Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (7 page)

Anakin turned, and found within Obi-Wan's eyes a depth of feeling he had only rarely glimpsed in all their years together; and the pure uncomplicated love that rose up within him then felt like a promise from the Force itself.

"I ... wouldn't have it any other way, Master."

"I believe," his onetime Master said with a gently humorous look of astonishment at the words coming out of his mouth, "that you should get used to calling me Obi-Wan."

"Obi-Wan," Anakin said, "let's go get the Chancellor."

"Yes," Obi-Wan said. "Let's."

Inside a turbolift pod, Dooku watched hologrammic images of Kenobi and Skywalker cautiously pick their way down the curving stairs from the entrance balcony to the main level of the General's Quarters, moving slowly to stay braced against the pitching of the cruiser. The ship shuddered and bucked with multiple torpedo bursts, and the lights went out again; lighting always the first to fail as power was diverted from life support to damage control.

"My lord." On the intraship comm, Grievous sounded actively concerned. "Damage to this ship is becoming severe. Thirty percent of automated weapons systems are down, and we may soon lose hyperspace capability."

Dooku nodded judiciously to himself, frowning down at the translucent blue ghosts slinking toward Palpatine. "Sound the retreat for the entire strike force, General, and prepare the ship for jump. Once the Jedi are dead, I will join you on the bridge."

"As my lord commands. Grievous out."

"Indeed you are, you vile creature," Dooku muttered to the dead comlink. "Out of luck, and out of time."

He cast the comlink aside and ignored its clatter across the deck. He had no further use for it. Let it be destroyed along with Grievous, those repulsive bodyguards of his, and the rest of the cruiser, once he was safely captured and away.

He nodded to the two hulking super battle droids that flanked him. One opened the lift door and they marched through, pivoting to take positions on either side.

Dooku straightened his cloak of shimmering armorweave and strode grandly into the half-dark lift lobby. In the pale emergency lighting, the door to the General's Quarters still smoldered where those two idiotic peasants had lightsabered it; to pick his way through the hole would risk getting his trousers scorched. Dooku sighed and gestured, and the opalescent wreckage of the door silently slid itself out of his way.

He certainly did not intend to fight two Jedi with his pants on fire.

Anakin slid along the bank of chairs on one side of the immense situation table that dominated the center of the General's Quarters' main room; Obi-Wan mirrored him on the opposite side. Silent lightning flashed and flared: the room's sole illumination came from the huge curving view wall at its far end, a storm of turbolaser blasts and flak bursts and the miniature supernovae that were the deaths of entire ships.

A stark shadow against that backdrop of carnage: the silhouette of one tall chair.

Anakin caught Obi-Wan's eye across the table and nodded toward the dark shape ahead. Obi-Wan replied with the Jedi hand signal for approach with caution, and added the signal for be ready for action.

Anakin's mouth compressed. Like he needed to be told. After all the trouble they'd had with the turbolifts, anything could be up here by now. The place could be full of droidekas, for all they knew.

The lights came back on.

Anakin froze.

The dark figure in the chair-it was Chancellor Palpatine, it was, and there were no droids to be seen, and his heart should have leapt within his chest, but-Palpatine looked bad.

The Chancellor looked beyond old, looked ancient like Yoda was ancient: possessed of incomprehensible age. And exhausted, and in pain. And worse-Anakin saw in the Chancellor's face something he'd never dreamed he'd find there, and it squeezed breath from his lungs and wiped words from his brain.

Palpatine looked frightened.

Anakin didn't know what to say. He couldn't imagine what to say. All he could imagine was what Grievous and Dooku must have done to put fear on the face of this brave good man-And that imagining ignited a sizzle in his blood that drew his face tight and clouded his heart and started again the low roll of thunder in his ears: thunder from Aargonar. From Jabiim.

Thunder from the Tusken camp.

If Obi-Wan was struck by any similar distress, it was invisible. With his customary grave courtesy, the Jedi Master inclined his head. "Chancellor," he said, a calmly respectful greeting as though they had met by chance on the Grand Concourse of the Galactic Senate.

Palpatine's only response was a tight murmur. "Anakin, behind you-!"

Anakin didn't turn. He didn't have to. It wasn't just the clack of boot heels and clank of magnapeds crossing the threshold of the entrance balcony; the Force gathered within him and around him in a sudden clench like the fists of a startled man.

In the Force, he could feel the focus of Palpatine's eyes: the source of the fear that rolled off him in billows like vapor down a block of frozen air. And he could feel the even colder wave of power, colder than the frost on a mynock's mouth, that slid into the room behind him like an ice dagger into his back.

Funny, he thought. After Ventress, somehow I always expect the dark side to be hot. . .

Something unlocked in his chest. The thunder in his ears dissolved into red smoke that coiled at the base of his spine. His lightsaber found his hand, and his lips peeled off his teeth in a smile that a krayt dragon would have recognized.

That trouble he was having with talking went away.

"This," he murmured to Palpatine, and to himself, "is not a problem."

The voice that spoke from the entrance balcony was an elegant basso with undernotes of oily resonance like a kriin-oak cavernhorn.

Count Dooku's voice.

"General Kenobi. Anakin Skywalker. Gentlemen-a term I use in its loosest possible sense-you are my prisoners."

Now Anakin didn't have any troubles at all.

The entrance balcony provided an appropriate angle-far above the Jedi, looking down upon them-for Dooku to make final assessments before beginning the farce.

Like all true farce, the coming denouement would proceed with remorseless logic from its ridiculous premise: that Dooku could ever be overcome by mere Jedi. Any Jedi. What a pity his old friend Mace couldn't have joined them today; he had no doubt the Korun Master would have enjoyed the coming show.

Dooku had always preferred an educated audience.

At least Palpatine was here, shackled within the great chair at the far end of the room, the space battle whirling upon the view wall behind him as though his stark silhouette spread great wings of war. But Palpatine was less audience than he was author.

Not at all the same thing.

Skywalker gave Dooku only his back, but his blade was already out and his tall, lean frame stood frozen with anticipation: so motionless he almost seemed to shiver. Pathetic. It was an insult to call this boy a Jedi at all.

Kenobi, now-he was something else entirely: a classic of his obsolete kind. He simply stood gazing calmly up at Dooku and the super battle droids that flanked him, hands open, utterly relaxed, on his face only an expression of mild interest.

Dooku derived a certain melancholy satisfaction-a pleasurably lonely contemplation of his own unrecognized greatness-from a brief reflection that Skywalker would never understand how much thought and planning, how much work, Lord Sidious had invested in so hastily orchestrating his sham victory. Nor would he ever understand the artistry, the true mastery, that Dooku would wield in his own defeat.

But thus was life. Sacrifices must be made, for the greater good.

There was a war on, after all.

He called upon the Force, gathering it to himself and wrapping himself within it. He breathed it in and held it whirling inside his heart, clenching down upon it until he could feel the spin of the galaxy around him.

Until he became the axis of the Universe. This was the real power of the dark side, the power he had suspected even as a boy, had sought through his long life until Darth Sidious had shown him that it had been his all along. The dark side didn't bring him to the center of the universe. It made him the center.

He drew power into his innermost being until the Force itself existed only to serve his will.

Now the scene below subtly altered, though to the physical eye there was no change. Powered by the dark side, Dooku's perception took the measure of those below him with exhilarating precision.

Kenobi was luminous, a transparent being, a window onto a sunlit meadow of the Force.

Skywalker was a storm cloud, flickering with dangerous lightning, building the rotation that threatens a tornado.

And then there was Palpatine, of course: he was beyond power. He showed nothing of what might be within. Though seen with the eyes of the dark side itself, Palpatine was an event horizon. Beneath his entirely ordinary surface was absolute, perfect nothingness. Darkness beyond darkness.

A black hole of the Force.

And he played his helpless-hostage role perfectly.

"Get help!" The edge of panic in his hoarse half whisper sounded real even to Dooku. "You must get help. Neither of you is any match for a Sith Lord!"

Now Skywalker turned, meeting Dooku's direct gaze for the first time since the abandoned hangar on Geonosis. His reply was clearly intended as much for Dooku as for Palpatine. "Tell that to the one Obi-Wan left in pieces on Naboo."

Hmp. Empty bravado. Maul had been an animal. A skilled animal, but a beast nonetheless.

"Anakin-" In the Force, Dooku could feel Kenobi's disapproval of Skywalker's boasting; and he could also feel Kenobi's effortless self-restraint in focusing on the matter at hand. "This time, we do it together."

Dooku's sharp eye picked up the tightening of Skywalker's droid hand on his lightsaber's grip. "I was about to say exactly that."

Fine, then. Time to move this little comedy along.

Dooku leaned forward, and his cloak of armorweave spread like wings; he lifted gently into the air and descended to the main level in a slow, dignified Force-glide. Touching down at the head of the situation table, he regarded the two Jedi from under a lifted brow.

"Your weapons, please, gentlemen. Let's not make a mess of this in front of the Chancellor."

Obi-Wan lifted his lightsaber into the balanced two-handed guard of Ataro: Qui-Gon's style, and Yoda's. His blade crackled into existence, and the air smelled of lightning. "You won't escape us this time, Dooku."

"Escape you? Please." Dooku allowed his customary mild smile to spread. "Do you think I orchestrated this entire operation with the intent to escape? I could have taken the Chancellor outsystem hours ago. But I have better things to do with my life than to babysit him while I wait for the pair of you to attempt a rescue."

Skywalker brought his lightsaber to a Shien ready: hand of black-gloved durasteel cocked high at his shoulder, blade angling upward and away. "This is a little more than an attempt."

"And a little less than a rescue."

With a flourish, Dooku cast his cloak back from his right shoulder, clearing his sword arm-which he used to gesture idly at the pair of super battle droids still on the entrance balcony above. "Now please, gentlemen. Must I order the droids to open fire? That becomes so untidy, what with blaster bolts bouncing about at random. Little danger to the three of us, of course, but I should certainly hate for any harm to come to the Chancellor."

Kenobi moved toward him with a slow, hypnotic grace, as though he floated on an invisible repulsor plate. "Why do I find that difficult to believe?"

Skywalker mirrored him, swinging wide toward Dooku's flank. "You weren't so particular about bloodshed on Geonosis."

"Ah." Dooku's smile spread even farther. "And how is Senator Amidala?"

"Don't-" The thunderstorm that was Skywalker in the Force boiled with sudden power. "Don't even speak her name."

Dooku waved this aside. The lad's personal issues were too tiresome to pursue; he knew far too much already about Skywalker's messy private life. "I bear Chancellor Palpatine no ill will, foolish boy. He is neither soldier nor spy, whereas you and your friend here are both. It is only an unfortunate accident of history that he has chosen to defend a corrupt Republic against my endeavor to reform it."

"You mean destroy it.""

"The Chancellor is a civilian. You and General Kenobi, on the other hand, are legitimate military targets. It is up to you whether you will accompany me as captives-" A twitch of the Force brought his lightsaber to his hand with invisible speed, its brilliant scarlet blade angled downward at his side. "-or as corpses.''

"Now, there's a coincidence," Kenobi replied dryly as he swung around Dooku to place the Count precisely between Skywalker and himself. "You face the identical choice."

Dooku regarded each of them in turn with impregnable calm. He lifted his blade in the Makashi salute and swept it again to a low guard. "Just because there are two of you, do not presume you have the advantage."

"Oh, we know," Skywalker said. "Because there are two of you."

Dooku barely managed to restrain a jolt of surprise.

"Or maybe I should say, were two of you," the young Jedi went on. "We're on to your partner Sidious; we tracked him all over the galaxy. He's probably in Jedi custody right now."

"Is he?" Dooku relaxed. He was terribly, terribly tempted to wink at Palpatine, but of course that would never do. "How fortunate for you."

Quite simple, in the end, he thought. Isolate Skywalker, slaughter Kenobi. Beyond that, it would be merely a matter of spinning Skywalker up into enough of a frenzy to break through his Jedi restraint and reveal the infinite vista of Sith power.

Lord Sidious would take it from there.

"Surrender." Kenobi's voice deepened into finality. "You will be given no further chance."

Dooku lifted an eyebrow. "Unless one of you happens to be carrying Yoda in his pocket, I hardly think I shall need one."

The Force crackled between them, and the ship pitched and bucked under a new turbolaser barrage, and Dooku decided that the time had come. He flicked a false glance over his shoulder-a hint of distraction to draw the attack-And all three of them moved at once.