Book 0 - The Dark Lord Trilogy

by James Luceno

  The myth—

  … directly influence the midi-chlorians to create life; with such knowledge, to maintain life in someone already living would seem a small matter …

  “Yes,” Anakin said. “Yes, I remember.”

  The shadow leaned so close that it seemed to fill the world.

  “Anakin, it’s no mere myth.”

  Anakin swallowed.

  “Darth Plagueis was real.”

  Anakin could force out only a strangled whisper. “Real …?”

  “Darth Plagueis was my Master. He taught me the key to his power,” the shadow said, dryly matter-of-fact, “before I killed him.”

  Without understanding how he had moved, without even intending to move, without any transition of realization or dawning understanding, Anakin found himself on his feet. A blue bar of sizzling energy terminated a centimeter from Palpatine’s chin, its glow casting red-edged shadows up his face and across the ceiling.

  Only gradually did Anakin come to understand that this was his lightsaber, and that it was in his hand.

  “You,” he said. Suddenly he was neither dizzy nor tired.

  Suddenly everything made sense.

  “It’s you. It’s been you all along!”

  In the clean blue light of his blade he stared into the face of a man whose features were as familiar to him as his own, but now seemed as alien as an extragalactic comet—because now he finally understood that those familiar features were only a mask.

  He had never seen this man’s real face.

  “I should kill you,” he said. “I will kill you!”

  Palpatine gave him that wise, kindly-uncle smile Anakin had been seeing since the age of nine. “For what?”

  “You’re a Sith Lord!”

  “I am,” he said simply. “I am also your friend.”

  The blue bar of energy wavered, just a bit.

  “I am also the man who has always been here for you. I am the man you have never needed to lie to. I am the man who wants nothing from you but that you follow your conscience. If that conscience requires you to commit murder, simply over a … philosophical difference … I will not resist.”

  His hands opened, still at his sides. “Anakin, when I told you that you can have anything you want, did you think I was excluding my life?”

  The floor seemed to soften beneath Anakin’s feet, and the room started to swirl darkness and ooze confusion. “You—you won’t even fight—?”

  “Fight you?” In the blue glow that cast shadows up from Palpatine’s chin, the Chancellor looked astonished that he would suggest such a thing. “But what will happen when you kill me? What will happen to the Republic?” His tone was gently reasonable. “What will happen to Padmé?”

  “Padmé …”

  Her name was a gasp of anguish.

  “When I die,” Palpatine said with the air of a man reminding a child of something he ought to already know, “my knowledge dies with me.”

  The sizzling blade trembled.

  “Unless, that is, I have the opportunity to teach it … to my apprentice …”

  His vision swam.

  “I …” A whisper of naked pain, and despair. “I don’t know what to do …”

  Palpatine gazed upon him, loving and gentle as he had ever been, though only a whisker shy of a lightsaber’s terminal curve.

  And what if this face was not a mask? What if the true face of the Sith was exactly what he saw before him: a man who had cared for him, had helped him, had been his loyal friend when he’d thought he had no other?

  What then?

  “Anakin,” Palpatine said kindly, “let’s talk.”

  The four bodyguard droids spread out in a shallow arc between Obi-Wan and Grievous, raising their electrostaffs. Obi-Wan stopped a respectful distance away; he still carried bruises from one of those electrostaffs, and he felt no particular urge to add to his collection.

  “General Grievous,” he said, “you’re under arrest.”

  The bio-droid general stalked toward him, passing through his screen of bodyguards without the slightest hint of reluctance. “Kenobi. Don’t tell me, let me guess: this is the part where you give me the chance to surrender.”

  “It can be,” Obi-Wan allowed equably. “Or, if you like, it can be the part where I dismantle your exoskeleton and ship you back to Coruscant in a cargo hopper.”

  “I’ll take option three.” Grievous lifted his hand, and the bodyguards moved to box Obi-Wan between them. “That’s the one where I watch you die.”

  Another gesture, and the droids in the ceiling hive came to life.

  They uncoiled from their sockets heads-downward, with a rising chorus of whirring and buzzing and clicking that thickened until Obi-Wan might as well have stumbled into a colony of Corellian raptor-wasps. They began to drop free of the ceiling, first only a few, then many, like the opening drops of a summer cloudburst; finally they fell in a downpour that shook the stone-mounted durasteel of the deck and left Obi-Wan’s ears ringing. Hundreds of them landed and rolled to standing; as many more stayed attached to the overhead hive, hanging upside down by their magnapeds, weapons trained so that Obi-Wan now stood at the focus of a dome of blasters.

  Through it all, Obi-Wan never moved.

  “I’m sorry, was I not clear?” he said. “There is no option three.”

  Grievous shook his head. “Do you never tire of this pathetic banter?”

  “I rarely tire at all,” Obi-Wan said mildly, “and I have no better way to pass the time while I wait for you to either decide to surrender, or choose to die.”

  “That choice was made long before I ever met you.” Grievous turned away. “Kill him.”

  Instantly the box of bodyguards around Obi-Wan filled with crackling electrostaffs whipping faster than the human eye could see—which was less troublesome than it might have been, for that box was already empty of Jedi.

  The Force had let him collapse as though he’d suddenly fainted, then it brought his lightsaber from his belt to his hand and ignited it while he turned his fall into a roll; that roll carried his lightsaber through a crisp arc that severed the leg of one of the bodyguards, and as the Force brought Obi-Wan back to his feet, the Force also nudged the crippled bodyguard to topple sideways into the path of the blade and sent it clanging to the floor in two smoking, sparking pieces.

  One down.

  The remaining three pressed the attack, but more cautiously; their weapons were longer than his, and they struck from beyond the reach of his blade. He gave way before them, his defensive velocities barely keeping their crackling discharge blades at bay.

  Three MagnaGuards, each with a double-ended weapon that generated an energy field impervious to lightsabers, each with reflexes that operated near lightspeed, each with hypersophisticated heuristic combat algorithms that enabled it to learn from experience and adapt its tactics instantly to any situation, were certainly beyond Obi-Wan’s ability to defeat, but it was not Obi-Wan who would defeat them; Obi-Wan wasn’t even fighting. He was only a vessel, emptied of self. The Force, shaped by his skill and guided by his clarity of mind, fought through him.

  In the Force, he felt their destruction: it was somewhere above and behind him, and only seconds away.

  He went to meet it with a backflipping leap that the Force used to lift him neatly to an empty droid socket in the ceiling hive. The MagnaGuards sprang after him but he was gone by the time they arrived, leaping higher into the maze of girders and cables and room-sized cargo containers that was the control center’s superstructure.

  Here, said the Force within him, and Obi-Wan stopped, balancing on a girder, frowning back at the oncoming killer droids that leapt from beam to beam below him like malevolent durasteel primates. Though he could feel its close approach, he had no idea from where their destruction might come … until the Force showed him a support beam within reach of his blade and whispered, Now.

  His blade flicked out and the durasteel beam parted, fresh-cut edges glowing whi
te hot, and a great hulk of ship-sized cargo container that the beam had been supporting tore free of its other supports with shrieks of anguished metal and crashed down upon all three MagnaGuards with the finality of a meteor strike.

  Two, three, and four.

  Oh, thought Obi-Wan with detached approval. That worked out rather well.

  Only ten thousand to go. Give or take.

  An instant later the Force had him hurtling through a storm of blasterfire as every combat droid in the control center opened up on him at once.

  Letting go of intention, letting go of desire, letting go of life, Obi-Wan fixed his entire attention on a thread of the Force that pulled him toward Grievous: not where Grievous was, but where Grievous would be when Obi-Wan got there …

  Leaping girder to girder, slashing cables on which to swing through swarms of ricocheting particle beams, blade flickering so fast it became a deflector shield that splattered blaster bolts in all directions, his presence alone became a weapon: as he spun and whirled through the control center’s superstructure, the blasts of particle cannons from power droids destroyed equipment and shattered girders and unleashed a torrent of red-hot debris that crashed to the deck, crushing droids on all sides. By the time he flipped down through the air to land catfooted on the deck once more, nearly half the droids between him and Grievous had been destroyed by their own not-so-friendly fire.

  He cut his way into the mob of remaining troops as smoothly as if it were no more than a canebrake near some sunlit beach; his steady pace left behind a trail of smoking slices of droid.

  “Keep firing!” Grievous roared to the spider droids that flanked him. “Blast him!”

  Obi-Wan felt the massive shoulder cannon of a spider droid track him, and he felt it fire a bolt as powerful as a proton grenade, and he let the Force nudge him into a leap that carried him just far enough toward the fringe of the bolt’s blast radius so that instead of shattering his bones it merely gave him a very strong, very hot push—

  —that sent him whirling over the rest of the droids to land directly in front of Grievous.

  A single slash of his lightsaber amputated the shoulder cannon of one power droid and continued into a spinning Forceassisted kick that brought his boot heel to the point of the other power droid’s duranium chin, snapping the droid’s head back hard enough to sever its cervical sensor cables. Blind and deaf, the power droid could only continue to obey its last order; it staggered in a wild circle, its convulsively firing cannon blasting random holes in droids and walls alike, until Obi-Wan deactivated it with a precise thrust that burned a thumb-sized hole through its thoracic braincase.

  “General,” Obi-Wan said with a blandly polite smile as though unexpectedly greeting, on the street, someone he privately disliked. “My offer is still open.”

  Droid guns throughout the control center fell silent; Obi-Wan stood so close to Grievous that the general was in the line of fire.

  Grievous threw back his cloak imperiously. “Do you believe that I would surrender to you now?”

  “I am still willing to take you alive.” Obi-Wan’s nod took in the smoking, sparking wreckage that filled the control center. “So far, no one has been hurt.”

  Grievous tilted his head so that he could squint down into Obi-Wan’s face. “I have thousands of troops. You cannot defeat them all.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  “This is your chance to surrender, General Kenobi.” Grievous swept a duranium hand toward the sinkhole-city behind him. “Pau City is in my grip; lay down your blade, or I will squeeze … until this entire sinkhole brims over with innocent blood.”

  “That’s not what it’s about to brim with,” Obi-Wan said. “You should pay more attention to the weather.”

  Yellow eyes narrowed behind a mask of armorplast. “What?”

  “Have a look outside.” He pointed his lightsaber toward the archway. “It’s about to start raining clones.”

  Grievous said again, turning to look, “What?”

  A shadow had passed over the sun as though one of the towering thunderheads on the horizon had caught a stray current in the hyperwinds and settled above Pau City. But it wasn’t a cloud.

  It was the Vigilance.

  While twilight enfolded the sinkhole, over the bright desert above assault craft skimmed the dunes in a tightening ring centered on the city. Hailfire droids rolled out from caves in the wind-scoured mesas, unleashing firestorms of missiles toward the oncoming craft for exactly 2.5 seconds apiece, which was how long it took for the Vigilance’s sensor operators to transfer data to its turbolaser batteries.

  Thunderbolts roared down through the atmosphere, and hailfire droids disintegrated. Pinpoint counterfire from the bubble turrets of LAAT/i’s met missiles in blossoming fireballs that were ripped to shreds of smoke as the oncoming craft blasted through them.

  LAAT/i’s streaked over the rim of the sinkhole and spiraled downward with all guns blazing, crabbing outward to keep their forward batteries raking on the sinkhole’s wall, while at the rim above, Jadthu-class armored landers hovered with bay doors wide, trailing sprays of polyplast cables like immense ice-white tassels that looped all the way to the ocean mouths that gaped at the lowest level of the city. Down those tassels, rappelling so fast they seemed to be simply falling, came endless streams of armored troopers, already firing on the combat droids that marched out to meet them.

  Streamers of cables brushed the outer balcony of the control center, and down them slid white-armored troopers, each with one hand on his mechanized line-brake and the other full of DC-15 blaster rifle on full auto, spraying continuous chains of packeted particle beams. Droids wheeled and dropped and leapt into the air and burst to fragments. Surviving droids opened up on the clones as though grateful for something to shoot at, blasting holes in armor, cooking flesh with superheated steam from deep-tissue hits, blowing some troopers entirely off their cables to tumble toward a messy final landing ten levels below.

  When the survivors of the first wave of clones hit the deck, the next wave was right behind them.

  Grievous turned back to Obi-Wan. He lowered his head like an angry bantha, yellow glare fixed on the Jedi Master. “To the death, then.”

  Obi-Wan sighed. “If you insist.”

  The bio-droid general cast back his cloak, revealing the four lightsabers pocketed there. He stepped back, spreading wide his duranium arms. “You will not be the first Jedi I have killed, nor will you be the last.”

  Obi-Wan’s only reply was to subtly shift the angle of his lightsaber up and forward.

  The general’s wide-spread arms now split along their lengths, dividing in half—even his hands split in half—

  Now he had four arms. And four hands.

  And each hand took a lightsaber as his cloak dropped to the floor.

  They snarled to life and Grievous spun all four of them in a flourishing velocity so fast and so seamlessly integrated that he seemed to stand within a pulsing sphere of blue and green energy.

  “Come on, then, Kenobi! Come for me!” he said. “I have been trained in your Jedi arts by Lord Tyranus himself!”

  “Do you mean Count Dooku? What a curious coincidence,” Obi-Wan said with a deceptively pleasant smile. “I trained the man who killed him.”

  With a convulsive snarl, Grievous lunged.

  The sphere of blue lightsaber energy around him bulged toward Obi-Wan and opened like a mouth to bite him in half. Obi-Wan stood his ground, his blade still.

  Chain-lightning teeth closed upon him.

  This is how it feels to be Anakin Skywalker, right now:

  You don’t remember putting away your lightsaber.

  You don’t remember moving from Palpatine’s private office to his larger public one; you don’t remember collapsing in the chair where you now sit, nor do you remember drinking water from the half-empty glass that you find in your mechanical hand.

  You remember only that the last man in the galaxy you still thought you could trust
has been lying to you since the day you met.

  And you’re not even angry about it.

  Only stunned.

  “After all, Anakin, you are the last man who has a right to be angry at someone for keeping a secret. What else was I to do?”

  Palpatine sits in his familiar tall oval chair behind his familiar desk; the lampdisks are full on, the office eerily bright.

  Ordinary.

  As though this is merely another one of your friendly conversations, the casual evening chats you’ve enjoyed together for so many years.

  As though nothing has happened.

  As though nothing has changed.

  “Corruption had made the Republic a cancer in the body of the galaxy, and no one could burn it out; not the judicials, not the Senate, not even the Jedi Order itself. I was the only man strong and skilled enough for this task; I was the only man who dared even attempt it. Without my small deception, how should I have cured the Republic? Had I revealed myself to you, or to anyone else, the Jedi would have hunted me down and murdered me without trial—very much as you nearly did, only a moment ago.”

  You can’t argue. Words are beyond you.

  He rises, moving around his desk, taking one of the small chairs and drawing it close to yours.

  “If only you could know how I have longed to tell you, Anakin. All these years—since the very day we met, my boy. I have watched over you, waiting as you grew in strength and wisdom, biding my time until now, today, when you are finally ready to understand who you truly are, and your true place in the history of the galaxy.”

  Numb words blur from your numb lips. “The chosen one …”

  “Exactly, my boy. Exactly. You are the chosen one.” He leans toward you, eyes clear. Steady. Utterly honest. “Chosen by me.”

  He turns a hand toward the panorama of light-sprayed cityscape through the window behind his desk. “Look out there, Anakin. A trillion beings on this planet alone—in the galaxy as a whole, uncounted quadrillions—and of them all, I have chosen you, Anakin Skywalker, to be the heir to my power. To all that I am.”

  “But that’s not … that’s not the prophecy. That’s not the prophecy of the chosen one …”