13

Artoo fired a crackling beam of electricity at Luke. Tatooine’s desert morning air sizzled with a spark that arced a full two meters long.

Luke, in the grip of the Force, had already snapped the lightsaber over to block the artificial lightning bolt. The charge cascaded harmlessly from the blade.

“Too easy,” he said.

Artoo whistled.

“I know, I know, it’s not your fault you’re no Darth Vader.”

Luke relaxed a hair. It took a few seconds for the capacitor that ran Artoo’s electroprod to build up enough of an electrical overload for another discharge. With the Force, the blue flash was easy to deflect; without the Force, it would zap him pretty good, since there was no way he could dodge the bolt.

Not that there was any danger. The electrostatic charge would make his hair stand on end and tickle some, but even with almost two hundred thousand volts, the amperage was so low that it couldn’t do much more than that, unless he was standing in a puddle of water.

Freestanding water was unlikely out here in the Wastes.

Luke heard a distant drone. It was a faint noise but quickly grew louder. He turned and looked into the morning desert—

Bzzzhhtttt!

Luke jumped a meter, came down rubbing at his backside. “Hey, ow!”

Artoo made a noise Luke had come to believe was his version of a laugh.

“That’s not funny!”

Artoo chirped and whistled, punctuated his reply with a bladder squeeze.

“I know I didn’t tell you to quit, but you saw me turn and look away!”

Artoo said something that was probably derogatory.

“Yeah, well, you just remember that next time you need a lube.”

Artoo whistled, sliding up and down the scale.

Master Yoda would be shaking his head. So much for Luke’s control of the Force. One little slip in concentration and poof! it was gone.

Luke quickly forgot his irritation at himself and the little droid. Those sounds were getting louder, and he could see the dust trail now, pointing like a comet right at him. Engines.

Somebody was coming to call, and there appeared to be a lot of them.

“Maybe we’d better get out of sight,” Luke said. “Hide inside, Artoo.”

With Artoo safely in Ben’s house, Luke circled around to a sandy hillock and crouched down. He couldn’t be bolting every time some passing dune rat coughed. He had to stay and see what was going on.

The noise of the engines was an echoing racket now, and Luke finally recognized the source: swoops.

Swoops were long, raked repulsor craft with a plowlike scoop on the front. The vehicles were capable of seating two, were fast and maneuverable but hard to control well. They weren’t much more than huge engines with seats and controls, and the combination of big repulsors and hot turbothrusters made for a mean, fast, noisy flier. A speeder bike was a child’s toy compared to a fully dressed-out swoop. Most people associated the small, unprotected craft with gangs, outlaws who did almost anything as long as it wasn’t legal. Some of them were famous, like the Nova Demons and the Dark Star Hellions. They could make their swoops do everything but dance. They ran spice, smuggled weapons, did odd jobs for various factions of the underworld, and generally raised a lot of grief wherever they went.

Of course, not everybody who flew a swoop was a thug.

He’d spent quite a bit of time riding a borrowed swoop himself when he’d been a teen, darting in and out of the canyons and roaring through the streets of Mos Eisley late at night when the traffic patrol was thin.

Question was, what was a swooptroop gang doing out here? He was the only person around for a hundred kilometers. Had they gotten lost?

Not likely, given their time in the seats.

No, if this was what he thought it was, they were coming to see him.

And he didn’t think they were coming out to wish him a nice day. Well, he’d wanted a real test for his lightsaber. Looked as if he might be about to get one.

Luke looked for insignia as the swoops roared in and began to circle Ben’s house. There were eight, nine … a dozen of them, and they all wore protective goggles and shock helmets, but their flight suits weren’t matched. A couple of them wore blue neocels; a couple wore orange and tan; one was in green puff sleeves; another sported dyed red bantha hide; and about half of them wore freight handler grays.

All had the same insignia on their jackets—Luke couldn’t quite place it, though it looked vaguely familiar somehow.

All carried blasters.

He wasn’t as well hidden as he’d thought. One of them spotted him, jerked his blaster up, and fired. The beam sizzled past him, turned sand into muddy glass. Not even close, but it didn’t look as if they were here to take any prisoners.

Uh-oh.

He heard one of the bikers yell above the engine racket: “Blow the little runt to Bespin, boys!”

Luke hurried to find better cover. There were a couple of large boulders that would keep most of their fire off him. He ran. His own blaster was in the house; all he had was his lightsaber and—ten-to-one, twelve-to-one odds? That could be a lot better. He’d never outrun them on foot. Not a whole lot of places to hide out here.

Why were they trying to kill him? Who sent them?

He needed to know that. He also needed to stay alive.

The engines rumbled; the vibrations of the repulsors shook the ground; the sound washed over him in hard bass, and the subsonics made his head ache. He could see their mouths working, but he couldn’t hear what they were yelling.

Okay, Luke. Think of something.

The swoopers roared in, snapped off shots at him. Most of the bolts didn’t come close, and he was able to block those that did with his own unaugmented skills. He tried to let the Force fill him, but it didn’t happen. Hard to concentrate with all that racket and a dozen armed thugs taking potshots at him that way.

Two of the riders headed for him; both fired again. Neither was even close; their beams missed by a meter.

Fortunately the swoops kicked up a lot of grit. A cloud of dust surrounded them and offered a translucent tan screen.

Again a blaster beam went wide as Luke jumped and swung his glowing green blade.

Behind him there came a crash. Luke spun, saw that two of the swoops had collided. One of them angled off and smashed into a clump of rocks, the rider leaping free at the last second. The other bike settled to the ground, damaged but probably not unusable. They couldn’t shoot and they couldn’t fly. Lucky for him.

A roar to his left. Luke twisted.

A biker roared in; he had what looked like a giant ax in his hand!

Another engine screamed closer than the axman. Luke set himself, and as the second swooper came in, he swung his saber in a feint and slammed his boot into the rider.

Luke’s kick toppled the attacker from the swoop. The deadman switch in the grips immediately killed the turbine, but not the repulsor engine. Luke hopped onto the swoop, grabbed the handlebars, and twisted the start ring. The swoop’s turbine grumbled back online.

Now the odds were better. He couldn’t keep riding his luck; better to take his chances riding one of these.

He opened the throttle a little, hit the retros, turned, put the swoop into a one-eighty and kicked up a sandwall, just like he’d done as a teen. He pointed the swoop at the axman and opened the throttle wide.

The acceleration nearly unseated him, but he managed to stay in the saddle.

Oh, boy! He’d nearly forgotten how much fun one of these was!

The axman’s weapon shattered when it hit Luke’s saber. Luke twisted the throttle, turned, roared away.

The next rider nearest Luke was the one dressed in puffy green. With the swoop’s turbos open wide, it didn’t take long to reach him.

Green saw him coming, and by the time he figured out Luke wasn’t one of his gang, it was too late. He tried to turn away at the last second, but Luke’s cut sheared through Green’s right thruster-control line. The right jet shut down, but the left jet did not, and the swoop immediately spun out of control. Luke was past him and safe, but the wildly twirling and gyrating little craft flew into the path of another of the gray riders. There came a crunch of metal and plastic as the two swoops smashed into each other and crashed to the ground.

Well, well. Three down, nine to go. So far, so good.

It was too good to last.

The leader saw Luke and used hand signals to move his troops. They scattered and re-formed in a unit.

Luke swung the swoop into a wide turn and hit the throttles. If he took this baby a few hundred meters up and out of the sand and ground clutter, he could open it up to racing speed. He could be at Beggar’s Canyon in minutes. He’d explored just about every centimeter of that place in his T-16; no way they’d run him down there. He could pick them off one at a time, disable their machines—shoot, he could capture the whole gang!

There was an extra set of goggles clipped to the handlebars. Luke belted his lightsaber, pulled the goggles free, and strapped them on. He’d need them—when the afterburners kicked in on a hot swoop, it could hit a good 600 kph. A bug would put an eye out at that speed. He hoped the machine’s owner kept this rake tuned.

Beggar’s Canyon, here I come.

Beggar’s Canyon was actually a series of interlinked canyons. Long ago, there had been a lot of water on Tatooine, and much of it had flowed as rivers. Beggar’s Canyon had been the confluence of at least three rivers, and, along with millions of years of wind and rain and sunlight, the flowing water had carved deep and twisted valleys into the rock.

It had been a while since Luke had flown the canyons. Then again, they hadn’t changed since his last visit. He and a few of the other local would-be star pilots had engaged in mock firefights here, using harmless light beams for lasers. Plus he’d hunted womp rats, some of them three meters long, but hard targets to hit with a low-powered sporting blaster while traveling at speed.

The pack of swooptroops was still behind him as he dropped below ground level. They hadn’t gained on him, save for one of the riders, who was only a hundred meters or so back. But the pack hadn’t lost much distance, either; it was only a few hundred meters behind the rider dressed in blue, and holding steady.

Luke grinned. Let’s see how they like playing in my territory.

The route called the Main Avenue went more or less straight for nearly two kilometers before it made a sharp-angled turn to the right. Dead Man’s Turn, they called it, and for good reason. Luke dropped his airspeed as he approached the intersection. Try to take it too fast and you’d turn yourself into a gooey paste on the far wall of the turn.

He hit the retros as he adjusted the turbojets for a hard arc to the right. The swoop slewed a little, drifted to the left; then the thrusters straightened it out with a heavy shove.

Easy as sneezing.

The rider behind him, apparently unfamiliar with the canyons, didn’t slow down enough.

Luke heard the crash as the swooper hit the far wall of the turn. The fuel cell let go, and a brilliant yellow-orange flash and fireball rose into the air.

No time to worry about that; another turn was upcoming, a long zigzag to the left, right, then left again, and he needed to keep to the center of the. corridor, which narrowed in the middle of the stretched-out Z.

He didn’t see the rest of the swooptroops behind him, but if they wanted to catch him, they’d have to be back there somewhere. They could stay high, but to see him they’d have to be so high they couldn’t possibly catch up. And if they got that far away, he could find an overhang and hover under it and they’d never find him.

Four down, eight to go.

Seconds later one of the graysuits appeared in Luke’s rear viewer.

He was pretty good, to have gained so fast. Or pretty stupid.

Gray gained. He was within sixty or seventy meters now.

Time to thread the needle. There it was, just ahead.

The Eye of the Needle was a narrow slot with jagged rock teeth lining it.

Luke gunned the turbojets. Went through the slot. Close enough so he felt a shard of rock catch his jacket and tear it. Man—!

Gray, hot on Luke’s tail, tried to follow him.

Didn’t make it.

Boom …

The rest of them were still after him. And the bad odds were still bad. It might be a long afternoon. Or a short one …

As he throttled back for a sharp turn, Luke heard a hoarse yell: “He’s got help! We ain’t gonna win this one, Spiker! Let’s burn!”

Huh? Help?

Luke looked over his shoulder.

A swoop, engines off, dropped silently in free fall. The man on the machine wore black, his head shrouded in a flight helmet and polarized shield, a blinking blaster held in his outstretched right hand. He was shooting at the swoopers.

If that guy on the swoop didn’t light his engines real soon, he was going to turn that expensive machine and himself into a big smoking crater—

As if he’d heard Luke, the falling swoop’s engines ignited. The little craft continued to fall, but more slowly.

It didn’t look as if he’d kicked the repulsore on in time—

He kept firing as he fell, missing but making the swoopers scatter. Who—?

The swoop got to within a handspan of the ground and stopped. It hovered, dead still.

Man, that was flying.

The swoopers took off. After a moment, the stranger eased his craft toward where Luke had put his swoop into a hovering idle.

The man pulled off his helmet and face shield.

Dash Rendar!

“What are you doing here?” Luke said.

Dash shrugged. “Saving your butt from swoop scum, it looks like.”

“You know what I mean. Why are you here?” Luke looked at the fallen attackers. “Well?”

“Well, here’s the thing. Leia—she’s a hot package, that one—Leia kinda wanted me to keep an eye on you until she gets back.”

“She what?”

“Ease up, you’ll blow a fuse. No big deal.”

“Listen, pal, I don’t need a baby-sitter!”

“Oh, yeah, you coulda taken these melloons all by yourself, right?”

“I wasn’t doing so bad.”

“No, you’re right, you weren’t. But you were gonna lose.”

Luke held his temper as best he could. He didn’t like this braggart, but Dash was right. It would have taken a miracle, one he wasn’t capable of just yet, to beat the last of the swooptroop alone. Like it or not—and he didn’t like it at all—Dash had saved his neck.

“Thanks.” It was a mumble.

“Excuse me, I didn’t hear what you said.”

“Don’t push it, Dash.”

The older man grinned.

Boy, was he going to have words with Leia when she came back. As much as he was attracted to her, as much as he thought she was the toughest, most beautiful woman he’d ever known, where did she get off sending this guy to watch him? And he knew she had to be paying Dash to do it—Dash wasn’t the kind of guy who did stuff for free.

Dash said something, and Luke blinked at him. “Huh?”

“I said, did you see their tattoos? This gang works for Jabba.”

Luke looked. That was where he recognized the insignia from. Jabba’s men.

Dash continued, “I was in Mos Eisley, kinda … hanging around, when I heard them talking. They had orders to kill you.”

Kill him, yeah, he’d figured that out. Dash kept talking, and Luke tuned back in to what he was saying. “… Vader is no longer your number one admirer.”

“He never was. If it’s him behind it.”

Was it? Luke shook his head. That still didn’t make sense.