Quickly he slashed through the support, turned off the lightsaber so it wouldn't give away his position, and threw himself backward as a sudden stuttering flare of tracer fire whined overhead.
The
Call
settled on the deck with a resounding crash, free of her magnetic constraints.
By the time Chuff made it to the turbolift, the countdown chrono running in his head said
Last Call
's engines were going to roar to life any second now. He had a sudden image of what that would mean: rippling bands of magnetic energy and fusion bursts pulsing through the hold, the ship smashing blindly into walls. Energy building for the blind jump to hyperspace, and Force help anyone caught in a confined space with that.
Chuff swallowed. Playing the hero with Yoda's own lightsaber in his hands he had felt shaky courage everywhere, but now the courage was draining fast and only the shaking remained. He curled up in a corner and turned his face to the wall so he wouldn't see the first gleam as the
Call
's engines flickered to life.
A hand touched him on the shoulder. He gasped, spun, and saw Yoda's merry eyes looking at him. Yoda grabbed Chuff and dived for the lift as a line of flechettes chopped into the wall where they'd been standing.
Lights flickered on throughout
Last Call,
and a deep humming throb began to build in her engines. The ship scraped across the docking bay floor blind, gathering speed, and then with a deafening metal scream punched into the space station wall. The
Call
jerked through the opening and tore free in a shower of transparisteel, insulation, and sparking wires. She picked up speed, angling away from the station as her preliminary thrusters kicked in.
Explosive decompression sucked all the air out of the docking bay, plucking chairs, papers, tools, small craft, and most importantly the four assassin droids, and flinging them into the black vault of space. The howling wind nearly jerked Chuff out of the lift tube to follow them, but Master Yoda's hand held him back. A pocket of air remained in the lift, held there by Yoda's will.
Out in the long dark of space, the assassin droids spun, tumbling slowly as they drifted farther and farther away, until their erratic blasterfire was only the twinkling of distant lights.
Yoda turned to Chuff. “Thank you,” he said.
Back on the staircase between the main concourse and the food court, the killer droid's metal hand was cold around Scout's throat. She felt her vertebrae creak as it slowly lifted her off the ground by her neck. Whie was staring at her. Two other droids lay in pieces around him. “Put away your weapon,” the droid told Whie.
“Don't do it,” Scout gasped. “I'm not importâ” The droid's fingers tightened just a fraction, choking off any kind of speech. She could barely get air. With a lifetime's experience of choke holds, she figured she would be unconscious in thirty seconds. Unless the droid decided to squeeze once, hard, of course; then she'd be dead.
Whie studied the situation. For once he was even breathing hard. He gave a little nod, and the flame of his lightsaber guttered and went out. “Hurt her and I willâ¦
disassemble
you.”
“That is irrelevant,” the droid said in its monotonous voice. “Only the mission is relevant. You must not interfere with the mission.”
A faint black ring was forming at the edge of Scout's vision. She fought to keep conscious. The droid was standing sideways on the stairs, holding her out from its body with mechanical ease, a clear warning to Whie, who stood five steps below.
There was something odd about the side of the droid's head. Scout blinked and forced herself to focus. Yes, there it was: a tiny red dot, like the point of a glow rod beam, centered on the side of the droid's head. Odd.
“Is there a problem here?” Fidelis said, picking his way fussily down the stairs.
“Any interference with the mission will result in the termination of this unit,” the droid said, emphasizing its point with a squeeze that wrung a strangled squeak out of Scout.
Fidelis approached slowly. “The girl is of no interest to me. I serve only Master Malreaux, who stands behind you. You and your comrades appear to have offered violence to him.”
“He tried to interfere with the mission,” the droid said. It didn't seem to notice the little red dot on its forehead. “Anyone who interferes with the mission must be suppressed. Stand back, or you, too, will be disassembled.”
“That's hardly polite,” Fidelis said. His fingers shot out, plunged through the assassin droid's eyeholes, and tore its head off.
At the same instant, the green blur of Whie's lightsaber flashed, and Scout fell to the ground with the assassin's severed hand still around her neck. Half a meter away, she could see the severed gears and wires in the stump of its wrist trying to close the hand and crush her throat.
The headless, handless machine lurched to its feet.
“I think not,” Fidelis said. The gentleman's personal gentlething plunged his hand down through the assassin droid's neck coupling and drew it back out holding the droid's innards, trailing tubes and wires like a heart ripped out with its ventricles still pumping. Fidelis tightened his hand with the same instant crushing force that had pulverized the SPCB soldier's gun, reducing the killer droid's innards to a gleaming lump the size of a sugar cube.
The droid crashed to the stairs like a pile of scrap metal.
“Cheap thugs,” Fidelis sniffed. “Terribly underbred.”
Whie was staring at his servant. “What
are
you?”
“Your gentleman's personal gentlething, sir.”
“Um, a little help here?” Scout gasped. Whie stopped gawping and used the Force to prize open the metal fingers clenched around her throat.
Scout sucked in a great gulp of air. Stale, canned, recycled air it might be, but no ocean breeze had ever tasted so sweet. She looked at the pieces of droid scattered down the stairs. Whie had been doing some neat sword work while she was falling down and trying to break metal hands with her throat. “Thank you for the rescue, handsome prince.”
Whie grinned. Scout decided that when he wasn't trying to be Serene and Above It All, he actually had a pretty likable face. He grabbed her hand and pulled her up. “All part of a day's work, princess.”
They looked down from their vantage point on the stairs. There was no sign of the little R2 unit in which Master Yoda had been hiding. The spaceport concourse was littered with droid debris. The ferroceramic floors were gouged and charred. Near Maks Leem they were spattered with blood. A few Phindians were still trying to crawl from the area. Distant sirens were ringing. There was a great muffled crash from somewhere down in the docking bay.
Jai and Maks were in trouble. Master Leem was trying to force herself to her feet, but even from this distance they could see from her unsteady, swaying movements that she was fighting to stay conscious. Thirty meters away, Jai Maruk was in a fierce fight with Asajj Ventress, his one lightsaber, sky blue, matched against a pair of blood-red blades. Asajj was winning.
Whie and Scout looked at one another in dismay. “Let's go!” Scout said.
Jai Maruk was deaf, moving in a haze of white noise that grew gradually softer until it was just the faintest hiss, the sound of blood running under his skin.
He had never fought this hard in his life. The droids had been just a warm-up, a stretching exercise, costing him a cup of blood and a little mobility moving to his right, thanks to a flechette in his hip.
In the eleven and a half weeks since he had seen Ventress the first time, he had gone through their meeting again and again, cataloging every mistake, analyzing everything he could remember from that first savage encounter. Back on Coruscant, he had come to understand that he had underestimated her. For the first few passes of their encounter he had been looking to disarm her; by the time he realized his mistake, she had taken the initiative and was driving him back with a relentless attack. His parries had become wild, and eventually this overswinging had eroded his defensive posture and his balance.
He had imagined the rematch a hundred times: contemplated which opening stances to use, which attacks would be most successful, which of his strengths he could play to. Her mastery of the two-sword form was admirable, but in his experience such fighters tended to rely too much on their blades, and pay too little attention to the Force.
There was only one thing he had never fully admitted into his analysis. She was better than he was.
Just.
Better.
On the long flight home it had been easy to look away from that fact. As he lay on his cot in the Jedi Temple, planning combinations and footwork, he had forgotten this one, seemingly critical detail.
She was better.
Faster. More elegant. Better footwork. More precise with her blades. Succumbing to the dark side of the Force might be a poor life decision, but even her touch with the Force was better than his: more powerful, more subtle, more nuanced, andâthis was the hardest thing to admitâmore deeply understood. She understood her own nature and skills and weaknesses better than Jai knew himself.
Just better.
Like a dream, that knowledge had faded from him as soon as he left Vjun. It was nothing he could bear to believe. But now, like a nightmare forgotten during the day but creeping back at night, the profound truth that Ventress
was
going to kill him was piercing Jai Maruk's understanding, hard and sharp as a knife blade driving home.
After only three passes she had scored a long wound up his arm when his parry had been too late coming. By then it was already evident that skill was not going to save him. He tried trickery, using the Force to pick up a piece of a broken droid and hurl it at her from behind. Somehow she felt it coming, twisted like an Askajian dancer, and sent the chunk of metal screaming into him. He tried to bat it away but succeeded only in slicing the metal in two, and one of the halves had hit him very hard in the right leg.
He switched from trickery to pure will. He had won that way before, too. As a small boy in the Temple, sheer implacable will had been his trump card. He had won staring contests from the age of seven because he was simply willing to keep his eyes open while they burned and ran with tears, staring relentlessly until the pain was too much for his opponent. That was Jai Maruk. The Hawk-bat, they called him, because of that fierce wild stare.
It wasn't enough.
He hated that. This woman was evil. Despicable. He had dedicated his entire life to the principles of justice, to truth and knowledge, to honing his whole body into a kind of blade, a sword-spirit, keen and quick.
And it wasn't enough.
This woman, younger than him by five years or more, this spiteful mocking killer was just better than he was, and he hated that. With a black fury he attacked, driving her back, letting go of himself in a way he never had before, battering her down, half blind and mad with hate. He pressed her hard across the blood-spotted floor.
There was a great crash, the whole concourse rippled, and he lunged high, driving Ventress before him to where poor Maks Leem, that good, kind, dying partner, stood bleeding her life away at the edge of a pit cut into the floor. She was soft and she was going to die for it, because at the end of the day it was the killers who were hardest.
Ventress was smiling. Her mouth moved. He couldn't hear her, of course, but he could follow the motion of her lips.
Good,
she was saying.
That's it, seventeen.
Ventress whirled, almost casually, and cut a smoking line across Master Leem's belly. The Gran sank to her knees. She didn't even look at the wound. She was staring at Jai, and her three eyes were sad, sad. Her lips said,
Don't, Jai.
Another grinding crash: he couldn't hear it, but he felt it through the soles of his feet. Then there was a hurricane in the concourse, a mighty wind as all the air started to suck down through the hole in the floor.
The space station hull has been breached,
Jai thought.
Smoke curled up from Master Leem's belly. Still she stared at him.
Don't, Jai.
Everything silent. Everything still.
Opening from the heart of stillness, a truth blossomed in Jai's chest: he was going to die.
He was going to die here. Now.
There would be no miraculous rescue. There would be no marvelous escape. They were both going to die, Ventress was going to kill them, and the question on Maks Leem's face was, Would he die as a Jedi, or would he spend the last seconds of his life giving in at last, forever, to the dark side?
Because that's where he was, right now. At the edges of this still place in his heart Jai could feel all his hatred. And despair, yes, that, too. The criminal waste of it, the horrible perversion that Ventress was going to win: it was all there, every reason he would ever need to admit the dark side was strongest. To give in.
There was the tiniest hesitation in his stroke. Maks Leem's body was being sucked into the hole cut into the floor. She couldn't look at Jai anymore, she was pouring the last of her strength into using the Force to seal the gap, to keep the station's air from running out. “I won't,” Jai said. He couldn't hear himself. “I won't,” he cried, and somehow he knew that Maks Leem, deaf and dying, heard him and was content.
Nobody would ever know how close Jai had come to giving in to the dark side. Nobody but Maks would ever know he had resisted at the end. In a few minutes they would both be dead, and to the universe, his choice would make no difference at all.
To Jai Maruk, it meant everything.
For the next thirty seconds he fought more beautifully than he had in his life, and when Asajj finally cut him down, he was smiling.
Whie had such phenomenal balance that he had managed to keep from falling even though he was racing down the stairs when the first blast of wind sucking into the hole in the concourse floor had hit. Scout was not so lucky. The gust knocked her down and dragged her tumbling down the stairs. She had to shake off a hard smack to the head before she could struggle to her feet. By that time, Master Leem seemed to be containing the breach, and Whie was far ahead, halfway to Asajj Ventress.