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

Our Order prohibits personal attachments for precisely this reason. Had I not honored him so-even loved
him-the galaxy might be at peace right now. Merely a feeling, Yoda said.

I am a Jedi.

I have been trained since birth to trust my feelings.

But which feelings should I trust?

When I faced the choice to kill a former Jedi Master, or to save Kenobi and young Skywalker and the
Senator. I let the Force choose for me. I followed my instincts.

I made the Jedi choice.

And so: Dooku escaped. And so: the galaxy is at war. And so: many of my friends have been
slaughtered.

There is no such thing as a second chance.

Strange: Jedi I am, yet I drown in regret for having spared a life.

Many survivors of Geonosis suffer from nightmares. I have heard tale after tale from the Jedi healers who
have counseled them. Nightmares are inevitable; there has not been such a slaughter of Jedi since the Sith
War, four thousand years ago. None of them could have imagined how it would feel to stand in that
arena, surrounded by the corpses of their friends, in the blazing orange noon and the stench and the
blood-soaked sand. I may be the only veteran of Geonosis who doesn't have nightmares of that place.

Because in my dreams, I always do it right.

My nightmare is what I find when I wake up.

Jedi have shatterpoints, too.

Mace Windu stopped in the doorway and tried to recover his calm. An arc of sweat darkened the cowl
of his robe, and his runic clung to his skin: he'd come straight from a training bout at the Temple without
taking time to shower. And the brisk pace-almost a jog-he'd maintained through the labyrinth of the
Galactic Senate had offered no chance for him to cool off.

Palpatine's private office, in the Supreme Chancellor's suite beneath the Senate's Great Rotunda, opened
before him, vast and stark. An expanse of polished ebonite floor; a few simple, soft chairs; a flat trestle
desk, also ebonite. No pictures, paintings, or decorations other than two lone statues; only
floor-to-ceiling holographic repeaters showing real-time images of Galactic City as seen from the pinnacle
of the Senate Dome. Outside, the orbital mirrors would soon turn their faces from Coruscant's sun,
bringing twilight to the capital.

Within was only Yoda. Alone. Perched solemnly on his hover-chair, hands folded around the head of his
stick. "On time you are," the ancient Master observed, "but barely. Take a chair; composed we must be.
Serious, I fear this is." 'I wasn't expecting a party." Mace's boot heels clacked on the polished floor. He
pulled one of the soft, plain chairs closer to Yoda and sat beside him, facing the desk. Tension made his
jaw ache. "The courier said this is about the operation on Haruun Kal." The fact that of all the members