Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [72]
“Get ready to take the control bars!” Anakin said.
Fa’ale’s hands clutched his robe. “Where are you planning to go?”
“Up.”
Pouring on all speed, Anakin steered the sled up the side of the hill that supported one half of the bridge. At the zenith of the climb, he engaged the repulsorlift. Then, leaping from the now rocketing sled, he called on the Force to propel himself toward the swaying cage.
The pilots of the skiff saw him coming, and banked hard to starboard, but not soon enough to prevent Anakin from latching onto the claw. A Rodian in the copilot’s chair cracked open the door and began firing down at his moving target.
“I had a feeling you’d show up,” Obi-Wan said from inside the claw.
A lucky shot from above hit the cage and ricocheted.
“Hang on, Master! This isn’t going to be pretty.”
Obi-Wan heard the snap-hiss of Anakin’s lightsaber. Peering through the metal fingers of the claw, he saw what was coming.
“Anakin, wait—”
But there was no stopping him.
As the claw came within reach of the cargo hold, Anakin swung his lightsaber and sliced open the floor of the skiff’s cockpit. Sparks and smoke poured from the rend, and almost immediately the craft slued to starboard. Passing within a meter of one of the bridge towers, it began to twirl toward the hillside.
An instant before the crash, Anakin severed the claw cable, and the cage plummeted, striking the slippery ground and racing down to the frozen river, out onto the ice, spinning crazily, with Obi-Wan bouncing around inside and Anakin Force-fastened to the outside through all the unpredictable pitches and tumbles. The skiff crashed into the hillside. By the time the claw came to a rest on the far side of the river, the two Jedi were so covered in snow they looked like wampas.
Anakin’s lightsaber made short work of the fingers of the claw. Obi-Wan scrambled out, spitting snow, and shaking like a hound.
“That has to make it forty—”
“Stop,” Obi-Wan said. “I concede.” He paused to empty the sleeves and hood of his sodden cloak. “Where’s Fa’ale?”
Anakin scanned the hillsides. The assassins on the bridge had packed up and fled. Ultimately, he pointed toward the opposite bank of the river, where a sled was wedged between two mounds of ice.
When they reached her, Fa’ale was laying facedown a few meters from the machine, which had been holed by blasterfire. Gently turning her over, Anakin saw that one bolt had amputated the Twi’lek’s right lekku. Her eyes blinked open, focusing on him as he cradled her in his arms.
“Don’t tell me,” she said weakly. “I’m going to live, right?”
“Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.”
“A week in bacta and you’ll be good as new,” Obi-Wan said.
Fa’ale sighed. “I won’t hold it against you. You did your best to get me killed.” She gazed around. “Shouldn’t we be looking for cover?”
“They’re gone,” Anakin said.
Fa’ale shook her head. “After all these years, they finally—”
“I don’t think so,” Obi-Wan interrupted. “Someone more important than Raith Sienar doesn’t want us to learn too much about the star courier.”
“Then I had better tell you the rest—about Coruscant, I mean.”
Anakin raised her up. “Where did you deliver the ship?”
“To an old building in the industrial quarter, west of the Senate. An area called The Works.”
Macrobinoculars pressed to his eyes, Mace studied the distant building top to bottom, his gaze lingering on broken windows, fissured ledges, canted balconies.
Central to a complex of half a dozen structures, the building was more than three centuries old and going to ruin. For two-thirds of its towering height it was an unadorned pillar with a rounded summit. Support for the superstructure was afforded by a circular base, reinforced by massive fins. Where the superstructure and the sloped tops of the buttresses met, the building was fenestrated by windows and antiquated gear-toothed docking gates. Many of the permaglass panels and skylights were intact, but time and corrosion had done their worst to the vertical hatches of the docking gates.
An investigation was under way to