Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [375]
Vader muted the holoprojector’s audio pickup and glanced across the aisle to Commander Appo. “Do you concur, Commander?”
“As it is we’re losing too many troopers,” Appo said without hesitation. “Grant permission to the naval commanders to initiate surgical bombardment from orbit.”
Vader mulled it over for a moment. He didn’t like being wrong, much less admitting that he had been wrong, but he saw no way out. “You may commence bombardment, Commander, but make certain you save Kachirho for last. I have business to finish up here.”
As the holoimage faded, Vader turned to the cabin’s small porthole, meditating on the whereabouts of his Jedi quarries, and what nature of trap they had set for him. The thought of confronting them stirred his impatience and his anger.
Wings uplifted, the shuttle made a rough landing on the tier, bolts from Wookiee blasters careening from the fuselage. When the boarding ramp had extended, Appo and his stormtroopers hurried outside, Vader right behind him, his ignited blade deflecting fire from all sides.
Three troopers fell before they made it two meters from the ramp.
The Wookiees were dug in, shooting from behind makeshift barricades and from crossbeams high above the balcony. Raising the shuttle on repulsorlift power, the clone pilot took the craft through a 180-degree sweep, drenching the area with laserfire. At the same time, two Wookiees with satchel charges slung over their shoulders rushed from cover and managed to hurl the explosives through the shuttle’s open hatch. A deafening explosion blew off one of the wings and sent the craft spinning and skidding to the very rim of the tier.
Counterattacking, Vader strode through fountaining flames to take the fight to the Wookiees. Crimson blade slashing left and right, he parried blaster bolts and amputated limbs and heads. Caterwauling and howling, showing their fangs and waving their long arms about, the Wookiees tried to hold their positions, but they had never faced anything like him, even in the darkest depths of Kashyyyk’s primeval forest.
As tall as some of them, Vader waded in, his lightsaber cleaving intricately carved war shields, sending blasters and bow-casters flying, setting fire to shaggy coats, leaving more than a score of bodies in his wake.
He was waving Appo and the other troopers forward when flashes of refulgent blue light caught his eye, and he swung to the source.
Emerging from a covered bridge anchored distally to the bole of the giant tree rushed six Jedi, deflecting blaster bolts from the stormtroopers as they attacked, doing to Appo’s cadre just what Vader had done to the Wookiees.
Forging through the offensive, three Jedi raced in to square off with Vader.
He recognized the petite, black-haired female among them, and tipped his blade in salute.
“You’ve saved me the trouble of looking for you, Padawan Starstone. These others must be the ones you gathered by accessing the Temple beacon.”
Starstone’s dark eyes bored into him. “You defiled the Temple by setting foot in it.”
“More than you know,” he told her.
“Then you’ll pay for that, as well.”
He angled the lightsaber in front of him, tip pointed slightly downward. “You’re very much mistaken, Padawan. It is you who will pay.”
Before Starstone could make a move, Siadem Forte and Iwo Kulka stepped in front of her and attacked Vader.
As was the case with many Jedi Knights, the two were familiar with accounts of what had happened on Geonosis when Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker had gone after the Sith Lord, Count Dooku. And so Forte and Kulka went in as a team, each of them employing a radically different lightsaber style, determined to off-balance Vader.
But Vader merely stood like