Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [110]
Instinctively he glanced to the right just as the second Vulture droid was rocketing into view. Seeing him, the droid sprayed the roof of the car with cannon fire. Mace turned into the powerful wind and focused all his intention on a front flip that carried him back through the rend. The Vulture veered, positioning itself directly over the laceration its partner had opened, and reorienting its wing cannons.
In what would surely have been a futile act, Mace raised his lightsaber.
But the expected cannon blast never arrived. Wings clipped and repulsors damaged by missiles fired from the gunships, the Vulture slammed down onto the roof of the speeding train, then rolled out of sight.
Deactivating their blades, Mace and Kit rushed into the forward car, which was now filled with Palpatine’s advisers and those passengers the Jedi women and Red Guards had relocated from the train’s lead car. Mace and Kit continued to squirm forward, arriving in the Supreme Chancellor’s car just as the maglev was emerging from the skytunnel. The sun was going down, and the tall buildings that rose to the west cast enormous shadows across the city canyon and the busy thoroughfares far below the cantilevered mag-lev line.
In the middle of the car, Palpatine stood at the center of the cordon the Red Guards had formed around him. And at a fixed-pane window they had deliberately shattered, Shaak Ti and Stass Allie were gazing toward the rear of the train.
“Those fighters could easily have derailed us with a torpedo,” Shaak Ti said as Mace and Kit approached.
Mace leaned partway out the window, eyes searching the canyon. “And battle droids don’t just drop from the sky. There’s a third craft.”
Kit’s bulging black eyes indicated Palpatine. “They want to take him alive.”
The words had scarcely left his mouth when something hit the train with sufficient force to whip everyone from one side of the car to the other, then back again. The Red Guards were just regaining their balance when the roof began to resound with the cadence of heavy, clanging footfalls, advancing from the rear of the train.
“Grievous,” Mace grumbled.
Kit glanced at him. “Here we go again.”
Hurrying into the vestibule between the two lead cars, they launched themselves to the roof. Three cars distant marched General Grievous and two of his elite droids, their capes snapping behind them in the wind, pulse-tipped batons angled across their barrel chests.
Farther back, clamped by animal-like claws to the roof of the train, was the gunboat from which the frightful trio had been released.
Without pausing, Grievous drew two lightsabers from inside his billowing cloak. By the time they were ignited, Mace was already on and all over the cyborg, batting away at the two blades, swinging low at Grievous’s artificial legs, thrusting at his skeletal face.
The lightsabers thrummed and hissed, meeting one another in bursts of dazzling light. In a corner of Mace’s mind he wondered to which Jedi Grievous’s blades had belonged. Just as the Force was keeping Mace from being blown from the mag-lev’s roof, magnetism of some sort was keeping the general fastened in place. For the cyborg, though, the coherence hindered as much as it helped, whereas Mace never remained in one place for very long. Again and again the three blades joined, in snarling attacks and parries.
As Mace already knew from Ki-Adi-Mundi and Shaak Ti, Grievous was well trained in the Jedi arts. He could recognize the hand of Dooku in the general’s training and technique. His strikes were as forceful as any Mace had ever had to counter, and his speed was astonishing.
But he didn’t know Vaapad—the technique of dark flirtation in which Mace excelled.
To the rear of the car, where Grievous’s pair of MagnaGuards had made the mistake of pitting themselves against Kit Fisto, the Nautolan’s blade was a cyclone of blazing