The dirty-white hulls of the Acclamators soared upward, leaving behind the scorching sands and rocks of Geonosis.
We had won.
And we were leaving the planet we'd left behind in ruins—strewn with mountains of corpses and the smoking carcasses of wrecked machinery. In the blink of an eye, the Republic tore apart the shackles of pacifism that had bound it for the last thousand years, and with the brazen, unceremonious boot of a clone trooper ground the foundations of its own Constitution into the dirt.
For those not in the know: before the events in the Petranaki arena, bankers and merchants, dissatisfied with bureaucracy, predatory taxes, and all the other joys of democracy, exploited provisions of the Constitution and withdrew from the Republic. With the help of a former Jedi—Count Dooku—the breakaway worlds formed the Confederacy of Independent Systems, also known as the CIS. In essence, a sovereign state thrown together on the fly, of which Geonosis was a part. And the arrival of Jedi and Senator Amidala on it could quite reasonably be considered an act of espionage…
But as usual, without understanding the situation, the keepers of peace and order in the galaxy barged into the dispute feet first, stunning not only the Separatists with the appearance of an army, but most of the Republic's citizens as well.
The Separatists—whose "union" before the Republic's incursion into Geonosis had been little more than a mix of frightened bankers and businessmen—suddenly bared their teeth in hatred at the government on Coruscant. Hundreds of planets were destined to turn into battlefields in the near future. Millions—if not billions—of sentients were fated to die in the millstones of big politics…
Calling the Geonosis massacre a victory was a stretch.
Yes, the senator and a tenth of the Jedi strike group—including me—survived. Formally, the Republic had won: the Seps' leaders fled, the droid armies were defeated, the factories bombed to rubble, and the sands of Geonosis were now being trampled by the armored boots of Republic soldiers. A clone garrison was methodically burning out pockets of resistance among the natives who refused to accept capitulation.
But unlike most sentients in this galaxy, I knew that both sides of the conflict were being run by one man.
Darth Sidious. Also known as Chancellor Palpatine. Also known as the former senator from Naboo… A Sith who devoted himself to destroying the Jedi Order, destroying the Republic, and creating an Empire. A man whose worldview and ultimate objective became the prerequisites for the bloodbath awaiting the galaxy for long years.
In tearing down the Republic and the Order, Palpatine wasn't only trying to create a state capable of resisting the Yuuzhan Vong threat—invaders from beyond the galaxy's borders—but also fulfilling an ancient Sith dream: to exterminate the Jedi.
Jedi and Sith. Two sides of the same Hutt, again and again plunging the galaxy into wars because of the irreconcilability of each other's dogma. A religion that originally encompassed both the dark side and the light side of the Force split its adherents into two warring camps, condemning the galaxy to become the battlefield of ancient, implacable enemies. Both groups exterminated each other for thousands of years, unable to accept the other's rightness. And the more violently their contradictions tore at them, the more bloodletting spilled across the galaxy.
"Begun, the Clone War has," Yoda's saying captured the essence better than ever.
The history of the galaxy far, far away—the Heavenly River—is cyclical. Long periods of peace and, essentially, stagnation are replaced by galaxy-scale conflicts that, when they end, completely change the balance of power in the GFFA. Jedi or Sith—it doesn't really matter which side started the next conflict. The result, as always, was billions dead.
It would be the same this time.
I lay on a bunk in the cabin assigned to me aboard the Acclamator that had taken aboard almost all the Jedi who left Geonosis. Having changed into a clean robe, I lay on the hard bunk with my hands folded over my chest. Eyes closed, breathing even and measured. I was meditating. Very soon the ship would reach Coruscant, and my mission would begin. I would lie, kill, set people up. I would do what had to be done to put an end to this chaos once and for all.
The Jedi…
There were about fifty of them aboard this ship. If I focused, I could sense them. To me, in the Force they looked like bright tongues of flame glowing with warmth—flames I wanted to reach out and touch. But I couldn't. Not yet.
I never got to test myself commanding ground forces on Geonosis. Frankly, I wasn't eager to. My only task was to keep my own hide alive by any means necessary—safe from a stray blaster bolt or a Separatist missile. Grand Master Yoda himself pulled the wounded Jedi away from the front line after noticing how awful my condition already was. Constant disorientation, nausea, vomiting… Yoda chalked it up to the aftermath of the chest wound and a concussion, and kindly suggested I remain at the command post. And under other circumstances—what kind of Jedi was I, anyway? I even managed to lose my lightsaber somewhere. And regarding that last part, Yoda still gave me a lecture about how important it is for a Jedi never to be separated from his weapon.
That was why I watched the ground battle from the comfortable conditions of the command center. And while the clones and Yoda successfully organized the transformation of the droid army into scrap metal, I could finally catch my breath and think.
My knees were still shaking from what I'd been through.
Out of nowhere I'd ended up in the Star Wars universe. The prequel trilogy was in full swing. The Clone Wars had begun, and if my memory served, they would last about three years. After which one crafty bastard would say, "Execute Order 66," and in the blink of an eye almost all the Jedi would die.
But, damn it—when was that going to be? Right now, here, I could see with my own eyes all the famous Jedi, the clones. Any Star Wars fan would give anything just to look at any walker up close, or fire a blaster rifle once.
So my joy was darkened by the fact that I couldn't understand why Valkorion had shoved my consciousness into the shell of a dead Jedi. Was there something special about me, or was it just random chance? As the saying goes: "Am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right?"
And the biggest question. What did Valkorion's ghost have to do with all this? As far as I remembered, the ancient Sith who, singlehandedly, directly or indirectly, turned the galaxy upside down again and again, had died about four thousand years before these events. And not just once.
An entire online game's storyline is dedicated to the struggle of noble Jedi against the forces of evil embodied by the most ancient and dangerous of Sith—Vitiate, also known as Valkorion. Unfortunately, that game never got a Russian localization, so I didn't just not know the exact plot—I couldn't even imagine it.
I couldn't brag about knowing foreign languages, not in the slightest. With a dictionary, sure—I could still translate something or say something. But to read the game's text fluently…
It's worth saying a little about my imaginary friend.
And Teacher.
Valkorion, also known as Vitiate, also known as Tenebrae.
An extremely mysterious, yet immensely powerful figure in the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
In the galaxy far, far away—about four thousand years before these events—the Sith Empire attacked what was then the Old Republic. The background to those events can be learned in the relevant computer games. Or on Wookieepedia.
But closer to the point. The Sith Empire was led by Emperor Vitiate. A personality, it must be said, scary as hell.
In life, you should fear two kinds of people: the strong and the smart. Vitiate was smart. Also cunning, cruel, and immeasurably power-hungry. Taking advantage of the fact that the Sith, defeated in yet another war with the Jedi, were morally broken, he used them—dragged them to the planet Dromund Kaas, where he built his own Sith Empire. Only first, he secured immortality for himself: by deceit he talked the Sith Lords into taking part in a ritual. And when the ritual ended, all that remained of Vitiate's homeworld were stones and silence. All life—all the planet's Force and the Force of its inhabitants—was sealed inside his body, consumed by him. Starting to see what kind of power ended up in the hands of a being who studied Force techniques so terrifying and mighty that few could ever replicate them? If the heir to the Rule of Two, Darth Sidious, ever faced Emperor Vitiate in battle, I'd bet everything on the latter. And something tells me the latter would effortlessly turn Palps into his obedient little errand boy.
Emperor Vitiate unleashed the Mandalorians upon the Republic, wanting to test its defenses before the Empire's invasion. The Republic, with the expected outcome, got its ass kicked hard by Mandalore's warriors. And it would have been completely crushed, if not for Revan—a Jedi who took command of the Republic's forces. He didn't just turn the tide. He broke the Mandalorians' spine, humiliated them, stripped them of their legacy, and turned a once-proud people into a bunch of mercenaries with no purpose.
Then Revan went into the Unknown Regions to destroy the Sith. But he came back as the Emperor's puppet, along with his apprentice Malak, while also—once again—smacking the long-suffering Republic in the face. The Jedi captured Revan, wiped his mind, and made him into a weapon against the Sith in the person of Malak, not even suspecting that a Sith Empire lurked in the Unknown Regions.
Deprived of his memories, Revan rolled over his former comrades, Malak and his own army, like a steamroller. After that, he once again went off to go crack the Emperor in the face.
And lost again. At this point, it should've been a facepalm. But no.
Of all the Jedi I knew, only Revan could turn a catastrophic failure into a victory.
The Emperor, having bound Revan with Sith sorcery, remained under Revan's influence for three hundred years and was in no hurry to attack the Republic. But at some point, he did it anyway.
When another war between the Empire and the Republic began, the latter got its ass kicked again, despite the fact that Revan had already shown them the danger of laxity three hundred years earlier. But this time the Sith were truly magnificent. They struck Coruscant—the Republic's capital—carved it up cleanly, destroyed the Jedi Temple and its defenders, thereby shaming the Order in the eyes of the entire galaxy. A large part of the Republic's defenders was annihilated as a result of the war with the Empire.
The Empire's enemy received a ringing slap that was hard to recover from.
The Jedi fled in disgrace to Tython—a planet deep in the Core—where they once again began restoring their severely depleted organization.
Then absolute fucking hell began.
A new lover of doing good and dispensing justice was born—the Hero of Tython. His name is unknown, but his feat is immortal. A Padawan with extraordinary abilities went on a real rampage through the galaxy, exterminating Sith and fallen Jedi, starting from Tython and the lower levels of Coruscant and ending deep in the Sith Empire's territory. At the end of his travels he reached Emperor Vitiate and, on the second try (the first attempt ended with the Hero being captured and brainwashed), took the Emperor out. Sounds like profit?
It seemed like it. But if everything were that simple, it wouldn't be Star Wars.
Vitiate was a smart bastard precisely because he had trump cards.
Unlike Revan—who understood both sides of the Force—the Emperor dug so deep into the dark side that he not only broke through the floor of reasonable study, but also successfully laid the foundation for being called the strongest dark side adept in the entire history of the GFFA.
The Emperor was reborn, thanks to yet another mess in Revan's head. Vitiate—against whom both the Republic and his own Empire united—once again ended up on top.
After creating the Sith Empire, he formed the Dark Council from the most powerful Sith, while he himself stepped back from governing the Empire. What exactly the Emperor did all that time was unknown—until the moment when armadas of the Eternal Empire of Zakuul poured out of Wild Space onto the heads of the Empire and the Republic—another of the Emperor's creations, something he'd been working on, so to speak, in his free time from the Sith Empire. If I remember right, Zakuul brought both the Republic and the Empire to their knees, burdening them with crushing tribute. Among notes about Zakuul, I found that its people worshiped Vitiate, known to them under the name Valkorion. And don't think they were all heartless bastards like their Emperor. Something changed in Valkorion. Instead of a ruthless Sith, he presented himself as magnanimous—almost an exemplary ruler. How he achieved it, whether it was an act for the public, or whether Valkorion truly became better, I don't know. Apparently the answers were in the relevant expansion, which I never managed to get through.
But Valkorion's end was the same as Vitiate's. He was killed—only this time by his own son.
And then, again judging by texts on the Internet, Valkorion's spirit was killed by the Emperor's children and his first killer—the Hero of Tython, who later went by "the Outlander." The reasons and details of all that remained a mystery to me.
Back on Earth, people online often wrote that the Emperor was essentially the only one who had explored the dark side so deeply that no Jedi or Sith before or after him could even dream of it. Of course, if there'd been a choice, I would've preferred for Revan to be involved in my arrival in this universe—he was more than a sane man, and he preached the path of the Unifying Force, which suited me more than either the light side or the dark side. Still, whatever I was, absolute evil—what Valkorion was to me—clearly wasn't my thing.
But I had no choice. The Sith had, so to speak, already claimed rights to me, and I wasn't just in the skin of a dead Jedi for nothing. And if I didn't know how vast Vitiate's designs could be, I might even have relaxed.
But unfortunately, I'd heard plenty about the Sith's attitude toward people and toward the galaxy as a whole.
Anyway, back to Geonosis.
I watched the picture of Separatist war machines being stomped into the sand from the GAR landing force command post. Surrounded by faceless clones, in Yoda's company, I observed how the droids' holographic little boxes crumbled under the attacks of the clones' own boxes.
As if hundreds of thousands of years of evolution and technological and scientific progress had never happened, the opposing armies met each other in formations that even the ancient Greeks on Earth once used.
Ask where the development of military art was. Where the wonders of commanding armies of a spacefaring era were.
There was none of that shit here. Seps and Republicans met each other in neat phalanxes, line against line, grinding each other down with almost volley-like fire. Skirmish formations, apparently, were unheard of.
Losses didn't worry anyone—neither the Seps nor the Jedi. Brave but foolish, yesterday's guardians of justice swung their glowsticks and hurled themselves into battle at the tip of the attack, dragging detachments of clones with them.
Almost immediately, they were covered by salvos from the Separatist droids' walking boxes. But for every clone who fell, another took his place in the line. Just as faceless, just as powerless a hostage to fate as the droids marching toward them. Perhaps this is where the contemptuous, insulting nickname "meat droids" for clones would originate.
It all stirred anger in me. The Jedi, who preached that life mattered above all, treated the mass slaughter of living beings with indifference. Even if they were clones—still!
"Grand Master Yoda!" I called out to the green one. "Our troops' tight formation is ineffective. The droids are simply exterminating them! We need to break the ranks up, have the clones fight dispersed!"
The head of the Order thought for a moment, then fixed a piercing gaze on me.
"Words of yours have their sense, young Knight!" After that, the little Cheburashka passed an order to the clone commander to change the formation.
I can't say whether it affected the casualties among the clones, but my own heart felt lighter. At the very least, I'd done everything that depended on me at that moment. Whether they'd implement it in practice—I didn't know.
However, a thought ripened and rooted in my head: that the military art of the galaxy far, far away lacked the elegance and scope inherent to Earthlings. Of course, I could be wrong, and the picture unfolding before me might simply be the natural result of a millennium without wars.
By the way, about unfolding pictures.
The gigantic ball-like ships of the Trade Federation rose upward unhurriedly, like gentlemen at a social soirée, climbing out of their landing nests.
Huge, turtle-like Republic artillery installations stung those giants with snow-white plasma beams, though without much result.
"We need to concentrate fire on one ship." Despite the weakness still chasing me, I rose from the bench I'd been sitting on and walked up to Yoda and the clone commanders. A face hidden behind an opaque helmet with a polarized visor stared at me, then at Yoda, who nodded almost immediately.
The clone started chattering into the radio, and the guns nearest us began pouring fire into the nearest "ball." First salvo, second… and now the burning space sphere was plunging straight down to the ground, kicking up a cloud of sand and dirt.
"A good plan, Knight Dougan," Yoda praised. "Effective, your ideas are, mm."
"Thank you, Master," I smiled—then immediately grimaced as sensations rolled over me.
My chest started hurting again. Then my head. With a groan, gripping the back of a chair with my hands, I slid down to the floor.
"A medic here!" Yoda ordered.
The next second, one of the clones ran up and started rummaging briskly through an army medkit.
They injected me with some kind of painkiller, and I realized my consciousness was leaving me. That was how I lay there until the end of the battle. Then there was the ship's medbay, where they patched me up and sent me to the cabin assigned to me to regain my strength.
When I reached my bunk, I collapsed onto it without even undressing.
"That was the shittiest day," I mumbled, my tongue thick.
I didn't even notice when sleep caught up with me. But instead of the oblivion I'd hoped for, I fell into the memories of my meeting with the Emperor's ghost.