But I can't help myself. Not right now.
Not while I'm up here, and Depa is down there.
Depa Billaba came into my life by accident: one of those joyous coincidences that are sometimes the gift of the galaxy. I found her after I fought and killed the pirates who had murdered her parents; these pirates had kidnapped their victims' lovely infant daughter. I never learned what they wanted to do with her. Or to her. I refuse to speculate.
An advantage of Jedi mental discipline: I can stop myself from imagining such things.
She grew to girlhood in the Temple, and to womanhood as my Padawan. The proudest moment of my life was the day I stood and directed the Jedi Council to welcome its newest member.
She is one of the youngest Jedi ever to be named to the Council. On the day of her elevation, Yoda suggested that it was my teaching that had brought her so far while still so young.
He said this, I think, more from courtesy than from honesty; she came so far while still so young because she is who she is. My teaching had little to do with it. I have never met anyone like her.
Depa is more than a friend to me. She's one of those dangerous attachments. She is the daughter I will never have.
All the Jedi discipline in the galaxy cannot entirely overpower the human heart.
I hear her voice again and again:. you should never have sent me here, and I should never have come.
I can't stop myself from reaching into the Force, though I know it is useless. Since shortly before Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi stood in front of the Council to report the rebirth of the Sith, a mysterious veil of darkness has clouded the Force. Close by-in both space and time-the Force is as it has always been: guide and ally, my invisible eyes and unseen hands.
But when I try to search through the Force for Depa, I find only shadows, indistinct and threatening. The crystal purity of the Force has become a thick fog of menace.
Again:. but what's done can never be undone.
I can shake my head till my brain rattles, but I can't seem to drive away those words. I must clear my mind; Pelek Baw is still Separatist, and I will have to be alert. I must stop thinking about her.
Instead, I think about the war.
The Republic was caught entirely unprepared. After a thousand years of peace, no one- especially not us Jedi-truly believed civil war would ever come. How could we? Not even Yoda could remember the last general war. Peace is more than a tradition. It is the bedrock of civilization itself.
This was the Confederacy's great advantage: the Separatists not only expected war, but counted on it.
By the time the smoldering Clone War burst into Geonosian flame, their ships were already in motion. In the weeks that followed, while we Jedi tended our wounds and mourned our dead, while the Senate scrambled to assemble a fleet-any kind of fleet-to match the power of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, while Supreme Chancellor Palpatine pleaded and bargained and sometimes had to outright threaten wavering Senators to not only stay loyal to the Republic but also support its clone army with their credits and their resources, the Separatists had fanned out across the galaxy, seeding the hyperspace lanes with their forces. The major approaches into Separatist space were picketed by droid starfighters, backed up by newly revealed capital ships: Geonosian Dreadnaughts that lumbered out from secret shipyards.
Strategically, it was a masterpiece. Any thrust into the worlds at the core of the Confederacy would be blunted, and delayed long enough for Separatist reserves to engage it; any attack with sufficient strength to swiftly overwhelm their pickets would leave hundreds or thousands of worlds open to swift Separatist reprisal. Behind their droid-walled frontier, they could gather their forces at leisure, striking out to swallow Republic systems piecemeal.
Even before the Republic was ready to fight, we had lost.
Yoda is the master strategist of the Jedi Council. A life as vast as his predisposes one to see the big picture, and take the long view. He developed our current strategy of limited engagement on multiple fronts; our goal is to harass the Separatists, wear them down in a war of attrition, chip away at them and prevent them from consolidating their po sition. In this way, we hope to gain time for the titanic manufacturing base of the Republic to be converted to the production of ships, weapons, and other war materiel.
And time to train our troops. The Kaminoan clone troopers are not only the best soldiers we have, they are very nearly our only soldiers. We would use them to train civilian volunteers and law-enforcement personnel in weapons and tactics, but the Separatists have managed to keep nearly all 1.2 million of them fully engaged, rushing from system to system and planet to planet to meet probing attacks from the bewildering variety of war droids that the TechnoUnion, with the financial backing of the Trade Federation, turns out in seemingly unlimited quantities.
Since we need all our clones simply to defend Republic systems, we have been forced to find ways to attack without them.
The Separatists don't enjoy unalloyed popularity, even in their core systems; and in any society, there are fringe elements eager to take up arms against authority. Jedi have been covertly inserted on hundreds of worlds, with a common mission: to organize Loyalist resistance, train partisans in sabotage and guerrilla warfare, and generally do whatever possible to destabilize the Separatist governments.
This was why Depa Billaba came to Haruun Kal.
I sent her here.
The Al' Har system-of which Haruun Kal is the sole planet-lies on the nexus of several hyperspace lanes: the hub of a wheel called the Gevarno Loop, whose spokes join the Separatist systems of Killisu, Jutrand, Loposi, and the Gevarno Cluster with Opari, Ventran, and Ch'manss-all Loyalist. Due to local stellar configurations and the mass sensitivities of modern hyperdrives, any ship traveling from one of these systems to another can cut several standard days off its journey by coming through Al' Har, even counting the daylong realspace transit of the system itself.
None of these systems has any vast strategic value-but the Republic has lost too many systems to secession to risk losing any to conquest. Control of the Al 'Har nexus offers control of the whole region. It was decided that
