Two speeder bikes cut into the alley, racing full bore after him. Corran’s first two shots hit the rightmost bike on the nose. The bike’s control panel exploded in a silver shower of sparks. The blast lifted the driver and pitched him head over heels off the speeder bike’s rear end. The bike itself immediately began a smoking dive toward the planet below and the driver slowly tumbled down in its wake.
He shifted his aim to the second bike, but the driver had already begun to pull up. Corran’s two shots hit his target, one on the driver’s leg and the other on the connector post fixing the sidepod to the speeder bike. The vehicle did not split apart and the driver veered away as if he’d had enough, so Corran rehomed the blaster and set off again.
Something on the data monitor squawked at him. He knew it was Rodian but he could no more understand the spoken tongue than he could read the written language. The guys on the bike and sidepod are comlinking with the others. They’ll coordinate and they know this city better than I do. His hand snaked up to where he usually wore his good luck charm but he felt nothing. On my own.
He refused to despair and instead set the speeder bike at a moderate pace and took it down farther and farther into the lower reaches of Coruscant. He had no idea where he was, but that did not matter to him as much as being aware of where his pursuit was. Fortunately for him they tended to announce themselves with blaster shots that sizzled past close, but never seemed to tag him.
With three on his tail, he dove into a black hole at the bottom of a canyon, then came around and shot back against his previous line of travel. Trimming his speed he ducked and dodged his way through a tangle of support girders, then dove back out of them and came up and around through a hole in the roof of a passage. Cutting back on his throttle, he locked the speeder bike in a gentle circling pattern that flew around the hole. He drew the blaster and waited. One has to be coming soon.
One of the three did jet up through the hole, but he came out riding a rocket. Corran snapped a quick shot off at him but missed. The way he came out means he was warned.
A speeder bike swooped at him from above. Something bright flashed at the front of the sidecar, then he felt a thump on the aft end of his bike. The whole speeder bike jolted, then started flying backward. Because of the way he’d locked his controls, the bike began spinning through an awkward spiral that almost pitched him to the ground.
Dropping back into the saddle—literally willing himself back into it—Corran shifted to neutral and adjusted the vector control to kill the roll. They’ve got a line on me. He twisted himself around and tried to see the line so he could shoot it, but it was too slender for him to spot in the darkness. Given no choice, he shifted his aim toward the main body of the Ikas-Ando Starhawk and triggered three shots at the lump a meter or so below a fist that had been thrust victoriously into the air.
The Starhawk’s pilot slumped forward over the front of the speeder bike and Corran immediately felt his bike begin to slow. Dropping back down into the saddle, he shifted the Zoom II into gear and punched the throttle forward. Coming around to his right, he sailed on past and below the hovering Starhawk. Twenty meters out from it he felt a tug and his bike slowed.
Damn, the sidecar guy didn’t release me. All speeder bikes came with a deadman switch that returned the throttle to zero thrust if it was released. That prevented the speeder bike from racing along if the person at the controls died, fell off, or somehow could no longer pilot the bike. It was a safety precaution built into the machines, but as with the one Corran had stolen, it was possible to put in a suicide-cruise switch that would keep the throttle set despite having no hands on it.
Corran cranked his throttle up full, but the drag from the Starhawk was making him far too slow. The trio of bikes that had chased him down were pacing him, but their drivers had clearly decided to call in other help to box him in. I have to get rid of this thing. I have to cut that line.
Corran sent the Zoom II into a dive, hauling the Starhawk after it. He sped on through level after level, then came out into a huge intersection of canyonlike airroads. Damn, back out in the open. His pursuit began to close, shooting again. Corran tried to make the bike dance as before, but with an air-anchor attached to it, he was having no luck at all.
Snarling with frustration, he pointed the speeder bike straight at the building on one corner of the intersection. He aimed at a lit rectangle on one of the lower levels, intending to whip the trailing Starhawk into the illuminated sign there. It would be poetic justice if it were an ad for Starhawks. He expected the impact would batter the bike to bits. If it didn’t, well, there are plenty more walls.
It wasn’t until he got close enough to see people sitting in the room move that he realized it wasn’t an advertising billboard but a window. He wanted to veer off, but blaster bolts on both sides bracketed him. He thought for a second about going straight through and out through the other side, but he knew the transparisteel would rip him apart. Get out of the way!
At the last moment Corran hauled the speeder bike around in a sharp left turn. The Starhawk trailing around after him hit the window. He felt a hard jolt, then his speeder bike shot off across the intersection and parallel to another building’s front. He glanced back and thought for a moment that he was free of the Starhawk, then a slight tremble in the bike’s frame matched sparks on the building wall.
Of all the luck! Instead of the transparisteel severing the cord that bound him to the Starhawk, the sharpness of the turn had snapped the weakened connectors between the sidepod and the Starhawk itself. The pod’s occupant had vanished, but Corran couldn’t see where he’d gone. The pod itself trailed after him like a balloon after a child in a stiff wind, but the advent of a half-dozen more speeder bikes into the intersection gave him no chance to try to shuck it off.
The trailing pod gave him all sorts of trouble because of the potential it had for anchoring him to pillar or post. He tried to keep his turns crisp, but he had to avoid narrow alleys and keep his speed under control. If he went too fast the pod would whip around, bashing into walls and throwing the aft end of his speeder bike around. If he slowed, the pod still shot forward. The elasticity of the line connecting it with his bike meant it shot it toward him unless he broke from his line of flight.
The trailing speeder bikes and swoops kept him hemmed in. He knew he was being herded toward a specific point, and he desperately wanted to avoid going there, but he didn’t have many choices. He did dive and sideslip to smash the pod against walls and break it loose, but it stayed with him. If I survive this perhaps I’ll send the Ikas-Ando people a testimonial on the durability of their sidepods …
Cruising around a corner, Corran saw bikes closing from above and behind, trapping him in a wide alley that ended in a solid wall a hundred and fifty meters on. It had no other outlets save up and what appeared to be a closed loading gate at the base of the wall toward which he sped. This is it, my run ends now. The only choices open to him seemed to be slamming into the wall and dying, or fighting and dying.
He thought about slowing to fight, but the whistling pod behind him reminded him of the folly of that idea. It’ll go through me faster than … hey, that’s an idea! Corran pointed the speeder bike directly at the loading gate and kicked the throttle up to full. Twenty meters out, he cranked the vector-shift back, nosing the speeder bike toward the sky, and reversed thrust. The combination pitched him forward, then brought the front of the bike up to bash him back into his seat. As the bike inverted and the pod sailed through beneath it, Corran grabbed the blaster pistol and dropped a dozen feet to the ground.
The pod hit the loading gate’s roll-up door with enough force to cave in the metal barrier toward the middle and rip it from the tracks on which it hung. The speeder bike, with the suicide-cruise switch engaged, slammed into the falling ribbon of metal, then flew on over the crest of it and on into the building’s interior. It tugged on the pod, but the pod had become trapped by the door, so the cord parted, freeing the speede
r bike to careen farther on.
With blaster bolts raining down around him, Corran dove for cover inside the building. Speeder bikes swooped past him as he twisted around and got just inside the doorway. Bringing his blaster pistol up, he tried to pick out targets, but found far too many to choose from. This confused him for a moment because while he distinctly remembered being chased by Zekka Thyne’s Black Sun villains, he could see no way stormtroopers could have anticipated his journey and set up the ambush into which he had ridden.
26
The peal of metal striking metal and the scream of the door being torn from its rails snapped Gavin’s head around to his right. Beyond Asyr he saw the door opposite the Imperial Fortress come crashing down, then a riderless speeder bike flew into the warehouse. Blaster bolts stippled the door and scarlet energy darts shot from incoming speeder bikes toward the stormtroopers.
As shock faded and the stormtroopers began to return fire, Gavin dove to the right and tackled Asyr Sei’lar. She snarled and clawed at his back as they went down, but he held on and rolled her toward the edge of the circle and behind debris. A dying Duros—his chest featuring a blackened hole at the center with flames burning around it—collapsed on top of them. Gavin shrugged him off and filled his hands with the blaster pistol the Duros had dropped.
Gavin came up on one knee and triggered two shots at a stormtrooper. One glanced off the man’s thigh armor, scoring it with a black stripe, and the other passed between the man’s knees. The stormtrooper came around, leveling his blaster carbine at Gavin. Oh, no, just like on Talasea.
A hand grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him down. The stormtrooper’s fire scythed up through where Gavin had been and one bolt passed through the hem of Gavin’s coat, but didn’t draw blood.
Having released her grip on his shoulder, Asyr leaned out around the ferrocrete blocks shielding them and snapped off two shots at the stormtrooper. Both hit him in the torso, turning him around and dropping him to the floor. There he twitched and slapped his hands at the holes in his armor, but he did not rise up again.
Red and green energy bolts crisscrossed in the air, filling the warehouse with the stink of ozone, melted armor, and burned flesh. The Fortress’s heavy blaster cannons pumped out bolts that methodically blasted into the lower levels of the makeshift dwellings. Shadowed interiors flared scarlet for a moment, then exploded in smoke and dust. The upper floors would collapse on the lower, burying people alive.
Gavin came up to fire again, but Asyr yanked him back down as a speeder bike just missed clipping him.
“Keep your head down unless you want to lose it.”
“A minute ago you were planning to have me killed.”
She flashed him a smile. “A bigot wouldn’t have saved me.”
Gavin shoved her aside with his left hand and triggered a line of shots at a stormtrooper peeking out from behind cover. “We can’t stay here.”
“C’mon, run to the open door.” Nimbly she rolled up onto her feet and started off. She scattered shots in the direction of the Fortress. He couldn’t see what she was shooting at because of the dust and the smoke, but he ran right along behind her and shot in the same direction she did. Blaster bolts sizzled back through the pall at him, but nothing came within a meter of hitting him.
As nearly as Gavin could tell, the volume of blaster fire heading in at the stormtroopers grossly exceeded the amount coming back from them. What the Imperial fire lacked in volume it made up for with accuracy and power. Through the smoke Gavin could see bolts from pistols and carbines glancing off the Fortress’s armor whereas its return fire stained the smoke with the color of blood and exploded whatever it touched. People ran screaming, others staggered and fell. He looked for anyone he could recognize, but saw none of the other Rogues among the refugees.
He reached the street outside and found himself abruptly dragged out of the river of fleeing people and to the left. He pulled his right arm free from the other man’s grasp, then smiled. “Corran?”
“Good to see you, too, Gavin.”
Asyr, who was standing next to Nawara and Rhysati, frowned. “Gavin?”
“Long story.” Gavin looked at the others gathered beside the door. Between them, Shiel and Ooryl supported the Devaronian, Dmaynel Kiph. His black blood oozed like oil from a wound in his right thigh. Everyone else looked fine. “Where’s Aril?”
Nawara shook his head. “Don’t know.”
Corran glanced at the people running from the warehouse. “She’s small. We could have missed her.”
Rhysati nodded. “There have been a lot of Sullustans running away.”
Gavin brandished his gun. “We can’t leave her.”
Another explosion rumbled from within the warehouse. Corran shied away from the opening. “The Fortress is moving up. We can’t go back in.”
Bits of masonry debris pitter-patted over Gavin’s coat and stung his face. He wanted to go diving back into the fight, but his belly began to throb where he had previously been gut-shot by a stormtrooper and that made him hesitate. Guilt immediately assailed him because he had been the cause for the Rogues to be in the warehouse. Part of him knew the Imperial operation had to have been one that was planned long before he was dragged down for a trial, but logic couldn’t defeat the fear he felt for Aril and the others inside.
Two speeder bikes shot back out of the warehouse, followed by a third and then a fourth. After them came two Imperial stormtroopers on speeder bikes of their own. The lead Imp bike fired a shot from its laser cannon and melted half the control surfaces on a Starhawk. The speeder bike went down hard, spilling the rider to the ground. The second bike swooped low toward the downed driver.
More smoothly than Gavin would have thought possible, Corran’s blaster pistol came up and around. He snapped off three quick shots. One missed the second Imp speeder, but the other two hit and boosted the driver up out of the saddle. The armored figure fell ten meters to the ferrocrete street, rolling up in a lifeless heap next to his prey. The speeder bike glided to a hover in midair above him, out of reach and benign.
Nawara pointed up as a half-dozen stormtroopers on speeder bikes dove down through the alley. “Reinforcements, let’s move.”
Asyr pointed to a doorway set flush with a wall off to the right. “This way.”
Corran waved them on, then darted out and ran toward the downed bike driver. Gavin followed him, directing a scattered pattern of covering fire back into the warehouse. He reached the rider a moment after Corran did and realized the rider was a woman. She tugged her helmet off, spilling brown hair over her shoulders. A blue forelock had been pasted to her forehead by sweat.
“Leave me alone!” she snarled at Corran.
“No way, Inyri.” Corran grabbed her by the shoulder of her jacket to pull her along, but just ended up keeping her off the ground when her step faltered.
“My knee,” she gasped, “I can’t.”
Gavin handed Corran his blaster, then swept her up in his arms. “Let’s go.”
Inyri struggled against Gavin for a moment, then hung on as stormtroopers started shooting at them from all directions. The Rogues who had gone over to the doorway Asyr had pointed out returned fire on the stormtroopers emerging from the warehouse, momentarily driving them back. Corran, with a blaster in each hand, triggered a flurry of shots at the first speeder bike as it came around to make a pass at them. He didn’t hit the pilot, but he made the man shy off and slam his speeder into the alley wall.
The speeder exploded, spilling fire down the wall and into the alley. It sparked a momentary lull in the shooting that Gavin used to complete his run to the doorway. He got inside quickly and stumbled forward, but kept his feet. The backlight of blaster fire from the other Rogues provided him with enough light to find his way a bit deeper into what appeared to be a cluttered stockroom of some sort. Despite the smoke in the air, Gavin detected a heavy chemical scent.
Up ahead Asyr cracked a door open, letting a sliver of dim yellow li
ght slice through the gloom. Janitorial supplies filled the shelves in the room, though dust covered all of them. As he moved out into the corridor with Inyri, he saw enough grime to confirm that the supplies were seldom used in the building.
Asyr cut across the corridor to a stairwell and led them down. Ooryl and Shiel followed with Dmaynel, leaving Nawara, Rhysati, and Corran to form the rear guard. Though no one seemed to be pursuing the group, Corran and the other two gave the wounded folks a good head start before they followed.
Gavin didn’t recognize any of the tunnels or passages they took, nor the buildings they cut through, though they all looked pretty much like those he and Shiel had seen in their survey of Invisec. Finally they moved up a few levels and were admitted to an apartment where an Ithorian led them through a fairly conventional room to a thickly overgrown, junglelike area of heavy humid air, dripping water, rainbow-colored plants, and artificial lighting.
Asyr pointed Ooryl and Shiel toward a bluish-green mossy patch and they deposited Dmaynel there. “Houlilan, take care of Dmaynel. This other one is hurt, too, but not badly.”
Inyri shifted a bit in Gavin’s arms. “You can let me down. I can stand. I just banged my knee up when I fell.”
Gavin eased her onto her feet and supported her as she balanced on her left foot. “Are you going to be okay?”
She nodded, wincing only slightly as she tried to put weight on her right leg. “I guess you think I should be grateful.”
Asyr looked surprised. “They saved you from death or worse at Imp hands. Thanks are warranted.”
Inyri shrugged. “Thank them? Never. They’re the reason I’m here. If they’d not interfered with my life, I wouldn’t have been in trouble.”
Corran frowned from the doorway. “You had a choice. You didn’t have to leave Kessel.”
Asyr pocketed her small blaster and folded her arms. “There’s definitely something going on here that I don’t know about. Do I want to?”