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“Know already, you do,” he said, and hobbled off into the gloom.

Darth Vader left nothing living behind when he walked from the main room of the control center.

Casually, carelessly, he strolled along the hallway, scoring the durasteel wall with the tip of his blade, enjoying the sizzle of disintegrating metal as he had savored the smoke of charred alien flesh.

The conference room door was closed. A barrier so paltry would be an insult to the blade; a black-gloved hand made a fist. The door crumpled and fell.

The Sith Lord stepped over it.

The conference room was walled with transparisteel. Beyond, obsidian mountains rained fire upon the land. Rivers of lava embraced the settlement.

Rune Haako, aide and confidential secretary to the viceroy of the Trade Federation, tripped over a chair as he stumbled back. He fell to the floor, shaking like a grub in a frying pan, trying to scrabble beneath the table.

“Stop!” he cried. “Enough! We surrender, do you understand? You can’t just kill us—”

The Sith Lord smiled. “Can’t I?”

“We’re unarmed! We surrender! Please—please, you’re a Jedi!”

“You fought a war to destroy the Jedi.” Vader stood above the shivering Neimoidian, smiling down upon him, then fed him half a meter of plasma. “Congratulations on your success.”

The Sith Lord stepped over Haako’s corpse to where Wat Tambor clawed uselessly at the transparisteel wall with his armored gauntlets. The head of the Techno Union turned at his approach, cringing, arms lifted to shield his faceplate from the flames in the dragon’s eyes. “Please, I’ll give you anything. Anything you want!”

The blade flashed twice; Tambor’s arms fell to the floor, followed by his head.

“Thank you.”

Darth Vader turned to the last living leader of the Confederacy of Independent Systems.

Nute Gunray, viceroy of the Trade Federation, stood trembling in an alcove, blood-tinged tears streaming down his green-mottled cheeks. “The war …,” he whimpered. “The war is over—Lord Sidious promised—he promised we would be left in peace …”

“His transmission was garbled.” The blade came up. “He promised you would be left in pieces.”

In the main holocomm center of the Jedi Temple, high atop the central spire, Obi-Wan used the Force to reach deep within the shell of the recall beacon’s mechanism, subtly altering the pulse calibration to flip the signal from come home to run and hide. Done without any visible alteration, it would take the troopers quite a while to detect the recalibration, and longer still to reset it. This was all that could be done for any surviving Jedi: a warning, to give them a fighting chance.

Obi-Wan turned from the recall beacon to the internal security scans. He had to find out exactly what he was warning them against.

“Do this not,” Yoda said. “Leave we must, before discovered we are.”

“I have to see it,” Obi-Wan said grimly. “Like I said downstairs: knowing is one thing. Seeing is another.”

“Seeing will only cause you pain.”

“Then it is pain that I have earned. I won’t hide from it.” He keyed a code that brought up a holoscan of the Room of a Thousand Fountains. “I am not afraid.”

Yoda’s eyes narrowed to green-gold slits. “You should be.”

Stone-faced, Obi-Wan watched younglings run into the room, fleeing a storm of blasterfire; he watched Cin Drallig and a pair of teenage Padawans—was that Whie, the boy Yoda had brought to Vjun?—backing into the scene, blades whirling, cutting down the advancing clone troopers with deflected bolts.

He watched a lightsaber blade flick into the shot, cutting down first one Padawan, then the other. He watched the brisk stride of a caped figure who hacked through Drallig’s shoulder, then stood aside as the old Troll fell dying to let the rest of the clones blast the children to shreds.

Obi-Wan’s expression never flickered.

He opened himself to what he was about to see; he was prepared, and centered, and trusting in the Force, and yet …

Then the caped man turned to meet a cloaked figure behind him, and he was—

He was—

Obi-Wan, staring, wished that he had the strength to rip his eyes out