"Jabba would lose authority if he was seen to be held to ransom by the Republic. That would have been enough to unseat him. But your way is much more emphatic."
Dooku smiled. It was reassuring to think that it looked so seamless from the outside. Yes, it was planned, but the plan had needed constant adjustment every time one component had failed-and it still did.
"I'm glad we're both happy, Lord Ziro."
"But what do I do with this Senator?"
"Ignore her. What else would a Republic Senator claim? Of course she'll accuse the filthy enemy of doing something outrageous. Counterpropaganda, conspiracy theory, call it what you will-governments in wars accuse one another. It would only be worthy of attention if she didn't."
"I can't ignore her."
Ziro was very slow on the uptake sometimes, considering his flashes of subtle gamesmanship, and for a moment Dooku wondered if he was trying to get him to say something incriminating on record. That struck Dooku as amusing, given recent events. He checked the chrono and cast around in the Force for Anakin Skywalker. He had to cut this short. He had Jedi to kill.
"Senators are very accident-prone individuals," Dooku said. "See that she has one, and my contacts will ensure that's how it's recorded. A tragic waste of a young and promising politician. State funeral. You know the drill."
There was a faint scuffle at Ziro's end of the link, and the Hutt turned suddenly as if someone had come into the chamber. One of his sentry droids appeared in the image dragging Senator Amidala.
"No, I meant that I have no option to ignore her," Ziro said. "She shot a sentry droid when he caught her spying on me. So an accident is the only choice now."
Dooku looked at her, and that meant she could see him. This was why he often preferred audio-only comlinks, but the fact that she'd seen him changed nothing.
"Senator," he said, bowing. "How are you? I'm late for another appointment, so you'll have to excuse me."
She looked contemptuous of him. She usually did. "So you're behind this, you poisonous traitor."
"Senator, I wish we could get one thing straight-I'm not a traitor. I was never on your side. I'm called the enemy." He had to leave now. "Lord Ziro, you might want to rethink my accident suggestion. Some of my Separatist allies will pay you a handsome price for her."
Ziro blinked as if he was basking in warm sunlight. "Excellent suggestion, Count Dooku. I can defray the costs of replacing my droid, too."
"Keep the change," said Dooku, and shut the link. He stepped out into the cold desert night, lightsaber ready, and mounted his speeder bike.
* * *
THE DESERT, FIVE KILOMETERS FROM JABBA'S PALACE
Anakin was almost grateful that he could feel Dooku coming. It stopped his thoughts wandering too far.
He sat meditating in the cold night air, a backpack strapped to his shoulders, staring at the three moons without blinking so that they became a blur and quieted his mind. His breathing had slowed; his pulse rate had dropped dramatically. In that state - and he reached it rarely these days-things spoke to him, and he didn't always want to hear them.
There were layers in his awareness. At the top, he searched for Ahsoka moving through the dunes toward Jabba's palace with Rotta, and-he hoped-R2-D2. They should have been almost there by now. He couldn't detect his astromech, however hard he tried, only the disturbances to living organisms that the droid sometimes created. Ahsoka had faded, too, drowned out by the Force impressions in the deeper layers, where Anakin felt Dooku-precise, targeted, controlled, a firaxa shark slicing through an ocean. In the depths, though, there was Tatooine.
It wasn't just memories. It was the accumulated misery, greed, and desperation of ages, generations of beings in poverty and servitude, and his small experience of that was barely visible in the mass. It was the voice that got to him. A wordless voice whispered, asking why he did as he was told and never asked the obvious questions, or demanded answers.
Why didn't you make them come back for her? Why didn't you see she was throwing you to safety, sacrificing herself and sinking back into this terrible ocean so that you could have a chance at life? Why didn't you come back sooner, change the course of events, and rescue her before it was too late?
He never needed to define her. She was his mother. Tonight, she blotted out everything, even thoughts of his wife. The irony of his task-saving a Hutt-teetered on the brink of being a final message, an ultimatum to his sanity.
You must save who you can from now on. You must save those who deserve it.
Dooku got closer. Anakin rose from the depths of the Tatooine that never left him, surfacing through eddies of Dooku and Ahsoka and breaking a surface that was simply ripples made by distant strife on other worlds. He adjusted the straps of the rock-laden backpack.
Dooku must have known that the sound of the speeder bike carried a long way in the desert at night. Anakin wondered why he didn't attempt an ambush. But neither of them needed physical evidence to find one another, and they couldn't hide.
Anakin heard the drive cut out a few meters away. Each footstep crunched in the sand. Finally, Dooku stood before him, robe flapping in the breeze. Something else caused a disturbance in the Force, but Anakin could concentrate only on Dooku now, and ignored it. He stood up, adjusting the pack of rocks on his back, and activated his lightsaber.
"Give me the Huttlet, Skywalker," Dooku said quietly." Or I'll have to kill you."
He'd swallowed the ruse, then. "I think you were going to do that anyway."
"Very well."
The tone of the confrontation was strangely courteous, like an Irmenu noblemen's duel. Dooku threw out his hand and sent Force lightning crackling across the sand toward Anakin, lighting up the night. Anakin evaded the bolts and channeled the lightning to his lightsaber.
"You're making progress," Dooku said. He lunged forward with his lightsaber, forcing Anakin back, then somersaulted over him. "Being here is painful, isn't it? Your home. Too many ghosts to contemplate. Stayed away too long, perhaps..."
Anakin whipped his hand up almost without thinking and sent a Force whirlwind of sand sweeping from the dunes. It spun toward Dooku, enveloping him and almost knocking him to the ground. The Count crouched for a moment as it passed over him, cloak pulled tight around him, and then stood again, lightsaber outstretched.
"Was I being insensitive?" He walked forward. "We all have to face our ghosts, Anakin. I face mine. They never go away, you know. They can be a burden, like that Hutt you're carrying, or a teacher, if you learn to live with them."
Did Dooku know about Shmi Skywalker? He seemed to know everything else, or maybe it was the trick of a fortune-teller, casting generalities to get a client to react and reveal specifics. Whatever it was, Anakin couldn't walk away from it or shut it out. He felt every shred of pain, his and his mother's, and lunged for Dooku with his lightsaber. His attack was blind and ferocious, oblivious of the dead weight on his back, slashing and whirling at the Count until he drove him back to the softer sand where he'd lose his footing.
But Dooku had been a master duelist, even among Jedi, and Anakin forgot that for a pain-blinded moment. Dooku ducked under his frantic sweeps and spun around behind him, slashing through the rigid backpack almost to Anakin's spine. The sudden movement of the rocks packed tightly inside made Anakin pause to get his balance.
"Oh dear," Dooku said mildly. "I seem to have cut Rotta in half."
"You wish." Anakin held out his lightsaber to fend off Dooku while he released the straps and let the backpack fall to the sand. Rocks spilled out.
Dooku raised his eyebrows. "Good grief, not a Hutt at all . . ."
It dawned on Anakin too slowly that Dooku wouldn't have been so easily fooled. This is a game. He's playing for time. Just when Anakin thought he'd passed that elusive finishing line that said adult, experienced, seen it all, he realized he was still twenty, Jedi or not, and the wounded boy in him still rose to the surface-provoked into angry violence, scared of abandonment, and still
in need of approval.
Dooku was playing decoy.
"You're too late, anyway," Anakin said. He had to choose: fight Dooku to the end, or make a run for it and try to get to Ahsoka. He had his eye on the speeder bike. "She'll be at Jabba's palace by now."
"You'll note I didn't ask where she was," Dooku said, taking a holoprojector from his cloak. "And I know you can't comm her. But I can show you some friends she's run into."
Anakin thought it was another trick, but the blue holoimage that sprang into life looked real enough. The angle suggested it was being recorded by something much taller than Ahsoka. She backed away from two MagnaGuard droids, stumbling in the sand, Rotta on her back in the makeshift harness she'd made.
Was this real? Anakin didn't trust anything he saw now.
"Jabba's son is still a casualty of war, alas, but your Padawan is being delivered to Jabba alive." Dooku carved a slow figure - eight in the air with the tip of his lightsaber. "He needs to vent his grief on something, and he won't have you to play with, will he?"
Anakin sprinted for the speeder.
He had it airborne the moment he settled into the saddle. Dooku seemed to give chase, but Anakin lost him in a cloud of sand.
As he raced for Jabba's palace, he had no idea whether this was still part of Dooku's maneuvering. Am I really stronger than him, or did he choose to let me escape? Why did he show me the hologram, to fool me or to demoralize me into dropping my guard in a fight? Why did he...
Anakin stopped thinking. It would only distract him. He'd made his decision; he had to follow through. The only thing he knew was that Dooku had tried to delay him for a reason, and he had to take the risk that the decoy wasn't simply to provoke him into rushing to the palace.
Maybe Ahsoka had run into MagnaGuards after all. Maybe she was already at the palace, reuniting Jabba with his son. The only way to find out was to get there.
* * *
TETH MONASTERY
"What a mess," said Cody. He kicked a scrap of droid casing out of the way as he crunched through the carpet of destruction in the courtyard. "And get your hair cut."
Rex, helmet under one arm, scratched the stubble that had sprouted on his scalp since he'd last had a chance to shave. "Yeah, I'll be tripping over it next."
"We're going to have to start fighting a lot smarter than this. Or we'll run out of men."
"Tell me about it."
"Not the first company we've lost. And it won't be the last."
Rex chose not to take it as Cody's offhand reassurance that it wasn't his fault. He knew it wasn't. "It's the first company I've lost, sir."
"Pays not to think about it too much, Captain."
"I'll try that. Trouble is, if we don't think, we might as well be droids."
Cody didn't press him further. They ambled around the battlefield, at a loss for something practical to occupy them beyond seeing what technology and intelligence had been gleaned from captured droids-or what was left of them-and learning from the mistakes. Kenobi wasn't around. The two clone officers held their own private washup to decide how to do things better next time, knee-deep in enemy dead. It was just as well they were fighting inorganics. Rex imagined the scene with flesh-and-blood casualties on this scale and hoped he never saw it. It was bad enough hauling out his own men and recording the armor tallies of KIAs, although that was a task that had fallen to the 212th, who now picked their way through metal recovering what they could. He'd hoped some of Torrent Company would turn up alive, but that hope hadn't lasted long. He'd kept the last five standing, though. Or they'd kept him standing. He suspected it was the latter.
"Well, next time we don't attempt this without air cover," Rex said. "Crazy. Larties aren't enough. Vee-nineteens, that's what we need."
"It wasn't supposed to be an infantry battle."
"Hostage extraction in a heavily defended and pretty inaccessible position? We should have sent in special forces to prepare the battlefield, then established air superiority and landed airborne troops. Not crawled through the jungle and lost a quarter of our men before we even started. And this needed battalion strength, not a company. It was supposed to be a critical mission, and they should have resourced it accordingly."
"Okay, everyone learns." Cody stood with hands on hips, looking down at the ground. "But don't expect things to improve any time soon."
Rex wasn't sure who to sink his teeth into. Skywalker didn't have any more say in the assets he was given than Rex did. Kenobi probably didn't, either. The problem was higher up the chain; and one thing he'd worked out fast after he left the confines of Kamino, where they learned only the military solutions and how to be the best soldiers, was that politicians didn't think like soldiers, and did stupid things for reasons best known to themselves.
Rex had heard Skywalker mutter occasionally about the Jedi Council and his . . . disagreements. Now he understood. It was down to the Jedi Council to tell the Chancellor to pick his battles carefully.
Rex swallowed his frustration for the time being. He could tell Cody was getting restless by his habit of rocking back slightly on his heels.
"Okay, tinnies really are useless in nonstandard situations and confined spaces," Rex said. "Proven. All they seem to know how to do is stand up and march forward firing. If we do the same, we just run out of men. We need to avoid engaging them on that kind of terrain. Maybe commit fewer ground troops and hit harder from the air. Maybe Kenobi can feed that back up the chain."
"Where's Skywalker?" Cody asked.
"Crash-landed on Tatooine, but the Hutt's still alive, according to General Kenobi's report."
"Mission accomplished, then. It wasn't in vain, Rex."
Rex was going to say that if the access to the Outer Rim routes was matched with a more realistic approach to the number of battles they could fight, then it had achieved something. But he had a feeling that it wouldn't change a thing, but just spread the Grand Army more thinly.
He had faith in Skywalker, because the man was in there with them, in the thick of it, and he understood the stakes. Rex found his faith was like the atmosphere, getting thinner the higher it went.
"I'll go round up my men, then," Rex said, turning to the aid station set up in one of the gunships that had landed on the perimeter. "It won't take long."
TWENTY
We've secured the Hutt location, sir. Senator Amidala's unharmed and she's returning to the Senate with her protocol droid.
We have Lord Ziro in custody. He's claiming he was forced into the kidnapping of jabba's son by Count Dooku. Zero casualties-unless you count droids, of course.
Clone Commander Fox, reporting a successful hostage extraction to GAR HQ
* * *
JABBA'S PALACE, TATOOINE
"Lord Jabba, we've located Skywalker." The captain of the Nikto guard came in at a brisk walk. "He's approaching the palace on a speeder bike. I've positioned snipers on the roof. Permission to use lethal force, my lord?"
Jabba concentrated on not letting grief overwhelm him. Anger was a good temporary antidote, a brief respite of cold focus.
"No, bring him to me alive," he said. "I want him to tell me what he's done with my son's body. After that, I don't want to be too hasty about killing him. I'll spend a few weeks about it, perhaps. And then the Sarlacc will take a few thousand years to digest him. No, I won't spare Skywalker with a quick death."
Jabba had his full entourage assembled. He wanted to crawl into a dark corner and bellow until the agonizing emptiness in his chest stopped, but he had to be seen to be strong and still in control. If he wasn't, the kajidic families, and so Hutt society, would fall into chaos and leave Hutts weak. He needed an audience to witness that even in his darkest moment, he remained in command.
A Nerrian piper played a lament in the background. Rotta's crib lay empty to one side of the dais. Eventually, Jabba heard droid footsteps, and TC-70 walked in carrying a lightsaber.
"Skywalker surrendered his weapon without a fight, my lord," said the
droid. "He asked for his Padawan."
Nikto and human footsteps came down the passage. Skywalker entered almost casually, certainly not a human preparing to die, and looked around as if he expected to see something.
His focus seemed to fall on the empty crib. Then he looked at the piper.
"Lord Jabba, where's my Padawan?" He spoke Huttese with a strong Mos Espan accent. "Where's your son?"
The piper stopped in midrefrain. Jabba didn't dare look away from the Jedi in case his rage now boiled over and left him helpless.
"My son ... is where you left bis body, you murdering Jedi filth."
"Your son is alive, unless Dooku's MagnaGuards killed him along with my Padawan. She was bringing him-she should have been here by now."
Jabba edged forward a little. "If you were any other human idiot, I would take your feeble attempt to deceive me as simple stupidity. But you know us, Skywalker, because you were raised here here, a shag, a common slave, and so you know you insult me in my grief."
Skywalker paused for a moment, blinking, and then reached out his hand. The lightsaber TC-70 was holding flew across the chamber and into the Jedi's grip, and within seconds the Nikto guards had crashed against the wall as if thrown by an invisible hand. Skywalker ignited the weapon and batted away blaster fire before leaping onto the dais and holding the glowing blade to Jabba's throat.
Jabba should have been outraged, but for a moment he felt that it would have been an end to the pain he was in. Then he found habit taking over. He did what he had always done; he sat defiant and unmoved. Hutts couldn't run. They'd made stalwart defense into a tactic instead.
"So Dooku was right," Jabba said. "You killed my son, and now you come to kill me."
Jabba knew the Nikto guards couldn't open fire. They risked hitting him, and Skywalker might kill him simply by deflecting the bolts. Everyone froze.
"No, I didn't come here to assassinate you." Skywalker actually looked into his eyes. Jabba could see that it was a struggle for him. "I came here to negotiate."