Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [93]
Once they caught up very close. The bodies of five lightly scarred Yuuzhan Vong warriors, young ones, lay in a brightly lit corridor, their wounds still smoking. In the distance, the Jedi could hear the footsteps of Lord Nyax fleeing.
“Where’s he going?” Mara asked.
Luke thought about where they started this fight, where they’d been since then. “It’s a big arc. Maybe part of a big circle.”
“Why?” Tahiri asked. She breathed more easily than Luke or Mara, the energy and resilience of youth standing her in good stead.
“He’s not fleeing,” Luke said. “He could have left us behind some time ago. So he wants us to follow him. Into a trap?” He shook his head. “He would have gone straight. No, he’s just leading us on a chase. A diversion.”
“So where does he want us not to go?” Tahiri asked.
Mara turned abruptly, headed back the way they’d come. “To wherever it sent that construction droid.” She pulled out her comlink. “Mara to Face. Come in, Face.”
Face ducked behind a pillar between two smashed-in panels of transparisteel. He got out of sight just in time. Outside, a wingpair of coralskippers flew by at his exact altitude—the same altitude as the top level of the combat droid. “Face here. I hear you.”
“Are you still with the construction droid?”
“Well, yes and no.” He leaned out of the shattered viewport next to him. In the distance, he could see the coralskippers hovering outside the mound of rubble the construction droid made when it plowed into the side of a giant ziggurat of buildings. “It’s ahead of me. It’s digging through construction. Moving a lot faster than those things are rated to move, I’ll bet. I’m cut off from it for the moment. I’m going to have to track it from floors above and hope they don’t fall out from under me.”
“Leave a tracking signal open. We need to find you.”
“Done. Face out.” He sat there for a few more moments, gasping in the warm, moist, cloying air of Coruscant, then rose again. “I hate this job.”
The Jedi circled around the growing accumulation of coralskippers hovering outside the collapsed hole the construction droid had bored into the ziggurat’s side. On an upper floor half a kilometer from the gathering, they met up with Face and peered at the ziggurat. “Interesting,” Luke said.
“What?” said Tahiri.
“This is one of the monolithic blocks that served the Old Republic as a government center,” Luke said. “A lot of it belonged to secondary bureaus, to embassies and legations from non-Republic worlds, and to businesses and organizations more or less allied with the Old Republic.”
Tahiri gave him a skeptical look. “How do you know that?”
“Because, youngster, the few surviving databases and filemaps that mentioned the old Jedi Temple indicated that it was—” Luke pointed. “—somewhere there. I’ve been all through it, kilometers and kilometers of it. By the time I got to look at it, of course, Emperor Palpatine had long destroyed every remaining trace of the Jedi.”
“Maybe not every trace,” Mara said. “Why do you suppose Lord Nyax is digging there?”
“Because …” Luke considered. “Because he has some kind of implanted memories or instincts? Perhaps he wants to destroy any remnant of the Temple because of lingering emotions. Or maybe he knows about some portion of it that was never on the public databases.”
“Either way,” Mara said, “we have to find out.”
Luke smiled. “One of the advantages about having been all through that region is that I know quite a few ways in and out. C’mon, let’s bypass these skips.”
Deep in the guts of the ziggurat, the construction droid leaned against the sloping black wall, driving its plasma cutters into the smooth surface, hammering the glossy wall with its mechanical limbs. Chunks of dense stone fell away from the impact points, but the wall yielded only very slowly.
Luke and his