by Various
He gazed up at the dark slab rising above him. Three sTorles was an impossible jump, at least for him. But halfway up the wall, a distance he could reach, was a line of louvered air vents, each about ten centimeters across.
He could only hope Lord Binalie’s father had built the vents and louvers with the same ruggedness with which he’d built everything else in Spaarti Creations. Getting a good grip on his lightsaber, making sure his hand was safely away from the activation stud, he bent his knees, stretched out to the Force, and jumped.
He was near the top of his arc when he spotted the nearest vent, dimly lit by the flashes of laser and blaster fire coming from Roshton’s position. With a quick flick of his mind, he reached out to the louvers, angling them up into a horizontal position.
And as his upward momentum slowed to a halt, he slipped his lightsaber hilt between two of the louvers.
The metal creaked in protest as his full weight came onto the hilt, but to his relief the louvers held. Stretching out to the Force, he pulled down hard against the wedged lightsaber, hurling himself upward again.
He made it with three centimeters to spare, catching the edge of the roof with his outstretched fingertips and heaving himself the rest of the way up to sprawl onto his belly on the cold permacrete. Swiveling around, he leaned partway over the edge, extricating his lightsaber hilt from the louvers and calling it back to his hand.
The blaster fire in the east seemed to be intensifying as he slipped silently across the roof toward the nearest skylight. He reached it, rubbed off some of the collected grit with his sleeve, and peered inside.
The factory floor below was deserted. He stretched out to the Force, trying to track down the agitated alien minds he could sense beneath him. Further to the west, perhaps? Yes, he decided: somewhere a little ways west of his position. He frowned, trying to visualize the layout of the plant. . .
Of course. Cowardly or merely very cautious, the Neimoidians would have set up shop in Production Area Four, where they could keep an eye on the tunnel leading to the Binalie estate.
He set off that direction, keeping a wary eye overhead for wandering STAR patrols. But all the ones he could see were a good distance away, either swooping behind him to the east near Roshton’s position, or else doing tight circles around the C-9979 landing ship over near the plant’s west door. The cacophony from Roshton’s position was definitely growing louder, possibly the droids from the landing ship now close enough to add their strength to the attack. A new sound shrieked through the air, and he turned in time to see a Republic gunship dive toward the ground, sweeping the droid positions with rapid-fire laser fire. It swung upward again, and was cutting around for another pass when it exploded in a brilliant red-and-yellow fireball. And then he was at the skylight over the Area Four control station. Again cleaning off a section of the transparisteel, he looked down.
There they were, directly below him on the control platform: the two Neimoidians who had earlier invaded Lord Binalie’s office, plus a few more in much drabber clothing, all gathered together around a plotting display that had been set up in front of the Cranscoc twillers. The Master Creator, Gehad, was jabbing at something on the display, apparently arguing with Commander Ashel about it. Milling alertly around the control platform were a half dozen battle droids, their attention and blasters turned outward. The skylight’s fastening catch was at the inside base directly across from Torles. Reaching out with the Force, he undid it and swung the skylight open on its hinges. Taking a deep breath, he dropped through the opening.
He landed on the platform directly behind Commander Ashel, his knees bending to absorb the impact. Ashel had time to twitch, and someone else had time to give a startled squeak, before Torles was upright again with his arm firmly around Ashel’s chest and the business end of his lightsaber pressed just as firmly against the side of the Neimoidian’s head. “Everyone stay still,” he warned. But the droids’ reflexes were apparently set on hair- trigger. Before Torles could say more, or Ashel could say anything at all, they whirled toward the platform, their blasters spitting fire toward him. Torles took a long step away from Ashel and the others, igniting his lightsaber and whipping it against the incoming blaster bolts. Two seconds later, all six droids lay shattered and smoking, destroyed by their own backscattered fire. Before the stunned Neimoidians could react, Torles took another long step back and regained his grip on Ashel’s robes. “Let’s try that again,” he said mildly. “Everyone stay still.”
“What do you want?” Ashel asked, his voice shaking.
“I want this to be over,” Torles told him. He glanced at the Cranscoc twillers crouching down in front of the control system mud flow, wondering how they were taking all this.
But if they were worried, surprised, or even fully aware of what was going on, he couldn’t see it. “Contact the command ship and order them to surrender.”
“Impossible.” Ashel made a cautious gesture toward the ruined droids. “We cannot communicate except through the droids, and you have destroyed them all. “
“Really,” Torles said. It was almost certainly a lie, but there was an easy way to call the other’s bluff. “Fine. Come on.”
“Where do we go?” Gehad asked timorously.
“It just so happens I know where there are other droids you can use,” Torles told him. “And watch it. I doubt you want the kind of trouble I can make for you.”
Keeping a grip on Ashel’s robe, he led the way down the platform steps. The Neimoidians’ sealing of the tunnel exit had been achieved by the simple procedure of welding the leading edge of the ramp solidly to the floor, and it took him only a couple of seconds to cut through the weld with his lightsaber. Ashel quivered in his grip as he did so, but said nothing.
Their footsteps echoed eerily as they headed east through the empty plant. Torles kept alert for a surprise attack, but apparently the Neimoidians really had sent all the rest of the droids outside.
The battle was still going on as they reached the east door and stepped out into the night air. “There are your droids,” Torles said, giving Ashel an imperative push toward the light and noise. “Let’s go talk to them.”
“You cannot be serious,” the Neimoidian protested, cringing back against Torles’ grip. “We are not equipped for battle.”
“Too bad,” Torles said. “But if that’s the only way to stop them. . .”
He broke off as, abruptly, the circle of blasters around Roshton’s position fell silent. Something in the sky to the left caught his eye, and he looked over as a pair of STAPs plummeted to the ground.
He craned his head to look up into the night sky. There, almost directly above him, was the fading light of an expanding gas cloud.
General Tiis and the Whipsaw had come through.
“I guess we won’t need to talk to the droids, after all,” he commented. He could see movement from Roshton’s position now as the clone troopers abandoned their positions, running toward him and the plant now wide open behind him.
“Come on,” he added, returning his lightsaber to his belt and nudging the Neimoidians toward the approaching troops.
The two groups met halfway. “I see you’ve been busy,” Roshton greeted Torles as he trotted to a halt, gesturing his troops to continue on toward the plant.
“What’s it like inside?”
“Empty, as far as I could tell,” Torles told him. “The tunnel’s been unsealed, too, if you want to get the techs back in.”
“Excellent,” Roshton said in grim satisfaction. “We’ll get the Cranscoc to undo any retooling they did, then get back to work.”
“I doubt the Neimoidians got very far with their retooling,” Torles said.
“Speaking of which, what should I do with them?”
Roshton glanced past him toward the plant. “Would you mind taking them to Commander Bratt? He’s in one of the gunships heading over to shut down the Number Two C-9979.”
“No problem,” Torles said. “I’ll see you later.”<
br />
Roshton nodded and hurried off after his men. Torles started his own party off in the opposite direction. “It is not yet over,” Ashel warned as they walked.
“We have not yet been defeated.”
“You just keep thinking that,” Torles said. They’d reached the site of Roshton’s stand now, and he paused for a moment, gazing across the battlefield. The ground was almost literally covered with the wreckage of droids, with the bodies of probably a dozen clone troopers lying among the debris, their armor no longer white. Fires were still burning in the remains of a couple of vehicles, one of them the gunship Torles had seen being destroyed. Standing amid the general carnage were probably a hundred more droids, still upright yet with an oddly sagging look about them, where the loss of their control ship had left them.
He was still gazing at them when, with a sort of collective twitch, they came back to life.
For perhaps half a second the sheer unexpectedness of it froze him to the spot. But for the Neimoidians, that half-second was all the time they needed. At a barked word from Ashel, the Neimoidians dropped flat on the ground.
And Torles found himself standing alone in the middle of a ring of blasters. There was no time for anything fancy, and literally nowhere to go but up. He leaped up and sideways, igniting his lightsaber and slashing behind him as he arced over the revived droid army, trusting in the Force to guide his hand and deflect the shots. He hit the ground running and dodging, heading away from the plant toward the city, a hail of blaster bolts nipping at his robes.
“Yes, run, Jedi,” Ashel’s mocking voice wafted after him, more painful even than the blaster bolt near-misses. “Tell us again of this trouble you can make for us.”
Torles didn’t answer. Ahead, he could hear the sounds of renewed blaster fire coming from Foulahn City, and from the sense of startled anguish rolling over his mind it was clear that the rest of the Republic forces had been taken as much by surprise as he had. Unless he could get to them in time, to lend his strength to theirs, the battle would be lost.
He couldn’t.
And it was.
“I guess the Separatists have finally learned from their past mistakes,” Doriana commented as he, Torles, and Binalie stood on one of the mansion’s north-facing balconies. “They must have found a way to make a control matrix compact enough that they could bring a backup down to the planet surface. My guess is that it’s probably in one of the landing ships. Not that it really matters.”
“And not that we’ll ever know for sure,” Binalie said bitterly, shivering in the cold night air. “They’re all dead, then?”
“Dead, or scattered,” Torles said quietly, and Doriana could hear the pain and self-reproach in the Jedi’s voice. “Except for the ones Roshton took into Spaarti with him.” Binalie sighed. “And they’re as good as dead, aren’t they?”
“I can’t see it any other way,” Doriana agreed, gazing out toward Spaarti Creations. Above the plant, a hundred STAPs were circling through the night sky like carrion-eaters, glinting with the light from a dozen distant fires. On the grounds around the plant, invisible from where the three men stood, a thousand combat droids and a dozen battle tanks stood their own silent watch.
And between the Binalie mansion and the plant, acrid smoke still rose from the crater where the Separatist hailfire droid had emptied both of its missile pods into the ground, collapsing the tunnel and cutting off the clone troopers’ last avenue of escape. The Separatists had been nothing if not thorough. “The only reason they’re still alive is that the Separatists don’t want to wreck the plant trying to force them out,” he added.
“But then, they don’t have to, do they?” Torles said quietly. “By the time General Tiis can return with enough ground troops, they’ll likely have starved in there.”
“Yes,” Binalie said. “Ironic, isn’t it? Commander Roshton spent all that effort to retake the plant. And he succeeded.”
“And that’s where he’s going to die.”
PART THREE: HERO’S END
The streets of Foulahn City were dark and deserted as Kinman Doriana picked his way through the litter of broken droids, small missile craters, shattered buildings, bodies, and the general clutter of war. The military comlink he’d borrowed from Commander Roshton had allowed him to listen in on the Republic side of the battle, and he’d known the fighting here and at the Triv Spaceport had been fierce. But even that knowledge hadn’t prepared him for the actual carnage the soldiers had left behind.
A half dozen craters overlapped each other across the street in front of him, half filled with rubble from the buildings the missiles had destroyed and a few mutilated bodies of the civilians who’d been caught in the crossfire. The fighting here must have been particularly bad, he decided, with a higher- ranking officer directing the Republic side of the attack. Maybe here he’d finally find what he was looking for.
He hoped so. It was well after midnight, he was achingly tired, and the new Separatist masters of this part of Cartao undoubtedly had a curfew in place for the citizenry. The first patrol that spotted him would be trouble, and he wasn’t in the mood for arguing with combat droids. Despite the dramatic events and reversals of the past few hours, things were still adhering reasonably closely to Lord Sidious’s plan, but that didn’t mean Doriana himself had to enjoy the situation. He’d had his fill of battles a long time ago, and very much preferred to stay at his desk in Supreme Chancellor Palpatine’s office and handle his schemes and manipulations long-distance.
A glimmer of white to the left caught his eye, and he picked his way carefully toward it through the shattered road material. Probably just another piece of the deco-rative white roof trim Foulahn’s residents were so fond of, he thought sourly, but it still had to be checked out.
But it wasn’t a piece of roof trim. It was the half buried body of a clone trooper. A lieutenant, from the markings on his armor.
Finally.
Under normal circumstances, it would have been the work of perhaps two minutes to dig the body out of the rubble. With the need for absolute silence, it took Doriana closer to ten. But it was worth the effort. Hidden away in the back of one of the survival pouches on the lieutenant’s utility belt was an unlabeled datacard. Slipping it into his pocket, Doriana resealed the survival pouch and started to straighten up.
“Halt,” a flat mechanical voice ordered from behind him. Doriana froze in mid-crouch. “Don’t shoot,” he called, stretching his hands slowly to the sides so that the droids could see they were empty. “I’m an official medical observer.”
“Turn and identify,” the voice ordered.
Doriana obeyed, turning carefully on the uncertain footing. It was a complete patrol, all right: six of the old-style battle droids, one of them standing slightly in the lead. In the dim light, Doriana couldn’t tell whether there was anyone of command rank among them. “Identify,” the droid in the lead repeated.
“My name is Kinman Drifkin,” he told them. “I’m a member of the Aargau Medical Observer Corps. We’re a neutral power sworn to observe and report on any atrocities taking place during this conflict.”
The droid seemed to digest that. “Come forward,” he ordered. “Do you have official identification?”
“Of course,” Doriana said, slipping his hand into his ID pocket as he walked toward the group. The droids lifted their blasters warningly as he withdrew his hand, relaxed slightly as they saw he held only a datacard. “Which of you has a reader?” he asked.
“I will take it,” the spokesman said, shifting his grip on his blaster and extending a claw-like hand.
Doriana stepped to him and handed him the datacard. So this one was definitely the leader; and at this distance, he could see now the pale yellow markings of a command officer on its head and torso. Excellent. “I believe you’ll find my credentials are in order,” he added, glancing casually around. There was no one else in sight, human or droid.
“We will see,” the officer droid said, taking the dataca
rd and sliding it into a reader slot set into the lower part of its jaw line. “It says here that your assigned observation area is. . .”
“Barauch seven-nine-seven,” Doriana said in a low voice. “Filliae gron one-one-three.”
The officer broke off in midsentence. Doriana eased a few centimeters to his right, watching to see if the droids and their weapons would track his movement.
They didn’t. To all appearances, the entire squad was frozen and oblivious. “I’ll be crocked,” Doriana murmured to himself, feeling muscles relax that he hadn’t noticed were tense. So, the magic backdoor lockout code that Sidious had given to him actually worked.
And if the lockout code worked. . . “Pinkrun four-seven-two aprion one- eight-one-one,” he said, reaching out to the spokesman’s jaw and retrieving his false ID. “Backskip three minutes; pause one minute; restart. Execute.”
The patrol gave a group shiver. “Accessed,” the spokesman said, his mechanical voice sounding somehow even flatter than it had before.
Smiling tightly, Doriana sidled past them, heading back the direction they’d come from as quickly as he could manage without twisting his ankle on the loose stone. He had just one minute to disappear before the droids came out of their freeze and restarted their patrol, with this little incident conveniently erased from their group memory. He reached the nearest corner and ducked around it, pausing there to listen. A few seconds later he heard the distinctive clunk as the droids came to life again. With more clattering, they continued on their patrol, their footsteps fading off into the night breezes. Smiling again, Doriana detached himself from the wall and headed back toward the Binalie estate.