“Where are they now?”
“They’re stealing a speeder and will rendezvous with us. They’re thinking of stealing some payroll credit chips, or kidnapping a bolo-drama star so we won’t come back empty-handed.”
“Good of them. Anything else?”
“The fleet jumped in and was ambushed, too. Nothing much is going right.”
“We need a spaceport,” Jaina shouted. “We’ll have to steal a shuttle.”
“All nonmilitary air and space travel will be shut down until things are settled. And the Coronet spaceport is going to be crawling with CorSec.”
“There are smaller ports. Private spaceports, spaceports for outlying communities. And they’ll have charter shuttle services,” Jaina said.
“I’m on it.” Kolir’s right cheek bulged with the cloth she’d stuffed in there to stanch the flow of blood. She reached into her blood-spattered bag and drew out a datapad. Opening it, she began searching the Coronet database she’d loaded into it.
“Find one with a female manager on duty,” Thann said. Kolir grimaced at him.
“It’ll speed things up,” he said.
“If I ever find out you do that to get datesh,” she said, “I’m going to cut shomething off you.”
“I am an ethical Jedi,” Thann said. Jaina couldn’t tell whether the indignation his tone expressed was real or affected. Thann showed more emotion than most Falleen, but often it was a deliberate display, an attempt to put others at ease, rather than what he was truly feeling. “I only twist people’s minds in the line of duty.”
CENTERPOINT STATION
Jacen rolled sideways, kicking the metal floor to propel himself, and managed to be a meter away when the first blaster bolt hit the spot where he’d been kneeling. He continued the roll, awkward because of the pain that racked him, but came up on his feet. Despite his blurring vision, he saw his lightsaber rolling across the floor, extended his hand toward it
Two white egg-shaped canisters hit the floor near him. He leapt backward away from them, rotating through the air as he went, and came down on his feet, but his legs buckled as he landed and he crashed to the floor.
He could still see his lightsaber. He exerted his will toward it. It wobbled on the floor and began rolling toward him.
The egg-shaped canisters detonated, filling the air around them with white smoke. It rapidly spread, obscuring everything. But Jacen managed to maintain his focus, and his lightsaber flew to his hand before the whiteness closed down all vision.
Jacen rolled to the side again, heard and felt the heat from blasterfire hitting where he’d just lain. So they can see, he thought. Optics in their helmets. There had to be sound bafflers, too.
Well, he had a couple of tricks remaining, and they had nothing to do with specialized gear.
He knew more about pain than his opponents realized. At the height of the Yuuzhan Vong war, he’d been a prisoner for months, subjected to their tortures and customs of self-inflicted agony. He had learned to function within their Embrace of Pain and other rituals that would break beings not accustomed to such hardships.
A sudden infliction of pain could surprise him, surely. But it couldn’t keep him down.
He let the pain flow through him as though it were the Force. He internalized it, experiencing it as an old friend-albeit an old friend he didn’t necessarily want visiting him too often.
He stood and moved forward. His first few steps were awkward and slow, his later ones sure, and once he was in full mastery of his body and the pain that suffused it, he put on a burst of speed in traditional Jedi fashion, outracing the blaster bolts that tailed him.
Pain-racked, unslowed, he neared the wall and leapt high up on it, landing on one of the ascending ramps. Now he was still within the smoke cloud from the canisters but shielded from blasterfire from above. Moments later he reached the walkway level where Thrackan Sal-Solo had stood.
He still could not see, but through the Force he could detect living beings ahead of him. They were changing their order, some retreating, some advancing, the foremost of them aiming…
The blaster bolts came, illuminating the canister smoke in curiously beautiful lines as they flashed toward him. He batted them back the way they’d come, mercilessly picking off the soldiers who’d fired them.
Then he changed tactics. There were curious gaps in the formation of the living ahead of them. Those gaps had to be where the droid generators of the sonic waves were situated. He began batting blasterfire toward them, and a moment later the pain-inducing shriek was reduced in volume by half. Three blaster bolts later, the sound and pain cut off entirely, and he could hear a mechanical cough as the motivator of the second sonic generator droid detonated dully within its housing.