Part 27 (1/2)
”How long - - ”
”Just for a moment,” Mon Mothma said in the same watery tone. ”I don't think you struck your head. You were fine after the crash. Then you fainted. Can you move?”
Padme sat up and saw that the skimmer's safety mechanisms had deployed.
Light-headed but unhurt, she brushed her hair from her face. ”I can barely hear you.”
Mon Mothma regarded her in knowing silence, then extended a hand to help her climb from the craft. ”Padme, you have to be careful. Quickly, now.”
She nodded. ”Cras.h.i.+ng wasn't exactly on my agenda.”
Mon Mothma hurried her away from the skimmer, to where Bail and C-3PO were hiding behind the blockish pedestal of a modernistic sculpture.
”Master Allie doesn't strike me as someone who will sue for damages,” the droid was saying.
Still in a daze, Padme grasped that they had skidded into the plaza that fronted the Emba.s.sy Mall, taking out a large holosign and three news kiosks along the way. Bail's skill had somehow kept them from mowing down pedestrians, who had apparently scattered on first sight of the nose-diving s.h.i.+p. Or perhaps at sight of the craft that had fallen to Separatist fire ahead of the skimmer - - a military police vehicle, similar to a Naboo Gian speeder, tipped on its side against the facade of the mall and belching smoke. Sprawled on the plaza close to the vehicle were the charred corpses of three clone troopers. Reality rea.s.serted itself in a rush of deafening noise, flas.h.i.+ng light, and acrid smells.
From nearby came anguished moans and terrified screams; from the tiered heights above the plaza, distant discharges of artillery.
Higher still, plasma bolts raked the sky; fire bloomed, detonations thundered. Padme saw a smear of blood on Bail's cheek.
”You're hurt - - ”
”It's nothing,” he said. ”Besides, we have more to worry about.”
She followed his grim gaze, and understood immediately why Coruscanti were fleeing the pedestrian skybridge that linked the mall to the midlevel entrances of the Senate Hospital. Five Vulture droids had alit on the far side of the span and reconfigured to patrol mode. Four-legged gargoyles, with heads deployed forward and sensor slits red as arterial blood, they were striding through Hospital Plaza, sowing destruction.
Their four laser cannons were aimed downward, but from paired launchers in their semicircular fuselage flew torpedoes aimed at air taxis, craft attempting to dock at the hospital's emergency platforms, the tunnel entrances to the Senate shelters... Republic LAATs had dropped from the Senate Plaza to engage the three-and-a-half-meter-tall droids but were maintaining a wary distance just now, pilots and gunners clearly worried about adding energy weapons or EMP missiles to the chaos.
”Xi Char monstrosities,” Mon Mothma said. Padme remembered standing helplessly at the tall windows of Theed Palace, watching squadrons of Vulture fighters fill the sky, like cave creatures loosed on Naboo by darkness...
Caught in the crossfire, pedestrians had raced across the skybridge, hoping to find sanctuary in the Emba.s.sy Mall - - midlevel in the dome-topped Nicandra Counterrevolutionary Signalmen's Memorial Building - - but thick security grates had been lowered over the entrances, leaving crowds of Coruscanti to scramble for whatever cover could be found. Padme felt faint once more. Huddled, frightened, panicked ma.s.ses of Coruscanti were suddenly getting a taste of what the inhabitants of Jabiim, Brentaal, and countless other worlds had faced during the past three years.
Caught up in a war of ideologies, often by dint of circ.u.mstance or location. Caught between the forces of a droid army led by a self-styled revolutionary and a cyborg butcher, and an army of vat-grown soldiers led by a monastic order of Jedi Knights who had once been the galaxy's peacekeepers. Caught in the middle, with no allegiance to either side. It was tragic and senseless, and she might have broken down and cried if her current circ.u.mstances had been different. She felt sick at heart, and in despair for the future of sentient life.
”Palpatine will never live this down,” Mon Mothma was saying. ”Committing so many of our s.h.i.+ps and troopers to the Outer Rim sieges. As if this war he is so intent on winning could never come to Coruscant.”
Bail frowned in sympathy. ”Not only will he live it down, he'll profit from it. The Senate will be blamed for voting to escalate the sieges, and while we're mired in accusations and counteraccusations of accountability, Palpatine will quietly accrue more and more power.
Without realizing it, the Separatists have played right into his hands by launching this attack.”
Padme wanted to argue with him but didn't have the strength. ”They're all mad,”
Bail continued. ”Dooku, Grievous, Gunray, Palpatine.”
Mon Mothma nodded sadly. ”The Jedi could have stopped this war. Now they're Palpatine's p.a.w.ns.”
Padme squeezed her eyes shut. Even if she managed to summon the strength, how could she respond, when her own husband was one of them - - a general? What had the Jedi gotten Anakin into - - taking him from Tatooine, from his youth, his mother? And yet hadn't she done as much as anyone to encourage him to remain a Jedi; to heed the tutelage of Obi-Wan, Mace, and the others; to perpetuate the lie that was their secret life as husband and wife? She hugged herself. What had she gotten Anakin into? What had she gotten both of them into? Bail's voice snapped her from self-pity.
”They're coming.” He aimed a finger across the plaza. ”They're coming across the bridge.” From somewhere in the Vultures' droid brains had come a revelation that the pedestrian skyway offered a better vantage for targeting buildings and craft to both sides of the kilometer-deep canyon.
More important, the guns.h.i.+ps were even less likely to fire on them there, lest they destroy the span and send it plummeting to the busy thoroughfares and mag-lev lines two hundred stories below.
”Perhaps if we throw ourselves on the mercy of the owners of the mall, they will raise the security grate,” C-3PO started to say.
Bail looked at Padme and Mon Mothma. ”We have to keep those droids on the far side of the bridge, so the guns.h.i.+ps can take them out.”
Mon Mothma glanced at the overturned military craft. ”I see a way to try.
The craft sat scarcely fifty meters from the base of the sculpture.
Without further word, the three of them hurried for it.
”What could I have possibility been thinking?” C-3PO shouted as he watched them search the craft for weapons. ”It can never be the easy answer!”
The three humans returned momentarily, carrying three blaster rifles.
”Not much power left,” Bail said, checking one of them. ”Yours?”
”Low on blaster gas,” Padme said.
Mon Mothma ejected the powerpack from hers. ”Empty.”
Bail nodded glumly. ”We'll have to make do.”
Hunkering down behind the pedestal, he and Padme took careful aim on the closest of the walking droids. By then three had started onto the skyway, firing at random. Exploding against the facades of buildings above and below, torpedoes sent slabs of durasteel-reinforced ferrocrete avalanching onto plazas, landing platforms, and balconies, burying scores of hapless Coruscanti.
”Be prepared to move as soon as we fire,” Bail said. He indicated one of the kiosks that had survived the crashes of both speeders. ”There's our first cover.”
Padme centered the lead droid in the blaster's targeting reticle and squeezed the trigger. Her initial bursts did little more than catch the droid's attention, but subsequent bolts from both blasters started to score hits on vital components. The droid actually retreated a couple of steps toward Hospital Plaza, only to launch a trio of torpedoes straight across the skyway. Padme and company were already in motion. One torpedo hit the pedestal, blowing it and the sculpture to fragments. A second slagged what was left of Sta.s.s Allie's skimmer. The third detonated against the lowered security grate, blowing a gaping hole into the mall.
Pedestrians to both sides hastened for it, fighting with one another to be first through the smoking maw. Padme thought that one of the Vultures would target them, but in their moment of inattention, the droids had left themselves open to strafing runs by the guns.h.i.+ps. Converging beams of brilliant light streaked from the fire dishes of the LAATs' wing - and armature-mounted ball turrets, and staccato bursts erupted from the forward guns. Two droids exploded. One turned to answer the volleys, but not in time. Missiles from the guns.h.i.+ps' ma.s.s-drive launchers took off the droid's left legs, then the head, then blew the rest clear across the plaza. The remaining two Vultures skittered onto the skyway to increase their odds of survival.
Bail and Padme laid down steady lines of fire, but the droids were undeterred.
”And I thought the Senate was a battlefield!” Mon Mothma said. The sight of smoke curling from holes in the lead droid's fuselage seemed to invigorate the one behind. Driving Padme and the others in search of new cover with a single torpedo, the droid scurried forward, edging around its stricken comrade and stepping brazenly into the mall plaza, red sensors gleaming. A guns.h.i.+p made a quick pa.s.s, but couldn't find a clear field of fire.
”I'm out,” Bail said, dropping his rifle.
Padme checked her weapon's display screen. ”Same.”
C-3PO shook his head. ”How will I ever explain this to Artoo-Detoo?” They broke for cover a final time, hoping to throw themselves through the ragged hole in the still-smoking security grate, but the droid hurried to intercept them; then, in seeming s.a.d.i.s.tic delight, began to back the four of them against the wall of the Nicandra Building. A rage began to build in Padme, born of instincts as old as life itself. She was on the verge of hurling herself against the towering machine, ripping the sensors from its teardrop-shaped head, when the droid came to a sudden halt, obviously in reception of some remote communication. Retracting its head and stiffening its scissor-like legs into wings, it turned and launched itself over the edge of the plaza into the canyon below. The droid on the skyway did the same, even with two guns.h.i.+ps in close pursuit.