CHAPTER TEN: The Sage & the Master Poisoner
PALPATINE
Untouched, Palpatine thought with wonder. The dwarfish creature stood where he had but a moment before, and to his either side the ruined Senate pods smoldered and sparked. A great note resounded from the tensed strings of the living Force. It sent Palpatine staggering back, his robes whipping around him, and the ruined pods flew away from Yoda to strike the walls of the chamber. A high, whining note built in the Supreme Chancellor's ear as he wrapped himself in the frayed veils and rotting vestments of the Dark Side. He snarled, letting cold malice flood his veins, and threw himself like a ravening rancor directly at the diminutive Master.
Yoda moved. Palpatine's hands, crooked into vicious claws, scored glowing gashes in the wall. He wheeled around and sent a pulse of power rushing outward such that dust, furniture, carpeting, and statuary were ripped from the floor and hurled at the Jedi. Yoda, now standing in the center of the chamber, simply stepped aside with a slow motion of his clawed green hands. His eyes were closed, his brow wrinkled in concentration.
"Strike back at me, coward," Palpatine laughed as the storm of trash and debris crashed to the floor, leaving a clean circle around Yoda's still form. "Where was your vaunted restraint on the battlefield? Am I worth more than all the conscripts you and the rest of your order slaughtered on Ryloth, on Trandosha, on Neimoidia?"
Yoda did not answer. He moved again, a single step, hands drifting through the air. A tingle of fear alerted Palpatine at the last moment to the Master's intent. He scrambled crablike to the right as a Senate pod slammed into the floor where he'd stood only a moment before. Plumes of sparks from the wreckage seared white-red afterimages into his retinas. He waved a hand, his sleeve smoldering, and tore into the wiring beneath the floor. Lights flickered out. Pods veered wildly into one another. A dizzying twenty-meter leap took him up into the chaos. He scrambled up onto a shuddering pod as the Senate floor cycled open far below, disgorging the Chancellor's podium and its monolithic support stalk. Yoda was nowhere to be seen, but Palpatine could feel the calm mote of his presence floating nearby. He will try to use my strength against me.
Two pods crashed together high above where Palpatine stood. Fire rained down on the seething spiral arms. "I took the greatest of you and broke him with my hands!" he cried, flattening himself against the surface of his pod and squinting out through the sea of whirling metal. The podium was still in ascent. "The future of the Jedi is smeared throughout the Temple's halls! I will have it torn down and turned into a slaver's mart!"
Yoda came up faster than Palpatine could have believed possible. The pod on which he rested clove in two as a small green and brown blur shot by, and Palpatine was forced to launch himself onto a passing pod to avoid plunging back down to the floor. He hurled himself higher in great, greedy bounds, his muscles singing with corrupt power. Yoda stood a dozen meters below him, still as a reflecting pool on the podium's circular floor. The Master's eyes were open. They stared up at Palpatine, ancient and sorrowful and resolved.
"Upon myself, this sin I take," Yoda said, his croaking voice carrying through the clangor of more collisions. "Die you must."
Palpatine screamed with laughter and launched himself skyward, whipping up through empty air, dodging pods with ease in his ravenous ascent. He sent them hurtling down toward the Jedi, missiles cast from the sling of his mind. They burst and broke in staggering profusion until the Round resounded madly to the clamor of their fiery destruction, but Yoda moved in a bubble of stillness from wreck to wreck, climbing steadily as though he traversed not a towering furnace but a set of garden steps. He set foot on a spinning pod, already half-demolished and venting volcanic plasma, and let it carry him to another plummeting hulk from which he jumped a scant meter to a catwalk running below the offices of the Malastare delegations.
Palpatine, still rising like a vengeful wraith, tore at the catwalk's joists and braces with his mind. At last he could unleash himself, could vent his hate upon this hypocritical dwarf. The catwalk groaned, struts tearing free of the Round's smooth walls, and Yoda climbed a swinging rail to take hold with a single clawed hand of a pod that moved in fitful jerks around the cylindrical space. He dropped free to another surface. His eyes never left the Chancellor's.
"You think yourself inexorable," Palpatine frothed, "but you are a husk, Master Yoda! All of your glory is behind you, and now only death remains!"
Flames raged in the growing mountain of trash below the now-tilting Chancellor's podium. Shadows writhed on the walls of the Round. Palpatine lit neatly on a grilled metal walkway near the ceiling. The network of suspended catwalks was intended for the press, but he had often used them to spy on closed proceedings when he had been an aid to old Senator Bibble, before the old fool had contracted a tragic case of slow, deliberate, untraceable poisoning.
Palpatine made a fist and the flames leapt higher, chasing Yoda in his deliberate climb. Amorphous shapes formed, dissolved, and reformed in the snarling fire. Teeth of efflorescent plasma snapped at the hem of the climbing Master's robe. He is nothing, Palpatine thought. There was a headache mounting at his temples and he drew on the pain for strength, nursing like a child at a swollen teat. His mauled lips twitched over his etched and eroding teeth. He is an insect.
He sent shadows to swirl and slaver around the Master. He raised up great clots of twisted durasteel adrip with molten flame and hurled them like javelins at his enemy. He shrieked with the voices of the innumerable dead, and he gathered his mantle close around himself until he smoked with acrid poisons and unholy vapors. Still, though, Yoda climbed. Veins bulging in his throat, Palpatine redoubled his assaults, but to no avail. Yoda stepped on a flake of drifting ash, and from there to the rail of the catwalk. He stepped to the walk itself like a leaf on the wind, as though he cared nothing for his destination. "Inward, I turn my eyes," Yoda murmured. "Water in the storm, am I."
Palpatine ground his teeth and unleashed hate. Lightning snarled and sizzled around them, lines of blue-white loathing that crawled along the catwalk and whipped bright and bestial at the naked air. Yoda came onward, slower now, his motions graceful and incredibly purposeful. Forked tongues of lightning charred his robe and blistered his skin, but they did not touch him. "Die!" Palpatine redoubled his efforts, spittle flecking his lips and running down his chin. "Die! Die!"
Yoda made a gesture as though he were pushing a curtain aside. The storm died out in an instant, though the stink of ozone lingered in the air. "At an end, this is," he said. The Master quickened his pace as Palpatine, his fingertips smoking, his vision swimming, shuffled back.
Terror jolted through the Chancellor's system like a drug. Yes, he whispered to himself, yes. Let is subsume you. Let desperation give you strength against this old, bent thing. "Please," he fell back, gripping at the rails, injecting a sick man's quaver into his voice while ash floated around him and below a lake of fire raged and roared. "Please, I surrender. I renounced my office! I'll do anything!" Below, one of the last pods left aloft crashed into the podium's support beam. The great structure plunged into the maelstrom, raising a plume of sparks and glowing refuse a hundred meters high.
Yoda advanced, step by silent step. Palpatine cowered, scrambling along the walk until his back hit another rail. He palmed the hilt of his lightsaber, hidden in his sleeve. "I beg of you, spare my life! Let me live!" He felt the beginnings of a Force grip closing around his body and, howling in terror, mustered the only thing he could think of. He wove a cheap illusion of light and dust, a conjuror's trick as low as any carnival hack's. He superimposed Anakin Skywalker's terrified face over his own.
Yoda faltered. It was only for an instant, but Palpatine felt the stutter in the old Master's calm. He whipped forward in a snakelike charge, his body boneless and low to the ground in a full-out sprint, and whipped his lightsaber around in a one-handed slash that cut through most of the walkway, the railing, and the old Master's stomach. Yoda's eyes widened in surprise. A few drops of mud-colored blood flew through the air as Palpatine reeled onward, out of control.
The Chancellor spun around, severing another rail with a wild swing, teeth bared in a sickly grin, but Yoda was gone. His brown robe, empty now, drifted down toward the fires below. Palpatine scanned the ruined Round frantically for any sign of the Jedi. He raced to the walk's opposite rail and stared downward. The fires raged. The Senate pods were gone, subsumed into the lake of flame. Palpatine deactivated his lightsaber and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
He had done it.
He had succeeded where a thousand generations of Sith had failed.
The Jedi Order was dead.
Darth Sidious threw back his head, exultant, and roared.
ANAKIN
The Executor leapt out of hyperspace like a junkyard vrelt loosed from its chain. Its vast sublight engines shook the deck with their warmup burn. Anakin had just turned from the instrument readouts to look out at the dun sphere of Serenno floating in the void when his ship, still powering up its combat systems, died. A green sun rose. The viewports polarized fully, shutting out the apocalypse of light, and Anakin fell back over a safety rail, his stomach twisting into a compacted knot, as the death-shrieks of six thousand naval personnel clawed at the borders of his mind. His cloak snagged on a stanchion and the cloth jerked tight around his throat as he dangled, legs kicking, above the crew pit.
-darling, I didn't-
-they never meant for us to go home-
-I need you I need you I need you-
-the box in the 'fresher has bandages I can put it back on-
-save me-
They screamed, their essences blasted free of their bodies, and the great ship groaned as Anakin swung like a pendulum, choking blindly on his own acrid vomit. He saw their faces, felt their pain fading into the numbing, septic terror of an open wound. The clones wailed as one through the onslaught of singular voices, their lament a Mandalorian chant deprived of its mother tongue. Anakin spat, darkness ringing his vision, the fingers of his good hand fumbling at his belt for his lightsaber.
The ship's gravity generators failed just as the blackness began to close in. Anakin floated free, globules of his own bile drifting from his purpling lips. He called his lightsaber to his hand and slashed through his cloak in one cut. Bodies drifted all around him. Some were still kicking. Others had been pulped by the force of the great ship's deceleration. The battle station. Sidious's spies had reported some secret Geonosian weapon protected by Dooku's fleet. Anakin ground his teeth, ignoring the screams of his bridge crew.
It took him only a few minutes to right himself in the free-floating nightmare of the bridge, claw his way back up to the captain's walk, and start toward the turbolift. He passed the corpse of his navigator, a red-faced woman named Selik, floating near a bank of dead screens. "You have the bridge," he said. He kicked off from the screens and sailed into the open turbolift shaft. Blackness gaped below him. He could feel the cold suction of a hull breach somewhere far down in the vast ship's guts. It was a long way to the hangar bay, but the magnetic atmosphere fields were still live, and gravity was active. Clone pilots were scrambling to their TIEs. Anakin dropped out of the shaft and started toward his own craft, a cutting-edge prototype Palpatine had given him before that dreadful night. "It's only a birthday present, Anakin," the old man had said. "Let me give you this small thing, when you've done so much for me."
The ship had the ball-like cockpit of a TIE, but its engines had been hand-crafted by Kuat's finest engineers and its solar-paneled wings were bent inward top and bottom, giving it a cowled silhouette. It also had a longer chassis with room enough for shield generators and a compact hyperdrive. Anakin lashed out with the Force, crushing and tossing the clones between him and the fighter. More scrambled to avoid him as he stalked across the deck and climbed the ladder on the side of the fighter's docking station. The hatch was open. He stepped onto the chassis and lowered himself down into the dark, cramped cockpit with its buzzing instruments and low-light readouts.
His hands gripped the control yoke. The fighter's engines howled to life with their characteristic scream. Anakin closed his eyes. It felt right as he rocketed out through the chaos of the docking bay and through the mag-shield into the embattled void. The comm feeds crackled to life with screams, grim reports, and desperate pleas for orders flooding in from the other ships in the fleet. He killed the channels. Droid fighters rose up around him. He reduced them to slag, spinning and whirling without effort, his fighter's lasers raking their metal hulls into ragged ruins.
I am a drop of water in a storm. His hands danced over the controls. He closed his eyes, letting the Force guide his hands. It blazed up in him. I am ash on the wind.
Anakin reached out through the blackness with the Force, questing for her, for the woman he had sacrificed everything to be with. Her presence wavered somewhere deep within the metal heart of Dooku's monstrosity. She withdrew at his touch and for an instant he could see her face before him, cheeks flushed, eyes wide. Then she was gone. The memory, though, remained. Black rage welled up in Anakin's heart. She's hiding from me. He opened his eyes. Dooku's weapon loomed large before him. Even as he watched, his viewport polarized to blackness again as the great station fired its weapon. Even through the polarization he could see it, a great lance of green light that speared one of the Venator -class star destroyers that had been assigned to escort Anakin's flagship.
The star destroyer exploded, gutted from stem to stern. Anakin looked away. He reached out again, probing more deeply this time into the station even as he juked and rolled through thickening clouds of vulture-class fighters. He did not look for Padmé. Dooku's familiar presence welled up all around him. He could sense the Count's satisfaction over undercurrents of anger and impatience. He could almost see the urbane old man, debonair in one of his black suits and elegant half-capes.
Come and find me, Anakin, Dooku's voice purred, half real and half imagined. I've been waiting a long time for this.
Anakin screamed in rage, sending his TIE through a vicious roll that tore at the edges of his consciousness and edged his vision with black. He raked the void with green laser fire, pulping droids, craving a more meaningful release, and then plunged like a comet toward the surface of the great false moon.
JANGO
Slave I left hyperspace a few thousand kilometers from the dying wreckage of the Executor. The great ship turned slowly in the black sea of space, venting a tremendous geyser of flame, wreckage, and gases. Unexpected. Jango had silenced the hyperspace proximity alarm. Boba slept sitting in the copilot's seat. Jango unbuckled his own restraints and stood, stretching.
"Take him to Dxun," Jango told the ship, and then he crossed the narrow cockpit and stepped into the airlock. The pressure door sealed behind him. He looked through the tiny viewport at his sleeping son, still buckled into his crash webbing. He donned his helmet and activated its seals. "Cede control of all shipboard systems to the warriors there, authorization code Krayt pearl, scalper, void."
A diode in the cramped airlock blinked amber in acknowledgment. The outer airlock blew and Jango was sucked out in a rush of crystallizing oxygen. He soared in silence through the blackness, knowing as he did that (Jango)'s plan was working better than they could have imagined. The death of the Executor, however it had happened, meant that every holo-cam in the fleet was now searching desperately for something else to transmit home. What could be better than the triumphant crusader, General Fett, storming the enemy fleet in his outdated armor?
Draw attention to yourself. Make it visible. Make it big. Fight loud, not smart.
The first of the vulture-class interceptor droids cut through the void toward Jango. He activated the short-range jammer on his gauntlet, blocking the droids' targeting hardware. Lasers strobed through the dark around him. Missiles flashed past, vapor trails crystallizing in their wake. He fired a cluster of rockets from his shoulder-mounted launchers and then rolled, boosters firing, through the drifting wreckage that was all that remained of the first three droid fighters. The Republic's TIEs were swarming out to meet their mechanized opposite numbers. They buzzed like gnats around one another, stabbing with blasters that flashed red and green in the void.
In the distance, Dooku's space station hung vast and bone-grey in the void. Jango kept an eye on his helmet display as Slave I reversed its course. It took a terrible three minutes for the ship's computer to plot its course, and then it vanished from Jango's sensors. He breathed a deep sigh of relief inside his armor. He had been a ghost for years. His (rotting corpse's) legacy was safe now, and headed for the last battle camp of the true Mandalorian nation.
He was free to die a glorious death.
(Again).
"To war," Jango said, and he plunged headfirst into the vast swarm of droid fighters that had come to meet him.
PADME
"He isn't dead," Padmé said as she watched the Executor's death throes from Dooku's private observation deck. The ship was venting miles-long plumes of atmosphere and wreckage. "I can feel him. He's coming."
"Well," Dooku said, shrugging, "I had to try." He took a boma fruit from the dish by the mantelpiece and bit into it. Juice stained his beard. "That ship of his was just too tempting."
"He's angry," Padmé said. Her voice sounded small to her own ears. Shmi and Qui-Gon were safe in a lightning-fast drone shuttle equipped with nurse droids and hard-programmed with the coordinates of a secret CIS base. She was as secure as anyone could be, protected by miles of decking and a seething hive of battle droids. Why do I feel so afraid?
"Use your fear," Dooku said. "Remember, it is yours to wield. Shrink down within it. Hide, and find strength in the darkness."
They had practiced the technique exhaustively. Padmé took a shallow breath, letting herself hyperventilate, and allowed the waters of the Force to close over her head. She felt Anakin's grasping presence fade as he lost track of her and his attention shifted to the Count. Dooku smiled thinly. "Good," he said. "You have your knife?"
"I'm a good shot," she said, her voice buzzing. Her hand flickered before her eyes as she held up the vibro-knife Dooku had given her. Seizing the Force made it hard to discern reality from illusion. "I could use a blaster."
"We've been over this," said the Count. "He must not sense the attack until it is too late. A blaster would only alert him to your presence prematurely. As it is, you must wait until an opportune moment presents itself, and then you will strike." He looked back out through the viewscreen and into the dark where lines of light grew and faded between far-away ships. "He's moving quickly."
Padmé sank down deeper into the unfamiliar currents of the Force. She moved to stand near Dooku, her throat tight. Oh, Anakin. Again and again she saw the Temple halls, the children slashed and brutalized. She pressed a fist to her mouth, tears threatening, and gripped the vibro-knife tightly. I'm so sorry, my love.
Once, a long, long time ago, they had laughed by the lake at Varykino and there had been nothing between them but the light.