Star Wars_ I, Jedi - Michael A. Stackpole [100]
Frustration rippled through me, but I shoved it away. Those creatures are not my problem right now. Exar Kun is. Stretching out my senses, I discovered slender ebon threads of influence, three of them, linked to the creatures the Dark Lord had sent to kill Luke Skywalker. The creatures were mindless beasts, far easier to control than Streen, affording Kun maximum destruction with a minimal amount of energy expended.
I overshot the Temple, then killed my thrust and cut in the repulsorlift coils. This left me hovering four hundred meters above the ground. Using the Headhunter’s etheric rudder, I twitched the ship around until the nose pointed off toward where I felt Kun’s influence originating. I hit a button on my console, locking in that heading.
Nudging the throttle forward, I rolled to starboard and cruised back past the Great Temple by a kilometer. I killed thrust again, hovered and pointed the nose off in the direction I felt Kun’s influence coming from. I logged those coordinates in the navicomp.
My comm unit beeped and an “all-clear” signal from Artoo appeared on my main screen. I smiled and felt the little link tendrils withering and retreating back to Exar Kun. I pushed my feelings, focusing them tightly, hoping to pick up a flash of anger or disappointment from him, but I got nothing of the sort. Instead I found four more of the anomalous lifeforms winging their way to the Great Temple from deep in the jungle.
I allowed myself a low laugh. The one problem with starfighter targeting systems is that they are built around a sensor package that recognizes the durasteel and other components that make up other starfighters or ships or anything else that can legitimately be classed as a target. Additional software uploads can define new targets, allowing systems to be updated as new foes and new equipment come online. And while these creatures did have metal claws, they actually had less metal content than the average civilian strolling around on Coruscant. As far as the Headhunter was concerned, they just weren’t really targets.
As a Jedi, I found them to be big fat targets.
They flew in toward the Temple, no more able to recognize the Headhunter as a threat than it was able to recognize them. The huge creatures were easily as tall in body as a man, with a huge wingspan of ugly, fleshy wings. They had two heads, each with a low enough cranium to only be sporting a cubic centimeter of brains. They also each had a muscular tail that ended in a nasty crystalline stinger. Decidedly scary and lethal.
Unless you’re a pilot in a starfighter.
My first shot crisscrossed twin blaster bolts in the thorax of the lead creature. Flesh boiled and scales melted, then the bolts burst out of its back and flew on only slightly spent. The creature’s heads curled inward, looking down at the smoking hole in its chest, then the wings collapsed. The creature dropped to the ground with the speed of a droid ejected from a fighter. It impaled itself on the branches of a massive Massassi tree below.
My shot at the next beastie came fast and much sloppier—only one bolt hit. The single energy projectile did the job, however. It burned a wing off the one it hit. The creature flapped furiously with the one good wing, but to no discernible benefit. Screaming, the beast spiraled down and smashed into the Temple’s stone base.
For the last two monsters I switched to the ion cannon. The initial shot from it caught the third monster in the pelvis. The blue ion bolt shattered into hundreds of little lightning tendrils. The bolt fired all of the creature’s nerves at once, making the creature’s limbs spasm. Its tail jerked backward and forward so violently that it stabbed itself. The creature’s heads struck at its own tail, tearing great jagged hunks out of it, then its wings folded in on it and the falling beast splattered itself down