ready to understand who you truly are, and your true place in the history of the galaxy.”
Numb words blur from your numb lips. “The chosen one …”
“Exactly, my boy. Exactly. You are the chosen one.” He leans toward you, eyes clear. Steady. Utterly honest. “Chosen by me.”
He turns a hand toward the panorama of light-sprayed cityscape through the window behind his desk. “Look out there, Anakin. A trillion beings on this planet alone—in the galaxy as a whole, uncounted quadrillions—and of them all, I have chosen you, Anakin Skywalker, to be the heir to my power. To all that I am.”
“But that’s not … that’s not the prophecy. That’s not the prophecy of the chosen one …”
“Is this such a problem for you? Is not your quest to find a way to overturn prophecy?” Palpatine leaned close, smiling, warm and kindly. “Anakin, do you think the Sith did not know of this prophecy? Do you think we would simply sleep while it came to pass?”
“You mean—”
“This is what you must understand. This Jedi submission to fate … this is not the way of the Sith, Anakin. This is not my way. This is not your way. It has never been. It need never be.”
You’re drowning.
“I am not …,” you hear yourself say, “… on your side. I am not evil.”
“Who said anything about evil? I am bringing peace to the galaxy. Is that evil? I am offering you the power to save Padmé. Is that evil? Have I attacked you? Drugged you? Are you being tortured? My boy, I am asking you. I am asking you to do the right thing. Turn your back on treason. On all those who would harm the Republic. I’m asking you to do exactly what you have sworn to do: bring peace and justice to the galaxy. And save Padmé, of course—haven’t you sworn to protect her, too …?”
“I—but—I—” Words will not fit themselves into the answers you need. If only Obi-Wan were here—Obi-Wan would know what to say. What to do.
Obi-Wan could handle this.
Rght now, you know you can’t.
“I—I’ll turn you over to the Jedi Council—they’ll know what to do—”
“I’m sure they will. They are already planning to overthrow the Republic; you’ll give them exactly the excuse they’re looking for. And when they come to execute me, will that be justice? Will they be bringing peace?”
“They won’t—they wouldn’t—!”
“Well, of course I hope you’re correct, Anakin. You’ll forgive me if I don’t share your blind loyalty to your comrades. I suppose it does indeed come down, in the end, to a question of loyalty,” he said thoughtfully. “That’s what you must ask yourself, my boy. Whether your loyalty is to the Jedi, or to the Republic.”
“It’s not—it’s not like that—”
Palpatine lifted his shoulders. “Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s simply a question of whether you love Obi-Wan Kenobi more than you love your wife.”
There is no more searching for words.
There are no longer words at all.
“Take your time. Meditate on it. I will still be here when you decide.”
Inside your head, there is only fire. Around your heart, the dragon whispers that all things die.
This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, right now.
There is an understated elegance in Obi-Wan Kenobi’s lightsaber technique, one that is quite unlike the feel one might get from the other great swordsbeings of the Jedi Order. He lacks entirely the flash, the pure bold élan of an Anakin Skywalker; there is nowhere in him the penumbral ferocity of a Mace Windu or a Depa Billaba nor the stylish grace of a Shaak Ti or a Dooku, and he is nothing resembling the whirlwind of destruction that Yoda can become.
He is simplicity itself.
Before Obi-Wan had left Coruscant, Mace Windu had told him of facing Grievous in single combat atop a mag-lev train during the general’s daring raid to capture Palpatine. Mace had told him how the computers slaved to Grievous’s brain had apparently analyzed even Mace’s unconventionally lethal Vaapad and had been able to respond in kind after a single exchange.
“He must have been trained by Count Dooku,” Mace had said, “so you can expect Makashi as well; given the number of Jedi he has fought and slain, you must expect that he can attack in any style, or all of them. In fact, Obi-Wan, I believe that of all living Jedi, you have the best chance to defeat him.”
This pronouncement had startled Obi-Wan, and he had protested. After all, the only form in which he was truly even proficient was Soresu, which was the most common lightsaber form in the Jedi Order. Founded upon the basic deflection principles all Padawans were taught—to enable them to protect themselves from blaster bolts—Soresu was very simple, and so restrained and defense-oriented that it was very nearly downright passive.
“But surely, Master Windu,” Obi-Wan had said, “you, with the power of Vaapad—or Yoda’s mastery of Ataro—”
Mace Windu had almost smiled. “I created Vaapad to answer my weakness: it channels my own darkness into a weapon of the light. Master Yoda’s Ataro is also an answer to weakness: the limitations of reach and mobility imposed by his stature and his age. But for you? What weakness does Soresu answer?”
Blinking, Obi-Wan had been forced to admit he’d never actually thought of it that way.
“That is so like you, Master Kenobi,” the Korun Master had said, shaking his head. “I am called a great swordsman because I invented a lethal style; but who is greater, the creator of a killing form—or the master of the classic form?”
“I’m very flattered that you would consider me a master, but really—”
“Not a master. The master,” Mace had said. “Be who you are, and Grievous will never defeat you.”
So now, facing the tornado of annihilating energy that is Grievous’s attack, Obi-Wan simply is who he is.
The electrodrivers powering Grievous’s mechanical arms let each of the four attack thrice in a single second; integrated by combat algorithms in the bio-droid’s electronic network of peripheral processors, each of the twelve strikes per second came from a different angle with different speed and intensity, an unpredictably broken rhythm of slashes, chops, and stabs of which every single one could take Obi-Wan’s life.
Not one touched him.
After all, he had often walked unscathed through hornet-swarms of blasterfire, defended only by the Force’s direction of his blade; countering twelve blows per second was only difficult, not impossible. His blade wove an intricate web of angles and curves, never truly fast but always just fast enough, each motion of his lightsaber subtly interfering with three or four or eight of the general’s strikes, the rest sizzling past him, his precise, minimal shifts of weight and stance slipping them by centimeters.
Grievous, snarling fury, ramped up the intensity and velocity of his attacks—sixteen per second, eighteen—until finally, at twenty strikes per second, he overloaded Obi-Wan’s defense.
So Obi-Wan used his defense to attack.
A subtle shift in the angle of a single parry brought Obi-Wan’s blade in contact not with the blade of the oncoming lightsaber, but with the handgrip.
—slice—
The blade winked out of existence a hairbreadth before it would have burned through Obi-Wan’s forehead. Half the severed lightsaber skittered away, along with the duranium thumb and first finger of the hand that had held it.
Grievous paused, eyes pulsing wide, then drawing narrow. He lifted his maimed hand and stared at the white-hot stumps that held now only half a useless lightsaber.
Obi-Wan smiled at him.
Grievous lunged.
Obi-Wan parried.
Pieces of lightsabers bounced on the durasteel deck.
Grievous looked down at the blade-sliced hunks of metal that were all he had left in his hands, then up at Obi-Wan’s shining sky-colored blade, then down at his hands again, and then he seemed to suddenly remember that he had an urgent appointment somewhere else.
Anywhere else.
Obi-Wan stepped toward him, but a shock from the Force made him leap back just as a scarlet HE bolt struck the floor right where he’d been about to place his foot. Obi-Wan rode the explosion, flipping in the air to land upright between a pair of super battle droids that were busily firing upon the flank of a squad of clone troopers, which they continued to do until they found themselves falling in pieces to the deck.
Obi-Wan spun.
In the chaos of exploding droids and dying men, Grievous was nowhere to be seen.
Obi-Wan waved his lightsaber at the clones. “The general!” he shouted. “Which way?”
One trooper circled his arm as though throwing a proton grenade back toward the archway where Obi-Wan had first entered. He followed the gesture and saw, for an instant in the sun-shadow of the Vigilance outside, the back curves of twin bladed rings—ganged together to make a wheel the size of a starfighter—rolling swiftly off along the sinkhole rim.
General Grievous was very good at running away.
“Not this time,” Obi-Wan muttered, and cut a path through the tangled mob of droids all the way to the arch in a single sustained surge, reaching the open air just in time to see the blade-wheeler turn; it was an open ring with a pilot’s chair inside, and in the pilot’s chair sat Grievous, who lifted one of his bodyguards’ electrostaffs in a sardonic wave as he took the scooter straight out over the edge. Four claw-footed arms deployed, digging into the rock to carry him down the side of the sinkhole, angling away at a steep slant.
“Blast.” Obi-Wan looked around. Still no air taxis. Not that he had any real interest in flying through the storm of battle that raged throughout the interior of the sinkhole, but there was certainly no way he could catch Grievous on foot …
From around the corner of an interior tunnel, he heard a resonant honnnnk! as though a nearby bantha had swallowed an air horn.
He said, “Boga?”
The beaked face of the dragonmount slowly extended around the interior angle of the tunnel.
“Boga! Come here, girl! We have a general to catch.”
Boga fixed him with a reproachful glare. “Honnnnnk.”
“Oh, very well.” Obi-Wan rolled his eyes. “I was wrong; you were right. Can we please go now?”
The remaining fifteen meters of dragonmount hove into view and came trotting out to meet him. Obi-Wan sprang to the saddle, and Boga leapt to the sinkhole’s rim in a single bound. Her huge head swung low, searching, until Obi-Wan spotted Grievous’s blade-wheeler racing away toward the landing decks below.
“There, girl—that’s him! Go!”
Boga gathered herself and sprang to the rim of the next level down, poised for an instant to get her bearings, then leapt again down into the firestorm that Pau City had become. Obi-Wan spun his blade in a continuous whirl to either side of the dragonmount’s back, disintegrating shrapnel and slapping away stray blasterfire. They plummeted through the sinkhole-city, gaining tens of meters on Grievous with every leap.
On one of the landing decks, the canopy was lifting and parting to show a small, ultrafast armored shuttle of the type favored by the famously nervous Neimoidian executives of the Trade Federation. Grievous’s wheeler sprayed a fan of white-hot sparks as it tore across the landing deck; the bio-droid whipped the wheeler sideways, laying it down for a skidding halt that showered the shuttle with molten durasteel.
But before he could clamber out of the pilot’s chair, several metric tons of Jedi-bearing dragonmount landed on the shuttle’s roof, crouched and threatening and hissing venomously down at him.
“I hope you have another vehicle, General!” Obi-Wan waved his lightsaber toward the shuttle’s twin rear thrusters. “I believe there’s some damage to your sublights!”
“You’re insane! There’s no—”
Obi-Wan shrugged. “Show him, Boga.”
The dragonmount dutifully pointed out the damage with two whistling strikes of her massive tail-mace—wham and wham again—which crumpled the shuttle’s thruster tubes into crimped-shut knots of metal.
Obi-Wan beckoned. “Let’s settle this, shall we?”
Grievous’s answer was a shriek of tortured gyros that wrenched the wheeler upright, and a metal-on-metal scream of blades ripping into deck plates that sent it shooting straight toward the sinkhole wall—and, with the claw-arms to help, straight up it.
Obi-Wan sighed. “Didn’t we just come from there?”
Boga coiled herself and sprang for the wall, and the chase was on once more.
They raced through the battle, clawing up walls, shooting through tunnels, skidding and leaping, sprinting where the way was clear and screeching into high-powered serpentines where it was not, whipping around knots of droids and bounding over troopers. Boga ran straight up the side of a clone hovertank and sprang from its turret directly between the high-slanting ring-wheels of a hailfire, and a swipe of Obi-Wan’s blade left the droid crippled behind them. Native troops had taken the field: Utapaun dragonriders armed with sparking power lances charged along causeways, spearing droids on every side. Grievous ran right over anything in his path, the blades of his wheeler shredding droid and trooper and dragon alike; behind him, Obi-Wan’s lightsaber caught and returned blaster bolts in a spray that shattered any droid unwise enough to fire on him. A few stray bolts he batted into the speeding wheeler ahead, but without visible effect.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Let’s try this from a little closer.”
Boga gained steadily. Grievous’s vehicle had the edge in raw speed, but Boga could out-turn it and could make instant leaps at astonishing angles; the dragonmount also had an uncanny instinct for where the general might be heading, as well as a seemingly infinite knowledge of useful shortcuts through side tunnels, along sheer walls, and over chasms studded with locked-down wind turbines. Grievous tried once to block Obi-Wan’s pursuit by screeching out onto a huge pod that held a whole bank of wind turbines and knocking the blade-brakes off them with quick blows of the electrostaff, letting the razor-edged blades spin freely in the constant gale, but Obi-Wan merely brought Boga alongside the turbines and stuck his lightsaber into their whirl. Sliced-free chunks of carboceramic blade shrieked through the air and shattered on the stone on all sides, and with a curse Grievous kicked his vehicle into motion again.
The wheeler roared into a tunnel that seemed to lead straight into the rock of the plateau. The tunnel was jammed with groundcars and dragonmounts and wheelers and jetsters and all manner of other vehicles and every kind of beast that might bear or draw the vast numbers of Utapauns and Utai fleeing the battle. Grievous blasted right into them, blade-wheel chewing through groundcars and splashing the tunnel walls with chunks of shredded lizard; Boga raced along the walls above the traffic, sometimes even galloping on the ceiling with claws gouging chunks from the rock.
With a burst of sustained effort that strangled her honnnking to thin gasps for air, Boga finally pulled alongside Grievous. Obi-Wan leaned forward, stretching out with his lightsaber, barely able to reach the wheeler’s back curve, and carved away an arc of the wheeler’s blade-tread, making the vehicle buck and skid; Grievous answered with a thrust of his electrostaff that crackled lightning against Boga’s extended neck. The great beast jerked sideways, honking fearfully and whipping her head as though the burn was a biting creature she could shake off her flank.
“One more leap, Boga!” Obi-Wan shouted, pressing himself along the dragonmount’s shoulder. “Bring me even with him!”
The dragonmount complied without hesitation, and when Grievous thrust again, Obi-Wan’s free hand flashed out and seized the staff below its discharge blade, holding it clear of Boga’s vulnerable flesh. Grievous yanked on the staff, nearly pulling Obi-Wan out of the saddle, then jabbed it back at him, discharge blade sparking in his face—
With a sigh, Obi-Wan realized he needed both hands.
He dropped his lightsaber.
As his deactivated handgrip skittered and bounced along the tunnel behind him, he reflected that it was just as well Anakin wasn’t there after all; he’d have never heard the end of it.
He got his other hand on the staff just as Grievous jerked the wheeler sideways, half laying it down to angle for a small side tunnel just ahead. Obi-Wan hung on grimly. Through the Force he could feel Boga’s exhaustion, the buildup of anaerobic breakdown products turning the dragonmount’s mighty legs to cloth. An open archway showed daylight ahead. Boga barely made the turn, and they raced side by side along the empty darkened way, joined by the spark-spitting rod of the electrostaff.
As they cleared the archway to a small, concealed landing deck deep in a private sinkhole, Obi-Wan leapt from the saddle, yanking on the staff to swing both his boots hard into the side of Grievous’s duranium skull. The wheeler’s internal gyros screamed at the sudden impact and shift of balance. Their shrieks cycled up to bursts of smoke and fragments of metal as their catastrophic failure sent the wheeler tumbling in a white-hot cascade of sparks.
Dropping the staff, Obi-Wan leapt again, the Force lifting him free of the crash.
Grievous’s electronic reflexes sent him out of the pilot’s chair in the opposite direction.
The wheeler flipped over the edge of the landing deck and into the shadowy abyss of the sinkhole. It trailed smoke all the way down to a distant, delayed, and very final crash.
The electrostaff had rolled away, coming to rest against the landing jack of a small Techno Union starfighter that stood on the deck a few meters behind Obi-Wan. Behind Grievous, the archway back into the tunnel system was filled with a panting, exhausted, but still dangerously angry dragonmount.
Obi-Wan looked at Grievous.
Grievous looked at Obi-Wan.
There was no longer any need for words between them.
Obi-Wan simply stood, centered in the Force, waiting for Grievous to make his move.
A concealed compartment in the general’s right thigh sprang open, and a mechanical arm delivered a slim hold-out blaster to his hand. He brought it up and fired so fast that his arm blurred to invisiblity.
Obi-Wan … reached.
The electrostaff flipped into the air between them, one discharge blade catching the bolt. The impact sent the staff whirling—
Right into Obi-Wan’s hand.
There came one instant’s pause, while they looked into each other’s eyes and shared an intimate understanding that their relationship had reached its end.
Obi-Wan charged.
Grievous backed away, unleashing a stream of blaster bolts as fast as his half a forefinger could pull the trigger.
Obi-Wan spun the staff, catching every bolt, not even slowing down, and when he reached Grievous he slapped the blaster out of his hand with a crack of the staff that sent blue lightning scaling up the general’s arm.
His following strike was a stiff stab into Grievous’s jointed stomach armor that sent the general staggering back. Obi-Wan hit him again in the same place, denting the armorplast plate, cracking the joint where it met the larger, thicker plates of his chest as Grievous flailed for balance, but when he spun the staff for his next strike the general’s flailing arm flailed itself against the middle of the staff and his other hand found it as well and he seized it, yanking himself upright against Obi-Wan’s grip, his metal skull-face coming within a centimeter of the Jedi Master’s nose.
He snarled, “Do you think I am foolish enough to arm my bodyguards with weapons that can actually hurt me?”
Instead of waiting for an answer he spun, heaving Obi-Wan right off the deck with effortless strength, whipping up him over his head to slam him to the deck with killing power; Obi-Wan could only let go of the staff and allow the Force to angle his fall into a stumbling roll. Grievous sprang after him, swinging the electrostaff and slamming it across Obi-Wan’s flank before the Jedi Master could recover his balance. The impact sent Obi-Wan tumbling sideways and the electroburst discharge set his robe on fire. Grievous stayed right with him, attacking before Obi-Wan could even realize exactly what was happening, attacking faster than thought—
But Obi-Wan didn’t need to think. The Force was with him, and he knew.
When Grievous spun the staff overhand, discharge blade sizzling down at Obi-Wan’s head for the killing blow, Obi-Wan went to the inside.
He met Grievous chest-to-chest, his upraised hand blocking the general’s wrist; Grievous snarled something incoherent and bore down on the Jedi Master’s block with all his weight, driving the blade closer and closer to Obi-Wan’s face—
But Obi-Wan’s arm had the Force to give it strength, and the general’s arm only had the innate crystalline intermolecular structure of duranium alloy.
Grievous’s forearm bent like a cheap spoon.
While the general stared in disbelief at his mangled arm, Obi-Wan had been working the fingers of his free hand around the lower edge of Grievous’s dented, joint-loose stomach plate.
Grievous looked down. “What?”
Obi-Wan slammed the elbow of his blocking arm into the general’s clavicle while he yanked as hard as he could on the stomach plate, and it ripped free in his hand. Behind it hung a translucent sac of synthskin containing a tangle of green and gray organs.
The true body of the alien inside the droid.
Grievous howled and dropped the staff to seize Obi-Wan with his three remaining arms. He lifted the Jedi Master over his head again and hurled him tumbling over the landing deck toward the precipice above the gloom-shrouded drop. Reaching into the Force, Obi-Wan was able to connect with the stone itself as if he were anchored to it with a cable tether; instead of hurtling over the edge he slammed down onto the rock hard enough to crush all breath from his lungs.
Grievous picked up the staff again and charged.
Obi-Wan still couldn’t breathe. He had no hope of rising to meet the general’s attack.
All he could do was extend a hand.
As the bio-droid loomed over him, electrostaff raised for the kill, the hold-out blaster flipped from the deck into Obi-Wan’s palm, and with no hesitation, no second thoughts, not even the faintest pause to savor his victory, he pulled the trigger.
The bolt ripped into the synthskin sac.
Grievous’s guts exploded in a foul-smelling shower the color of a dead swamp. Energy chained up his spine and a mist of vaporized brain burst out both sides of his skull and sent his face spinning off the precipice.
The electrostaff hit the deck, followed shortly by the general’s knees.
Then by what was left of his head.
Obi-Wan lay on his back, staring at the circle of cloudless sky above the sinkhole while he gasped air back into into his spasming lungs. He barely managed to roll over far enough to smother the flames on his robe, then fell back.
And simply enjoyed being alive.
Much too short a time later—long before he was actually ready to get up—a shadow fell across him, accompanied by the smell of overheated lizard and an admonitory honnnk.
“Yes, Boga, you’re right,” Obi-Wan agreed reluctantly. Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself to his feet.
He picked up the electrostaff, and paused for one last glance at the remains of the bio-droid general.
“So …” He summoned a condemnation among the most offensive in his vocabulary. “… uncivilized.”
He triggered his comlink, and directed Cody to report to Jedi Command on Coruscant that Grievous had been destroyed.
“Will do, General,” said the tiny holoscan of the clone commander. “And congratulations. I knew you could do it.”
Apparently everyone did, Obi-Wan thought, except Grievous, and me …
“General? We do still have a little problem out here. About ten thousand heavily armed little problems, actually.”
“On my way. Kenobi out.”
Obi-Wan sighed and clambered painfully onto the dragonmount’s saddle.
“All right, girl,” he said. “Let’s go win that battle, too.”
As has been said, the textbook example of a Jedi trap is the one that was set on Utapau, for Obi-Wan Kenobi.
It worked perfectly.
The final element essential to the creation of a truly effective Jedi trap is a certain coldness of mind—a detachment, if you will, from any desire for a particular outcome.
The best way to arrange matters is to create a win-win situation.
For example, one might use as one’s proxy a creature that not only is expendable, but would eventually have to be killed anyway. Thus, if one’s proxy fails and is destroyed, it’s no loss—in fact, the targeted Jedi has actually done one a favor, by taking care of a bit of dirty work one would otherwise have to do oneself.
And the final stroke of perfection is to organize the Jedi trap so that by walking into it at all, the Jedi has already lost.
That is to say, a Jedi trap works best when one’s true goal is merely to make sure that the Jedi in question spends some hours or days off somewhere on the far side of the galaxy. So that he won’t be around to interfere with one’s real plans.
So that by the time he can return, it will be already too late.