Part 13 (1/2)

Then Grievous shrugged, and sighed. What more could he have done? There was a war on, after all.

He was sure Lord Sidious would forgive him.

On the bridge, a blast s.h.i.+eld had closed over the destroyed transparisteel window, and every last surviving combat-model droid had been cut to pieces even before the atmosphere had had a chance to stabilize.

But there was a more serious problem.

The bucking of the s.h.i.+p had become continuous. White-hot sparks outside streamed backward past the view wall windows. Those sparks, according to the three different kinds of alarms that were all screaming through the bridge at once, were what was left of the ablative s.h.i.+elding on the nose of the disabled cruiser.

Anakin stared grimly down at a console readout. ”All the escape pods are gone. Not one left on the whole s.h.i.+p.” He looked cape at Obi-Wan. ”We're trapped.”

Obi-Wan appeared more interested than actually concerned. ”Well. Here's a chance to display your legendary piloting skills, my young friend. You can fly this cruiser, can't you?”

”Flying's no problem. The trick is landing, which, ah . . .” Anakin gave a slightly shaky laugh. ”Which, you know, this cruiser is not exactly designed to do. Even when it's in one piece.”

Obi-Wan looked unimpressed. ”And so?”

Anakin unsnapped the crash webbing that held the pilot's corpse and pulled the body from its chair. ”And so you'd better strap in,” he said, settling into the chair, his fingers sliding over the unfamiliar controls.

The cruiser bounced even harder, and its att.i.tude began to skew as a new klaxon joined the blare of the other alarms. ”That wasn't me!” Anakin jerked his hands away from the board. ”I haven't even done anything yet!”

”It certainly wasn't.” Palpatine's voice was unnaturally calm. ”It seems someone is shooting at us.”

”Wonderful,” Anakin muttered. ”Could this day get any better?”

”Perhaps we can talk with them.” Obi-Wan moved over to the comm station and began working the screen. ”Let them know we've captured the s.h.i.+p.”

”All right, take the comm,” Anakin said. He pointed at the copilot's station. ”Artoo: second chair. Chancellor?”

”Yes?”

”Strap in. Now. We're going in hot.” Anakin grimaced at the sc.r.a.ps of burning hull flas.h.i.+ng past the view wall. ”In more ways than one.”

The vast s.p.a.ce battle that had ripped and battered Coruscant s.p.a.ce all this long, long day, finally began to flicker out.

The s.h.i.+mmering canopy of ion trails and turbolaser bursts was fading into streaks of s.h.i.+ps achieving jump as the Separatist strike force fled in full retreat. The light of Coruscant's distant star splintered through iridescent clouds of gas crystals that were the remains of starfighters, and of pilots. Damaged cruisers limped toward s.p.a.ceyards, pa.s.sing shattered hulks that hung dead in the infinite day that is interplanetary s.p.a.ce. Prize crews took command of surrendered s.h.i.+ps, imprisoning the living among their crews and affixing restraining bolts to the droids.

The dayside surface of the capital planet was shrouded in smoke from a million fires touched off by meteorite impacts of s.h.i.+p fragments; far too many had fallen to be tracked and destroyed by the planet's surface-defense umbrella. The nightside's sheet of artificial lights faded behind the red-white glow from craters of burning steel; each impact left a caldera of unimaginable death. In the skies of Coruscant now, the important vessels were no longer wars.h.i.+ps, but were instead the fire-suppression and rescue craft that crisscrossed the planet.

Now one last fragmentary s.h.i.+p screamed into the atmosphere, coming in too fast, too steep, pieces breaking off to spread apart and stream their own contrails of superheated vapor; banks of turbolasers on the surface-defense towers isolated their signature, and starfighters whipped onto interception courses to thin out whatever fragments the SD towers might miss, and far above, beyond the atmosphere, on the bridge of RSS Integrity, Lieutenant Commander Lorth Needa spoke urgently to a knee-high blue ghost scanned into existence by the phased-array lasers in a holocomm: an alien in Jedi robes, with bulging eyes set in a wrinkled face and long, pointed, oddly flexible ears.

”You have to stand down the surface-defense system, sir! It's General Ken.o.bi!” Needa insisted. ”His code verifies, Skywalker is with him-and they have Chancellor Palpatine!”

”Heard and understood this is,” the Jedi responded calmly.

”Tell me what they require.”

Needa glanced down at the boil of hull plating that was burning off the falling cruiser, and even as he looked, the s.h.i.+p broke in half at the hangar deck; the rear half tumbled, exploding in sections, but whoever was flying the front half must have been one of the greatest pilots Needa had ever even heard of: the front half wobbled and slewed but somehow righted itself using nothing but a bank of thrusters and its atmospheric drag fins.

”First, a flight of fires.h.i.+ps,” Needa said, more calmly now. ”If they don't get the burnoff under control, there won't be enough hull left to make the surface. And a hardened docking platform, the strongest available; they won't be able to set it down. This won't be a landing, it will be a controlled crash. Repeat: a controlled crash.”

”Heard and understood this is,” the hologrammic Jedi repeated. ”Crossload their transponder signature.” When this was done, the Jedi nodded grave approval. ”Thank you, Lieutenant Commander. Valiant service for the Republic you have done today-and the grat.i.tude of the Jedi Order you have earned. Yoda out.”

On the bridge of Integrity, Lorth Needa now could only stand, and watch, hands clasped behind his back. Military discipline kept him expressionless, but pale bands began at his knuckles and spread whiteness nearly to his wrists.

Every bone in his body ached with helplessness. Because he knew: that fragment of a s.h.i.+p was a death trap. No one could land such a hulk, not even Skywalker. Each second that pa.s.sed before its final breakup and burn was a miracle in itself, a testament to the gifts of a pilot who was justly legendary-but when each second is a miracle, how many of them can be strung together in a row?

Lorth Needa was not religious, nor was he a philosopher or metaphysician; he knew of the Force only by reputation, but nonetheless now he found himself asking the Force, in his heart that when the fiery end came for the men in that sc.r.a.p of a s.h.i.+p it might as least come quickly.

His eyes stung. The irony of it burned the back of his throat The Home Fleet had fought brilliantly, and the Jedi had done their superhuman part; against all odds, the Republic had won the day.

Yet this battle had been fought to save Supreme Chancellor Palpatine.

They had won the battle, but now, as Needa stood watching helplessly, he couldn't help feeling that they were about to lose the war.

This is Anakin Skywalker's masterpiece: Many people say he is the best star pilot in the galaxy, but that's merely talk, born of the constant HoloNet references to his unmatched string of kills in starfighter combat. Blowing up vulture droids and tri-fighters is simply a matter of superior reflexes and trust in the Force; he has spent so many hours in the c.o.c.kpit that he wears a Jedi starfighter like clothes. It's his own body, with thrusters for legs and cannons for fists.

What he is doing right now transcends mere flying the way Jedi combat transcends a schoolyard scuffle.

He sits in a blood-spattered, blaster-chopped chair behind a console he's never seen before, a console with controls designed for alien fingers. The s.h.i.+p he's in is not only bucking like a maddened dewback through brutal coils of clear-air turbulence, it's on fire and breaking up like a comet ripping apart as it crashes into a gas giant. He has only seconds to learn how to maneuver an alien craft that not only has no aft control cells, but has no aft at all.

This is, put simply, impossible. It can't be done.

He's going to do it anyway.

Because he is Anakin Skywalker, and he doesn't believe in impossible.

He extends his hands and for one long, long moment he merely strokes controls, feeling their shape under his fingers, listening to the s.h.i.+vers his soft touch brings to each remaining control surface of the disintegrating s.h.i.+p, allowing their resonances to join inside his head until they resolve into harmony like a Ferroan joy-harp virtuoso checking the tuning of his instrument.

And at the same time, he draws power from the Force. He gathers perception, and luck, and sucks into himself the instinctive, preconscious what-will-happen-in-the-next-ten-seconds intuition that has always been the core of his talent. And then he begins.

On the downbeat, atmospheric drag fins deploy; as he tweaks their angles and cycles them in and out to slow the s.h.i.+p's descent without burning them off altogether, their contraba.s.s roar takes on a punctuated rhythm like a heart that skips an occasional beat. The forward att.i.tude thrusters, damaged in the s.h.i.+p-to-s.h.i.+p battle, now fire in random directions, but he can feel where they're raking him and he strokes them in sequence, making their song the theme of his impromptu concerto.

And the true inspiration, the sparkling grace note of genius that brings his masterpiece to life, is the soprano counterpoint: a syncopated sequence of exterior hatches in the outer hull sliding open and closed and open again, subtly altering the aerodynamics of the s.h.i.+p to give it just exactly the amount of sideslip or lift or yaw to bring the huge half cruiser into the approach cone of a pinpoint target an eighth of the planet away.

It is the Force that makes this possible, and more than the Force. Anakin has no interest in serene acceptance of what the Force will bring. Not here. Not now. Not with the lives of Palpatine and Obi-Wan at stake. It's just the opposite: he seizes upon the Force with a stark refusal to fail.

He will land this s.h.i.+p.

He will save his friends.

Between his will and the will of the Force, there is no contest