Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [172]
Obi-Wan regarded the general without emotion. “Perhaps you should reconsider my offer.”
Grievous braced himself against a control console, its durasteel housing buckling under his grip. “This is my answer!”
He ripped the console wholly into the air, right out from under the hands of the astonished Neimoidian operator, raised it over his head, and hurled it at the Jedi. They split, rolling out of the console’s way as it crashed to the deck, spitting smoke and sparks.
“Open fire!” Grievous shook his fists as though each held a Jedi’s neck. “Kill them! Kill them all!”
For one more second there was only the scuttle of priming levers on dozens of blasters.
One second after that, the bridge exploded into a firestorm.
Grievous hung back, crouching, watching for a moment as his two MagnaGuards waded into the Jedi, electrostaffs whirling through the blinding hail of blasterfire that ricocheted around the bridge. Grievous had fought Jedi before, sometimes even in open battle, and he had found that fighting any one Jedi was much like fighting any other.
Kenobi, though—
The ease with which Kenobi had taken command of the situation was frightening. More frightening was the fact that of the two, Skywalker was reportedly the greater warrior. And even their R2 unit could fight: the little astromech had some kind of aftermarket cable-gun it had used to entangle the legs of a super droid and yank it off its feet, and now was jerking the droid this way and that so that its arm cannons were blasting chunks off its squadmates instead of the Jedi.
Grievous was starting to think less about winning this particular encounter than about surviving it.
Let his MagnaGuards fight the Jedi; that’s what they were designed for—and they were doing their jobs well. IG-101 had pressed Kenobi back against a console, lightning blazing from his electrostaff’s energy shield where it pushed on Kenobi’s blade; the Jedi general might have died then and there, except that one of the simple-minded super battle droids turned both arm cannons on his back, giving Kenobi the chance to duck and allow the hammering blaster bolts to slam 101 stumbling backward. Skywalker had stashed the Chancellor somewhere—that sniveling coward Palpatine was probably trembling under one of the control consoles—and had managed to sever both of 102’s legs below the knee, which for some reason he apparently expected to end the fight; he seemed completely astonished when 102 whirled nimbly on one end of his electrostaff and used the stumps of his legs to thump Skywalker so soundly the Jedi went down skidding.
On the other hand, Grievous thought, this might be salvageable after all.
He tapped his internal comlink’s jaw sensor to the general droid command frequency. “The Chancellor is hiding under one of the consoles. Squad Sixteen, find him, and deliver him to my escape pod immediately. Squad Eight, stay on mission. Kill the Jedi.”
Then the ship bucked, sharper than it ever had, and the view wall panels whited out as radiation-scatter sleeted through the bridge. Alarm klaxons blared. The nav console flared sparks into the face of a Neimoidian pilot, setting his uniform on fire and adding his screams to the din, and another console exploded, ripping the newly promoted senior gunnery officer into a pile of shredded meat.
Ah, Grievous thought. In all the excitement, he had entirely forgotten about Lieutenant Commander Needa and Integrity.
The other pilot—the one who wasn’t shrieking and slapping at the flames on his uniform until his own hands caught fire—leaned as far away from his screaming partner as his crash webbing would allow and shouted, “General, that shot destroyed the last of the aft control cells! The ship is deorbiting! We’re going