Disclaimer: George Lucas owns Star Wars. I am not making any profit from this work of fanfiction.
Author's note: Action! UST! Danger!
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
The Lorethans suited up for war with a kind of brisk efficiency that suggested they'd done this before, maybe even as a team.
Anakin watched Ryn with a burning heart. "Be careful," he told her as she checked her lightsaber one last time.
Ryn looked up from her utility belt and gave him a smile - her real smile. "You, too."
Anakin swallowed hard. "I will." Deep breaths. "Ryn, I -"
Ryn crossed the cockpit in one long stride, leaned over his pilot's seat ... and kissed him, unexpectedly, full on the mouth.
Hard.
In front of Obi-Wan.
It was a desperate, searing kiss, a kiss of parting, a kiss full of all the things they meant to each other, and Anakin wound his fingers through her dirty hair and kissed her back with all the fervor of his confusion.
They were both breathing raggedly when Ryn broke the kiss and pulled back to meet his eyes. "Don't say it," she whispered, the breath hitching in her throat, and he knew she meant goodbye.
Anakin nodded slowly, his eyes locked on hers. "Good luck," he said instead, and Ryn ducked her head to hide her crooked smile, but he knew it was there.
"I'll see you on the other side," she promised, and went to join the fight.
Obi-Wan, mercifully, pretended to have been temporarily blind, deaf, and stupid: he gave no sign that he had noticed anything out of the ordinary.
The fighting was intense but short-lived. The pirates had prepared the spaceport - rather shabbily - against a frontal assault, but not against a targeted hit-and-run, demonstrating a remarkable lack of insight about their own line of work. Hondo would have spit, but Evinne was mostly just relieved.
Their plan depended on speed - on striking, refueling, and getting off-world again fast. Skywalker had won the Boonta Eve; Evinne wasn't terribly worried about his piloting. Makesh was as reliably swift and accurate as ever, unperturbed in the face of violent death. Ryn, in some ways, was better than she had ever been: faster, fiercer, more ruthless. It was as if, with nothing left to lose, she no longer kept anything to hold back.
Bereft, Ryn was fearless.
Evinne, as usual, was just trying to stay alive. It seemed like enough to keep her busy.
The pirates managed to raise some reinforcements just as Evinne was connecting the fuel hose. Makesh saw them first and shouted a warning.
Not good. The pirates were coming in low, flying heavily modded starfighters and stitching down red lines of strafing fire.
Ryn heard Evinne cursing, and felt a distant agreement with her. This was the moment when they were most vulnerable. Evinne was tied to the fuel line, and Anakin and Obi-Wan were sitting dead. They couldn't take evasive action, and one shot anywhere along the fuel system would obliterate them in a ball of flame.
But there was a rusty speeder bike sitting against the nearest retaining wall.
It was crazy, but ... It's not like I've got anything to lose.
Ryn wrenched it free, kicked it to life, and pointed it straight at her own ship.
The thing about speeder bikes was that they operated on basic repulsor technology. Not strong enough to get them much more than head-height off the ground, usually - but a speeder bike's repulsors couldn't tell the difference between the ground and any other mass bigger than itself.
So when she tugged up sharply on the control bars, a meter short of splattering herself all over the hull of the ship, the speeder bike obediently tracked up the side and floated a couple of meets over the surface as Ryn revved the engines.
There were three fighters incoming, and Ryn met them head-on.
Shooting past over the cockpit, Ryn heard the repulsors whine and cut out, but she had the altitude she needed, and she let go the controls long enough to open fire with both blasters. At that range, multiple shots would slag even space-worthy transparisteel, and she held the trigger down and didn't let up.
Whether the pilots were actually dead or just blinded by the light and smoke, Ryn couldn't tell - she still couldn't feel much beyond her own pain. But the first two fighters corkscrewed like badly thrown rocks and impacted on the unforgiving duracrete on either side.
The other one was tracking on her now, ignoring its original target. Ryn observed her imminent destruction with a curious detachment as she fell toward earth.
Blaster fire from the cannons ripped the air around her, plasma ionizing the local atmosphere and scalding her skin. Ryn felt herself jerked to one side, as though an invisible fist had snatched her out of the way, for some inscrutable purpose known only to itself.
Oh. She twisted to look. Obi-Wan, holding onto her with the Force while Anakin jinked the ship around on its tight leash, a lead of less than two meters.
Put me down and activate the dorsal turret, Ryn thought impatiently. But then she saw why he hadn't done so already: the dorsal turret was a smoking ruin.
I've got a bad feeling about this.