[Legacy Of The Force] - 01(7)
Not that this was likely to be a threat to the Jedi. Unless the vehicle was armed with antipersonnel weapons systems, something capable of piercing flesh but not penetrating typical building construction material, the odds of it making an actual attack were low
The vehicle’s foremost pod fired. Jacen saw the smoke trail of a missile headed their way.
He felt an exertion in the Force from Ben, the boy leaping laterally. He added some kinetic energy to his own downward motion, reduced friction to his heels and buttocks-he sat down and slid faster.
The missile impacted dozens of meters above his head. He heard the explosion, felt the building shake beneath him, but was not hit by any heat or debris. The warhead must have penetrated into the building before detonating. A little part of him went cold, infuriated at his enemy’s callous willingness to risk and kill civilians to bag the targets, but the rest of Jacen remained analytical. He put on the brakes, stepping up heel friction and coming more upright again.
The enemy fighter spun closer, then dived past him and out of sight.
Out of sight? Jacen leaned forward. Yes, the building surface did seem to come to an end only a few dozen meters below him, but still well above street level. That meant the angle had to change at that point, becoming a vertical drop. The attacker was below the drop point, waiting.
Jacen turned his attention to reflections in the spacescrapers in the distance ahead of him. There, he could see the enemy fighter. It was flush against this building, its central body still and its legs rotating, four stories below the drop-off point, several meters to the right of where Jacen would go over the edge.
If he kept his current angle of descent, of course.
As the distance to the drop-off point shortened, he bounced across one bank of viewports, then another, ending up on a duracrete strip headed straight for a point above the enemy fighter. Then he reached the lip.
He was now only about twenty stories above the ground. Below, he could see a main avenue thick with traffic and, for the first four or five stories above street level, heavily crisscrossed with cables-private communications cables strung across streets all over Adumar to give neighbors secure communications access with one another.
Directly below Jacen was the fighter craft. Jacen somersaulted as he went over the lip, then came down straddling one of the fighter’s arms just beside the vehicle’s main body. The fighter jolted from the impact and dropped a couple of meters. Through the transparisteel canopy, Jacen could see a helmeted pilot, her body language showing alarm at the sudden proximity of her enemy.
She jerked the control yoke. The fighter spun away from the building. In his peripheral vision Jacen saw a grapnel and white cord wrap around another of the vehicle’s arms.
They angled away from the building, roaring out high above the avenue-then dived straight toward the ground.
Jacen grinned. It was a smart enough tactic. All those cables crossing the street would cut an average attacker-assuming an average attacker could end up in this situation-to pieces without doing significant harm to the fighter.
But Jedi weren’t average attackers.
Ben pulled himself onto the arm his grapnel had grabbed. His face looked flushed with windburn, and his red hair had been whipped into an unruly mess.
“Cut your way in,” Jacen invited.
Ben perked up. Holding the vehicle arm with both legs and one arm, he got his lightsaber into his hand and ignited it.
Jacen leaned over and looked at the ground, so much closer than it had been just seconds before. He gestured toward it, fingers flexing… and the comm cables directly beneath him suddenly wavered like alarmed serpents. He exerted himself more and they parted, some separating completely from one side of the street or the other. The fighter craft plunged into their midst but hit none of them. Just before hitting the street, and below where the cable layer ended, the fighter angled to join the groundspeeder traffic.
The pilot looked at the Jedi, obviously expecting to see limbless torsos or mere gouts of blood remaining. She had just enough time to register alarm before Ben plunged his lightsaber blade into the side of the canopy. As he dug around, trying to find the release catch or hinges, the blade almost grazed the woman’s thigh.
She panicked. That was the only explanation Jacen could come up with. She wrenched her control yoke off to the side, at an unnatural angle, and the canopy suddenly blew clear, shooting up into the sea of comm cables above, nearly knocking Ben clear as it went.
An instant later, the pilot’s seat ignited and shot her straight up. Into the cables. Half blinded by the ejection seat’s propulsion, Jacen still saw her hit the first set of cables.
They held. She didn’t. She and her ejection seat separated into two pieces, each headed a different direction. Jacen saw the upper half of her body hit yet another cable, and then her remains were out of sight behind them.