Republic Executive Building, Coruscant
"Excellency, you're going to want to see this."
It was a phrase that was beginning to grow quite tiresome. Sidious turned away from the holoprojection, where 5,000 Clones, largely Coruscant Guards but with a battalion from the 501st, were now marching across the Temple Precinct towards the Jedi Temple. In the Executive Building's war room, Sidious had assembled a group including his inner circle, a group of Clone True Believers, a cadre of Red Guards, and a select few military officers and cadets who were involved with the Sith Eternal through the Taung and Zhell Society.
As he approached the signals intelligence section of the room, which had also become a makeshift media monitoring center, a scowl formed on his face. The scowl quickly gave way to an expression of complete shock and surprise.
Onscreen, a group of five pundits and one holopresence were in the middle of a deep discussion on the differences between Jedi and Sith. The headline running across the bottom of the screen read: "Is the Chancellor a Sith Lord?"
The holopresence answering questions from the pundits was none other than Ki-Adi-Mundi.
"How are the Jedi getting messages out of the Temple?" Sidious hissed, his initial surprise giving way anger. "Is anyone on the Strategic Advisory Cell working with the Jedi in the Temple?"
After inputting a query at her work station, a red-haired female cadet was the first to answer. "One Parwan, Doctor Gubacher, was undertaking an assignment at the Jedi Temple when Order 66 was implemented."
"I knew we should have never given him access," Sidious snarled, glancing over his shoulder back towards the holoprojection of the Jedi Temple. The first wave of Clones was just a few hundred meters from the steps. He started walking back towards the holoprojection, reaching for the comm button so he could append an additional order to apprehend the treacherous Gubacher.
"Uh, Excellency, I have an uh… different theory," said Gurka, a true believer Clone sitting at a station to Sidious's right.
"Let's hear it."
"The Jedi Temple is not being jammed at all."
"And why is that?" he hissed under his breath.
"Because the siege units were never instructed to jam the temple," Gurka replied, shifting nervously in his seat.
Sidious clenched his jaw, raw fury causing his eyes to flicker a brilliant sulfurous yellow. How did those idiots not jam the temple of their own initiative?
Standing nearby, Kinman Doriana and Sate Pestage winced as they saw the Sith Lord's raw anger unveiled, both worried he'd lash out at them.
"Should I… Inform CC-2224 to commence jamming operations?" Doriana asked, clasping his hands at the small of his back.
Sidious exhaled and let his anger redirect to more constructive uses. His thoughts were already shifting to the potential blowback of jamming the Temple in the middle of an interview, and whether or not that even mattered given the all out Clone assault underway. An assault Sidious knew was doomed to fail, but in a failure he hoped would push public support more in his direction.
"The damage to your image is done, at this point it would be denounced as a cover-up," Sate Pestage suggested, speaking after a long silence. "The media—"
"Is quickly going to become irrelevant," Sidious interrupted, walking away from the communication's station and back towards the holoprojection of the Temple. He beckoned Sate Pestage and Sly Moore away from the cadets, true believers, and career military officers. The fate he was planning for the treacherous media was one which absolutely could never be on-record.
Before Sidious could begin, Sly Moore said abruptly, "My Lord," then leaned in close, lowering her voice to a hushed whisper of alarm. "I've received a forwarded message from the Athega System announcing a ceasefire."
"Ceasefire," Sidious repeated skeptically. The Athega System was where a loose thread was supposed to have been eliminated. Using state of the art interdictor technology, a Separatist Fleet was supposed to intercept the Republic fleet under Commodore Los'ean which had been carrying Kix, a Clone who had discovered the nature of the inhibitor chips, and wipe it out. "A ceasefire originating in the Athega system is impossible. The Separatist forces are utilizing an entirely droid fleet!"
A holoprojection appeared on Sly Moore's datapad, which Sate Pestage quickly buried, pressing his hand firmly to her datapad's screen. "Perhaps it would be best to review this in another room," he muttered, looking at one of the cadets, a dark-haired boy, staring at them.
"I think I understand enough already," Sidious muttered, turning in place and heading abruptly out of the room. When Moore and Pestage moved to follow he held up a hand. "I did not request you to accompany me."
"But my Lord!" protested the Umbaran, "What are our orders?!"
"Do what you know is best," Sidious sighed, stepping out the door. So much had gone wrong today because his underlings were so used to him controlling everything without giving them the latitude to operate—allowing things to happen simply because he had not expressly ordered them stopped. This model had worked so long as Sidious could predict the future with a high degree of accuracy, or at least to a degree that failures could be mitigated with quick and careful action, but with inexplicable spanners thrown into his plans, the future was becoming less and less like the one he had foreseen and planned towards.
As he walked down the hall, he could sense the lives of a dozen Clones being snuffed out at once at the tops of the Temple steps. Several more fell immediately thereafter, cut down by deflected blasterfire. That, at least, he had predicted correctly since the start of Order 66.
Rounding the corner, the Sith Lord stepped into a communication's room he could sense was empty. With his hood pulled up, he initiated a call to the Mustafar System. An unfamiliar Neimoidian with green skin and rounded orange-red eyes answered.
"Lord Sidious, I apologize but—"
"Who is this?" Sidious asked as diplomatically as he could, alarmed that this unknown Neimoidian knew his name.
"Captain Gap Nox," reported the Neimoidian with a bow. "We were told to expect—"
"Where is Grievous?"
"That I do not know," stammered the Neimoidian. "We were sent to the Klegger Corporation facility ahead of the Separatist Council. Grievous has yet to—"
The Sith Lord had already terminated the call and was frantically pressing the code for the Separatist War Council on Utapau. With how fragmented the Separatist command structure was, if he couldn't get a hold of any members of the War Council, it would be impossible to contain this.
Thankfully, Grievous himself answered. Or at least, what answered was an extremely damaged being that resembled Grievous. Dozens of blaster scorches pocked his entire body, and a spider web-like pattern that looked downright artistic now weaved across his face.
"What happened!?" Sidious demanded, momentarily so shocked by blaster marks and cracks crossing Grievous's mask that he had to ask.
"There were," Grievous started, then bowed so deeply he looked down at the floor, "Complications."
"Complications?"
"Jedi scum," Grievous spat. "Even when unconscious, they manage to poison the minds of so many."
Sidious gulped, feeling his mouth go dry. "What are you talking about?"
"The others were convinced that you and that slime Chancellor Palpatine are one in the same!"
Without any elaboration from the mad cyborg, Sidious could only conclude that unconscious Jedi had somehow come into Separatist custody with evidence that convinced them of the truth. The feeling of dread, already rising in Sidious's chest, reached near-panic levels. He took a sharp inhalation of breath, then opened his mouth to say something, but had no idea what to say. With the Separatists knowing the truth about his own identity, and his tenuous position at best on Coruscant, there would only be one option: escape. Abandon the entire Sith plan and initiate a Galaxy-wide scorch and burn tactic to cover his retreat.
"I had to kill them!" Grievous snarled, banging his fist on a surface which was out of sight. "All of them!"
Unable to believe his own ears, Sidious blinked in surprise. "All of them?" he asked in a gasp, scarcely able to hide his delight.
Grievous dared to look up, and Sidious noticed that, under the cyborg's faceplate, the skin around one of his eyes was darker than usual and badly bruised. After an almost suspiciously long pause, he nodded. "Yes. I killed all of them. They turned their defensive armies on me, and I had to board the command ship and manually override—"
"You did excellently," Sidious interjected breathlessly, the rollercoaster of events was overwhelming, even for him. "It is a tragedy that you had to eliminate the others, but it was an outcome that was always a possibility. I had foreseen a chance they would turn on us."
"You… had?" Grievous asked, then began coughing in a hysterical fit.
Sidious waited a few seconds for Grievous to finish coughing, then changed the topic to one of more urgency. "There is a message, seemingly originating in the Athega System, declaring a ceasefire."
"Ceasefire!" Grievous yelled angrily, then screamed. "CEASEFIRE!"
"One that needs to be prevented from occurring. Reactivate the Shadowfeeds. Jam all intersystem comm transmissions…" Sidious trailed off. The death of the Separatist War Council was one piece of good news, but their deaths did not actually put out any of the fires sprouting all over the Galaxy. It only slowed their spread. The total undoing of the Sith Grand Plan was still a significant possibility.
"Jam hyperspace transmissions?" Grievous asked skeptically. "But the Shadowfeeds were destroyed…"
"The facility was destroyed," Sidious said slowly. "Along with all of the propagandists involved. Yet, the technique for disrupting HoloNet communications will be possible from anywhere with as much HoloNet reach as the Murkhana facility. The Republic has yet to develop countermeasures… The facilities on Mustafar will serve this purpose well."
"Yes…" Grievous cackled. "All word of this so-called 'ceasefire' would be snuffed out!"
Sidious remained silent, continuing to brainstorm. What Grievous said wasn't quite true. While the HoloNet would be substantially disrupted, the Shadowfeed static would have no effect on subspace radio transmissions, or word of mouth as ships traveled between systems. At subspace radio speeds, it could take days or even weeks for news from Coruscant to reach the Outer Rim. Weeks during which the media talking heads could be exterminated and replaced, and the Coruscanti population pacified. Weeks for Sidious and his inner circle to think of a plausible narrative for exactly what happened here. Unless the outlying systems began sending ships to Coruscant to relieve the beleaguered Jedi Temple, Sidious would have the advantage.
"Is there anything else, my Lord?" asked the Commander of the Droid Armies.
After a long pause, Sidious said, "You have done well," and terminated the call. He stood in silence, pondering what comes next. It wasn't that Sidious had no next moves. A few possibilities came to mind, but most of them necessitated the Jedi doing something. They were usually so predictable, but today…
Staring into the now darkened room, the Sith Lord felt a twang of suspicion. There had been a cloud of secrecy and nervousness in the Force emanating from Grievous, and the pause he'd made had been too long, but he did not have the time to worry about it. Too many events were in motion to fully control at this stage, and all of it had to be slowed down.
Before he had returned to the War Room, Sidious felt a jolt of warning from the Force, just as the alarm klaxons began ringing. He stepped through the doorway just in time to hear the shouts of status updates and frantic orders.
"Air defense perimeter breach, sector seven!"
"Contact fighter command. We need reinforcements."
"Anti-air batteries intensify your barrage!"
"IT'S TOO LATE!"
Sidious did what every fiber of his being told him to do: duck for cover. Sly Moore had already hit the deck by the time the Sith Lord had, and Sate Pestage was following suit.
And then the world exploded. The glowlamps overhead shattered into sparks and shrapnel, which fell like glowing hot rain onto the ground. Lying prone, Sidious stared around the room, slackjaw in astonishment. There was only one possible perpetrator: the Jedi.
With the destruction of the internal lighting system, everything went dark, and the room descended into screams and moans of pain, before a second explosion erupted. This time, Sidious pressed his face into the ground, covering his head with his arm as heat encapsulated him.
The explosion tore through walls and piping, hurdling dozens of permacrete chunks into the room, some weighing hundreds of kilos. Amidst the burning, roaring flames, and the screams of terror, almost any being in the Galaxy would think the end was nigh.
But not Sidious. He looked up, coughing in the smoke for a moment, then wiped the soot from his mouth with the sleeve of his robe. His expression had turned into an eerie smirk.
The Jedi had done something so brash, so arrogant, and so destructive that Sidious was sure he no longer needed a false flag.
So predictable…
o.o.o.o.o
OBI-WAN KENOBI
Peering around one of the pillars at the exit to the Jedi Archives, on the right hand side of the vast entrance hall from the perspective of the Clones spilling into the Jedi Temple, Obi-Wan had a good vantage point. Fifty meters or so ahead, towards the public entrance to the structure itself, Kit Fisto and thirty-six other Jedi defenders were holding off columns of Clone Troopers wearing the blue and white of the 501st and the red and white of the Coruscant Guard.
With only the pylons at Temple's main entrance for cover, the troopers were dropping left and right, blasted by their own deflected shots or hacked down by the blade of a lightsaber. Clones who had faithfully fought alongside Obi-Wan and many other Jedi for more than two years.
Plo-Koon's voice, muffled by not only his antiox breath max but also over the medium of the HoloNet, came through Obi-Wan's wrist-comm. "Did it stop? Have the Clones changed their behavior?"
The Kel-Dor Master and a handful of other Jedi had returned to Coruscant in starfighters from the front lines. In a daring attack on the Republic Executive Building itself, they had destroyed the antenna array from which Order 66 had been transmitted.
Obi-Wan flinched as an explosion echoed off the marble walls, and he felt two Jedi pass into the Force. The Clones were continuing their borderline suicidal advance unabated, but now with more results. One of them on the far right was crouched on his knees, holding up a shoulder-mounted RPS-6 Launcher with a now-smoking barrel.
Before the Clone could reload the launcher, blasterfire erupted from a balcony on the opposite side of the entryway, cutting down him and several of his own squadmates. Obi-Wan inhaled sharply, hoping for a moment that this meant some of the Clones had changed sides. Instead, he saw a trio of non-Jedi Temple Security Force personnel standing on the balcony, now targeting any Clones wielding heavy weaponry.
"No, I'm afraid not," Obi-Wan replied, unable to hide his dismay. Dozens of Clone bodies were piling up in the entrance, quickly becoming hundreds. Those two Jedi casualties were the first Obi-Wan had witnessed since the battle at the Sith Shrine, but against a force so numerous, Jedi fatalities would inevitably mount. The Clones had room to make mistakes and learn from them, finding ever better ways to inflict casualties on the Jedi. "Are you certain the signal has been deactivated?"
"Yes. The communications array is a smoldering ruin, and the channel is silent." Plo Koon's deflated sigh echoed from the comlink speaker. "All we can hope is that we have prevented any Clones who have yet to receive the order from being forced to turn on their Jedi Commanders."
"I suggest you return to the Temple. There's nothing more you can do out there."
"We're en route already," Plo-Koon said through the comlink. "Prepare to lower the shields in eight minutes."
"Understood. May the Force be with you."
A collective wave of surprise in the Force hit the Jedi Master from those behind him in the Jedi archives as he cut the transmission. He turned around in time to see Ki-Adi-Mundi stand up, abandoning his seat in front of a HoloCam. From his body language, Obi-Wan could tell that the interview was over. Technicians, Jedi and non-Jedi alike, were fidgeting about, frantically typing onto consoles displaying error screens.
It had taken a great deal of will for Obi-Wan to pull himself away from the battle unfolding at the entrance to the Temple, but he had done so. "What happened?"
Jocasta Nu looked up as Obi-Wan approached her station, which had once been the Archives' help desk. "We lost all access to the HoloNet."
Obi-Wan attempted to comm Plo-Koon again, to no avail. The Jedi would have to use the Force and their own eyes to know exactly when to lower the shields and admit Plo-Koon's squadron in.
"Are we being jammed?" Ki-Adi-Mundi asked, approaching the side of the information desk. Like Obi-Wan, he had abandoned his station.
"No, it's as if… Master Mundi, what does this bandwidth profile look like to you?"
Ki-Adi-Mundi leaned over Jocasta Nu's shoulder, scrutinizing the screen closely. "Well, it looks like someone is disrupting the network with… No…"
"Someone is redirecting HoloNet traffic," Jocasta explained, her fingers tapping away quickly on the touch screen before zooming in. "They're using many of the same backchannels the Separatists used nine months after Geonosis… Look at this… That illicit transceiver hasn't been used in over a year."
"Shadowfeeds," Obi-Wan gasped, recognizing one of the designators Republic Intelligence had given the transceiver nodes that the Separatists had seeded the spaceways with. "I thought those had all been destroyed! Are we picking up any transmissions from the Separatists?"
Mere seconds after he asked the question, the HoloProjector emitted an ear-piercing screech noise. Sparkling blue static appeared in the air above it. For the second time in the war, the HoloNet was being completely jammed.
"We're not picking up any transmissions," Jocasta Nu said, muting the volume and answering Obi-Wan's previous question belatedly.
"The Separatists are not using it for propaganda then," Ki-Adi-Mundi muttered. "They jam the hyperwaves in the middle of an uprising against Sidious on the HoloNet. This can't be a coincidence.
Obi-Wan shook his head helplessly, then shuddered, remembering something Dooku had once said about the Sith controlling everything. "If Sheev Palpatine was pulling Dooku's strings we can only assume he is now actively pulling Grievous's strings…" He trailed off, a new worrying thought coming to mind.
If Sidious were using the Separatists to act against the Jedi, in coordination with the Clones and loyalist Republic forces who had seemingly gone mad, things could get very ugly. Trapped on Coruscant, the Jedi would have no way of even knowing if the Separatists were now working with the Clones or if there was any coordination beyond this sophisticated attack on the hyperwaves.