Book 0 - The Dark Lord Trilogy

by James Luceno

  He snarled, “Do you think I am foolish enough to arm my bodyguards with weapons that can actually hurt me?”

  Instead of waiting for an answer he spun, heaving Obi-Wan right off the deck with effortless strength, whipping up him over his head to slam him to the deck with killing power; Obi-Wan could only let go of the staff and allow the Force to angle his fall into a stumbling roll. Grievous sprang after him, swinging the electrostaff and slamming it across Obi-Wan’s flank before the Jedi Master could recover his balance. The impact sent Obi-Wan tumbling sideways and the electroburst discharge set his robe on fire. Grievous stayed right with him, attacking before Obi-Wan could even realize exactly what was happening, attacking faster than thought—

  But Obi-Wan didn’t need to think. The Force was with him, and he knew.

  When Grievous spun the staff overhand, discharge blade sizzling down at Obi-Wan’s head for the killing blow, Obi-Wan went to the inside.

  He met Grievous chest-to-chest, his upraised hand blocking the general’s wrist; Grievous snarled something incoherent and bore down on the Jedi Master’s block with all his weight, driving the blade closer and closer to Obi-Wan’s face—

  But Obi-Wan’s arm had the Force to give it strength, and the general’s arm only had the innate crystalline intermolecular structure of duranium alloy.

  Grievous’s forearm bent like a cheap spoon.

  While the general stared in disbelief at his mangled arm, Obi-Wan had been working the fingers of his free hand around the lower edge of Grievous’s dented, joint-loose stomach plate.

  Grievous looked down. “What?”

  Obi-Wan slammed the elbow of his blocking arm into the general’s clavicle while he yanked as hard as he could on the stomach plate, and it ripped free in his hand. Behind it hung a translucent sac of synthskin containing a tangle of green and gray organs.

  The true body of the alien inside the droid.

  Grievous howled and dropped the staff to seize Obi-Wan with his three remaining arms. He lifted the Jedi Master over his head again and hurled him tumbling over the landing deck toward the precipice above the gloom-shrouded drop. Reaching into the Force, Obi-Wan was able to connect with the stone itself as if he were anchored to it with a cable tether; instead of hurtling over the edge he slammed down onto the rock hard enough to crush all breath from his lungs.

  Grievous picked up the staff again and charged.

  Obi-Wan still couldn’t breathe. He had no hope of rising to meet the general’s attack.

  All he could do was extend a hand.

  As the bio-droid loomed over him, electrostaff raised for the kill, the hold-out blaster flipped from the deck into Obi-Wan’s palm, and with no hesitation, no second thoughts, not even the faintest pause to savor his victory, he pulled the trigger.

  The bolt ripped into the synthskin sac.

  Grievous’s guts exploded in a foul-smelling shower the color of a dead swamp. Energy chained up his spine and a mist of vaporized brain burst out both sides of his skull and sent his face spinning off the precipice.

  The electrostaff hit the deck, followed shortly by the general’s knees.

  Then by what was left of his head.

  Obi-Wan lay on his back, staring at the circle of cloudless sky above the sinkhole while he gasped air back into into his spasming lungs. He barely managed to roll over far enough to smother the flames on his robe, then fell back.

  And simply enjoyed being alive.

  Much too short a time later—long before he was actually ready to get up—a shadow fell across him, accompanied by the smell of overheated lizard and an admonitory honnnk.

  “Yes, Boga, you’re right,” Obi-Wan agreed reluctantly. Slowly, painfully, he pushed himself to his feet.

  He picked up the electrostaff, and paused for one last glance at the remains of the bio-droid general.

  “So …” He summoned a condemnation among the most offensive in his vocabulary. “… uncivilized.”

  He triggered his comlink, and directed Cody to report to Jedi Command on Coruscant that Grievous had been destroyed.

  “Will do, General,” said the tiny holoscan of the clone commander. “And congratulations. I knew you could do it.”

  Apparently everyone did, Obi-Wan thought, except Grievous, and me …

  “General? We do still have a little problem out here. About ten thousand heavily armed little problems, actually.”

  “On my way. Kenobi out.”

  Obi-Wan sighed and clambered painfully onto the dragonmount’s saddle.

  “All right, girl,” he said. “Let’s go win that battle, too.”

  As has been said, the textbook example of a Jedi trap is the one that was set on Utapau, for Obi-Wan Kenobi.

  It worked perfectly.

  The final element essential to the creation of a truly effective Jedi trap is a certain coldness of mind—a detachment, if you will, from any desire for a particular outcome.

  The best way to arrange matters is to create a win–win situation.

  For example, one might use as one’s proxy a creature that not only is expendable, but would eventually have to be killed anyway. Thus, if one’s proxy fails and is destroyed, it’s no loss—in fact, the targeted Jedi has actually done one a favor, by taking care of a bit of dirty work one would otherwise have to do oneself.

  And the final stroke of perfection is to organize the Jedi trap so that by walking into it at all, the Jedi has already lost.

  That is to say, a Jedi trap works best when one’s true goal is merely to make sure that the Jedi in question spends some hours or days off somewhere on the far side of the galaxy. So that he won’t be around to interfere with one’s real plans.

  So that by the time he can return, it will be already too late.

  REVELATION

  Mace Windu stood in the darkened comm center of Jedi Command, facing a life-sized holoscan of Yoda, projected from a concealed Wookiee comm center in the heart of a wroshyr tree on Kashyyyk.

  “Minutes ago,” Mace said, “we received confirmation from Utapau: Kenobi was successful. Grievous is dead.”

  “Time it is to execute our plan.”

  “I will personally deliver the news of Grievous’s death.” Mace flexed his hands. “It will be up to the Chancellor to cede his emergency powers back over to the Senate.”

  “Forget not the existence of Sidious. Anticipate your action, he may. Masters will be necessary, if the Lord of the Sith you must face.”

  “I have chosen four of our best. Master Tiin, Master Kolar, and Master Fisto are all here, in the Temple. They are preparing already.”

  “What about Skywalker? The chosen one.”

  “Too much of a risk,” Mace replied. “I am the fourth.”

  With a slow purse of the lips and an even slower nod, Yoda said, “On watch you have been too long, my Padawan. Rest you must.”

  “I will, Master. When the Republic is safe once more.” Mace straightened. “We are waiting only for your vote.”

  “Very well, then. Have my vote, you do. May the Force be with you.”

  “And with you, Master.”

  But he spoke to empty air; the holoscan had already flickered to nonexistence.

  Mace lowered his head and stood in the darkness and the silence.

  The door of the comm center shot open, spilling yellow glare into the gloom and limning the silhouette of a man half collapsed against the frame.

  “Master …” The voice was a hoarse half whisper. “Master Windu …?”

  “Skywalker?” Mace was at his side in an instant. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”

  Anakin took Mace’s arm in a grip of desperate strength, and used it like a crutch to haul himself upright.

  “Obi-Wan …,” he said faintly. “I need to talk to Obi-Wan—!”

  “Obi-Wan is operational on Utapau; he has destroyed General Grievous. We are leaving now to tell the Chancellor, and to see to it that he steps down as he has promised—”

  “Steps—st
eps down—” Anakin’s voice had a sharply bitter edge. “You have no idea …”

  “Anakin—? What’s wrong?”

  “Listen to me—you have to listen to me—” Anakin sagged against him, shaking; Mace wrapped his arms around the young Jedi and guided him into the nearest chair. “You can’t—please, Master Windu, give me your word, promise me it’ll be an arrest, promise you’re not going to hurt him—”

  “Skywalker—Anakin. You must try to answer. Have you been attacked? Are you injured? You have to tell me what’s wrong!”

  Anakin collapsed forward, face into his hands.

  Mace reached into the Force, opening the eye of his special gift of perception—

  What he found there froze his blood.

  The tangled web of fault lines in the Force he had seen connecting Anakin to Obi-Wan and to Palpatine was no more; in their place was a single spider-knot that sang with power enough to crack the planet. Anakin Skywalker no longer had shatterpoints. He was a shatterpoint.

  The shatterpoint.

  Everything depended on him.

  Everything.

  Mace said slowly, with the same sort of deliberate care he would use in examining an unknown type of bomb that might have the power to destroy the universe itself, “Anakin, look at me.”

  Skywalker raised his head.

  “Are you hurt? Do you need—”

  Mace frowned. Anakin’s eyes were raw, and red, and his face looked swollen. For a long time he didn’t know if Anakin would answer, if he could answer, if he could even speak at all; the young Jedi seemed to be struggling with something inside himself, as though he fought desperately against the birth of a monster hatching within his chest.

  But in the Force, there was no as though; there was no seemed to be. In the Force, Mace could feel the monster inside Anakin Skywalker, a real monster, too real, one that was eating him alive from the inside out.

  Fear.

  This was the wound Anakin had taken. This was the hurt that had him shaking and stammering and too weak to stand. Some black fear had hatched like fever wasps inside the young Knight’s brain, and it was killing him.

  Finally, after what seemed forever, Anakin opened his blood-raw eyes.

  “Master Windu …” He spoke slowly, painfully, as though each word ripped away a raw hunk of his own flesh. “I have … bad news.”

  Mace stared at him.

  “Bad news?” he repeated blankly.

  What news could be bad enough to make a Jedi like Anakin Skywalker collapse? What news could make Anakin Skywalker look like the stars had gone out?

  Then, in nine simple words, Anakin told him.

  This is the moment that defines Mace Windu.

  Not his countless victories in battle, nor the numberless battles his diplomacy has avoided. Not his penetrating intellect, or his talents with the Force, or his unmatched skills with the lightsaber. Not his dedication to the Jedi Order, or his devotion to the Republic that he serves.

  But this.

  Right here.

  Right now.

  Because Mace, too, has an attachment. Mace has a secret love.

  Mace Windu loves the Republic.

  Many of his students quote him to students of their own: “Jedi do not fight for peace. That’s only a slogan, and is as misleading as slogans always are. Jedi fight for civilization, because only civilization creates peace.”

  For Mace Windu, for all his life, for all the lives of a thousand years of Jedi before him, true civilization has had only one true name: the Republic.

  He has given his life in the service of his love. He has taken lives in its service, and lost the lives of innocents. He has seen beings that he cares for maimed, and killed, and sometimes worse: sometimes so broken by the horror of the struggle that their only answer was to commit horrors greater still.

  And because of that love now, here, in this instant, Anakin Skywalker has nine words for him that shred his heart, burn its pieces, and feed him its smoking ashes.

  Palpatine is Sidious. The Chancellor is the Sith Lord.

  He doesn’t even hear the words, not really; their true meaning is too large for his mind to gather in all at once.

  They mean that all he’s done, and all that has been done to him—

  That all the Order has accomplished, all it has suffered—

  All the Galaxy itself has gone through, all the years of suffering and slaughter, the death of entire planets—

  Has all been for nothing.

  Because it was all done to save the Republic.

  Which was already gone.

  Which had already fallen.

  The corpse of which had been defended only by a Jedi Order that was now under the command of a Dark Lord of the Sith.

  Mace Windu’s entire existence has become crystal so shot-through with flaws that the hammer of those nine words has crushed him to sand.

  But because he is Mace Windu, he takes this blow without a change of expression.

  Because he is Mace Windu, within a second the man of sand is stone once more: pure Jedi Master, weighing coldly the risk of facing the last Dark Lord of the Sith without the chosen one—

  Against the risk of facing the last Dark Lord of the Sith with a chosen one eaten alive by fear.

  And because he is Mace Windu, the choice is no choice at all. “Anakin, wait in the Council Chamber until we get back.”

  “Wh—what? Master—”

  “That’s an order, Anakin.”

  “But—but—but the Chancellor—” Anakin says desperately, clutching at the Jedi Master’s hand. “What are you going to do?”

  And it is the true measure of Mace Windu that, even now, he still is telling the truth when he says, “Only as much as I have to.”

  In the virtual nonspace of the HoloNet, two Jedi Masters meet.

  One is ancient, tiny, with skin of green leather and old wisdom in his eyes, standing in a Kashyyyk cave hollowed from the trunk of a vast wroshyr tree; the other is tall and fierce, seated before a holodisk in Coruscant’s Jedi Temple.

  To each other, they are blue ghosts, given existence by scanning lasers. Though they are light-years apart, they are of one mind; it hardly matters who says what.

  Now they know the truth.

  For more than a decade, the Republic has been in the hands of the Sith.

  Now, together, blue ghost to blue ghost, they decide to take it back.

  APOCALYPSE

  The dark is generous, and it is patient, and it always wins.

  It always wins because it is everywhere.

  It is in the wood that burns in your hearth, and in the kettle on the fire; it is under your chair and under your table and under the sheets on your bed. Walk in the midday sun and the dark is with you, attached to the soles of your feet.

  The brightest light casts the darkest shadow.

  THE FACE OF THE DARK

  Depowered lampdisks were rings of ghostly gray floating in the gloom. The shimmering jewelscape of Coruscant haloed the knife-edged shadow of the chair.

  This was the office of the Chancellor.

  Within the chair’s shadow sat another shadow: deeper, darker, formless and impenetrable, an abyssal umbra so profound that it drained light from the room around it.

  And from the city. And the planet.

  And the galaxy.

  The shadow waited. It had told the boy it would. It was looking forward to keeping its word.

  For a change.

  Night held the Jedi Temple.

  On its rooftop landing deck, thin yellow light spilled in a stretching rectangle through a shuttle’s hatchway, reflecting upward onto the faces of three Jedi Masters.

  “I’d feel better if Yoda were here.” This Master was a Nautiloid, tall and broad-shouldered, his glabrous scalp-tentacles restrained by loops of embossed leather. “Or even Kenobi. On Ord Cestus, Obi-Wan and I—”

  “Yoda is pinned down on Kashyyyk, and Kenobi is out of contact on Utapau. The Dark Lord has revealed hims
elf, and we dare not hesitate. Think not of if, Master Fisto; this duty has fallen to us. We will suffice.” This Master was an Iktotchi, shorter and slimmer than the first. Two long horns curved downward from his forehead to below his chin. One had been amputated after being shattered in battle a few months before. Bacta had accelereated its regrowth, and the once maimed horn was now a match to the other. “We will suffice,” he repeated. “We will have to.”

  “Peace,” said the third Master, a Zabrak. Dew had gathered on his array of blunt vestigial skull-spines, glistening very like sweat. He gestured toward a Temple door that had cycled open. “Windu is coming.”

  Clouds had swept in with the twilight, and now a thin drizzling rain began to fall. The approaching Master walked with his shaven head lowered, his hands tucked within his sleeves.

  “Master Ti and Gate Master Jurokk will direct the Temple’s defense,” he said as he reached the others. “We are shutting down all nav beacons and signal lights, we have armed the older Padawans, and all blast doors are sealed and code-locked.” His gaze swept the Masters. “It’s time to go.”

  “And Skywalker?” The Zabrak Master cocked his head as though he felt a distant disturbance in the Force. “What of the chosen one?”

  “I have sent him to the Council Chamber until our return.” Mace Windu turned a grim stare upon the High Council Tower, squinting against the thickening rain. His hands withdrew from his sleeves. One of them held his lightsaber.

  “He has done his duty, Masters. Now we shall do ours.”

  He walked between them into the shuttle.

  The other three Masters shared a significant silence, then Agen Kolar nodded to himself and entered; Saesee Tiin stroked his regrown horn, and followed.