Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith Read Online Free PDF Page A

over-"
    "Every one of them would gladly trade his life for Palpatine's. Will you trade Palpatine's life for theirs?"
    "No-no, of course not, but-"
    "Anakin, I understand: you want to save everyone. You always do. But you can't.''''
    Anakin's voice went tight. "Don't remind me."
    "Head for the command ship." Without waiting for a reply, Obi-Wan targeted the command cruiser and shot away at maximum thrust.
    The cross of burn-scar beside Anakin's eye went pale as he turned his starfighter in pursuit. Obi-Wan was right. He almost always was.
    You can't save everyone
    His mother's body, broken and bloody in his arms-Her battered eyes struggling to open-The touch of her smashed lips-I knew you would come to me ... I missed you so much . . .
    That's what it was to be not quite good enough.
    It could happen anytime. Anyplace. If he was a few minutes late. If he let his attention drift for a single second. If he was a whisker too weak.
    Anyplace. Anytime.
    But not here, and not now.
    He forced his mother's face back down below the surface of his consciousness.
    Time to get to work.
    They flashed through the battle, dodging flak and turbolaser bolts, slipping around cruisers to eclipse themselves from the sensors of droid fighters. They were only a few dozen kilometers from the command cruiser when a pair of tri-fighters whipped across their path, firing on the deflection.
    Anakin's sensor board lit up and R2-D2 shrilled a warning. "Missiles!"
    He wasn't worried for himself: the two on his tail were coming at him in perfect tandem. Missiles lack the sophisticated brains of droid fighters; to keep them from colliding on their inbound vectors, one of them would lock onto his fighter's left drive, the other onto his right. A quick snap-roll would make those vectors intersect.
    Which they did in a silent blossom of flame.
    Obi-Wan wasn't so lucky. The pair of missiles locked onto his sublights weren't precisely side by side; a snap-roll would be worse than useless. Instead he fired retros and kicked his dorsal jets to halve his velocity and knock him a few meters planet-ward. The lead missile overshot and spiraled off into the orbital battle.
    The trailing missile came close enough to trigger its proximity sensors, and detonated in a spray of glowing shrapnel. Obi-Wan's starfighter flew through the debris-and the shrapnel tracked him.
    Little silver spheres flipped themselves into his path and latched onto the starfighter's skin, then split and sprouted spidery arrays of jointed arms that pried up hull plates, exposing the starfighter's internal works to multiple circular whirls of blade like ancient mechanical bone saws.
    This was a problem.
    "I'm hit." Obi-Wan sounded more irritated than concerned. "I'm hit."
    "I have visual." Anakin swung his starfighter into closer pursuit. "Buzz droids. I count five."
    "Get out of here, Anakin. There's nothing you can do."
    "I'm not leaving you, Master."
    Cascades of sparks fountained into space from the buzz droids' saws. "Anakin, the mission! Get to the command ship! Get the Chancellor!."
    "Not without you," Anakin said through his teeth.
    One of the buzz droids crouched beside the cockpit, silvery arms grappling with R4; another worked on the starfighter's nose, while a third skittered toward the ventral hydraulics. The last two of the aggressive little mechs had spidered to Obi-Wan's left wing, working on that damaged control surface.
    "You can't help me." Obi-Wan still maintained his Jedi calm. "They're shutting down the controls."
    "I can fix that ..." Anakin brought his starfighter into line only a couple of meters off Obi-Wan's wing. "Steady . . . ," he muttered, "steady .
    . . ," and triggered a single burst of his right-side cannon that blasted the two buzz droids into gouts of molten metal.
    Along with most of Obi-Wan's left wing.
    Anakin said, "Whoops."
    The starfighter bucked hard enough to knock Obi-Wan's skull against the transparisteel canopy. A gust of stinging smoke filled the