Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [59]
Ten meters down the corridor, K’sar was on his feet, the heavy weapon held in front of him in a two-handed grip, firing directly into the spider’s bulging red photoreceptors and power cells. Confused, the droid tried desperately to spin around, but there wasn’t room. Loose rock calved from the walls as the barrel of the cannon struck again and again. All the while, the Bith continued to advance, emptying the blaster’s power cell. An electronic shriek tore from somewhere inside the spider, and sparks began to geyser from its perforated dome. The four legs danced in anger for a moment longer, then stopped, and the tunnel began to fill with smoke. Finally the droid collapsed, the tip of its cannon slamming into the floor at K’sar’s feet.
Anakin eased around the smoking machine and gently removed the blaster from the Bith’s shaking grip. The droid’s dome pinged as it cooled; a steady susurration escaped the blaster’s gas chamber.
“How much farther?” Anakin asked after a moment.
“We’re close,” K’sar said in a daze. “Half a kilometer or so past the bend.”
“Can you make it?”
K’sar nodded, and they hurried through the final stretch, emerging from a tunnel opening at the rear of the docking bay. A hundred meters away the cruiser was sitting just where the tractor beam had left it. Few guards were about, and most of them were battle droids.
Anakin took a moment to study the disposition of the droids, then turned to K’sar, who seemed to have recovered from the ordeal in the tunnel.
“No matter what I do, I want you to head straight for the boarding ramp. Don’t stop running until you’re inside the ship, understand?”
K’sar nodded.
Anakin leapt out of the corridor, deliberately calling attention to himself to distract the droids from firing at K’sar. Evading blaster bolts with perfectly timed jumps and rolls, he got close enough to the droids to wave some of them into others, toppling them as if they had been picked up by a strong wind. From one, he called a blaster rifle into his own hands, and mowed down those that were still on their feet.
Following K’sar up the boarding ramp, he rushed into the cockpit and began to power up the cruiser’s defensive systems. Bolts from the droids’ blasters ricocheted from the fuselage and transparisteel panels. Traversing the cruiser’s fore and aft cannons, Anakin fired, burying the droids under huge chunks of ferrocrete blown from the walls and ceiling.
When the flight systems were online he left the cockpit to search for K’sar, who was sitting on the floor of the main hold, panting.
“Why aren’t you raising the ship?” the Bith said. “Guild corvettes are probably already on the way.”
Anakin stepped closer to him, his expression darkening visibly. “You and I need to talk first. And either you answer my questions, or I jettison you here, and let the Gossams do what they will with you.”
The Bith’s eyes expanded. “Talk? About what?”
“A hyperwave transceiver you designed fourteen years ago.”
“Fourteen years ago? I can barely remember last week.”
Anakin glared at him from beneath an angrily furrowed brow. “Think harder.”
“Why are you doing this to me? I just saved your life!”
“Remind me to thank you later. Right now you’re going to tell me about the transceiver. It would have been a special order. More than the usual secrecy. You would have been well paid. You installed it in a mechno-chair.”
K’sar started. His wrinkled mouth puckered and he stared at Anakin in terror. “Now it all comes together—my arrest and imprisonment, the death sentence! The transceiver … that’s what brought you here.”
“Who placed the order?”
“I suspect you already know the answer.”
“How did he contact you?”
“Through my personal comlink. He needed someone of great skill. Someone willing to follow his every instruction without question. The designs he sent were like nothing I had ever seen. The end result was almost … artistic.”
“Why did he allow you to live—afterward?”
“I was never sure. I knew I’d been useful. I thought he might require additional devices, but I never heard from