Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 01_ Outcast - Aaron Allston [23]
Valin smiled at them, but not in a friendly way. “Two maladjusted want-to-be bounty hunters and their dressed-up protocol droid.”
“Surrender,” the Quarren said. “It will hurt less.” He raised his preposterous weapon to his shoulder.
“Jump into a fire.” Valin all but ignored the two organic beings. He kept his attention on the droid—a YVH 1 combat droid, one of the most dangerous machines to be found anywhere.
Now even machines were giving him a bad feeling. And he could detect a life-form heading toward him from straight above—
He glanced upward to see a speeder car passing by overhead, and boot heels, flapping Jedi robes, and an illuminated lightsaber descending toward him at a normal falling rate.
In his lower peripheral vision, he saw the three bounty hunters glance up to spot the descending Jedi. Valin took the opportunity to act: he grabbed his abandoned ejection seat and leapt with it off the rear end of the cargo hauler.
Jaina landed in a crouch just where Valin had been standing. He was gone. She rose to glower at the bounty hunters. “Don't bother.”
“We're not here to harm you,” the YVH droid said, its tones utterly and confidently human.
Jaina stared at the thing, nonplussed. “Just what have you been programmed for?”
She felt a tickle in the Force, warning of imminent attack, and saw the Quarren's finger tighten on the trigger. She jumped to one side as he fired.
It did her no good. The missile that emerged from the weapon immediately flared out into a haze that wrapped around her, clinging everywhere—it took her a fraction of a second to recognize it as a metal-mesh net trailing some sort of cylindrical package.
Then the first jolt of electrical pain hit her. Startled, suddenly separated from her Force powers, she sailed over the edge of the cargo hauler and dropped into empty space beyond.
* * *
Valin clung to the ejection seat and rode it down another twenty meters. The next vehicle to approach him held no ersatz Jedi, no imposters that he could see—it was a boxy blue speeder, the Galaxy 9 News logo painted on its side in yellow. It drew alongside, its pilot skillfully keeping pace with Valin's rate of descent.
A dark-skinned woman leaned out the passenger-side window. “Jedi Horn! Is it true you're on a destructive rampage?”
Valin leapt from his seat, slamming into the side of the speeder, holding on to the woman's door to keep from falling. She drew back, startled, but he gave her a friendly smile. “Get me out of here, away from these people, and I'll give you the greatest scoop you've ever had.”
The woman's eyes widened. She turned to issue a brief command to her pilot, then turned back, all smiles. “Let me help you in …”
“I'll hang on here, thanks.” The news speeder banked, sluggish, and headed toward the business district. “How did you know I was Valin Horn?”
“An arrest bulletin issued a little while ago by the office of the Chief of State …”
The Quarren watched, startled, as Jaina Solo vanished over the lip.
The woman in the black jacket clapped him on the back. “Nice move, fish-head. She's not—”
Her words were cut off as an airspeeder, painted in a stylish silver-gray, dived past the cargo hauler's cab, missing it by less than a meter.
The hauler's pilot reacted instinctively, veering to starboard and down. The sudden maneuver sharply tilted the cargo bed.
The Quarren staggered to his left and stumbled clean off the edge of the cargo hauler. The blond woman staggered, too, but dropped, rolled with an acrobat's skill, and fetched up safely against the low rail at the side of the cargo bed.
The YVH droid didn't budge.
* * *
Luke flipped into the cockpit and did an involuntary dance for a moment until both feet found nonsuperheated areas on