R2-D2 swiveled his dome to watch, too, and beeped. He didn’t fancy meeting Jawas in a dark alley, he said. It was the hydrospanners that disturbed him.
“Don’t worry, it’s never going to happen to you, buddy,” Anakin said. “Come on. Keep up.”
All they could do was keep putting one foot in front of the other, and not concentrate on how far they had to go. Ahsoka had made a bonnet of sorts out of a sheet of bulkhead insulation, and draped it over Rotta’s head. Anakin could hear it rustling against the edge of the backpack.
“It’s a shame you can’t see him, Skyguy,” she said. “He really does look cute.”
“If we see a vendor selling Neuvian sundaes, I’ll buy him one . . .”
“So this is home.”
“No.”
“Tell me about it.”
“No.”
“Okay . . .”
“The more you talk, the more you dehydrate.” Anakin wasn’t sure if that was true, but he thought it was good advice for both of them. “The desert’s a killer. It takes everything from you in the end.”
“I understand,” she said quietly.
Yeah, he had a horrible feeling that, even without knowing the details, she probably did.
They kept up steady pace all afternoon, stopping for regular water breaks and to check on Rotta. He gurgled happily. For a slug, he seemed to be coping with the dry heat well. Maybe it was the slime acting as a protective barrier. By the time the twin suns were edging close to the horizon, the temperature had fallen from near-unbearable to a balmy stiflingly hot. In a few hours, though, it might plummet close to freezing. The desert was out to get the unprepared every moment of the day.
Anakin felt a chill now, but it wasn’t the climate. He stopped.
“Feel it?” he asked.
Ahsoka half closed her eyes. “Yes. We’re not alone.”
“It’s the dark side. It’s Dooku. He’s coming for Rotta.”
“He’s not going to get him. Over my dead body.”
“Oh, he’ll oblige, Snips . . . time to split up.”
“Master, I can do this. I don’t need protecting. We should stick together.”
“No, I need you to get Rotta back to his father.” Anakin scrambled up a slope and squatted on the top of the ridge, pointing out features in the desert that were almost invisible in the unending sand. “See that gully between those rocks? It’s part of a network of ancient riverbeds. Take Artoo and follow it. Watch out for Dooku’s droids, too. If he’s borrowed any more hardware from Grievous, they’ll be out searching, and there’s not much cover out here, even at night—they’ve probably got infrared sensors.”
Ahsoka looked at him blankly for a moment as if digesting the enormity of the mission. “But Dooku—”
“I’ll deal with Dooku. He’ll come after me.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You’re best suited to a stealthy approach, and I’m the more experienced at fighting the likes of Dooku. You can’t argue with that logic.”
“No,” she said. “I can’t.”
“But you will.”
“No, Master, I won’t.”
It was getting easier. They’d cracked it now, this Master and Padawan business. Maybe it took a war to shake things down, because he didn’t remember falling into line that fast, and he wasn’t sure he ever had.
“Give me the backpack,” he said. “We need to make a decoy so that I look like I’m still a devoted guardian of Stinky.”
NINETEEN
Why not just let them cede from the Republic? Why do we need to have a war about this? What’s a republic if it’s not about allowing beings to decide who governs them? I don’t get it.
CALLER TO HOLONET NEWS OPINION SHOW
DOOKU’S SHIP, TATOOINE
“YOUR PLAN’S FALLEN apart,” Ziro said. “I’ve got a Senator here begging me to tell Jabba the kidnap is a plot by you to discredit the Jedi.”
Dooku had no time for panickers, especially not when he had to hunt down Skywalker. He stood in front of the hologram in his best you’re-not-backing-out-on-me-now pose.
“My plan, is it? Let’s not forget this was an agreement for mutual advantage.”
“Okay, our plan. It’s still in tatters.”
“Think this through, Lord Ziro. Of course there’ll be those who think the Separatists are behind this. And there’ll be those who think the Republic is. I’m certain that Jabba thinks both sides are equally capable of it and trusts neither, so all he wants is proof of who’s guilty this time. I’ve got it under control. I’ve told Jabba that the Jedi murdered his son, and that they’re on their way to kill him, too.”
Ziro wobbled with exasperation. “Jabba will kill the Jedi on sight!”
Dooku pulled on his gloves. The desert was chilly at night. “Will you lose any sleep over that?”
“No, but . . .”
“If Jabba kills the Jedi, then the Jedi Order, exercising their great moral authority, will be obliged to bring Jabba to justice. Which means you’re left to take control of all the Hutt clans. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
Ziro’s ghostly blue image considered Dooku in silence for a moment, as if the Hutt lord had suddenly realized something. “Ah. So that’s how you intended to do it.”
“Does that not meet your needs?”
“It does, Count Dooku.”
“It meets mine, too. I get a dead Jedi or two out of it, and my armies get sole access to the Outer Rim. Why does the strategy come as a surprise?”
“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 in-organics. 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.”