Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [263]
Obi-Wan suspected it actually meant what had happened on Utapau was far from an isolated incident.
He keyed the comlink for audio. He took a deep breath.
“Emergency Code Nine Thirteen,” he said, and waited.
The starfighter’s comm system cycled through every response frequency.
He waited some more.
“Emergency Code Nine Thirteen. This is Obi-Wan Kenobi. Repeat: Emergency Code Nine Thirteen. Are there any Jedi out there?”
He waited. His heart thumped heavily.
“Any Jedi, please respond. This is Obi-Wan Kenobi declaring a Nine Thirteen Emergency.”
He tried to ignore the small, still voice inside his head that whispered he might just be the only one out here.
He might just be the only one, period.
He started punching coordinates for a single jump that would bring him close enough to pick up a signal directly from Coruscant when a burst of fuzz came over his comlink. A quick glance confirmed the frequency: a Jedi channel.
“Please repeat,” Obi-Wan said. “I’m locking onto your signal. Please repeat.”
The fuzz became a spray of blue laser, which gradually resolved into a fuzzy figure of a tall, slim human with dark hair and an elegant goatee. “Master Kenobi? Are you all right? Have you been wounded?”
“Senator Organa!” Obi-Wan exclaimed with profound relief. “No, I’m not wounded—but I’m certainly not all right. I need help. My clones turned on me. I barely escaped with my life!”
“There have been ambushes all over the galaxy.”
Obi-Wan lowered his head, offering a silent wish to the Force that the victims might find peace within it.
“Have you had contact with any other survivors?”
“Only one,” the Alderaanian Senator said grimly. “Lock onto my coordinates. He’s waiting for you.”
A curve of knuckle, skinned, black scab corrugated with dirt and leaking red—
The fringe of fray at the cuff of a beige sleeve, dark, crusted with splatter from the death of a general—
The tawny swirl of grain in wine-dark tabletop of polished Alderaanian kriin—
These were what Obi-Wan Kenobi could look at without starting to shake.
The walls of the small conference room on Tantive IV were too featureless to hold his attention; to look at a wall allowed his mind to wander …
And the shaking began.
The shaking got worse when he met the ancient green stare of the tiny alien seated across the table from him, for that wrinkled leather skin and those tufts of withered hair were his earliest memory, and they reminded Obi-Wan of the friends who had died today.
The shaking got worse still when he turned to the other being in the room, because he wore politician’s robes that reminded Obi-Wan of the enemy who yet lived.
The deception. The death of Jedi Masters he had admired, of Jedi Knights who had been his friends. The death of his oath to Qui-Gon.
The death of Anakin.
Anakin must have fallen along with Mace and Agen, Saesee and Kit; fallen along with the Temple.
Along with the Order itself.
Ashes.
Ashes and dust.
Twenty-five thousand years wiped from existence in a single day.
All the dreams. All the promises.
All the children …
“We took them from their homes.” Obi-Wan fought to stay in his chair; the pain inside him demanded motion. It became wave after wave of tremors. “We promised their families—”
“Control yourself, you must; still Jedi, you are!”
“Yes, Master Yoda.” That scab on his knuckle—focused on that, he could suppress the shaking. “Yes, we are Jedi. But what if we’re the last?”
“If the last we are, unchanged our duty is.” Yoda settled his chin onto hands folded over the head of his gimer stick. He looked every day of his nearly nine hundred years. “While one Jedi lives, survive the Order does. Resist the darkness with every breath, we must.”
He lifted his head and the stick angled to poke Obi-Wan in the shin. “Especially the darkness in ourselves, young one. Of the dark side, despair is.”
The simple truth of this called to him. Even despair is attachment: it is a grip clenched upon pain.