Star Wars_ The New Jedi Order 08_ Edge of Victory 01_ Conquest - J. Gregory Keyes [62]
Most of the trees were gone, no doubt burned off in one of the many battles that had occurred on the jungle moon since the Rebel Alliance located its resistance here before the battle against the first Death Star. What remained was waist-high scrub. Farther down, the trees began again, a green necklace around the hill, and Anakin suddenly understood what Rapuung was concerned about. Fire burned up. Anything caught up here when the blaze started had probably died. If these netting beetles were anything like fire …
He realized, reluctantly, that Rapuung was right. Anakin thought too much like a pilot, where the high ground was everything. He wasn’t a pilot right now; he was prey.
But dangerous prey—a feral rycrit, not a tame one, he reminded himself, when the first tsik vai flier came over.
Anakin didn’t hesitate; he knew what he wanted to do. He reached in a ten-meter radius and lifted everything that wasn’t fastened down—leaf litter, twigs, stones—and hurled them in a cyclone at the intake slits on the side of the flier.
“Fool!” Rapuung shouted. “That was your plan?”
The tsik vai swooped in low, and the tentaclelike cables fired out at them. Anakin dodged, keeping up his barrage. Undeterred, the flier followed close, dropping lower. A tentacle caught Rapuung. The warrior leapt, gripped the upper part of the tentacle in his hands, and started climbing, a grim expression on his scarred face. Getting the idea, Anakin tried to do the same, but without the Force to give him certainty—without being able to feel the tentacles as well as see them—he missed.
The flier suddenly made a peculiar whine, and its flexible wings began to shiver as if in spasm. The tentacle holding Rapuung released him, and he instantly leapt for the ground. The flier hung there, shaking itself.
“Run,” Rapuung shouted. “It will clear its lungs quickly. These tsik vai were not shaped by idiot children, as you seem to think.”
Anakin fell into step with him. “Where are the other fliers?”
“They know where we are now. They will seed the netting beetles into the lowland, as I told you.”
“I wish you had told me what these things do.”
“They draw fibers from tree to tree, from bush to bush. They come in waves that overtake one another, the first wave weaving and the waves behind feeding to replenish their fiber. They move very quickly.”
“Oh. That’s not good.” A sudden thought occurred to him. “You were climbing toward the flier when it had you. Did you think you could capture it?”
“No. I thought I might die gloriously rather than ignominiously. My bare hands are not capable of forcing open the cockpits.”
“But if we can get above the net, somehow …”
“Some of the beetles will draw strands up into the air and cross them above our heads. If we could fly at this very moment, we might escape.”
Anakin came to a halt. “Why are we running, then? Whichever way we go, we’re only coming nearer to the net.”
“True. And if we go uphill, we will only delay our confrontation with it. Do you have your Jeedai blade-that-burns? It might cut the fibers.”
“No.” Anakin was peering downhill. The trees started perhaps a hundred meters away, but he had enough elevation to see their swaying tops stretching off to the horizon, bending this way and that in a fickle wind.
Except in a strip, where they weren’t moving at all. Following the strip, he saw it curving around the hill.
“That’s it, isn’t it,” he murmured. “The net is holding them together.”
“Yes. The fibers are very strong, the net very fine.”
Even as Anakin watched, more trees froze in place, and the strip deepened.
“Will the netting beetles eat us?”
“They will attach to our flesh and draw