Part 42 (1/2)
C-3PO cautiously poked his head around the rim of the skiff's hatch.
Though his threat-avoidance subroutines were in full screaming overload, and all he really wanted to be doing was finding some nice dark closet in which to fold himself and power down until this was all over-preferably an armored closet, with a door that locked from the inside, or could be welded shut (he wasn't particular on that point)-he found himself nonetheless creeping down the skiff's landing ramp into what appeared to be a perfectly appalling rain of molten lava and burning cinders . . .
Which was an entirely ridiculous thing for any sensible droid to be doing, but he kept going because he hadn't liked the sound of those conversations at all.
Not one little bit.
He couldn't be entirely certain what the disagreement among the humans was concerned with, but one element had been entirely clear.
She's hurt, Anakin . . . she needs medical attention . . . He shuffled out into the swirling smoke. Burning rocks clattered around him. The Senator was nowhere to be seen, and even if he could find her, he had no idea how he could get her back to her s.h.i.+p-he certainly had not been designed for transporting anything heavier than a tray of c.o.c.ktails; after all, weight-bearing capability was what cargo droids were for-but through the volcano's roar and the gusts of wind, his sonoreceptors picked up a familiar ferooo-wheep peroo, which his autotranslation protocol converted to don't worry, you'll be all right.
”Artoo?” C-3PO called. ”Artoo, are you out here?”
A few steps more and C-3PO could see the little astromech: he'd tangled his manipulator arm in the Senator's clothing and was dragging her across the landing deck. ”Artoo! Stop that this instant! You'll damage her!”
R2-D2's dome swiveled to bring his photoreceptor to bear on the nervous protocol droid. what exactly do you suggest? it whistled.
”Well ... oh, all right. We'll do it together.”
There came a turning point in the clash of the light against the dark.
It did not come from a flash of lightning or slash of energy blade, though there were these in plenty; it did not come from a flying kick or a surgically precise punch, though these were traded, too.
It came as the battle s.h.i.+fted from the holding office to the great Chancellor's Podium; it came as the hydraulic lift beneath the Podium raised it on its tower of durasteel a hundred meters and more, so that it became a laserpoint of battle flaring at the focus of the vast emptiness of the Senate Arena; it came as the Force and the podium's controls ripped delegation pods free of the curving walls and made of them hammers, battering rams, catapult stones cras.h.i.+ng and crus.h.i.+ng against each other in a rolling thunder-roar that echoed the Senate's cheers for the galaxy's new Emperor.
It came when the avatar of light resolved into the lineage of the Jedi; when the lineage of the Jedi refined into one single Jedi.
It came when Yoda found himself alone against the dark.
In that lightning-speared tornado of feet and fists and blades and bas.h.i.+ng machines, his vision finally pierced the darkness that had clouded the Force.
Finally, he saw the truth.
This truth: that he, the avatar of light, Supreme Master of the Jedi Order, the fiercest, most implacable, most devastatingly powerful foe the darkness had ever known... just-didn't-have it.
He'd never had it. He had lost before he started.
He had lost before he was born.
The Sith had changed. The Sith had grown, had adapted, had invested a thousand years' intensive study into every aspect of not only the Force but Jedi lore itself, in preparation for exactly this day. The Sith had remade themselves.
They had become new.
While the Jedi-The Jedi had spent that same millennium training to refight the last war.
The new Sith could not be destroyed with a lightsaber; they could not be burned away by any torch of the Force. The brighter his light, the darker their shadow. How could one win a war against the dark, when war itself had become the dark's own weapon?
He knew, at that instant, that this insight held the hope of the galaxy. But if he fell here, that hope would die with him. Hmmm, Yoda thought. A problem this is . . .
Blade-to-blade, they were identical. After thousands of hours in lightsaber sparring, they knew each other better than brothers, more intimately than lovers; they were complementary halves of a single warrior.
In every exchange, Obi-Wan gave ground. It was his way. And he knew that to strike Anakin down would burn his own heart to ash.
Exchanges flashed. Leaps were sideslipped or met with flying kicks; ankle sweeps skipped over and punches parried. The door of the control center fell in pieces, and then they were inside among the bodies. Consoles exploded in fountains of white-hot sparks as they ripped free of their moorings and hurtled through the air. Dead hands spasmed on triggers and blaster bolts sizzled through impossibly intricate lattices of ricochet.
Obi-Wan barely caught some and flipped them at Anakin: a desperation move. Anything to distract him; anything to slow him down. Easily, contemptuously, Anakin sent them back, and the bolts flared between their blades until their galvening faded and the particles of the packeted beams dispersed into radioactive fog.
”Don't make me destroy you, Obi-Wan.” Anakin's voice had gone deeper than a well and bleak as the obsidian cliffs. ”You're no match for the power of the dark side.”
”I've heard that before,” Obi-Wan said through his teeth, parrying madly, ”but I never thought I'd hear it from vow.”
A roar of the Force blasted Obi-Wan back into a wall, smas.h.i.+ng breath from his lungs, leaving him swaying, half stunned. Anakin stepped over bodies and lifted his blade for the kill.
Obi-Wan had only one trick left, one that wouldn't work twice-But it was a very good trick.
It had, after all, worked rather splendidly on Grievous . . .
He twitched one finger, reaching through the Force to reverse the polarity of the electrodrivers in Anakin's mechanical hand.
Durasteel fingers sprang open, and a lightsaber tumbled free.
Obi-Wan reached. Anakin's lightsaber twisted in the air and flipped into his hand. He poised both blades in a cross before him. ”The flaw of power is arrogance.”
”You hesitate,” Anakin said. ”The flaw of compa.s.sion-”
”It's not compa.s.sion,” Obi-Wan said sadly. ”It's reverence for life. Even yours. It's respect for the man you were.”
He sighed. ”It's regret for the man you should have been.”
Anakin roared and flew at him, using both the Force and his body to crash Obi-Wan back into the wall once more. His hands seized Obi-Wan's wrists with impossible strength, forcing his arms wide. ”I am so sick of your lectures!”
Dark power bore down with his grip.
Obi-Wan felt the bones of his forearms bending, beginning to feather toward the greenstick fractures that would come before the final breaks.
Oh, he thought. Oh, this is bad.
The end came with astonis.h.i.+ng suddenness.
The shadow could feel how much it cost the little green freak to bend back his lightnings into the cage of energy that enclosed them both; the creature had reached the limits of his strength. The shadow released its power for an instant, long enough only to whirl away through the air and alight upon one of the delegation pods as it flew past, and the creature leapt to follow-Half a second too slow.
The shadow unleashed its lightning while the creature was still in the air, and the little green freak took its full power. The shock blasted him backward to crash against the podium, and he fell.
He fell a long way.
The base of the Arena was a hundred meters below, littered with twisted sc.r.a.ps and jags of metal from the pods destroyed in the battle, and as the little green freak fell, finally, above, the victorious shadow became once again only Palpatine: a very old, very tired man, gasping for air as he leaned on the pod's rail.
Old he might have been, but there was nothing wrong with his eyesight; he scanned the wreckage below, and he did not see a body.
He flicked a finger, and in the Chancellor's Podium a dozen meters away, a switch tripped and sirens sounded throughout the enormous building; another surge of the Force sent his pod streaking in a downward spiral to the holding office at the base of the Podium tower. Clone troops were already swarming into it. ”It was Yoda,” he said as he swung out of the pod. ”Another a.s.sa.s.sination attempt. Find him and kill him. If you have to, blow up the building.”