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

STAR WARS

SHATTERPOINT

by MATTHEW STOWER


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.
I knew it.
That is my gift.
Imagine a Corusca gem: a mineral whose interlocking crystalline structure
makes it harder than durasteel. You can strike one with a five-kilo hammer and
do no more than dent the hammer's face. Yet the same cystalline structure that
gives the Corusca strength also gives it shatterpoints: spots where a precise
application of carefully measured force-no more than a gentle tap-will break