It is a strange sensation having my life hijacked by a fictional plot, but fun nonetheless :) Last bit before I take a mini-break, dear readers – or else I'll miss my tonight's flight!
.
Mechanically, her mind registers the remaining seconds.
10
9
8
The thin red bolt of blaster fire lances past her so close that she almost jumps. In her peripheral vision she sees the trooper who had been standing to her right jolt and crumple; a second later, his counterpart meets a similar fate.
She was wrong about Nawara's lookouts, after all.
She does not wait to witness the officer's fate; by the time the third bolt meets its target she is already sprinting out of the alley, her lungs burning.
She is halfway across the square when the explosion goes off. She scrambles on, past the square and into the opening of the narrow street beyond, clinging to its flanking wall when the blast wave reaches her; she is well out of the damage radius, but the wall of hot air still hits her hard enough to make her stumble. She steadies herself and continues toward her getaway bike; by then her knees are weak but her mind is ablaze with a joyous tingle.
She made it.
By the time she has started up the bike and kicked the thrusters into gear, speeding away from the scene, she has to revise that conclusion when she hears the high-pitched wail of a siren a couple of hundred meters further up the slope.
She has been fortunate, and careful enough, not to have had any run-ins with the Dorvallan security force in all the time she spent here. The local Imperial garrison may be a relatively laid-back affair and local crime rates may be the laughing stock of places like Mos Eisley or Ord Mantell, but no place open to galactic space trade is completely immune from crime, and if popular opinion is to be believed, the local security officers have had a reputation for efficiency and tenacity from long before the Empire arrived. She certainly witnessed her fair share of lightning-fast arrest raids at the spaceport, and once even had to make a temporary detour to the forlorn-looking reserve spaceport further south due to a large-scale ambush they had laid out for a visiting criminal gang, none of whose members, she recalls, managed to escape. To be caught by one of Dorvalla's finest now that she is past the worst of it would be the height of irony, and a silly mistake she has no intention of committing.
Her first thought is to kill the thrusters and lie low. With any luck, the officer is not so much following her as trying to investigate the blast before his fellows arrive in force. But when she slows down a fraction while looking for a convenient side alley, she hears the siren apparently the same distance away.
Which means he is following her.
Her second best option, then, is to run. So long as she keeps moving, he will be compelled to follow, and speeding along narrow streets should be a harrowing enough task to take his full attention; with any luck, between staying on her trail and avoiding a lethal crash, he will have no chance to call reinforcements. Besides, by now surely the majority of his peers should be converging upon what was once the uptown office of First Imperial Bank.
And so long as he remains a lone pursuer, she still has a good fighting chance.
Keeping one of her hands on the steering handle, she reaches under the narrow hood for her concealed blaster – or rather Cassian's blaster she has requisitioned – and sticks it into her empty belt holster. If she can somehow lure him into following her on a loop and cut across to switch places with him, she may get the golden opportunity of putting him in her sights, and out of commission.
Trouble is, a loop trajectory is not exactly easy to conjure up in a city layout consisting almost exclusively of long parallel streets running along a mountain slope. And the whine of her thrusters echoing off the stone walls is bound to give her away should she try to veer into any of the steep connecting lanes in an attempt to reach the next street up or down.
Unless…
It is an insane idea, but it may be her best bet yet.
She takes a quick glance up the mountainside ahead of her, trying to gauge the location of the nearest water stream. There are dozens of them running down the slope; some of them are nearly vertical so as to be more akin to waterfalls. The parallel streets traverse them with sturdy stone bridges, leaving just enough of a gap between the corners of the adjoining walls and the gushing water below for her to make it onto either of the steep shrubbery-encrusted side slopes that would ease her descent to the water's edge. Steering a speeder bike above water is notoriously tricky, as the liquid surface tends to cancel out any attempt to make turns; but all she needs to do is take the bike straight up the stream far enough to exit onto a street above the one her pursuer is on. She could, conceivably, try to increase the distance between them by going down rather than up, but the thought of hurtling down a vertiginous incline over a treacherous surface makes her slightly nauseous.
And maybe her luck has taken a turn for the better after all, she figures, when she sees the narrow but impenetrably thick fog blanket start its descent down the mountain. In a few minutes and for the next half hour or so, it will be difficult to see more than a few meters ahead. The only slight downside is that her own progress might be easier to hear in the absence of traffic as locals wisely stay away from their bikes for the duration of the twice-daily foggy spells; but the benefit of concealment far outweighs it.
She pauses when she reaches the bridge, the full-on craziness of what she is about to do giving her momentary doubt; but the dogged siren wail spurs her on.
She eases off the throttle just long enough to cushion her jump down onto the slope by the side of the stream, then cranks it full up again to give the bike maximum power for the climb over the water.
The thrusters whine in protest, but climb she does; and unlike the amplified noise of going down a street, she finds herself moving quieter, if slower, as the noise is drowned out by rushing water.
She leans hard onto her left side to avoid smashing her head against the bridge upstream of the one where she left off; she cannot quite hear the siren over the surrounding water noise, but if her gauge on their relative moving positions is at all accurate, the officer must be following the next street up.
And presently she sees him cross the next bridge ahead, red light flashing on top of the standard-issue security-force bike hood in the thickening fog.
Gotcha.
She slows down just enough to let him ride past the bridge, then guns the thrusters again until she is almost level with it. A mere five meters away, she steers the bike onto the slope and, ignoring the protesting engine, forces it further up until she is level with the street. With a slight jolt the bike leaps up onto the bridge, and she turns it around to go in the same direction as her erstwhile pursuer. She cannot see him in the foggy haze, but the siren sounds clearer as she closes in before abruptly cutting out.
A few seconds later the walled street widens into a narrow sort-of-square, and she sees him.
He has killed the siren and powered down the engine, no doubt perplexed by the disappearance of his quarry and trying to pick up her trail. Judging by the fact that he has flipped his bike around and is facing her, he must have been contemplating doubling back; maybe even abandoning the pursuit altogether. Had he done that earlier they could have happily gone their separate ways, but now that they are face-to-face, or rather helmet-to-helmet, albeit at a distance of ten meters, she is left with little choice.
She whips the blaster out of the holster the same instant she has stopped the bike, and fires a warning shot a hair's breadth above his head.
"I missed on purpose," she warns him, pleased to see that he was taken sufficiently unawares as not to have had the time to target her in turn. "My next shot will be on target."
He does not move.
She wonders momentarily what her next action should be, distantly berating herself for not having thought this through. She was kind of busy, true, but now she needs a quick way out of this impasse; she cannot forever continue the standoff, but is hesitant to shoot. Threaten him as she might, last time she heard, killing a security officer carried a minimum 20-standard-year prison term on Dorvalla, and she doubts that the punishment has grown any more lenient since. The best solution would be to stun him, but she is not familiar enough with Cassian's custom-tweaked blaster to know the setting change shortcut.
And then the idea hits her.
"Step away from your vehicle," she orders him, careful to keep him in her sights. Had the juncture been any less critical she would have been amused by the role reversal. "Keep your hands up where I can see them." Assuming that he stays reasonable, she might spare his life by ordering him a few steps away and shooting up his bike engine before making her escape.
He obeys, but just as he straightens up standing away from the bike, his left hand touches the side of the mirrored helmet. It could almost be taken for an accidental gesture, but Jyn is not so easily fooled. At best, he has activated an internal microphone that will let him call for backup. At worst, he may have keyed the remote activation for the bike-mounted guns.
Her finger tightens on the trigger.
.
TBC
.
PS I am very saddened by the news about Carrie Fisher. She was one of the great personalities I just thought would always be there, and just like David Bowie this past January, it is those always-be-there people whose loss is felt most keenly. This year just keeps on taking :'( …fingers crossed that the next one may be better.