Before the Storm - Michael P. Kube-McDowell [156]
A light winked on a console torn from the wall; he hadn’t realized there was still a functioning power supply in this complex. Not a booby trap. No HUD sensor warning. Just a light. Rex ran on. Skywalker’s robes flapped, blotting out the faint lights beyond like a black cloud.
Rex glanced at the HUD icons set to one side of the main display to check for stragglers, counting the transponder blips and ID numbers of the platoon. Sergeant Coric was right behind him—and the injured trooper. He must have been tanked up on painkillers. The trooper’s bodysuit had lost some integrity, too. Rex hoped he didn’t get into a situation where he needed it to be airtight.
“You could sit this one out, Ged,” Rex said. “I get lonely, sir.”
“We’ll keep you company, then …”
It took maybe ten minutes to skirt around the droid lines, staying close to the canyon-like walls and covering as much ground as possible under cover to avoid aerial detection.
Skywalker leaped ahead—it would have been very handy to bound clear over obstacles like that, Rex thought—and was already on the roof of the energy sphere building by the time Rex pushed through the doors.
They edged to the parapet around the sphere. Troopers positioned themselves and sighted up, snapping anti-armor attachments onto their rifles. On the ground floor, the rest of the platoon hid in the lobby, ready to give the droids a street-level surprise from the rear.
Skywalker seemed to be sizing up for a jump. Two stories beneath them, three octuptarra droids marched forward in that three-legged staccato gait, each one a sphere supported by thin arching legs, spitting a stream of cannon fire.
“What’s the plan, then, sir?” Ged asked, as if he didn’t know. There was one surefire way to take a droid like that. But their narrow profile and relatively small spherical bodies made them a hard target to hit.
The general seemed to be focused on one of the droids. “Follow me.”
“Right you are, sir …”
Rex secured his rappel line on the edge of the roof and signaled to the men behind. Skywalker didn’t need anything fancy like that.
He just jumped.
STREET LEVEL, CRYSTAL CITY
Anakin landed on the back of the octuptarra droid just hard enough to balance on the flat section on top of its spherical body without tipping both of them over.
And the droid couldn’t do a thing about it.
It spun and flailed as he rammed his lightsaber deep into its top panel. One of its comrades swiveled its cannon and fired. Anakin batted the bolts away with his lightsaber as Rex and the rest of the clone troopers opened fire and took down the two remaining octuptarras, running over the wreckage to engage the rear rank of battle droids, which had now realized they were facing a rearguard action as well.
Anakin knew he wasn’t actually thinking at this point. An odd moment of mental separation left him able to run on some buried instinct at the same time as part of him took a step back and observed it all, both fascinated and appalled. His body had bypassed his higher brain functions, moving him around the battlefield without his consent. He was aware of the position of every droid, every clone trooper, but not consciously; he could see Kenobi’s blue lightsaber blade, flashing intermittently through a smoky forest of battle droids. The noise was deafening—screaming, ripping metal, explosions so loud that they felt like a punch high in the chest—but he wasn’t sure he was hearing or even listening. It was … a kind of blindness where he could still somehow see.
Images flared and vanished in front of him like flash-frames. He was swinging his lightsaber into a group of Tusken Raiders. You killed my mother. Now it’s your turn. It was a memory; he’d done exactly that. For a split second, he wasn’t sure if he was looking at droids or Sand People. He simply spun around the droid lines, swinging and slashing, buoyed up on a wave of reflexes. Metal fragments flashed past his face. Some veered away at angles,