by James Luceno
Shryne was glancing at Chatak. “Does she ever stop?”
“I haven’t been able to find the off switch.”
Shryne moved to the nearest window and watched the night sky.
“Republic starfighters will be setting down on the landing platform by late morning,” he said.
Chatak joined him at the window. “Then Murkhana is won.”
Shryne turned to face her. “We have to reach the platform. The troopers have their orders, and now we have ours. If we can seize a transport or starfighters, we may yet be able to return to Coruscant.”
Throughout the long night and morning, explosive light strobed through the warehouse’s arched windows as Republic and Separatist forces clashed at sea and in the air. The battle for the landing platform raged well into the afternoon. But now the Separatist forces were in full retreat, streaming across the two intact bridges, leaving the platform’s defense to homing spider droids, hailfire weapons platforms, and tanks.
By the time the Jedi managed to reach the more northern of the pair of bridges, the wide avenue was so closely packed with fleeing mercenaries and other Separatist fighters they could scarcely make any headway against the flow. A crossing that should have taken an hour required more than three, and the sun was low on the horizon when they reached the end of the bridge.
They were just short of the platform itself when a succession of powerful explosions took out the final hundred meters of the span and split the massive hexagon into thirds, sending hundreds of clone troopers, mercenaries, and Separatist droids plummeting into the churning water.
Shryne knew that the Separatists were responsible for the explosions. Before too long, munitions planted under the final bridge would be detonated, as well. By then, though, there would be no stopping the Republic onslaught.
While mercenaries shouldered past him in a frenzy, Shryne surveyed the forest of bridge pylons left exposed by the explosions, calculating their distance from one another and the odds of accomplishing what he had in mind.
Finally he said: “Either we frog-leap for the platform or we head back into the city.” He looked at Starstone. “You decide.”
Her blue eyes sparkled and she put on a brave face. “Not a problem, Master. We leap for it.”
Shryne almost grinned. “Right. One at a time.”
Chatak put her arm around her Padawan’s shoulder. “Let’s just hope no clone troopers are watching.”
Shryne gestured to his pilfered outfit of robe and headcloth. “We’re just a bunch of very agile mercs.”
Chatak took the lead, with Starstone right on her heels. Shryne waited until they were halfway along before following. The first few leaps were easy, but the closer he got to the platform, the greater the distance between the pylons, many of which had been left with jagged tops. On his penultimate jump, he nearly lost his balance, and on his final leap for the edge of the platform his hands arrived well in front of his feet.
A last-moment grab from Starstone was all that saved him from a plunge into the waves.
“Remind me to mention this to the Council, Padawan,” he told her.
The platform was being hammered, but not past the point of utility. On one fractured section gunships were beginning to land, along with a vanguard flight of troop transports. Elsewhere, battle droids were being flattened by magpulse busters, then picked off before they had a chance to reactivate by V-wings and ARC-170s performing lightning-fast strafing runs.
With night falling, the Jedi wove through firefights and fountaining explosions, using their captured blasters rather than their lightsabers to defend themselves against teams of clone troopers and commandos, though without killing any.
They came to a halt at a ruined stretch of permacrete, at the far end of which a squadron of starfighters was touching down.
“Can you pilot a ship?” Shryne asked Starstone in a rush.
“Only an interceptor, Master. But without an astromech droid I doubt I could fly one to Coruscant. And I’ve never even seen the cockpit of a V-wing.”
Shryne considered it. “Then it’ll have to be an ARC-one-seventy.” He pointed to a bomber that was just landing, probably to refuel. “That’s our ship. It’s our best bet, anyway. Enough chairs for the three of us, and hyperspace-capable.”
Chatak watched the crew for a moment. “We may have to stun the copilot and tail gunner.”
Shryne was on the verge of moving when he felt the beacon transceiver vibrate again, and he pawed it from the deep pocket of the robe.
“What is it, Roan?” Chatak asked while he was staring in stupefaction at the device. “What?” she repeated.
“Another coded burst from the beacon,” he said without moving his gaze from the screen.
“Same order?”
“The opposite.” Eyes wide, he looked up at Chatak and Starstone. “All Jedi are ordered to avoid Coruscant at all costs. We’re to abandon whatever missions we’re involved in, and go into hiding.”
Chatak’s mouth fell open.
Shryne made his lips a thin line. “We still need to get off Murkhana.”
They double-checked their blasters and again were on the verge of setting out for the starfighter when every Separatist droid and war machine on the landing platform abruptly began to power down. At first Shryne thought that another droid buster had been delivered without his being aware of it. Then he realized his mistake.
This was something different.
The droids hadn’t simply been dazzled. They had been deactivated, even the hailfires and tanks. Red photoreceptors lost their glow, alloy limbs and antennas relaxed, every soldier and war machine stood motionless.
At once, a full wing of gunships dropped out of the noon sky, releasing almost a thousand clone troopers, riding polyplast cables to the platform’s ruined surface.
Shryne, Chatak, and Starstone watched helplessly as they were almost instantly surrounded.
“Capture is infinitely preferable to execution,” Shryne said. “It could still be our way out.”
Closest to the ragged edge of the platform, he allowed his blaster, comlink, beacon transceiver, and lightsaber to slip from his hands into the dark waters far below.
PART II
THE EMPEROR’S EMISSARY
The Star Destroyer Exactor, second in a line of newly minted Imperator-class naval vessels, emerged from hyperspace and inserted into orbit, its spiked bow aimed at the former Separatist world of Murkhana. At sixteen hundred meters in length, the Exactor, unlike its Venator-class predecessors, was a product of Kuat Drive Yards, and featured gaping ventral launching bays rather than a dorsal flight deck.
Moved by gravity rather than by their ion drives, the carcasses of Banking Clan and Commerce Guild warships were grim reminders of the Republic invasion that had been launched in the concluding weeks of the war. Murkhana, however, had fared far better than some contested worlds, and the Corporate Alliance elite had decamped for remote systems in the galaxy’s Tingel Arm, taking much of the planet’s wealth with it.
In his quarters aboard the capital ship now under his personal command, Darth Vader, gloved and artificial right hand clamped on the hilt of his new lightsaber, knelt before a larger-than-life hologram of Emperor Palpatine. Only four standard weeks had elapsed since the war had ended and Palpatine had proclaimed himself Emperor of the former Republic, to the adulation of the leaders of countless worlds that had been drawn into the protracted conflict, and to the sustained acclaim of nearly the entire Senate.
Palpatine wore a voluminous embroidered robe of rich weave, the cowl of which was raised, concealing in shadow the scars he had suffered at the hands of the four treasonous Jedi Masters who had attempted to arrest him in his chambers in the Senate Office Building, as well as other deformations resulting from his fierce battle with Master Yoda in the Rotunda of the Senate itself.
“This is an important time for you, Lord Vader,” Palpatine was saying. “You are finally free to make full use of your powers. If not for us
, the galaxy would never have been restored to order. Now you must embrace the sacrifices you made to bring this about, and revel in the fact that you have fulfilled your destiny. It can all be yours, my young apprentice, anything you wish. You need only have the determination to take it, at whatever cost to those who stand in your way.”
Palpatine’s disfigurements were really nothing new; nor was his deliberate, vaguely contemptuous voice. The Emperor had used the same voice to procure his first apprentice; to ensnare Trade Federation Viceroy Nute Gunray in facilitating his dark designs; to persuade Count Dooku to unleash a war; and finally to seduce Vader—former Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker—to the dark side, with the promise that he could keep Anakin’s wife from dying.
Few among the galaxy’s trillions were aware that Palpatine was also a Sith Lord, known by the title Darth Sidious, or that he had manipulated the war in order to bring down the Republic, crush the Jedi, and place the entire galaxy under his full control. Fewer still knew of the crucial role Sidious’s current apprentice had played in those events, having helped Sidious defend himself against the Jedi who had sought his arrest; having led the assault on the Jedi Temple on Coruscant; having killed in cold blood the half dozen members of the Separatist Council in their hidden fortress on volcanic Mustafar.
And who there had suffered even more gravely than Palpatine.
Down on one knee, his black-masked face raised to the hologram, tall, fearsome Vader was wearing the bodysuit and armor, helmet, boots, and cloak that both camouflaged the evidence of his transformation and sustained his life.
Without revealing his distress at being unable to maintain the kneeling posture, Vader said: “What are your orders, Master?”
And asked himself: Is this poorly designed suit the source of my distress, or is something else at work?
“Do you recall what I told you about the relationship between power and understanding, Lord Vader?”
“Yes, Master. Where the Jedi gained power through understanding, the Sith gain understanding through power.”
Palpatine smiled faintly. “This will become clearer to you as you continue your training, Lord Vader. And to that end I will provide you with the means to increase your power, and broaden your understanding. In due time, power will fill the vacuum created by the decisions you made, the acts you carried out. Married to the order of the Sith, you will need no other companion than the dark side of the Force …”
The remark stirred something within Vader, but he was unable to make full sense of the feelings that washed through him: a commingling of anger and disappointment, of grief and regret …
The events of Anakin Skywalker’s life might have occurred a lifetime ago, or to someone else entirely, and yet some residue of Anakin continued to plague Vader, like pain from a phantom limb.
“Word has reached me,” Palpatine was saying, “that a group of clone troopers on Murkhana may have deliberately refused to comply with Order Sixty-Six.”
Vader tightened his hold on the lightsaber. “I had not heard, Master.”
He knew that Order 66 had not been hardwired into the clones by the Kaminoans who had grown them. Rather, the troopers—the commanders, especially—had been programmed to demonstrate unfailing loyalty to the Supreme Chancellor, in his role as Commander in Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic. And so when the Jedi had revealed their seditious plans, they had become a threat to Palpatine, and had been sentenced to death.
On myriad worlds Order 66 had been executed without misfortune—on Mygeeto, Saleucami, Felucia, and many others. Taken by surprise, thousands of Jedi had been assassinated by troopers who had for three years answered almost exclusively to them. A few Jedi were known to have escaped death by dint of superior skill or accident. But on Murkhana, apparently unique events had played out; events that were potentially more dangerous to the Empire than the few Jedi who had survived.
“What was the cause of the troopers’ insubordination, Master?” Vader asked.
“Contagion.” Palpatine sneered. “Contagion brought about by fighting alongside the Jedi for so many years. Clone or otherwise, there is only so much a being can be programmed to do. Sooner or later even a lowly trooper will become the sum of his experiences.”
Light-years distant in his inner sanctum, Palpatine leaned toward the holotransceiver’s cam.
“But you will demonstrate to them the peril of independent thinking, Lord Vader, the refusal to obey orders.”
“To obey you, Master.”
“To obey us, my apprentice. Remember that.”
“Yes, my Master.” Vader paused with purpose. “It’s possible, then, that some Jedi may have survived?”
Palpatine adopted a look of consummate displeasure. “I am not worried about your pathetic former friends, Lord Vader. I want those clone troopers punished, as a reminder to all of them that for the rest of their abbreviated lives they would do well to understand whom they truly serve.” Retracting his face into the hood of his robe, he said in a seething tone: “It is time that you were revealed as my authority. I leave it to you to drive the point home.”
“And the escaped Jedi, Master?”
Palpatine fell silent for a moment, as if choosing his words carefully. “The escaped Jedi … yes. You may kill any you come across during the course of your mission.”
Vader didn’t rise until the Emperor’s holoimage had derezzed entirely. Then he stood for a long moment with his sheathed arms dangling at his sides, his head mournfully bowed. Finally he turned and moved for the hatch that opened onto the Exactor’s ready room.
To the galaxy at large, Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker—poster boy for the war effort, the “Hero with No Fear,” the Chosen One—had died on Coruscant during the siege of the Jedi Temple.
And to some extent that was true.
Anakin is dead, Vader told himself.
And yet, if not for events on Mustafar, Anakin would sit now on the Coruscant throne, his wife by his side, their child in her arms … Instead, Palpatine’s plan could not have been more flawlessly executed. He had won it all: the war, the Republic, the fealty of the one Jedi Knight in whom the entire Jedi order had placed its hope. The revenge of the self-exiled Sith had been complete, and Darth Vader was merely a minion, an errand boy, allegedly an apprentice, the public face of the dark side of the Force.
While he retained his knowledge of the Jedi arts, he felt uncertain about his place in the Force; and while he had taken his first steps toward awakening the power of the dark side, he felt uncertain about his ability to sustain that power. How far he might have been now had fate not intervened to strip him of almost everything he possessed, as a means of remaking him!
Or of humbling him, as Darths Maul and Tyranus had been humbled before him; as indeed the Jedi order itself had been humbled.
Where Darth Sidious had gained everything, Vader had lost everything, including—for the moment, at least—the self-confidence and unbridled skill he had demonstrated as Anakin Skywalker.
Vader turned and moved for the hatch.
But this is not walking, he thought.
Long accustomed to building and rebuilding droids, supercharging the engines of landspeeders and starfighters, upgrading the mechanisms that controlled the first of his artificial limbs, he was dismayed by the incompetence of the medical droids responsible for his resurrection in Sidious’s lofty laboratory on Coruscant.
His alloy lower legs were bulked by strips of armor similar to those that filled and gave form to the long glove Anakin had worn over his right-arm prosthesis. What remained of his real limbs ended in bulbs of grafted flesh, inserted into machines that triggered movement through the use of modules that interfaced with his damaged nerve endings. But instead of using durasteel, the medical droids had substituted an inferior alloy, and had failed to inspect the strips that protected the electromotive lines. As a result, the inner lining of the pressurized bodysuit was continually snagging on places where the strips were anchored to knee and ankle joints.
The tall boots were a poor fit for his artificial feet, whose claw-like toes lacked the electrostatic sensitivity of his equally false fingertips. Raised in the heel, the cumbersome footgear canted him slightly forward, forcing him to move with exaggerated caution lest he stumble or topple over. Worse, they were so heavy that he often felt rooted to the ground, or as if he were moving in high gravity.
What good was motion of this sort, if he was going to have to call on the Force even to walk from place to place! He may as well have resigned himself to using a repulsor chair and abandoned any hope of movement.
The defects in his prosthetic arms mirrored those of his legs.
Only the right one felt natural to him—though it, too, was artificial—and the pneumatic mechanisms that supplied articulation and support were sometimes slow to respond. The weighty cloak and pectoral plating so restricted his movement that he could scarcely lift his arms over his head, and he had already been forced to adapt his lightsaber technique to compensate.
He could probably adjust the servodrivers and pistons in his forearms to provide his hands with strength enough to crush the hilt of his new lightsaber. With the power of his arms alone, he had the ability to lift an adult being off the ground. But the Force had always given him the ability to do that, especially in moments of rage, as he had demonstrated on Tatooine and elsewhere. What’s more, the sleeves of the bodysuit didn’t hug the prostheses as they should, and the elbow-length gloves sagged and bunched at his wrists.
Gazing at the gloves now, he thought: This is not seeing.
The pressurized mask was goggle-eyed, fish-mouthed, short-snouted, and needlessly angular over the cheekbones. Coupled with a flaring dome of helmet, the mask gave him the forbidding appearance of an ancient Sith war droid. The dark hemispheres that covered his eyes filtered out light that might have caused further injury to his damaged corneas and retinas, but in enhanced mode the half globes reddened the light and prevented him from being able to see the toes of his boots without inclining his head almost ninety degrees.