Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [250]
“… hurt …”
He pitched forward onto his face, and lay still.
Palpatine stood at the doorway, but the door stayed shut. From his right hand extended a blade the color of fire.
The door locked itself at his back.
“Help! Help!” Palpatine cried like a man in desperate fear for his life. “Security—someone! Help me! Murder! Treason!”
Then he smiled.
He held one finger to his lips, and, astonishingly, he winked.
In the blank second that followed, while Mace Windu and Kit Fisto could do no more than angle their lightsabers to guard, Palpatine swiftly stepped over the bodies back toward his desk, reversed his blade, and drove it in a swift, surgically precise stab down through his desktop.
“That’s enough of that.”
He let it burn its way free through the front, then he turned, lifting his weapon, appearing to study it as one might study the face of a beloved friend one has long thought dead. Power gathered around him until the Force shimmered with darkness.
“If you only knew,” he said softly, perhaps speaking to the Jedi Masters, or perhaps to himself, or perhaps even to the scarlet blade lifted now as though in mocking salute, “how long I have been waiting for this …”
Anakin’s speeder shrieked through the rain, dodging forked bolts of lightning that shot up from towers into the clouds, slicing across traffic lanes, screaming past spacescrapers so fast that his shock-wake cracked windows as he passed.
He didn’t understand why people didn’t just get out of his way. He didn’t understand how the trillion beings who jammed Galactic City could go about their trivial business as though the universe hadn’t changed. How could they think they counted for anything, compared with him?
How could they think they still mattered?
Their blind lives meant nothing now. None of them. Because ahead, on the vast cliff face of the Senate Office Building, one window spat lightning into the rain to echo the lightning of the storm outside—but this lightning was the color of clashing lightsabers.
Green fans, sheets of purple—
And crimson flame.
He was too late.
The green fire faded and winked out; now the lightning was only purple and red.
His repulsorlifts howled as he heeled the speeder up onto its side, skidding through wind-shear turbulence to bring it to a bobbing halt outside the window of Palpatine’s private office. A blast of lightning hit the spire of 500 Republica, only a kilometer away, and its white burst flared off the window, flash-blinding him; he blinked furiously, slapping at his eyes in frustration.
The colorless glare inside his eyes faded slowly, bringing into focus a jumble of bodies on the floor of Palpatine’s private office.
Bodies in Jedi robes.
On Palpatine’s desk lay the head of Kit Fisto, faceup, scalp-tentacles unbound in a squid-tangle across the ebonite. His lidless eyes stared blindly at the ceiling. Anakin remembered him in the arena at Geonosis, effortlessly carving his way through wave after wave of combat droids, on his lips a gently humorous smile as though the horrific battle were only some friendly jest. His severed head wore that same smile.
Maybe he thought death was funny, too.
Anakin’s own blade sang blue as it slashed through the window and he dived through the gap. He rolled to his feet among a litter of bodies and sprinted through a shattered door along the small private corridor and through a doorway that flashed and flared with energy-scatter.
Anakin skidded to a stop.
Within the public office of the Supreme Chancellor of the Galactic Republic, a last Jedi Master battled alone, blade-to-blade, against a living shadow.
Sinking into Vaapad, Mace Windu fought for his life.
More than his life: each whirl of blade and whipcrack of lightning was a strike in defense of democracy, of justice and peace, of the rights of ordinary beings to live their own lives in their own ways.
He was fighting for the Republic that he loved.
Vaapad, the seventh