• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“What do you think I’m doing?”

Another charged-particle blast missed them by centimeters and blew a hole in a nearby slurry tank. “If the answer to that question is anything other than Trying to get us killed, then perhaps I’d better pilot,” I-Five said.

Jax weighed the relative positives and negatives of simply pushing the droid out of the weaver. “If you think you can do better, then we’ll change places. Otherwise, shut—”

“Do you have any particular strategy in mind?”

Jax dropped the weaver several centimeters as they zoomed under a ferrocrete arch. He felt the rough underside skim his hair. “Other than giving them you?”

“I’ll assume you don’t, then.” They zipped around the blackened remains of a land freighter. Jax jerked the weaver to the left just as a laser slashed through the spot where their trajectory would have taken them, then to the right again to avoid a collision with the support strut of a cloudcutter. The streets were narrow and winding here, and the gigantic structural frames supporting the buildings often intruded into the street, making their high-speed flight even more difficult to navigate. The cloudcutters of the Yaam Sector might not be as tall as the skytowers of the equatorial regions, but they were tall enough to require massive ferrocrete foundations, with giant durasteel anchors embedded hundreds of meters into the bedrock. Jax knew that it was only a matter of time before they either collided with a building or some other obstacle, or were nailed by one of the PCBUs. He’d had little sleep in the past three days, and even though a Jedi could draw upon the Force for stamina and energy beyond most beings’ capacities, he still wasn’t at his peak.

“All right, droid,” he shouted as an energy bolt from the closer unit sizzled past them and fried a floating advert-sphere. “What’s your plan?”

I-Five quickly explained as they bobbed and weaved down the serpentine street, which had become little more than an alley by now. The two PCBUs had been forced into a single file, but neither had given up the chase.

The weight of the towers themselves often required gigantic structural stabilization braces, tiebacks, and columnar support. In the older planetary sectors, such as Yaam, these reinforcements had often been added centuries after construction, and in some cases there had been no room to build the necessary abutments. In those situations, tractor and pressor fields were usually employed.

The fields, according to I-Five, were too diffuse to affect organic beings or smaller mechanical units, such as droids and weavers. Larger vehicles, however, were in danger of having their repulsorlifts thrown off frequency, and thus were usually detoured around these sectors.

“How do we know the Zeds piloting those units don’t know about the frequency resonance?”

“We don’t.”

“Brilliant. How do we know the PCBUs are big enough to be affected?”

“We don’t. However, the energy output of a PCBU’s repulsorlifts is approximately eight hundred joules per second, and the tolerance factor of a standardized pressor field is—”

“Hang on,” Jax said as he banked hard and headed for a large cloudcutter. On one wall, filthy with centuries of grime and soot but still partly readable, was the warning glyph that meant a pressor field was in use. “We’re about to test your theory.”

“Oh, good.”

Jax steered the weaver into the building’s shadow, slowing to a halt in the darkness in what should be the middle of the field. He could feel his skin prickle slightly, and his hair rise, as if in response to an electrostatic charge. He hoped the droid knew what it was talking about.

As he’d hoped, the Zed in the lead unit took the bait and followed in pursuit. As soon as it entered the field, it started to wobble. Jax could see the Zed pilot struggling with the controls, trying to compensate, but it was no use. The flying disk spun out of control, flipped completely over, and plowed into one of the ferrocrete supports, exploding in a sphere of flame.

“One