[Legacy Of The Force] - 04(24)

There was an immediate reply of two clicks, Iella letting him know that she saw him.

He had proceeded about a hundred meters down the walkway-as speeder traffic hurtled by to his left, he’d counted ninety-eight steps-when he heard three clicks on his comlink. Iella reporting that he was being tailed.

Wedge swore. This wasn’t going to be a clean departure, then. He put his hands in his jacket pockets, gripping the blaster with his right.

Ahead, one street up, was the speeder hangar building where Iella had left the airspeeder that was to be his departure vehicle. It was, in fact, a vehicle belonging to the Corellian government, to the fleet of speeders used by minor functionaries; the day before, Iella had stolen it and put it in place on the building’s fourth floor.

As he approached the street corner, Wedge weighed his options. The obvious one was to continue ahead, down into the depressed, plascrete-lined pedestrian underpass. But that would put him in a straight tunnel about twenty meters long with nowhere to duck if enemies entered behind him and began shooting.

Beside him, speeders occasionally slowed to allow passengers to board or depart. He could jump into one of those vehicles, commandeer it, make a run for it. But that wasn’t inconspicuous, and he was likely to be identified.

He could break into a run, see if that flushed out his pursuers so that Iella could deal with them

His decision was forced on him. His comlink crackled with Iella’s voice, her cry of “Down!” He dived for the sidewalk, hit it hard, felt the air above his back heat up. Ahead, a speeder making a right turn onto the cross-street between Wedge and the parking hangar took a blaster bolt, a blaster rifle bolt, in the starboard side. That plasteel panel and the transparisteel viewport above it blackened and bowed in, and a moment later the speeder was lost to sight, behind the building Wedge had departed mere moments ago.

Wedge rolled over toward the street to his left, freeing the blaster pistol from his pocket before he was completely on his back. He took quick note of the orange airspeeder now heading his way from a proscribed altitude above the normal traffic flow-realized that, from the angle of the shot meant for him, the speeder couldn’t have been its source-and kept rolling, inverting as he did so, leaving him facing back the way he’d come as he rolled out into the traffic lane.

That wasn’t as dangerous as it would have been had the traffic included ground vehicles. For the moment, it was all speeders, and the ones headed his way swerved or gained a little altitude as their pilots realized there was a man sprawled in the road.

They didn’t swerve or climb particularly well. Three ran over him in the space of a second, but only their repulsorlift pulses hit him, pushing him harder into the roadway duracrete. And in passing over him, they provided a little cover from the oncoming airspeeder, giving him time to look for

There they were on the sidewalk, two men in traveler’s robes Jedi robes? One carried a blaster rifle; the other, a silvery tube Wedge thought had to be an unlit lightsaber. There were no pedestrians between their position and Wedge’s-no shock there, as they had obviously waited for the walkway to clear before firing.

He returned fire, squeezing the trigger as fast as he could, using each bolt’s passage through the air to show him how to traverse. He knew the Jedi attacker would ignite his lightsaber and bat the bolts out of the air, but perhaps his wild spray of fire would cause the sniper to panic

It didn’t work out quite that way. Both men dived for the ground. Wedge’s shots still hit the Jedi in the groin and then the face; that man twitched and then lay still, scorched and smoking.

The sniper resumed aiming … and Wedge resumed rolling, moving farther out into the traffic lanes, banging knees and elbows with every revolution, being hammered by the repulsors of each speeder that passed directly over him. His ears rang from the impacts.

A man dressed in an eye-hurting green jumpsuit fell out of the sky and landed beside the sniper. He was broadshouldered, not tall, and had a bushy red beard that fell nearly to his waist. Even at this distance, something about him shouted disguise to Wedge.

The sniper looked up at the man from the sky, losing his fix on Wedge.

Wedge glanced up for a moment. The airspeeder that had been heading his way was now moving from a position directly over the sniper and back toward the traffic laneback toward Wedge. The bearded man had to have come from it, and had to have dropped four stories to land beside the sniper.

The red-bearded man kicked the sniper full in the face. The force of the blow snapped the man’s head back and sent him skidding for a meter across the sidewalk.

Wedge’s comlink crackled again with Iella’s voice. “Are you all right?”