CHAPTER TWELVE: The Ill-Made Knight
DOOKU
Skywalker came through the door like a wraith. He moved at a dead sprint, his face a mask of brownish-red Geonosian blood. His eyes found Dooku's. The Count stood, the dead wind of the Death Star's ventilated atmosphere cold against his clean-shaven face. "Young Jedi," he said, his voice ringing from the walls with a deep, liquid power amplified by the currents of the Dark Side he had wrapped around himself. "I think you'll find-"
A wave came. It was like the great breakers that had crashed sometimes on the beach near his mother's summer home. It came not in the ocean but in the Force, a dark swell of ruin and anger that stripped away his careful defenses like a pack of dogs, like a hurricane, like a fusillade of blaster fire. It was the pounding, petulant, unloving sea given voice. He staggered back, his words gone, his aura of dark power cut to ribbons, as Skywalker ran barefoot like a savage through the unfinished garden. The younger man splashed through the meditation river and, gaining the far bank, attacked with a blood-curdling shriek.
Dooku ignited his saber and parried the younger man's first two blows, moving like a sleepwalker as he struggled to regain his equilibrium. He felt like a man on a high-wire, his body swaying over an abyss of roaring black. The third strike went through his belly like a bar of white-hot steel. The fourth laid his breast open. The fifth darted in just under his ribcage. It severed his spine. He inhaled sharply as he fell. His arms failed to respond when he tried to break his fall. The back of his head hit durasteel, hard. He saw light.
Skywalker loomed over him, that mask-like snarl still etched deep into his hungry features. "Where are they?" he grated.
Dooku stared at the young man. There is a fire in him, he thought, but it is not the danger. The danger is what comes after, what comes when the coals are dead and the ash has been shoveled out. What remains when the light is gone?
"Gone," Dooku said. She never struck. The coward.
Skywalker, waxy-faced, seized him by the front of his robe and dragged him to the meditation river. Dooku watched the trails of blood his limp heels left on the durasteel. The young Jedi stared at Dooku for a moment, then threw him unceremoniously into the water. Muddy currents closed over Dooku's head, but for an instant he could see Skywalker through the murmuring surface of the river.
The Jedi was a skeletal thing, his body charred black, one arm a festering absence in the world, the other little more than skin stretched hard across old bones. His lightsaber, still burning, was the color of a dying sun. The ghosts of children followed in his ghastly train, and the only light he cast was the light of his fissile eyes. Red. Terrible and red.
Behind him came a woman dressed in black and bearing like a votive in her hand a knife.
It had all come to nothing in the end. His schemes, his desperate gambits. Palpatine had outmatched him at every turn. I should have seen it sooner, he thought. Bubbles streamed from his nostrils. I shouldn't have fought so hard.
I was always a joke to him.
Dooku opened his mouth and slipped away with the current.
OBI-WAN
The bay was a minor one, positioned carefully away from the main offensive architecture of the massive battle station. The Reminder's sophisticated sensors found it without too much difficulty. Obi-Wan docked in silence, setting the Reminder down beside the sleek Neimoidian shuttle in the tiny oblong bay. Attendant droids swarmed out to connect fuel lines and service the rapidly cooling nacelles. Obi-Wan debarked and crossed the echoing deck to the shuttle's lowered boarding ramp.
Inside the hold a pair of nanny droids cradled the sleeping children in their padded arms. They turned their comfortingly average synthskin faces toward Obi-Wan and cooed inquisitively. He paid them no mind. The Senator's beacon was underneath the pilot's couch, its lone blue diode blinking. He removed it, deactivating its magnetic seal, and sat down on the padded surface. He held the little beacon in his hands.
He couldn't sense Padmé, though he'd tried to reach out into the roiling maelstrom of the Death Star's inner chambers. Is this all that remains of you, my friend?
They had journeyed together from Theed to the Senate Round. They had worked together to escape Tatooine. He had counted her among his few friends, had kept the secret of her dalliance with Anakin against all his better judgment, and now he had no way to know whether or not she had paid the price for his foolishness.
The beacon let out a single hitch-pitched beep and Padmé's image appeared in miniature atop its minute projection plate. "Help me, Obi-Wan," the senator's flickering hologram whispered. "You're the only one left that I can trust."
It settled on him, then. She's dead.
"I knew you'd come. It's too late for me, but you can still save my children. They shouldn't pay for my mistakes." She paused, and even in miniature he could see the tears in her eyes. "I've rigged the shuttle to your personal clearance code. Take them away, Obi-Wan. I know you're here to face him, but I'm begging you to save my children instead."
Obi-Wan had spent decades mastering his emotions. He had labored under Qui-Gon's tutelage to accept serenity, to purge himself of want and need. It had never come easy to him. Now he saw what a waste it had all been. What had his control done but distance him from Anakin and from the others in the Order? The young man had needed a friend, a father, not some distant arbiter of abstract morality. The Jedi teachings had failed him. Somewhere, lost in their long history, they had traded peace for stoicism, and their hearts had withered for it.
The Senator's image winked out.
Obi-Wan looked back at the children and their caretakers, back to the narrow airlock which still stood open on the bay. He could sense Anakin's presence. The other man was a wound in the world, an abscess bloated up with pus and foulness.
He was gone.
Obi-Wan sealed the shuttle and prepped it for flight.
ANAKIN
He was staring down at the old man's quiescent face, naked without its silvery beard, when a low, clicking whir drew his attention. He turned, drawing again from the new wells of power that were opening within him, and something hot and sharp drew a line across his throat. The pain was bitter; nauseating. He jerked back, howling. Blood sheeted down his chest to soak his shirt as he swung his lightsaber in a killing arc. Flesh parted. Bones superheated and burst.
She toppled to the floor in a pile of dirt and chemical manure spilling out from a tangle of torn bags. He had nearly bisected her, but there was life in her eyes. A little firefly glow. It lingered as she stared up at him, and in the stillness of the moment Anakin Skywalker felt the last thread snap.
"Murderer," she husked through bloody lips. The wound, though, held his shivering gaze. Her organs pulsed and slithered. Glistening. Charred meat smoked in the temperature-controlled environment of the battle station.
He raised a hand to the cut she had given him. Shallow. It would bleed, but there was no danger. "No," he said. No.
She laughed bloodily, completely, and then her head fell to the side and she was still. She had run out of herself in rivers and in lakes, and a halo of dark redness grew around her skull. Her sweat-damped hair was pressed across her cheek.
Anakin knelt and took her in his arms. He pressed his face into the hollow of her neck. He lifted her and, dead-eyed, left the ruined garden and the old man in the simulacral river. Doors were torn screaming from their mounts at his approach. Droids were crushed like discarded cans. Geonosians fled, or stayed and died in the whirlwind that built and roared around Anakin Skywalker. Wall paneling crumpled and shrieked. Wires tore and sparks spilled out like burning stars.
Blood from the shallow cut on the side of Anakin's neck ran down to mingle with Padmé's. Her head lolled against his chest. She was heavy.
She was dead.
The Death Star was a labyrinth. Its corridors folded back on themselves in tangled skeins. A hundred identical guard stations, unmanned and empty. Cell blocks gaping like hungry mouths. The storm slackened as Anakin's wrath drained away. The walls shook and shivered where he passed. Lights flickered. Some died. His living fingers dug hard into his wife's shoulder as he carried her like some priceless thing into a service shaft, a dark slot in the heart of the great machine. The sounds of pursuit faded behind them.
He walked across narrow catwalks spanning gulfs of blackness. Hydroponic tanks. Grey water reprocessing stations. He ripped maintenance doors from their hinges, twisted palm locks into unrecognizable messes of metal and wiring, and passed deeper, deeper, ever deeper into the dark. At last, when his legs had grown weak and his shoulders ached with the burden of Padmé's corpse, he emerged from a half-built radiation lock into the echoing cathedral of the station's reactor core. Two great flanged durasteel towers, one sprouting from the floor, the other from the ceiling, met at the center of a vast, empty sphere. Lightning snarled and snapped between the poles. Malevolent-looking architectures gnarled the paired apparatuses.
The emptiness was bathed in green-blue light. Anakin limped out onto the curving floor, a mote of dust in an ocean of nothing. He kept his eyes on the reactor, on its artificial sunlight, so much brighter than the twin sunrises on Tatooine. A sob sent a tremor up his spine. He fell to his knees, Padmé spilling from his arms, and like a supplicant he knelt bathed in unclean light while a symphony of breach alarms roared and thundered in his ears.
The clone boarding parties found him there the next day, silent, skin red and peeling, half-blind with sunstroke, when the maimed and dying Archduke surrendered his battle station to the victorious Republic.
YODA
The pod dropped down through the planet's turbulent atmosphere. Clouds swirled outside its tiny porthole. Yoda fell with it. He sat cross-legged on the oversized crash couch, his breathing slow and purposeful. It had taken an enormous effort of will to return to Organa's waiting speeder and retreat back to the Senator's apartment. There Yoda had made his last arrangements. The surviving students would be hidden, all records of their existence expunged. The academy records left in Bail's care would be destroyed.
The Order was at an end. He had failed in its final accounting. All his years of meditation, all his careful shepherding of young minds. It was over. Now he descended toward a world he had not visited in centuries, a broken being wrapped around a wound not just of body but of spirit. Palpatine had not killed him, but the duel had been his last. Just to stand in the same room with such raw, suppurating evil had touched the old Master's soul too deeply for it to ever be cleansed or undone. The wound in his belly, too, would never really heal. The cane he had carried for so long as an aid and a friend was now a grim necessity.
The pod slowed, braking thrusters firing. The clouds slid past and grey light filtered through the windows. Below, a jungle spread out vast across a rainy continent in a grey-green sea. Life thrummed and throbbed down there, beneath the clouds. Yoda put a clawed hand to the porthole, pressing his palm against the cold, glassy surface. A half hour later the pod slipped without incident through the canopy and into the moss-shrouded jungle. The door hissed open and hot, fetid air rushed in. The world was alive with the sounds of animals crying, hooting, bellowing, and shrieking.
Yoda stepped out onto the sodden turf, his cane sinking into the muck. Gnarled trees surrounded him, looming like weary giants. Avians flitted through the muggy dusk. He closed his eyes and passed a hand over his face. The ache in his belly throbbed and pulsed, a constant reminder of his failure. He sighed. "Hmmm," he said to himself, "done, it is. Dwell on it, no more will I."
He walked away into the hissing drizzle. The jungle swallowed him.
PALPATINE
They walked together at the head of the funeral procession, chancellor and knight. Skywalker limped along numbly. His eyes were dead and cold, still healing from exposure to the Death Star's reactor. His skin had a pallid, sickly cast to it. The coffin, resting on repulsors and drawn by a pair of noble tusk cats arrayed in black barding, came silently in their wake. The people of Theed lined the great thoroughfare as the Senator's friends and family accompanied her body through the lamplit night. Candles blazed in their hands.
Naboo was deep in mourning. So tragic, Palpatine thought, looking back at the woman's angelic face. She wore a black burial gown that hid what Skywalker had done to her. Necessary, though. Her death bound the younger man to him forever, and it bound the galaxy to Skywalker. They would never stop loving him for his bravery in the wake of his beautiful, brilliant wife's murder at the hands of the villainous Count Dooku.
The great palace of Theed was darkened in mourning, a black hill of spires and domes silhouetted against the moon. The queen and her ministers walked with the procession, but it was Palpatine who held the father's place beside the grieving widower. The galaxy, it seemed, awaited only his announcement of assumption of the imperial mantle. He watched them sidelong from the shadows of his hood. Dooku was dead. A fair maiden, martyred brutally in service to the Republic, dominated the entire galactic news cycle. Skywalker had nothing left but their connection.
Nothing left but Kenobi.
The procession passed canals where paper lanterns bobbed in gentle currents. One of the tusk cats dropped a steaming pile of dung, quickly shoveled up by its wary minders, on the boulevard. The people gathered along the street and watching from windows, doorways, and rooftops wept to see their precious Padmé carted toward her funeral pyre. It was to happen at the roaring falls. A bier of black marble waited on an overlook. At the burial site the Naberrie women, weeping mother, spinster aunts, young sisters pale and stricken, gaggle of old crones resigned to constant death, took Padmé from the coffin and laid her gently, reverently, on the bier.
Blue-robed priests from whatever backwater cult collected dues in Theed emerged from the throngs of mourners to sing Padmé's praises. Her mother stood and related a drearily boring story about the girl's childhood in the countryside. Tears glistened in the aging woman's eyes.
"You've been strong, Anakin," Palpatine said. He gripped the younger man's hand briefly. "I know that this has been a challenge for you. I know how much you loved her.
"There's only one thing left to do."
He clenched his teeth, grinding them. His false hand twitched in its masking glove. "Obi-Wan," he said, and the venom in his tone nearly brought a smile to Palpatine's lips.
"Obi-Wan," the Chancellor agreed, sorrowfully.
OBI-WAN
Organa's men took the children on a nameless moon near Alderaan. They delivered a message from the Senator himself explaining the specifics of their relocation. Obi-Wan hardly heard them. He could still feel it, the wave of insane hatred that had swept out from the Death Star mere moments after his departure from it. The holonet had its stories about Padmé's death, but he knew the truth. He saw it whenever he closed his eyes.
He spent two nights in a cheap portside flophouse on Nar Shadaa, berthing the Reminder in a wild-looking Toydarian's garage. The moon masked his presence, its iron canyons thronging with unhealthy life. It was Coruscant in grubby miniature, a slum-world in Nal Hutta's bloated shadow. Hutt gang lords reigned over seas of crumbling tenements, five-credit slave brothels, and piss-stinking casinos where the drunk, the victorious, and the destitute mingled, tangled, and traded places.
This was the Republic he had fought for. A decrepit husk swaddled at the galaxy's heart in its old finery, its mirrors smeared with oil to keep its eyes from finding truth. Slave markets, he thought in the smoky darkness of his cheap, grimy room. I saw them with my own eyes. Anakin was sold at one. His mother, too. A million, billion slaves crying out to the deaf and the heartless.
He had never taken the younger man back to Tatooine. Obi-Wan still remembered the day Anakin had asked. He wanted to visit Shmi's grave. He was so frightened to ask me, so certain that I would pass judgment on his attachments. I did, though. I always judged him. Found him wanting. Too close to the world, too in love with his friends. Too open. Too angry.
He had failed the boy. Qui-Gon had left what might have been his greatest student in the hands of a small-hearted clerk, and Obi-Wan had performed accordingly. He had crushed and stymied Anakin at every turn, trying desperately to mold him into the archetypal Jedi, the man in the high tower with his eyes shut and his heart turned to stone.
Obi-Wan knew he had to move. Someone would report his ship, obviously military and just as obviously not his property. Someone would recognize his face from the printouts plastered on bounty boards around the city. He'd read a few of those. Obi-Wan Kenobi, so-called Jedi Knight. Wanted for sedition, treason, and murder. In the accompanying hologram he looked sinister and brutish, his beard a thorny thicket, his eyes narrowed, lip twisted in a killer's sneer.
Nar Shadaa would notice him sooner or later, and he had business to attend to. He knew where Anakin would be. Palpatine left no loose ends, and only one remained.
He just had to find the Confederacy.
