A flash.
A brief gout of sparks spurting up through the hole, followed by several
clangs and a crash.
Silence.
"Assassin Droid A Seven Seven, report," said the leader of the assassin
droids in its mechanical voice. After a brief pause, A 77's head popped out of
the hole, hit the terminal floor with a clatter, and rolled slowly to a stop.
Asajj studied the head, then kicked it furiously down the hallway. She took a
deep breath. "Well, then. I guess we'd better make a bigger hole."
Time was slowing down for Maks Leem. She was bleeding from dozens of little
cuts from the assassin droids' flechette sprayers. No one injury that severe,
but she had to parry the razor flakes headed for her eyes first, and a few of
the others seemed to nick her with every new spray of blades. She was a moving
target now, no longer stunned by the hard-sound throwers, but the flechette
launchers were a well-chosen weapon—impossible to parry completely, difficult to
wholly escape. The flechettes themselves were light enough that the droids
didn't have to worry about their own crossfire at all; the tiny razors tinged
and pattered off their transparisteel exoskeletons, leaving nothing but a few
minor nicks. For flesh and blood, the danger was considerably greater. Sooner or
later, if Maks got unlucky, one of the sprays would catch the tendons behind her
knees, or ankles, and then the situation would become very bad.
She felt slow. Out of shape. Now, in the crystal clarity of battle, it seemed
clear to her that her hatred for the war had manifested itself in a dull
subconscious resistance to the whole idea of fighting. She had trained, of
course she had. But not enough—not enough for this new scenario, in which the
Jedi had been debased, falling from their true calling as peacekeepers to
something very close to mercenaries.
She turned a high, twisting flip, taking the edge of a cloud of flechettes in
her flank, coming down like thunder, her lightsaber a wand of lightning. The
assassin droid's head was there for the taking, but she couldn't afford to do
that right now. She lopped the arm off instead, grabbing it as her feet touched
the ground. She cradled the severed arm into her body as she rolled past the
startled droid, and came up firing the blaster still attached to it, her fingers
closing over its metal fingers on the trigger, one shot, two, three four five
into the back of the droid shooting at Jai Maruk, each pulse of diamond light
hitting the exact same spot until its armor blew out from the inside.
Fire rushed like blood from its mouth and eyes.
In the midst of mayhem Jai looked fiercely happy now, at home, as if violence
were his true element, and this moment a consummation long awaited. His face was
streaming with blood but he gave her a quick grin and ran his lightsaber through
the chest of another assassin. She wished she could feel that gladness. A little
touch of battle madness would have helped, but she was not formed that way. As
hard as she tried to retain her Jedi serenity, sadness kept welling up from the
core of her body, leaking out from a hundred cuts to stain her robes.
Another volley of razors caught her from behind and she went down to one
knee.
"Come on!" Scout cried. "We've got to help!" She put her hands on the railing
overlooking the main concourse and started to jump over, only her muscles were
thinking faster than her head and weren't ready to risk the eight-meter drop.
She whirled and looked at Whie. "You go over from here—you can make it. I'll
take the stairs—it's better if we come from different directions anyway. Solis,
you come with me!"
"No," the droid said.
Scout turned. "What?"
The droid shrugged. "Not my fight."
"But they're dying down there!"
"Animals die. It's what you do," he said. "Machines, on the other hand, run
for as long as they are kept in good repair. In the big picture, my life may not
mean much, but I have worked and schemed and bullied and cheated for four
hundred standard years to keep it. I've become attached to my own existence, and
I won't risk it for something as pointless as delaying meat's inevitable end."
Scout's expression of outrage faded slowly to something like contempt. "If
that's your idea of life, you're welcome to it."
Fidelis shuddered in wholehearted agreement. "Shocking lack of values.
There's one in every production run," he said primly, shaking his head.
Scout saved her breath for running, and sprinted for the stairs.
Behind her, Whie put one hand on the banister, scanning the fight below to
decide where he would come out of his roll. Four of the new droids were making
their way toward the stairs. All right—if the fight was going to come to them,
so much the better. He could run along the top of the rail, take a flying leap,
and come down on the two hindmost. Hopefully the distraction would give Scout an
opening to do some damage to the two in front.
A steel band closed over his wrist. He looked down. Fidelis's hand was over
his own, pinning him to the railing as effectively as if he had been nailed
there. "What are you doing?"
"It's not safe," Fidelis said.
"But—"
"I didn't wait ten years outside the Jedi Temple only to let you throw your
life away in a pointless defense of a couple of outnumbered Jedi," the droid
said, as if explaining something to a small child. "If the droids don't get
them, Asajj Ventress will."
"You're crazy!" Whie went for his lightsaber, only to find his other hand
trapped inside the droid's iron grip. "No, Master. Only sensible."
Whie heard Scout cry, "I'm coming, Master Maruk!" An instant later she came
pelting down the stairs, taking them four at a time, lightsaber blazing in her
hand. Did she even realize she was about to meet a party of four assassin
droids? "Look," he hissed, "if I am your master, you have to do what I tell you,
right?"
"Ah!" Fidelis chirped. "Now we are getting somewhere. You admit you are my
master, then?"
"Yes, yes! Anything you say, but now you have to let me go."
"Much better," Fidelis said complacently. "But I have to tell you, sir, in my
capacity as your adviser—a not inconsiderable part of the role of gentleman's
personal gentlething—entering this engagement is not a course of action I can
recommend. The odds are very poor, sir. Very poor indeed."
Scout had pelted down to the middle landing on the stairs when she found four
custom-armed assassin droids only ten meters away from her, and coming fast. She
skidded to a halt, looking around for Whie. Her eyes met his and she stared at
him, still safely back in the food court, with an expression of mingled fury and
surprise and dawning fear.
If she died, Whie knew, that look would haunt every breath he took for the
rest of his life.
Scout and the droids stared at one another for the space of three loud
heartbeats. Then the girl turned and raced right back up the stairs, dodging and
weaving, as blaster bolts whined and sizzled around her.
"Forgive me," Fidelis was remarking, "But I do consider
giving advice to be
part of my duties."
"Let me go!" Whie roared.
Fidelis hesitated, torn between his orders and his duty. "I wouldn't," Solis
said quietly.
But the moment of indecision was enough. Whie used the Force to lever open
the droid's fingers, vaulted up into the air, and sprinted along the guardrail
for the stairs. "I'm coming, Scout!"
The girl turned, distracted for a split second by the sound of her name. A
blaster bolt caught her a glancing blow and she hit the stairs hard.
8
The docking bay deck was the dim underbelly of Phindar Spaceport. The big
craft—commercial transports, passenger ferries, military troopships—hung outside
the port proper, using small extendable walkways to offload their personnel.
Smaller craft, from single-pilot intersystem hoppers to luxury yachts holding up
to thirty passengers, came in through the gaping jaws of the bay doors to dock
inside the spaceport proper. After settling with a clang on the reinforced deck,
they would wait for air and pressure to cycle into the bay, and then let the
pilot droids park their craft according to their filed flight plans. Asajj
Ventress, preferring a spot near the doors so she could make a quick getaway,
had chosen not to utilize the docking service. In fact, a sprinkle of nuts,
washers, scrap metal, and smoldering lubricant was all that remained of the
valet droids.
The security cams hung from the ceiling like detached eyeballs, pitiful
smoking tangles of wire with knobs of smoking glass at the end. Had they still
been working, they would have beheld two rather remarkable figures moving toward
one another. From one side, weaving swiftly through the parked starcraft, came
Master Yoda, with a green light of battle gleaming dangerously in his eyes.
Yoda—a different Yoda—was also tottering down the ladder from Last Call's
cockpit. This Yoda looked rather the worse for wear, bruised, dirty, and
dehydrated. His ankles and wrists were still bound together, and one of his ears
had come unstuck, so it now hung sadly from the side of his head, furling and
unfurling in little jerks and twitches.
The first Yoda held up his lightsaber like a glow rod and studied the
battered parody of himself. "Hm," he snuffed. "Worse for wear, I look!"
"By the stars," Palleus Chuff croaked, "it's me! I mean, you!"
Somewhere in the murky distance came a flash of light, followed by a series
of distinct thumps: one, two, three, four assassin droids dropping the eight
meters from the main concourse to the docking bay deck.
"Now two of us there are," Yoda grunted. "Soon to be zero, unless move
quickly we can." He wiggled his fingers, and Palleus Chuff watched, astonished,
as the tape lashing his wrists and ankles together began to unwind itself. He
yelped as the loops of tape suddenly tore themselves free, taking bands of body
hair with them. "Might sting," Yoda added.
Metal footsteps clattered toward them in the dark.
"It's Ventress!" Chuff said. "She's come here to kill you. She took me
prisoner, thinking I was you, but somehow she found out you were going to be
here, and she's come for the real thing. She made one miscalculation, though,"
he gasped triumphantly. "Left me alone in the ship. Didn't think I could do her
any harm, oh no! Not Chuff the puny actor. But I have programmed her horrible
ship to self-destruct!"
A blaster bolt lit the darkness like sudden lightning. Yoda parried it.
"Self-destruct?"
"Yes! I do the same thing in Jedi!—Act three, scene two, when you were
escaping the Tholians . . ." Chuff paused. "Do you think maybe you should put
that sword out? It seems like a natural tar—"
Yoda used the Force to whirl them both high into the air and over Last Call
as a hail of flechettes pinged and pattered off the starship's side. "Set this
to explode?" Yoda said again.
"Yes—I set a countdown to engage the hyper . . ." Palleus Chuff paused.
"Although, you know, in Jedi! the ship is in open space and you have an escape
pod. Do you think having Last Call's engines fire and then boost for a random
hyperdrive jump from inside the space station might be a bad thing?"
It was hard to get a thorough read on the Jedi Master's expression in the
strobing flash of nearly continuous blasterfire, but Chuff, who had studied vids
of Yoda for months, thought the old Jedi's crumpled face looked a trifle on the
sour side.
Back on the main level, Whie leapt off the balcony railing with a loud cry,
hoping to distract the assassin droid aiming a flechette launcher at Scout. The
droid turned, the gun's throaty chatter roared out, and a hail of razor-sharp
tracers came keening through the air at Whie. He twisted, using the Force to
deflect the stream of metal up into the ceiling. The station's artificial
gravity was only 0.69g, heightening the boy's appearance of weightless grace. He
came down spinning, his lightsaber a furious green blur. The four droids on the
stairs scattered: two tumbled down below Whie; the other two dived up toward
Scout. One grabbed for her ankle, meaning to crush it in its metal hand, only to
have the whining blue blur of her lightsaber slash the hand off at its metal
wrist.
The droid held up the severed stump of its arm. Sparks jumped from its gears
chest, but it turned sideways, letting her blade pass harmlessly through space,
and swung at her, a tremendous blow that would have taken her head off if the
droid's hand had still been attached to the end of its arm. As it was, its stump
whipped past her face, hissing and spitting sparks.
Years of training with Iron Hand kicked in. Dropping her lightsaber without
hesitation, Scout grabbed the passing stump, tucked it close to her body, and
dropped, spinning, to the stairs, using the droid's own momentum to hurl its
massive body over the banister. It seemed to hang in space, and then plunged
with a crash to the floor six meters down.
"Good throw," said a metallic voice. Scout turned around just as the second
droid's hand closed around her throat.
Maks Leem lay gasping on the spaceport concourse, bleeding from a hundred
cuts. Her lightsaber lay where she had dropped it when the last flechette pulse
had turned her sword hand into chopped meat.
Two assassin droids were left of the six that had been assigned to take out
her and Jai Maruk.
Traveling incognito through the spaceport, she and Jai hadn't been carrying
any weapons that could fire at range, and their opponents took full advantage of
this fact. Stupid battle droids would press the attack with any available
weapon; these super assassin droids had stayed maddeningly out of range, quite
content to shoot from a distance, shielding themselves behind white-faced ticket
agents or security guards they caught crawling away. Good programming, or good
tactical briefing, or both.
The droid whose blast had finally brought her down threw aside the
jump-shuttle pilot it had been using as a shield and approached to within five
meters. No clos
er, of course. Blood dripped between the Gran's three eyes as she
looked at her lightsaber. Not sure what point there would be pulling it to her
with the Force. She'd have to fight left-handed, and the merciless droid would
stay far away anyhow, waiting for time and numbers to tell.
"You will be disassembled," it remarked, raising its blaster.
"I know," Maks said. "But not by you." And she used the Force to make two
quick tweaks in succession: the first, the hard one, crimping the barrel of his
blaster. That was difficult: but once the metal squeezed shut, pulling the
weapon's trigger and holding it down was child's play.
The blaster blew up, taking the droid's hand with it and knocking it on its
back.
Then she did the same thing to the heavy-caliber blaster built into its
shoulder. That one blew its chest open, sending gobbets of hot metal rocketing
through the concourse.
Jai Maruk turned at the first blast, grinning in fierce triumph. When the
second explosion came, he was ready. He reached out with the Force, shaping the
blast to guide the molten fragments of the exploding droid like smoking
cannonballs into the body of the assassin that had been tormenting him. The
impact knocked the droid back into a wall, banging a dent into the
transparisteel sheeting. Jai used the Force to keep the droid pinned there, and
raced over to him. Driven by a rage perilously close to the dark side, his
lightsaber flashed and fell in a mighty cut, cleaving the assassin droid into
two smoking halves.
He stood over his enemy, gasping, breath rough in his throat. There was blood
in his mouth. He spat. It's just a machine, he told himself. Just a tool. His
real enemy was the mind that had bought and briefed these killers.
A single pair of hands clapped lazily in the almost deserted complex. "Well
done, Jedi," said a mocking voice.
Master Maruk turned slowly around. The big concourse was all but empty. A few
people cowered, terrified, behind the ticketing booths and baggage carousels.
Over by the information desk, Maks Leem had struggled to her knees. Splotches of
her blood spattered the tile floor around her, red on white. The shattered forms
of the five assassin droids they had destroyed lay scattered around the