It would have been a pleasant walk, Luke thought with a quiet pang of regret, but he didn’t seem to have the time lately for such simple pleasures. “The important point is that Karrde has always come to us first with information that we need,” he added to Artoo, ushering the droid onto the slideway and stepping on behind him. “Whether he admits it or not, he really is on our side.”
Artoo swiveled his dome around to face Luke, made an I-suppose-so sort of grunt, then rotated back to face forward again. The slideway was speeding up, Luke noted with interest, accelerating steadily as they approached the center of the arch. Presumably the entire strip wasn’t speeding up, which would create quite a challenge for anyone trying to get onto the strip behind him. Composed of some kind of pseudofluid material, he guessed, using a variant of laminar flow to create variable speeds along its l ength. One more engineering marvel to add to the list.
They reached the top of the arch, and he was just thinking of asking Artoo to analyze the slideway for him, when be felt a flicker in the Force. It wasn’t much; little more than a twinge in the near distance. But it was enough.
Somewhere very near at hand, someone was preparing for murder.
He stepped off the slideway, fighting for a moment with the abrupt change in speed before be regained his balance. Artoo, suddenly missing him, squawked in surprise-then squawked again as Luke stretched out with the Force and lifted him bodily into the air. “Quiet,” Luke admonished as he set the droid down on the stationary section of the walkway. Looking around, he stretched out again with the Force.
The murderous intent was still there, somewhere close by. But though there were a handful of other pedestrians in sight, there was nothing he could see that appeared to fit the sensation.
At least, not on this particular skyarch.
He turned around, peering upward beneath the edge of his skyarch’s roof and through the guardwall mesh of the skyarch running parallel one level above him. And there they were, perhaps ten meters farther along from where he stood: two cloaked and hooded figures standing with their backs pressed against the guardwall, the smaller child-sized figure clinging to the taller one. Beyond them, Luke could just make out the shadowy forms of three assailants moving slowly and confidently in on them. In the hand of one of them, be caught the glint of a blade.
There was no time to waste, and exactly one route that had any chance of getting Luke to them in time. It would take a hefty jump, but nothing that a Jedi drawing on the Force couldn’t easily handle. The only imponderable was whether the Canyonade’s safety tractor beams would react fast enough to snatch him in midair and whisk him helplessly away.
There was only one way to find out. “Wait here, Artoo,” be murmured. Stretching out to the Force, he hopped over the slideway to the top of his skyarch’s guardwall. For a pair of heartbeats he crouched there, steadying his balance as he did one final visual measurement of the distance up and across to the other skyarch. Then, taking a deep breath, he again drew on the Force and leaped.
The emergency tractor beams were obviously not as hair-trigger as he’d feared, and he reached the other side without so much as a nudge from them. Catching the top of the other skyarch’s guardwall, he swung his legs through the opening between guardwall and roof to land in a slight crouch on the nonmoving section of the walkway.
He took in the tableau laid out before him in a glance. The two prospective victims, as he’d already seen, were standing ahead and to his right, their backs pressed against the guardwall. The hood on the taller of them bad slipped back, revealing the lined face and white hair of an old woman. The face of the child clinging to her side-most likely a grandchild or even great-grandchild, considering the woman’s age-was still completely in shadow. But Luke didn’t need to see an expression, the way the child clutched the old woman’s side was all the evidence anyone needed to recognize the silent terror there.
A terror that was well founded; From the lower skyarch Luke had seen three knife-wielding men closing in on them. Now, from his new vantage point, he could see that those three were merely the inner circle of a much larger group. Nine other men were standing a few paces farther back, forming a semicircle around their intended prey. All nine of them had the hardened faces of men whose lives had been shaped by violence and cruelty; all nine had blasters out and ready.
And at the moment, all nine of those faces-and five of those blasters-were pointed at Luke.
“That’s far enough,” Luke called, straightening up from his landing crouch. “Put down your weapons.”
“I’ve got a better idea,” one of the men snarled, his voice as nasty as his appearance. “Why don’t you turn around and walk away. While you still can.”