Star Wars_ Revenge Of The Sith Part 39

"What?"

"Bail, it's the only way. It's the only hope you have of remaining in a position to do anyone any good. Vote for Palpatine. Vote for the Empire. Make Mon Mothma vote for him, too. Be good little Senators. Mind your manners and keep your heads down. And keep doing ... all those things we can't talk about. All those things I can't know. Promise me, Bail."

"Padme, what you're talking about-what we're not talking about-it could take twenty years! Are you under suspicion? What are you going to do?"

"Don't worry about me," she said distantly. "I don't know I'll live that long."

Within the Separatist leaders.h.i.+p bunker's control center were dozens of combat droids. There were armed and armored guards. There were automated defense systems.

There were screams, and tears, and pleas for mercy. None of them mattered. The Sith had come to Mustafar.

Poggle the Lesser, Archduke of Geonosis, scrambled like an animal through a litter of severed arms and legs and heads, both metal and flesh, whimpering, fluttering his ancient gauzy wings until a bar of lightning flash-burned his own head free of his neck.

Shu Mai, president and CEO of the Commerce Guild, looked up from her knees, hands clasped before her, tears streaming down her shriveled cheeks. "We were promised a reward,'' she gasped. "A h-h-handsome reward-"

"I am your reward," the Sith Lord said. "You don't find me handsome?"

"Please!" she screeched through her sobbing. "Pleee-" The blue-white blade cut into and out from her skull, and her corpse swayed. A negligent flip of the wrist slashed through her column of neck rings. Her brain-burned head tumbled to the floor.

The only sound, then, was a panicky stutter of footfalls as Wat Tambor and the two Neimoidians scampered along a hallway toward a nearby conference room.

The Sith Lord was in no hurry to pursue. All the exits from the control center were blast-s.h.i.+elded, and they were sealed, and he had destroyed the controls.

The conference room was, as the expression goes, a dead end.

Thousands of clone troops swarmed the Jedi Temple. Multiple battalions on each level were not just an occupying force, but engaged in the long, painstaking process of preparing dead bodies for positive identification. The Jedi dead were to be tallied against the rolls maintained in the Temple archives; the clone dead would be cross-checked with regimental rosters. All the dead had to be accounted for.

This was turning out to be somewhat more complicated than the clone officers had expected. Though the fighting had ended hours ago, troopers kept turning up missing. Usually small patrolling squads-five troopers or less-that still made random sweeps through the Temple hallways, checking every door and window, every desk and every closet.

Sometimes when those closets were opened, what was found inside was five dead clones.

And there were disturbing reports as well; officers coordinating the sweeps recorded a string of sightings of movement-usually a flash of robe disappearing around a corner, caught in a trooper's peripheral vision-that on investigation seemed to have been only imagination, or hallucination. There were also multiple reports of inexplicable sounds coming from out-of-the-way areas that turned out to be deserted.

Though clone troopers were schooled from even before awakening in their Kaminoan creche-schools to be ruthlessly pragmatic, materialistic, and completely impervious to superst.i.tion, some of them began to suspect that the Temple might be haunted.

In the vast misty gloom of the Room of a Thousand Fountains, one of the clones on the cleanup squad caught a glimpse of someone moving beyond a stand of Hylaian marsh bamboo. "Halt!" he shouted. "You there! Don't move!"

The shadowy figure darted off into the gloom, and the clone turned to his squad brothers. "Come on! Whatever that was, we can't let it get away!"

Clones pelted off into the mist. Behind them, at the spill of bodies they'd been working on, fog and gloom gave birth to a pair of Jedi Masters.

Obi-Wan stepped over white-armored bodies to kneel beside blaster-burned corpses of children. Tears flowed freely down tracks that hadn't had a chance to dry since he'd first entered the Temple. "Not even the younglings survived. It looks like they made a stand here."

Yoda's face creased with ancient sadness. "Or trying to flee they were, with some turning back to slow the pursuit."

Obi-Wan turned to another body, an older one, a Jedi fully mature and beyond. Grief punched a gasp from his chest. "Master Yoda-it's the Troll . . ."

Yoda looked over and nodded bleakly. "Abandon his young students, Cin Drallig would not."

Obi-Wan sank to his knees beside the fallen Jedi. "He was my lightsaber instructor . . ."

"And his, was I," Yoda said. "Cripple us, grief will, if let it we do."

"I know. But . . . it's one thing to know a friend is dead, Master Yoda. It's another to find his body . . ."

"Yes." Yoda moved closer. With his gimer stick, he pointed at a bloodless gash in Drallig's shoulder that had cloven deep into his chest. "Yes, it is. See this, do you? This wound, no blaster could make."

An icy void opened in Obi-Wan's heart. It swallowed his pain and his grief, leaving behind a precariously empty calm.

He whispered, "A lightsaber?"

"Business with the recall beacon, have we still." Yoda pointed with his stick at figures winding toward them among the trees and pools. "Returning, the clones are."

Obi-Wan rose. "I will learn who did this."

"Learn?"

Yoda shook his head sadly.

"Know already, you do," he said, and hobbled off into the gloom.

Darth Vader left nothing living behind when he walked from the main room of the control center.

Casually, carelessly, he strolled along the hallway, scoring the durasteel wall with the tip of his blade, enjoying the sizzle of disintegrating metal as he had savored the smoke of charred alien flesh.

The conference room door was closed. A barrier so paltry would be an insult to the blade; a black-gloved hand made a fist. The door crumpled and fell.

The Sith Lord stepped over it.

The conference room was walled with transparisteel. Beyond, obsidian mountains rained fire upon the land. Rivers of lava embraced the settlement.

Rune Haako, aide and confidential secretary to the viceroy of the Trade Federation, tripped over a chair as he stumbled back. He fell to the floor, shaking like a grub in a frying pan, trying to scrabble beneath the table.

"Stop!" he cried. "Enough! We surrender, do you understand? You can't just kill us-"

The Sith Lord smiled. "Can't I?"

"We're unarmed! We surrender! Please-please, you're a Jedi!"

"You fought a war to destroy the Jedi." Vader stood above the s.h.i.+vering Neimoidian, smiling down upon him, then fed him half a meter of plasma. "Congratulations on your success."

The Sith Lord stepped over Haako's corpse to where Wat Tambor clawed uselessly at the transparisteel wall with his armored gauntlets. The head of the Techno Union turned at his approach, cringing, arms lifted to s.h.i.+eld his faceplate from the flames in the dragon's eyes. "Please, I'll give you anything. Anything you want!"

The blade flashed twice; Tambor's arms fell to the floor, followed by his head. "Thank you." Darth Vader turned to the last living leader of the Confederacy of Independent Systems.

Nute Gunray, viceroy of the Trade Federation, stood trembling in an alcove, blood-tinged tears streaming down his green-mottled cheeks. "The war . . . ," he whimpered. "The war is over-Lord Sidious promised-he promised we would be left in peace . . ."

"His transmission was garbled." The blade came up. "He promised you would be left in pieces.''

In the main holocomm center of the Jedi Temple, high atop the central spire, Obi-Wan used the Force to reach deep within the sh.e.l.l of the recall beacon's mechanism, subtly altering the pulse calibration to flip the signal from come home to run and hide. Done without any visible alteration, it would take the troopers quite a while to detect the recalibration, and longer still to reset it. This was all that could be done for any surviving Jedi: a warning, to give them a fighting chance.

Obi-Wan turned from the recall beacon to the internal security scans. He had to find out exactly what he was warning them against.

"Do this not," Yoda said. "Leave we must, before discovered we are."

"I have to see it," Obi-Wan said grimly. "Like I said downstairs: knowing is one thing. Seeing is another."

"Seeing will only cause you pain."

"Then it is pain that I have earned. I won't hide from it." He keyed a code that brought up a holoscan of the Room of a Thousand Fountains. "I am not afraid."

Yoda's eyes narrowed to green-gold slits. "You should be."

Stone-faced, Obi-Wan watched younglings run into the room, fleeing a storm of blasterfire; he watched Cin Drallig and a pair of teenage Padawans-was that Whie, the boy Yoda had brought to Vjun?-backing into the scene, blades whirling, cutting down the advancing clone troopers with deflected bolts.

He watched a lightsaber blade flick into the shot, cutting down first one Padawan, then the other. He watched the brisk stride of a caped figure who hacked through Drallig's shoulder, then stood aside as the old Troll fell dying to let the rest of the clones blast the children to shreds.

Obi-Wan's expression never flickered.

He opened himself to what he was about to see; he was prepared, and centered, and trusting in the Force, and yet . . .

Then the caped man turned to meet a cloaked figure behind him, and he was-He was-Obi-Wan, staring, wished that he had the strength to rip his eyes out of his head.

But even blind, he would see this forever.

He would see his friend, his student, his brother, turn and kneel in front of a black-cloaked Lord of the Sith.

His head rang with a silent scream.

"The traitors have been destroyed, Lord Sidious. And the archives are secured. Our ancient holocrons are again in the hands of the Sith."

"Good . . . good . . . Together, we shall master every secret of the Force." The Sith Lord purred like a contented rancor. "You have done well, my new apprentice. Do you feel your power growing?"

"Yes, my Master."

"Lord Vader, your skills are unmatched by any Sith before you. Go forth, my boy. Go forth, and bring peace to our Empire."

Fumbling nervelessly, Obi-Wan somehow managed to shut down the holoscan. He leaned on the console, but his arms would not support him; they buckled and he twisted to the floor.

He huddled against the console, blind with pain.

Yoda was as sympathetic as the root of a wroshyr tree.

"Warned, you were."

Obi-Wan said, "I should have let them shoot me . . ."

"What?"

"No. That was already too late-it was already too late at Geonosis. The Zabrak, on Naboo-I should have died there . . . before I ever brought him here-"

"Stop this, you will!" Yoda gave him a stick-jab in the ribs sharp enough to straighten him up. "Make a Jedi fall, one cannot; beyond even Lord Sidious, this is. Chose this, Skywalker did." Obi-Wan lowered his head. "And I'm afraid I might know why."

"Why? Why matters not. There is no why. There is only a Lord of the Sith, and his apprentice. Two Sith." Yoda leaned close. "And two Jedi."

Obi-Wan nodded, but he still couldn't meet the gaze of the ancient Master. "I'll take Palpatine."

"Strong enough to face Lord Sidious, you will never be. Die you will, and painfully."

"Don't make me kill Anakin," he said. "He's like my brother, Master."

"The boy you trained, gone he is-twisted by the dark side. Consumed by Darth Vader. Out of this misery, you must put him. To visit our new Emperor, my job will be."

Now Obi-Wan did face him. "Palpatine faced Mace and Agen and Kit and Saesee-four of the greatest swordsmen our Order has ever produced. By himself. Even both of us together wouldn't have a chance."

"True," Yoda said. "But both of us apart, a chance we might create . . ."

=20=.

Chiaroscuro C-3PO identified the craft docking on the veranda as a DC0052 Intergalactic Speeder; to be on the safe side, he left the security curtain engaged.

In these troubled times, safety outweighed courtesy, even for him.

A cloaked and hooded human male emerged from the DC0052 and approached the veil of energy. C-3PO moved to meet him. "h.e.l.lo, may I help you?"

The human lifted his hands to his hood; instead of taking it down, he folded it back far enough that C-3PO could register the distinctive relations.h.i.+p of eyes, nose, mouth, and beard.

"Master Ken.o.bi!" C-3PO had long ago been given detailed and quite specific instructions on the procedure for dealing with the unexpected arrival of furtive Jedi.

He instantly deactivated the security curtain and beckoned. "Come inside, quickly. You may be seen."

As C-3PO swiftly ushered him into the sitting room, Master Ken.o.bi asked, "Has Anakin been here?"

"Yes," C-3PO said reluctantly. "He arrived shortly after he and the army saved the Republic from the Jedi Rebellion-"

He cut himself off when he noticed that Master Ken.o.bi suddenly looked fully prepared to dismantle him bolt by bolt. Perhaps he should not have been so quick to let the Jedi in.

Wasn't he some sort of outlaw, now?

"I, ah, I should-" C-3PO stammered, backing away. "I'll just go get the Senator, shall I? She's been lying down-after the Grand Convocation this morning, she didn't feel entirely well, and so-"

The Senator appeared at the top of the curving stairway, belting a soft robe over her dressing gown, and C-3PO decided his most appropriate course of action would be to discreetly withdraw.