Star Wars_ Episode VI_ Return of the Jedi - James Kahn [38]
Her bike spun out of control. She jumped free just in time—the speeder exploded on a giant tree, as Leia rolled clear into a tangle of matted vines, rotting logs, shallow water. The last thing she saw was the orange fireball through a cloud of smoking greenery; and then blackness.
The scout looked behind him at the explosion, with a satisfied sneer. When he faced forward again, though, the smug look faded, for he was on a collision course with a fallen tree. In a moment it was all over but the flaming.
Meanwhile, Luke was closing fast on the last scout. As they wove from tree to tree, Luke eased up behind and then drew even with the Imperial rider. The fleeing soldier suddenly swerved, slamming his bike into Luke’s—they both tipped precariously, barely missing a large fallen trunk in their path. The scout zoomed under it, Luke over it—and when he came down on the other side, he crashed directly on top of the scout’s vehicle. Their steering vanes locked.
The bikes were shaped more or less like one-man sleds, with long thin rods extending from their snouts, and fluttery ailerons for guidance at the tip of the rods. With these vanes locked, the bikes flew as one, though either rider could steer.
The scout banked hard right, to try to smash Luke into an onrushing grove of saplings on the right. But at the last second Luke leaned all his weight left, turning the locked speeders actually horizontal, with Luke on top, the scout on the bottom.
The biker scout suddenly stopped resisting Luke’s leftward leaning and threw his own weight in the same direction, resulting in the bikes flipping over three hundred sixty degrees and coming to rest exactly upright once more … but with an enormous tree looming immediately in front of Luke.
Without thinking, he leaped from his bike. A fraction of a second later, the scout veered steeply left—the steering vanes separated—and Luke’s riderless speeder crashed explosively into the redwood.
Luke rolled, decelerating, up a moss-covered slope. The scout swooped high, circled around, and came looking for him.
Luke stumbled out of the bushes as the speeder was bearing down on him full throttle, laser cannon firing. Luke ignited his lightsaber and stood his ground. His weapon deflected every bolt the scout fired at Luke; but the bike kept coming. In a few moments, the two would meet; the bike accelerated even more, intent on bodily slicing the young Jedi in half. At the last moment, though, Luke stepped aside—with perfect timing, like a master matador facing a rocket-powered bull—and chopped off the bike’s steering vanes with a single mighty slash of his lightsaber.
The bike quickly began to shudder; then pitch and roll. In a second it was out of control entirely, and in another second it was a rumbling billow of fire on the forest floor.
Luke snuffed out his lightsaber and headed back to join the others.
Vader’s shuttle swung around the unfinished portion of the Death Star and settled fluidly into the main docking bay. Soundless bearings lowered the Dark Lord’s ramp; soundless were his feet as they glided down the chilly steel. Chill with purpose were his strides, and swift.
The main corridor was filled with courtiers, all awaiting an audience with the Emperor. Vader curled his lip at them—fools, all. Pompous toadys in their velvet robes and painted faces; perfumed bishops passing notes and passing judgments among themselves—for who else cared; oily favor-merchants, bent low from the weight of jewelry still warm from a previous owner’s dying flesh; easy, violent men and women, lusting to be tampered with.
Vader had no patience for such petty filth. He passed them without a nod, though many of them would have paid dearly for a felicitous glance from the high Dark Lord.
When he reached the elevator to the Emperor’s tower, he found the door closed. Red-robed, heavily armed royal guards flanked the shaft,