Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [118]
In the meadow on Pzob he’d watched these silvery, gleaming spheres in action, and knew the few instants’ whirring shift and refocus of the antennalike nest of sensors—rolled, ducked, changing direction. The central vision ports shifted and the second droid splatted fire, not at him, but in a line of quick bursts on the floor in a raking pattern, driving him toward the open panel of the shaft and the enclision grid within.
“Oh, clever,” muttered Luke, crawling back, gauging his timing for a leap. More by instinct than anything else he flung himself through an opening in the pattern of bolts, rolled up to his knees, and whipped the diagnostic mirror from his pocket as the trackers swiveled in his direction again. He caught the bolt of the first one on the angled glass, clean and vicious and perfectly aimed. It struck the second tracker in the instant before it fired. The tracker burst in a shattering rain of shrapnel that clawed Luke’s face like thorns, but it gave him the second or so he needed to reangle the mirror as the first tracker tried again—and zapped itself into noisy oblivion with its own reflected bolt.
Luke lay on the floor, gasping, the warmth of the blood trickling down his face contrasting sharply with the cold of drying sweat. One dead tracker lay like a squashed spider on the floor a meter from his side. The second still hung fifty or so centimeters above the floor, broken grippers trailing, turning disjointedly here and there. Luke got his hands under him preparatory to crawling for his staff.
With a faint whirring, the three SP-80s in the corner came to life.
Luke dove for the door as they whipped toward him, moving faster than he’d have given those tractor treads credit for. He held out his hand, calling his staff to it, as the MMF came to life again and shot out a gripper. Luke rolled out the doorway, wondering if he could get as far as the gangway in time, and skidded to a halt as two more SPs and the biggest Tredwell he’d ever seen—a 500 or 600 at least, a massively armored furnace stoker—loomed out of the hall’s darkness, reaching for him with inexorable arms.
The lightsaber whined to life in his hand as snaky silver tentacles caught his wrist from behind. He struck at one of the snake-eye droids, the other jabbing at him with a long, jointed rod, and the jolt of the electrical shock knocked him breathless. He flipped the lightsaber to his left hand, as he could when he had to, cut at the snake-droid’s sensors. Something struck him from behind, wrenching strength grabbing his arms, lifting him bodily from the floor. He cut again, sparks exploding as the glowing blade severed a G-40’s servocable, but, unlike human opponents, the droids didn’t know enough to back off, and were incapable of going into shock. They surrounded him, gripping with an impossible strength, and when he slashed through sensor wires, joints, servotransmitters, there were always more.
The Tredwell’s case-hardened arms resisted even the cut of the laser. It was made to work in the heart of an antimatter furnace, and though the lightsaber hissed and slashed, the searing violence of the blows reverberated up Luke’s arms as if it would shatter the bones. Arms dangling, eyestalks dangling, such droids as were still operable followed the stoker as it bore Luke through the doorway, and the mephitic stink of the enzyme chamber’s darkness engulfed them. Luke hammered, twisted, slashed at the pinchers that held his arms and ankles, but couldn’t so much as make them flinch. The stink redoubled as the enzyme vat irised wide. Steam boiled up around him like thin foam, the smell as much as the heat of the dark red-brown liquid that bubbled beneath him making him dizzy.
Luke went limp. The lightsaber’s blade retracted. A leaf on the wind, he thought. A leaf on the wind.
The Tredwell let him drop. Relaxed, almost as if he could sleep, Luke summoned the Force as he fell, light and true as if he drifted above the steam. From some abstract distance he