Revenge of the Sith Page 3

  "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.

  Little silver spheres flipped themselves into his path and latched onto the starfighter's skin, then split and sprouted spidery arrays of jointed arms that pried up hull plates, exposing the starfighter's internal works to multiple circular whirls of blade like ancient mechanical bone saws.

  This was a problem.

  "I'm hit." Obi-Wan sounded more irritated than concerned. "I'm hit."

  "I have visual." Anakin swung his starfighter into closer pur­suit. "Buzz droids. I count five."

  "Get out of here, Anakin. There's nothing you can do."

  "I'm not leaving you, Master."

  Cascades of sparks fountained into space from the buzz droids' saws. "Anakin, the mission! Get to the command ship! Get the Chancellor!."

  "Not without you," Anakin said through his teeth.

  One of the buzz droids crouched beside the cockpit, silvery arms grappling with R4; another worked on the starfighter's nose, while a third skittered toward the ventral hydraulics. The last two of the aggressive little mechs had spidered to Obi-Wan's left wing, working on that damaged control surface.

  "You can't help me." Obi-Wan still maintained his Jedi calm. "They're shutting down the controls."

  "I can fix that..." Anakin brought his starfighter into line only a couple of meters off Obi-Wan's wing. "Steady...," he muttered, "steady...," and triggered a single burst of his right-side cannon that blasted the two buzz droids into gouts of molten metal.

  Along with most of Obi-Wan's left wing.

  Anakin said
, "Whoops."

  The starfighter bucked hard enough to knock Obi-Wan's skull against the transparisteel canopy. A gust of stinging smoke filled the cockpit. Obi-Wan fought the yoke to keep his starfighter out of an uncontrolled tumble. "Anakin, that's not helping."

  "You're right, bad idea. Here, let's try this—move left and swing under—easy..."

  "Anakin, you're too close! Wait—" Obi-Wan stared in disbelief as Anakin's starfighter edged closer and with a dip of its wing physically slammed a buzz droid into a smear of metal. The impact jolted Obi-Wan again, pounded a deep streak of dent into his starfighter's hull, and shattered the forward control surface of Anakin's wing.

  Anakin had forgotten the first principle of combat. Again. As usual.

  "You're going to get us both killed!"

  His atmospheric scrubbers drained smoke from the cockpit, but now the droid on the forward control surface of Obi-Wan's starfighter's right wing had peeled away enough of the hull plates that its jointed saw arms could get deep inside. Sparks flared into space, along with an expanding fountain of gas that instantly crystallized in the hard vacuum. Velocity identical to Obi-Wan's, the shimmering gas hung on his starfighter's nose like a cloud of fog. "Blast," Obi-Wan muttered. "I can't see. My controls are going."

  "You're doing fine. Stay on my wing."

  Easier said than done. "I have to accelerate out of this."

  "I'm with you. Go."

  Obi-Wan eased power to his thrusters, and his starfighter parted the cloud, but new vapor boiled out to replace it as he went. "Is that last one still on my nose? Arfour, can you do anything?"

  The only response he got came from Anakin. "That's a negative on Arfour. Buzz droid got him."

  "It," Obi-Wan corrected automatically. "Wait—they attacked Arfour?"

  "Not just Arfour. One of them jumped over when we hit."

  Blast, Obi-Wan thought. They are getting smarter.

  Through a gap torn in the cloud by the curve of his cockpit, Obi-Wan could see R2-D2 grappling with a buzz droid hand-to-hand. Well: saw-arm-to-saw-arm. Even flying blind and nearly out of control through the middle of a space battle, Obi-Wan could not avoid a second of disbelief at the bewildering variety of auxiliary tools and aftermarket behaviors Anakin had tinkered onto his starfighter's astromech, even beyond the sophisticated upgrades performed by the Royal Engineers of Naboo. The little device was virtually a partner in its own right.

  R2's saw cut through one of the buzz droid's grapplers, sending the jointed arm flipping lazily off into space. Then it did the same to another. Then a panel opened in R2-D2's side and its datajack arm stabbed out and smacked the crippled buzz droid right off Anakin's hull. The buzz droid spun aft until it was caught in the blast wash of Anakin's sublights then blew away faster than even Obi-Wan's eye could follow.

  Obi-Wan reflected that the Separatist droids weren't the only ones that were getting smarter.

  The datajack retracted and a different panel opened, this time in R2-D2's dome. A claw-cable shot from it into the cloud of gas that still billowed from Obi-Wan's right forward wing, and pulled back out dragging a struggling buzz droid. The silver droid twisted and squirmed and its grapplers took hold of the cable, climbing back along it, saw arms waving, until Anakin popped the starfighter's underjets and R2 cut the cable and the buzz droid dropped away, tumbling helplessly through the battle.

  "You know," Obi-Wan said, "I begin to understand why you speak of Artoo as though he's a living creature."

  "Do you?" He could hear Anakin's smile. "Don't you mean, it?"

  "Ah, yes." He frowned. "Yes, of course. It. Erm, thank it for me, will you?"

  "Thank him yourself."

  "Ah—yes. Thanks, Artoo."

  The whistle that came back over the comm had a clear flavor of you're welcome.

  Then the last of the fog finally dispersed, and the sky ahead was full of ship.

  More than one kilometer from end to end, the vast command cruiser filled his visual field. At this range, all he could see were savannas of sand-colored hull studded with turbolaser mountains that lit up space with thunderbolts of disintegrating energy.

  And that immense ship was getting bigger.

  Fast.

  "Anakin! We're going to collide!"

  "That's the plan. Head for the hangar."

  "That's not—"

  "I know: first Jedi principle of—"

  "No. It's not going to work. Not for me."

  "What?"

  "My controls are gone. I can't head for anything.''

  "Oh. Well. All right, no problem."

  "No problem?"

  Then his starfighter clanged as if he'd crashed into a ship-sized gong.

  Obi-Wan jerked and twisted his head around to find the other starfighter just above his tail. Literally just above: Anakin's left lead control surface was barely a hand span from Obi-Wan's sublight thrusters.

  Anakin had hit him. On purpose.

  Then he did it again.

  CLANG

  "What are you doing?"

  "Just giving you..." Anakin's voice came slow, tight with concentration. "... a little help with your steering..."

  Obi-Wan shook his head. This was completely impossible. No other pilot would even attempt it. But for Anakin Skywalker the completely impossible had an eerie way of being merely difficult.

  He reflected that he should be used to it by now.

  While these thoughts chased each other aimlessly through his mind, he had been staring bleakly at a blue shimmer of energy filling the yawning hangar bay ahead. Belatedly, he registered what he was looking at.

  He thought, Oh, this is bad.

  "Anakin—" Obi-Wan began. He tried rerouting control paths through his yoke. No luck.

  Anakin drew up and tipped his forward surfaces down be­hind the sparking scrap that used to be Arfour.

  "Anakin—!"

  "Give me... just a second, Master." Anakin's voice had gone even tighter. A muffled thump, then another. Louder. And a scrape and a squeal of ripping metal. "This isn't quite... as easy as it looks..."

  "Anakin!"

  "What?"

  "The hangar bay—"

  "What about it?"

  "Have you noticed that the shield's still up?"

  "Really?"

  "Really." Not to mention so close that Obi-Wan could prac­tically taste it—

  "Oh. Sorry. I've been busy."

  Obi-Wan closed his eyes.

  Reaching into the Force, his mind followed the starfighter's mangled circuitry to locate and activate the sublight engines' manual test board. With a slight push, he triggered a command normally used only in bench tests: full reverse.

  The cometary tail of glowing debris shed by his disintegrating starfighter shot past him and evaporated in a cascade of miniature starbursts on contact with the hangar shield. Which was exactly what was about to happen to him.

  The only effect of full reverse from his failing engines was to give him more time to see it coming.

  Then Anakin's starfighter swooped in front of him, crossing left to right at a steep deflection. Energy flared from his cannons, and the shield emitters at the right side of the hangar door exploded into scrap. The blue shimmer of the bay shield flickered, faded, and vanished just as Obi-Wan came spinning across the threshold and slammed along the deck, trailing sparks and a scream of tortured metal.

  His entire starfighter—what was left of it—vibrated with the roar of atmosphere howling out from the unshielded bay. Massive blast doors ground together like jaws. Another Force-touch on the manual test board cut power to his engines, but he couldn't trigger the explosive bolts on his cockpit canopy, and he had a bad feeling that those canopy bolts were the only thing on his craft that weren't about to explode.

  His lightsaber found his hand and blue energy flared. One swipe and the canopy burst away, ripped into space by the hurricane of escaping air. Obi-Wan flipped himself up into the stunningly cold gale and let it blow him tumbling away as the remnants o
f his battered craft finally exploded.

  He rode the shock wave while he let the Force right him in the air. He landed catfooted on the blackened streak—still hot enough to scorch his boots—that his landing had gouged into the deck.

  The hangar was full of battle droids.

  His shoulders dropped and his knees bent and his lightsaber came up to angle in front of his face. There were far too many for him to fight alone, but he didn't mind.

  At least he was out of that blasted starfighter.

  Anakin slipped his craft toward the hangar through a fountain of junk and flash-frozen gas. One last touch of the yoke twisted his starfighter through the closing teeth of the blast doors just as Obi-Wan's canopy went the other way.

  Obi-Wan's ship was a hunk of glowing scrap punctuating a long smoking skid mark. Obi-Wan himself, beard rimed with frost, lightsaber out and flaming, stood in a tightening ring of battle droids.

  Anakin slewed his starfighter into a landing that scattered droids with the particle blast from his sublight thrusters and for one second he was nine years old again, behind the controls of a starfighter in the Theed royal hangar, his first touch of a real ship's real cannons blasting battle droids—He'd have done the same right here, except that Palpatine was somewhere on this ship. They just might need one of the light shuttles in this hangar to get the Chancellor safely to the surface; a few dozen cannon blasts bouncing around in here could wreck them all.

  This he'd have to do by hand.

  One touch blew his canopy and he sprang from the cockpit, flipping upward to stand on the wing. Battle droids opened fire instantly, and Anakin's lightsaber flashed. "Artoo, locate a computer link."

  The little droid whistled at him, and Anakin allowed himself a tight smile. Sometimes he thought he could almost understand the droid's electrosonic code. "Don't worry about us. Find Palpatine. Go on, I'll cover you."

  R2 popped out of its socket and bounced to the deck. Anakin jumped ahead of it into a cascade of blasterfire and let the Force direct his blade. Battle droids began to spark and collapse.

  "Get to that link!" Anakin had to shout above the whine of blasters and the roar of exploding droids. "I'm going for Obi-Wan!"

  "No need."

  Anakin whirled to find Obi-Wan right behind him in the act of slicing neatly through the braincase of a battle droid.