Alliances (Star Wars: Thrawn, #2)(45)

He snarled under his breath. At least, no one he could see.

Thrawn’s assassin, Rukh, had a personal cloaking device. Apparently, someone on Batuu did, too.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw another insect swarm suddenly appear and start buzzing toward them. An instant later a volley of blasterfire raked the area beneath the tables. Clearly, Thrawn had already come to the same conclusion as Vader and was hoping a patterned counterattack would take out their hidden enemy. There was a sudden, choked-off scream, and a Darshi body abruptly appeared, twitched violently, then toppled to the floor and lay still.

“There!” Thrawn snapped.

“There are three more,” Vader snapped back. He still couldn’t see them, but he could sense them.

Thrawn’s response was more blasterfire, this time running a new pattern beneath all the tables.

Only there was no guarantee that was where the other Darshi were hiding. The cantina was dark enough that there were several places where they could be standing or crouching unseen. Especially if they remained still—Vader had noted that Rukh was slightly visible when he moved.

If the Darshi didn’t move, and if each of them had a canister of insects, he and Thrawn would be immobilized long before they could smoke out their attackers.

He looked down at his armor. His right shoulder and arm were rapidly being encased in gray stone, as were both legs around the knees and hips. Clearly, the Darshi had some way to aim the insects’ attack. But so far his left arm was clear.

With luck, that would be the last mistake the Darshi ever made.

“Visual cover!” he snapped to Thrawn, continuing to swing his lightsaber through the insect cloud as best he could with only his right wrist still free to move. A couple more insects fell, bursting into gray blobs that solidified before they even hit the floor.

An instant later Vader found himself in the middle of a shower of splinters and dust as Thrawn turned his aim upward and began blasting into the ceiling. For a brief moment both Vader and the attacking insect swarm were obscured.

And in that moment of privacy, Vader reached down with the Force and tore a strip of cloth from the bottom edge of his cloak. Bringing it up, he pressed it against his left arm, loosely wrapping the whole area from wrist to chest plate.

The cloth was barely in place when the shower of debris from the ceiling abruptly stopped. Vader looked over to see that the insects had targeted and wrapped Thrawn’s gun arm, freezing the elbow and shoulder joints and locking his aim upward. In response, the Chiss had bent over at the waist and was firing more or less blindly in his continuing attempt to take out the remaining attackers. A third insect swarm appeared from near the back of the room, followed immediately by a fourth from the far end of the bar.

Four Darshi. Four swarms. Hopefully, that was all of them. Vader continued to swing his lightsaber as far as he could, his range of movement steadily decreasing as the insects splattered against his wrist, adding layer after layer of stone. His legs were frozen, effectively pinning him to this one spot. His left arm was now under attack, with insects throwing themselves at those joints. Two insects headed for his helmet’s eyes; reaching to the Force, he shoved them to the sides. The Darshi might have immobilized him, but he was absolutely not going to let him blind him as well. At his side, Thrawn’s blasterfire settled to a single spot as the insects continued to bury him in the quick-setting stone.

And then, as the last of the insects expended itself against the two Imperials, there were three brief shimmers from various parts of the room, and three Darshi abruptly appeared. Each held a weapon the size of a blaster carbine, with large attached cylinders beneath the barrels where the insect swarms had presumably been carried. Walking with what could only be their version of an arrogant swagger, they headed toward their immobilized victims.

Vader waited until they were nearly to him. Then, reaching out to the Force, he stripped away the section of stone-hardened cloak that he’d wrapped around his left arm and sent his lightsaber from his frozen right hand to his left.

The Darshi had barely enough time to jerk to horrified halts before Vader slashed the red blade through all four of them.

He waited until they were lying dead on the floor. “I presume, Admiral,” he said into the silence, “that you no longer require us to take prisoners?”

“I believe the situation has moved beyond that point,” Thrawn agreed darkly. “Well done, my lord. Can you summon aid from the Chimaera? My comlink is out of reach.”

Summon aid? Lining up the lightsaber blade with his right elbow, Vader carefully sliced through the gray stone wrapped around it. A quick snap of his arm, and the joint was free. Another slice at wrist and shoulder, and the entire arm was once again fully mobile. Shifting the lightsaber back to his right hand, he freed his legs, then turned to Thrawn.

The Chiss was still hunched over, little but his face still visible. He was lucky, Vader thought as he began freeing him, that he hadn’t lost his balance and fallen over.

It was one thing to lose a battle, as Thrawn had at Atollon. It was worse to lose both a battle and one’s dignity at the same time.

“Thank you,” Thrawn said when he was finally able to straighten up again. He sent a quick look around the cantina, then looked down at the freshly dead Darshi. “Can you travel?”

“Can you?” Vader countered. Even with his own arms and legs free, he could feel the extra weight of all that stone. Thrawn, without Vader’s bioenhancements or the Force, would be hard-pressed to carry the extra load. Not to mention that he looked less like a living being than he did the midway point of some sculptor’s artwork.