Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [241]
But before he could clamber out of the pilot’s chair, several metric tons of Jedi-bearing dragonmount landed on the shuttle’s roof, crouched and threatening and hissing venomously down at him.
“I hope you have another vehicle, General!” Obi-Wan waved his lightsaber toward the shuttle’s twin rear thrusters. “I believe there’s some damage to your sublights!”
“You’re insane! There’s no—”
Obi-Wan shrugged. “Show him, Boga.”
The dragonmount dutifully pointed out the damage with two whistling strikes of her massive tail-mace—wham and wham again—which crumpled the shuttle’s thruster tubes into crimped-shut knots of metal.
Obi-Wan beckoned. “Let’s settle this, shall we?”
Grievous’s answer was a shriek of tortured gyros that wrenched the wheeler upright, and a metal-on-metal scream of blades ripping into deck plates that sent it shooting straight toward the sinkhole wall—and, with the claw-arms to help, straight up it.
Obi-Wan sighed. “Didn’t we just come from there?”
Boga coiled herself and sprang for the wall, and the chase was on once more.
They raced through the battle, clawing up walls, shooting through tunnels, skidding and leaping, sprinting where the way was clear and screeching into high-powered serpentines where it was not, whipping around knots of droids and bounding over troopers. Boga ran straight up the side of a clone hovertank and sprang from its turret directly between the high-slanting ring-wheels of a hailfire, and a swipe of Obi-Wan’s blade left the droid crippled behind them. Native troops had taken the field: Utapaun dragonriders armed with sparking power lances charged along causeways, spearing droids on every side. Grievous ran right over anything in his path, the blades of his wheeler shredding droid and trooper and dragon alike; behind him, Obi-Wan’s lightsaber caught and returned blaster bolts in a spray that shattered any droid unwise enough to fire on him. A few stray bolts he batted into the speeding wheeler ahead, but without visible effect.
“Fine,” he muttered. “Let’s try this from a little closer.”
Boga gained steadily. Grievous’s vehicle had the edge in raw speed, but Boga could out-turn it and could make instant leaps at astonishing angles; the dragonmount also had an uncanny instinct for where the general might be heading, as well as a seemingly infinite knowledge of useful shortcuts through side tunnels, along sheer walls, and over chasms studded with locked-down wind turbines. Grievous tried once to block Obi-Wan’s pursuit by screeching out onto a huge pod that held a whole bank of wind turbines and knocking the blade-brakes off them with quick blows of the electrostaff, letting the razor-edged blades spin freely in the constant gale, but Obi-Wan merely brought Boga alongside the turbines and stuck his lightsaber into their whirl. Sliced-free chunks of carboceramic blade shrieked through the air and shattered on the stone on all sides, and with a curse Grievous kicked his vehicle into motion again.
The wheeler roared into a tunnel that seemed to lead straight into the rock of the plateau. The tunnel was jammed with groundcars and dragonmounts and wheelers and jetsters and all manner of other vehicles and every kind of beast that might bear or draw the vast numbers of Utapauns and Utai fleeing the battle. Grievous blasted right into them, blade-wheel chewing through groundcars and splashing the tunnel walls with chunks of shredded lizard; Boga raced along the walls above the traffic, sometimes even galloping on the ceiling with claws gouging chunks from the rock.
With a burst of sustained effort that strangled her honnnking to thin gasps for air, Boga finally pulled alongside Grievous. Obi-Wan leaned forward, stretching out with his lightsaber, barely able to reach the wheeler’s back curve, and carved away an arc of the wheeler’s blade-tread, making the vehicle buck and skid; Grievous answered with a thrust of his electrostaff that crackled lightning against