Book 0 - The Dark Lord Trilogy

by James Luceno

  Higher, a plunging vehicle—a boxy cargo ship, engulfed in flames—came streaking through a horizontal autonavigation lane, surrendering some of its velocity to a violent collision with a public transport pod before continuing its fiery plunge toward the bottom of the canyon.

  Mace tracked the ill-fated ship for a moment, then tilted his head back and put the edge of his hand to his brow. Distant buildings shimmered, as if miraged by heat.

  The district’s defensive shield had been raised!

  Higher still, something was wrong with the flickering sky. Light flared behind stratified clouds, and thunder of a kind reverberated from the summits of the taller buildings. Far to the south, Coruscant’s pale blue mantle was hashed into triangles and slivers by white contrails.

  In their oblate pools of white skin, Shaak Ti’s eyes were wide when she looked at Mace.

  “An attack,” she said in stunned disbelief.

  Comlink already in hand, Mace activated the Jedi Temple frequency and held the device to his ear.

  “Nothing but noise.”

  “The deflector shield,” Shaak Ti said.

  She craned her neck, striped montrals and head-tail quivering. “Or could they be jamming transmissions?”

  Mace’s nostrils flared. “Crowd control!” he told the commandos. To Shaak Ti, he said: “Find Palpatine. See to it he’s conveyed to safety. I’ll send backup.”

  In the ruined archive hall of LiMerge Power’s plasma facility, Count Dooku waited for Kenobi and Skywalker to arrive. The room was enormous by any standard, thirty meters high and three times that in circumference. Dooku could imagine it when it had hummed with life and activity, before the catastrophe. Still, that it had remained intact was a testament to its builders. And with its curved walls of holobooks and data storage disks—irradiated beyond salvage—he accepted that some might believe that secrets of the most sinister sort were concealed here.

  Jedi like Kenobi and Skywalker, who wanted to believe as much.

  Despite their gullibility, they were nothing if not tenacious and—dare he admit it?—exceptional.

  In the risks they undertook.

  In how deluded they were—about so many things.

  In their unabashed zeal to capture him they had actually piloted their starfighters straight through the roof of the largest of the facility’s containment domes, and had managed to survive. Such superhuman feats were almost enough to convince Dooku that they still had the Force with them.

  If only they weren’t so naïve and easily manipulated.

  Once again, Darth Sidious had divined the actions they would take well in advance of their own deciding. The talent had less to do with being able to peer into the future, than with having access to streams of possibilities. Sidious wasn’t unerring. He could be surprised or taken off his guard—as at Geonosis, as in the case of Gunray’s mechno-chair—but not for long. His mastery of the dark side of the Force endowed him with the power to decipher the currents that comprised the future, and to comprehend that while those currents were manifold, they were not boundless.

  Such mastery was one of the skills that distinguished Sidious from Yoda, who believed the future was so much in motion it could not be read with any clarity—especially during times when the dark side was on the ascendant. But how could Yoda be expected to see the whole picture with one eye closed?

  Deliberately closed.

  The Jedi accepted as a matter of faith that embracing the dark side meant cutting themselves off from the light, when in fact the dark side opened one to the full range of the Force.

  There was, after all, only the Force.

  It was unfortunate for the Jedi that they believed the Force was theirs alone to use and honor. That sense of entitlement was evident in the way Kenobi and Skywalker called on the Force in their fervor to confront him: opening doors with waves of their hands, clearing obstacles from their path with similar gestures, moving with what appeared to be numinous speed and agility, flourishing their blue blades as if they were powered by the will of the Force itself …

  While at the same time oblivious.

  Dooku took a moment to set in place his compact welcoming device, then hurried through a series of decontamination chambers into the facility’s control room, which overlooked the rear of the archive hall and the vast space enclosed by the containment dome itself. There he activated a second small holoprojector and positioned himself for the holocam. Owing to interference, images of the achive hall were nowhere near as clear as he might have wished, and the audio feed was worse. It was more important, though, that Kenobi and Skywalker be able to see him, than he them.

  At long last the two Jedi rushed headlong into the hall, only to stop upon spying his life-sized holoimage emanating from the compact holoprojector he had left behind.

  “Dooku!” young Skywalker said, as if his tone of voice should suffice to send shivers down the backbones of his opponents. “Show yourself!”

  Rooms distant, Dooku merely spread his hands in a gesture of greeting, and aimed his words at the holoprojector’s microphone. “Stand not amazed, young Jedi. Is this not the way you had your first glimpse of Lord Sidious?”

  Instead of replying, Kenobi touched Skywalker on the arm, and the two of them began to scan the hall, no doubt in an attempt to locate him through the Force.

  “You won’t find me, Jedi—”

  “We know you’re here, Dooku,” Kenobi said suddenly—and with irksome audio distortion. “We can sense you.”

  Dooku sighed in disappointment. They weren’t hearing him. Worse, the video feed was also becoming hopelessly corrupted. More through the Force than the holocam feed he saw them moving toward the very doorway he had taken to reach the control room.

  Exceptional, he thought.

  Despite his mastery of the Quey’tek technique for hiding oneself in the Force, they had located him! Ah, well then, time to entertain them, in observance of Sidious’s wishes.

  Plucking his comlink from his belt, Dooku’s right thumb leapt across the small touch pad.

  Heralded by the sound of metallic footfalls, fifty infantry droids crowded into the archive hall through two opposing doorways, perpendicular to the one through which the Jedi had entered.

  “—beginning to … things almost as much … I hate sand,” Skywalker was saying to his former mentor as he raised his lightsaber over one shoulder.

  Kenobi spread his legs and brought his blade directly in front of him. “Then … sweep up.”

  Touched by their camaraderie, Dooku smiled to himself. Darth Sidious had his work cut out for him if he ever expected to turn Skywalker to the dark side.

  He thumbed a final comlink key.

  And with that, the droids leveled their blaster rifles at the Jedi and opened fire.

  Yoda surrendered himself to the current of the Force. Sometimes, when the current was swift and steadfast, he could see through the eyes of his fellow Jedi, almost as if they were the Temple’s remote sensors. And sometimes when the current was especially forceful, when it surged as if descending from great heights, he could hear the voice of Qui-Gon Jinn, as clearly as if he were still alive.

  Master Yoda, he might say, we still have much to learn. The Force remains a code only partially deciphered. But another key has been found. We will become stronger than we have ever been …

  Today was not one of those days. Today the current was interrupted by eddies and whirlpools, hydraulic traps whose roar overpowered the voices Yoda sought to hear. Today the current was not pellucid, but muddied by red soil eroded from distant shores, treacherous with obstacles, tainted.

  Though he was scarcely aware of it, his eyelids were squeezed tight, his eyeballs dancing beneath as if incapable of focusing on any one thing. He had an image of himself drawing aside a veil only to find another, and another beyond that.

  The dark side frustrated his every effort to see clearly.

  The experience was still something new to him.

  Even though he’
d had centuries to grow accustomed to foreboding, he had lived far longer without it. The dark side never completely disappeared—it scratched at the surface like an insect crawling across a transparisteel panel—and he had been able to sense its incremental increases in strength when the Jedi erred, or when the Republic erred, and soon the two were hand in hand.

  Drawn into the mistakes of the Republic, the Jedi had been. But knowingly, and sometimes with full complicity. Allowed the dark side to take root, the Jedi had. Allowed arrogance to infect the Order, the Jedi had. A priority, holding on to power had become. Inflated by their own conquests, the Jedi became.

  Some Jedi believed that Yoda wasn’t aware of these things, or that he hadn’t done enough to stem the tide of the dark side. Some believed that the Council had acted improperly or, worse, ineptly. What they failed to understand was that, once rooted, the growth of the dark side was inexorable, and could only be reversed by the one born to restore balance.

  Yoda was not that one.

  Aged, experienced, diplomatic, informative, brilliant with a lightsaber … Yes, all of these things. And not unacquainted with the power of the dark side. For that reason he understood just how dangerous this new Sith Lord was. He hadn’t had a sense of that danger until he had fought Dooku on Geonosis.

  Then he understood.

  In self-exile for a thousand years, the Sith had not merely been waiting for an appropriate time to reemerge and exact revenge, but for the birth of one strong enough to embrace the dark side fully and become its dedicated instrument. This was Sidious: powerful enough to hide in plain sight. Powerful enough to instruct his apprentice, Dooku, to expose him, and still remain hidden from the Jedi.

  And as arrogant as the Jedi. Convinced that his way was the one and only way.

  Did he know about Skywalker?

  Surely he did. What better way to ensure total victory than by killing or corrupting the Chosen One? Even if not that One, someone so strong in midi-chlorians … Someone birthed by the Force itself, Qui-Gon would have said—never a doubt that Anakin’s mother might have been lying.

  The boy had no father.

  None I choose to remember. None I would honor with that title.

  The Sith were aware of Skywalker. How would he react when they tried finally to ensnare him?

  Yoda’s eyes snapped open. A disturbance in the Force—of such magnitude that he had been hurled from the current.

  At his thought command, the window shutters in his quarters opened, and he gazed out on Coruscant, over the plain of The Works and beyond. Something was wrong with the sky. Behind gathered clouds turned red and gold by noxious smoke: a lightstorm. Pulsing light, brighter than the waning rays of Coruscant’s sun. Movement, as well; outside Coruscant’s busy envelope, not seen but sensed.

  An attack.

  The Sith Lord’s response to his being chased? Was it possible?

  He perceived Mace running down corridors in the Temple; then turned as Mace rushed through the doorway. At the same instant, a flaming Republic ship streaked past the Temple’s crowning spires and crashed violently in the heart of The Works.

  “Tiin, Koon, Ki-Adi-Mundi, and some of the others are on their way up the well,” Mace said. “I sent Stass Allie to assist Shaak Ti in guarding Chancellor Palpatine.”

  Yoda nodded sagely. “Well trained the Supreme Chancellor’s Red Guards are. But display due concern for his safety, the Jedi must.”

  “Reports from naval command are garbled,” Mace continued. “It’s clear that the attack caught the home fleet by surprise. Groups of Separatist ships managed to penetrate the envelope before the fleet had time to engage. Now, by all accounts, our vessels are holding the line.”

  Yoda adopted an expression that mixed anger and bafflement. “Monitoring hyperspace reversion points, our commanders weren’t?”

  Mace’s eyes narrowed. “The Separatist fleet jumped from the Deep Core.”

  “Secret, those routes were. Known to us and few others.” Yoda looked at Mace. “Unrestricted access to the archives, Dooku had. Access enough to erase all mentions of Kamino. Access enough to learn of explorations in the Deep Core.”

  Mace went to the window wall and stared at the sky. “Dooku isn’t leading this attack. Obi-Wan confirmed that he is on Tythe.”

  “Revealed, the importance of Tythe is. To draw into the Outer Rim additional Jedi.”

  “Maybe Palpatine will heed the Council’s warnings next time.”

  “Improbable. But as you say: perhaps.”

  Mace swung back to Yoda. “It’s Grievous. But he can’t be planning to occupy Coruscant. There aren’t enough battle droids in the entire galaxy for that.”

  “Desperate he is,” Yoda said, more to himself.

  “It’s not in his programming.”

  Yoda looked up. “Not Grievous—Sidious.”

  Mace took a moment to answer. “If that’s true, then we’re closer to finding him than we thought. Still, he can’t believe we’d call off the search now.”

  “Demoralize Coruscant, Grievous will. Harry those who live in the heights and who wield power. Send them fleeing for safer havens, the attack will. Disrupt the Senate.”

  Mace paced in front of the windows. “This will only encourage Palpatine to triple the size of the clone army, construct more and more starships and fighters, strike at more worlds. With the Senate crippled, no one will oppose him.”

  “Modulate, this war does. Recall every available Jedi, we must.”

  “The HoloNet is down,” Mace said. “Surface communications are distorted by the defensive shields.”

  Yoda nodded. “Use the beacon, we will.”

  In the wake of the erratic and mostly unintelligible messages that had reached 500 Republica regarding the Separatists’ surprise attack, Dyne had considered the sub-basement to be the safest place on Coruscant. But now that the team had discovered a possible finish to the long trail they had followed from The Works, the building’s vast underground seemed the most dangerous place to be.

  With a battle raging in space, and notwithstanding Mace Windu’s command to the contrary, Dyne had been tempted to suspend the search for Sidious’s lair and report back to the Intelligence division, as he had ordered the other analysts to do. But as ARC commander Valiant had pointed out, the search team’s objective was as important to the war as the actions of the ships that were protecting Coruscant.

  So, while the team waited for Intelligence to deliver additional probe droids, a search of the sub-basement had begun—admittedly superficial and somewhat desultory, but only in response to the seeming impossibility of the task. Electronically tethered to the probe droids, Dyne and the commandos had performed imagings of some of the partitions and walls, and investigated numerous unlit hollows and recesses. The basement became a kind of microcosm for the entire war, with everyone on the team contributing separate skills.

  Only the interpreter droid, TC-16, was at a loss for something to do.

  Five Hundred Republica hadn’t sustained any follow-up jolts. Dyne had learned that the initial jolts had owed not to bombardment, but to the fall of ships destroyed at the edge of space. With thousands of cargo and passenger vessels arriving at Coruscant at any given moment, he could scarcely imagine the chaos upside. Secondary shocks that had rocked the huge building had been traced to the firing of plasma weapons concealed in 500 Republica’s cake of a crown.

  Several hours into the cursory search, Dyne had been struck by the possibility that certain Coruscanti—perhaps the Sith Lord himself—could be helping to coordinate the attack. With HoloNet transmissions jammed and surface communications sabotaged by the defensive shields, he had theorized that the probe droids might be able to home in on exchanges occurring on eccentric frequencies.

  He was as astonished as anyone when the hovering probe droids had led the team right back to where they had begun the search: where the footprints of their as-yet-unidentified quarry ended.

  The source of the unusual frequency was de
termined to be directly beneath them. The droids had discovered further that the ferrocrete floor panel thought to have been the end of the trail was actually a movable platform, not unlike a turbolift, but powered hydraulically rather than by antigrav repulsor. The search for a hidden control panel, such as had been detected at the niche, hadn’t come to anything. But by broadcasting sounds—both within and outside the range of human hearing—the probe droids had ultimately conjured a response from the platform.

  Following what had sounded like a debate, the probe droids had chirped and bleated at the panel a second time. Issuing a resolved click, the panel had descended a couple of centimeters, then come to a halt.

  Dyne recalled wondering where the platform’s shaft could lead.

  Unlike many of Coruscant’s tallest buildings, 500 Republica did not rely on the support of earlier structures for its foundation, but was solid almost all the way down to bedrock. Or at least was thought to be. This far below Coruscant’s civilized crust, there remained areas as unfamiliar as the surfaces of some distant worlds.

  Dyne had decided to contact Mace Windu at the Jedi Temple for advice on how to proceed. But when his repeated attempts failed, he and Valiant had made a command decision to carry on without the Jedi.

  Ground imaging scans had already shown the shaft to be fifty meters deep. Four meters in diameter, the panel was large enough to accommodate the entire team, including the interpreter droid.

  Definitely the most dangerous place to be, Dyne thought as he wedged himself among the commandos.

  The probe droids chirped instructions to the panel, and it began to drop.

  Slower than would have been the case had it answered to a repulsorlift.