Zar frowned at their hissing blades. “No need for that, Jedi Solo. They’re just watch droids.” She stepped forward, blocking the droids’ line of fire. “You two stand down. These guests were just leaving.”
“Negative.” The closer droid raised the arm containing its blaster cannon. “Please clear an attack lane. Intruders are designated targets.”
Zar placed her hands on her hips. “I decide who the targets are around here, Two-Twenty. I’m the one the Ducha left in charge.”
“Uh, Entora,” Jaina said. “Maybe you’d better listen…”
Jaina was cut off by the rapid whomping of a blaster cannon, and suddenly there was blood and hot light everywhere. Knowing better than to allow the droids to concentrate their ferocious firepower, she and Zekk sprang away in opposite directions, tumbling through the air in a wild helix of twists and flips, relying on the Force to stay one eye-blink ahead of the droids’ targeting computers.
A tremendous cracking echoed through the compound as cannon fire struck the wall around the murg pit, spraying rock chips and superheated dust everywhere. Jaina came down four meters away and rolled into a somersault, then launched herself into a long, arcing spiral. There were so many bolts the air seemed about to burst into flame, and twice she had to use her lightsaber to deflect attacks that came so close she thought half her face would melt.
A cacophony of ear-piercing shrieks sounded behind her, almost as loud as the droids’ blaster cannons. Jaina hit the ground rolling and somersaulted into cover behind the wall of the first building she could find.
She spun to face her attackers and was surprised to glimpse a string of slimy gray forms clambering through a smoking breach in the murg pit wall. The creatures’ eyes were open wide, they were trailing long strings of yellow drool, and-given their ungainly form and misshaped legs-they were slithering into the compound with a speed Jaina could only think of as astonishing.
A volley of cannon bolts tore into the building she was using for cover-then abruptly went wide. She peered around the corner and saw that the pack of fleeing murgs had slammed headlong into the battle droids. Most had clamped their powerful jaws around a droid’s leg or arm and were struggling to drag it down, but the smallest was holding what remained of Zar’s lifeless body in its mouth and circling the melee, apparently trying to carry her to safety.
Jaina glanced across the courtyard at Zekk, who was also crouched behind a building, studying the situation. She reached out to him in the Force and knew instantly they were both thinking the same thing: Go while the going is good.
Zekk nodded toward her, then rolled in the opposite direction and disappeared behind the building. Jaina did likewise, racing down a twisting pathway that led more or less in the direction of the gate.
She pulled her comlink and opened a direct channel to Sneaker. “Hardfire those engines! We’re coming back hot and need to be at takeoff power fast.”
Sneaker replied with an irritated whistle.
“No time to explain-just do it!” Jaina ordered.
Though Jaina couldn’t really understand beep code, it was easy enough to guess her astromecrTs objection. Because they were running low on fuel, Jaina and Zekk had shut their StealthXs down without burning off the supply in the preheating cell. Hardfiring the engines now meant forcing cold fuel into the combustion chambers, and that would mean a complete overhaul-assuming, of course, the engines lasted long enough to return to base.
Jaina was about halfway back to the gate when the murgs flashed across an adjacent intersection, now chortling and squawking in excitement. A moment later she heard hissing servomotors and knew one of the battle droids had found her. She dodged around a bend, barely escaping death as a flurry of cannon bolts blasted a meter-wide hole through a gratenite wall.
The battle droid pounded after her, its blaster cannon continuing to punch black stars into the building at her back. When Jaina came to the next intersection, she used the Force to send a rock clattering down the walkway toward the gate, then deactivated her lightsaber, ducked around the opposite side of the building, and dropped to her belly on the cold walkway.
It seemed to take the battle droid forever to arrive. Jaina began to worry that despite her precautions, it had detected her heat signature with a thermal-imaging sweep, or had perhaps picked up the pounding of her pulse through an acoustic analysis. She concentrated on her breathing, trying to quiet her heart with a relaxation exercise she rarely used.
From the other side of the compound came the sound of Zekk’s battle against his own pursuer-his lightsaber droning in muffled counterpoint to the rapid crump of the battle droid’s blaster cannon. Even more troubling was the fear and uncertainty Jaina felt through the Force, the growing desperation as the droid continued to press its assault. She began to fear Zekk was not going to make it; that the time had come to see if she could slip away from her own attacker and take Zekk’s by surprise.