Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2 page)

The slip-jaws maneuver was named for the scissorlike mandibles of the Kashyyyk slash-spider. Droids closing rapidly on their tails, cannonfire stitching space on all sides, the two Jedi pulled their ships through perfectly mirrored rolls that sent them streaking head-on for each other from opposite ends of a vast Republic cruiser.

For merely human pilots, this would be suicide. By the time you can see your partner's starfighter streaking toward you at a respectable fraction of lightspeed, it's already too late for your merely human reflexes to react.

But these particular pilots were far from merely human.

The Force nudged hands on control yokes and the Jedi starfighters twisted and flashed past each other belly-to-belly, close enough to scorch each other's paint. Tri-fighters were the Trade Federation's latest space-superiority droid. But even the electronic reflexes of the tri-fighters' droid brains were too slow for this: one of his pursuers met one of Anakin's head-on. Both vanished in a blossom of flame.

The shock wave of debris and expanding gas rocked Obi-Wan; he fought the control yoke, barely keeping his starfighter out of a tumble that would have smeared him across the cruiser's ventral hull. Before he could straighten out, his threat display chimed again.

"Oh, marvelous," he muttered under his breath. Anakin's surviving 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 is not the word I'd use." Obi-Wan twisted his yoke, juking madly as space around him flared scarlet. "We have to split them up!"

"Break left." Anakin sounded calm as a stone. "The turbolaser tower off your port bow: thread its guns. I'll take things from there."

"Easy for you to say." Obi-Wan whipped sideways along the cruiser's superstructure. Fire from the pursuing tri-fighters blasted 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 the right. One of the tri-fighters behind him decided it couldn't follow and went for a ventral slip that took it directly into the blasts from Anakin's cannons.

It vanished in a boil of superheated gas.

"Good shooting, Artoo." Anakin's dry chuckle in the cockpit's speakers vanished behind the clang of lasers blasting ablative shielding off Obi-Wan's left wing.

"I'm running out of tricks here-"

Clearing the vast Republic cruiser put him on course for the curving hull of one of the Trade Federation's battleships; space between 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-fighter had 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 up and down. It was averaging his movements with Anakin's; somehow its droid brain had realized that as long as it stayed between the two Jedi, Anakin couldn't fire on it without hitting his partner. The tri-fighter was under no similiar restraint: Obi-Wan flew through a storm of scarlet needles.

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

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

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

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

Cannonfire tracked closer. Obi-Wan's cockpit speakers buzzed. "Cut right, Obi-Wan! Hard right! Don't let him get a handle 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 the cruiser's guns tried to pick him up. He rolled a right wingover into the service trench that stretched the length of the cruiser's hull. This low and close to the deck, the cruiser's antifighter guns couldn't depress their angle of fire enough to get a shot, but the tri-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 even Obi-Wan's small craft. He kicked his starfighter into a half roll that whipped him out of the trench and shot him straight up the tower's angled leading edge. One burst of his underjets jerked him 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, where are you?"

One of the control surfaces on his left wing shattered in a burst of plasma. It felt like being shot in the arm. He toggled switches, fighting the yoke. R4-P17 shrilled at him. Obi-Wan keyed internal comm. "Don't try to fix it, Arfour. I've shut it down."

"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 as Anakin's cannons vaporized the last tri-fighter.

Obi-Wan fired retros to stall his starfighter in the blind spot behind the Separatist cruiser's bridge. He hung there for a few seconds 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 devastating warrior who'd rather not fight. A negotiator without peer who frankly 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's none of these things.

Inside, he still feels like a Padawan.

It is a truism of the Jedi Order that a Jedi Knight's education truly 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 as well as feeling; he dreams that his own Master, Qui-Gon Jinn, did not die at the plasma-fueled generator core in Theed. He dreams that his Master's wise guiding hand is still with him. But Qui-Gon's death is an old pain, one with which he long ago came to terms.

A Jedi does not cling to the past.

And Obi-Wan Kenobi knows, too, that to have lived his life without being Master to Anakin Skywalker would have left him a different 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-has unlocked something inside Obi-Wan. It's as though Anakin has rubbed off on him a bit, and has loosened that clenched-jaw insistence on absolute correctness that Qui-Gon always said was his greatest flaw.

Obi-Wan Kenobi has learned to relax.

He smiles now, and sometimes even jokes, and has become known for the wisdom gentle humor can provide. Though he does not know it, his relationship with Anakin has molded him into the great Jedi Qui-Gon always said he might someday be.

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

Being named to the Council came as a complete surprise; even now, he is sometimes astonished by the faith the Jedi Coun-cil has in his abilities, and the credit they give to his wisdom. Greatness was never his ambition. He wants only to perform whatever task he is given to the best of his ability.

He is respected throughout the Jedi Order for his insight as well as his warrior skill. He has become the hero of the next generation of Padawans; he is the Jedi their Masters hold up as a model. He is the being that the Council assigns to their most important missions. He is modest, centered, and always kind.

He is the ultimate Jedi.

And he is proud to be Anakin Skywalker's best friend.

"Artoo, where's that signal?"

From its socket beside the cockpit, R2-D2 whistled and beeped. A translation spidered across Anakin's console readout: SCANNING. LOTS OF ECM SIGNAL JAMMING.

"Keep on it." He glanced at Obi-Wan's starfighter limping through the battle, a hundred meters off his left wing. "I can feel his jitters from all the way over here."

A tootle: A jedi is always calm.

"He won't think it's funny. Neither do I. Less joking, more scanning."

For Anakin Skywalker, starfighter battles were usually as close to fun as he ever came.

This one wasn't.

Not because of the overwhelming odds, or the danger he was in; he didn't care about odds, and he didn't think of himself as being in any particular danger. A few wings of droid fighters didn't much scare a man who'd been a Podracer since he was six, and had won the Boonta Cup at nine. Who was, in fact, the only human to ever finish a Podrace, let alone win one.

In those days he had used the Force without knowing it; he'd thought the Force was something inside him, just a feeling, an instinct, a string of lucky guesses that led him through maneuvers other pilots wouldn't dare attempt. Now, though . . .

Now-Now he could reach into the Force and feel the engagement throughout Coruscant space as though the whole battle were happening inside his head.

His vehicle became his body. The pulses of its engines were the beat of his own heart. Flying, he could forget about his slavery, about his mother, about Geonosis and Jabiim, Aargonar and Muunilinst and all the catastrophes of this brutal war. About everything that had been done to him.

And everything he had done.

He could even put aside, for as long as the battle roared around him, the starfire of his love for the woman who waited for him on the world below. The woman whose breath was his only air, whose heartbeat was his only music, whose face was the only beauty his eyes would ever see.

He could put all this aside because he was a Jedi. Because it was time to do a Jedi's work.

But today was different.

Today wasn't about dodging lasers and blasting droids. Today was about the life of the man who might as well have been his father: a man who could die if the Jedi didn't reach him in time.

Anakin had been late once before.

Obi-Wan's voice came over the cockpit speakers, flat and tight. "Does your droid have anything? Arfour's hopeless. I think that last cannon hit cooked his motivator."

Anakin could see exactly the look on his former Master's face: a mask of calm belied by a jaw so tight that when he spoke his mouth barely moved. "Don't worry, Master. If his beacon's working, Artoo'll find it. Have you thought about how we'll find the Chancellor if-"

"No." Obi-Wan sounded absolutely certain. "There's no need to consider it. Until the possible becomes actual, it is only a distraction. Be mindful of what is, not what might be."

Anakin had to stop himself from reminding Obi-Wan that he wasn't a Padawan anymore. "I should have been here," he said through his teeth. "I told you. I should have been here."

"Anakin, he was defended by Stass Allie and Shaak Ti. If two Masters could not prevent this, do you think you could? Stass Allie is clever and valiant, and Shaak Ti is the most cunning Jedi I've ever met. She's even taught me a few tricks."

Anakin assumed he was supposed to be impressed. "But General Grievous-"

"Master Ti had faced him before, Anakin. After Muunilinst. She is not only subtle and experienced, but very capable indeed. Seats on the Jedi Council aren't handed out as party favors."

"I've noticed." He let it drop. The middle of a space battle was no place to get into this particular sore subject.

If only he'd been here, instead of Shaak Ti and Stass Allie, Council members or not. If he had been here, Chancellor Palpatine would be home and safe already. Instead, Anakin had been stuck running around the Outer Rim for months like some useless Padawan, and all Palpatine had for protectors were Jedi who were clever and subtle.

Clever and subtle. He could whip any ten clever and subtle Jedi with his lightsaber tied behind his back.

But he knew better than to say so.

"Put yourself in the moment, Anakin. Focus."

"Copy that, Master," Anakin said dryly. "Focusing now."

R2-D2 twittered, and Anakin checked his console readout. "We've got him, Master. The cruiser dead ahead. That's Grievous's flagship-Invisible Hand.''

"Anakin, there are dozens of cruisers dead ahead!"

"It's the one crawling with vulture fighters."

The vulture fighters clinging to the long curves of the Trade Federation cruiser indicated by Palpatine's beacon gave it eerily life-like ripples, like some metallic marine predator bristling with Alderaanian walking barnacles.

"Oh. That one." He could practically hear Obi-Wan's stomach dropping. "Oh, this should be easy . . ."

Now some of them stripped themselves from the cruiser, ignited their drives, and came looping toward the two Jedi.

"Easy? No. But it might be fun." Sometimes a little teasing was the only way to get Obi-Wan to loosen up. "Lunch at Dex's says I'll blast two for each of yours. Artoo can keep score."

"Anakin-"

"All right, dinner. And I promise this time I won't let Artoo cheat."

"No games, Anakin. There's too much at stake." There, that was the tone Anakin had been looking for: a slightly scolding, schoolmasterish edge. Obi-Wan was back on form. "Have your droid tight-beam a report to the Temple. And send out a call for any Jedi in starfighters. We'll come at it from all sides."