Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [236]
Two, three, and four.
Oh, thought Obi-Wan with detached approval. That worked out rather well.
Only ten thousand to go. Give or take.
An instant later the Force had him hurtling through a storm of blasterfire as every combat droid in the control center opened up on him at once.
Letting go of intention, letting go of desire, letting go of life, Obi-Wan fixed his entire attention on a thread of the Force that pulled him toward Grievous: not where Grievous was, but where Grievous would be when Obi-Wan got there …
Leaping girder to girder, slashing cables on which to swing through swarms of ricocheting particle beams, blade flickering so fast it became a deflector shield that splattered blaster bolts in all directions, his presence alone became a weapon: as he spun and whirled through the control center’s superstructure, the blasts of particle cannons from power droids destroyed equipment and shattered girders and unleashed a torrent of red-hot debris that crashed to the deck, crushing droids on all sides. By the time he flipped down through the air to land catfooted on the deck once more, nearly half the droids between him and Grievous had been destroyed by their own not-so-friendly fire.
He cut his way into the mob of remaining troops as smoothly as if it were no more than a canebrake near some sunlit beach; his steady pace left behind a trail of smoking slices of droid.
“Keep firing!” Grievous roared to the spider droids that flanked him. “Blast him!”
Obi-Wan felt the massive shoulder cannon of a spider droid track him, and he felt it fire a bolt as powerful as a proton grenade, and he let the Force nudge him into a leap that carried him just far enough toward the fringe of the bolt’s blast radius so that instead of shattering his bones it merely gave him a very strong, very hot push—
—that sent him whirling over the rest of the droids to land directly in front of Grievous.
A single slash of his lightsaber amputated the shoulder cannon of one power droid and continued into a spinning Forceassisted kick that brought his boot heel to the point of the other power droid’s duranium chin, snapping the droid’s head back hard enough to sever its cervical sensor cables. Blind and deaf, the power droid could only continue to obey its last order; it staggered in a wild circle, its convulsively firing cannon blasting random holes in droids and walls alike, until Obi-Wan deactivated it with a precise thrust that burned a thumb-sized hole through its thoracic braincase.
“General,” Obi-Wan said with a blandly polite smile as though unexpectedly greeting, on the street, someone he privately disliked. “My offer is still open.”
Droid guns throughout the control center fell silent; Obi-Wan stood so close to Grievous that the general was in the line of fire.
Grievous threw back his cloak imperiously. “Do you believe that I would surrender to you now?”
“I am still willing to take you alive.” Obi-Wan’s nod took in the smoking, sparking wreckage that filled the control center. “So far, no one has been hurt.”
Grievous tilted his head so that he could squint down into Obi-Wan’s face. “I have thousands of troops. You cannot defeat them all.”
“I don’t have to.”
“This is your chance to surrender, General Kenobi.” Grievous swept a duranium hand toward the sinkhole-city behind him. “Pau City is in my grip; lay down your blade, or I will squeeze … until this entire sinkhole brims over with innocent blood.”
“That’s not what it’s about to brim with,” Obi-Wan said. “You should pay more attention to the weather.”
Yellow eyes narrowed behind a mask of armorplast. “What?”
“Have a look outside.” He pointed his lightsaber toward the archway. “It’s about to start raining clones.”
Grievous said again, turning to look, “What?”
A shadow had passed over the sun as though one of the towering thunderheads on the horizon had caught a stray current