"Matthew Woodring Stover - Clone Wars - Shatterpoint" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stover Matthew Woodring)

Star Wars - Shatterpoint

Author: Mathew Stover

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU

In my dreams, I always do it right.

In my dreams, I'm on the arena balcony. Geonosis. Orange glare slices shadow from my eyes. Below on
the sand: Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker, Senator Padme Amidala. On the rough-shaped stone
within reach of my arm: Nute Gunray. Within reach of my blade: Jango Fett.

And Master Dooku.

No. Master no more. Count Dooku.

I may never get used to calling him that. Even in dreams.

Jango Fett bristles with weapons. An instinctive killer: the deadliest man in the galaxy. Jango can kill me in
less than a second. I know it. Even if I had never seen Kenobi's report from Kamino, I can feel the
violence Jango radiates: in the Force, a pulsar of death.

But I do it right.

My blade doesn't light the underside of Fett's square jaw. I don't waste time with words. I don't hesitate.

I believe.

In my dreams, the purple flare of my blade sizzles the gray hairs of Dooku's beard, and in the critical
semisecond it takes Jango Fett to aim and fire, I twitch that blade and take Dooku with me into death.

And save the galaxy from civil war.

I could have done it.

I could have done it.

Because I knew. I could feel it.

In the swirl of the Force around me, I could feel the connections Dooku had forged among Jango and the
Trade Federation, the Geonosians, the whole Separatist movement: connections of greed and fear, of
deception and bald intimidation. I did not know what they were-I did not know how Dooku had forged
them, or why-but I felt their power: the power of what I now know is a web of treason he had woven to
catch the galaxy.

I could feel that without him to maintain its weave, to repair its flaws and double its thinning strands, the
web would rot, would shrivel and decay until a mere breath would shred it and scatter its strings into the
infinite stellar winds.

Dooku was the shatterpoint.