In the next chamber, racing between and across assembly lines while workers ducked to get out of their way or, occasionally and more foolishly, lunged at them, Jacen and Ben spotted turbolift doors. It took a moment to get to them, and another moment to realize that the sensors indicated no movement of the turbolift beyond even when they’d pressed the SUMMON button multiple times. With a sigh of exasperation, Jacen cut his way into the turbolift shaft and he and his apprentice leapt through the hole, its edges still glowing, to grasp the diagonal support spars on the far side of the shaft. Clinging there, they could see the turbolift car roof about ten meters below … but this shaft was side by side with another, and the car in that shaft was only a few meters down and rising fast.
Jacen swung over the second shaft and readied himself for the shock of impact when the turbolift car reached him. He could feel Ben following his motion, could even feel it as Ben also began focusing on aspects of the Force that would allow for the absorption of kinetic energy …
Then the rising car hit them. They absorbed the shock with their knees and with control over the Force, and suddenly they were hurtling upward along the darkened shaft.
Jacen estimated that they’d risen three hundred meters or more before the car executed a rapid deceleration and locked into place a mere three meters before the top of the shaft. Jacen and Ben both grabbed at support spars at the shaft’s side. After a moment’s noise from beneath—hissing of opening doors, tramping of feet, conversation, closing doors—the car dropped away out of sight, leaving them alone in comparative silence at the top of the shaft.
“I think we’re aboveground,” Ben said.
“Well aboveground.” Jacen ignited his lightsaber and plunged it into what he assumed was the back wall of the shaft—the direction opposite that of the turbolift doors lining the shaft below them. He dragged the blade around in a circle, and just before the end of the burning circuit met the beginning, the plug he was cutting was yanked violently away into daylight brightness, spinning out into open space. A tug of air nearly yanked Jacen after it, and more air roared up the shaft to flee through the hole he’d cut.
Outside the hole was a skyscraper vista of the city of Cartann, part of the nation of Cartann and government capital of the planet of Adumar. The Jedi could see forty-story apartment buildings thickly lined with balconies, many of those balconies serving as small landing pads for personal fighter craft, as well as taller business spires, circular defensive towers whose featureless exteriors hid gun emplacements, and tall flagpoles from which streamed government, neighborhood, sports team, and advertising banners dozens of meters in length.
Jacen leaned out. The building wall beneath them sloped away at an angle rather than straight down. Far below, he could see skyspeeder traffic in tightly regulated streams through the air.
Ben stuck his head out just under Jacen’s. “Lubed. I know how to do this.”
“Don’t say lubed.”
“Why not?”
“It’s generational slang, invented to distinguish between your generation and every other one by making use of superfluous and irritatingly precious vocabulary, and I’m not from your generation.”
Ben turned up to look at him. His mouth worked as he sought to come up with a cutting reply.
Jacen continued, “Do you have a grapnel and line in your utility belt?”
“Sure, but I won’t need it. I know how to do angle building drops like this.”
“Get it ready anyway.”
Ben grumbled but pulled the grapnel from his belt and dragged out a few meters of slender, strong cord.
“All right, Ben. You first.”
Ben grinned and leapt outward. Jacen clipped his lightsaber back onto his belt and followed.
They fell a few meters, but Jedi acrobatic training and their control over the Force allowed them to come down with their heels against the angled building wall. From that point, it was a simple matter of reducing their inertia, keeping friction maximized between heel and wall surface.
They ran and occasionally slid down the side of the skyscraper along duracrete strips set between broad, high transparisteel viewports. On the other side of those viewports, they saw faces with mouths open in surprise or disbelief.
Jacen sensed the wind gust a moment before he felt it. He braced himself against it with foot placement and the Force before it hit.
Ben, less experienced, didn’t. Jacen saw the boy’s cape flap, then Ben was whirled away from the building face, yelling.
Jacen reached out for him, but the boy, still mostly clearheaded, was already hurling the grapnel hook toward him. Jacen snatched it out of the air and wrapped the cord several times around his wrist before the cord hit its maximum length. Jacen braced his arm against the shock of the impact and withstood it without being dragged off the building front.
With cord control and an extra tug against Ben himself through the Force, he dragged Ben back to the building face. Now Jacen was in front on the descent, Ben meters above and behind. He heard Ben shout, “You can let go now.” The boy’s voice sounded appropriately abashed.
Jacen released the grapnel. “You know how to do angle building drops like this, huh?”
“What?”
“I said—”
“Can’t hear you. Too much wind.”
Jacen grinned.
“Up ninety degrees!”
Jacen looked up in the direction Ben indicated. Above, just over skyscraper level, a blue-green flying vehicle was banking at them over a tower dome. It wasn’t shaped like the split-tail Blade series of starfighters produced on this world and flown recreationally, and for duels, by so many Adumari—this was shaped roughly like a starfruit, one central body and five arms protruding from it. The arms ended in stubby housings that, Jacen could see, held thrusters, repulsor vents, and weapons muzzles. He decided that the vehicle would be slow but highly maneuverable—and capable of attacking in any direction, perhaps several directions at once. The arms rotated as a unit, but independent of the vehicle’s central body, where Jacen could see a darkened transparisteel canopy protecting the pilot’s seat.
Not that this was likely to be a threat to the Jedi. Unless the vehicle was armed with antipersonnel weapons systems, something capable of piercing flesh but not penetrating typical building construction material, the odds of it making an actual attack were low—
The vehicle’s foremost pod fired. Jacen saw the smoke trail of a missile headed their way.
He felt an exertion in the Force from Ben, the boy leaping laterally. He added some kinetic energy to his own downward motion, reduced friction to his heels and buttocks—he sat down and slid faster.
The missile impacted dozens of meters above his head. He heard the explosion, felt the building shake beneath him, but was not hit by any heat or debris. The warhead must have penetrated into the building before detonating. A little part of him went cold, infuriated at his enemy’s callous willingness to risk and kill civilians to bag the targets, but the rest of Jacen remained analytical. He put on the brakes, stepping up heel friction and coming more upright again.
The enemy fighter spun closer, then dived past him and out of sight.
Out of sight? Jacen leaned forward. Yes, the building surface did seem to come to an end only a few dozen meters below him, but still well above street level. That meant the angle had to change at that point, becoming a vertical drop. The attacker was below the drop point, waiting.
Jacen turned his attention to reflections in the spacescrapers in the distance ahead of him. There, he could see the enemy fighter. It was flush against this building, its central body still and its legs rotating, four stories below the drop-off point, several meters to the right of where Jacen would go over the edge.
If he kept his current angle of descent, of course.
As the distance to the drop-off point shortened, he bounced across one bank of viewports, then another, ending up on a duracrete strip headed straight for a point above the enemy fighter. Then he reached the lip.
He was now only about twenty stories above the ground. Below, he could see a main avenue thick with traffic and, for the first four or five stories above street level, heavily crisscrossed with cables—private communications cables strung across streets all over Adumar to give neighbors secure communications access with one another.
Directly below Jacen was the fighter craft. Jacen somersaulted as he went over the lip, then came down straddling one of the fighter’s arms just beside the vehicle’s main body. The fighter jolted from the impact and dropped a couple of meters. Through the transparisteel canopy, Jacen could see a helmeted pilot, her body language showing alarm at the sudden proximity of her enemy.
She jerked the control yoke. The fighter spun away from the building. In his peripheral vision Jacen saw a grapnel and white cord wrap around another of the vehicle’s arms.
They angled away from the building, roaring out high above the avenue—then dived straight toward the ground.
Jacen grinned. It was a smart enough tactic. All those cables crossing the street would cut an average attacker—assuming an average attacker could end up in this situation—to pieces without doing significant harm to the fighter.
But Jedi weren’t average attackers.
Ben pulled himself onto the arm his grapnel had grabbed. His face looked flushed with windburn, and his red hair had been whipped into an unruly mess.
“Cut your way in,” Jacen invited.
Ben perked up. Holding the vehicle arm with both legs and one arm, he got his lightsaber into his hand and ignited it.
Jacen leaned over and looked at the ground, so much closer than it had been just seconds before. He gestured toward it, fingers flexing … and the comm cables directly beneath him suddenly wavered like alarmed serpents. He exerted himself more and they parted, some separating completely from one side of the street or the other. The fighter craft plunged into their midst but hit none of them. Just before hitting the street, and below where the cable layer ended, the fighter angled to join the groundspeeder traffic.
The pilot looked at the Jedi, obviously expecting to see limbless torsos or mere gouts of blood remaining. She had just enough time to register alarm before Ben plunged his lightsaber blade into the side of the canopy. As he dug around, trying to find the release catch or hinges, the blade almost grazed the woman’s thigh.
She panicked. That was the only explanation Jacen could come up with. She wrenched her control yoke off to the side, at an unnatural angle, and the canopy suddenly blew clear, shooting up into the sea of comm cables above, nearly knocking Ben clear as it went.
An instant later, the pilot’s seat ignited and shot her straight up. Into the cables. Half blinded by the ejection seat’s propulsion, Jacen still saw her hit the first set of cables.
They held. She didn’t. She and her ejection seat separated into two pieces, each headed a different direction. Jacen saw the upper half of her body hit yet another cable, and then her remains were out of sight behind them.
Jacen glanced ahead. The pilotless fighter was rising. In another few seconds, it would hit the cable layer again, this time at an angle that would keep it within that layer for long seconds or even minutes. “Let’s go,” he said.
Ben nodded, deactivated his lightsaber, and dropped clear. Jacen followed suit.
He saw Ben drop into the back of a groundspeeder, bounce out of it as though it were a trampoline, angle over to bounce onto one end of a dinner table on a streetside second-story balcony—the spray of food dishes catapulting off the table was quite impressive—and then drop down to street level. Jacen contented himself with one bounce from a heavy transport speeder and a tuck-and-roll as he reached the sidewalk beside Ben. Adumari pedestrians gave the two Jedi curious looks but seemed unalarmed. Most of them were watching the fighter plow through the cables overhead.
Ben had a well-cooked leg of some avian in one hand. He’d already taken a bite out of it and was chewing furiously.
“What, don’t you get enough Jedi Temple food to eat?” Jacen commented.
Ben shook his head. “What’s next?”
“Transmit.”
“Don’t you want to do that? You’re the Jedi Knight.”
“I’m not the one who needs to learn how to do it.” Jacen turned and led the way through the sidewalk traffic. If his bearings were correct, this direction would lead them to the hangars where his shuttle waited.
With a long-suffering sigh, Ben discarded his improvised meal and pulled the little holocam, a datapad, and a comlink from pouches on his belt. Awkwardly, handling three items with two not-fully-grown hands, he began manipulating controls and keyboards, entering commands. “All right. The data package is being compressed and encrypted.”
“While it’s doing that, check to see if the shuttle’s holocomm is still live. Remotely activate it and bounce a comm echo off the old lunar New Republic station.”
“Yes, sir.” This time, Ben didn’t sound as put-upon. This was more of a challenge, something he’d never done before on his own authority. He typed commands into his datapad, relayed them through the comlink. “Holocomm is … live.”
Kilometers away, the communications system aboard Jacen’s shuttle—a full-fledged holocomm unit, capable of transmitting through hyperspace and thus communicating faster than light—would have just awakened from its power-down status.
“Querying automated comm systems on Relay Station ADU-One-One-Zero-Four through to Coruscant,” the boy said. His voice, though no deeper, sounded more confident, more mature when he was engrossed in a task like this. “Successful echo.” Another message popped up on his datapad. “Package encrypted.”
“Transmit it,” Jacen said. He kept a close eye on the pedestrian traffic, but he didn’t anticipate any problems at this point. It would be some time before the operators of the Dammant Killers firm figured out where the Jedi were. “Await confirmation of reception. Request confirmation of decryption.”
“Yes, sir.” Ben typed in another set of commands, then tucked his holocam back in its pouch; it would no longer be needed. “So how do we get offworld?”
“We go back to the shuttle and take off.”
“But the planet’s full of starfighters! One shuttle, even an armed shuttle, isn’t going to be able to fight its way through all of them.”
“Correct. But why would they attack us?”
“To keep—to keep—” Understanding dawned in the boy’s eyes. “To keep us from getting offworld with what we found out.”
“Correct.”
“But we just holocast it, so it’s too late.” Ben checked the screen on his datapad. “They got the package. They’re decrypting.” His expression turned suspicious. “But what if the Adumari attack us for revenge?”
“Think it through, Ben. Take your time.” They reached a broad plaza, and Jacen knew his bearings were correct; they were headed back toward the proper hangars, which should only be a couple of kilometers distant.
“If the package decrypts, and the spies see what we saw, they’ll start talking to the government here.”
“Military Intelligence. Not spies.”
“Oh, they’re spies.” Ben sounded scornful of Jacen’s correction. “Mom’s a spy. What we just did makes us spies.”
“Your mother’s a Jedi. We’re Jedi.”
“Jedi spies.” The datapad beeped, and Ben looked at it again. He snapped it shut. “The message decrypted. Our spy bosses say ‘Well done.’ So … they’ll talk to the Adumari government, who know that if anything happens to us, things will be worse for them.”
“Correct.”
“So we can leave.”
“And go on to our next assignment.”
A look of unease crossed Ben’s features. “Do we have to?”
“Yes, we do.”
“There are going to be a lot of them.”
“Not as many as we just encountered.”
“It’s going to be noisy.”
“Not as noisy as that assembly line.”
Ben heaved a sigh, defeated.
A few minutes later, Jacen and Ben boarded Jacen’s shuttle—an armored variant on the old Lambda-class model, fitted with a turreted laser cannon and a holocomm unit—and lifted off. The shuttle’s upswept wings lowered into horizontal position after liftoff, and Jacen oriented the craft toward Adumar’s sky.
A flight of four Blade starfighters, Adumar’s distinctive split-tail fighter craft, escorted the shuttle until it left the planet’s gravity well and entered hyperspace. Nothing came close enough to fire a shot at the Jedi craft.