Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [280]
Simultaneous surges of the Force carried them both spinning up off the cables to the slant of the toppling superstructure’s crane deck. Obi-Wan barely got his feet on the metal before Anakin pounced on him and they stood almost toe-to-toe, blades whirling and crashing on all sides, while around them the collection plant’s maintenance droids still tinkered mindlessly away at the doomed machinery, as they would continue to do until lava closed over them and they melted to their constituent molecules and dissolved into the flow.
A roar louder even than the volcano’s eruption came from the river ahead; metal began to shriek and stretch. The river dropped away in a vertical sheet of fire that vanished into boiling clouds of smoke and gases.
The whole collection plant was being carried, inexorably, out over a vast lava-fall.
Obi-Wan decided he didn’t really want to see what was at the bottom.
He turned Anakin’s blade aside with a two-handed block and landed a solid kick that knocked the two apart. Before Anakin could recover his balance, Obi-Wan took a running leap that became a graceful dive headlong off the crane deck. He hurtled down past level after level, and only a few tens of meters above the lava itself the Force called a dangling cable to his hand, turning his dive into a swing that carried him high and far, to the very limit of the cable.
And he let it go.
As though jumping from a swing in the Temple playrooms, his velocity sent him flying up and out over a catenary arc that shot him toward the river’s shore.
Toward. Not quite to.
But the Force had led him here, and again it had not betrayed him: below, humming along a few meters above the lava river, came a big, slow old repulsorlift platform, carrying droids and equipment out toward a collection plant that its programming was not sophisticated enough to realize was about to be destroyed.
Obi-Wan flipped in the air and let the Force bring him to a catfooted landing. An adder-quick stab of his lightsaber disabled the platform’s guidance system, and Obi-Wan was able to direct it back toward the shore with a simple shift of his weight.
He turned to watch as the collection plant shrieked like the damned in a Corellian hell, crumbling over the brink of the falls until it vanished into invisible destruction.
Obi-Wan lowered his head. “Good-bye, old friend.”
But the Force whispered a warning, and Obi-Wan lifted his head in time to see Anakin come hurtling toward him out from the boil of smoke above the falls, perched on a tiny repulsorlift droid. The little droid was vastly swifter than Obi-Wan’s logy old cargo platform, and Anakin was easily able to swing around Obi-Wan and cut him off from the shore. Obi-Wan shifted weight one way, then another, but Anakin’s droid was nimble as a sand panther; there was no way around, and this close to the lava, the heat was intense enough to crisp Obi-Wan’s hair.
“This is the end for you, Master,” he said. “I wish it were otherwise.”
“Yes, Anakin, so do I,” Obi-Wan said as he sprinted into a leaping dive, making a spear of his blade.
Anakin leaned aside and deflected the thrust almost contemptuously; he missed a cut at Obi-Wan’s legs as the Jedi Master flew past him.
Obi-Wan turned his dive into a forward roll that left him barely teetering on the rim of a low cliff, just above the soft black sand of the riverbank. Anakin snarled a curse as he realized he’d been suckered, and leapt off his droid at Obi-Wan’s back—
Half a second too slow.
Obi-Wan’s whirl to parry didn’t meet Anakin’s blade. It met his knee. Then his other knee.
And while Anakin was still in the air, burned-off lower legs only starting their topple down the cliff, Obi-Wan’s recovery to guard brought his blade through Anakin’s left arm above the elbow. He stepped back as Anakin fell.
Anakin dropped his lightsaber, clawing at the edge of the cliff with