• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

And that—that there—that looked like it could have been a body …

Draped in a cape of armorweave.

Grievous turned back toward the intership holocomm. “The Chancellor is—indisposed.”

“Ah. I see.”

Grievous suspected that the young officer saw entirely too well. “I assure you—”

“I do not require your assurance, General. You have the same amount of time you offered us. Ten minutes from now, I will have either your surrender, or confirmation that Supreme Chancellor Palpatine is alive, unharmed—and present—or Invisible Hand will be destroyed.”

“Wait—you can’t simply—”

“Ten minutes, General. Needa out.”

When Grievous turned to the bridge security officer, his mask was blankly expressionless as ever, but he made up for it with the open murder in his voice.

“Dooku is dead and the Jedi are loose. They have the Chancellor. Find them and bring them to me.”

His armorplast fingers curled into a fist that crashed down on the security console so hard the entire thing collapsed into a sparking, smoking ruin.

“Find them!”

RESCUE

Anakin counted paces as he trotted along the turbolift shaft, Obi-Wan over his shoulder and Palpatine at his side. He’d reached 102—only a third of the way along the conning spire—when he felt the gravity begin to shift.

Exactly the wrong way: changing the rest of the long, long shaft from ahead to down.

He put out his free arm to stop the Chancellor. “This is a problem. Find something to hang on to while I get us out of here.”

One of the turbolift doors was nearby, seemingly lying on its side. Anakin’s lightsaber found his hand and its sizzling blade burned open the door controls, but before he could even move aside the sparking wires, the gravitic vector lurched toward vertical and he fell, skidding along the wall, free hand grabbing desperately at a loop of cable, catching it, hanging from it—

And the turbolift doors opened.

Inviting. Safe. And mockingly out of reach: a meter above his outstretched arm—

And his other arm was the only thing holding Obi-Wan above a two-hundred-meter drop down which his lightsaber’s handgrip now clanked and clattered, fading toward infinity. For half a second Anakin was actually glad Obi-Wan was unconscious, because he wasn’t in the mood for another lecture about hanging on to his lightsaber right now, and that thought blew away and vanished because something had grabbed on to his leg—

He looked down.

It was Palpatine.

The Chancellor hugged Anakin’s ankle with improbable strength, peering fearfully into the darkness below. “Anakin, do something! You have to do something!”

I’m open to suggestions, he thought, but he said, “Don’t panic. Just hang on.”

“I don’t think I can …” The Chancellor turned his anguished face upward imploringly. “Anakin, I’m slipping. Give me your hand—you have to give me your hand!”

And drop Obi-Wan? Not in this millennium.

“Don’t panic,” Anakin repeated. The Chancellor had clearly lost his head. “I can get us out of this.”

He wished he were as confident as he sounded. He had been counting on the artificial gravity to continue to swing until the shaft turned back into a hallway, but instead it seemed to have stopped where it was.

This would be an especially lousy time for the generators to start working right.

He fixed a measuring glance on the open lift doorway above; perhaps the Force could give him enough of a boost to carry all three of them to safety.

But that was an exceedingly large perhaps.

Obi-Wan, old buddy old pal, he thought, this would be a really good time to wake up.

Obi-Wan Kenobi opened his eyes to find himself staring at what he strongly suspected was Anakin’s butt.

It looked like Anakin’s butt—well, his pants, anyway—though it was thoroughly impossible for Obi-Wan to be certain, since he had never before had occasion to examine Anakin’s butt upside down, which it currently appeared to be, nor from this rather uncomfortably close range.

And how he might have arrived at this angle and this range was entirely baffling.

He said, “Um, have I missed