CHAPTER NINE: I am the Senate
DOOKU
"Can you feel her hunger?"
The child lay on a clean white mat; she was sucking on one of her fists, eyes closed, expression serene. Dooku knelt a short way off. He watched the Senator watch her daughter. They were alone in the great battle station's heart in a spacious cabin set aside for meditation. The walls were polished black durasteel, the ceiling a vidscreen playing a looped exploration of a nebula. Woven mats covered the floor and the soft strains of the Silent Waltz, masterwork of one of Serenno's greatest composers, drifted through the incense-scented air.
"I can feel it," Padmé said. Her voice, and the vibrations of her presence in the Force, held the by now familiar mixture of guilt, awe, greed, and hesitation. "Her mind is so...warm."
"Love makes us secure." Dooku disliked infants. The mind of a child was a wondrous thing, full of lateral thinking and ingenious ability, but an infant was no better than a Geonosian grub wriggling in its jelly caul. "So does hatred. When we touch another through the Force we understand their mind instinctively; language is irrelevant, as is familiarity."
"How does it work?"
"It is the binding principle of all life." Curiosity was damaging the Senator's tenuous connection to the Force, but she had extended herself enough for one day. Dooku rose, his knees aching. "It connects us, defines us, carries our memories onward through the decay of entropy. Its functions are a law, a constant. It cannot be explained."
At first he'd found the Force's mysteries a frustration. When Yoda had explained to him on his sixth birthday that no Jedi had ever found a reason for the Force's existence, a pattern to the individuals in which it manifested its gifts, or a single shred of physical evidence beyond its wielders' abilities, he had been irate. Now he found it comforting, the vast unknowability of it always eddying around him. He extinguished with a wave of his hand the incense he had set to burning on the room's low altar.
Padmé lifted her drowsing daughter into her arms. She opened her loose grey robe and gave the girl her breast. "Anakin is leading the expedition to kill you. I saw it on the news."
"Yes," Dooku said. He knelt at the altar and splashed rosewater on his face, then cleaned his hands. "I expected as much. Palpatine is not a warrior."
"Why are you teaching me?" She didn't look at him. Her attention was for the child in her arms. "What can I possibly learn in two months that my husband hasn't in fifteen years, that Palpatine hasn't in sixty?" She held her despair close to her heart, a knot of festering doubt and terror. "Why did you bring me here?"
"I can give you several reasons," Dooku said. "First, I believe that your husband will decline to fire upon my battle station while you are aboard. Second, you are a talented negotiator and manipulator. Third, I wish very badly to kill the man you chose to marry and I consider such an outcome more likely with your involvement."
"What did he do to you?"
"He took something precious that belonged to me." Dooku led Padmé out of the meditation cabin and into the dull gunmetal hall. Geonosian architecture was so utilitarian. Perhaps Poggle could be made to see his way toward a touch of showmanship. They walked together down the empty corridor. The station's only occupants were a team of Geonosian engineers and just short of a billion war droids of various makes and models. Any boarding action will be suicide, any assault a psychotic expenditure of life and materiel.
The station's capabilities were impressive. Poggle assured him that the superlaser, once the station's many reactors had been brought online, would be quite capable of annihilating a planet. Even with only a twentieth of its planned operational power it would be nothing for the weapon to vaporize shields and boil durasteel plating. No ship in the Republic fleet could hope to withstand the fury of the Death Star. The name was melodramatic, but the station itself was melodrama incarnate. The power to shatter a planet. It gave Dooku nightmares.
"I never said I'd help you stop him." She walked briskly at his side, her daughter still nursing.
"Kill him," Dooku corrected her without breaking stride. "Never tell purposeless lies. Falsehood thrives on intent, not delusion. I intend to murder Anakin Skywalker in cold blood."
"Forgive me," Padmé snapped, "I'm not acclimated to slaughter yet."
She was afraid. "Don't be delusional," Dooku passed through a security door and into a bare-walled atrium where droids were installing light fixtures in the ceiling. "You've been complicit in one of the greatest programs of extermination ever conceived of. Hundreds of billions have died in this war, Senator, and your signature is on their death warrants."
She looked as though she'd tasted something sour. "I don't see it that way."
"Illusion is a tool to wield," Dooku said, "not a set of blinders to don when the world displeases you. If something angers you, then change it."
They passed through another set of doors and onto one of the station's many observation decks. Serenno hung pristine with its three grey moons in the blackness of space, its sun a distant, burning presence. The remnants of the Confederate Fleet formed a loose network of turbolaser batteries and torpedo tubes. Lucrehulk-class merchant galleons, dreadnoughts, frigates, and hulking destroyers with experimental ion cannons dominating half their mass. It might be enough, with the half-built station to support it, to break Sidious's stranglehold on the galaxy.
Dooku moved to the observation window, a long sheet of curved duraplast separating him from hard vacuum. He laid a hand against the cold, hard material. "The moment you bemoan your fate you surrender your own agency. You are no longer the anvil." He looked back at Padmé, cradling her sleeping daughter. "You are the hammer."
ANAKIN
The Count had taken his wife. The Count had taken his daughter. The Count had taken his son. He stood on the elevated command bridge of the Executor, his hands clenched at his sides, his hood thrown back while he stared out into the starry void. He ground his teeth. Bridge crew and officers toiled in the operations pits to either side of the Captain's Walk. The ship was a metropolis in its own right, its launches and bays loaded with experimental TIE fighters, its miles-long barracks decks packed with battalions of clones whose buzzing thoughts rose up like gas through the vents.
The Chancellor had stayed just long enough to soothe Anakin's apoplectic fit of rage in the wake of Padmé's abduction and the kidnapping of the twins. Several of Anakin's command staff were dead, crushed by the Force at the height of his fury, and one of the ship's skyscraper-sized engines was still malfunctioning in the wake of the outburst. On the bridge's many viewscreens the entirety of the battle fleet, from rust-bucket Venator-class assault cruisers to the Executor's escort of savage Republic-class Star Destroyers. The sleek, arrowhead-shaped ships cruised sharklike through Coruscant's exosphere. The planet glittered darkly, a fat spider nestled in its own crushing gravity well.
Anakin felt more collected at a ship's helm. It had always been that way, ever since he'd been a boy flying half-junked pod racers for Watto. I wonder if that old cretin is still alive. He flexed his mechanical hand. He hadn't thought about Watto in years, but it was easier than thinking of his mother's body mummifying in the Tusken cliff-town, easier than thinking about Padmé speeding through the stars in Dooku's custody. Did she leave of her own free will? The thought made him feverish with anger. Now that the furnace in his heart was cracked he could no more staunch the flames than he could kill a star. He felt everything. It was glorious. It was terrifying.
The month since the abductions had eaten at him. First there had been a media blitz, a sudden exposé of the Jedi whose secret wife had kept him loyal to the Republic. Then the calls from holonet news agencies looking to scoop his story. Then, finally, whispers of the slaughter in the Temple had silenced the whole clamoring crowd of them. Underground networks on the holonet were playing retrieved footage of Anakin leading clones through the Temple's halls. I destroyed the records, he told himself a thousand times. Nobody knows what happened. Nobody could have found the footage.
That night he dreamed of children running, laughing, in the slave quarter where he'd grown up on Tatooine. He dreamed that his mother's sun-dried body sat at their table, and when he left and went into his room he found it covered in dusty cobwebs, the bedclothes musty, the windows papered over. He took one of the model starfighters from a shelf beside his bed. It crumbled to dust in his hands, but now both his hands were steel and hydraulics whined beneath polished housings. He stumbled out of the hut and into the sunlight, but there was no slave quarter.
A river cut through farming country. Whatever had grown in the fields, something with long, fibrous stalks and bulb-like fruits, had gone to rot. Broken fruit made a mulch on the ground and dead stalks stirred lazily in the hot, slow breeze. The river was shrunken. Qui-Gon sat at its edge. He wore the roughspun clothes and moth-eaten poncho he'd worn when Anakin had first met him a thousand years before on Tatooine. He saw Anakin and raised a hand in greeting.
The bank was steep and treacherous. Anakin made his way down it, clinging to roots and protruding rocks for balance. He sat down beside Qui-Gon, his bare feet dangling just above the river's surface. "I've made some mistakes," he said. He looked down and saw that his hands were covered in blood. Corpses floated by on the sluggish current, scavenger avians riding them like rafts. "Help me, Qui-Gon. I don't know what to do."
"Trust the Force," the dead man said. "Your son is your salvation."
Anakin woke nauseous and sweaty in the darkened confines of his cabin aboard the Executor. His com was chiming. He opened the channel. "What is it?"
"Lord Skywalker, the engine room reports ready."
"It's the middle of the night." Black rage coiled around his heart. "What's your name, soldier?"
The man hesitated. Anakin heard him lick his lips. "Lieutenant J-jens Navik, my lord."
Anakin sat up. He ran his good hand over his scalp. "Tell the fleet to set a course for the Serenno system," he said after a long, panicked silence had passed on the channel's other end. "Once you've done that, seal yourself in an airlock."
"S-sir?"
"Seal yourself in an airlock, Lieutenant Navik." He rose and padded to his closet. "Am I understood, or do I need to repeat myself again?"
"N-no, my lord." The man swallowed audibly. "I'll see to it at once."
The line went dead. Anakin dressed himself in silence. Let him wait, he thought as he pulled his padded glove over the skeletal fingers of his left hand. It'll teach him a lesson.
The building rumble of the vast ship's engines was like music in his ears.
OBI-WAN
The shuttle Bail had given him raced like lightning through hyperspace. The ship was a sleek black stealth vessel of the kind the Republic used for deep strike operations. Obi-Wan wonder where a pacifist world like Alderaan had acquired a ship like the Unpleasant Reminder. He disliked it. He wasn't fond of flying to begin with, and the Reminder was too sensitive and powerful for his tastes. While she was in hyperspace, at least, he could concentrate on his meditation.
He sat in the cramped hold, his mind thrown out like a billowing sail against the nothingness of space. He thought of Qui-Gon, of the Senator, of Mace, and Palpatine, and all the dead masters of the Council. He thought of Coruscant, of its wounded skin, of its starving masses. He thought of Anakin.
Anger fell away. Fear ran through him and out into the stars. He shed his dead skin and fell through a silent storm, another drop of water caught up in the tumult. I am the rain, he thought. Let the wind drive me where it will.
He saw himself walking along a street on Cato Neimoidia, Anakin at his side. He still wore a Padawan's braid. "Master," the younger man said, "if the war comes here they'll have no way to defend themselves. Neimoidia won't lift a finger, even for its own colony."
Obi-Wan had stopped and looked back along the quiet, muddy street in Vesper City. The colony was a backwater. They had been sent to ferret out a Confederate informant by the name of Dulran, but the Ortolan had vanished a few days after they'd made contact. "We'll do what we can," he said. It seemed the only thing to say.
Two years later they had run together through the fire swamps of Corellia, hunting down a cabal of arms dealers trying to subvert the planet's famous shipyards to the Confederate cause. Anakin had broken his leg and Obi-Wan had dragged him, delirious and feverish, through the bog. He'd arrested the arms dealers himself before calling for extraction. Anakin hadn't even questioned the decision, he'd just chuckled through a haze of painkillers at the outraged expressions on the rodent-like faces of the Drell warmongers.
On the day Anakin had done his first public service announcement for the Chancellor's office they had watched it together in Republic Square and laughed while the crowds cheered the grave young man on all the holoscreens.
You understood sacrifice too well, Obi-Wan thought. He straightened up, rubbing at his forehead. You gave your childhood to the slave huts of Tatooine. You gave your youth to the Temple. You gave your manhood to a secret wife, a dead mother, children you could not afford to love. Maybe Qui-Gon could have shown you how to come back to the light. I couldn't.
He returned to the cockpit and sank into the pilot's crash couch. Hyperspace boiled and rippled outside the viewscreen. Meditation's clarity bled out quickly enough. Obi-Wan felt fear. He felt loss. He felt a gnawing dread at the idea of passing sentence on the one friend left to him. His lightsaber felt like a mountain at his belt. He removed it from its clip and held it in his hands, feeling its weight, judging its heft. How did you become the sum of us? He closed his eyes.
We are all executioners, now.
PALPATINE
Palpatine had never actually walked on the physical Senate floor. The pods spiraled up the walls of the titanic dome, and the Chancellor's podium rose and descended through a spiracle set in the chamber's center. The floor itself was plain grey tile, unremarkable in every way. Palpatine paced the featureless expanse, his footsteps echoing in the empty Rotunda. This hovel will need renovating, he thought idly, looking up at the dome's ceiling. Perhaps a throne room. Byssian marble, erotic statuary, probably Sith Imperial period...
"You sent for me?" Mas Amedda stood at the mouth of one of the concealed maintenance entries to the Senate floor. He wore a set of ludicrously expensive-looking robes and a petulant frown. The sensory horns draped over his shoulders were flushed an unappealing green. "I was occupied. Senators Tarkin and Shesh-"
"They can wait," Palpatine adopted his most convincing expression of exhausted distress. "There has been an attack." He doesn't even bother with my title anymore.
"An attack?" Amedda's brow-ridge rose. He strode toward Palpatine. "Where? When?"
Palpatine smiled. He embraced the Force and the world seemed to slow around him, warping subtly to his will. Mas's eyes widened as realization burned its way through his brain. He turned, robes flying, and raced back toward the door. The Senatorial pod caught him halfway across the blank expanse of the floor. A metric ton of durasteel, bronzium, leather, and repulsor fluid smashed Amedda flat against the gunmetal finish of the chamber's base. The pod itself, released from Palpatine's grip, skidded into the wall in a spray of sparks.
"Just now," said Palpatine, walking past the mangled wreckage of the Chagrian's body. "And right in the Senate Round. Imagine the audacity." He stepped in the dead aide's blood, looking down at the pale bone protruding through those fine silk robes. The wretch had been getting above himself, contemplating blackmail, hobnobbing with the wrong dignitaries.
No loose ends, Palpatine thought. He clasped his hands behind his back.
"Chancellor."
The gravelly croak drew Palpatine's attention to the chamber's far side. He reached out to take hold of two more pods, his influence stretching and sliding through the Rotunda like quick-growing mold. Yoda stood thirty meters distant, a small and wizened figure in the echoing vastness. He wore a robe of brown sackcloth and leaned heavily on his gnarled cane. Palpatine's smile widened. He fed his fear into the furnace of his power. "Master Yoda. How good of you to attend my coronation."
"Too long your reign has been," said the little master. "At an end, it is."
Palpatine howled and two tons of metal came crashing down onto the Senate Floor.
