The Clone Wars

by Karen Traviss

  There was a crackling pause, very brief but telling. “So you don’t need us, then.”

  “We’re fine, sir. Good luck with the Hutt. I’ll let General Kenobi know you’re okay, because he’s just gone looking for you in the monastery.”

  “I didn’t mean to waste his time.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he’ll mind, sir.” Ah, he still worries what his Master thinks of him, even when he’s got a Padawan of his own. “He’ll probably take the opportunity to catch up on old times with Ventress.”

  Skywalker laughed, but there wasn’t any humor in it. Rex closed the link.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Coric said.

  The six men, all that was left of Torrent Company, 501st Legion, stood in the center of the chaos that only moments before had been their fort, and might well have been their grave, and felt oddly irrelevant. The 212th had taken over and was sweeping back the droids. The adrenaline was ebbing, and though it would take a while to settle completely, Rex already had that shaky, drained, lost feeling.

  Yeah, we know how it feels not to be needed, sir.

  “Well, that’s a different ending to your holovid, Sarge,” Attie said to Coric. “We all lived happily ever after.”

  “No,” said Del. “Most of us didn’t.”

  Rex holstered his short blasters and picked up his rifle.

  “In that case,” he said, “let’s commemorate them the Five-oh-first way. By wiping out every last tinny on this rock.”

  Tomorrow, they’d start all over again.

  SIXTEEN

  Enemies are not accidental or unfortunate. We make them, we earn them, and we nurture them, whether we realize it or not. If we can’t find real enemies, we’ll invent them and make them as big as we can. They become our justification for existing, or excuses for our own failings. Many of us would suffer if we didn’t have them—who would need Jedi if there were no dark Force users?

  LORD GAJAKUR BIUL, Kilian Ranger

  TETH MONASTERY

  VENTRESS HAD THOUGHT there was nothing left that the Jedi could take away from her, but she was wrong.

  The last moments of intelligence droid 4A-7 unfolded as a holorecording. After she’d acted on that transmission, coldly rational, to alert vessels to look for Skywalker’s ship, she had a moment to reflect.

  She watched it two, three, then four times in the semidarkness of an alcove in the passageway, shutting out the battle raging in the monastery grounds outside. Artillery fire smashed into the building and the volcanic rock of the plateau. The floor trembled beneath her feet.

  They had to take him from me, too, didn’t they? Without a second thought.

  4A-7 was designed to upload stored data and his temporary volatile memory if he was too badly damaged to function, to stop information from falling into enemy hands. His backup power supply was set to detect a catastrophic failure and then transmit everything, both stored and volatile, to a secure location. When the system finally failed—when the droid died—there would be no data left in his components for an enemy to extract.

  So he’d continued to dump data—still running on that short-lived backup power, still conscious—even after the Jedi brat decapitated him. That realization disturbed Ventress more than anything else.

  It means nothing to you, does it, Jedi?

  The droid had been the only trustworthy entity in her world. Ventress heard his words, and saw the events from the perspective of the holorecorders embedded in the side of each photoreceptor. No, eyes; he had eyes, and the recorded data were his thoughts. She refused to use that sterile machine language. 4A-7 had died like . . . a man. He was more of a real being than most organics she had to endure. He’d done his duty, and, irrelevant as it was now, he’d told the Jedi some home truths about the dictatorship of the Republic. His termination on active service was as heroic to Ventress as any flesh-and-blood soldier’s.

  She looked at her datapad. It now contained everything that had been 4A-7—programming, data, and working memory up to the point when his backup power supply had finally failed. In the terms of flesh and blood, she had his soul in her hand.

  My resolve has never weakened. But you’ve strengthened it, Jedi. Again, you earn your enemies.

  If she’d never learned to convert pain, loss, and anger into action, she would have died a long time ago. She turned to go back to the battle, reinvigorated.

  The comlink bleeped again. She responded, and the empty air in front of her was filled with a hologram of Dooku.

  “I hear Kenobi’s forces have arrived, Asajj.”

  “We’re dealing with it.”

  “Have you recovered the Hutt yet?”

  You know I haven’t. I’d have told you the second I did. “Skywalker still has him, but we’ll take his ship before he leaves the Teth system.”

  “You know the stakes.” Dooku never sounded angry. He was always quietly understated, but she knew he was furious in his own way. “It’s not enough to create enmity between Jabba and the Republic now. He needs a reason to be seen to reward us with sole access to the Outer Rim. We have to be the ones who rescue the child.”

  “I understand, Master. My challenge, though, is stopping Skywalker without harming the Hutt. The Jedi have been carrying the child at all times, so I’m dealing with a living shield. Normally, that would mean nothing and I would regard the innocent as collateral damage, but in this case, I can’t.”

  “Then you need to think more laterally. And faster. Dooku out.”

  Ventress stared at the empty air where the hologram had been and swallowed her resentment.

  Remember—this is the man who won’t train me as a Sith. This is the man who’s happy to use my skills for Sith ends, but won’t let me join the club.

  They had a common objective, but he wasn’t on her side. She was the hired help. She reminded herself of the ramifications of that.

  But there was no point obeying blindly. She was the commander on the ground; only she knew the situation. If Skywalker managed to hand that Hutt over to a Republic warship—and that was now his best option—she stood little chance of preventing the Huttlet from being returned to his father. She paused to transmit new orders to the vulture droids.

  If unable to prevent Skywalker from docking with enemy warship, override order to preserve the hostage and destroy the Twilight.

  She had no other option. That was the last resort.

  In that brief quiet moment, she felt someone coming closer in the Force, a brash fanfare of a presence. She took a lightsaber in each hand and hefted the hilts to focus herself before activating the blades.

  “Master Kenobi,” she said, not looking up for a few moments. “You’re late. Never keep a lady waiting.”

  Kenobi ambled down the passage toward her. “I was looking for Anakin. He stood you up, then?”

  “Consider me on the rebound when it comes to killing Jedi.” She held one glowing red blade vertically in front of her face. “You’ll do.”

  She turned and sprinted into a side passage that led to an older part of the site, a different style of construction where the ceilings were flat and supported by columns, rather than the spacious vaulted rooms of more recent architecture. The chamber she found herself in was a stone forest, filled with precise ranks of granite columns that glittered in the low light; less room to maneuver, but plenty of cover from saber strikes and opportunity for feints.

  For him, too. Remember that.

  Ventress slid behind a column and waited, lightsabers shut down. For a while, she thought he might have resisted the lure, or that he really was on other business, somehow unaware of Skywalker’s whereabouts and searching for him. But she heard his footsteps coming closer. If he missed the entrance to the chamber, she’d have to guide him.

  But he didn’t. She could hear the rustle of his robes coming closer.

  “Ventress, there’s no point hiding from me . . .”

  She stayed silent and turned her head slowly to pinpoint the sound. Footsteps, and the
occasional vzzzzm of his lightsaber. He was either swinging the blade or spinning around to check behind him.

  Kenobi was easy to sense in the Force anyway.

  “Ventress, we have Jabba’s son. It’s over.”

  His voice was closer. He could sense her in the Force, too, of course. Come and get me, braggart . . .

  “Ventress . . .”

  He talked too much. Maybe he liked the drama, or used it to work himself up for a fight.

  “Ventress . . .” The tone was soothing, like calling a pet to come for feeding. “Ventress . . .”

  She sprang from behind the column, thumbing both lightsabers to life, and swung one into him. The blades clashed, red on blue. For a split second she saw the look of surprise illuminated on his face. He parried. But she brought the other saber swinging in an arc, and then they were locked in combat. Ventress used both sabers simultaneously in a scissor action to drive him back and force him against a wall or a column, but each time, Kenobi managed to ram his weapon between her blades.

  He spun away behind a column. She heard him panting. They both needed a few seconds to draw breath.

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” he said.

  “And you’ll have to learn to keep your mouth shut.” She leaped around the column from the other side. Her blade missed his head by a fraction as he ducked, and sent a cloud of dust sparkling from the stone. Kenobi raced away. She pursued.

  He’s not invincible. He couldn’t take Fett. But he’s not trying this time.

  Ventress wouldn’t trust Kenobi as far as she could spit.

  She stalked him, and this time it was his turn to leap out at her and strike. He drove her back against a wall, but she used it as a springboard to Force-push him back before hacking at him with all the raw strength she could muster. It wasn’t hard to summon up. She simply saw Narec, and wanted to destroy the whole world in vengeance.

  Kenobi’s lightsaber spun in the air. For a second she thought it was a trick; but she’d knocked it from his hand. Her blade was at his throat in a heartbeat.

  Kenobi looked up at her, chest rising and falling as he caught his breath. “Okay, Ventress, are you going to gloat and give me a speech on the futility of my mission?”

  “No,” she said. “I’m just going to kill you.”

  Then he threw her backward with a Force push. She hit a column hard enough to hear something crack, and staggered to her feet. Kenobi summoned his lightsaber back to his hand with a grin.

  She was going to have to wipe that smirk off his smug Jedi face the hard way.

  THE FREIGHTER TWILIGHT, TETH SPACE

  Anakin knew he should never have expected things to get easier.

  The trajectory he’d set took the Twilight close to the action. It was inevitable. He needed to locate Yularen’s flagship, Spirit of the Republic. Once he handed over Rotta, he could get back to the fighting, or start replacing the men of Torrent Company if the ground engagement was over, or—anything but this.

  He’d opted for the most direct course. The airspace above the jungle combat zone and up through the atmosphere into space was crawling with V-19 fighters, vulture droids, and warships. Even at maximum thrust, the Twilight climbed slowly for a pilot used to starfighters.

  We might as well have a big target roundel painted on us.

  The freighter shuddered as it climbed. Ahsoka sat in silence with Rotta clutched on her lap. In a confined cockpit, the smell was almost too much for Anakin to bear. He tweaked the fuel injectors a little higher.

  Come on . . . come on . . .

  Bursts of white light flared against the sky in the thinning layers of the planet’s atmosphere. Anakin kept a wary eye on both the ship’s sensors and what he could see with his own eyes through the viewport. He could see Spirit’s transponder on the screen, but the cruiser was in the thick of it, surrounded by smaller pinpoints of light that indicated Republic and Sep fighters.

  “They’re too busy to worry about us,” Ahsoka said at last.

  “I’ll try to worry less obviously in future.”

  “Yularen knows you’re inbound.”

  “Yeah, but so does Ventress, I’ll bet. She had her droids ready for us, and she knows this crate’s gone. She also knows we won’t be crazy enough to head for Tatooine in it. So she knows we’ve got to do a transfer, and that we don’t have many ships to choose from.”

  “She might not.”

  “She’s smart. If I can think of this solution to our problem, so can she.” Anakin adjusted course, looking to divert around a knot of V-19s chasing down a flight of vultures. Rotta whimpered. “What would you do?”

  “Er . . . booby-trap the freighter to explode?”

  Anakin’s gut flipped over. He hadn’t thought of that one. “No. No, she needs Rotta. That’s got to be her plan.”

  “Admit it, we found this tub really conveniently.”

  It would take a matter of minutes to reach Yularen. “She wasn’t expecting us. She couldn’t have planned the hunting fly. She’ll have vulture droids looking out for us.”

  “It all hinges on who’s the best pilot, then, you or a heap of smart scrap.”

  R2-D2 chirped and flashed. He said he thought that was a little organicist, speaking as a heap of smart scrap himself.

  Ahsoka was still learning. “I didn’t understand all that.”

  “I’ll give you some sensitivity lessons later . . .”

  The Twilight began her approach to Spirit. Any minute now, a Sep sensor officer or a vulture would notice the freighter on their screen, and then it was all down to nerve, speed, and skill. Anakin knew he was weak on one of those. He realigned his instruments on Spirit and lined up with the cruiser’s hangar bay.

  There was an awful lot of traffic in between.

  “Hang on to our slippery friend, Snips. Here we go.”

  “Yes, Master.”

  Anakin opened the comm. “General Skywalker to Jedi cruiser, we need hangar bay access. I say again, we need hangar bay access urgently.”

  A blip appeared instantly on the screen. A vulture had dropped out of nowhere and was skimming just above the cockpit, matching their speed. Anakin couldn’t fire the Twilight’s laser cannon. It was like a nasty itch in a place you couldn’t reach without tearing yourself up. Another vulture peeled off from formation and headed straight for them. It was on an intercept course.

  Something hit the Twilight hard. Rivets flew from the internal bulkheads as they flexed under the impact. The freighter had taken a hit. Anakin held it on course.

  “Maybe she doesn’t want Stinky alive after all . . . ,” Ahsoka said.

  Maybe. “Nearly there. Hang on.”

  He could see the cruiser and the hangar now. The outline of the opening was picked out in hazard lighting. But he also saw a ball of energy heading directly at the freighter, coming straight from the cruiser’s aft cannon position.

  “Brace!” he yelled. “Ahsoka, brace!”

  The cannon round hit the cockpit and Anakin felt the shock wave travel up through the steering yoke to his hands and smack into his elbow and shoulder joints. The freighter shook violently.

  “Are they targeting the vultures?” Ahsoka asked.

  “No, they’re firing at us!” The cruiser still had its deflector shields up. Anakin opened the comm again. “Jedi cruiser, this is General Skywalker, this is a Republic friendly, repeat, freighter Twilight is a Republic friendly, hold fire, hold fire.”

  The comm popped in response. “Freighter Twilight, you’re showing a CIS military transponder code . . . your call.”

  Stang. Of course: the spy droid and his detachment would have made sure their own forces didn’t fire on them. 4A-7 had had the last laugh, then.

  “Jedi cruiser, this is Skywalker. We’re crawling with vultures and we need to drop off a very sick Huttlet. Open the hangar. Please.”

  After a second’s pause, Admiral Yularen’s voice came over the comm. “Skywalker, we’re going to drop the deflectors, but we need
to lose those vultures. Divert to the aft hangar, I repeat, aft hangar. And check your transponder next time you commandeer an enemy vessel. We’ve had a few suicide runs before, and we shoot first.”

  “Yes, Admiral.” Wow, consider me put in my place. An admiral was lord of all he surveyed in his own fleet, and Anakin was just another pilot who should have known better. “Stand by for a possible crash landing.”

  Anakin jerked the Twilight violently to port, leaving the pursuing vultures wrong-footed for a vital moment, and looped under the cruiser. Ahsoka gasped, Rotta shrieked, and the freighter came about facing the cruiser’s stern. The hangar doors were open; the aperture rushed up on Anakin like a gaping mouth about to consume him.

  The vultures were still pursuing, hammering the hull with laser cannon. How the crate was holding together Anakin would never know, but it was, and that was all that mattered.

  Ten seconds.

  The vultures were still with them. He couldn’t do a deck landing with them clinging to him. The cruiser knew that, and opened up with precision lasers. One vulture shattered and cartwheeled away, showering red-hot debris on the cockpit viewport.

  The next shot hit a vulture with unerring accuracy, too. But it was suddenly a ball of flame tumbling ahead of the freighter’s nose. It streaked into the hangar, and all Anakin could see was a ball of fire and smoke where sanctuary should have been.

  “Pull up! Pull up!”

  “Abort, abort, abort!”

  Anakin did it without thinking. He jerked back on the yoke and sent the freighter climbing vertically. He didn’t have time to worry about the cruiser or the hangar crew, but the ship had its hands full with damage and casualties now, so they couldn’t worry about him, either. There was no going around for another approach.

  And he was still trailing an unwelcome escort of vultures.

  Just as Captain Rex had been, he and Ahsoka were now on their own. The irony wasn’t lost on him.