Part 39 (1/2)

”What?”

”Bail, it's the only way. It's the only hope you have of remaining in a position to do anyone any good. Vote for Palpatine. Vote for the Empire. Make Mon Mothma vote for him, too. Be good little Senators. Mind your manners and keep your heads down. And keep doing ... all those things we can't talk about. All those things I can't know. Promise me, Bail.”

”Padme, what you're talking about-what we're not talking about-it could take twenty years! Are you under suspicion? What are you going to do?”

”Don't worry about me,” she said distantly. ”I don't know I'll live that long.”

Within the Separatist leaders.h.i.+p bunker's control center were dozens of combat droids. There were armed and armored guards. There were automated defense systems.

There were screams, and tears, and pleas for mercy. None of them mattered. The Sith had come to Mustafar.

Poggle the Lesser, Archduke of Geonosis, scrambled like an animal through a litter of severed arms and legs and heads, both metal and flesh, whimpering, fluttering his ancient gauzy wings until a bar of lightning flash-burned his own head free of his neck.

Shu Mai, president and CEO of the Commerce Guild, looked up from her knees, hands clasped before her, tears streaming down her shriveled cheeks. ”We were promised a reward,'' she gasped. ”A h-h-handsome reward-”

”I am your reward,” the Sith Lord said. ”You don't find me handsome?”

”Please!” she screeched through her sobbing. ”Pleee-” The blue-white blade cut into and out from her skull, and her corpse swayed. A negligent flip of the wrist slashed through her column of neck rings. Her brain-burned head tumbled to the floor.

The only sound, then, was a panicky stutter of footfalls as Wat Tambor and the two Neimoidians scampered along a hallway toward a nearby conference room.

The Sith Lord was in no hurry to pursue. All the exits from the control center were blast-s.h.i.+elded, and they were sealed, and he had destroyed the controls.

The conference room was, as the expression goes, a dead end.

Thousands of clone troops swarmed the Jedi Temple. Multiple battalions on each level were not just an occupying force, but engaged in the long, painstaking process of preparing dead bodies for positive identification. The Jedi dead were to be tallied against the rolls maintained in the Temple archives; the clone dead would be cross-checked with regimental rosters. All the dead had to be accounted for.

This was turning out to be somewhat more complicated than the clone officers had expected. Though the fighting had ended hours ago, troopers kept turning up missing. Usually small patrolling squads-five troopers or less-that still made random sweeps through the Temple hallways, checking every door and window, every desk and every closet.

Sometimes when those closets were opened, what was found inside was five dead clones.

And there were disturbing reports as well; officers coordinating the sweeps recorded a string of sightings of movement-usually a flash of robe disappearing around a corner, caught in a trooper's peripheral vision-that on investigation seemed to have been only imagination, or hallucination. There were also multiple reports of inexplicable sounds coming from out-of-the-way areas that turned out to be deserted.

Though clone troopers were schooled from even before awakening in their Kaminoan creche-schools to be ruthlessly pragmatic, materialistic, and completely impervious to superst.i.tion, some of them began to suspect that the Temple might be haunted.

In the vast misty gloom of the Room of a Thousand Fountains, one of the clones on the cleanup squad caught a glimpse of someone moving beyond a stand of Hylaian marsh bamboo. ”Halt!” he shouted. ”You there! Don't move!”

The shadowy figure darted off into the gloom, and the clone turned to his squad brothers. ”Come on! Whatever that was, we can't let it get away!”

Clones pelted off into the mist. Behind them, at the spill of bodies they'd been working on, fog and gloom gave birth to a pair of Jedi Masters.

Obi-Wan stepped over white-armored bodies to kneel beside blaster-burned corpses of children. Tears flowed freely down tracks that hadn't had a chance to dry since he'd first entered the Temple. ”Not even the younglings survived. It looks like they made a stand here.”

Yoda's face creased with ancient sadness. ”Or trying to flee they were, with some turning back to slow the pursuit.”

Obi-Wan turned to another body, an older one, a Jedi fully mature and beyond. Grief punched a gasp from his chest. ”Master Yoda-it's the Troll . . .”

Yoda looked over and nodded bleakly. ”Abandon his young students, Cin Drallig would not.”

Obi-Wan sank to his knees beside the fallen Jedi. ”He was my lightsaber instructor . . .”

”And his, was I,” Yoda said. ”Cripple us, grief will, if let it we do.”

”I know. But . . . it's one thing to know a friend is dead, Master Yoda. It's another to find his body . . .”

”Yes.” Yoda moved closer. With his gimer stick, he pointed at a bloodless gash in Drallig's shoulder that had cloven deep into his chest. ”Yes, it is. See this, do you? This wound, no blaster could make.”

An icy void opened in Obi-Wan's heart. It swallowed his pain and his grief, leaving behind a precariously empty calm.

He whispered, ”A lightsaber?”

”Business with the recall beacon, have we still.” Yoda pointed with his stick at figures winding toward them among the trees and pools. ”Returning, the clones are.”

Obi-Wan rose. ”I will learn who did this.”

”Learn?”

Yoda shook his head sadly.

”Know already, you do,” he said, and hobbled off into the gloom.

Darth Vader left nothing living behind when he walked from the main room of the control center.

Casually, carelessly, he strolled along the hallway, scoring the durasteel wall with the tip of his blade, enjoying the sizzle of disintegrating metal as he had savored the smoke of charred alien flesh.

The conference room door was closed. A barrier so paltry would be an insult to the blade; a black-gloved hand made a fist. The door crumpled and fell.

The Sith Lord stepped over it.

The conference room was walled with transparisteel. Beyond, obsidian mountains rained fire upon the land. Rivers of lava embraced the settlement.

Rune Haako, aide and confidential secretary to the viceroy of the Trade Federation, tripped over a chair as he stumbled back. He fell to the floor, shaking like a grub in a frying pan, trying to scrabble beneath the table.

”Stop!” he cried. ”Enough! We surrender, do you understand? You can't just kill us-”

The Sith Lord smiled. ”Can't I?”

”We're unarmed! We surrender! Please-please, you're a Jedi!”

”You fought a war to destroy the Jedi.” Vader stood above the s.h.i.+vering Neimoidian, smiling down upon him, then fed him half a meter of plasma. ”Congratulations on your success.”

The Sith Lord stepped over Haako's corpse to where Wat Tambor clawed uselessly at the transparisteel wall with his armored gauntlets. The head of the Techno Union turned at his approach, cringing, arms lifted to s.h.i.+eld his faceplate from the flames in the dragon's eyes. ”Please, I'll give you anything. Anything you want!”

The blade flashed twice; Tambor's arms fell to the floor, followed by his head. ”Thank you.” Darth Vader turned to the last living leader of the Confederacy of Independent Systems.

Nute Gunray, viceroy of the Trade Federation, stood trembling in an alcove, blood-tinged tears streaming down his green-mottled cheeks. ”The war . . . ,” he whimpered. ”The war is over-Lord Sidious promised-he promised we would be left in peace . . .”