Revenge of the Sith Page 2

  "What was that, Master? I didn't copy."

  Obi-Wan kicked his starfighter into a tight spiral toward the Federation cruiser. "I'm taking the deck!"

  "Good idea. I need some room to maneuver."

  Cannonfire tracked closer. Obi-Wan's cockpit speakers buzzed. "Cut right, Obi-Wan! Hard right! Don't let him get a handle on you! Artoo, lock on!"

  Obi-Wan's starfighter streaked along the curve of the Separatist cruiser's dorsal hull. Antifighter flak burst on all sides as the cruiser's guns tried to pick him up. He rolled a right wingover into the service trench that stretched the length of the cruiser's hull. This low and close to the deck, the cruiser's antifighter guns couldn't depress their angle of fire enough to get a shot, but the tri-fighter stayed right on his tail.

  At the far end of the service trench, the massive support buttresses of the cruiser's towering bridge left no room for even Obi-Wan's small craft. He kicked his starfighter into a half roll that whipped him out of the trench and shot him straight up the tower's angled leading edge. One burst of his underjets jerked him past the forward viewports of the bridge with only meters to spare—and the tri-fighter followed his path exactly.

  "Of course," he muttered. "That would have been too easy. Anakin, where are you?"

  One of the control surfaces on his left wing shattered in a burst of plasma. It felt like being shot in the arm. He toggled switches, fighting the yoke. R4-P17 shrilled at him. Obi-Wan keyed internal comm. "Don't try to fix it, Arfour. I've shut it down."

  "I have the lock!" Anakin said. "Go! Firing—now!"

  Obi-Wan hit maximum drag on his intact wing, and his starfighter shot into a barely controlled arc high and right as Anakin's cannons vaporized the last tri-fighter.

  Obi-Wan fired retros to stall his starfighter in the blind spot behind the Separatist cruiser's bridge. He hung there for a few seconds to get his breathing and heart under control. "Thanks, Anakin. That was—thanks. That's all."

  "Don't thank me. It was Artoo's shooting."

  "Yes. I suppose, if you like, you can thank your droid for me as well. And, Anakin—?"

  "Yes, Master?"

  "Next time, you're the bait."

  This is Obi-Wan Kenobi:

  A phenomenal pilot who doesn't like to fly. A devastating warrior who'd rather not fight. A negotiator without peer who frankly prefers to sit alone in a quiet cave and meditate.

  Jedi Master. General in the Grand Army of the Republic. Member of the Jedi Council. And yet, inside, he feels like he's none of these things.

  Inside, he still feels like a Padawan.

  It is a truism of the Jedi Order that a Jedi Knight's education truly begins only when he becomes a Master: that everything important about being a Master is learned from one's student. Obi-Wan feels the truth of this every day.

  He sometimes dreams of when he was a Padawan in fact as well as feeling; he dreams that his own Master, Qui-Gon Jinn, did not die at the plasma-fueled generator core in Theed. He dreams that his Master's wise guiding hand is still with him. But Qui-Gon's death is an old pain, one with which he long ago came to terms.

  A Jedi does not cling to the past.

  And Obi-Wan Kenobi knows, too, that to have lived his life without being Master to Anakin Skywalker would have left him a different man. A lesser man.

  Anakin has taught him so much.

  Obi-Wan sees so much of Qui-Gon in Anakin that sometimes it hurts his heart; at the very least, Anakin mirrors Qui-Gon's flair for the dramatic, and his casual disregard for rules. Training Anakin—and fighting beside him, all these years—has unlocked something inside Obi-Wan. It's as though Anakin has rubbed off on him a bit, and has loosened that clenched-jaw insistence on absolute correctness that Qui-Gon always said was his greatest flaw.

  Obi-Wan Kenobi has learned to relax.

  He smiles now, and sometimes even jokes, and has become known for the wisdom gentle humor can provide. Though he does not know it, his relationship with Anakin has molded him into the great Jedi Qui-Gon always said he might someday be.

  It is characteristic of Obi-Wan that he is entirely unaware of this.

  Being named to the Council came as a complete surprise; even now, he is sometimes astonished by the faith the Jedi Council has in his abilities, and the credit they give to his wisdom. Greatness was never his ambition. He wants only to perform whatever task he is given to the best of his ability.

  He is respected throughout the Jedi Order for his insight as well as his warrior skill. He has become the hero of the next generation of Padawans; he is the Jedi their Masters hold up as a model. He is the being that the Council assigns to their most important missions. He is modest, centered, and always kind.

  He is the ultimate Jedi.

  And he is proud to be Anakin Skywalker's best friend.

  "Artoo, where's that signal?"

  From its socket beside the cockpit, R2-D2 whistled and beeped. A translation spidered across Anakin's console readout: SCANNING. LOTS OF ECM SIGNAL JAMMING.

  "Keep on it." He glanced at Obi-Wan's starfighter limping through the battle, a hundred meters off his left wing. "I can feel his jitters from all the way over here."

  A tootle: A jedi is always calm.

  "He won't think it's funny. Neither do I. Less joking, more scanning."

  For Anakin Skywalker, starfighter battles were usually as close to fun as he ever came.

  This one wasn't.

  Not because of the overwhelming odds, or the danger he was in; he didn't care about odds, and he didn't think of himself as being in any particular danger. A few wings of droid fighters didn't much scare a man who'd been a Podracer since he was six, and had won the Boonta Cup at nine. Who was, in fact, the only human to ever finish a Podrace, let alone win one.

  In those days he had used the Force without knowing it; he'd thought the Force was something inside him, just a feeling, an instinct, a string of lucky guesses that led him through maneuvers other pilots wouldn't dare attempt. Now, though...

  Now—Now he could reach into the Force and feel the engagement throughout Coruscant space as though the whole battle were happening inside his head.

  His vehicle became his body. The pulses of its engines were the beat of his own heart. Flying, he could forget about his slavery, about his mother, about Geonosis and Jabiim, Aargonar and Muunilinst and all the catastrophes of this brutal war. About everything that had been done to him.

  And everything he had done.

  He could even put aside, for as long as the battle roared around him, the starfire of his love for the woman who waited for him on the world below. The woman whose breath was his only air, whose heartbeat was his only music, whose face was the only beauty his eyes would ever see.

  He could put all this aside because he was a Jedi. Because it was time to do a Jedi's work.

  But today was different.

  Today wasn't about dodging lasers and blasting droids. Today was about the life of the man who might as well have been his father: a man who could die if the Jedi didn't reach him in time.

  Anakin had been late once before.

  Obi-Wan's voice came over the cockpit speakers, flat and tight. "Does your droid have anything? Arfour's hopeless. I think that last cannon hit cooked his motivator."

  Anakin could see exactly the look on his former Master's face: a mask of calm belied by a jaw so tight that when he spoke his mouth barely moved. "Don't worry, Master. If his beacon's working, Artoo'll find it. Have you thought about how we'll find the Chancellor if—"

  "No." Obi-Wan sounded absolutely certain. "There's no need to consider it. Until the possible becomes actual, it is only a distraction. Be mindful of what is, not what might be."

  Anakin had to stop himself from reminding Obi-Wan that he wasn't a Padawan anymore. "I should have been here," he said through his teeth. "I told you. I should have been here."

  "Anakin, he was defended by Stass Allie and Shaak Ti. If two Masters could not prevent this, do you think you could? Stass
Allie is clever and valiant, and Shaak Ti is the most cunning Jedi I've ever met. She's even taught me a few tricks."

  Anakin assumed he was supposed to be impressed. "But General Grievous—"

  "Master Ti had faced him before, Anakin. After Muunilinst. She is not only subtle and experienced, but very capable indeed. Seats on the Jedi Council aren't handed out as party favors."

  "I've noticed." He let it drop. The middle of a space battle was no place to get into this particular sore subject.

  If only he'd been here, instead of Shaak Ti and Stass Allie, Council members or not. If he had been here, Chancellor Palpatine would be home and safe already. Instead, Anakin had been stuck running around the Outer Rim for months like some useless Padawan, and all Palpatine had for protectors were Jedi who were clever and subtle.

  Clever and subtle. He could whip any ten clever and subtle Jedi with his lightsaber tied behind his back.

  But he knew better than to say so.

  "Put yourself in the moment, Anakin. Focus."

  "Copy that, Master," Anakin said dryly. "Focusing now."

  R2-D2 twittered, and Anakin checked his console readout. "We've got him, Master. The cruiser dead ahead. That's Grievous's flagship—Invisible Hand.''

  "Anakin, there are dozens of cruisers dead ahead!"

  "It's the one crawling with vulture fighters."

  The vulture fighters clinging to the long curves of the Trade Federation cruiser indicated by Palpatine's beacon gave it eerily life-like ripples, like some metallic marine predator bristling with Alderaanian walking barnacles.

  "Oh. That one." He could practically hear Obi-Wan's stomach dropping. "Oh, this should be easy..."

  Now some of them stripped themselves from the cruiser, ignited their drives, and came looping toward the two Jedi.

  "Easy? No. But it might be fun." Sometimes a little teasing was the only way to get Obi-Wan to loosen up. "Lunch at Dex's says I'll blast two for each of yours. Artoo can keep score."

  "Anakin—"

  "All right, dinner. And I promise this time I won't let Artoo cheat."

  "No games, Anakin. There's too much at stake." There, that was the tone Anakin had been looking for: a slightly scolding, schoolmasterish edge. Obi-Wan was back on form. "Have your droid tight-beam a report to the Temple. And send out a call for any Jedi in starfighters. We'll come at it from all sides."

  "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."