Light of the Jedi(50)

“Good, Erika…you’re doing it!”

“Don’t…talk to me…right now…” she said, her voice tight with concentration.

Blaster bolts, hot white through the ocular, began zipping out from both sets of Nihil—the four at the front door and another six clustered around their speeder. The raiders had noticed the approaching droids…no surprise there.

The machines were tough, built to withstand high impacts and temperatures, but they weren’t impervious. One of the droids stopped moving, then another.



“Faster, Erika! They’re knocking them down!”

His wife didn’t answer, just flicked him a momentary glance. Ottoh understood. She was running the droids from her datapad. She knew when they became inoperative right away—she didn’t need his updates. He knew that—he’d known it when he spoke. He just wanted to…do something.

From behind him, he heard his son’s voice, talking quickly, and Ottoh realized he’d actually gotten someone on the comlink. Ogden’s Hope maintained a small communal security force; all the claims paid into its budget every year. Their station wasn’t so far away. If the family could just hold on a bit longer…

A third droid stopped in its tracks, hot green sparks shooting from where its head had once been attached to its neck.

Just one droid left, and Ottoh watched as the machine barreled forward. He saw it dodge a Nihil shot, and again marveled at his wife’s skill. What operator could make a delving droid dodge? The one he was married to, apparently.

The last droid took a hit, dead center, and its speed slowed to a crawl.

“Blast it!” his wife said.

“Is that it?” Ottoh said.

“No,” Erika answered, her voice cold and certain. “It’s not.”

Ottoh heard his wife’s fingertips tapping furiously on the datapad, and whatever rerouting and adjustments she did seemed to work. The last droid lurched forward, careening ahead at a rapidly increasing rate of speed. The Nihil weren’t done shooting, but the droid seemed all but impervious. It lost an arm, then another. Half its head disappeared, but it didn’t stop.

It reached the Nihil’s speeder, and Ottoh yanked his eye from the ocular just before the lens flared white. A huge sound from outside, not a boom but a BOOM, this time definitely an explosion.

The delving droids were mining machines. Sometimes they dug, sometimes they sorted, sometimes they lugged debris…and sometimes they blasted holes in dense, metallic rock with small pellets of high-powered explosive. From the sound, Erika had just set off every bit of the droid’s load at once.



“Hnh,” his wife said, her tone satisfied. “How many did I get, dear?”

Ottoh raised the ocular to his eyes and looked outside. The scene was radically altered—the Nihil’s speeder was gone, as was the delving droid, both replaced by hot, twisted metal and leaping flames. He turned down the brightness, looking for…there. He counted outlines…four, close to the fire, and none of them moving. But two others were still alive, one slowly dragging himself away from the wreckage, and another being pulled free by the team that had been using the battering ram at the front door. That group, unfortunately, had been mostly sheltered from the blast by the house.

“Not enough,” Ottoh said. “But it helps.”

He lowered the ocular and turned to his son, who was speaking to Bee in a low, kind voice.

“Did you get someone, Ronn?” Ottoh said. “I heard you on the comlink. Is help coming?”

Ronn looked up. His face was bleak.

“I got through to Ogden’s Hope security, Dad,” he said. “I told them what was happening. The man on the other end was asking a lot of questions, but he stopped when I told him the Nihil were here. He…he just…he said they’re too far away to get here in time. The man said he was sorry…but he just sounded like he was afraid. I’ve tried calling back, but they won’t answer.”

“Cowards,” Erika spat.

From below, a sound: a thud, of something heavy hitting their front door, and then a voice.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” it called, floating up from outside, low and strange. “We were just going to take you.”

thud

“Now we’re going to hurt you, too.”



* * *





“You want more stew?” Porter Engle said, looking down into Bell’s empty bowl. “Falling’s hungry work, I guess.”

Across the table, Loden chuckled. Bell didn’t care. He was over it. He’d figure out the Force falling eventually, and even if he didn’t, that was no reason to turn down a second bowl of Porter’s Nine-Egg Stew.

Porter Engle was a legend. He’d been in the Jedi Order for over three hundred years, a burly Ikkrukki who, at this point, was more beard than being. He had explored full careers in most of the primary Jedi roles in his time—teacher, explorer, diplomat, warrior—and the stories told about him in any one of those occupations would be enough to ensure his status in the chronicles. He had just one eye, for example, the other lost long ago, a long scar down his face a story of its own. But now he was nearing the end of his span, and his latest and final calling seemed to be cook. The stew really did have nine different kinds of egg in it, but Porter would only reveal five of them. The remaining sources were either too rare or too revolting for him to divulge. Whatever was in it, the stuff was good.