The Cestus Deception (28 page)

Obi-Wan’s senses tingled and he whirled barely in time to see one of the infiltration droids fixing him in its sights. There was no place, no time to move, only time to raise his lightsaber, awaiting the deadly flash.

With an eye-numbing blast, the droid was struck from the other side. It staggered, long enough for Obi-Wan to close the gap and sever its treads. The mechanical monster reared back and then fell sideways, crushing segments of stalactite as it did.

He looked over at the spot where the saving blasts had been launched—and saw Doolb Snoil waving back, stubby arms bracing one of the portable cannons against his shell.

Despite their desperate straits Obi-Wan could not repress a smile. After all this time, Snoil had repaid his debt to the Jedi several times over, even if it meant disobeying orders—

Then a
crack
ing sound drew his attention to the ceiling. One of the stalactites had been weakened when the droid reared up. It separated from the ceiling and began to fall. “Snoil!” Obi-Wan cried out, but it was already too late. The barrister looked up just as the rock spear hit his shell, lancing through the outer toughness into the vulnerable flesh beneath.

Within seconds Obi-Wan was at his side. As he cradled Snoil’s heavy, fleshy head in his arms, the Vippit’s rapidly declining body temperature confirmed Obi-Wan’s worst fears. His friend was dying. Snoil’s eyestalks weaved up toward him. “I did it, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did.” Obi-Wan had never noticed the little flecks of color along Snoil’s neck. They were bright green and blue against the browning flesh, and they were growing dull even as he watched.

“If there is any combat bonus, make certain that my broodmates receive full measure… and…” His stalk-tip eyes grew dim and glazed. “And see that it isn’t taxed. The agreement we signed with the Republic, which my grandfather negotiated…,” he said proudly. He coughed a green bubble, and even before it burst he went still.

Obi-Wan laid Snoil’s head gently on the ground. “A great barrister, from a great line,” he said.

Then he returned to the fight.

Jangotat found himself trapped between a press of miners and an onrushing JK. Escape through the front cave seemed to be unimpeded, although instinct told him that enemy troops would be stationed in line of sight of the cave mouth, ready to pick off fleeing anarchists.

How had this disaster happened? General Kenobi had been correct: there was more here than met the eye.

Still, it was his duty to follow orders, and his inclination to protect unarmed and innocent civilians.

From a hiding point behind a massive stalagmite he fired at the droids again and again with his blaster rifle. The blue laser bolts sang off the outer casing, doing no damage. Resta and another Desert Wind fighter fired at it. The JK went at them, ensnaring the man in stun-cable as Resta sprang to the side with surprising agility.

Was that the only way to escape one of these demonic things? Sacrifice a friend?

A terrible crash shook the cave as another of the infiltration droids fell, and he took heart. The cave entrance rocked with another flash, followed by more screams. Bodies and wreckage flew back into the cavern, and smoke rolled. Screams and moans filtered out from beneath the rubble.

There. The trap had closed, and the pressure was crushing.

“Side caves!” someone yelled. The miners, farmers, and soldiers of Desert Wind scrambled back and away from the main action. Jangotat stood with his back against the wall as the miners fled into the side cavern. This entire mountain was honeycombed with such tunnels. There was no way an enemy could cover all of them. Many of his compatriots could escape to fight again another day… he hoped.

Another droid toppled and fell. Was that the third infiltration droid down? How many remained? If the blasts from outside stopped, they might have a chance. But they didn’t, and that meant they were dead in the water.

The sight of green fluid bubbling from Doolb Snoil’s crushed shell triggered a deep, hot wave of regret. The barrister had been a true asset. In his own way, the Vippit had even displayed courage.

He glimpsed the Jedi, magnificent and fearless in battle, leading others by word and example. Glimpses were all he could catch: they moved so swiftly from one hiding place or ambush spot to another, darting out to slash at a leg or protect an innocent farmer. His spirits soared. Perhaps—

Then to his dismay Jangotat spotted Sheeka Tull. When had
she
entered the cave? Why hadn’t he seen her? He knew that he should leave the main cave with the others, but Sheeka was cut off. She cowered behind a boulder, perhaps uncertain where to go.

“Sheeka!” he called to her. In the tumult his voice could not be heard. Only one thing to do—he dashed out and grabbed her, pulling them both behind a boulder as the last infiltration droid blasted in his direction. He heard himself scream, watched the world turn white, and then all sight and sound and sensation died away to darkness.

Sheeka Tull had argued with herself about coming to the celebration, not entirely comfortable with the deepening of her relationship with the clone trooper she now called Jangotat. It was all too possible that if she went to the camp, their relationship would grow more entangling still. But despite her misgivings she had gone, and now she was both horrified and glad of her decision.

The unexpected droid intrusion had overwhelmed her. She still shook almost uncontrollably. The droids were creatures of nightmare, and she felt her mind trying to shut down on her, attempting to surrender consciousness to save her the horror of painful death. Her feet froze to the ground as the giant droid locked its sights upon her. Her wind
whuff
ed out of her as something collided with her from the right side, and she was pulled down behind a boulder by none other than Jangotat himself. There was no doubt but that he had risked his life to save hers, shielding her body with his own. When a blaster chipped rock behind her it grazed Jangotat: his face contorted in agony and he bit through his own lip. His clothes peeled away in smoking scraps, exposing a badly scalded back. He rolled off her, unconscious, shirt and pants smoking. Dead?

No.
She checked. Merely stunned. Even half conscious, Jangotat’s hands cast about, as if searching for his rifle. She found it and placed it in his palms. His fingers curled around it, and he trembled, as if trying to awaken himself.

As if war was all he knew, or ever could know.

The yelling and screaming intensified to a ghastly peak, then died away. Another wall-shaking explosion followed, but she risked a peek.

Several of the recruits were engaged in heroic combat against a killer droid tall enough to graze the ceiling. Their combined blasts actually drove it back a step. To her left, a golden hourglass-shaped droid absorbed a similar volley with little apparent effect, tentacles casting about and bringing down one miner after another.

The side caves still looked clear. She dragged Jangotat over in their direction and was met halfway by a tall, thin, blond miner, Skot OnSon. She barely knew him. Yesterday he was a boy. Now his eyes were an old man’s.

“Can I help you get him out of here?” OnSon asked her, keeping one eye on the battle. The air was rent with eye-searing energy bolts.

“Okay.”

OnSon’s calm facade seemed to crack a bit. Was it the sight of Jangotat’s seared face? Was that what had unnerved the boy, even as he struggled to find courage? Or was he using this excuse to get out of the charnel house?

Together they pulled Jangotat toward safety and darkness. The tunnels behind them flashed with light. Screams echoed in the caves, even as they lost themselves in the labyrinthine twists and turns of the side tunnels, winding their way toward a dubious safety.

Obi-Wan led a group of six refugees into a side cave, shepherding them across the uneven floor through the darkness. Behind them, he heard the clank of a pursuing droid. His group had only three blasters. Two of its members were children. If they were lucky, the cave would narrow, such that the larger droids couldn’t pursue. Would one of the JKs spot them? If it did, they were most likely dead.

He brushed past webbing as he ran. Old? New? A few hand-size winged reptiles were suspended in one of them, and he remembered something that Kit had told him about the ARC’s first day in the caves. What was that?

“Gen’ Kenobi!” Resta called, jerking him out of his desperate memory scan. It took only a moment to see the threat: the cave had indeed narrowed, and blocking the exit were four gigantic cave spiders, staring at them with glowing red eyes.

How could he have forgotten! Kit may have driven the spiders out of the main caves, kept them away with sensors and proximity mines, but in fleeing, these unlucky humans had jumped from the griddle to the grave.

The spiders hissed, and Obi-Wan triggered his lightsaber. Spiders ahead. Droids behind. They were trapped, and perhaps all he could do now was sell his life dearly…

Then he realized that
the spiders weren’t hissing at them. No.
They were hissing at the approaching JK droid, and he understood why. It was behaving as it had in the arena, half a lifetime ago: dividing into segments that then gripped the ground like the limbs of a thick-legged, small-bodied spider. Perhaps they’d watched a JK cast a web at a fleeing human, and must have thought the droids to be some strange kind of arachnid, more natural competition than the offworlders.

The arachnid defense of their territory was automatic and devastating.

And the JKs seemed to accept the challenge. They cast tentacles, stunning several spiders, but others shot silk in cascades as the offworlders retreated to the shadows.

It was one of the most bizarre spectacles Obi-Wan had ever seen. The spiders could not stop the JK, but they could slow it with their silk, and by swarming it with smaller spiders. The air clouded with silk and stunned, smoking spiders but they came on and on. Obi-Wan managed to get his people out, but turned to watch the spiders as they made their stand.

The JK fired, pumping juice into the spiders until…

It’s running out of power!
Obi-Wan realized. It had probably defeated the equivilent of a hundred warriors, but was running out of power! Now the spiders rained more silk on it, and Obi-Wan screamed to his people to fire at the stalactites above the JK, burying it in rock and sticky strands. Even then, the JK trembled against the rock. Exhausted but refusing to give up, still trying to reach its enemies.

Unbelievable.

Obi-Wan faced the cave spider clan. An immense red female stepped slowly forward, sheltering her young. Obi-Wan and the female stared at each other, and in her eyes he saw awareness. They were not friends, not allies, but had faced a common enemy.

The matron bent her forward legs, bowing. Obi-Wan raised his lightsaber in salute. The matron backed away into the shadows with her brood.

“You’re letting them go?” one of the farmers breathed.

“We’re letting each other go,” he corrected. “No favors. Just respect.” The shadows had claimed the spider clan. One day soon the offworlders would be gone, and the caves would belong to the spiders. What then? Was there any way for the eight-legged folk to ever walk in the sun again?

Perhaps. There might be a way to finesse such an outcome. First, of course, he had to survive.

“Come on,” he said. “We’ve got to find a way out.”

Navigating twisting side tunnels, it took another exhausting hour for Sheeka to make her way back to the surface. For the first ten minutes, they heard distant explosions and screams. Then… nothing. The golden-haired young miner stayed with her the entire time, but as soon as he saw that she was in the clear, OnSon said, “I’ve got to go back.”

“No.” She clutched at his arm. “You’ll be killed.”

“Maybe. Maybe.” OnSon examined the wounded clone. “Take care of him. He fought well.” And he disappeared back down the tunnel.

Sheeka wiped her face, gritty with the rock dust that seemed to have ground its way into her body’s every crevice. It took her a few moments to orient herself. She was on the far side of the ridge. Good. This was where she had hidden
Spindragon.
An arc of light split the southern sky—the cave battle was continuing. The distant thunder of security assault ships filled her ears.

In the depths of those caves, sheer chaos had clawed its way into the living world. For a moment she was torn. Was there anything she could do? Were her friends being maimed and slaughtered, friends who might survive if she went to their aid? Then Jangotat groaned, and all options were reduced to one: find the trooper medical assistance immediately. Get help for the man who had protected her at the cost of his own flesh. She dragged him down over the rocks. Jangotat was semiconscious now. He shuddered with pain for a few minutes, and then fumbled with something at his belt. Almost immediately, his body relaxed. She panicked as he became a deadweight, but when he began to struggle to his feet she figured he had self-administered some kind of pain-killer that left him dreamy but still able to walk.

She supported his shoulder, trying not to touch any of the spots seared by the droid’s blast. He stumbled along beside her, knees buckling and ankles turning. Then he began to carry some of his own weight, and for that she was grateful.

They stumbled down the side of the defile. There, hidden in a maze of shadows, was
Spindragon.
Although by now the muscles in her legs and back screamed for release, Sheeka ignored them and hauled Jangotat toward the ship, and safety.

“Leave… me…,” she heard him whisper, and it alarmed her that some part of her silently agreed, wanted to give up. But Sheevis Tull, the same man who had taught her to fly, had taught her to ignore the weak and traitorous voices in her head. She disregarded them and bent to the task at hand.
Breathe, pull, rest. Breathe, pull, rest…

She lost count of the cycles of pulling and breathing, but a moment came when
Spindragon
’s autopilot sensed her proximity and automatically extended the ramp, a sensible, albeit costly modification. She climbed up the incline, Jangotat gripping at her with a weakening hand. With every minor jolt, he grunted as if the pain stripped his nerves raw.

A few more staggering steps brought them into the ship’s interior. Sheeka loaded Jangotat into a crash seat, and initiated the ship’s warm-up sequence.

“Don’t worry,” she called back to him. “We’re getting out of here.”

He seemed to smile at her weakly, and made a closed-fist gesture she had seen him make to other clones. She thought that it meant “good to go.” Gritting her teeth, Sheeka turned back to her controls. She would have to deal with him, of course, but the first task was to get out of the mountains in one piece.

Her scanners indicated that a quartet of enemy ships was sweeping toward her from the north. Time to move.

All systems flushed and ready, Sheeka started her engines and lifted
Spindragon
from the ground, whirling her in place as the first of the pursuit ships appeared over the broken stone horizon.

Their intentions were announced with the first bolt that sizzled in her direction, striking sparks and splashing slag from the rocks.

Her face tightened in a fighting snarl: the daughter of Sheevis Tull was not so easily killed. She had made low-altitude runs through the mountain passes more times than she wanted to remember, every one of them wickedly dangerous. Always in the past she had risked arrest, imprisonment, revocation of her flying privileges. This was different. This time, it was life and death.

Without further delay, Sheeka accelerated her ship toward the south, scrambling her transponder beacon so that it would broadcast no identifying signals. Now the only thing she had to worry about was being shot down in a blazing fireball.

Of course, that was a pretty big
only.

If only she had armament! But
Spindragon
went in and out of cities too frequently, was scanned on a weekly basis. The Five Families were terrified of another uprising, and forbade suborbital craft from carrying mounted weapons.

The pursuit craft were two-person security units, built for long-range recon and pursuit of… well, of suborbital ships like hers. All muscle and brain. But it just might be possible to meet their challenge…

Unlike her pursuers, Sheeka Tull knew the mines.

She rose up, flipped, and dived into an opening that was little more than an angry gash in the desert floor. With stomach-wrenching speed she dropped straight down. At the last moment she straightened out, making a sharp right turn.

The security ships were only seconds behind her. Her task was to get far enough ahead of them to break visual contact. The heavy mineral deposits would reduce scanner efficiency. Given that, there was an excellent chance they’d be confused by the tunnels, and confusion shifted the odds in her favor.

But first—

A flash bright enough to stun the eye washed the tunnel from wall to wall. Sheeka screamed and threw a hand in front of her face in a reflexive motion that almost cost her her pitch and yawl control. She spun
Spindragon
sideways to slip between two enormous underground pillars, then zipped around a corner and sank to the cave floor swiftly, killing all lights.

She could hear them, but they could not hear her. Distant searchlights splashed around the broken rock walls as they slowed to a crawl.

“Where… are we?” Jangotat gasped.

Sheeka slipped out of her captain’s chair and walked quietly to him. “Shhh,” she said. “They can find us with sound.”

“That may be a problem,” he gasped.

“Why?”

“Because I think I’m going to scream.” Despite the pain his lips curled in a bitter, self-mocking smile. “I’m out of pain meds.”

She wanted to hug him. Instead she said: “I think we’ll make it. Hold on.”

Sheeka had a few tricks up her sleeve, and one of them was specifically designed to misdirect scanners: a trick that would blind her and the pursuing security ships as well.

The difference was that she had been down here before, and they had not.

She hoped.

“I’m going to try something,” she said. “If it doesn’t work, then—”

“Try it,” he said, and closed his eyes against another fit of shakes.

“For luck,” she said. She bent and, wiping the blood from his chin, kissed him firmly on the lips. His eyes widened in pleased surprise, then she gave a crooked grin and went back to her captain’s chair.

No way to prevent this next part from being dangerous. She could see a searchlight off in the distance, reflected between a pair of stalactites, and figured that this would be her best chance. Sheeka enriched the fuel mixture absurdly, until the unburned hydrocarbons gushed from
Spindragon
’s rear as dense, black smoke.

Within seconds the lights had turned in her direction, and she struggled against a surge of panic. Then she calmed her breathing and lifted off from the ground a meter or two—much more was impossible because of the low ceiling. But she moved. Yes… even without her running lights, the reflected illumination revealed a turn up ahead. It was just as she remembered. If only the rest of it conformed to memory as well…

She turned the corner just in time: a sizzling energy bolt slagged the wall just behind her. The passageway churned with dense, oily smoke. The pursuing ship slid past them, right through the murk, and collided with the wall in a flame-blossom that temporarily turned a smoky night into day.

Just as she thought: the ships were maneuverable and fast, but not well armored, and with no crash shields. The entire cavern glowed fiercely as the ship exploded.

Her chance. Spewing more smoke, Sheeka took the opportunity to cruise low, knowing that the other ships would home in on the destruction.

And there came one now, prowling like some kind of predator. Smoke belched from
Spindragon
’s rear as the engine labored on its absurdly rich mix, but she knew that the cloud was large enough to conceal her.

The approaching ship had twin beacons in the fore, so that it looked like some kind of lurking predator. An energy bolt ripped through the smoke and slammed against the wall, causing a rock slide she could hear and feel but not see. She tensed as another bolt sizzled by, but didn’t move. The search ship was just questing about. It didn’t know where she was.

But Sheeka did. Just barely, but she did. She lifted up and pivoted her ship about. She knew where another exit lay, and if she was careful, she just might make it.

Both front and rear viewscreens showed nothing as she crept away. Occasionally she caught the barest glimmer of a headlight, but then as she turned the corner once and then twice she left that behind and moved as quickly as she could toward the exit, trying not to think of the deadly search behind her, or wonder what had become of the Jedi and their proud plans.