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“I think it’s safe to assume,” the droid said, “that we’ve been set up.”

A fusillade of laser and particle beams erupted from across the room, aimed at the five of them, as if to punctuate the statement. Den looked at Jax. “Aren’t you glad your father gave him that neural upgrade?”

Another series of beams struck the huge hypercondensor unit behind which they were hiding. They were protected for the moment, Jax knew, but eventually, if the stormtroopers’ lasers and charged-particle bursts kept hitting the unit, the duralumin housing would overheat, quite possibly upsetting the stability of the ultracold Tibanna condensate within. Should that happen, I-Five estimated the explosive factor as at least a 7.5, which would certainly vaporize the building they were in, as well as a sizable chunk of the surrounding urban landscape.

“That’s only a rough estimate,” the droid explained. “There are too many variables to factor for me to refine my—”

“Seven-point-five is more than enough for me,” Jax assured him. “Den?”

“I’m good,” Den agreed. The little Sullustan was crouched beside I-Five. “You definitely know how to motivate people,” he added to the droid.

“Less talk. More shooting,” Laranth said. The Twi’lek Paladin had a blaster in either hand and was crouched near the far end of the unit. “I say we go—now.”

Jax couldn’t argue with her logic. The longer they remained pinned down, the less chance of survival they and their client had, not to mention however many hundreds of thousands of beings would die if I-Five’s 7.5 scenario really was in the immediate future. Not that Jax had any doubt of it. The droid had an annoying habit of being right just about all the time.

“Okay,” he said. “Laranth, take the right; I-Five, the left. On my signal—”

“Hey, what about me?” Den asked.

“Stay here with the undersecretary.” Jax spared a glance at the corpulent, trembling form crouched beside Den. Before the Empire had superseded the Republic, Varesk Bura’lya had been a midlevel government official assigned to the Bothan embassy on Coruscant. Immediately after the Republic’s fall, he had become a fugitive, along with thousands of other representatives of various species on the city-planet. True, no particular effort was being made to hunt them down, and in a global metropolis that was home to literally trillions of sentient beings, one stood a very good chance of living a lifetime (thousands of lifetimes, in fact) without ever coming into contact with an enemy. But one overall characteristic of the Bothan species was paranoia, and Bura’lya had no shortage of that. So he had contacted the Coruscant resistance movement known as the Whiplash, and arranged for safe passage offworld through the Underground Mag-Lev, a dangerous and circuitous secret route that delivered enemies of the state to spaceports and sympathetic starships via safe houses, private conapts, and other clandestine means.

Jax Pavan, one of the last surviving Jedi and a partisan of the Whiplash resistance, had been assigned to help ferry the Bothan dignitary to freedom. All had gone well until they’d reached the final checkpoint, in the dimly lit interior of a carbonite-processing plant. Here they’d been greeted, not by the resistance members they’d expected, but instead by a brace of Imperial stormtroopers.

They were smart, he had to give them that. Knowing that a droid was part of the party, they’d staged the attack in the depths of the carbonite-cracking plant, taking advantage of the low-level background radiation that would confuse I-Five’s bio- and energy sensors for the moment needed. They hadn’t known that there would also be two Jedi to contend with, however. The Force had warned Jax and Laranth of the trap, which is why four troopers now lay dead on the floor. If the Bothan hadn’t, in his panic, gotten in the way, Jax was certain that the rest of the troopers would also be dead by now, and Varesk Bura’lya would be about to board the spice freighter Big Score and become a fading unpleasant memory instead of hiding behind the hypercondensor unit, caterwauling