Yoda (19 page)

Something wet on his neck. Blood. Blood was pouring from his earholes.

Focus.

A crackle of energy passed between him and Maks Leem as the tactical tractor beam smacked the R2 unit into the air like a tin can blasted by a slugthrower bullet. Then the beam steadied and slammed hard to the floor, the R2 can clamped tight in an electromagnetic vise.

The droids knew Master Yoda was in there.

They were hunting him down.

Beside Jai, Master Leem held out her hand. Her lips were pulled back over her long, narrow jaw in a grimace of concentration. Her lightsaber flew into her hand. With one swing she cut the head off one of the little metal poles that held the line-divider ribbons. The chunk of metal went spinning into the air. The Gran grabbed it in her other hand, spun, and hurled it through one of the two hard-noise projector dishes. It exploded in a shower of sparks.

Jai couldn't actually tell if the other one was still making noise. It was as if the auditory section of his brain had blown a fuse—everything happening fast, but soundlessly. Finally the rattling feeling inside his skull subsided, and he managed to find a still point, an almost peaceful center to the maelstrom. A lifetime of training took over, and he was running, leaping, twisting in the air through a slicing hail of flechettes that opened a dozens cuts on his body. Everything crystal clear and soundless, as if it were happening behind transparisteel. Curiously impersonal now: the last battle of his life.

He dropped in front of the droid with the second hard-sound projector, and his lightsaber carved it into smoking ruin.

The terminal was a pandemonium of screams and shouts. The crowd, seeing Jai drop to his knees with blood streaming from his ears, had lost its tenuous sense of order, and people were now scrambling witlessly through the spaceport concourse like mermyns running from a burning nest.

Up on the second level by the food court, Scout tore her eyes away from the madhouse and started thinking again.
“Hey, Major!”
she yelled at the SPCB commander. “That looks like some pretty dangerous Sentient Property down there.
Start shooting!
”

The men looked uncertainly at the indecisive Major Quecks. One SPCB trooper raised his blaster rifle and sighted down into the main concourse. A Confederacy assassin droid looked up, and half a second later the SPCB trooper toppled forward with a burn crater where his face had been.

Major Quecks stared at the body. “That's it,” he said unsteadily. He drew the neural-net eraser from his side holster and covered Solis and Fidelis with a shaking hand. “Take these units into custody and retreat until reinforcements arrive.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Solis said. “Except for the first part.” There was a brief blur of motion, inconceivably fast, like a repeating blaster striking, and suddenly the major was looking from the broken fingers of his right hand to the neural-net eraser now in Solis's comfortable grip. “Do you want to live?” the droid asked.

“Y-y-yes!”

“Me, too,” the droid said, and he crushed the weapon into scrap. It wasn't a slow squeeze, metal buckling and shrieking. It was instant and effortless, as if the eraser had fallen under the gigantic footpads of an AT-PT transport.

The SPCB troops broke and ran.

Another troop of assassin droids came down the walkway from the docking terminals. A few little sirens and blinking lights saluted them as they passed through the spaceport metal detectors in two groups of four. Between them paced a lithe bald woman with a tattooed skull. She was smiling as she came. It was not a pretty smile.

The eighteen assassin droids—the full complement that
Last Call
could carry in her outboard crèches—now split into four distinct groups. Four of the newcomers stayed with Asajj. Four others peeled off and headed upstairs to secure the food court area. Five were closely engaged with the two Jedi, where the one Jai had taken down lay in a heap of smoking metal. Two were operating the tactical tractor beam, holding the R2 unit pinned to the floor a safe distance away, while two others approached just close enough to pitch sonic grenades to within centimeters of the droid's casing. The grenades went off with a churning, concussive vibration that buckled the floor underneath the R2 and made its casing writhe and ripple.

There was something anticlimactic about the business, Ventress felt. Part of her would far rather have taken on the old Jedi: Asajj Ventress and Master Yoda, lightsaber-to-lightsaber, winner take all. But Dooku, though an elegant man with a profound sense of the aesthetic, never confused flair with efficiency, and never accepted style in lieu of substance. Killing Yoda was the thing, and if it was messy and brutal and somehow perfunctory, it remained far better than giving him any chance to stay alive.

Still, it didn't make the next part especially pleasant. Asajj was not squeamish by anyone's standards, but she was not looking forward to seeing what a pair of high-decibel sonic grenades would have done to an old body trapped in such a metal shell—if indeed the little cripple had survived the opening blast of hard sound and subsequent tractor beam smack-around. But it had to be done. Flanked by her guard, Asajj approached the R2 unit, drew her twin lightsabers, and carved the metal canister opened with a flourish, so it fell slowly into pieces, like a flower shedding petals in the breeze.

It was a fine, dramatic moment, completely spoiled by the fact that the canister was empty.

Asajj blinked. There, where the bottom of the R2 unit should have been, was a neat circular hole. Yoda had carved an escape hatch through the floor and dropped into the dim ship's parking level below.

Ventress growled like a sand panther that had missed its kill and slashed another ring around Yoda's escape hatch so the assassin droids could fit through. “Get
down
there!” she snarled. The first of her droid commanders dropped into the hole feetfirst and disappeared.

There was a
thump.

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

T
he 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 and wires. Scout lunged forward, trying to skewer it through the heavily armored 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 closer, 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 concourse. The sixth lay twitching and sparking on the floor by the stairs. It kept trying to stand up, but something was broken in its leg or hip joints. Instead of rising, it scrabbled around and around in slow jerky circles, like a child's broken toy.

There was no sign of Master Yoda.

In all the shattered scene, one figure remained brisk and erect: Asajj Ventress, as tall, slim, elegant, and deadly as he remembered her. “Ah—it's seventeen, isn't it?” she said pleasantly. A pair of sabers spat and blazed into hissing life in her hands. “Now I'm glad the droids didn't finish you off. That would have muddled my count.”

“You number your victims?” Jai said. “That must take an army of accountants.”

“Oh, I'm really a one-woman show, and I like to travel light,” Ventress said, flexing her wrists and cutting quick arcs of brightness in the air. “I only count my Jedi, and I find dead reckoning is enough for that.”

Down in the docking bay, Palleus Chuff had set
Last Call
to engage her engines after ten minutes. At least five of those minutes must have gone by, and the more the actor thought about those giant engines firing inside the enclosed bay, the more he thought that maybe the whole idea hadn't been such a great one.

Yoda was working very fast. The
Call
was anchored to the deck with high-pull magnets on the bottom of five support legs. The old Jedi was chopping them off one by one. “Why are you doing that?” Chuff asked, peering forward so his head was right under the corner of the ship now without support.

Yoda squeaked and puffed out his round cheeks with the sudden effort of using the Force to keep the
Call
from crushing Chuff into a grease spot on the docking bay floor. “Step back!” he barked.

“You don't have to get huffy about it.” A stream of superheated plasma arced toward Chuff, curving mysteriously away at the last minute. “Whoa! That was lucky!”

Yoda snarled. He grabbed the actor's wrist and flipped him under the starship, letting the corner come crashing down where they had been standing a tenth of a second before. The air crackled and pinged as a line of flechettes tore into the ship's hull.

“Don't you think it would be better to take out these droids?” Chuff squeaked. “Not that I would try to teach you your business, but under the circumstances—”

A sonic grenade came bounding under the ship's belly. With a swat of the Force, Yoda sent it rocketing out again. “If the ship's engines fire, tear the spaceport apart it will,” he grunted.

“Oh,” Chuff said, crestfallen. “I guess I hadn't thought—”

“True!” Yoda grunted, and with another sudden twitch of the Force, the two of them were stuck to the ship's underside as a line of plasma fire swept the deck where they had just been standing. An instant later they dropped back to the floor, now hot underfoot.

“I will deal with the
machines,
” Yoda said, eyes twinkling. He turned off his lightsaber and passed it to Chuff. “Take this. Cut off the last leg you must, so ship out of the docking bay I can push. Then get to the turbolifts.”

“Me!” the actor said. “But—”

Yoda held Chuff's hands, clasping them around the lightsaber. “Live your part, you can. Be a Jedi hero, you must!” And somehow, strength and courage and confidence seemed to flow from the old one's hands, and Chuff felt more alive than he had ever been. As if courage were a fire, and he was standing too close to Yoda not to burn.

He felt his own eyes gleam and his own mouth curve up into Yoda's Merry Havoc smile. “May the Force be with you, Master Yoda.”

The old Jedi cackled. “It usually is!”

Then the chattering sound of a railgun bit into the dim docking bay, gouging a line of sparks out of the floor, and Yoda was gone. An instant later one of the assassin droids was picked up as if by an invisible hand and hurled into a comrade. Tracers of railgun fire converged on a shadowy figure flitting away from Chuff.

How much time left,
the actor wondered.
Three minutes? Two?
He drew a deep breath. Quietly he crept toward the
Call
's last magnetic anchor.

The docking bay was filled with a grinding, scraping noise as a single-pilot stunt craft some distance away began to drag across the floor. Yoda was drawing the droids away.

Chuff limped over to the last leg of the ship. After days trussed up in Ventress's hold, his whole body felt stiff, sore, and awkward. The skin in the middle of his back was crawling, expecting the burst of blasterfire that would cut him down. He forced himself to ignore it, determined not to let Yoda down.

Muzzle flashes lit the far end of the bay like continuous lightning, and a sonic grenade went off, adding its bass growl to the whine and chatter of the railguns. Without so much as a lightsaber, Master Yoda was giving the assassin droids all they could handle.

When Chuff got to the last stanchion, he had a sudden moment of panic, sure he wouldn't know how to turn the lightsaber back on. He tabbed what would have been the power button on the prop he had used for 1,437 performances of
Jedi!
To his delight the weapon hissed immediately to life. “By the stars,” he murmured, feeling his best Knowing Yoda Smile creep onto his face, “the Force
is
with me.”