Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [141]
“It is already being done, my lord. Does my lord wish to observe the progress of the Jedi? I can feed the security monitors onto this channel.”
“Thank you, General. That will be welcome.”
“Gracious as ever, my lord. Grievous out.”
Count Dooku allowed himself a near-invisible smile. His inviolable courtesy—the hallmark of a true aristocrat—was effortless, yet somehow it seemed always to impress the common rabble. As well as those with the intellect of common rabble, regardless of accomplishment or station: like, for example, that repulsive cyborg Grievous.
He sighed. Grievous had his uses; not only was he an able field commander, but he would soon make a marvelous scapegoat upon whom to hang every atrocity of this sadly necessary war. Someone had to take that particular fall, and Grievous was just the creature for the job. It certainly would not be Dooku.
This was, in fact, one purpose of the cataclysmic battle outside.
But not the only one.
The blue-scanned image before him now became miniatures of Kenobi and Skywalker as he had seen them so many times before: shoulder-to-shoulder, lightsabers whirling as they enthusiastically dismantled droid after droid after droid. Feeling as if they were winning, while in truth they were being chivvied exactly where the Lords of the Sith wanted them to go.
Such children they were. Dooku shook his head.
It was almost too easy.
This is Dooku, Darth Tyranus, Count of Serenno:
Once a great Jedi Master, now an even greater Lord of the Sith, Dooku is a dark colossus bestriding the galaxy. Nemesis of the corrupt Republic, oriflamme of the principled Confederacy of Independent Systems, he is the very personification of shock and awe.
He was one of the most respected and powerful Jedi in the Order’s twenty-five-thousand-year history, yet at the age of seventy Dooku’s principles would no longer allow him to serve a Republic in which political power was for sale to the highest bidder. He’d said farewell to his close friends on the Jedi Council, Mace Windu and the ancient Master Yoda; he’d said farewell to the Jedi Order itself.
He is numbered among the Lost: the Jedi who renounced their fealty to the Order and resigned their commissions of Jedi Knighthood in service of ideals higher than even the Order itself professed. The Lost Twenty, as they have been known since Dooku joined their number, are remembered with both honor and regret among the Jedi; their images, sculpted from bronzium, stand enshrined in the Temple archives.
These bronzium images serve as melancholy reminders that some Jedi have needs the Order cannot satisfy.
Dooku had retired to his family estate, the planetary system of Serenno. Assuming his hereditary title as its Count made him one of the wealthiest beings in the galaxy. Amid the unabashed corruption endemic to the Republic, his immense wealth could have bought the allegiance of any given number of Senators; he could, perhaps, have bought control of the Republic itself.
But a man of such heritage, such principle, could never stoop to be lord of a garbage heap, chief of a horde of scavengers squabbling over scraps; the Republic, to him, was nothing more than this.
Instead, he used all the great power of his family fortune—and the vastly greater power of his unquestioned integrity—to begin the cleansing of the galaxy from the fester of this so-called democracy.
He is the icon of the Separatist movement, its public face. He is to the Confederacy of Independent Systems what Palpatine is to the Republic: the living symbol of the justice of its cause.
This is the public story.
This is the story that even Dooku, in his weaker moments,