He could see them for what they were.
A crime.
He'd become a war criminal.
Guilt hit him like a fist. He felt it—a punch to his heart that smacked breath from his lungs and buckled his knees. It hung on his shoulders like a yoke of collapsium: an invisible weight beyond his mortal strength, crushing his life.
There were no words in him for this. All he could say was, "It was wrong."
And that was the sum of it, right there.
It was wrong.
"Nonsense. Disarming him was nothing; he had powers beyond your imagination."
Anakin shook his head. "That doesn't matter. It's not the Jedi way."
The ship shuddered again, and the lights went out.
"Have you never noticed that the Jedi way," Palpatine said, invisible now within the stark shadow of the General's Chair, "is not always the right way?"
Anakin looked toward the shadow. "You don't understand. You're not a Jedi. You can't understand."
"Anakin, listen to me. How many lives have you just saved with this stroke of a lightsaber? Can you count them?"
"But—"
"It wasn't wrong, Anakin. It may be not the Jedi way, but it was right. Perfectly natural—he took your hand; you wanted revenge. And your revenge was justice."
"Revenge is never just. It can't be—"
"Don't be childish, Anakin. Revenge is the foundation of justice. Justice began with revenge, and revenge is still the only jusice some beings can ever hope for. After all, this is hardly your first time, is it? Did Dooku deserve mercy more than did the and People who tortured your mother to death?"
"That was different.'"
In the Tusken camp he had lost his mind; he had become a force of nature, indiscriminate, killing with no more thought or intention than a sand gale. The Tuskens had been killed, slaughtered, massacred—but that had been beyond his control, and now it seemed to him as if it had been done by someone else: like a story he had heard that had little to do with him at all. But Dooku—
Dooku had been murdered. By him. On purpose.
Here in the General's Quarters, he had looked into the eyes of a living being and coldly decided to end that life. He could have chosen the right way. He could have chosen the Jedi way. But instead—
He stared down at Dooku's severed head. He could never unchoose this choice. He could never take it back. As Master Windu liked to say, there is no such thing as a second chance.
And he wasn't even sure he wanted one. He couldn't let himself think about this. Just as he didn't let himself think about the dead on Tatooine. He put his hand to his eyes, trying to rub away the memory. "You promised we would never talk about that again."
"And we won't. Just as we need never speak of what has happened here today." It was as though the shadow itself spoke kindly. "I have always kept your secrets, have I not?"
"Yes—yes, of course, Chancellor, but—" Anakin wanted to crawl away into a corner somewhere; he felt sure that if things would just stop for a while—an hour, a minute—he could pull himself together and find some way to keep moving forward. He had to keep moving forward. Moving forward was all he could do.
Especially when he couldn't stand to look back.
The view wall behind the General's Chair blossomed with looping ion spirals of inbound missiles. The shuddering of the ship built itself into a continuous quake, gathering magnitude with each hit.
"Anakin, my restraints, please," the shadow said. "I'm afraid this ship is breaking up. I don't think we should be aboard when it does."
In the Force, the field-signatures of the magnetic locks on the Chancellor's shackles were as clear as text saying unlock me like this; a simple twist of Anakin's mind popped them open. The shadow grew a head, then shoulders, then underwent a sudden mitosis that left the General's Chair standing behind and turned its other half into the Supreme Chancellor.
Palpatine picked his way through the debris that littered the gloom-shrouded room, moving surprisingly quickly toward the stairs. "Come along, Anakin. There is very little time."
The view wall flared white with the missiles' impacts, and one of them must have damaged the gravity generators: the ship seemed to heel over, forcing Palpatine to clutch desperately at the banister and sending Anakin skidding down a floor that had suddenly become a forty-five-degree ramp.
He rolled hard into a pile of rubble: shattered permacrete, hydrofoamed to reduce weight. "Obi-Wan—!"
He sprang to his feet and waved away the debris that had buried the body of his friend. Obi-Wan lay entirely still, eyes closed, dust-caked blood matting his hair where his scalp had split.
Bad as Obi-Wan looked, Anakin had stood over the bodies of too many friends on too many battlefields to be panicked by a little blood. One touch to Obi-Wan's throat confirmed the strength of his pulse, and that touch also let Anakin's Force perception flow through the whole body of his friend. His breathing was strong and regular, and no bones were broken: this was a concussion, no more.
Apparently Obi-Wan's head was somewhat harder than the cruiser's interior walls.
"Leave him, Anakin. There is no time." Palpatine was half hanging from the banister, both arms wrapped around a stanchion. "This whole spire may be about to break free—"
"Then we'll all be adrift together." Anakin glanced up at the Supreme Chancellor and for that instant he didn't like the man at all—but then he reminded himself that brave as Palpatine was, his was the courage of conviction; the man was no soldier. He had no way of truly comprehending what he was asking Anakin to do.
"His fate," he said in case Palpatine had not understood, "will be the same as ours."
With Obi-Wan unconscious and Palpatine waiting above, with responsibility for the lives of his two closest friends squarely upon him, Anakin found that he had recovered his inner balance. Under pressure, in crisis, with no one to call upon for help, he could focus again. He had to.
This was what he'd been born for: saving people.
The Force brought Obi-Wan's lightsaber to his hand and he clipped it to his friend's belt, then hoisted the limp body over his shoulder and let the Force help him run lightly up the steeply canted floor to Palpatine's side.
"Impressive," Palpatine said, but then he cast a significant gaze up the staircase, which the vector of the artificial gravity had made into a vertical cliff. "But what now?"
Before Anakin could answer, the erratic gravity swung like a pendulum; while they both clung to the railing, the room seemed to roll around them. All the broken chairs and table fragments and hunks of rubble slid toward the opposite side, and now instead of a cliff the staircase had become merely a corrugated stretch of floor.
"People say"—Anakin nodded toward the door to the turbolift lobby—"when the Force closes a hatch, it opens a viewport. After you?"
=5=
GRIEVOUS
The ARC-170s of Squad Seven had joined the V-wings of Squad Four in swarming the remaining vulture fighters that had screened the immense Trade Federation flagship, Invisible Hand. Clone pilots destroyed droid after droid with machine-like precision of their own. When the last of the vultures had been converted to an expanding globe of superheated gas, the clone fighters peeled away, leaving Invisible Hand exposed to the full fire of Home Fleet Strike Group Five: three Carrack-class light cruisers—Integrity, Indomitable, and Perseverance—in support of the Dreadnaught Mas Ramdar.
Strike Group Five had deployed in a triangle around Mas Ramdar, maintaining a higher orbit to pin Invisible Hand deep Coruscant's gravity well. Turbolasers blasted against Invisible Hand's faltering shields, but the flagship was giving as good as it got: Mas Ramdar had sustained so much damage already that it was little more than a target to absorb the Hand's return fire, and Indomitable was only a shell, most of its crew dead or evacuated, being run remotely by its commander and bridge crew; it swung unsteadily through the Hand's vector cone of escape routes to block any attempt to run up toward jump.
As it
s shields finally failed, Invisible Hand began to roll whirling like a bullet from a rifled slugthrower, trailing spiral jets of crystallizing gas that gushed from multiple hull ruptures. The rolling picked up speed, breaking the targeting locks of the ship's Republic adversaries. Unable to pound the same point again and again, their turbolasers weren't powerful enough to breach the Hand's heavy armor directly; their tracking points became rings that circled the ship, chewing gradually into the hull in tightening garrotes of fire.
On the Hand's bridge, overheated Neimoidians were strapped into their battle stations in full crash webbing. The air reeked of burning metal and the funk of reptilian stress hormones, and the erratically shifting gravity threatened to add a sharper stench: the faces of several of the bridge officers had already paled from healthy gray-green to nauseated pink.
The sole being on the bridge who was not strapped into a chair stalked from one side to the other, floor-length cape draped over shoulders angular as exposed bone. He ignored the jolts of impact and was unaffected by the swirl of unpredictable gravity as he paced the deck with metal-on-metal clanks; he walked on taloned creations of magnetized duranium, jointed to grab and crush like the feet of a Vratixan blood eagle.
His expression could not be read—his face was a mask of bleached ceramic armorplast stylized to evoke a humanoid skull—but the pure venom in the voice that hissed through the mask's electrosonic vocabulator made up for it.
"Either get the gravity generators calibrated or disable them altogether," he snarled at a blue-scanned image of a cringing Neimoidian engineer. "If this continues, you won't live long enough to be killed by the Republic."
"But, but, but sir—it's really up to the repair droids—"
"And because they are droids, it's useless to threaten them. So I am threatening you. Understand?"
He turned away before the stammering engineer could summon a reply. The hand he extended toward the forward viewscreen wore a jointed gauntlet of armorplast fused to its bones of duranium alloy. "Concentrate fire on Indomitable,'' he told the senior gunnery officer. "All batteries at maximum. Fire for effect. Blast that hulk out of space, and we'll make a hyperspace jump through its wreckage."
"But—the forward towers are already overloading, sir." The officer's voice trembled on the edge of panic. "They'll be at critical failure in less than a minute—"
"Burn them out."
"But sir, once they're gone—"
The rest of the senior gunnery officer's objection was lost in the wetly final crunching sound his face made under the impact of an armorplast fist. That same fist opened, seized the collar of the officer's uniform, and yanked his corpse out of the chair, ripping the crash webbing free along with it.
An expressionless skull-face turned toward the junior gunnery officer. "Congratulations on your promotion. Take your post."
"Y-y-yes, sir." The newly promoted senior gunnery officer's hands shook so badly he could barely unbuckle his crash web, and his face had gone deathly pink. "Do you understand your orders?"
"Y-y-y-"
"Do you have any objections?"
"N-n-n—"
"Very well, then," General Grievous said with flat, impenetrable calm. "Carry on."
This is General Grievous:
Durasteel. Ceramic armorplast-plated duranium. Electro-drivers and crystal circuitry.
Within them: the remnants of a living being. He doesn't breathe. He doesn't eat. He cannot laugh, and he does not cry.
A lifetime ago he was an organic sentient being. A lifetime ago he had friends, a family, an occupation; a lifetime ago he had things to love, and things to fear. Now he has none of these. Instead, he has purpose. It's built into him.
He is built to intimidate. The resemblance to a human skeleton melded with limbs styled after the legendary Krath war droids is entirely intentional. It is a face and form born of childhood's infinite nightmares.
He is built to dominate. The ceramic armorplast plates protecting limbs and torso and face can stop a burst from a starfighter's laser cannon. Those indestructible arms are ten times stronger than human, and move with the blurring speed of electronic reflexes.
He is built to eradicate. Those human-sized hands have human-sized fingers for exactly one reason: to hold a lightsaber. Four of them hang inside his cloak.
He has never constructed a lightsaber. He has never bought one, nor has he recovered one that was lost. Each and all, he has taken from the dead hands of Jedi he has killed. Personally.
He has many, many such trophies; the four he carries with him are his particular favorites. One belonged to the interminable K'Kruhk, whom he had bested at Hypori; another to the Viraanntesse Jedi Jmmaar, who'd fallen at Vandos; the other two had been created by Puroth and Nystammall, whom Grievous had slaughtered together on the flame-grass plains of Tovarskl so that each would know the other's death, as well as their own; these are murders he recalls with so much pleasure that touching these souvenirs with his hands of armorplast and durasteel brings him something resembling joy.
But only resembling.
He remembers joy. He remembers anger, and frustration. He remembers grief and sorrow.
He doesn't actually feel any of them. Not anymore.
He's not designed for it.
White-hot sparks zipped and crackled through the smoke that billowed across the turbolift lobby. Over Anakin's shoulder, the unconscious Jedi Master wheezed faintly. Beside his other shoulder, Palpatine coughed harshly into the sleeve of his robe, held aver his face for protection from caustic combustion products of the overloading circuitry.
"Artoo?" Anakin shook his comlink sharply. The blasted ling had been on the blink ever since Obi-Wan had stepped on: during one of the turbolift fights.
"Artoo, do you copy? I need you to activate—" The smoke was so thick he could barely make out the numerals on the code Mate. "—elevator three-two-two-four. Three-two-two-four, do you copy?"
The comlink emitted a fading wheep that might have been an acknowledgment, and the doors slid apart, but before Anakin could carry Obi-Wan through, the turbolift pod shot upward and the artificial gravity vector shifted again, throwing him and his partner into a heap next to Palpatine in the lobby's opposite corner.
Palpatine was struggling to rise, still coughing, sounding weak. Anakin let the Force lift Obi-Wan back to his shoulder, then picked himself up. "Perhaps you should stay down, sir," he said to the Chancellor. "The gravity swings are getting worse."
Palpatine nodded. "But, Anakin—"
Anakin looked up. The turbolift doors still stood open. "Wait here, sir."
He opened himself more fully to the Force and in his mind placed himself and Obi-Wan balanced on the edge of the open doorway above. Holding this image, he leapt, and the Force made his intention into reality: his leap carried him and the unconscious Jedi Master precisely to the rim.
The altered gravitic vector had made the turbolift shaft into a horizontal hallway of unlit durasteel, laser-straight, shrinking into darkness. Anakin was familiar with the specs for Trade Federation command cruisers; the angled conning spire was some three hundred meters long. As it stood, they could walk it in two or three minutes. But if the wrong gravity shift were to catch them inside the shaft...
He shook his head, grimly calculating the odds. "We'll have to be fast."
He glanced back over his shoulder, down at Palpatine, who still huddled below. "Are you all right, Chancellor? Are you well enough to run?"
The Supreme Chancellor finally rose, patting his robes in a futile attempt to dust them off. "I haven't run since I was a boy on Naboo."
"It's never too late to start getting into shape." Anakin reached through the Force to give Palpatine a little help in clambering up to the open doorway. "There are light shuttles on the hangar deck. We can be there in five minutes."
Once Palpatine was safely within the shaft-hall, Anakin said, "Follow me," and turned to go, but the Chancellor stopped him with a hand on his arm.
"An
akin, wait. We need to get to the bridge."
Through an entire shipful of combat droids? Not likely. "The hangar deck's right below—well, beside us, now. It's our best chance."
"But the bridge—Grievous is there." Now Anakin did stop. Grievous. The most prolific slaughterer of Jedi since Durge. In all the excitement, Anakin had entirely forgotten that the bio-droid general was aboard.
"You've defeated Dooku," Palpatine said. "Capture Grievous and you will have dealt a wound from which the Separatists may never recover."
Anakin thought blankly: I could do it.
He had dreamed of capturing Grievous ever since Muunilinst—and now the general was close. So close Anakin could practically smell him... and Anakin had never felt so powerful. The Force was with him today in ways more potent than he had ever experienced.
"Think of it, Anakin." Palpatine stood close by his shoulder, opposite to Obi-Wan, so close he needed only to whisper. "You have destroyed their political head. Take their military commander, and you will have practically won the war. Single-handed. Who else could do that, Anakin? Yoda? Mace Windu? They couldn't even capture Dooku. Who would have a chance against Grievous, if not Anakin Skywalker? The Jedi have never faced a crisis like the Clone Wars—but also they have never had a hero like you. You can save them. You can save everyone."
Anakin jerked, startled. He turned a sharp glance toward Palpatine. The way he had said that... Like a voice out of his dreams.
"That's—" Anakin tried to laugh; it came out a little shaky. "That's not what Obi-Wan keeps telling me."
"Forget Obi-Wan," Palpatine said. "He has no idea how powerful you truly are. Use your power, Anakin. Save the Republic." Anakin could see it, vivid as a HoloNet feature: arriving at the Senate with Grievous in electrobonds, standing modestly aside as Palpatine announced the end of the war, returning to the Temple, to the Council Chamber, where finally, after all this time, there would be a chair waiting, just for him.
They could hardly refuse him Mastership now, after he had won the war for them...
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