Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [125]
“I will treat it as if it were my crowning achievement,” Dooku had promised.
Hyperspace awaited.
“To Coruscant,” he told FA-4 from his comfortable chair in the sloop’s main hold.
And with that, the ship jumped.
The two starfighters sat side by side in the launching bay, only a few meters separating them, engines warming, droids in their sockets, cockpit canopies raised.
Neither pilot wore a helmet, so Anakin could hear Obi-Wan plainly when he shouted: “For all the jinks and jukes you’ve taken me through, there’s no one else I’d rather fly with.”
Anakin canted his head and smiled. “It’s about time you admitted it. Can I take that to mean you’ll follow my lead without question?”
“To the best of my ability,” Obi-Wan said. “I may not always be able to remain at your wing, but I won’t be far off, and I’ll always have your back.”
“When I call for help, you’ll come speeding to the rescue.”
“The day you call for help, I’ll know that we’re both in over our heads.”
Anakin adopted a serious look. “Obi-Wan, you don’t know how many times you’ve already rescued me.”
Obi-Wan swallowed the lump that formed in his throat. “Then whatever lies ahead for us shouldn’t be a problem.”
Anakin laughed lightly. “Who’ll restore peace to the galaxy if we don’t?”
Obi-Wan returned a tight-lipped nod. “At least you said we.”
They lowered the starfighters’ canopies and engaged the repulsors, lifting off, rotating 180 degrees, and easing through the launching bay’s transparent containment field.
Flying abreast, all but sharing a wing, they enabled their thrusters and banked away from the massive ship. Accelerating on columns of brilliant blue energy, sluing slightly to port, slightly sinister, they coupled with their hyperdrive rings and disappeared into the long night.
[TO BE CONCLUDED]
the author respectfully dedicates this adaptation
To George Lucas
with gratitude for the dreams of a generation,
and of generations to come,
for twenty-eight years, and counting …
thank you, sir.
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, courage and sacrifice and the death of dreams. It is a story of the blurred line 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 that words cannot describe the time or the distance, it is also happening right now. Right here.
It is happening as you read these words.
This is how twenty-five millennia come to a close. Corruption and treachery have crushed a thousand years of peace. This is not just the end of a republic; night is falling on civilization itself.
This is the twilight of the Jedi.
The end starts now.
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 atmosphere become tangled ribbons of cloud. The nightside sky is an infinite lattice 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 to vaporize 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 close that your cockpit rings like a broken annunciator, of the bootsole shock of concussion missiles that blast into your cruiser, killing