[Legacy Of The Force] - 01(6)

Jacen swung over the second shaft and readied himself for the shock of impact when the turbolift car reached him. He could feel Ben following his motion, could even feel it as Ben also began focusing on aspects of the Force that would allow for the absorption of kinetic energy …

Then the rising car hit them. They absorbed the shock with their knees and with control over the Force, and suddenly they were hurtling upward along the darkened shaft.

Jacen estimated that they’d risen three hundred meters or more before the car executed a rapid deceleration and locked into place a mere three meters before the top of the shaft. Jacen and Ben both grabbed at support spars at the shaft’s side. After a moment’s noise from beneath-hissing of opening doors, tramping of feet, conversation, closing doors-the car dropped away out of sight, leaving them alone in comparative silence at the top of the shaft.

“I think we’re aboveground,” Ben said.

“Well aboveground.” Jacen ignited his lightsaber and plunged it into what he assumed was the back wall of the shaft-the direction opposite that of the turbolift doors lining the shaft below them. He dragged the blade around in a circle, and just before the end of the burning circuit met the beginning, the plug he was cutting was yanked violently away into daylight brightness, spinning out into open space. A tug of air nearly yanked Jacen after it, and more air roared up the shaft to flee through the hole he’d cut.

Outside the hole was a skyscraper vista of the city of Cartann, part of the nation of Cartann and government capital of the planet of Adumar. The Jedi could see forty-story apartment buildings thickly lined with balconies, many of those balconies serving as small landing pads for personal fighter craft, as Well as taller business spires, circular defensive towers whose featureless exteriors hid gun emplacements, and tall flagpoles from which streamed government, neighborhood, sports team, and advertising banners dozens of meters in length.

Jacen leaned out. The building wall beneath them sloped away at an angle rather than straight down. Far below, he could see skyspeeder traffic in tightly regulated streams through the air.

Ben stuck his head out just under Jacen’s. “Lubed. I know how to do this.”

“Don’t say lubed.”

“Why not?”

“It’s generational slang, invented to distinguish between your generation and every other one by making use of superfluous and irritatingly precious vocabulary, and I’m not from your generation.”

Ben turned up to look at him. His mouth worked as he sought to come up with a cutting reply.

Jacen continued, “Do you have a grapnel and line in your utility belt?”

“Sure, but I won’t need it. I know how to do angle building drops like this.”

“Get it ready anyway.”

Ben grumbled but pulled the grapnel from his belt and dragged out a few meters of slender, strong cord.

“All right, Ben. You first.”

Ben grinned and leapt outward. Jacen clipped his lightsaber back onto his belt and followed.

They fell a few meters, but Jedi acrobatic training and their control over the Force allowed them to come down with their heels against the angled building wall. From that point, it was a simple matter of reducing their inertia, keeping friction maximized between heel and wall surface.

They ran and occasionally slid down the side of the skyscraper along duracrete strips set between broad, high transparisteel viewports. On the other side of those viewports, they saw faces with mouths open in surprise or disbelief.

Jacen sensed the wind gust a moment before he felt it. He braced himself against it with foot placement and the Force before it hit.

Ben, less experienced, didn’t. Jacen saw the boy’s cape flap, then Ben was whirled away from the building face, yelling.

Jacen reached out for him, but the boy, still mostly clearheaded, was already hurling the grapnel hook toward him. Jacen snatched it out of the air and wrapped the cord several times around his wrist before the cord hit its maximum length. Jacen braced his arm against the shock of the impact and withstood it without being dragged off the building front.

With cord control and an extra tug against Ben himself through the Force, he dragged Ben back to the building face. Now Jacen was in front on the descent, Ben meters above and behind. He heard Ben shout, “You can let go now.” The boy’s voice sounded appropriately abashed.

Jacen released the grapnel “You know how to do angle building drops like this, huh?”

“What?”

“I said-“

“Can’t hear you. Too much wind.”

Jacen grinned.

“Up ninety degrees!”

Jacen looked up in the direction Ben indicated. Above, just over skyscraper level, a blue-green flying vehicle was banking at them over a tower dome. It wasn’t shaped like the split-tail Blade series of starfighters produced on this world and flown recreationally, and for duels, by so many Adumari-this was shaped roughly like a starfruit, one central body and five arms protruding from it. The arms ended in stubby housings that, Jacen could see, held thrusters, repulsor vents, and weapons muzzles. He decided that the vehicle would be slow but highly maneuverable-and capable of attacking in any direction, perhaps several directions at once. The arms rotated as a unit, but independent of the vehicle’s central body, where Jacen could see a darkened transparisteel canopy protecting the pilot’s seat.