Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (5 page)

The little droid's datajack rotated in the wall socket. Its holoprojector eye swiveled and the blue scanning laser built a ghostly image near Anakin's boot: Palpatine shackled into a large swivel chair. Even in the tiny translucent blur, he looked exhausted and in pain-but alive.

Anakin's heart thumped once, painfully, against his ribs. He wasn't too late. Not this time.

He dropped to one knee and squinted at the image. Palpatine looked as if he'd aged ten years since Anakin had last seen him. Muscle bulged along the young Jedi's jaw. If Grievous had hurt the Chancellor-had so much as touched him-The hand of jointed durasteel inside his black glove clenched so hard that electronic feedback made his shoulder ache.

Obi-Wan spoke from over that shoulder. "Do you have a location?"

The image rippled and twisted into a schematic map of the cruiser. Far up at the top of the conning spire R2 showed a pulsar of brighter blue.

"In the General's Quarters." Obi-Wan scowled. "Any sign of Grievous himself?"

The pulsar shifted to the cruiser's bridge.

"Hmm. And guards?"

The holoimage rippled again, and transformed into an image of the cruiser's General's Quarters once more. Palpatine appeared to be alone: the chair sat in the center of an arc of empty floor, facing a huge curved viewing wall.

Anakin muttered, "That doesn't make sense.''''

"Of course it does. It's a trap."

Anakin barely heard him. He stared down at his black-gloved fist. He opened his fist, closed it, opened it again. The ache from his shoulder flowed down to the middle of his bicep-And didn't stop.

His elbow sizzled, and his forearm; his wrist had been packed with red-hot gravel, and his hand-His hand was on fire.

But it wasn't his hand. Or his wrist, or his forearm, or his elbow. It was a creation of jointed durasteel and electrodrivers. "Anakin?"

Anakin's lips drew back from his teeth. "It hurts."

"What, your replacement arm? When did you have it equipped with pain sensors?"

"I didn't. That's the point."

"The pain is in your mind, Anakin-"

"No." Anakin's heart froze over. His voice went cold as space. "I can feel him."

"Him?"

"Dooku. He's here. Here on this ship."

"Ah." Obi-Wan nodded. "I'm sure he is."

"You knew?"

"I guessed. Do you think Grievous couldn't have found Palpatine's beacon? It can hardly be accident that through all the ECM, the Chancellor's homing signal was in the clear. This is a trap. A Jedi trap." Obi-Wan laid a warm hand upon Anakin's shoulder, and his face was as grim as Anakin had ever seen it. "Possibly a trap set for us. Personally."

Anakin's jaw tightened. "You're thinking of how he tried to recruit you on Geonosis. Before he sent you down for execution."

"It's not impossible that we will again face that choice."

"It's not a choice." Anakin rose. His durasteel hand clenched and stayed that way, a centimeter from his lightsaber. "Let him ask. My answer is right here on my belt."

"Be mindful, Anakin. The Chancellor's safety is our only priority."

"Yes-yes, of course." The ice in Anakin's chest thawed. "All right, it's a trap. Next move?"

Obi-Wan allowed himself a bit of a smile of his own as he headed for the nearest exit from the hangar bay. "Same as always, my young friend: we spring it."

"I can work with this plan." Anakin turned to his astromech.

"You stay here, Artoo-"

The little droid interrupted him with a wheedling whirr.

"No arguments. Stay. I mean it."

R2-D2's whistling reply had a distinctly sulky tone.

"Listen, Artoo, someone has to maintain computer contact; do you see a datajack anywhere on me?"

The droid seemed to acquiesce, but not before wheeping what sounded like it might have been a suggestion where to look.

Waiting by the open hatchway, Obi-Wan shook his head. "Honestly, the way you talk to that thing."

Anakin started toward him. "Careful, Master, you'll hurt his feelings-" He stopped in his tracks, a curious look on his face as if he was trying to frown and to smile at the same time.

"Anakin?"

He didn't answer. He couldn't answer. He was looking at an image inside his head. Not an image. A reality.

A memory of something that hadn't happened yet.

He saw Count Dooku on his knees. He saw lightsabers crossed at the Count's throat.

Clouds lifted from his heart: clouds of Jabiim, of Aargonar, of Kamino, of even the Tusken camp. For the first time in too many years he felt young: as young as he really was.

Young, and free, and full of light.

"Master ..." His voice seemed to be coming from someone else. Someone who hadn't seen what he'd seen. Hadn't done what he'd done. "Master, right here-right now-you and I . . ."

"Yes?"

He blinked. "I think we're about to win the war."

The vast semisphere of the view wall bloomed with battle. Sophisticated sensor algorithms compressed the combat that sprawled throughout the galactic capital's orbit to a view the naked eye could enjoy: cruisers hundreds of kilometers apart, exchanging fire at near lightspeed, appeared to be practically hull-to-hull, joined by pulsing cables of flame. Turbolaser blasts became swift shafts of light that shattered into prismatic splinters against shields, or bloomed into miniature supernovae that swallowed ships whole. The invisible gnat-clouds of starfighter dogfights became a gleaming dance of shadowmoths at the end of Coruscant's brief spring.

Within that immense curve of computer-filtered carnage, the only furnishing was one lone chair, centered in an expanse of empty floor. This was called the General's Chair, just as this apartment atop the flagship's conning spire was called the General's Quarters.

With his back to that chair and to the man shackled within it, hands folded behind him beneath his cloak of silken armor-weave, stood Count Dooku.

Stood Darth Tyranus, Lord of the Sith.

He looked upon his Master's handiwork, and it was good.

More than good. It was magnificent.

Even the occasional tremor of the deck beneath his boots, as the entire ship shuddered under enemy torpedo and turbolaser blasts, felt to him like applause.

Behind him sounded the initiating hum of the intraship holocomm, which crackled into a voice both electronic and oddly expressive: as though a man spoke through a droid's electrosonic vocabulator. "Lord Tyranus, Kenobi and Skywalker have arrived."

"Yes." Dooku had felt them both in the Force. "Drive them toward me."

"My lord, I must express once more my objections-"

Dooku turned. From his commanding height, he stared down at the blue-scanned holoimage of Invisible Hand's commander. "Your objections have been noted already, General. Leave the Jedi to me."

"But driving them to you also sends them directly toward the Chancellor himself. Why does he remain on this ship at all? He should be hidden. He should be guarded. We should have had him outsystem hours ago!"

"Matters are so," Count Dooku said, "because Lord Sidious wishes them so; should you desire to press your objections, please feel at liberty to take them up with him."

"I, ah, don't believe that will be necessary . . ."

"Very well, then. Confine your efforts to preventing support troops from boarding. Without their pet clones to back them up, no Jedi is a danger to me."

The deck shuddered again, more sharply, followed by a sudden shift in the vector of the cruiser's artificial gravity that would have sent a lesser man stumbling; with the Force to maintain the dignified solidity of his posture, the effect on Dooku was confined to the lift of one eyebrow. "And may I suggest that you devote some attention to protecting this ship? Having it destroyed with both you and me aboard might put something of a cramp in the war effort, don't you think?"

"It is already being done, my lord. Does my lord wish to observe the progress of the Jedi? I can feed the security monitors onto this channel."

"Thank you, General. That will be welcome."

"Gracious as ever, my lord. Grievous out."

Count Dooku allowed himself a near-invisible smile. His inviolable courtesy-the hallmark of a true aristocrat-was effortless, yet somehow it seemed always to impress the common rabble. As well as those with the intellect of common rabble, regardless of accomplishment or station: like, for example, that repulsive cyborg Grievous.

He sighed. Grievous had his uses; not only was he an able field commander, but he would soon make a marvelous scapegoat upon whom to hang every atrocity of this sadly necessary war. Someone had to take that particular fall, and Grievous was just the creature for the job. It certainly would not be Dooku.

This was, in fact, one purpose of the cataclysmic battle outside.

But not the only one.

The blue-scanned image before him now became miniatures of Kenobi and Skywalker as he had seen them so many times before: shoulder-to-shoulder, lightsabers whirling as they enthusiastically dismantled droid after droid after droid. Feeling as if they were winning, while in truth they were being chivvied exactly where the Lords of the Sith wanted them to go.

Such children they were. Dooku shook his head.

It was almost too easy.

This is Dooku, Darth Tyranus, Count of Serenno:

Once a great Jedi Master, now an even greater Lord of the Sith, Dooku is a dark colossus bestriding the galaxy. Nemesis of the corrupt Republic, oriflamme of the principled Confederacy of Independent Systems, he is the very personification of shock and awe.

He was one of the most respected and powerful Jedi in the Order's twenty-five-thousand-year history, yet at the age of seventy Dooku's principles would no longer allow him to serve a Republic in which political power was for sale to the highest bidder. He'd said farewell to his former Padawan, Qui-Gon Jinn, now a legendary Master in his own right; he'd said farewell to his close friends on the Jedi Council, Mace Windu and the ancient Master Yoda; he'd said farewell to the Jedi Order itself.

He is numbered among the Lost: the Jedi who renounced their fealty to the Order and resigned their commissions of Jedi Knighthood in service of ideals higher than even the Order itself professed. The Lost Twenty, as they have been known since Dooku joined their number, are remembered with both honor and regret among the Jedi; their images, sculpted from bronzium, stand enshrined in the Temple archives.

These bronzium images serve as melancholy reminders that some Jedi have needs the Order cannot satisfy.

Dooku had retired to his family estate, the planetary system of Serenno. Assuming his hereditary title as its Count made him one of the wealthiest beings in the galaxy. Amid the unabashed corruption endemic to the Republic, his immense wealth could have bought the allegiance of any given number of Senators; he could, perhaps, have bought control of the Republic itself.

But a man of such heritage, such principle, could never stoop to be lord of a garbage heap, chief of a horde of scavengers squabbling over scraps; the Republic, to him, was nothing more than this.

Instead, he used all the great power of his family fortune-and the vastly greater power of his unquestioned integrity-to begin the cleansing of the galaxy from the fester of this so-called democracy.

He is the icon of the Separatist movement, its public face. He is to the Confederacy of Independent Systems what Palpatine is to the Republic: the living symbol of the justice of its cause.

This is the public story.

This is the story that even Dooku, in his weaker moments, almost believes.

The truth is more complicated.

Dooku is ... different.

He doesn't remember quite when he discovered this; it may have been when he was a young Padawan, betrayed by another learner who had claimed to be his friend. Lorian Nod had said it to his face: "You don't know what friendship is."

And he didn't.

He had been angry, certainly; furious that his reputation had been put at risk. And he had been angry at himself, for his error in judgment: trusting as an ally one who was in fact an enemy. The most astonishing part of the whole affair had been that even after turning on him before the Jedi, the other boy had expected him to participate in a lie, in the name of their "friendship."

It had been all so preposterous that he hadn't known how to reply-In fact, he has never been entirely sure what beings mean when they speak of friendship. Love, hate, joy, anger-even when he can feel the energy of these emotions in others, they translate in his perception to other kinds of feelings. The kinds that make sense.

Jealousy he understands, and possessiveness: he is fierce when any being encroaches on what is rightfully his.

Intolerance, at the intractability of the universe, and at the undisciplined lives of its inhabitants: this is his normal state.

Spite is a recreation: he takes considerable pleasure from the suffering of his enemies.

Pride is a virtue in an aristocrat, and indignation his inalienable right: when any dare to impugn his integrity, his honor, or his rightful place atop the natural hierarchy of authority.

And moral outrage makes perfect sense to him: when the incorrigibly untidy affairs of ordinary beings refuse to conform to |the plainly obvious structure of How Society Ought To Be.

He is entirely incapable of caring what any given creature might feel for him. He cares only what that creature might do for him. Or to him.

Very possibly, he is what he is because other beings just aren't very . . . interesting.

Or even, in a sense, entirely real.

For Dooku, other beings are mostly abstractions, simple schematic sketches who fall into two essential categories. The first category is Assets: beings who can be used to serve his various interests. Such as-for most of his life, and to some extent even now-the Jedi, particularly Mace Windu and Yoda, both of whom had regarded him as their friend for so long that it had effectively blinded them to the truth of his activities. And of course-for now-the Trade Federation, and the InterGalactic

Banking Clan, the Techno Union, the Corporate Alliance, and the weapon lords of Geonosis. And even the common rabble of the galaxy, who exist largely to provide an audience of sufficient size to do justice to his grandeur.