CHAPTER ELEVEN: Void Dragon
ANAKIN
He plunged toward one of the space station's docking bays, a deadly missile armed and racing at full speed toward its destination. With the Force he reached out and tore couplings free, smashed servos, and crushed droid mechanics. The shields flickered, reversing their polarity, and his TIE flitted through them as easily as an errant dust mote. He pulsed the fighter's reverse thrusters, slowing as monumental architecture blurred by to his either side. The bay was cavernous and empty except for a few repair and maintenance droids. Anakin slowed and set the TIE down in the shadow of a monstrous docking crane. He climbed out of the fighter while its tortured engines cut out.
Dooku's presence had grown stronger. It bore no resemblance to the aura of cobwebs and whispers that surrounded Palpatine; instead it was like a heady wine's bouquet, dark and disarming. Anakin could almost feel the knives poised at his back. He could feel his children, too. They flickered at the edge of his perceptions, two frightened points of light somewhere in the station's outer skin. She's here somewhere. He looked back at the dueling fleets beyond the narrow mouth of the docking bay. Lances of hard light linked burning hulls across the black. The Executor turned slowly like the corpse of some colossal seagoing beast.
Maintenance droids craned their skeletal faces in Anakin's direction. Somewhere, an alarm began to blare.
DOOKU
Skywalker had torn a hole in the Death Star's defenses like a krayt dragon tearing through the walls of a mud hut. Now he seethed through the great battle station, a fissile point of rage collapsing infinitely back in upon itself. Geonosians met him and died. Battle droids were crushed by the force of his illimitable hatred, by his bottomless hunger. All paths led to violence.
Dooku sat cross-legged in the center of a half-finished meditation grotto, surrounded by murmuring fountains and unplanted beds where shu-fronds and crystal trees would grow. A tiny river, all recycled water, ran through the artificial landscape. A single pair of boma trees, twisted and stunted, branches bare, shaded the Count with their dwarfish limbs as he wet his razor in the metallic-tasting waters. With great precision Dooku drew the blade along the gaunt lines of his cheek. Silvery-grey hairs floated away on the river's placid surface. Padmé had hidden herself somewhere among the piled crates of fertilizer and the stacks of hyperbaric micro-chambers in which the garden's seeds were held. Dooku could barely feel her. The woman would have made a talented apprentice, given time.
He had done what he could. She was, fortunately, a tangle of conflicting emotions so toxic that she could not help but immerse herself like a drowning swimmer in the Dark Side. A few more months of such unrestrained sorcery and corruption would set in. She would not live to see it, though. Anakin will kill her. His grief will buy me an instant. Or she will kill him, and then she is of no use to me.
"He's coming," came the woman's voice.
Dooku drew his lightsaber. "Thank you, my dear," he said to the shuddering air. He held the weapon loosely, unlit. He remembered the day he had made it, the weeks of preparation under Yoda's tutelage. The old Master had watched him work with a furrowed brow. Dark, this old tradition is, he'd warned the young count of Serenno. Warriors, we are not meant to be.
The first time he had kindled its ruby blade, he had known that Yoda was right. Oh, he had excelled. More than that, he had proved himself a virtuoso with the blade, but he had seen the dual truths in his Master's statement. The blade, Yoda had meant, was too violent a symbol for the Order. Dooku had seen deeper, though; he had seen the weakness of the weapon, the limitations of scale inherent in the curved hilt of the relic. There were more potent swords to bring to hand.
The Count inhaled. The Dark Side welled up around him like a symphony's brass section blaring in the fibers of his being. Serpents wrapped themselves around his trembling limbs and whispered secrets, slick and meaningful, into his ears. A sun kindled in the dark behind his eyes. New horizons warped and burst like flowering fruit, overripe and trembling. He saw the dark mouths gaping at the heart of the galaxy.
The world was was light and sound and water.
PADME
It made her feel like she had swallowed a bag of kreetles. Her stomach churned. Her throat, feverish and raspy, itched like fury. Her skin crawled. Every moment made it easier. Not less horrible, but easier to understand. There were currents in her, waves of love and fear that crashed together and made roaring riptides, sucking thought out, out, out into the black where her darkest depths waited, toothy and monotonous. Her palm was slick on the rough grip of the vibro-knife.
It wrapped her up and drew her down, a sucking whirlpool that drained her even as her veins thrilled with sickening power. She walked the margins of the Count's unfinished grotto, a shadow among shadows in the cold light of the battle in the void. For a moment Anakin's mind had been upon her, starved and wild and hungry, but there was safety in fear. She'd hidden herself, and now everything was in position. She had planted the beacon carefully.
By the time Anakin arrived, it would all be over.
OBI-WAN
The battle was chaos, but he was at peace. The Unpleasant Reminder coasted above the orbital plane of the engagement, Serenno's smallest moon still between it and the massive battle station the Reminder's sensors had picked up when she had dropped out of hyperspace. They'd picked up something else, too. Obi-Wan let out a long, weary breath.
A red diode blinked on and off on the ship's communications panel. A Senate emergency signal beacon. It was coded to his personal frequency.
Padmé.
Obi-Wan locked onto the signal and put the Reminder on a course for the station. Outside, the fire-pierced void was silent.
ANAKIN
They could not bar his way or stay his hand. Blasters rose and spoke. Pupils dilated in terror at his approach. They threw up walls of flesh and steel against him. Anakin Skywalker raged. Like a beast he hurled himself down echoing corridors, traveling in monstrous bounds, and his lightsaber left glowing durasteel and smoking meat behind him. It felt like tearing into a good nerf steak, like ripping through sinew with his teeth and worrying at the meat until its tangy membranes separated with a satisfying ripping noise. Geonosians boiled up out of vents like the insects they were. Their sonic blasters sputtered and whined.
He killed them. Their bodies burst in his mind's grasp. Their delicate wings were shredded in hurricane winds. Their own weapons-fire pulped their exoskeletons and burst their veins. In an unfinished loading turbolift shaft they swarmed him, hundreds upon hundreds of them piling in as he launched himself from support to catwalk to support in a series of dizzying leaps. Below, they were a storm of pinched red-brown faces and a growing buzz that drove daggers into Anakin's temples. He struck their outflung arms from their bodies, but still they pressed on. They carried no weapons.
Just drones, he thought to himself as the fire in his breast leaked out of him in nauseating torrents. There was always more to burn. Up and up he clawed and leapt, the workers, engineers, and maintainers of the ship scrabbling desperately after him even as their swarm-mates were crushed and broken against the walls of the shaft. Anakin screamed. He screamed until his throat was raw, until his whole body vibrated. His false arm flew through inelegant forms, death trailing behind the blue-white arc of his saber.
He cut his way free of the shaft, his vision blurred and bloody red, the servos of his droid arm seizing and overheating. The vacant lift was an abattoir behind him, its occupants heaped dead in tumbled mountains. Anakin found himself in a long, curving corridor walled in durasteel. Panels hung askew or leaned against the walls, waiting to be bolted into place. Exposed wiring bulged like fat serpents from the empty spaces in the alloy. Girders stood like bones across the dark pits of the great station's nuclear heart.
Anakin suppressed a burst of manic laughter. He lost his balance, fell, and rolled onto his back. A groan escaped him. They're in here somewhere, he told himself as he stared up at the unfinished ceiling. He took them, and I'll take them back. He got to his feet, his dead arm still opening and closing of its own free will, and leaned for a moment against the cool durasteel of the wall paneling. He opened the casing on his arm, killed the actuators, and reset the system. This was where meaning lived. Not in words, not in the Force, but in things he could control. The cockpit of a fighter. The crew of a starship. The innards of a droid.
He flexed his durasteel fingers. There was a strange ringing sound in his ears. He bent and carefully removed his boots, setting them aside from the center of the hall. He stood, his blood-splattered reflection livid in the polished paneling. He turned away from it, flanked by himself In stockinged feet he padded down the winding way, lightsaber unlit in the palm of his living hand, and the dead one whining, flexing, crushing, but in voluntary lockstep with the beating of his heart.
JANGO
Vengeance came in many forms, Jango reflected. He had killed a score of sentients for crossing him, and more than he could count in fights more or less fair. He had hunted thousands across the galaxy. Clients had betrayed him. Armies had hunted him. Once, before he'd been split into a hundred million shards, he had dueled the finest gunman on Corellia in an alleyway and walked away with two holes burned through his chest and the dead man's blaster holstered at his belt.
On Ord Mantell he'd scalped the warchief of a Nikto crime hive in the middle of his own bar. On Duro he'd found a Trandoshan slaver who had left him drifting in the cold, his ship disabled by ion cannon fire, and he had slit her throat with her own knife. Except he hadn't. Not really. That man had traded his life for a son and an army, and then he had died a dozen deaths. The thing floating now in his armor was a clone, a replica pumped full of chemical memories.
He turned slowly as he drifted toward Serenno's gravity well. The battle was behind him now, a swarm of ants trading jabs of light in the black. Plumes of oxygen hissed from his ruptured armor. A vulture droid, its navigation matrices malfunctioning, had crashed into him at full speed. Already his vision had begun to narrow. Breathing was torture.
The voices of his clone brothers (his voice) hissed through his failing helmet-mounted comlink system. They were dying by the thousands, swallowed in seas of radioactive flame, drowned in the vast uncaring seas between the stars, and crushed by ruined bulkheads.
Be strong, brother.
There will be revenge.
We hold our name close.
We do not forget.
