Star Wars: Knight Errant (18 page)

“Hide behind my bike, Tan,” Kerra said, putting the Givin’s grounded vehicle into hover mode. She pulled the unconscious rider from the ground by his spindly arms. “It’ll only be a minute, I promise!”

Concussion missiles screaming overhead, Rusher forced himself to focus on the debris-strewn path. There was more incoming than outgoing, he figured, by a three-to-one margin. Whenever that happened for any stretch of
time, the battle was over, even for a gunner with a full crew.

And his wasn’t. It had come apart so quickly. There were others here: all the specialists from that day in Daiman’s temple, minus the unlucky Togorian. And yet they seemed to be suffering even worse. He still saw some weak fire coming from the Nosaurian’s position up the line, but he couldn’t see Medagazy’s droids at all.

His people back on
Diligence
had told him Dackett had left with a recovery team to try to bring back anything from Tun-Badon’s battalion, from guns to the Sanyassan himself.
Always worried about the lurch ratio
, Rusher thought.
Leave no one behind
. Dackett must not have known that Serraknife Battalion’s entire chunk of ridge was already destroyed. Communications had gone to blazes, along with discipline. That usually happened around the same time.

Rusher looked to a rise in the ridge, just ahead. The formation wasn’t there before; much of what lay beyond had given way, and the rest of it was smoking. Stabbing at the ground with his walking stick, he propelled himself forward, fearing what he’d see on the other side of the divide.

“Sir! Sir!”

Rusher gaped as he crested the hill. There was the death and destruction he’d expected, worse than he’d seen in his career. Hillside and weaponry had changed places, leaving the odd metal spar—and organic limb—jabbing up from the sizzling rubble. But his eyes fixed on the one thing moving. Beadle Lubboon’s cargo crawler trundled through the smoke, puttering between impact craters. In place of the gun barrel from earlier, the Duros recruit had chained a makeshift stretcher to the back.

“I have Master Dackett, sir!”

“I can see that!”

Forgetting the pain in his leg, Rusher dashed around the crawler to the litter. Dackett was there, bloody clothing shredded.

Beadle called from ahead. “I saw him when I went over the hill with the gun, sir!”

Rusher knelt beside the stretcher. Looking behind, he saw a long trail gouged in the gravel and snaking out of sight. He doubted repulsorlifts could handle this terrain. “Kind of a bumpy ride, Ryland.”

Dackett grabbed Rusher’s collar with a bruised right hand. “Shoot me, Brig, before he kills me!”

Rusher looked at Dackett’s other arm. It was down near his feet, set at the end of the litter. “I brought it back myself,” Dackett coughed. “Never leave anything behind—”

Another turbolaser blast struck the ridge, lower down. Tossing his cane aside, Rusher clambered back to the cargo crawler. He opened a bin inside the vehicle’s door and pulled out a medpac.

“Oh, that’s where it was,” Beadle said, still frozen at the control yoke.

“That’s where it was,” Rusher said, scrambling back.

Rusher found a spot in the folds of Dackett’s neck and injected a painkiller. Dazed, the veteran babbled, apologizing for leaving the ship. “Getting too old, I guess—takin’ chances I shouldn’t.” Rusher looked around. Everyone on the team, it seemed, was acting with abandon today. The Duros boy included. Something felt wrong about Gazzari. They had to get away.

“Give me a hand, kid!”

Ripping his fingers from the control yoke, the Duros bounded from his seat and stumbled to the surface. Together with Rusher, he helped lift the hefty victim into the crawler’s passenger seat. “Don’t forget the arm,” Dackett ordered woozily.

“Yes, sir. I mean, no, sir,” the Duros said.

With Beadle perched awkwardly on the hood, Rusher settled into the driver’s seat and reached for the control yoke. Imprints of the recruit’s fingers were there, worn deep into the plastoid. Rusher shook his head. He’d had driven Dackett through half a kilometer of the most pockmarked terrain on the ridge, under fire. “Kid, what possessed you to come all the way down here to get him?”

The Duros looked down, embarrassed. “He was the only person I knew, sir.”

Rusher laughed, despite himself—but only for a moment. Crowning the hill, he saw his worst fears realized. Before leaving
Diligence
, he’d called a general retreat, using the battalions nearest the ship on either side to screen the movements of the forces coming from farther away. But the blazing wreckage strewn ahead was all that was left of the screeners and the screened.

“Outfit status!”

“One battalion aboard,” crackled the reply over the comlink. “Two still out and stragglers, north and south—”

Rusher couldn’t hear the rest. From far away on the crater floor, the Death Spiral fired again and again, banks of turrets on different levels targeting all along the crater wall. They didn’t have
Diligence
in their sights yet; Rusher doubted they could
see
it, with all the dust and ash in the air. But they were doing a great job of picking off any of his forces trying to return to it. The only possible haven for the remains of the brigade might as well have been light-years away.

And what’s my top speed? Four kilometers an hour?
Rusher stood up in his seat and scowled. There was no way through. No way for anyone.

“So much for working for the creator of the universe,” he snarled, sitting down and slamming the vehicle into gear. “No miracles here!”

* * *

Crouching behind the frame of a crashed airspeeder, Narsk looked at the comm unit. And looked again. Such timing. This would be the strangest thing ever to happen in the history of organized warfare—or even war between Sith Lords.

But the message he had received from space was clear—as was his mission. He had a signal to send to the combatants on Gazzari. Odion—
and
Daiman.

He would have the passcode. They would have to accept his word. But looking at the Death Spiral hurling energy at the dwindling forces on the crater wall, Narsk wondered if any present would hear his message. Searching, he found a pair of macrobinoculars near the corpse of the speeder’s Odionite pilot. Even if the Death Spiral weren’t throwing off interference, were Odion and Daiman even listening?

Scanning across the field, he found them. They weren’t hard to miss. Daiman stood atop a hover platform on the northern ridge of the crater, lightsaber lit. His own forces were gathered beneath, a mix of soldiers and the accursed Correctors, wielding their own weapons. Less than a kilometer away, Odion’s Thunderers crashed toward them, having broken the ambush. The man himself rode above them, carried atop a flying skiff. Force lightning flashed in the destroyer’s hands as he approached his long-desired confrontation.

No, they definitely won’t listen
, Narsk thought. And probably no one in the space battle raging above would hear his call, either. He turned his macrobinoculars to the east, where the expensive arxeum had been reduced almost entirely to slag. It wouldn’t be long now before the Death Spiral found the mass of refugees, scattering to the east—

Narsk blinked. No mistake: a green lightsaber. The Jedi. She was astride a swoop bike carrying some youngling,
directing traffic.
Insane
. Black hair came and went from his view as she alternated her gaze between them and the Death Spiral. But she wasn’t looking at its towering heights, now firing fruitlessly at Daiman’s shielded platform. Rather, she stared at something closer to its base.

Narsk shifted his view to the left, across an endless stretch of body-strewn muck. The Odionites had cleared the entire area surrounding the conical weapons platform, an area now being traversed by a single speeder bike. Coming from the Jedi’s position, the grayish flier was traveling beneath the energy shield on a direct course back to the Death Spiral’s speeder bays. Narsk tightened his focus.

Jelcho
.

The unconscious Givin was slumped over the handlebars of the speeder bike, hurtling at full speed, its accelerator jammed. Moving his scope, Narsk saw that Jelcho was attached to the vehicle by something dark. A bandolier, lined with small, silvery pouches.

Just before the helpless rider reached the tower, Narsk scanned back across the crater to see a vision from the past: Kerra Holt, squeezing something. His detonator.

Narsk dived behind the tipped body of the airspeeder.
This’ll be bad
.

The base of the Death Spiral disappeared with a blinding flash, sundering the massive structure. A shattering crack emanated from the epicenter, shaking the floor of the crater and throwing Odion’s rearmost echelons into the air. To the north, the blast wave knocked both Sith Lords from their aerial perches, depositing them violently upon their respective coteries below.

The quake drove all others in the crater to the ground—even the students herded near the northeastern wall. Kerra looked back in fear. She’d gotten them well
enough away from the blast zone, but the ringed tower was wrenching itself into bits as it collapsed, throwing shrapnel in all directions.

Then, seeing the debris fall short of the mob, Kerra sat back on the bike and smiled gently. Daiman’s plant had produced the baradium nitrite for use against Odion. She’d just used it as it was intended, but in a way the so-called creator had never imagined!

“What in blazes was that?” Even Dackett, in his pharmaceutical haze, felt the tremor rattling through the cargo crawler’s frame.

“Our miracle,” Rusher said, mouth dry. The turrets that had been firing on the ridge were now spiraling for real, far over the crater’s edge. Not waiting for the echoes to die, he pulled the helmet mike to his lips. “That’s our cue. All units, recall and board!”

Reactivating the cargo crawler, Rusher looked back at the pillar of fire and marveled.
Where had Daiman pulled that trick from?
Many more moments like this, and he’d become a believer himself!

Narsk slid out from beneath the body of the airspeeder. The shock wave had lifted the car and thrown it into the southern wall of the crater, picking Narsk up in transit. The Bothan found himself upside down in the front seat, the crumpled dashboard having taken most of the impact.

Staggering to his feet, he swore. Everything hurt again—but he’d picked the right time to take his call. The Death Spiral had collapsed into its own metallic funeral pyre, a miniature volcano added to Gazzari’s complement. Jelcho had found his void, thanks to the Jedi.
If only the pleasure had been mine
, Narsk thought, stumbling painfully away.
From orbit
.

He found the comm unit not far from the wreck. Its casing was cracked, but it otherwise appeared func
tional. Narsk activated it. He could make his call. And maybe now, the Sith Lords might even be listening.

Kerra stood on her bike, her lightsaber pointed straight ahead as she flew over the student body. She yelled to one side and the other in every language she could remember; on the back of the seat, little Tan did the same. “To the east! To the hills!”

The Sith Lords behind had momentarily ceased their battle to regroup, but they would eventually recover—and the victor would have the students. Refuge now could only exist in one place, Kerra realized. Something had to have brought all those war droids and cannons to the battle.

“Kerra, there’s a path!”

Kerra thanked the Force for the Sullustan’s sharp vision. The bombardment had collapsed the ridge in places, but some of the graded pathways the battle droids had paved to reach the crater floor remained. She couldn’t tell what lay above in the smoke, but it had to be better than staying here.

“Everyone, climb!”

The ship’s master was safely aboard. Rusher had seen the Duros recruit and Dackett up the ramp before returning to the surface. Coyn’skar and Zhaboka battalions had already returned; amazingly, with most of their equipment. But Team Ripper was still out there, returning from the northernmost position through the mess Beadle had wandered into. The Death Spiral was gone, but Odion’s forces were not. Rusher would wait as long as he could, but not a second longer.

He looked down. Gazzari had been a disaster right up there with Serroco. He’d always wanted a piece of military history. Now he had it—if anyone on the world survived to tell about it. Three thousand soldiers had
awakened under his command that morning. If a thousand remained, he would be relieved.

No, not relieved
. Nothing would heal this wound. He’d been lucky, so far. All these years, and never the big wipeout, until today. So many were gone. Tun-Badon, and his Serraknifes. The Sat’skars. The Dematoils. And now Dackett was fighting for his life. There wasn’t any coming back from this for Rusher, not for a gunner with only half a—

Through the swirling dust, Rusher saw the long barrels of the Kelligdyds above the northern fold of the ridge. The Rippers had made it! Rusher trotted forward, stepping around debris as the machines came across the rise on their repulsorlifts. Elated, Rusher patted the backs of the bewildered, battered troopers running beside.