The Clone Wars

by Lou Anders

  “You’re cleared,” one of them grunted. Obi-Wan was pleased he didn’t have to knock out another few Mandalorians.

  The cellblocks formed a labyrinth of transparent walls, floors, and ceilings. Shaded figures of guards passed above and below, and the haunted eyes of prisoners looked out through the clear doors of their cells. Obi-Wan suspected most of them weren’t criminals but enemies of Prime Minister Almec, which meant they were friends of Satine. With help from the Jedi Council and a squad of clone troopers, he could free them all and help restore freedom to the whole planet. But that’s not what he was there for. He was there to free only one person.

  His heart jumped when he found Satine, sitting on a bench in her bare cell, facing a blank wall. She was still dressed in the elegant robes of a duchess, but her hair hung limp and unkempt about her slumped shoulders. She always took care to present herself with dignity, wearing colors that reminded one of rich foliage and adopting floral-inspired hairstyles that she wore like a crown. It was not vanity. It was strategy. Her appearance was designed to remind her people that their world had been one of lush forests and jewel-colored lakes before war turned Mandalore into a desert. With the people’s help and consent, she would lead them forward to an even better age.

  Obi-Wan tapped a control pad, and the cell door slid open. He stood on the threshold of her cell, too many words rising to his lips for him to speak.

  Satine did not turn around. “Here to do your master’s bidding?”

  There was contempt in her voice. But also strength.

  Obi-Wan removed his helmet. “I do my own bidding.”

  “Obi-Wan!” Satine sprang off the bench and ran to him, pressing her cheek against his chest.

  He could not fully return her embrace, but neither could he stop himself from smiling. Gently, he pushed her away.

  He examined her face. Her shadowed cheeks. The dark circles under her eyes.

  “Are you alone?” she whispered.

  “Yes. The Jedi Council and Galactic Senate will be of no help to us here.” He hoped he’d managed to conceal his bitterness and anger. These were unwelcome emotions, and Obi-Wan didn’t want Satine to witness them. Putting his helmet back on, he checked the corridor to make sure there were no guards approaching. The way was clear, at least for the moment. He took her hand and led her from her cell.

  They hurried to the closest turbolift. Obi-Wan smacked the pad to summon a car, and they stood there, waiting for it to arrive, awkward and exposed to any guard who might happen to come along.

  “I trust you have an escape plan?” she asked.

  “As always, my dear.” It was more important to sound confident than to be confident.

  At last, the lift door opened. And standing right there was the towering, broad-chested figure of yet another super commando. There was at least a 50 percent chance Obi-Wan would have to knock the massive guard out. Ah, well, he thought. As Master Yoda would say, size matters not.

  He gave Satine a harsh shove into the lift as if she were his prisoner and stepped in behind the commando. The car began its descent.

  There were a few seconds of blissful silence, but then the guard had to ruin it. “There’s no record of a prisoner transfer here.”

  “The orders came from upstairs,” Obi-Wan said. He wasn’t precisely sure who or what was upstairs, but there was always an upstairs.

  Satine shook her head and rolled her eyes. They’d found themselves in situations like this many times during the Mandalorian civil war. They’d fought together and they’d fought each other, and they’d grown close. If she had but said the word, he would have left the Jedi Order for her. But that was a long time ago.

  “What’s the authorization code?” said the guard.

  Obi-Wan sighed.

  The lift reached its floor, the doors opened, and the commando’s unconscious form fell with a hard thunk on the deck. Obi-Wan and Satine made a quick dash through the tunnel to a landing platform, where they found an unattended speeder.

  “I hope you won’t object to me stealing this,” Obi-Wan said.

  “Well, I am the duchess of Mandalore, and this is a government speeder, so technically the speeder is mine.”

  Obi-Wan grinned.

  As they flew off, a commando ran out on the platform. “Hey, you! Stop!”

  Had “Hey, you! Stop!” ever successfully stopped anyone in the entire history of the galaxy? “Not likely,” muttered Obi-Wan, accelerating. “Are we being followed?”

  “The duchess of Mandalore just escaped a high-security cell with an imposter commando,” Satine shouted back. “What do you think?”

  “This does bring back memories.”

  “We have a lot of bad memories, Obi-Wan.”

  “A few of them are pleasant.”

  “Hopefully in the end, this will be one of them.”

  Obi-Wan spotted the Twilight parked on an elevated cargo platform ahead. “Hold on tight.”

  He landed the speeder, skidding to a stop and just barely managing not to smash into anything. It was as Anakin often said: “Any landing that doesn’t burn you to a crisp is a good landing.”

  With four pursuing speeders coming in fast, Obi-Wan and Satine sprinted for the Twilight’s ramp. Sparks and debris flew in an onslaught of blaster fire. Returning fire, Obi-Wan followed Satine up the ramp and into the ship.

  He slid into the pilot’s seat and watched with alarm through the cockpit window as more commandos arrived, dismounting their speeders and loosing a storm of energy bolts from their weapons. He didn’t trust Anakin’s ship to withstand the attack. Really, he didn’t trust it to do anything.

  “We have to contact my sister for help,” said Satine. “She’ll send reinforcements.”

  Obi-Wan looked at her with surprise as the Twilight’s landing pods lifted from the platform. Satine had a sister with access to troops?

  “Who’s your sister?”

  “It’s a long story. She’s part of Death Watch.”

  How could that be possible? Death Watch was a violent splinter group of Mandalorians who stood in direct opposition to Satine’s rule. How could her sister be in league with them?

  Before Obi-Wan could respond, a sensor screen on the ship’s console picked up a pair of incoming projectiles.

  “Brace yourself!” he screamed.

  Explosions rocked the ship so hard that Obi-Wan felt the concussive force in his teeth. Waves of terrific heat flooded the cabin.

  Satine coughed. “I fear this won’t be one of the good memories, my dear.”

  The ship spun out of control, sending Obi-Wan and Satine careening into the bulkheads. They struggled through flames and toxic fumes for the ramp. If they couldn’t get out of the ship, this would end up being a very bad landing, even by Anakin’s standards.

  Obi-Wan was able to get the ramp open, but a sudden lurch of the ship sent him falling into free space. He just barely managed to grab on to a hydraulic strut, glowing flakes of charred hull threatening to burn him.

  “Obi-Wan!” Satine called out. She hurried down the ramp, holding out her hand to help him, but another lurch knocked her off her feet. She plummeted, with the hard deck still several meters below.

  There was no time for thought. No time for feelings. No flames, no heat, no past, no future—only the now. Obi-Wan calmed his mind and calmed his heart. He reached out with the Force and suspended Satine’s fall. She floated in midair, held aloft by Obi-Wan’s will. He drew her to him and held her tight against his side.

  And then they crashed along with the Twilight to the platform.

  Obi-Wan hit hard, smashing his head. He was dimly aware of a cracking noise that must have been ribs. Smoke poured into his agonized lungs, and he wanted nothing more than to slip into unconsciousness.

  But there was Satine, lying pinned beneath a large slab of debris from the wreckage.

  Extending his hand and banishing fear, Obi-Wan let himself serve as a conduit for the Force. The debris elevated off of her, floated t
o the side, and fell a few meters away with a massive boom. Satine moaned. She was still alive.

  Obi-Wan tried to ignore the pain of his injuries and get up, but something colder than ice gripped his entire body.

  He knew this sensation.

  This was more than injury.

  This was something far more hideous—more sickening.

  This was darkness.

  Through a haze of pain and hot smoke, shapes appeared. Commandos, blasters at the ready. Obi-Wan didn’t think he could fight them in his condition.

  A figure strode behind them with the mechanical whir of powerful legs.

  “No,” croaked Obi-Wan, “it can’t be.”

  He recognized the black markings on the Dathomirian’s red flesh. This was the man who’d killed Obi-Wan’s master. The one Obi-Wan had sliced in half. The one he’d watched fall down a chasm to his doom. The one who kept coming back, dragging with him the deepest, heaviest shadow of wrath and leaving nothing but death and mourning in his wake.

  Hate was not the Jedi way. But for this man, Obi-Wan had grown weary of keeping it at bay.

  Wincing, he forced himself to his feet. With the press of a button and a commitment to whatever would happen next, he extended the blade of his lightsaber and found himself once again facing Darth Maul.

  Maul reached out his black-gloved hand. A horrific power robbed Obi-Wan of control. Helpless, he sailed through a veil of smoke and landed with Maul’s fingers wrapped around his throat. His saber clattered to the ground.

  “We meet again, Kenobi.” Maul’s voice was a deep whisper loaded with perverse malice and cheer. “Welcome to my world.”

  As if Obi-Wan were nothing more than a rag, Maul tossed him to a pair of commandos. “Take them to the palace” was the last thing Obi-Wan heard before agony overtook him.

  Maul had staged a scene in the palace throne room. He sat on the duchess’s throne, with Satine bound on her knees before him. On Maul’s left stood Prime Minister Almec, a traitor to his people and Maul’s obvious puppet. And on his right loomed Maul’s apprentice, Savage Opress, a hulking Dathomirian with a tattooed face and crown of sharp horns.

  Restrained in binders and held tight by a pair of super commandos, Obi-Wan was the audience for Maul’s grim play. Pain still racked his body from the crash of the Twilight and from his brutal treatment at Maul’s hands. The commandos had taken his lightsaber. But Obi-Wan would not let Satine down.

  Maul seemed to sense his thoughts. “Your noble flaw is a weakness shared by you and the duchess.” With a gesture, and without touching Satine, he lifted her, kept her dangling in midair, and squeezed her throat. He rose from his throne and took slow, deliberate steps toward Obi-Wan. Struggling to breathe, feet kicking uselessly, Satine trailed behind him. “You should have chosen the dark side, Master Jedi.”

  “Obi-Wan—” Satine rasped.

  The commandos yanked Obi-Wan off his knees. As his eyes shifted from Satine to Maul, the image of a red lightsaber blade flashed in his mind.

  Maul seemed pleased. “Your emotions betray you. Your fear and, yes, your anger. Let your anger deepen your hatred.”

  “Don’t listen to him, Obi,” Satine managed to say.

  “Quiet,” growled the other Dathomirian.

  Satine should not be there. She should not have been dragged into a conflict years in the making, begun when Maul murdered Qui-Gon Jinn, the man who’d been the closest thing Obi-Wan had to a father since the Jedi took him from his parents.

  “You can kill me, but you will never destroy me,” Obi-Wan said, trying to keep his anger under control. “It takes strength to resist the dark side. Only the weak embrace it.”

  “It is more powerful than you know.”

  “And those who oppose it are more powerful than you’ll ever be.”

  There was still a chance to turn this right. He could not overpower Maul, but maybe he could reach him. Maybe he could match Maul’s fury, not with equal fury but with understanding. With sympathy. Maul had not always been this way. He’d had his future stolen from him. He’d been warped by the Force-wielders of Dathomir. He’d been groomed to become the creature of anger and vengeance who stood before Obi-Wan.

  “I know where you’re from,” said Obi-Wan. “I’ve been to your village. I know the decision to join the dark side wasn’t yours. The Nightsisters made it for you.”

  Obi-Wan cringed. The words had not come out as he’d intended. He’d wanted to extend a kindness that Maul had perhaps never experienced. But he let his own anger and his own fear infect his words with venom.

  “Silence!” Maul roared. “You think you know me? It was I who languished for years thinking of nothing but you, nothing but this moment, and now the perfect tool for my vengeance is in front of us. I never planned on killing you. But I will make you share my pain, Kenobi.”

  Maul drew a lightsaber hilt, and as Satine’s struggle for air worsened, Obi-Wan’s fear turned to terror. He twisted to free himself from the guards, only to receive a sharp blow to the head that knocked him to the floor.

  No. He would not let this happen. He would not.

  But with another gesture, Maul drew Satine forward. He ignited his blade, a wedge of blackness like a hole in space shot through with crackling white threads.

  The blade went through Satine’s back. Threads of smoke rose from her chest.

  “Satine,” Obi-Wan gasped. He broke free of the commandos’ grip and rushed to Satine as Maul let her crash to the ground.

  Brushing the hair out of her eyes, cradling her in his arms, he felt something course through his veins. It was not blood. It was something simultaneously colder and yet hotter than blood. It was anger. He fought to hold it back and listened to Satine’s last words.

  “Remember, my dear Obi-Wan, I’ve loved you always.” Her fingers touched his face. “I always will.”

  She closed her eyes. Her body went limp in his arms.

  And she was dead.

  When Maul killed Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan was stricken with sorrow. Sorrow gripped him again. But there was something else, as well. Something dangerous. Something that scorched. Satine wasn’t Maul’s enemy. She was just a tool Maul had used to get something he wanted, the throne of Mandalore. And a tool to hurt Obi-Wan. Using a person that way was the worst form of cruelty. Satine had been a person, and her death wasn’t just a loss for Obi-Wan. It was a loss for so many more. She’d been a child on this world. Like other children, she’d taken her first step, uttered her first word, laughed and chased flitters in the tall grass of the Mandalorian plains. She’d learned to read, made friends, suffered hurts, recovered and laughed again. And she’d become a leader. She should have lived to see her world thrive, to see her people find peace, to prosper, to make music and art. She should have grown old and been able to look back on all she’d achieved.

  But in a split second, Maul had ended all that. He’d extinguished a light in the universe and replaced it with shadow. Such an act was truly the definition of the dark side. And Obi-Wan burned with rage.

  With the rage came a vision: Eyes smoldering with hatred. Screams in the red glare of a lightsaber.

  Obi-Wan would cleave Maul in two. He would do much worse. There would be nothing left of him. Or the other Dathomirian. Or the commandos, those Mandalorian traitors. He would kill Almec. He would kill anyone who’d had a hand in overthrowing Satine, anyone who’d contributed to her death.

  And he would kill anyone who tried to stop him. Anyone who stood in his way, by word or by deed.

  Anyone.

  Maul laughed. “And now we see the true Obi-Wan Kenobi. The one he hides behind a mask of wit and charm. The one who yearns to be set free.”

  And if Obi-Wan gave in to his desires, he’d be giving Maul exactly what he wanted.

  He’d become the thing he’d dedicated his life to oppose.

  He’d no longer be himself.

  None of that was what Satine would have wanted. Not on her world. Not anywhere.

  “
You can’t win, Maul. Not this way.”

  “Imprison him below,” Maul seethed. “Let him drown in his misery. Take him to his cell to rot.”

  As Obi-Wan allowed the commandos to drag him away, only he knew of the painful victory he’d just won—and how he could not have done it without drawing strength from Satine Kryze, duchess of Mandalore.

  A squad of commandos trained their blasters on Obi-Wan’s back, forcing him to the cellblocks. With his hands immobilized in binders, his muscles and bones still radiating pain from the crash of the Twilight, and his lightsaber clipped to the belt of one of the guards, this was his last chance to make a move.

  Metallic impacts rang out as magnetic darts attached themselves to the nearest commando’s jet pack. It seemed someone was giving Obi-Wan an opportunity. Whether a friend or a new foe, it hardly mattered.

  The darts blinked with red lights. Blinking red lights usually meant one thing. Obi-Wan gave the commando a sharp kick to get some distance from him, and he took satisfaction when the darts detonated. Before the echo of the booms had even faded, another Mandalorian set down on the platform. She moved in a blur, blasting the rifle out of one commando’s hands, taking out another guard with a high spinning kick, and firing his gauntlet cable into the chest plate of another. She knifed the jet pack’s control trigger, and the hapless guard launched off the platform, dragging his comrade behind him into the side of a building.

  In fewer than three seconds, the newcomer had taken out the entire squad.

  Obi-Wan rose to his feet. There was something familiar about the woman’s sharp-angled face, framed by bluntly cut red hair.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

  She picked up Obi-Wan’s lightsaber from the deck. Four warriors in Death Watch armor descended to the platform, flanking her. Her armor matched theirs.

  “Bo-Katan,” she said, slicing through Obi-Wan’s binders. She handed Obi-Wan his lightsaber. “I’m here to rescue you. That’s all you need to know.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  She attached one of the fallen commando’s jet packs to his back. “You ever use one of these before?”