by James Luceno
She nodded. “All the way to the bottom.”
Again.
The turbolift deposited them not far from where she had been earlier, though on the opposite side of the tunnel leading to the east skydock. As they hurried for the tunnel, Shaak Ti took a moment to survey the huge space for some sign of Captain Dyne’s team. Considering all that had happened since she left, it was likely that Dyne and Commander Valiant had curtailed the search for Sidious’s hideaway. Or perhaps they were still at it, somewhere in the sub-basement. Just short of entering the tunnel, she caught a glance of a bright silver protocol droid that might have been TC-16 hastening toward the exit to the west skydock.
The tunnel was darker than it should have been at that time of day, and the lower reaches of the canyon were darker still.
“Wait here,” Shaak Ti instructed the Red Guards and Palpatine when they had reached the mouth of the tunnel.
Stass Allie strode to the center of the platform and gazed up at the buildings that loomed on all sides. “Grievous’s forces must have destroyed the orbital mirror that feeds this sector.”
Shaak Ti looked straight up at the sliver of sky.
“The shield is down. They must have taken out the generator.”
Allie blew out her breath. “I’ll find an appropriate vehicle to confiscate.”
Shaak Ti laid a hand on her upper arm. “Too risky. We should remain as close to ground as possible.”
Allie indicated the stairway that led to the mag-lev platform. “The train won’t take us to the bunker complex, but close enough.”
Shaak Ti smiled at her and reactivated the comlink.
“Mace,” she said when he answered. “Another change in plans …”
Dragging himself out from under plasteel girders and chunks of ferrocrete, Count Dooku came shakily to his feet and gazed in astonished disbelief at the shambles of the control room. Had the containment dome been so weak that it had succumbed to flurries of ricocheting blaster bolts, or had Skywalker’s voiced rage actually called the ceiling down?
Had Dooku not leapt forcefully at the last moment, he might have been buried, as the two Jedi were, somewhere below, in the expanse of rubble that covered the archive room. He was certain that they had survived. But if nothing else they were trapped, which had been the intent from the start.
But Skywalker … Assuming that he had grown powerful enough to have collapsed the dome, the end result was simply further evidence that he would someday undo himself. Wasn’t it? Because admitting to any alternative explanation meant accepting that Skywalker was potentially a greater threat to the Sith than anyone realized.
Initially, it had cheered him to observe that Skywalker and Kenobi had finally learned to fight together; to see how powerful they had become in partnership. Complementing each other’s strengths, compensating for each other’s weaknesses. Kenobi making full use of his inherent discretion to balance young Skywalker’s inattentive rowdiness. He could have watched them until the light faded on fair Tythe. And he wished that General Grievous could have been there to witness the display for himself.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
What if it should all come crashing down? he found himself thinking, as he dusted himself off and raced to exit the ruined facility.
What if Grievous was outwitted and destroyed at Coruscant? Sidious, apprehended and defeated? What if the Jedi should triumph, after all?
What would become of his dream of a galaxy brought under eminent stewardship?
On Vjun, Yoda had implied that the Jedi Temple would always be open to Dooku’s return … But, no. There was no turning back from the dark side, especially from the depths in which he had swum. Was there, then, a life of retirement somewhere in the galaxy for the former Count Dooku of Serenno?
So much rested on what would take place over the next few standard days.
So much rested on whether Lord Sidious’s plan could succeed on all fronts—even though forced to unfold hastily, because of a foolish oversight by Nute Gunray.
Outside, under Tythe’s yellow-gray sky, his sloop was waiting, and standing alongside it the ship’s pilot droid.
“A recorded message,” the droid announced. “From General Grievous.”
“Play it!” Dooku said as he hurried up the sloop’s aft boarding ramp and into the instrument-filled main hold.
A paused holoimage of the cyborg floated in blue light.
Throwing off his dusty cape, Dooku paced while the FA-4 triggered the recording to replay.
“Lord Tyranus,” Grievous said, in motion suddenly and genuflecting. “Supreme Chancellor Palpatine will soon be ours.”
Dooku exhaled in satisfaction. “And just in time,” he muttered.
As if recalled to life, he positioned himself on the transmission grid and sent a simple return message: “General, I will join you shortly.”
Padmé’s eyes fluttered open.
Into focus swam the faintly smiling face of Mon Mothma.
“No sleeping on the job, Senator,” Mon Mothma said, as if from underwater. “We have to get you out of here.”
Padmé took stock of herself; realized that she was reclined in the rear seat of Stass Allie’s skimmer. Her head was pillowed on Mon Mothma’s left arm, and her ears felt as if they were plugged with cotton.
“How long—”
“Just for a moment,” Mon Mothma said in the same watery tone. “I don’t think you struck your head. You were fine after the crash. Then you fainted. Can you move?”
Padmé sat up and saw that the skimmer’s safety mechanisms had deployed. Light-headed but unhurt, she brushed her hair from her face. “I can barely hear you.”
Mon Mothma regarded her in knowing silence, then extended a hand to help her climb from the craft. “Padmé, you have to be careful. Quickly, now.”
She nodded. “Crashing wasn’t exactly on my agenda.”
Mon Mothma hurried her away from the skimmer, to where Bail and C-3PO were hiding behind the blockish pedestal of a modernistic sculpture.
“Master Allie doesn’t strike me as someone who will sue for damages,” the droid was saying.
Still in a daze, Padmé grasped that they had skidded into the plaza that fronted the Embassy Mall, taking out a large holosign and three news kiosks along the way. Bail’s skill had somehow kept them from mowing down pedestrians, who had apparently scattered on first sight of the nose-diving ship. Or perhaps at sight of the craft that had fallen to Separatist fire ahead of the skimmer—a military police vehicle, similar to a Naboo Gian speeder, tipped on its side against the façade of the mall and belching smoke. Sprawled on the plaza close to the vehicle were the charred corpses of three clone troopers.
Reality reasserted itself in a rush of deafening noise, flashing light, and acrid smells. From nearby came anguished moans and terrified screams; from the tiered heights above the plaza, distant discharges of artillery. Higher still, plasma bolts raked the sky; fire bloomed, detonations thundered.
Padmé saw a smear of blood on Bail’s cheek. “You’re hurt—”
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Besides, we have more to worry about.”
She followed his grim gaze, and understood immediately why Coruscanti were fleeing the pedestrian skybridge that linked the mall to the midlevel entrances of the Senate Hospital. Five Vulture droids had alit on the far side of the span and reconfigured to patrol mode. Four-legged gargoyles, with heads deployed forward and sensor slits red as arterial blood, they were striding through Hospital Plaza, sowing destruction. Their four laser cannons were aimed downward, but from paired launchers in their semicircular fuselage flew torpedoes aimed at air taxis, craft attempting to dock at the hospital’s emergency platforms, the tunnel entrances to the Senate shelters …
Republic LAATs had dropped from the Senate Plaza to engage the three-and-a-half-meter-tall droids but were maintaining a wary distance just now, pilots and gunners clearly worried about adding energy weapons or EMP missiles to the chaos.
&n
bsp; “Xi Char monstrosities,” Mon Mothma said.
Padmé remembered standing helplessly at the tall windows of Theed Palace, watching squadrons of Vulture fighters fill the sky, like cave creatures loosed on Naboo by darkness …
Caught in the crossfire, pedestrians had raced across the skybridge, hoping to find sanctuary in the Embassy Mall—midlevel in the dome-topped Nicandra Counterrevolutionary Signalmen’s Memorial Building—but thick security grates had been lowered over the entrances, leaving crowds of Coruscanti to scramble for whatever cover could be found.
Padmé felt faint once more.
Huddled, frightened, panicked masses of Coruscanti were suddenly getting a taste of what the inhabitants of Jabiim, Brentaal, and countless other worlds had faced during the past three years. Caught up in a war of ideologies, often by dint of circumstance or location. Caught between the forces of a droid army led by a self-styled revolutionary and a cyborg butcher, and an army of vat-grown soldiers led by a monastic order of Jedi Knights who had once been the galaxy’s peacekeepers.
Caught in the middle, with no allegiance to either side.
It was tragic and senseless, and she might have broken down and cried if her current circumstances had been different. She felt sick at heart, and in despair for the future of sentient life.
“Palpatine will never live this down,” Mon Mothma was saying. “Committing so many of our ships and troopers to the Outer Rim sieges. As if this war he is so intent on winning could never come to Coruscant.”
Bail frowned in sympathy. “Not only will he live it down, he’ll profit from it. The Senate will be blamed for voting to escalate the sieges, and while we’re mired in accusations and counter-accusations of accountability, Palpatine will quietly accrue more and more power. Without realizing it, the Separatists have played right into his hands by launching this attack.”
Padmé wanted to argue with him but didn’t have the strength.
“They’re all mad,” Bail continued. “Dooku, Grievous, Gunray, Palpatine.”
Mon Mothma nodded sadly. “The Jedi could have stopped this war. Now they’re Palpatine’s pawns.”
Padmé squeezed her eyes shut. Even if she managed to summon the strength, how could she respond, when her own husband was one of them—a general? What had the Jedi gotten Anakin into—taking him from Tatooine, from his youth, his mother? And yet hadn’t she done as much as anyone to encourage him to remain a Jedi; to heed the tutelage of Obi-Wan, Mace, and the others; to perpetuate the lie that was their secret life as husband and wife?
She hugged herself.
What had she gotten Anakin into? What had she gotten both of them into?
Bail’s voice snapped her from self-pity.
“They’re coming.” He aimed a finger across the plaza. “They’re coming across the bridge.”
From somewhere in the Vultures’ droid brains had come a revelation that the pedestrian skyway offered a better vantage for targeting buildings and craft to both sides of the kilometer-deep canyon. More important, the gunships were even less likely to fire on them there, lest they destroy the span and send it plummeting to the busy thoroughfares and mag-lev lines two hundred stories below.
“Perhaps if we throw ourselves on the mercy of the owners of the mall, they will raise the security grate,” C-3PO started to say.
Bail looked at Padmé and Mon Mothma. “We have to keep those droids on the far side of the bridge, so the gunships can take them out.”
Mon Mothma glanced at the overturned military craft. “I see a way to try.”
The craft sat scarcely fifty meters from the base of the sculpture. Without further word, the three of them hurried for it.
“What could I have possibility been thinking?” C-3PO shouted as he watched them search the craft for weapons. “It can never be the easy answer!”
The three humans returned momentarily, carrying three blaster rifles.
“Not much power left,” Bail said, checking one of them.
“Yours?”
“Low on blaster gas,” Padmé said.
Mon Mothma ejected the powerpack from hers. “Empty.”
Bail nodded glumly. “We’ll have to make do.”
Hunkering down behind the pedestal, he and Padmé took careful aim on the closest of the walking droids.
By then three had started onto the skyway, firing at random. Exploding against the façades of buildings above and below, torpedoes sent slabs of durasteel-reinforced ferrocrete avalanching onto plazas, landing platforms, and balconies, burying scores of hapless Coruscanti.
“Be prepared to move as soon as we fire,” Bail said. He indicated one of the kiosks that had survived the crashes of both speeders. “There’s our first cover.”
Padmé centered the lead droid in the blaster’s targeting reticle and squeezed the trigger. Her initial bursts did little more than catch the droid’s attention, but subsequent bolts from both blasters started to score hits on vital components. The droid actually retreated a couple of steps toward Hospital Plaza, only to launch a trio of torpedoes straight across the skyway.
Padmé and company were already in motion. One torpedo hit the pedestal, blowing it and the sculpture to fragments. A second slagged what was left of Stass Allie’s skimmer. The third detonated against the lowered security grate, blowing a gaping hole into the mall. Pedestrians to both sides hastened for it, fighting with one another to be first through the smoking maw. Padmé thought that one of the Vultures would target them, but in their moment of inattention, the droids had left themselves open to strafing runs by the gunships. Converging beams of brilliant light streaked from the fire dishes of the LAATs’ wing- and armature-mounted ball turrets, and staccato bursts erupted from the forward guns.
Two droids exploded.
One turned to answer the volleys, but not in time. Missiles from the gunships’ mass-drive launchers took off the droid’s left legs, then the head, then blew the rest clear across the plaza. The remaining two Vultures skittered onto the skyway to increase their odds of survival.
Bail and Padmé laid down steady lines of fire, but the droids were undeterred.
“And I thought the Senate was a battlefield!” Mon Mothma said.
The sight of smoke curling from holes in the lead droid’s fuselage seemed to invigorate the one behind. Driving Padmé and the others in search of new cover with a single torpedo, the droid scurried forward, edging around its stricken comrade and stepping brazenly into the mall plaza, red sensors gleaming.
A gunship made a quick pass, but couldn’t find a clear field of fire.
“I’m out,” Bail said, dropping his rifle.
Padmé checked her weapon’s display screen. “Same.”
C-3PO shook his head. “How will I ever explain this to Artoo-Detoo?”
They broke for cover a final time, hoping to throw themselves through the ragged hole in the still-smoking security grate, but the droid hurried to intercept them; then, in seeming sadistic delight, began to back the four of them against the wall of the Nicandra Building.
A rage began to build in Padmé, born of instincts as old as life itself. She was on the verge of hurling herself against the towering machine, ripping the sensors from its teardrop-shaped head, when the droid came to a sudden halt, obviously in reception of some remote communication. Retracting its head and stiffening its scissor-like legs into wings, it turned and launched itself over the edge of the plaza into the canyon below.
The droid on the skyway did the same, even with two gunships in close pursuit.
Padmé was first to reach the skyway railing. Far below, the Senate District mag-lev was racing south toward the skytunnel that would take it through the kilometer-wide Heorem Complex and on into the wealthy Sah’c District. The two Vulture droids were swooping down to join ranks with a Separatist gunboat that was already chasing the train.
How had Grievous known to attack 500 Republica? Mace asked himself as the mag-lev rushed at three hundred kilometers per hour toward the s
kytunnel that would spirit the train from the Senate District.
Having boarded the mag-lev at its 500 Republica platform, he, Kit Fisto, Shaak Ti, and Stass Allie were in the car the Supreme Chancellor’s Red Guards had commandeered—second in a train of some twenty cars. Through a gap in the protective circle the guards had forged, Mace caught a glimpse of Palpatine, his head of wavy gray hair lowered in what might have been anguish or deep concentration.
How had Grievous known? Mace asked himself.
Many Coruscanti knew that Palpatine resided in 500 Republica, but the location of his suite was a well-kept secret. More important, how had Grievous known that Palpatine wasn’t to be found in either of his offices?
Not everything could be traced to Dooku.
It was conceivable that Dooku had furnished Grievous with data on hyperlanes that skimmed the outer limits of the Deep Core. That much, Dooku could have pilfered from the Jedi archives before he left the Order, presumably when he was erasing mentions of Kamino from the data banks. Similarly, Dooku could have supplied Grievous with the orbital coordinates of specific communications satellites and mirrors, or with tactical information regarding the location of dedicated shield generators on the surface. But Palpatine had only just been elected Supreme Chancellor when Dooku left Coruscant to return to Serenno, and back then, some thirteen years ago, Palpatine had been living in a high-rise tower close to the Senate Building.
So how had Grievous known to go to 500 Republica?
Sidious?
If it was true that hundreds of Senators had, for a time, been under the Sith Lord’s influence, then he may have had access to the highest levels of confidential information. As many on the Jedi Council feared, Sidious’s network of agents and assets might have infiltrated the Republic military command itself. Which suggested that the sneak attack on Coruscant may have been years in the planning!
Mace caught another glimpse of Palpatine, insulated by the flowing red robes of his handpicked bodyguards.
This was hardly the time to question him about his closest confidants.