Read Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith for Free Online Page B

to look.
    Waiting by the open hatchway, Obi-Wan shook his head. "Honestly, the way you talk to that thing."
    Anakin started toward him. "Careful, Master, you'll hurt his feelings-" He stopped in his tracks, a curious look on his face as if he was trying to frown and to smile at the same time.
    "Anakin?"
    He didn't answer. He couldn't answer. He was looking at an image inside his head. Not an image. A reality.
    A memory of something that hadn't happened yet.
    He saw Count Dooku on his knees. He saw lightsabers crossed at the Count's throat.
    Clouds lifted from his heart: clouds of Jabiim, of Aargonar, of Kamino, of even the Tusken camp. For the first time in too many years he felt young: as young as he really was.
    Young, and free, and full of light.
    "Master ..." His voice seemed to be coming from someone else. Someone who hadn't seen what he'd seen. Hadn't done what he'd done. "Master, right here-right now-you and I . . ."
    "Yes?"
    He blinked. "I think we're about to win the war."
    The vast semisphere of the view wall bloomed with battle. Sophisticated sensor algorithms compressed the combat that sprawled throughout the galactic capital's orbit to a view the naked eye could enjoy: cruisers hundreds of kilometers apart, exchanging fire at near lightspeed, appeared to be practically hull-to-hull, joined by pulsing cables of flame. Turbolaser blasts became swift shafts of light that shattered into prismatic splinters against shields, or bloomed into miniature supernovae that swallowed ships whole. The invisible gnat-clouds of starfighter dogfights became a gleaming dance of shadowmoths at the end of Coruscant's brief spring.
    Within that immense curve of computer-filtered carnage, the only furnishing was one lone chair, centered in an expanse of empty floor. This was called the General's Chair, just as this apartment atop the flagship's conning spire was called the General's Quarters.
    With his back to that chair and to the man shackled within it, hands folded behind him beneath his cloak of silken armor-weave, stood Count Dooku.
    Stood Darth Tyranus, Lord of the Sith.
    He looked upon his Master's handiwork, and it was good.
    More than good. It was magnificent.
    Even the occasional tremor of the deck beneath his boots, as the entire ship shuddered under enemy torpedo and turbolaser blasts, felt to him like applause.
    Behind him sounded the initiating hum of the intraship holocomm, which crackled into a voice both electronic and oddly expressive: as though a man spoke through a droid's electrosonic vocabulator. "Lord Tyranus, Kenobi and Skywalker have arrived."
    "Yes." Dooku had felt them both in the Force. "Drive them toward me."
    "My lord, I must express once more my objections-"
    Dooku turned. From his commanding height, he stared down at the blue-scanned holoimage of Invisible Hand's commander. "Your objections have been noted already, General. Leave the Jedi to me."
    "But driving them to you also sends them directly toward the Chancellor himself. Why does he remain on this ship at all? He should be hidden. He should be guarded. We should have had him outsystem hours ago!"
    "Matters are so," Count Dooku said, "because Lord Sidious wishes them so; should you desire to press your objections, please feel at liberty to take them up with him."
    "I, ah, don't believe that will be necessary . . ."
    "Very well, then. Confine your efforts to preventing support troops from boarding. Without their pet clones to back them up, no Jedi is a danger to me."
    The deck shuddered again, more sharply, followed by a sudden shift in the vector of the cruiser's artificial gravity that would have sent a lesser man stumbling; with the Force to maintain the dignified solidity of his posture, the effect on Dooku was confined to the lift of one eyebrow. "And may I suggest that you devote some attention to protecting this ship? Having it destroyed with both you and me aboard might put something of a cramp in the war effort, don't you think?"
    "It is