Star Wars - [Episode 3] - Revenge of the Sith (by Matthew Stover)

REVENGE

OF THE SITH

Star Wars, Episode III

by Matthew Stover

This story happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.It is already over. Nothing can be done to

change it.

It is a story of love and loss, brotherhood and betrayal, courageand sacrifice and the death of dreams. It

is a story of the blurredline between our best and our worst.

It is the story of the end of an age.

A strange thing about stories—

Though this all happened so long ago and so far away thatwords cannot describe the time or the

distance, it is also happeningright now. Right here.

It is happening as you read these words.

This is how twenty-five millennia come to a close. Corruptionand treachery have crushed a thousand

years of peace. This is notjust the end of a republic; night is falling on civilization itself.

This is the twilight of the Jedi.

The end starts now.

=Introduction=

THE AGE OF HEROES

The skies of Coruscant blaze with war.

The artificial daylight spread by the capital's orbital mirrors is sliced by intersecting flames of ion drives

and punctuated by starburst explosions; contrails of debris raining into the atmospherebecome tangled

ribbons of cloud. The nightside sky is an infinitelattice of shining hairlines that interlock planetoids and

track erratic spirals of glowing gnats. Beings watching from rooftops of Coruscant's endless cityscape

can find it beautiful.

From the inside, it's different.

The gnats are drive-glows of starfighters. The shining hairlines are light-scatter from turbolaser bolts

powerful enough tovaporize a small town. The planetoids are capital ships.

The battle from the inside is a storm of confusion and panic,of galvened particle beams flashing past your

starfighter so closethat your cockpit rings like a broken annunciator, of the boot-sole shock of

concussion missiles that blast into your cruiser, killing beings you have trained with and eaten with and

playedand laughed and bickered with. From the inside, the battle isdesperation and terror and the

stomach-churning certainty thatthe whole galaxy is trying to kill you.

Across the remnants of the Republic, stunned beings watchin horror as the battle unfolds live on the

HoloNet. Everyoneknows the war has been going badly. Everyone knows that moreJedi are killed or

captured every day, that the Grand Army of theRepublic has been pushed out of system after system, but

this—

A strike at the very heart of the Republic?

Aninvasion ofCoruscant itself?

How can thishappen?

It's a nightmare, and no one can wake up.

Live via HoloNet, beings watch the Separatist droid armyflood the government district. The coverage is

filled with imagesof overmatched clone troopers cut down by remorselessly powerful destroyer droids in

the halls of the Galactic Senate itself.

A gasp of relief: the troopers seem to beat back the attack.There are hugs and even some quiet cheers in

living rooms acrossthe galaxy as the Separatist forces retreat to their landers andstreak for orbit—We

won!beings tell each other.We held them off!

But then new reports trickle in—only rumors at first—thatthe attack wasn't an invasion at all. That the

Separatists weren't trying to take the planet. That this was a lightning raid on theSenate itself.

The nightmare gets worse: the Supreme Chancellor is missing.

Palpatine of Naboo, the most admired man in the galaxy,whose unmatched political skills have held the

Republic together. Whose personal integrity and courage prove that the Separatist propaganda of

corruption in the Senate is nothing but lies.Whose charismatic leadership gives the whole Republic the will

to fight on.

Palpatine is more than respected. He is loved.

Even the rumor of his disappearance strikes a dagger to theheart of every friend of the Republic. Every

one of them knows it in her heart, in his gut, in its very bones—Without Palpatine, the Republic will fall.

And now confirmation comes through, and the news isworse than anyone could have imagined. Supreme

ChancellorPalpatine has been captured by the Separatists—and not just theSeparatists.

He's in the hands of General Grievous.

Grievous is not like other leaders of the Separatists. Nute Gunray is treacherous and venal, but he's

Neimoidian: venalityand treachery are expected, and in the Chancellor of the TradeFederation they're

even virtues. Poggle the Lesser is Archduke ofthe weapon masters of Geonosis, where the war began: he

is analytical and pitiless, but also pragmatic. Reasonable. The politicalheart of the Separatist

Confederacy, Count Dooku, is known forhis integrity, his principled stand against what he sees as

corruption in the Senate. Though they believe he's wrong, many respecthim for the courage of his

mistaken convictions.

These are hard beings. Dangerous beings. Ruthless and aggressive.

General Grievous, though—Grievous is amonster.

The Separatist Supreme Commander is an abomination ofnature, a fusion of flesh and droid—and his

droid parts havemore compassion than what remains of his alien flesh. This half-living creature is a

slaughterer of billions. Whole planets haveburned at his command. He is the evil genius of the

Confederacy.The architect of their victories.

The author of their atrocities.

And his durasteel grip has closed upon Palpatine. He confirms the capture personally in a wideband

transmission from his command cruiser in the midst of the orbital battle. Beings across the galaxy watch,

and shudder, and pray that they might wake up from this awful dream.

Because they know that what they're watching, live on theHoloNet, is the death of the Republic.Many

among these beings break into tears; many more reachout to comfort their husbands or wives, their

creche-mates orkin-triads, and their younglings of all descriptions, from children to cubs to spawn-fry.

But here is a strange thing: few of the younglingsneed comfort. It is instead the younglings who offer

comfort to their elders. Across the Republic—in words or pheromones, in magneticpulses,

tentacle-braids, or mental telepathy—the message fromthe younglings is the same:Don't worry. It'll be

all right.

Anakin and Obi-Wan will be there any minute.

They say this as though these names can conjure miracles.

Anakin and Obi-Wan. Kenobi and Skywalker. From the beginning of the Clone Wars, the phrase

Kenobi and Skywalker has become a single word. They are everywhere. HoloNet features oftheir

operations against the Separatist enemy have made themthe most famous Jedi in the galaxy.

Younglings across the galaxy know their names, know everything about them, follow their exploits as

though they are sportsheroes instead of warriors in a desperate battle to save civilization. Even

grown-ups are not immune; it's not uncommon foran exasperated parent to ask, when faced with

offspring whohave just tried to pull off one of the spectacularly dangerousbits of foolishness that are the

stock-in-trade of high-spiritedyounglings everywhere,So which were you supposed to be, Kenobior

Skywalker?

Kenobi would rather talk than fight, but when there is fighting to be done, few can match him. Skywalker

is the master ofaudacity; his intensity, boldness, and sheer jaw-dropping luck arethe perfect complement

to Kenobi's deliberate, balanced steadiness. Together, they are a Jedi hammer that has crushed Sepa

ratist infestations on scores of worlds.

All the younglings watching the battle in Coruscant's skyknow it: when Anakin and Obi-Wan get there,

those dirty Seppers are going to wish they'd stayed in bed today.

The adults know better, of course. That's part of what beinga grown-up is: understanding that heroes are

created by the HoloNet, and that the real-life Kenobi and Skywalker are only human beings, after all.

Even if they really are everything the legends say they are, who's to say they'll show up in time? Who

knows where they are right now? They might be trapped on some Separatist backwater.They might be

captured, or wounded. Even dead.

Some of the adults even whisper to themselves,They mighthave fallen.

Because the stories are out there. Not on the HoloNet, ofcourse—the HoloNet news is under the

control of the Office ofthe Supreme Chancellor, and not even Palpatine's renownedcandor would allow

tales like these to be told—but people hear whispers. Whispers of names that the Jedi would like to

pretendnever existed.

Sora Bulq. Depa Billaba. Jedi who have fallen to the dark.Who have joined the Separatists, or worse:

who have massacred civilians, or even murdered their comrades. The adults have asickening suspicion

that Jedi cannot be trusted. Not anymore. That even the greatest of them can suddenly just... snap.

The adults know that legendary heroes are merely legends,and not heroes at all.

These adults can take no comfort from their younglings. Palpatine is captured. Grievous will escape. The

Republic will fall.No mere human beings can turn this tide. No mere human beings would even try. Not

even Kenobi and Skywalker.

And so it is that these adults across the galaxy watch theHoloNet with ashes where their hearts should

be.

Ashes because they can't see two prismatic bursts of realspacereversion, far out beyond the planet's

gravity well; because theycan't see a pair of starfighters crisply jettison hyperdrive rings andstreak into the

storm of Separatist vulture fighters with all gunsblazing.

A pair of starfighters. Jedi starfighters. Only two.

Two is enough.

Two is enough because the adults are wrong, and theiryounglings are right.

Though this is the end of the age of heroes, it has saved itsbest for last.

=Part One=

VICTORY

The dark is generous.

Its first gift is concealment: our true faces lie in the dark beneath our skins, our true hearts remain

shadowed deeper still. Butthe greatest concealment lies not in protecting our secret truths, but in hiding

from us the truths of others.

The dark protects us from what we dare not know.

Its second gift is comforting illusion: the ease of gentle dreamsin night's embrace, the beauty that

imagination brings to whatwould repel in day's harsh light. But the greatest of its comforts is theillusion

that the dark is temporary: that every night brings a newday. Because it is day that is temporary.

Day is the illusion.

Its third gift is the light itself: as days are defined by the nightsthat divide them, as stars are defined by the

infinite black through which they wheel, the dark embraces the light, and brings it forth from the center of

its own self.

With each victory of the light, it is the dark that wins.

=1=

ANAKIN AND OBI-WAN

Antifighter flak flashed on all sides. Even louder than the clatter of shrapnel and the snarl of his sublight

drives, his cockpithummed and rang with near hits from the turbolaser fire of thecapital ships crowding

space around him. Sometimes his whirlingspinning dive through the cloud of battle skimmed bursts so

closely that the energy-scatter would slam his starfighter hardenough to bounce his head off the supports

of his pilot's chair.

Right now Obi-Wan Kenobi envied the clones: at least theyhad helmets.

"Arfour," he said on internal comm, "can't you do something with the inertials?"

The droid ganged into the socket on his starflghter's leftwing whistled something that sounded

suspiciously like a humanapology. Obi-Wan's frown deepened. R4-P17 had been spending too much

time with Anakin's eccentric astromech; it was picking up R2-D2's bad habits.

New bursts of flak bracketed his path. He reached into theForce, feeling for a safe channel through the

swarms of shrapneland sizzling nets of particle beams.

There wasn't one.

He locked a snarl behind his teeth, twisting his starfighteraround another explosion that could have

peeled its armor like an overripe Ithorian starfruit. He hated this part.Hated it.

Flying's for droids.

His cockpit speakers crackled."There isn't a droid made thatcan outfly you, Master."

He could still be surprised by the new depth of that voice.The calm confidence. The maturity. It seemed

that only last weekAnakin had been a ten-year-old who wouldn't stop pestering himabout Form I

lightsaber combat.

"Sorry," he muttered, kicking into a dive that slipped a turbo-laser burst by no more than a meter. "Was

that out loud?"

"Wouldn't matter if it wasn't. I know what you're thinking."

"Do you?" He looked up through the cockpit canopy to find his onetime Padawan flying inverted,

mirroring him so closely that but for the transparisteel between them, they might haveshaken hands.

Obi-Wan smiled up at him. "Some new gift of theForce?"

"Not the Force, Master. Experience. That's what you'realwaysthinking."

Obi-Wan kept hoping to hear some of Anakin's old cockygrin in his tone, but he never did. Not since

Jabiim. Perhaps notsince Geonosis.

The war had burned it out of him.

Obi-Wan still tried, now and again, to spark a real smile in hisformer Padawan. And Anakin still tried to

answer.

They both still tried to pretend the war hadn't changedthem.

"Ah." Obi-Wan took a hand from the starfighter's controlyoke to direct his upside-down friend's

attention forward. Deadahead, a blue-white point of light splintered into four laser-straight trails of ion

drives. "And what does experience tell youwe should do about those incoming tri-fighters?"

"That we should break—right!"

Obi-Wan was already making that exact move as Anakinspoke. But they were inverted to each other:

breaking right shot him one way while Anakin whipped the other. The tri-fighters' cannons ripped space

between them, tracking faster than theirstarfighters could slip.

His onboard threat display chimed a warning: two of thedroids had remote sensor locks on him. The

others must have litup his partner. "Anakin! Slip-jaws!"

"My thought exactly."

They blew past the tri-fighters, looping in evasive spirals. Thedroid ships wrenched themselves into

pursuit maneuvers thatwould have killed any living pilot.

The slip-jaws maneuver was named for the scissorlikemandibles of the Kashyyyk slash-spider. Droids

closing rapidly ontheir tails, cannonfire stitching space on all sides, the two Jedipulled their ships through

perfectly mirrored rolls that sent themstreaking head-on for each other from opposite ends of a vast Re

public cruiser.

For merely human pilots, this would be suicide. By the timeyou can see your partner's starfighter

streaking toward you at arespectable fraction of lightspeed, it's already too late for yourmerely human

reflexes to react.

But these particular pilots were far from merely human.

The Force nudged hands on control yokes and the Jedistarfighters twisted and flashed past each other

belly-to-belly, close enough to scorch each other's paint. Tri-fighters were theTrade Federation's latest

space-superiority droid. But even theelectronic reflexes of the tri-fighters' droid brains were too slowfor

this: one of his pursuers met one of Anakin's head-on. Bothvanished in a blossom of flame.

The shock wave of debris and expanding gas rocked Obi-Wan; he fought the control yoke, barely

keeping his starfighterout of a tumble that would have smeared him across the cruiser'sventral hull. Before

he could straighten out, his threat displaychimed again.

"Oh, marvelous," he muttered under his breath. Anakin'ssurviving pursuer had switched targets. "Why is

it always me?"

"Perfect."Through the cockpit speakers, Anakin's voice carried grim satisfaction."Both of them are on

your tail."

"Perfect isnot the word I'd use." Obi-Wan twisted his yoke,juking madly as space around him flared

scarlet. "We have to splitthem up!"

"Break left."Anakin sounded calm as a stone."The turbolasertower off your port bow: thread its guns.

I'll take things from there."

"Easy for you to say." Obi-Wan whipped sideways along thecruiser's superstructure. Fire from the

pursuing tri-fightersblasted burning chunks from the cruiser's armor. "Why am I always the bait?"

"I'm right behind you. Artoo, lock on."

Obi-Wan spun his starfighter between the recoiling turbo-cannons close enough that energy-scatter

made his cockpit clang like a gong, but still cannonfire flashed past him from the tri-fighters behind.

"Anakin, they're all over me!"

"Dead ahead. Move right to clear my shot. Now!"

Obi-Wan flared his port jets and the starfighter kicked to theright. One of the tri-fighters behind him

decided it couldn't follow and went for a ventral slip that took it directly into the blastsfrom Anakin's

cannons.

It vanished in a boil of superheated gas.

"Good shooting, Artoo."Anakin's dry chuckle in the cockpit'sspeakers vanished behind the clang of

lasers blasting ablativeshielding off Obi-Wan's left wing.

"I'm running out oftricks here—"

Clearing the vast Republic cruiser put him on course for the curving hull of one of the Trade Federation's

battleships; spacebetween the two capital ships blazed with turbolaser exchanges.

Some of those flashing energy blasts were as big around as his entire ship; the merest graze would blow

him to atoms.

Obi-Wan dived right in.

He had the Force to guide him through, and the tri-fighterhad only its electronic reflexes—but those

electronic reflexes operated at roughly the speed of light. It stayed on his tail as if he were dragging it by a

tow cable.

When Obi-Wan went left and Anakin right, the tri-fighter would swing halfway through the difference.

The same with upand down. It was averaging his movements with Anakin's; somehow its droid brain had

realized that as long as it stayed betweenthe two Jedi, Anakin couldn't fire on it without hitting his partner.

The tri-fighter was under no similiar restraint: Obi-Wan flewthrough a storm of scarlet needles.

"No wonder we're losing the war," he muttered. "They'regettingsmarter."

"What was that, Master? I didn't copy."

Obi-Wan kicked his starfighter into a tight spiral toward theFederation cruiser. "I'm taking the deck!"

"Good idea. I need some room to maneuver."

Cannonfire tracked closer. Obi-Wan's cockpit speakersbuzzed."Cut right, Obi-Wan! Hard right!

Don't let him get ahandle on you! Artoo, lock on!"

Obi-Wan's starfighter streaked along the curve of the Separatist cruiser's dorsal hull. Antifighter flak

burst on all sides as thecruiser's guns tried to pick him up. He rolled a right wingover into the service

trench that stretched the length of the cruiser'shull. This low and close to the deck, the cruiser's antifighter

gunscouldn't depress their angle of fire enough to get a shot, but thetri-fighter stayed right on his tail.

At the far end of the service trench, the massive support buttresses of the cruiser's towering bridge left

no room for evenObi-Wan's small craft. He kicked his starfighter into a half rollthat whipped him out of

the trench and shot him straight up thetower's angled leading edge. One burst of his underjets jerkedhim

past the forward viewports of the bridge with only meters to spare—and the tri-fighter followed his path

exactly.

"Of course," he muttered. "That would have been too easy.Anakin, whereare you?"

One of the control surfaces on his left wing shattered in aburst of plasma. It felt like being shot in the

arm. He toggled switches, fighting the yoke. R4-P17 shrilled at him. Obi-Wankeyed internal comm.

"Don't try to fix it, Arfour. I've shut itdown."

"I have the lock!"Anakin said."Go! Firing —now!"

Obi-Wan hit maximum drag on his intact wing, and his starfighter shot into a barely controlled arc high

and right asAnakin's cannons vaporized the last tri-fighter.

Obi-Wan fired retros to stall his starfighter in the blind spotbehind the Separatist cruiser's bridge. He

hung there for a fewseconds to get his breathing and heart under control. "Thanks,Anakin. That

was—thanks. That's all."

"Don't thank me. It was Artoo's shooting."

"Yes. I suppose, if you like, you can thank your droid for me as well. And, Anakin—?"

"Yes, Master?"

"Next time,you're the bait."

This is Obi-Wan Kenobi:

A phenomenal pilot who doesn't like to fly. A devastatingwarrior who'd rather not fight. A negotiator

without peer whofrankly prefers to sit alone in a quiet cave and meditate.

Jedi Master. General in the Grand Army of the Republic.Member of the Jedi Council. And yet, inside,

he feels like he'snone of these things.

Inside, he still feels like a Padawan.

It is a truism of the Jedi Order that a Jedi Knight's educationtruly begins only when he becomes a

Master: that everything important about being a Master is learned from one's student. Obi-Wan feels the

truth of this every day.

He sometimes dreams of when he was a Padawan in fact aswell as feeling; he dreams that his own

Master, Qui-Gon Jinn, did not die at the plasma-fueled generator core in Theed. Hedreams that his

Master's wise guiding hand is still with him. ButQui-Gon's death is an old pain, one with which he long

agocame to terms.

A Jedi does not cling to the past.

And Obi-Wan Kenobi knows, too, that to have lived his lifewithout being Master to Anakin Skywalker

would have left him adifferent man. A lesser man.

Anakin has taught him so much.

Obi-Wan sees so much of Qui-Gon in Anakin that sometimes it hurts his heart; at the very least, Anakin

mirrors Qui-Gon's flair for the dramatic, and his casual disregard for rules.Training Anakin—and fighting

beside him, all these years—hasunlocked something inside Obi-Wan. It's as though Anakin hasrubbed

off on him a bit, and has loosened that clenched-jaw insistence on absolute correctness that Qui-Gon

always said was hisgreatest flaw.

Obi-Wan Kenobi has learned to relax.

He smiles now, and sometimes even jokes, and has becomeknown for the wisdom gentle humor can

provide. Though hedoes not know it, his relationship with Anakin has molded himinto the great Jedi

Qui-Gon always said he might someday be.

It is characteristic of Obi-Wan that he is entirely unaware ofthis.

Being named to the Council came as a complete surprise;even now, he is sometimes astonished by the

faith the Jedi Council has in his abilities, and the credit they give to his wisdom.Greatness was never his

ambition. He wants only to performwhatever task he is given to the best of his ability.

He is respected throughout the Jedi Order for his insight aswell as his warrior skill. He has become the

hero of the next generation of Padawans; he is the Jedi their Masters hold up as amodel. He is the being

that the Council assigns to their most important missions. He is modest, centered, and always kind.

Star Wars - [Episode 3] - Revenge of the Sith (by Matthew Stover)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: