[Last Of The Jedi] - 07(21)

It was nothing more than a shadow on the surveillance playback. A figure who leaped from a building a hundred meters away, landed lightly on the roof, then entered the building through an open window. Solace had seen the image and breathed Jedi. Immediately they had staked it out. No one had come in or out, through the front door or the windows or the roof.

“It’s time to take a look,” Solace said. “I doubt I can surprise a Jedi, but if I can get close enough they’ll see that I’m a Jedi, too. I’d like to avoid tangling with one unnecessarily.”

“Good point,” Clive said. “You go first.”

Solace arched an eyebrow at him, then Force-leaped to a ledge fifty meters up.

“Show-off,” Clive said.

From high above, Solace looked down on Astri and Clive. She hoped they would stay out of the way.

From that vantage point, she spied the window she’d seen on the surveillance feed. Solace leaped over the distance and into the open window.

She stood in a narrow hallway, listening to the quality of the silence. It was a trick she’d honed on countless, tedious sessions at the Temple. She’d only been a human. She didn’t have the kind of extrasensory powers she’d seen in other species. So she’d worked on her senses for endless hours. She’d discovered that her hearing was above average, so she’d focused on that. She’d drilled and drilled, entering thousands of different sounds into the computer, turning down the volume lower and lower to identify them, until she could hear a fly land on a wall twenty meters away. Concentrate. Differentiate. The slight hum of the air control vents, the distant whine of the lift tube. A cough behind the door of 1257. Someone turned over on a sleep couch in the room directly opposite her. In the room next to that, a towel slipped off a rod and fell to the floor. It was picked up and re-hung.

Then she heard what she was waiting for.

The slither of rough fabric against the leather of a belt as someone moved. The slight, unmistakable metallic click as an object was unclipped.

He knew she was here.

Solace went carefully down the hallway, stopping outside the door she wanted. There was only one way to announce herself, one way to let the being on the other side of the door know she meant him no harm.

She unclipped her lightsaber, activated it, and buried it in the door.

A heartbeat later, three things happened simultaneously. A lightsaber came through the door from the other side.

Well, hello, she said in her head.

She was still smiling as stormtroopers charged out of the lift tube. At the same moment, Clive and Astri climbed in the hallway window.

“Stormtroopers!” Astri shouted.

“No kidding!” Solace yelled back.

The blasterfire streaked down the hallway. Solace pulled her lightsaber out of the molten metal doorway and began advancing, her lightsaber dancing. She didn’t know what the Jedi on the other side of the door would do, but a little help would be nice. But no one arrived.

The stormtroopers released two droidekas in wheel mode. No Jedi wanted to tangle with a droideka. They were hard to shut down, and their double-barreled blaster cannonfire could give even a Jedi a battle headache. Solace leaped out of the way, trying to figure out a way to get past the deflector shields without being blown to bits.

Another stormtrooper rolled a grenade down toward her. Solace kicked it back with one foot while leaping up to take down the seeker droid overhead. More stormtroopers poured out of the lift tube. The grenade exploded, sending three of them flying.

She certainly had her hands full.

Thanks a lot, whoever you are, Solace thought. The Jedi had obviously escaped out of the room through the window.

Well, the galaxy had changed, and the remaining Jedi had changed along with it. It was every Jedi for himself or herself now.

Wasn’t that what she’d told Ferus?

A spasm of blasterfire came a little close for comfort. Her battle mind had slipped for a moment. It wasn’t like her to start thinking in the middle of a battle. That could be deadly.

Suddenly a tall human male came swinging out of the turbolift shaft. Solace didn’t get a glimpse of his face, hidden in the shadows of a hood. But his lightsaber work was extraordinary. The stormtroopers were surrounded now, and Solace and the mysterious Jedi moved as a team. The tall Jedi was obviously familiar with droidekas. He charged, his lightsaber in a spinning arc, and with deft precision struck them at a vulnerable point Solace hadn’t known existed, underneath their shell, near their repulsorlift motors.

The Jedi leaped over the remaining stormtroopers and landed by her side. She had a quick impression of chromium eyes, pale skin, and a melancholy face.

He jerked his chin toward the window in the hallway, where Clive and Astri had taken shelter in a doorway.