Disclaimer: I do not own Star Wars. I am not making any profit from this work of fanfiction.
Author's note: I know, it's been like a week since the last update. I've been at CV in Orlando, where I (gasp!) finished writing FLAWED. It's still got to be typed up, because I write longhand first, but the story's climax is coming! I've begun work on the sequel, but it doesn't have a name yet. Nothing so far feels right; we'll see. In the meantime: enjoy the chapter, and let me know what you think!
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Ryn wasn't thrilled with her trip to the new memorial. She would have preferred a lot more windows, for instance, so she could see what was going on. She didn't have the kind of control of the Force that would alert her to incoming danger of the non-aware variety.
Imram said the lack of windows was a security measure.
Ryn didn't say that she was a security measure, too. She scowled at him and said, "I like to see what's coming at me."
Imram leaned closer, his face avid rather than frightened. "You really think we might be attacked?"
"Of course not," Ryn said bitingly. "I'm sure the enemies of the State are hoping we have a lovely evening."
For a second she thought Imram was going to voice a wounded objection to her sarcasm. But he pulled himself together and said, "Don't worry. If anything happens, I'll take care of you."
That couldn't be good. "If anything happens," Ryn corrected him, "my orders are to take care of you."
This went over like a male Wookiee at a Chandrilan women's retreat. Imram turned deeply red. "I don't need a bodyguard," he bit out. "Especially not a girl."
"I'm not a girl," Ryn said. "I'm a combat specialist."
Now Imram's face turned white. "So you're just here with me because of orders? Because it's your duty?"
Ryn opened her mouth to snap yes, and then caught herself, checked by Imram's sudden, genuine pain. It felt like nothing so much as an old wound, and then Ryn knew: it wasn't about her, or about this night. It was about a lifetime of never having any real friends because everybody wanted something and it wasn't you.
"I -" Ryn began, but then the groundcar lurched and she was thrown forward, across the space between seats into Imram's arms. he caught her reflexively, one hand wrapping around her arm, then other clutching at her stiff bodice, and Ryn had time to note that his breath still tasted like medicine before she shoved off against his chest and thrust herself backwards into her seat, just as the groundcar jerked again and then tilted onto its side, trapped in an awkward diagonal.
I have a bad feeling about this. "Are groundcars supposed to do that?" she asked her companion.
"No," said Imram. "It must be one of the treads."
That sounded like a nice, mundane explanation. Ryn liked it a lot.
She didn't believe it for a minute.
"Stay here," she instructed Imram, and pushed the door open so she could crawl out.
A battle droid or three looked back at her.
Ryn yanked the door shut so fast even droid reflexes couldn't get a lock and fire.
She looked over her shoulder at Imram, who stared back at her for a long beat and then abruptly leaned over and vomited.
Ryn listened to the droids firing against the closed door and waited.
"Sorry," Imram panted at last, straightening. "I-"
"Don't worry about it." Ryn reached through the small slit Anakin had cut in her skirt, concealed behind an enormous glitter-encrusted bow, and retrieved her lightsaber.
The car was armored, but the droids would manage to blast through eventually. She pulled her chrono and comlink out of her cleavage - there was a lot hiding in there tonight - and commed Obi-Wan one-handed while she worked to strap her chrono on with her teeth.
"Kenobi here."
Ryn tucked the comlink between her middle and ring fingers and finished strapping the chrono to her wrist, where she could get a look at it.
"The groundcar is wrecked and we are under assault by battle droids. I don't have a count yet." The groundcar groaned under the impact of some unknown explosives. Yeah, they've got more than rifles. "They have explosives. I can get us out, but -"
"Stay where you are," Obi-Wan said. "I'm sending -"
"Negative!" Ryn snapped, as the groundcar shook again. The metal toward the front of the vehicle was beginning to take on an ominous glow. "The armor won't last. We have to make a run for it."
The briefest of pauses while Obi-Wan accepted, in his Jedi way, that the odds were heavily against his ever seeing her again. "Understood," he said slowly. "May the Force be with you." He broke the connection before Ryn could wish him the same.
Ryn shoved the comlink back down her bodice as another blast rocked the groundcar.
Imram stared at her with wide, frightened eyes. "We're going to die, aren't we?"
This was no time to lie.
"Everybody dies," Ryn said, and opened the door.
She grabbed the muzzle of the blaster that came in after her and jerked it forward, out of the surprised battle droid's grasp. Imram caught it as Ryn reversed her motion and shoved the battle droid backward into his companions.
Her lightsaber cut through them like a scythe through grass, and then Ryn hauled herself up out of the groundcar one-handed while deflecting bolts from more distant blasters.
She leapt clear and rolled as a canon blast hit the groundcar, and then she was on her feet, screaming for Imram to get out, get out NOW, and she charged the canon to give him a fighting chance, sprinting and praying he had enough sense to use the droid's discarded blaster.
Every battle droid on this street - and there seemed to be a lot of them; where the kriff did they get a canon? - started tracking on her as the threat to their heavy artillery became clear, but that was a good thing, because it meant they weren't paying attention to Imram. So Ryn zigzagged across the open space, brandishing her lightsaber to draw their fire, and she felt Imram's relief as he cleared the groundcar just as the canon trained on her and fired.
By the time it locked on target, Ryn was already sprinting into point-blank range; she dodged three inches to the left and kept coming.
And then she was inside its blind spot, and even though blaster shots scorched her skirt to tatters, Ryn jumped up and caught he muzzle with one hand and sheared her lightsaber through it with the other.
She felt a blaster burn graze her thigh and dropped, but the canon was maimed. She didn't go for a kill; protecting Imram was her priority, not demolishing droids.
She raced back to his position, yelling at him to get down and trying to ignore the unsteadiness in her right leg. Imram had the blaster, and he was firing, but either he had no aim, or he was a lot angrier than she'd thought, because he was fully as close to killing her as he was to hitting any battle droids.
"Stop shooting at me!" she shrieked, dodging another near-miss.
He lowered the blaster as she came even with him. "I was trying to give you cover fire," he explained, wounded.
"Well, you covered me in fire," Ryn said, grabbing his arm to hustle him along. "Try not to do that any more."
She jerked him off his feet in time to escape a hail of blaster fire from incoming support troops. Great.
Ryn rolled to deflect fire, and behind her shoulder, Imram cringed.
"Um," he said. "Are there more of them?"
"Yes," Ryn said shortly. She'd been practicing in the dojo; most of the deflected blasts returned to their sources, cutting down the numbers.
Ryn ripped the panniers loose from what was left of her skirt, snatched her blaster free, and kicked the panniers away as she rolled to her feet.
Imram had enough sense to follow her, but he'd caught sight of her right thigh. "You're bleeding."
"I'd noticed."
The street was filling with human opponents now, arming themselves with the fallen droids's blasters. That was bad, because Ryn didn't want to kill any people if she could help it; but it was also good, because she didn't need to see them to shoot them: she could sense them all clearly.
Well, she had hadn't kriffing well fired first. Ryn kept her eyes on the droids, returning their fire with her lightsaber, and fired without looking at their living attackers as she herded Imram down the street, into what could be either escape or a trap: the way their luck was going, Ryn's money was on the trap, but it wasn't like they had anywhere else to go.
Ryn felt every hit: over twenty kills, three wounded, no misses.
Imram threw up again as they ducked and wove, using the canon now for cover.
"I know just how you feel," Ryn said, and fired over his head, straight into the chest of a girl younger than she was. The light went out of the girl's eyes, but it was the feel of her death, that made Ryn swallow hard and blink her burning eyes.
I'm so sorry, she thought, and hated herself for thinking it. What good did it do if she kept killing them anyway?
She cut down a teenage boy with a flick of her lightsaber.
"I'm sorry," she whispered.
The attack came from two sides at once, heavy artillery blasting away from the East, blowing chunks in the memorial wall, and droid infantry in marching up from the North.
Obi-Wan leapt in front of the Prime Minister and began deflecting fire. That should have been Ryn's job, but Ryn was pinned down somewhere to the North, on the other side of those droid battalions and couldn't come. Obi-Wan didn't hold it against her - his job had been to make sure an attack like this never got close enough to be a problem, and he'd failed.
Anakin appeared beside him, his lightsaber clearing a narrow path through the bolts. His face was tight, and Obi-Wan didn't think it was all from the battle. He didn't dare ask what his Padawan was sensing from Ryn; either she would survive, or she wouldn't.
Keep your mind on the here and now, where it belongs, his memory said in Qui-Gon's voice.
Yes, Master. I'm listening.
Ferus streaked through the dark cityscape, backlit now and again, despite his efforts, by the flare of explosions as he flitted from cover to cover.
Canons boomed, the impact of their blasts shaking the ground - you wouldn't think lasers could do that, but they did.
The Force whispered its warnings, nudging him first one way and then another to find a safe path through the storm.
He could just make out Siri, several meters ahead on the other side of the street, heading in the same general direction. If they could get behind the lines and find the leaders of this revolt quickly - before the Planetary Guard mobilized and began to put down the uprising by force - there was still a chance that the Jedi could somehow engineer a peace out of this.
Maybe.
They had to try.
Ferus ducked and wove and dodged. There was some kind of barricade up ahead, less than five hundred meters now. The resistance leaders must be behind that. Ferus put on speed, trying to catch up to Siri.
He never heard the blast that tore him from his feet and sent him flying through the air.
Evinne swung her lightsaber again, feeling an impact that shouldn't have been there - it was a laser, made of nothing more substantial than light, after all; how could it have drag? - and slid it loose from the droid body it had ruined in time to duck as Makesh fired past her shoulder.
"Something's wrong," Evinne panted, leaning back against the wall. "They were ready for us. Even if we'd triggered a sensor, they couldn't have mobilized this fast."
Makesh leaned past her to fire around the corner. Evinne listened for hits, heard at leas two that were kills, or what amounted to kills when you were fighting droids.
"How many?" she asked him as he ducked back beside her.
"Maybe twenty, and more coming." He glanced at her face. "I didn't tell anyone where I was going."
He didn't ask, but Evinne answered anyway: "Terch knew. He dropped me off."
Makesh nodded; there was nothing to say.
"We have to get into the air shafts," she told him, trusting that the droids wouldn't understand Lorethan even if they overheard. "It's the only way."
"I'll hold them," Makesh said. "You cut."
So Makesh held them at the bend of the hallway where they'd welded shut the hatch that would have made it an intersection, and Evinne cut the nearest vent free of its moorings. The edges she left were red-hot, but that wouldn't kill them and those droids would.
"Go!" she snapped at Makesh.
"You-"
"No! Go, now! That's an order!" Evinne put all the weight of her authority behind it, the respect she'd earned in service backed by the power she'd inherited, and Makesh caved and went.
The first droids came into sight just as Makesh's bootheels cleared the vent.
Standing alone in the corridor, Evinne committed sacrilege.
She let herself feel the energy crackling in the air around her, humming through the ship itself, vibrating in her droid attackers.
She sucked that energy in, drawing on it as one would draw water up through a straw.
She drew it in, and she let it out.
Droids faltered and crumpled, melting like plastic, turning into slag before her eyes, taking more down with them, energy rolling through their ranks like waves of invisible lightning until the corridor was clear.
But one of them got off a shot. Evinne felt the impact in her side, shuddered and flinched shamefully.
She tried to embrace the pain, tried to accept it as her penance. There was no cheating the universe; everything was balance. She had broken the rules, and now she must pay.
She couldn't quite feel acceptance, not yet, but she knew she would, someday.
Assuming she lived long enough.
She reached up one hand and let Makesh pull her to safety.
Next up: Things get REALLY bad ...