Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [278]
“It was Yoda,” he said as he swung out of the pod. “Another assassination attempt. Find him and kill him. If you have to, blow up the building.”
He didn’t have time to direct the search personally. The Force hummed a warning in his bones: Lord Vader was in danger.
Mortal danger.
Clones scattered. He stopped one officer. “You. Call the shuttle dock and tell them I’m on my way. Have my ship warmed and ready.”
The officer saluted, and Palpatine, with vigor that surprised even himself, ran.
With the help of the Force, Yoda sprinted along the service accessway below the Arena faster than a human being could run; he sliced conduits as he passed, filling the accessway behind him with coils of high-voltage cables, twisting and spitting lightning. Every few dozen meters, he paused just long enough to slash a hole in the accessway’s wall; once his pursuers got past the cables, they would have to divide their forces to search each of his possible exits.
But he knew they could afford to; there were thousands of them.
He pulled his comlink from inside his robe without slowing down; the Force whispered a set of coordinates and he spoke them into the link. “Delay not,” he added. “Swiftly closing is the pursuit. Failed I have, and kill me they will.”
The Convocation Center of the Galactic Senate was a drum-mounted dome more than a kilometer in diameter; even with the aid of the Force, Yoda was breathing hard by the time he reached its edge. He cut through the floor beneath him and dropped down into another accessway, this one used for maintenance on the huge lighting system that shone downward onto Republic Plaza through transparisteel panels that floored the underside of the huge dome’s rim. He cut into the lightwell; the reflected wattage nearly blinded him to the vertiginous drop below the transparisteel on which he stood.
Without hesitation he cut through that as well and dived headlong into the night.
Catching the nether edges of his long cloak to use as an improvised airfoil, he let the Force guide him in a soaring free fall away from the Convocation Center; he was too small to trigger its automated defense perimeter, but the open-cockpit speeder toward which he fell would get blasted from the sky if it deviated one meter inward from its curving course.
He released his robe so that it flapped upward, making a sort of drogue that righted him in the air so that he fell feetfirst into the speeder’s passenger seat beside Bail Organa.
While Yoda strapped himself in, the Senator from Alderaan pulled the rented speeder through a turn that would have impressed Anakin Skywalker, and shot away toward the nearest intersection of Coruscant’s congested skyways.
Yoda’s eyes squeezed closed.
“Master Yoda? Are you wounded?”
“Only my pride,” Yoda said, and meant it, though Bail could not possibly understand how deep that wound went, nor how it bled. “Only my pride.”
With Anakin’s grip on his wrists bending his arms near to breaking, forcing both their lightsabers down in a slow but unstoppable arc, Obi-Wan let go.
Of everything.
His hopes. His fears. His obligation to the Jedi, his promise to Qui-Gon, his failure with Anakin.
And their lightsabers.
Startled, Anakin instinctively shifted his Force grip, releasing one wrist to reach for his blade; in that instant Obi-Wan twisted free of his other hand and with the Force caught up his own blade, reversing it along his forearm so that his swift parry of Anakin’s thundering overhand not only blocked the strike but directed both blades to slice through the wall against which he stood. He slid Anakin’s following thrust through the wall on the opposite side, guiding both blades again up and over his head in a circular sweep so that he could use the power of Anakin’s next chop to drive himself backward through the wall, outside into the smoke and the falling cinders.
Anakin followed, constantly attacking; Obi-Wan again gave ground, retreating along a narrow