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Twin particle blasts and laser beams, perfectly aimed, struck the vane droid and the parity droid in their circuit-link assemblies, disconnecting the robotic bodies from their CPUs. The two droids were effectively paralyzed. Jax reactivated his lightsaber and plunged it straight through the tube droid’s thoracic subprocessor. In a shower of sparks the last BXL-99 was deactivated.

As he pulled the lightsaber from the droid’s midsection, Jax looked closely at the chassis. What he saw made him shudder.

The patches he’d thought were rust weren’t rust. They were blood.

There was a moment of silence, broken by the impact of something very hot and very fast against the transparisteel window. The center crack webbed outward.

Laranth stepped cautiously to where she could see out the window, her blasters ready. When she spoke, her voice was grimmer than usual.

“There’re half a dozen droids down there on the assembly-line floor, maybe more,” she said. “They keep milling about so that it’s hard to count ’em. But,” she added, “they definitely outnumber us.”

Another ball of orange light struck the huge window, driving her back.

“And,” she added, “one has a plasma gun.”

“Terrific,” Dhur said.

forty

Jax gripped his lightsaber and reached once more for the familiar lines of the Force. Another plasma burst would destroy the transparisteel panel, and then they would need all the help they could get to defeat the—

No, he thought. Not again.

As had happened before, there came what felt like a hesitancy, a stutter, in what was normally the smooth, nearly effortless connection. An uncertainty, a void where there was usually the familiar surge of the Force, the sense of power and confidence that had always filled him before.

It isn’t there!

Jax fought panic. It was absurd, this flickering, on-again, off-again linkage. He’d used the Force to leap over the labor droid not five minutes ago, and it had worked fine then.

Well, it’s not working now.

Another plasma bolt hit the panel, which exploded in half-molten fragments that sleeted into the room. Laranth deflected them, but shrapnel was the least of their worries. Jax looked back at the window in time to see another droid, obviously just as haywire as the previous ones, climbing over the edge.

It was an 8D8 smelting operator, a spindly humanoid droid designed to withstand the searing heat of blast furnaces and smelting pits. Its exoframe was made of a durasteel alloy that could withstand long exposure to extremely high temperatures. Normally the model was unarmed, but in this one’s case, a heavy-duty blaster had been swivel-mounted to its left shoulder. And for some reason known only to its own psychotic processor, a strip of metal had been fastened around its head as a crude gag, covering its vocabulator.

The blaster began firing, sweeping the room, as soon as the 8D8’s upper body cleared the edge. Jax knew he had only seconds in which to act. He couldn’t trust his ability to anticipate and block the blasts, so he dived forward, body-surfing through shards of razor-sharp transparisteel fragments, his lightsaber extended before him. Before the crazed 8D8 could adjust, Jax was in front of it. He swung the energy blade in a short arc, neatly clipping the blaster from its mount. The blade hesitated at the droid’s neck, but only for a moment; the frictionless shaft didn’t have to burn through the durasteel column to sever it.

Because of his awkward position, Jax couldn’t put his normal strength and speed into the blow. As a result, instead of cutting the head cleanly off, the incandescent blade resealed part of the inner conduits as it passed through them, while the impact turned the CPU partially around. The 8D8’s head remained welded to its neck, only facing more or less backward.

The droid toppled, knocking off two others on the way down. There were two more climbing up, however: a Roche J9 drone and an asp droid. Jax pushed to his feet, part of his mind commenting ironically on the strange pairing of