Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [97]
Mara rose beside him. Luke had known she was unhurt.
“Force energy,” she whispered.
This must have been a wellspring of it, he thought. The old Jedi Temple must have been built above because it was here. They were guarding it. And guarding the planet from it.
Nyax finished dancing. He turned to look at the Jedi. His expression was so full of uncomplicated happiness that it seemed impossible that he would ever try to hurt them.
Nor did he attack them now. He simply raised a hand.
Above him, a portion of the ceiling, a plug some ten meters across, shot straight up and out of sight. Debris rained down, but drifted to one side before it could hit Nyax. Tremendous crashing noises emerged from the hole above, and the walls all around them began to shake.
Tahiri joined Luke and Mara, tucking something away in her backpack. “We’re in trouble,” she said.
One of the advantages of running around in a lawless, ruined city several kilometers deep, Face reflected, was there was always gear to find.
Such as this airtaxi. It had been perhaps the thirtieth one he’d seen since leaving the Jedi, the fourth undamaged one he’d come across—and the first one to start up with a single press of the controls. Now he roared along the tumbled canyons of Coruscant, following a comm beacon, keeping well below rooftop altitude.
It was a necessary precaution. He saw a lot of coralskippers. All seemed to be heading toward one location … the same location he’d recently fled.
He reached the vicinity of the beacon, gained until the signal was its strongest. That put him directly opposite the collapsed corner of a building. He could see something shining silver there—a simple antenna, attached so recently that nothing had had time to grow on it; no dust or soot had darkened it. “Face to Kell,” he said. “I see your antenna.”
“Drop six stories and drift over to the next building. Come in the first big window,” Kell answered. “The access to where I am is in the main chamber there.”
“On my way.” Face lost altitude and sideslipped. He peered in through the shattered viewport of what had once been a luxury apartment, could see the stairwell reaching from the ceiling. He gunned his thruster and crashed through the framework around the viewport, then cut power. His airtaxi dropped half a meter to the floor.
Seconds later, he squeezed in through the access hatch of the vehicle named Ugly Truth.
Kell was above him in the pilot’s seat. He didn’t turn around. “Did you feel something a couple of minutes ago?” Kell asked.
“No.”
“Good. Me either, then.”
Face looked up through the cockpit viewport at the jumble of rubble overhead. “Do you really have enough explosives to blast through that?”
“Approximately … but that’s not what we’re going to do.” “Ah.”
“A detonation like that might damage this frail little flower of an escape ship.” Kell pointed down toward his feet. “But the building wall on that side isn’t a support wall. Support comes from the building’s metal skeleton. So I’ve planted shaped charges to blow that wall out.”
“And then what?”
“And then I hit the topside nose repulsors. We tilt forward, I hit the thrusters, we punch free, and we rotate for a while, everybody screaming and vomiting, until I regain control.”
“Kell, sometimes I hate you.”
“Yeah, but I’m still the best pilot you ever saw.”
“Where are the others?”
“En route. I got a comm message to them.”
“How? There are kilometers of rubble between us and them! A comm message couldn’t possibly penetrate.”
Exasperated, Kell finally did look down at his leader. “Do you remember something about us putting a sensor package up at rooftop, then running a direct cable down so Danni and Baljos could get a constant sensor feed?”
“Oh, that’s right.”
“I broadcast to that sensor package—”
“Never mind, never mind, I get you now.