He raised his gaze.
"We go left at the top of the stairs."
Anakin heard a note of indecision in his voice.
"You don"t sound as sure as you did."
"I haven"t been in this area for a long while, but I"m certain we can reach the docking level."
The rock walls of the corridor into which they raced bore the scars of the giant drills that had hollowed Escarte. Light and oxygen were scant, and the uneven floor was slippery. Anakin clamped his right arm around the Bith"s narrow waist to help him along.
"Wait, wait!" K"sar said suddenly.
"What"s wrong?" K"sar eyes filled with dread.
"I made a mistake! We shouldn"t have come this way!"
Anakin prevented him from moving.
"Too late to turn back."
"We have to! You don"t understand - - "
K"sar words were swallowed by the sound of servomotors and hydraulics.
Around a bend in the gloomy tunnel raced a dwarf spider droid, its long-barreled blaster cannon already sweeping side to side, in search of targets.
25.
"Someone"s coming," Obi-Wan warned Travale.
They were standing on a narrow gantry that accessed the control panel for Escarte"s number three tractor beam coupling station. Six meters high, the tower rose from a circular platform that projected from the wall of a deep air shaft. They"d had to wait for full power to return to the area before seeing to the task of disabling the tractor beam. Initially, Travale had made a few mistakes, but he had sorted through his confusion and was almost done.
Obi-Wan peered around the corner of the tower in the direction of the voices he had heard. Three Geonosian security guards were approaching the coupling station from a corridor on the far side of the shaft.
"Never a lightsaber when you need one," Travale whispered. "Can you divert them somehow?"
Obi-Wan considered his options, then made a flicking motion with the fingers of his right hand. An unidentifiable sound issued from deeper in the corridor the guards had taken. Whirling, the three Geonosians hurried off to investigate.
Travale shook his head back and forth in appreciation of Obi-Wan"s skill.
"It"s a wonder the war isn"t over yet."
"Too few of us."
Travale studied Obi-Wan for a moment.
"Is that the reason?"
Obi-Wan touched Travale on the arm, and motioned with his bearded chin to the tower.
"No time to waste."
The Jedi watched over Travale"s shoulder as he dialed the coupling power feed to zero.
"These things are the future," Travale said. "Fill a ship with enough tractor beam arrays and you could prevent an enemy from jumping to hypers.p.a.ce. "
"There aren"t ships large enough."
"There will be," Travale said. "To ensure that another war doesn"t happen."
Mainstay of the Commerce Guild"s mining operations, the dwarf spider droid was a hunter-killer. The spider didn"t stand much taller than a Trade Federation battle droid, but it was agile and equipped with two powerful blaster cannons. Perched at the juncture of four splayed legs, the hemispherical body was dominated by two huge circular photoreceptors, which appeared to be fixed on Anakin and K"sar as the droid rushed in to make the kill.
Anakin threw K"sar to one side and rolled as the dwarf spider fired. Two glaring bolts gouged a trench in the hewn floor of the tunnel, and the report of the cannon resounded deafeningly from the walls. The head pivoted, photoreceptors finding Anakin, and the weapon discharged again.
Anakin flipped himself away. Calling on the Force, he swirled his hands in front of him to prevent the intense heat from engulfing him. Rolling once more, he tried to get underneath the droid"s striding legs, but the spider antic.i.p.ated him, skittered backward, and loosed another burst.
Anakin leapt. Propelled by the Force, as well as the force of the explosion, he struck the arched ceiling and fell hard to the floor.
Blacking out for a moment, he awoke to find the droid charging toward him, reorienting the smaller of its cannons to place him in the crosshairs. Catapulting to his feet, he flew forward, intent on ripping the power cells from beneath the droid"s dome. No less determined, the droid countered by retreating and rearing up. Falling short of the mark, Anakin curled his body, counting on momentum to carry him forward. The spider continued to retreat, then dropped back on all fours, traversing its cannon. Feigning a sidestep, Anakin hurled himself completely under the droid, but still couldn"t find cover. He heard the sound of the spider"s dome rotating, then the sound of the muzzle of the long cannon hitting the scabrous wall. Realizing that it had entered a section of the tunnel too narrow to allow for a half turn, the droid stamped its legs in frustration, then began to back itself into the wider stretch.
Without a clear plan in mind, Anakin chased it, heard the dome begin to pivot once more, then the sound of a hand blaster set on full automatic.
Ten meters down the corridor, K"sar was on his feet, the heavy weapon held in front of him in a two-handed grip, firing directly into the spider"s bulging red photoreceptors and power cells. Confused, the droid tried desperately to spin around, but there wasn"t room. Loose rock calved from the walls as the barrel of the cannon struck again and again.
All the while, the Bith continued to advance, emptying the blaster"s power cell. An electronic shriek tore from somewhere inside the spider, and sparks began to geyser from its perforated dome. The four legs danced in anger for a moment longer, then stopped, and the tunnel began to fill with smoke. Finally the droid collapsed, the tip of its cannon slamming into the floor at K"sar"s feet.
Anakin eased around the smoking machine and gently removed the blaster from the Bith"s shaking grip. The droid"s dome pinged as it cooled; a steady susurration escaped the blaster"s gas chamber.
"How much farther?" Anakin asked after a moment.
"We"re close," K"sar said in a daze. "Half a kilometer or so past the bend."
"Can you make it?"
K"sar nodded, and they hurried through the final stretch, emerging from a tunnel opening at the rear of the docking bay. A hundred meters away the cruiser was sitting just where the tractor beam had left it. Few guards were about, and most of them were battle droids.
Anakin took a moment to study the disposition of the droids, then turned to K"sar, who seemed to have recovered from the ordeal in the tunnel.
"No matter what I do, I want you to head straight for the boarding ramp.
Don"t stop running until you"re inside the ship, understand?"
K"sar nodded. Anakin leapt out of the corridor, deliberately calling attention to himself to distract the droids from firing at K"sar. Evading blaster bolts with perfectly timed jumps and rolls, he got close enough to the droids to wave some of them into others, toppling them as if they had been picked up by a strong wind. From one, he called a blaster rifle into his own hands, and mowed down those that were still on their feet.
Following K"sar up the boarding ramp, he rushed into the c.o.c.kpit and began to power up the cruiser"s defensive systems.
Bolts from the droids" blasters ricocheted from the fuselage and transparisteel panels. Traversing the cruiser"s fore and aft cannons, Anakin fired, burying the droids under huge chunks of ferrocrete blown from the walls and ceiling. When the flight systems were online he left the c.o.c.kpit to search for K"sar, who was sitting on the floor of the main hold, panting.
"Why aren"t you raising the ship?" the Bith said.
"Guild corvettes are probably already on the way." Anakin stepped closer to him, his expression darkening visibly.
"You and I need to talk first. And either you answer my questions, or I jettison you here, and let the Gossams do what they will with you."
The Bith"s eyes expanded. "Talk? About what?"
"A hyperwave transceiver you designed fourteen years ago."
"Fourteen years ago? I can barely remember last week."
Anakin glared at him from beneath an angrily furrowed brow.
"Think harder."
"Why are you doing this to me? I just saved your life!"
"Remind me to thank you later. Right now you"re going to tell me about the transceiver. It would have been a special order. More than the usual secrecy. You would have been well paid. You installed it in a mechnochair."
K"sar started. His wrinkled mouth puckered and he stared at Anakin in terror.
"Now it all comes together - - my arrest and imprisonment, the death sentence! The transceiver... that"s what brought you here."
"Who placed the order?"
"I suspect you already know the answer."
"How did he contact you?"
"Through my personal comlink. He needed someone of great skill. Someone willing to follow his every instruction without question. The designs he sent were like nothing I had ever seen. The end result was almost...
artistic."
"Why did he allow you to live - - afterward?"
"I was never sure. I knew I"d been useful. I thought he might require additional devices, but I never heard from him again."
"If you"re right about your arrest, that means he has been keeping an eye on you. Tell me the rest and we might be able to keep you from his long reach. "
"That"s everything!"
"You"re holding something back," Anakin said in a flat, menacing tone. "I can feel it."
K"sar gulped, and clutched at his neck. "I built two of them!"
"Who received the second one? One of the Separatist leaders?"
Swallowing with difficulty, K"sar said: "It went to Sienar!"
Anakin blinked in surprise. "Raith Sienar?"
"To Sienar Advanced Projects. It was designed for some sort of experimental s.p.a.cecraft they were building."
"Who was the craft meant for?"
"I don"t know - - I swear, Jedi, I don"t."
K"sar paused, then added: "But I knew the pilot Sienar hired to deliver the ship."
"Knew?"
"I don"t know if she"s still alive. But I know where you could begin to look."
Obi-Wan and Travale negotiated the cofferdam that linked Escarte"s air lock to a docking ring just forward of the cruiser"s tri-barreled thruster fantail.
Stepping into the main hold, Travale gave a shout of joy.
"Good to be alive!"
Obi-Wan glanced at Thal K"sar, thinking the Bith might feel the same.
Instead, K"sar was curled up on the hold"s worn acceleration couch. Obi-Wan hurried on to the c.o.c.kpit and strapped into the copilot"s seat.
"Any problems reaching the ship?"
"The usual close calls," Anakin said evasively.
"Obviously you were successful at disabling the tractor beam."
"Not a skill I expect to draw on again, but, yes, thanks to Travale."
Anakin glanced at the console, waiting for the cofferdam telltale to go off, then called on the thrusters to move the cruiser away from Escarte.
Off to port, Obi-Wan saw two Guild corvettes dead in s.p.a.ce.
"And here I was certain we weren"t out of this yet."
Anakin shrugged.
"Anticlimactic."
Obi-Wan regarded him for a moment.