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“Not without you,” Anakin said through his teeth.

One of the buzz droids crouched beside the cockpit, silvery arms grappling with R4; another worked on the starfighter’s nose, while a third skittered toward the ventral hydraulics. The last two of the aggressive little mechs had spidered to Obi-Wan’s left wing, working on that damaged control surface.

“You can’t help me.” Obi-Wan still maintained his Jedi calm. “They’re shutting down the controls.”

“I can fix that …” Anakin brought his starfighter into line only a couple of meters off Obi-Wan’s wing. “Steady …,” he muttered, “steady …,” and triggered a single burst of his right-side cannon that blasted the two buzz droids into gouts of molten metal.

Along with most of Obi-Wan’s left wing.

Anakin said, “Whoops.”

The starfighter bucked hard enough to knock Obi-Wan’s skull against the transparisteel canopy. A gust of stinging smoke filled the cockpit. Obi-Wan fought the yoke to keep his starfighter out of an uncontrolled tumble. “Anakin, that’s not helping.”

“You’re right, bad idea. Here, let’s try this—move left and swing under—easy …”

“Anakin, you’re too close! Wait—” Obi-Wan stared in disbelief as Anakin’s starfighter edged closer and with a dip of its wing physically slammed a buzz droid into a smear of metal. The impact jolted Obi-Wan again, pounded a deep streak of dent into his starfighter’s hull, and shattered the forward control surface of Anakin’s wing.

Anakin had forgotten the first principle of combat. Again. As usual.

“You’re going to get us both killed!”

His atmospheric scrubbers drained smoke from the cockpit, but now the droid on the forward control surface of Obi-Wan’s starfighter’s right wing had peeled away enough of the hull plates that its jointed saw arms could get deep inside. Sparks flared into space, along with an expanding fountain of gas that instantly crystallized in the hard vacuum. Velocity identical to Obi-Wan’s, the shimmering gas hung on his starfighter’s nose like a cloud of fog. “Blast,” Obi-Wan muttered. “I can’t see. My controls are going.”

“You’re doing fine. Stay on my wing.”

Easier said than done. “I have to accelerate out of this.”

“I’m with you. Go.”

Obi-Wan eased power to his thrusters, and his starfighter parted the cloud, but new vapor boiled out to replace it as he went. “Is that last one still on my nose? Arfour, can you do anything?”

The only response he got came from Anakin. “That’s a negative on Arfour. Buzz droid got him.”

“It,” Obi-Wan corrected automatically. “Wait—they attacked Arfour?”

“Not just Arfour. One of them jumped over when we hit.”

Blast, Obi-Wan thought. They are getting smarter.

Through a gap torn in the cloud by the curve of his cockpit, Obi-Wan could see R2-D2 grappling with a buzz droid hand-to-hand. Well: saw-arm-to-saw-arm. Even flying blind and nearly out of control through the middle of a space battle, Obi-Wan could not avoid a second of disbelief at the bewildering variety of auxiliary tools and aftermarket behaviors Anakin had tinkered onto his starfighter’s astromech, even beyond the sophisticated upgrades performed by the Royal Engineers of Naboo. The little device was virtually a partner in its own right.

R2’s saw cut through one of the buzz droid’s grapplers, sending the jointed arm flipping lazily off into space. Then it did the same to another. Then a panel opened in R2-D2’s side and its datajack arm stabbed out and smacked the crippled buzz droid right off Anakin’s hull. The buzz droid spun aft until it was caught in the blast wash of Anakin’s sublights then blew away faster than even Obi-Wan’s eye could follow.

Obi-Wan reflected that the Separatist droids weren’t the only ones that were getting smarter.

The datajack retracted and a different panel opened, this time in R2-D2’s dome. A claw-cable shot from it into the cloud of gas that still billowed from Obi-Wan’s right forward wing, and pulled back out dragging a struggling buzz droid. The silver droid twisted and squirmed and its grapplers took hold of the cable,