Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [91]
“I said, it’s a big machine,” Face shouted. Here, at the source of the vibration, the noise was much worse.
He, Kell, and their struggling cargo were on a catwalk two levels down from the floor where the Jedi and Yuuzhan Vong fought, one level down from the side-passageways by which the Vong must have arrived. And the catwalk itself was the top level of a deep, deep chamber—a chamber that housed a single vehicle.
Had that machine been set up on any world but Coruscant, it would have been considered a skyscraper. It was hundreds of meters tall. At its base were treaded appendages that could roll like tank treads or lift and move independently like feet. All along its surface were hydraulic arms; some ended in what looked like plasma cutters, others in huge ball-like weapons, still others in manipulator hands.
At the top was a sensor station surrounded by transparisteel panels, and packed into that station were living beings. Many of the workers who had not been on the floor above at the onset of the Yuuzhan Vong attack were here, and more were shoving their way way along a catwalk extension that led to a door in that station.
Down below were more beings, tirelessly carrying hunks of debris away from the machine’s base.
The whole thing roared like a fleet of antiquated Pod-racers. The vibration cut into Face’s skin wherever the vonduun crab armor did not cover it.
“Tell her it’s a construction droid,” Kell shouted. “It looks completely functional.”
Face shouted that information into his comlink.
“Did she hear you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Tell her it’s moving.”
Far below, the treads spun into action. The construction droid’s machinery whined as the gigantic machine lurched into action … and then crashed into the duracrete wall before it.
Unable to hear, Mara bit off a curse. She tucked her comlink away and jumped back into the fight, deflected a pair of thudbugs, took a swipe at Lord Nyax’s hand; its arm rotated and it caught the attack on its lightsaber blade.
Luke flipped over the pale thing, striking as he went; his blow was blocked.
Tahiri, in front, lunged forward … and stumbled, right into the path of a knee blade. Mara reached out, an effort to shove with the Force, knowing that she was too late, knowing that the knee-blade would emerge in a fraction of a second from the back of Tahiri’s skull—but Tahiri whipped to the side, still in control, still in balance, even as Luke crashed feetfirst into Lord Nyax’s neck, forcing its head down toward its own knee-blade.
The blade turned itself off. Lord Nyax’s head passed through empty space. Luke, backflipping to his feet, offered up an expression of bafflement and frustration.
Mara sighed. It had been a feint, an effort to trick the thing into spearing itself with its own weapons. But its designers had been too thorough. There were fail-safes.
The floor rocked under their feet. Mara felt the crash from below as much as she heard it.
Lord Nyax leapt upward a half-dozen meters and then, impossibly, just hung there in space, smiling down at the Jedi and the Yuuzhan Vong.
Mara realized, a fraction of a second too late, that it had merely grabbed the same cord by which she and Luke had descended. Then the floor went out from under her.
The construction droid plowed into the wall before it, smashing steel and duracrete out, allowing blue-white sunlight to spill in. It lurched and wobbled as it continued, internal balance compensators having a hard time keeping up with the irregularity of the surface it moved across.
The catwalk under Face’s feet rippled. “C’mon!” He turned back toward the stairs they’d descended, but the catwalk mounting on the corner nearest the droid’s exit hole snapped and dropped, snapping the next mounting toward him and the next mounting after that. The catwalk fell all along one