Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [225]
The Senators turned reluctantly and began to file out. Padmé paused, just for a second, to meet Anakin’s eyes with a gaze as clear as a slap on the mouth.
He stayed expressionless. Because in the end, no matter how much he wanted to, no matter how much it hurt … he couldn’t quite make himself believe he was on her side.
DEATH ON UTAPAU
When constructing an effective Jedi trap—as opposed to the sort that results in nothing more than an embarrassingly brief entry in the Temple archives—there are several design features that one should include for best results.
The first is an irresistible bait. The commanding general of an outlaw nation, personally responsible for billions of deaths across the galaxy, is ideal.
The second is a remote, nearly inaccessible location, one that is easily taken and easily fortified, with a sharply restricted field of action. It should also, ideally, belong to someone else, preferably an enemy; the locations used for Jedi traps never survive the operation unscathed, and many don’t survive it at all. An excellent choice would be an impoverished desert planet in the Outer Rim, with unwarlike natives, whose few cities are built in a cluster of sinkholes on a vast arid plateau. A city in a sinkhole is virtually a giant kill-jar; once a Jedi flies in, all one need do is seal the lid.
Third, since it is always a good idea to remain well out of reach when plotting against a Jedi’s life—on the far side of the galaxy is considered best—one should have a reliable proxy to do the actual murder. The exemplar of a reliable proxy would be, for example, the most prolific living Jedi killer, backed up by a squad of advanced combat droids designed, built, and armed specifically to fight Jedi. Making one’s proxy double as the bait is an impressively elegant stroke, if it can be managed, since it ensures that the Jedi victim will voluntarily place himself in contact with the Jedi killer—and will continue to do so even after he realizes the extent of the trap, out of a combination of devotion to duty and a not-entirely-unjustified arrogance.
The fourth element of an effective Jedi trap is a massively overwhelming force of combat troops who are willing to burn the whole planet, including themselves if necessary, to ensure that the Jedi in question does not escape.
A textbook example of the ideal Jedi trap is the one that waited on Utapau for Obi-Wan Kenobi.
As Obi-Wan sent his starfighter spiraling in toward a landing deck that protruded from the sheer sandstone wall of the biggest of Utapau’s sinkhole-cities, he reviewed what he knew of the planet and its inhabitants.
There wasn’t much.
He knew that despite its outward appearance, Utapau was not a true desert planet; there was water aplenty in an underground ocean that circled its globe. The erosive action of this buried ocean had undermined vast areas of its surface, and frequent groundquakes collapsed them into sinkholes large enough to land a Victory-class Star Destroyer, where civilization could thrive below reach of the relentless scouring hyperwinds on the surface. He knew that the planet had little in the way of high technology, and that their energy economy was based on wind power; the planet’s limited interstellar trade had begun only a few decades before, when offworld water-mining companies had discovered that the waters of the world-ocean were rich in dissolved trace elements. He knew that the inhabitants were near-human, divided into two distinct species, the tall, lordly, slow-moving Utapauns, nicknamed Ancients for their astonishing longevity, and the stubby Utai, called Shorts, both for their stature and for their brief busy lives.
And he knew that Grievous was here.
How he knew, he could not say; so far as he could tell, his conviction had nothing to do with the Force. But within seconds of the Vigilance’s realspace reversion, he was sure. This was it. One way or another, this was the place his hunt for General Grievous would come to a close.
He felt it in his bones: Utapau was a planet for endings.
He was