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The vulture droids tried to follow … but they were just a hair too big.

When the first two impacted, Obi-Wan triggered his cannons in a downward sweep. The evasion maneuvers preprogrammed into the vulture fighters’ droid brains sent them diving away from Obi-Wan’s lasers—straight into the fireball expanding from the front of the struts.

Obi-Wan looked up to find Anakin soaring straight out from the cruiser with a quick snap-roll of victory. Obi-Wan matched his course—without the flourish.

“I’ll give you the first four,” Anakin said over the comm, “but the other eight are mine.”

“Anakin—”

“All right, we’ll split them.”

As they left the cruiser behind, their sensors showed Squad Seven dead ahead. The clone pilots were fully engaged, looping through a dogfight so tight that their ion trails looked like a glowing ball of string.

“Oddball’s in trouble. I’m going to help him out.”

“Don’t. He’s doing his job. We need to do ours.”

“Master, they’re getting eaten alive over—”

“Every one of them would gladly trade his life for Palpatine’s. Will you trade Palpatine’s life for theirs?”

“No—no, of course not, but—”

“Anakin, I understand: you want to save everyone. You always do. But you can’t.”

Anakin’s voice went tight. “Don’t remind me.”

“Head for the command ship.” Without waiting for a reply, Obi-Wan targeted the command cruiser and shot away at maximum thrust.

The cross of burn-scar beside Anakin’s eye went pale as he turned his starfighter in pursuit. Obi-Wan was right. He almost always was.

You can’t save everyone

His mother’s body, broken and bloody in his arms—

Her battered eyes struggling to open—

The touch of her smashed lips—

I knew you would come to me … I missed you so much …

That’s what it was to be not quite good enough.

It could happen anytime. Anyplace. If he was a few minutes late. If he let his attention drift for a single second. If he was a whisker too weak.

Anyplace. Anytime.

But not here, and not now.

He forced his mother’s face back down below the surface of his consciousness.

Time to get to work.

They flashed through the battle, dodging flak and turbolaser bolts, slipping around cruisers to eclipse themselves from the sensors of droid fighters. They were only a few dozen kilometers from the command cruiser when a pair of tri-fighters whipped across their path, firing on the deflection.

Anakin’s sensor board lit up and R2-D2 shrilled a warning. “Missiles!”

He wasn’t worried for himself: the two on his tail were coming at him in perfect tandem. Missiles lack the sophisticated brains of droid fighters; to keep them from colliding on their inbound vectors, one of them would lock onto his fighter’s left drive, the other onto his right. A quick snap-roll would make those vectors intersect.

Which they did in a silent blossom of flame.

Obi-Wan wasn’t so lucky. The pair of missiles locked onto his sublights weren’t precisely side by side; a snap-roll would be worse than useless. Instead he fired retros and kicked his dorsal jets to halve his velocity and knock him a few meters planetward. The lead missile overshot and spiraled off into the orbital battle.

The trailing missile came close enough to trigger its proximity sensors, and detonated in a spray of glowing shrapnel. Obi-Wan’s starfighter flew through the debris—and the shrapnel tracked him.

Little silver spheres flipped themselves into his path and latched onto the starfighter’s skin, then split and sprouted spidery arrays of jointed arms that pried up hull plates, exposing the starfighter’s internal works to multiple circular whirls of blade like ancient mechanical bone saws.

This was a problem.

“I’m hit.” Obi-Wan sounded more irritated than concerned. “I’m hit.”

“I have visual.” Anakin swung his starfighter into closer pursuit. “Buzz droids. I count five.”

“Get out of here, Anakin. There’s nothing you can do.”

“I’m not leaving you, Master.”

Cascades of sparks fountained into space from the buzz droids’ saws. “Anakin, the