25

Corran let himself sag toward the man on his right. The man jabbed him again with the gun to shove him away. Corran moved to the left but when he could no longer feel the gun in his ribs he took a step backward. The man on his right pulled the blaster’s trigger, sending a scarlet bolt of energy into the Trandoshan’s belly. It opened a smoking hole there, hurling the reptile back onto a table that collapsed under his weight.

Corran’s left hand dropped over the top of the blaster and pulled. At the same time his right elbow came up and out, catching the shooter between mouth and nose. Twisting slightly, Corran pulled the man around between him and Zekka Thyne. He tore the blaster from the man’s grip, then gave him a sidekick that propelled him toward Thyne.

Without waiting to see what happened, Corran spun and ran a zigzag course toward the doorway. The whine of blaster fire filled the room. Bolts burned past his legs and over his head, lighting little guttering fires on either side of the doorway. Remembering what he’d observed on his way in, Corran dove forward into a somersault, then came up to his feet at the base of the shadowed stairs. Shifting the gun to his right hand, he brought his arm up and fired back over his shoulder to discourage pursuit.

Bursting out through the doorway, he kicked a Rodian off a speeder bike, settled himself in the saddle, and dropped it into first gear. Cranking the throttle, he shot off and headed for the nearest canyonlike intersection that would allow him to lose himself in the city. He instantly regretted not having shot up the other speeder bikes in front of the Headquarters, but a glance back at his pursuit suggested returning to do that now would be suicide.

If I’m going to die, I’d prefer it on my terms, in my time. Doing what he’d done back in the cantina had been stupid, but that was the only option he had when being faced with death. There had been no doubt in his mind—or the minds of anyone else in that cantina—that Thyne was going to kill him. That knowledge was the reason Corran knew the man on his right would hesitate before shooting—robbing Thyne of his kill would be as fatal as being Corran Horn in that situation.

Corran clutched and shifted with his feet, then gave the bike more throttle with his right hand. Using his thumb he hit the suicide-cruise button, keeping the throttle constant, then shoved the blaster down onto a pair of snap-clips that held it perfectly at the muzzle and trigger guard. With his left hand he rotated the vector-shift back, canting the forward directional vanes up, and hung on as the speeder bike climbed toward a hovering skyhook.

I don’t remember the Incom Zoom II being this responsive, but it looks like the Rodian had this one all tricked out. Good thing for me, I guess. He hunkered down and rotated the speeder bike to put its bulk between him and the blaster bolts being shot by his pursuit. The Incom speeder bike didn’t have any weaponry built onto it. The small data display between the throttle and vector handles constantly had stuff scrolling across it, but it was all in Rodian, which meant Corran had no idea what was going on. As long as I go fast, does it really matter?

Rolling the bike and playing with the vector-shift, he straightened it out and sent it screaming along through one of the upper canyons. He aimed the speeder bike well away from the mountainous Imperial Palace and cut around a skyhook tether. Shifting his weight and giving the vector-shift nudges now and again, he kept the speeder bike juking and bouncing as the wind tugged at his hair and blaster bolts streaked scarlet past him. Some of them were heavier than those a handheld blaster could produce, letting him know that some of the machines were military surplus and in good working order.

He glanced back, but in the darkness all he could see was blaster bolts coming at him. The riders coming up behind were getting better with their shots and Corran realized that flying up high and in the open was playing to their strength. I need a tight course with few shots available. That means down!

Hanging on tightly he inverted and cranked the vector-shift back. The speeder bike dove through the night, flashing past level after level of apartments, malls, offices, and grand promenades. Chopping the throttle back, Corran threw his weight to the left and hooked the bike around and back up through a narrow space between two towers. Leaning back to the right, he came around the cylindrical tower and shot off down an alley.

A scattering of blaster bolts scored the walls around him. Corran broke left, then cut the throttle back and shifted into neutral. A tug on the vector-shift brought his bike around in a flat spin that he killed by goosing the thrust to kill his momentum. Hanging there in the air, he filled his hand with the blaster and braced his hand on the speeder bike’s chassis.

Two speeder bikes cut into the alley, racing full bore after him. Corran’s first two shots hit the rightmost bike on the nose. The bike’s control panel exploded in a silver shower of sparks. The blast lifted the driver and pitched him head over heels off the speeder bike’s rear end. The bike itself immediately began a smoking dive toward the planet below and the driver slowly tumbled down in its wake.

He shifted his aim to the second bike, but the driver had already begun to pull up. Corran’s two shots hit his target, one on the driver’s leg and the other on the connector post fixing the sidepod to the speeder bike. The vehicle did not split apart and the driver veered away as if he’d had enough, so Corran rehomed the blaster and set off again.

Something on the data monitor squawked at him. He knew it was Rodian but he could no more understand the spoken tongue than he could read the written language. The guys on the bike and sidepod are comlinking with the others. They’ll coordinate and they know this city better than I do. His hand snaked up to where he usually wore his good luck charm but he felt nothing. On my own.

He refused to despair and instead set the speeder bike at a moderate pace and took it down farther and farther into the lower reaches of Coruscant. He had no idea where he was, but that did not matter to him as much as being aware of where his pursuit was. Fortunately for him they tended to announce themselves with blaster shots that sizzled past close, but never seemed to tag him.

With three on his tail, he dove into a black hole at the bottom of a canyon, then came around and shot back against his previous line of travel. Trimming his speed he ducked and dodged his way through a tangle of support girders, then dove back out of them and came up and around through a hole in the roof of a passage. Cutting back on his throttle, he locked the speeder bike in a gentle circling pattern that flew around the hole. He drew the blaster and waited. One has to be coming soon.

One of the three did jet up through the hole, but he came out riding a rocket. Corran snapped a quick shot off at him but missed. The way he came out means he was warned.

A speeder bike swooped at him from above. Something bright flashed at the front of the sidecar, then he felt a thump on the aft end of his bike. The whole speeder bike jolted, then started flying backward. Because of the way he’d locked his controls, the bike began spinning through an awkward spiral that almost pitched him to the ground.

Dropping back into the saddle—literally willing himself back into it—Corran shifted to neutral and adjusted the vector control to kill the roll. They’ve got a line on me. He twisted himself around and tried to see the line so he could shoot it, but it was too slender for him to spot in the darkness. Given no choice, he shifted his aim toward the main body of the Ikas-Ando Starhawk and triggered three shots at the lump a meter or so below a fist that had been thrust victoriously into the air.

The Starhawk’s pilot slumped forward over the front of the speeder bike and Corran immediately felt his bike begin to slow. Dropping back down into the saddle, he shifted the Zoom II into gear and punched the throttle forward. Coming around to his right, he sailed on past and below the hovering Starhawk. Twenty meters out from it he felt a tug and his bike slowed.

Damn, the sidecar guy didn’t release me. All speeder bikes came with a deadman switch that returned the throttle to zero thrust if it was released. That prevented the speeder bike from racing along if the person at the controls died, fell off, or somehow could no longer pilot the bike. It was a safety precaution built into the machines, but as with the one Corran had stolen, it was possible to put in a suicide-cruise switch that would keep the throttle set despite having no hands on it.

Corran cranked his throttle up full, but the drag from the Starhawk was making him far too slow. The trio of bikes that had chased him down were pacing him, but their drivers had clearly decided to call in other help to box him in. I have to get rid of this thing. I have to cut that line.

Corran sent the Zoom II into a dive, hauling the Starhawk after it. He sped on through level after level, then came out into a huge intersection of canyonlike airroads. Damn, back out in the open. His pursuit began to close, shooting again. Corran tried to make the bike dance as before, but with an air-anchor attached to it, he was having no luck at all.

Snarling with frustration, he pointed the speeder bike straight at the building on one corner of the intersection. He aimed at a lit rectangle on one of the lower levels, intending to whip the trailing Starhawk into the illuminated sign there. It would be poetic justice if it were an ad for Starhawks. He expected the impact would batter the bike to bits. If it didn’t, well, there are plenty more walls.

It wasn’t until he got close enough to see people sitting in the room move that he realized it wasn’t an advertising billboard but a window. He wanted to veer off, but blaster bolts on both sides bracketed him. He thought for a second about going straight through and out through the other side, but he knew the transparisteel would rip him apart. Get out of the way!

At the last moment Corran hauled the speeder bike around in a sharp left turn. The Starhawk trailing around after him hit the window. He felt a hard jolt, then his speeder bike shot off across the intersection and parallel to another building’s front. He glanced back and thought for a moment that he was free of the Starhawk, then a slight tremble in the bike’s frame matched sparks on the building wall.

Of all the luck! Instead of the transparisteel severing the cord that bound him to the Starhawk, the sharpness of the turn had snapped the weakened connectors between the sidepod and the Starhawk itself. The pod’s occupant had vanished, but Corran couldn’t see where he’d gone. The pod itself trailed after him like a balloon after a child in a stiff wind, but the advent of a half-dozen more speeder bikes into the intersection gave him no chance to try to shuck it off.

The trailing pod gave him all sorts of trouble because of the potential it had for anchoring him to pillar or post. He tried to keep his turns crisp, but he had to avoid narrow alleys and keep his speed under control. If he went too fast the pod would whip around, bashing into walls and throwing the aft end of his speeder bike around. If he slowed, the pod still shot forward. The elasticity of the line connecting it with his bike meant it shot it toward him unless he broke from his line of flight.

The trailing speeder bikes and swoops kept him hemmed in. He knew he was being herded toward a specific point, and he desperately wanted to avoid going there, but he didn’t have many choices. He did dive and sideslip to smash the pod against walls and break it loose, but it stayed with him. If I survive this perhaps I’ll send the Ikas-Ando people a testimonial on the durability of their sidepods …

Cruising around a corner, Corran saw bikes closing from above and behind, trapping him in a wide alley that ended in a solid wall a hundred and fifty meters on. It had no other outlets save up and what appeared to be a closed loading gate at the base of the wall toward which he sped. This is it, my run ends now. The only choices open to him seemed to be slamming into the wall and dying, or fighting and dying.

He thought about slowing to fight, but the whistling pod behind him reminded him of the folly of that idea. It’ll go through me faster than … hey, that’s an idea! Corran pointed the speeder bike directly at the loading gate and kicked the throttle up to full. Twenty meters out, he cranked the vector-shift back, nosing the speeder bike toward the sky, and reversed thrust. The combination pitched him forward, then brought the front of the bike up to bash him back into his seat. As the bike inverted and the pod sailed through beneath it, Corran grabbed the blaster pistol and dropped a dozen feet to the ground.

The pod hit the loading gate’s roll-up door with enough force to cave in the metal barrier toward the middle and rip it from the tracks on which it hung. The speeder bike, with the suicide-cruise switch engaged, slammed into the falling ribbon of metal, then flew on over the crest of it and on into the building’s interior. It tugged on the pod, but the pod had become trapped by the door, so the cord parted, freeing the speeder bike to careen farther on.

With blaster bolts raining down around him, Corran dove for cover inside the building. Speeder bikes swooped past him as he twisted around and got just inside the doorway. Bringing his blaster pistol up, he tried to pick out targets, but found far too many to choose from. This confused him for a moment because while he distinctly remembered being chased by Zekka Thyne’s Black Sun villains, he could see no way stormtroopers could have anticipated his journey and set up the ambush into which he had ridden.