Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (3 page)

"Way ahead of you." But when he checked his comm readout, he shook his head. "There's still too much ECM. Artoo can't raise the Temple. I think the only reason we can even talk to each other is that we're practically side by side."

"And Jedi beacons?"

"No joy, Master." Anakin's stomach clenched, but he fought the tension out of his voice. "We may be the only two Jedi out here."

"Then we will have to be enough. Switching to clone fighter channel."

Anakin spun his comm dial to the new frequency in time to hear Obi-Wan say, "Oddball, do you copy? We need help."

The clone captain's helmet speaker flattened the humanity out of his voice. "Copy, Red Leader."

"Mark my position and form your squad behind me. We're going in."

On our way."

The droid fighters had lost themselves against the background of the battle, but R2-D2 was tracking them on scan. Anakin shifted his grip on his starfighter's control yoke. "Ten vultures inbound, high and left to my orientation. More on the way."

"I have them. Anakin, wait-the cruiser's bay shields have dropped! I'm reading four, no, six ships incoming." Obi-Wan's voice rose. "Tri-fighters! Coming in fast!"

Anakin's smile tightened. This was about to get interesting.

"Tri-fighters first, Master. The vultures can wait."

"Agreed. Slip back and right, swing behind me. We'll take them on the slant."

Let Obi-Wan go first? With a blown left control surface and a half-crippled R-unit? With Palpatine's life at stake?

Not likely.

"Negative," Anakin said. "I'm going head-to-head. See you on the far side."

"Take it easy. Wait for Oddball and Squad Seven. Anakin-"

He could hear the frustration in Obi-Wan's voice as he kicked his starfighter's sublights and surged past; his former Master still hadn't gotten used to not being able to order Anakin around.

Not that Anakin had ever been much for following orders. Obi-Wan's, or anyone else's.

"Sorry we're late." The digitized voice of the clone whose call sign was Oddball sounded as calm as if he were ordering dinner. "We're on your right, Red Leader. Where's Red Five?"

"Anakin, form up!"

But Anakin was already streaking to meet the Trade Federation fighters. "Incoming!"

Obi-Wan's familiar sigh came clearly over the comm; Anakin knew exactly what the Jedi Master was thinking. The same thing he was always thinking.

He still has much to learn.

Anakin's smile thinned to a grim straight line as enemy starfighters swarmed around him. And he thought the same thing he always thought.

We'll see about that.

He gave himself to the battle, and his starfighter whirled and his cannons hammered, and droids on all sides began to burst into clouds of debris and superheated gas.

This was how he relaxed.

This is Anakin Skywalker:

The most powerful Jedi of his generation. Perhaps of any generation. The fastest. The strongest. An unbeatable pilot. An unstoppable warrior. On the ground, in the air or sea or space, there is no one even close. He has not just power, not just skill, but dash: that rare, invaluable combination of boldness and grace.

He is the best there is at what he does. The best there has ever been. And he knows it.

HoloNet features call him the Hero With No Fear. And why not? What should he be afraid of?

Except-Fear lives inside him anyway, chewing away the firewalls around his heart.

Anakin sometimes thinks of the dread that eats at his heart as a dragon. Children on Tatooine tell each other of the dragons that live inside the suns; smaller cousins of the sun-dragons are supposed to live inside the fusion furnaces that power everything from starships to Podracers.

But Anakin's fear is another kind of dragon. A cold kind. A dead kind.

Not nearly dead enough.

Not long after he became Obi-Wan's Padawan, all those years ago, a minor mission had brought them to a dead system: one so immeasurably old that its star had long ago turned to a frigid dwarf of hypercompacted trace metals, hovering a quantum fraction of a degree above absolute zero. Anakin couldn't even remember what the mission might have been, but he'd never forgotten that dead star.

It had scared him.

"Stars can die-?"

"It is the way of the universe, which is another manner of saying that it is the will of the Force," Obi-Wan had told him. "Everything dies. In time, even stars burn out. This is why Jedi form no attachments: all things pass. To hold on to something-or someone-beyond its time is to set your selfish desires against the Force. That is a path of misery, Anakin; the Jedi do not walk it."

That is the kind of fear that lives inside Anakin Skywalker: the dragon of that dead star. It is an ancient, cold dead voice within his heart that whispers all things die . . .

In bright day he can't hear it; battle, a mission, even a report before the Jedi Council, can make him forget it's even there. But at night-At night, the walls he has built sometimes start to frost over. Sometimes they start to crack.

At night, the dead-star dragon sometimes sneaks through the cracks and crawls up into his brain and chews at the inside of his skull. The dragon whispers of what Anakin has lost. And what he will lose.

The dragon reminds him, every night, of how he held his dying mother in his arms, of how she had spent her last strength to say I knew you would come for me, Anakin . . .

The dragon reminds him, every night, that someday he will lose Obi-Wan. He will lose Padme. Or they will lose him.

All things die, Anakin Skywalker. Even stars burn out. . .

And the only answers he ever has for these dead cold whispers are his memories of Obi-Wan's voice, or Yoda's.

But sometimes he can't quite remember them.

?????? all things die . . .

He can barely even think about it.

But right now he doesn't have a choice: the man he flies to rescue is a closer friend than he'd ever hoped to have. That's what puts the edge in his voice when he tries to make a joke; that's what flattens his mouth and tightens the burn-scar high on his right cheek.

The Supreme Chancellor has been family to Anakin: always there, always caring, always free with advice and unstinting aid. A sympathetic ear and a kindly, loving, unconditional acceptance of Anakin exactly as he is-the sort of acceptance Anakin could never get from another Jedi. Not even from Obi-Wan. He can tell Palpatine things he could never share with his Master.

He can tell Palpatine things he can't even tell Padme.

Now the Supreme Chancellor is in the worst kind of danger. And Anakin is on his way despite the dread boiling through his blood. That's what makes him a real hero. Not the way the HoloNet labels him; not without fear, but stronger than fear.

He looks the dragon in the eye and doesn't even slow down.

If anyone can save Palpatine, Anakin will. Because he's already the best, and he's still getting better. But locked away behind the walls of his heart, the dragon that is his fear coils and squirms and hisses.

Because his real fear, in a universe where even stars can die, is that being the best will never be quite good enough.

Obi-Wan's starfighter jolted sideways. Anakin whipped by him and used his forward attitude jets to kick himself into a skew-flip: facing backward to blast the last of the tri-fighters on his tail. Now there were only vulture droids left.

A lot of vulture droids.

"Did you like that one, Master?"

"Very pretty." Obi-Wan's cannons stitched plasma across the hull of a swooping vulture fighter until the droid exploded. "But we're not through yet."

"Watch this." Anakin flipped his starfighter again and dived, spinning, directly through the flock of vulture droids. Their drives blazed as they came around. He led them streaking for the upper deck of a laser-scarred Separatist cruiser. "I'm going to lead them through the needle."

"Don't lead them anywhere." Obi-Wan's threat display tallied the vultures on Anakin's tail. Twelve of them. Twelve. "First Jedi principle of combat: survive."

"No choice." Anakin slipped his starfighter through the storm of cannonfire. "Come down and thin them out a little.''

Obi-Wan slammed his control yoke forward as though jamming it against its impact-rest would push his battered fighter faster in pursuit. "Nothing fancy, Arfour." As though the damaged droid were even capable of anything fancy. "Just hold me steady."

He reached into the Force and felt for his shot. "On my mark, break left-now!" The shutdown control surface of his left wing turned the left break into a tight overhead spiral that traversed Obi-Wan's guns across the paths of four vultures-flash flash flash flash

-and all four were gone.

He flew on through the clouds of glowing plasma. He couldn't waste time going around; Anakin still had eight of them on his tail.

And what was this? Obi-Wan frowned.

The cruiser looked familiar.

The needle? he thought. Oh, please say you're kidding.

Anakin's starfighter skimmed only meters above the cruiser's dorsal hull. Cannon misses from the vulture fighters swooping toward him blasted chunks out of the cruiser's armor.

"Okay, Artoo. Where's that trench?"

His forward screen lit with a topograph of the cruiser's hull. Just ahead lay the trench that Obi-Wan had led the tri-fighter into. Anakin flipped his starfighter through a razor-sharp wingover "down past the rim. The walls of the service trench flashed past him as he streaked for the bridge tower at the far end. From here, he couldn't even see the minuscule slit between its support struts.

With eight vulture droids in pursuit, he'd never pull off a slant up the tower's leading edge as Obi-Wan had. But that was all right.

He wasn't planning to.

His cockpit comm buzzed. "Don't try it, Anakin. It's too tight."

Too tight for you, maybe. "I'll get through."

R2-D2 whistled nervous agreement with Obi-Wan.

"Easy, Artoo," Anakin said. "We've done this before."

Cannonfire blazed past him, impacting on the support struts ahead. Too late to change his mind now: he was committed. He would bring his ship through, or he would die.

Right now, strangely, he didn't actually care which.

"Use the Force." Obi-Wan sounded worried. Think yourself through, and the ship will follow.''''

"What do you expect me to do? Close my eyes and whistle?" Anakin muttered under his breath, then said aloud, "Copy that. Thinking now."

R2-D2's squeal was as close to terrified as a droid can sound. Glowing letters spidered across Anakin's readout: ABORT! ABORT ABORT!

Anakin smiled. "Wrong thought."

Obi-Wan could only stare openmouthed as Anakin's starfighter snapped onto its side and scraped through the slit with centimeters to spare. He fully expected one of the struts to knock R2's dome off.

The vulture droids tried to follow . . . but they were just a hair too big.

When the first two impacted, Obi-Wan triggered his cannons in a downward sweep. The evasion maneuvers preprogrammed into the vulture fighters' droid brains sent them diving away from Obi-Wan's lasers-straight into the fireball expanding from the front of the struts.

Obi-Wan looked up to find Anakin soaring straight out from the cruiser with a quick snap-roll of victory. Obi-Wan matched his course-without the flourish.

"I'll give you the first four," Anakin said over the comm, "but the other eight are mine."

"Anakin-"

"All right, we'll split them."

As they left the cruiser behind, their sensors showed Squad Seven dead ahead. The clone pilots were fully engaged, looping through a dogfight so tight that their ion trails looked like a glowing ball of string.

"Oddball's in trouble. I'm going to help him out."

"Don't. He's doing his job. We need to do ours."

"Master, they're getting eaten alive over-"

"Every one of them would gladly trade his life for Palpatine's. Will you trade Palpatine's life for theirs?"

"No-no, of course not, but-"

"Anakin, I understand: you want to save everyone. You always do. But you can't.''''

Anakin's voice went tight. "Don't remind me."

"Head for the command ship." Without waiting for a reply, Obi-Wan targeted the command cruiser and shot away at maximum thrust.

The cross of burn-scar beside Anakin's eye went pale as he turned his starfighter in pursuit. Obi-Wan was right. He almost always was.

You can't save everyone

His mother's body, broken and bloody in his arms-Her battered eyes struggling to open-The touch of her smashed lips-I knew you would come to me ... I missed you so much . . .

That's what it was to be not quite good enough.

It could happen anytime. Anyplace. If he was a few minutes late. If he let his attention drift for a single second. If he was a whisker too weak.

Anyplace. Anytime.

But not here, and not now.

He forced his mother's face back down below the surface of his consciousness.

Time to get to work.

They flashed through the battle, dodging flak and turbolaser bolts, slipping around cruisers to eclipse themselves from the sensors of droid fighters. They were only a few dozen kilometers from the command cruiser when a pair of tri-fighters whipped across their path, firing on the deflection.

Anakin's sensor board lit up and R2-D2 shrilled a warning. "Missiles!"

He wasn't worried for himself: the two on his tail were coming at him in perfect tandem. Missiles lack the sophisticated brains of droid fighters; to keep them from colliding on their inbound vectors, one of them would lock onto his fighter's left drive, the other onto his right. A quick snap-roll would make those vectors intersect.

Which they did in a silent blossom of flame.

Obi-Wan wasn't so lucky. The pair of missiles locked onto his sublights weren't precisely side by side; a snap-roll would be worse than useless. Instead he fired retros and kicked his dorsal jets to halve his velocity and knock him a few meters planet-ward. The lead missile overshot and spiraled off into the orbital battle.

The trailing missile came close enough to trigger its proximity sensors, and detonated in a spray of glowing shrapnel. Obi-Wan's starfighter flew through the debris-and the shrapnel tracked him.