Part 35 (1/2)
”Rise, Darth Vader.”
The Sith Lord who once had been a Jedi hero called Anakin Skywalker stood, drawing himself up to his full height, but he looked not outward upon his new Master, nor upon the planet-city beyond, nor out into the galaxy that they would soon rule. He instead turned his gaze inward: he unlocked the furnace gate within his heart and stepped forth to regard with new eyes the cold freezing dread of the dead-star dragon that had haunted his life.
I am Darth Vader, he said within himself.
The dragon tried again to whisper of failure, and weakness, and inevitable death, but with one hand the Sith Lord caught it, crushed away its voice; it tried to rise then, to coil and rear and strike, but the Sith Lord laid his other hand upon it and broke its power with a single effortless twist.
I am Darth Vader, he repeated as he ground the dragon's corpse to dust beneath his mental heel, as he watched the dragon's dust and ashes scatter before the blast from his furnace heart, and you-You are nothing at all.
He had become, finally, what they all called him.
The Hero With No Fear.
Gate Master Jurokk sprinted through the empty vaulted hallway, clattering echoes of his footsteps making him sound like a platoon. The main doors of the Temple were slowly swinging inward in answer to the code key punched into the outside lockpad. The Gate Master had seen him on the monitor. Anakin Skywalker. Alone.
The huge doors creaked inward; as soon as they were wide enough for the Gate Master to pa.s.s, he slipped through.
Anakin stood in the night outside, shoulders hunched, head down against the rain.
”Anakin!” he gasped, running up to the young man. ”Anakin, what happened? Where are the Masters?”
Anakin looked at him as though he wasn't sure who the Gate Master was. ”Where is Shaak Ti?”
”In the meditation chambers-we felt something happen in the Force, something awful. She's searching the Force in deep meditation, trying to get some feel for what's going on . . .” His words trailed away. Anakin didn't seem to be listening. ”Something has happened, hasn't it?”
Jurokk looked past him now. The night beyond the Temple was full of clones. Battalions of them. Brigades. Thousands.
”Anakin,” he said slowly, ”what's going on? Something's happened. Something horrible. How bad is it-?”
The last thing Jurokk felt was the emitter of a lightsaber against the soft flesh beneath his jaw; the last thing he heard as blue plasma chewed upward through his head and burst from the top of his skull and burned away his life, was Anakin Skywalker's melancholy reply.
”You have no idea ...”
=18=.
Order Sixty-Six Pau City was a cauldron of battle.
From his observation post just off the landing ramp of the command lander on the tenth level, Clone Commander Cody swept the sinkhole with his electrobinoculars. The droid-control center lay in ruins only a few meters away, but the Separatists had learned the lesson of Naboo; their next-generation combat droids were equipped with sophisticated self-motivators that kicked in automatically when control signals were cut off, delivering a program of standing orders.
Standing Order Number One was, apparently, Kill Everything That Moves.
And they were doing a good job of it, too.
Half the city was rubble, and the rest was a firestorm of droids and clones and Utapaun dragon cavalry, and just when Commander Cody was thinking how he really wished they had a Jedi or two around right now, several metric tons of dragon-mount hurtled from the sky and hit the roof of the command lander hard enough to buckle the deck beneath it.
Not that it did the s.h.i.+p any harm; Jadthu-cla.s.s landers are basically flying bunkers, and this particular one was triple-armored and equipped with internal shock buffers and inertial dampeners powerful enough for a fleet corvette, to protect the sophisticated command-and-control equipment inside.
Cody looked up at the dragonmount, and at its rider. ”General Ken.o.bi,” he said. ”Glad you could join us.”
”Commander Cody,” the Jedi Master said with a nod. He was still scanning the battle around them. ”Did you contact Coruscant with the news of the general's death?”
The clone commander snapped to attention and delivered a crisp salute. ”As ordered, sir. Erm, sir?” Ken.o.bi looked down at him. ”Are you all right, sir? You're a bit of a mess.” The Jedi Master wiped away some of the dust and gore that smeared his face with the sleeve of his robe-which was charred, and only left a blacker smear across his cheek. ”Ah. Well, yes. It has been a ... stressful day.” He waved out at Pau City. ”But we still have a battle to win.”
”Then I suppose you'll be wanting this,” Cody said, holding up the lightsaber his men had recovered from a traffic tunnel. ”I believe you dropped it, sir.”
”Ah. Ah, yes.”
The weapon floated gently up to Ken.o.bi's hand, and when he smiled down at the clone commander again, Cody could swear the Jedi Master was blus.h.i.+ng, just a bit. ”No, ah, need to mention this to, erm, Anakin, is there, Cody?” Cody grinned. ”Is that an order, sir?”
Ken.o.bi shook his head, chuckling tiredly. ”Let's go. You'll have noticed I did manage to leave a few droids for you ...”
”Yes, sir.” A silent buzzing vibration came from a compartment concealed within his armor. Cody frowned. ”Go on ahead, General. We'll be right behind you.”
That concealed compartment held a secure comlink, which was frequency-locked to a channel reserved for the commander in chief.
Ken.o.bi nodded and spoke to his mount, and the great beast overleapt the clone commander on its way down into the battle.
Cody withdrew the comlink from his armor and triggered it.
A holoscan appeared on the palm of his gauntlet: a hooded man.
”It is time,” the holoscan said. ”Execute Order Sixty-Six.”
Cody responded as he had been trained since before he'd even awakened in his creche-school. ”It will be done, my lord.”
The holoscan vanished. Cody stuck the comlink back into its concealed recess and frowned down toward where Ken.o.bi rode his dragonmount into selflessly heroic battle.
Cody was a clone. He would execute the order faithfully, without hesitation or regret. But he was also human enough to mutter glumly, ”Would it have been too much to ask for the order to have come through before I gave him back the b.l.o.o.d.y lightsaber. . . ?”
The order is given once. Its wave-front spreads to clone commanders on Kashyyyk and Felucia, Mygeeto and Tellanroaeg and every battlefront, every military installation, every hospital and rehab center and s.p.a.ceport cantina in the galaxy.
Except for Coruscant.
On Coruscant, Order Sixty-Six is already being executed.
Dawn crept across Galactic City. Fingers of morning brought a rose-colored glow to the wind-smeared upper reach of a vast twisting cone of smoke.
Bail Organa was a man not given to profanity, but when he caught a glimpse of the source of that smoke from the pilot's chair of his speeder, the curse it brought to his lips would have made a Corellian dockhand blush.
He stabbed a code that canceled his speeder's programmed route toward the Senate Office Building, then grabbed the yoke and kicked the craft into a twisting dive that shot him through half a dozen crisscrossing streams of air traffic.
He triggered his speeder's comm. ”Antilles!”
The answer from the captain of his personal crew was instant. ”Yes, my lord?”
”Route an alert to SER,” he ordered. ”The Jedi Temple is on fire!”