Whie swirled his juice around in his glass. “Do you think we’ll…fit, when we get back? I just can’t imagine doing the same classes, talking to the same people as if nothing had happened. Everything feels different to me,” he said, and his voice was troubled.
He has changed, Scout thought. He used to be the boy who knew everything. Now he sounded much less certain, but it made him seem older. He wasn’t a boy pretending to be a Jedi anymore; he was a young man beginning to grapple with the shifting, uncertain, grownup world in which a real Jedi Knight had to live.
Whie glanced over at her. “So—are you still worried about being sent to the Agricultural Corps?”
And to Scout’s surprise, she found she wasn’t. “Nah,” she said comfortably. “I think the Jedi are stuck with me now.”
“I guess we can learn to live with that.” Whie smiled, but his eyes were haunted. “You know,” he added, after a moment of silence, “I chose to leave Château Malreaux. I chose to come back to Coruscant. I was hoping it would feel like home to me—like Vjun did when I first stepped on the planet. But it doesn’t.”
He looked at the planet rapidly swelling in the viewscreen. “It feels as if I’ve come unstuck. I don’t belong on Vjun, I know that: I couldn’t go back there now, no matter how much my mother wanted me to. I’m not Viscount Malreaux, I’m me, Whie, Jedi apprentice. But I don’t feel like I belong on Coruscant, either. Is that a Jedi’s destiny?” he asked Yoda. “To wander everywhere and never be at rest? If so, I accept that. I pledged my life to the Order and I won’t take that back, but I guess…I guess I didn’t know it would be so hard. I guess I didn’t know I could never be at home.”
Yoda refilled Whie’s glass, and sighed. “Never step in the same river twice can you. Each time the river hurries on. Each time he that steps has changed.” He furled his ears, remembering. “On many long journeys have I gone. And waited, too, for others to return from journeys of their own. The Jedi travel to the stars: and wait: and hope, with a candle in the window. Some return; some are broken; some come back so different only their names remain. Some choose the dark side, and are lost until the last journey, the one we all must take together. Sometimes, on the darkest days, feel the pull of that last voyage, I do.” He threw back his glass of juice and glanced at Whie. “The dark side within you is: you know this.”
Whie looked away. “Yes.”
“But other things, inside you there are.” Yoda tapped him gently on the chest. “The Force is inside you. A true Jedi lives in the Force. Touches the Force. It surrounds him: and it reaches up from inside him to touch that which surrounds.” Yoda smiled, and Scout felt his presence, warm and bright in the Force, like a lantern shining in the middle of the cabin. “Not a pile of permacrete, home is,” Yoda said. “Not a palace or a hut, ship or shack. Wherever a Jedi is, there must the Force be, too. Wherever we are, is home.”
Scout raised her glass, and clinked it gravely against the others’: tink, ting. “To coming home,” she said, and they drank together.
Far, far away, on a minor planet in a negligible system deep behind Trade Federation lines, Count Dooku of Serenno walked along the shore of an alien sea, alone. He had established his new headquarters here, and in an hour he would be back in the camp, surrounded by advisers, droids, servants, sycophants, engineers, and officers, all vying for his time, all presenting their schemes and stratagems, sucking like bees on the nectar of his power. Possibly Asajj Ventress, his protégée, would be there, clamoring to be made his apprentice. He had a meeting scheduled with the formidable General Grievous, who was even more powerful than Ventress, but a great deal less interesting as a dinner-table conversationalist. And of course at any time his Master might summon.
What are we?
On the surface of the bay, water heaped and rolled, landing with a white crash to run hissing up the cold sand.
What are we, think you, Dooku?
The sea foamed up around his boots and then withdrew, leaving an empty shell half buried in the sand. Dooku picked it up. He had a sudden vivid memory of doing this back on Serenno when he was still a tiny boy, before the Jedi ever came. He could remember the smell of the sea, the thin salty mud trickling from the shell as he held it to his ear: and in this memory something wonderful had happened, something magical that filled him with delight, only he could not now recall what it had been.
He shook the shell to dry it, and held it up to his ear. An old man’s ear, now: that child he had been had lived long ago. He felt his heartbeat speed up, as if—absurd thought—he might hear something in the shell, something terribly important.
But either the shell was different, or the sea, or something inside him was broken beyond repair. All he heard was the thin hiss of wind and wave, and beneath it all the dull echoing thud of his heart.
In the end, what we are is: alone.
Alone, the shell whispered. Alone, alone, alone.
He crushed the shell in his hand, letting the fragments drift down to the beach. Then he turned and started walking back to camp.
Whie’s mother sat in the big study chair in the broken shell of Château Malreaux, looking at the sunset. The window Dooku had smashed with her body had not been repaired; ragged spikes of glass showed around the edge of the casement like teeth in a howling mouth. The glass had slashed her pink ball gown to ribbons and spattered it with blood. She didn’t care. The Baby was gone.
When she first read her future in the broken glass, she wept. Then the time for tears was past. There was nothing left, now. Nothing to do but sit at the window.
The sun sank. With the coming of night, the wind turned to a rare land breeze, and the ever-present clouds rolled back. The sun touched water: floundered: drowned. Darkness crept over the sky, clear for once. The stars overhead like chips of ice. Her boy out there, somewhere. Never coming back.
Full dark fell, but she did not move to put a light in the window.
Dark now, and colder still. The little Vjun fox whined and nosed around her stiffening legs.
By morning, it, too, was gone.
Light.
Gray at first, touching the spires of the Jedi Temple, the tall peaks of the Chancellor’s residence. A soft light the same color as the sleepy trantor pigeons just sidling from their roosts in the great ferrocrete skyrises of Coruscant. The low, continuous hum of traffic began to swell as the first commuters hurried to their early-morning jobs at bakeries and factories and holocomm stations. Then the rim of the sun peeked up over the horizon. The light turned pale watery gold, splashing across windows. Dew sparkled on parked fliers; their sleek metallic sides took on the day’s first blush of warmth.
Dawn on Coruscant.
A bell rang in the depths of the large suite housing the Senator from Naboo, and a few moments later the second handmaiden of Padmé’s entourage hurried into the main room, still struggling into her dressing gown, to find her mistress standing at the window. “You rang, m’lady?”
“Put on some water for tea and set out a suit of clothes, would you? Something I can wear outside, but it must make me look wonderful,” Senator Padmé Amidala said, and she laughed out loud.
The second handmaiden found herself grinning. “Wonderful it is, m’lady. Can I ask what the occasion is?”
“Look!” A kilometer away, a ship had settled on the landing platforms of the Jedi Temple. Little figures came down her ramps; other little figures ran forward to greet them. Padmé turned. The smile on her face was radiant. “They’re home,” she said.
By Sean Stewart
PASSION PLAY
NOBODY’S SON
RESURRECTION MAN
CLOUDS END
THE NIGHT WATCH
MOCKINGBIRD
GALVESTON
PERFECT CIRCLE
STAR WARS: YODA: DARK RENDEZVOUS
Read on for an excerpt from the exciting prequel to Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith
LABYRINTH OF EVIL
by James Luceno
&nb
sp; Capturing Trade Federation Viceroy—and Separatist Councilmember—Nute Gunray is the mission that brings Jedi Knights Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker, with a squad of clones in tow, to Neimoidia. But the treacherous ally of the Sith proves as slippery as ever, evading his Jedi pursuers even as they narrowly avoid deadly disaster. Still, their daring efforts yield an unexpected prize: a unique holotransceiver that bears intelligence capable of leading the Republic forces to their ultimate quarry, the ever-elusive Darth Sidious.
Swiftly taking up the chase, Anakin and Obi-Wan follow clues from the droid factories of Charros IV to the far-flung worlds of the Outer Rim...every step bringing them closer to pinpointing the location of the Sith Lord—whom they suspect has been manipulating every aspect of the Separatist rebellion. Yet somehow, in the escalating galaxy-wide chess game of strikes, counterstrikes, ambushes, sabotage, and retaliations, Sidious stays constantly one move ahead.
Then the trail takes a shocking turn. For Sidious and his minions have set in motion a ruthlessly orchestrated campaign to divide and overwhelm the Jedi forces—and bring the Republic to its knees.
1
Darkness was encroaching on Cato Neimoidia’s western hemisphere, though exchanges of coherent light high above the beleaguered world ripped looming night to shreds. Well under the fractured sky, in an orchard of manax trees that studded the lower ramparts of Viceroy Gunray’s majestic redoubt, companies of clone troopers and battle droids were slaughtering one another with bloodless precision.
A flashing fan of blue energy lit the undersides of a cluster of trees: the lightsaber of Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Attacked by two sentry droids, Obi-Wan stood his ground, twisting his upraised blade right and left to swat blaster bolts back at his enemies. Caught midsection by their own salvos, both droids came apart, with a scattering of alloy limbs.
Obi-Wan moved again.
Tumbling under the segmented thorax of a Neimoidian harvester beetle, he sprang to his feet and raced forward. Explosive light shunted from the citadel’s deflector shield dappled the loamy ground between the trees, casting long shadows of their buttressed trunks. Oblivious to the chaos occurring in their midst, columns of the five-meter-long harvesters continued their stalwart march toward a mound that supported the fortress. In their cutting jaws or on their upsweeping backs they carried cargoes of pruned foliage. The crushing sounds of their ceaseless gnawing provided an eerie cadence to the rumbling detonations and the hiss and whine of blaster bolts.
From off to Obi-Wan’s left came a sudden click of servos; to his right, a hushed cry of warning.
“Down, Master!”
He dropped into a crouch even before Anakin’s lips formed the final word, lightsaber aimed to the ground to keep from impaling his onrushing former Padawan. A blur of thrumming blue energy sizzled through the humid air, followed by a sharp smell of cauterized circuitry, the tang of ozone. A blaster discharged into soft soil, then the stalked, elongated head of a battle droid struck the ground not a meter from Obi-Wan’s feet, sparking as it bounced and rolled out of sight, repeating: “Roger, roger...Roger, roger...”
In a tuck, Obi-Wan pivoted on his right foot in time to see the droid’s spindly body collapse. The fact that Anakin had saved his life was nothing new, but Anakin’s blade had passed a little too close for comfort. Eyes somewhat wide with surprise, he came to his feet.
“You nearly took my head off.”
Anakin held his blade to one side. In the strobing light of battle his blue eyes shone with wry amusement. “Sorry, Master, but your head was where my lightsaber needed to go.”
Master.
Anakin used the honorific not as learner to teacher, but as Jedi Knight to Jedi Council member. The braid that had defined his earlier status had been ritually severed after his audacious actions at Praesitlyn. His tunic, knee-high boots, and tight-fitting trousers were as black as the night. His face scarred from a contest with Dooku-trained Asajj Ventress. His mechanical right hand sheathed in a tight-fitting glove. He had let his hair grow long the past few months, falling almost to his shoulders now. His face he kept clean-shaven, unlike Obi-Wan’s, whose strong jaw was defined by a short beard.
“I suppose I should be grateful your lightsaber needed to go there, rather than desired to.”
Anakin’s grin blossomed into a full-fledged smile. “Last time I checked we were on the same side, Master.”
“Still, if I’d been a moment slower...”
Anakin booted the battle droid’s blaster aside. “Your fears are only in your mind.”
Obi-Wan scowled. “Without a head I wouldn’t have much mind left, now, would I?” He swept his lightsaber in a flourishing pass, nodding up the alley of manax trees. “After you.”
They resumed their charge, moving with the supernatural speed and grace afforded by the Force, Obi-Wan’s brown cloak swirling behind him. Victims of the initial bombardment, scores of battle droids lay sprawled on the ground. Others dangled like broken marionettes from the branches of the trees into which they had been hurled.
Areas of the leafy canopy were in flames.
Two scorched droids little more than arms and torsos lifted their weapons as the Jedi approached, but Anakin only raised his left hand in a Force push that shoved the droids flat onto their backs.
They jinked right, somersaulting under the wide bodies of two harvester beetles, then hurdling a tangle of barbed underbrush that had managed to anchor itself in the otherwise meticulously tended orchard. They emerged from the tree line at the shore of a broad irrigation canal, fed by a lake that delimited the Neimoidians’ citadel on three sides. In the west a trio of wedge-shaped Acclamator-class assault cruisers hung in scudding clouds. North and east the sky was in turmoil, crosshatched with ion trails, turbolaser beams, hyphens of scarlet light streaming upward from weapons emplacements outside the citadel’s energy shield. Rising from high ground at the end of the peninsula, the tiered fastness was reminiscent of the command towers of the Trade Federation core ships, and indeed had been the inspiration for them.
Somewhere inside, trapped by Republic forces, were the Trade Federation elite.
With his homeworld threatened and the purse worlds of Deko and Koru Neimoidia devastated, Viceroy Gunray would have been wiser to retreat to the Outer Rim, as other members of the Separatist Council were thought to be doing. But rational thinking had never been a Neimoidian strong suit, especially when possessions remained on Cato Neimoidia the viceroy apparently couldn’t live without. Backed by a battle group of Federation warships, he had slipped onto Cato Neimoidia, intent on looting the citadel before it fell. But Republic forces had been lying in wait, eager to capture him alive and bring him to justice—thirteen years late, in the judgment of many.
Cato Neimoidia was as close to Coruscant as Obi-Wan and Anakin had been in almost four standard months, and with the last remaining Separatist strongholds now cleared from the Core and Colonies, they expected to be back in the Outer Rim by week’s end.
Obi-Wan heard movement on the far side of the irrigation canal.
An instant later, four clone troopers crept from the tree line on the opposite bank to take up firing positions amid the water-smoothed rocks that lined the ditch. Far behind them a crashed gunship was burning. Protruding from the canopy, the LAAT’s blunt tail was stenciled with the eight-rayed battle standard of the Galactic Republic.
A gunboat glided into view from downstream, maneuvering to where the Jedi were waiting. Standing in the bow, a clone commander named Cody waved hand signals to the troopers on shore and to others in the gunboat, who immediately fanned out to create a safe perimeter.
Troopers could communicate with one another through the comlinks built into their T-visored helmets, but the Advanced Recon Commando teams had created an elaborate system of gestures meant to thwart enemy attempts at eavesdropping.
A few nimble leaps brought Cody face-to-face with Obi-Wan and Anakin.
“Sirs, I have the latest from airborne command.” r />
“Show us,” Anakin said.
Cody dropped to one knee, his right hand activating a device built into his left wrist gauntlet. A cone of blue light emanated from the device, and a hologram of task force commander Dodonna resolved.
“Generals Kenobi and Skywalker, provincial recon unit reports that Viceroy Gunray and his entourage are making their way to the north side of the redoubt. Our forces have been hammering at the shield from above and from points along the shore, but the shield generator is in a hardened site, and difficult to get at. Gunships are taking heavy fire from turbolaser cannons in the lower ramparts. If your team is still committed to taking Gunray alive, you’re going to have to skirt those defenses and find an alternative way into the palace. At this point we cannot reinforce, repeat, cannot reinforce.”
Obi-Wan looked at Cody when the hologram had faded. “Suggestions, Commander?”
The ARC made an adjustment to the wrist projector, and a 3-D schematic of the redoubt formed in midair. “Assuming that Gunray’s fortress is similar to what we found on Deko and Koru, the underground levels will contain fungus farms and processing and shipment areas. There will be access from the shipping areas into the midlevel grub hatcheries, and from the hatcheries we’ll be able to infiltrate the upper reaches.”
Cody carried a short-stocked DC-15 blaster rifle and wore the white armor and imaging system helmet that had come to symbolize the Grand Army of the Republic—grown, nurtured, and trained on the remote world of Kamino, three years earlier. Just now, though, areas of white showed only where there were no smears of mud or dried blood, no gouges, abrasions, or charred patches. Cody’s position was designated by orange markings on his helmet crest and shoulder guards. His upper right arm bore stripes signifying campaigns in which he had participated: Aagonar, Praesitlyn, Paracelus Minor, Antar 4, Tibrin, Skor II, and dozens of other worlds from Core to Outer Rim.