For the whole next month, we worked on settling into our new home.
I loaded Han up with a construction program and set him to checking the support struts and wiring and running a full diagnostic on the base.
Say what you want, but being able to dump any information straight into a droid’s mechanical brain is incredibly convenient.
As long as there’s room left to store it.
I wasn’t sitting idle either.
Gear doesn’t move itself.
That, as it turned out, nearly became a serious problem.
At some point somebody spotted my route and apparently pegged me for a spy or some other kind of criminal.
Only sheer force of will — and the Force itself — got me clear of a Republic clone ambush.
A scorched speeder, part of my cargo lost, and a wounded shin were an unpleasant bit of bad luck, but nothing I couldn’t live through.
I had to find a new route after that, and from then on I could only travel at night.
At one point I considered stealing a starship or a transport outright and using it to move everything.
Two problems killed that idea.
First, the Republic guarded their ships too well, and they had a Jedi on hand.
Fly a Separatist shuttle instead, and the same clones would shoot me down — lately they’d started blasting anything in the sky that wasn’t flying under their own colors.
Second, and more importantly, I simply didn’t know how to fly a ship.
So it was back to the old-fashioned way: hauling everything back and forth on the speeder bike.
Things picked up once I rigged a cargo rack onto it.
I never did manage proper fasteners, but as long as I kept the speed down, I actually had decent odds of not losing my cargo along the way.
Hunting down power generators became its own special kind of nightmare.
Every generator in the city had already been stripped by looters.
The bunkers I knew about had either been destroyed or picked clean by our own people — though who knows, maybe that was on the Boss’s orders.
So in the end I had to lift one straight off a Separatist outpost.
For that, I needed Han’s help.
There was no way I’d have tried it alone.
The plan was as simple as three credits, but it just might work.
The droid, naturally, cursed me out six ways from Sunday and stalked off muttering about his hard life — but he did the job.
Disguised as an ordinary Separatist droid, he slipped onto the outpost.
After that, it was just a matter of technicalities.
Half an hour later my comm beeped, lighting up with a map of the base marking every patrol route and our main target: the portable power generators.
There was a real risk of him getting caught, but everything went off without a hitch.
A hundred droids would’ve been a serious problem for the two of us — you’d have to be a special kind of suicidal to charge a crowd like that head-on, and I now understood that a lot more clearly than before, which was, frankly, a relief.
But it all went off surprisingly smoothly.
Darting between guard posts and sticking to the shadows, I managed to strap the generators onto two speeder bikes without anyone noticing.
Droids really were dumb as rocks.
Thank the manufacturers for that.
Hiding behind some crates, keeping half an eye on my surroundings, I tried to raise my droid.
“Han.
Come in, do you copy?”
“Yes, Master.”
“Everything set?”
“Affirmative.”
“Then blow it.”
A siren wailed, screaming about an attack, and several columns of droids marched double-time toward the presumed direction of the assault.
March along, my dears.
March along.
We had a few seconds now to slip away in the confusion.
We jumped onto our bikes almost in unison.
“Over the rooftops, like we planned!”
“Are you aware that you’re insane?”
“No, but thanks for the vote of confidence in my creativity.”
We kept bickering even as we tore up a staircase at full speed, riding our speeders like maniacs.
We’d never make it out through the main gate in time, so there was only one way out left.
The engineers who built this place clearly never imagined anyone trying to leave in a hurry — and that was exactly what we were counting on.
The repulsor cushions let us ride over almost any surface, and the stairs were no exception.
From a certain angle, a staircase is basically a ramp anyway.
We clipped a couple of droids on the way and launched off the outpost wall.
In that split second I prayed to every god I knew that we’d land clean.
I’d done the math, sure, but you never really know.
The undercarriage scraped hard against the rocks, but the speeder leveled out and shot away from the base.
“Congratulations, Master.
Your plan was a success.”
“Of course it was.
Did you doubt—”
I didn’t get to finish.
A red blaster bolt hissed past my ear.
A handful of droids, riding speeders identical to mine, came vaulting out from behind a pile of rubble.
Hutt’s sake!
The chase through the ruined city that followed was something else entirely.
I swerved and a few more bolts whistled past, way too close for comfort.
I signaled Han to split up at the next intersection — I banked left, he went right.
I’d hoped our pursuers would fall behind, but no such luck.
Like they’d rehearsed this exact scenario, the pack of seven droids split too.
That left four tin cans on my tail.
I had the city on my side; they had the numbers.
I cut hard into a dark gap between two buildings.
The generator slammed against the wall with a pained clang but held together.
I was hoping they’d overshoot the turn.
No such luck.
One of them shot past, but the rest managed to follow me in.
It took a second — right as my shoulder erupted in pain — for me to realize how badly I’d just screwed up.
My speeder was now boxed in between two crumbling walls, and I made just as perfect a target as my own body did.
I’d always heard fear gives you strength.
Turns out that’s true.
I banked to dodge another volley and used the Force to bring down a pile of rubble behind me that had been holding on by pure stubbornness.
Judging by the explosions, it worked — but the sudden itch of danger that made me duck told me I’d been wrong.
One more droid was still on my tail.
I broke out of the narrow passage, cut a hard turn, and dove into a field of debris, hoping to lose him in the maze of stone.
The gap between us grew.
A little more and I’d be free.
A shot came from above and nearly killed me outright.
I only just managed to jerk my head aside, losing nothing but a lock of hair.
The control panel lit up with warning lights — this ride was done for.
Another droid was riding the rubble down from above.
It had to be the one that had made the turn earlier.
I wrenched the wheel and dodged getting crushed under his speeder.
We were level now.
I kicked his bike, nearly slamming him into a slab of concrete, but he managed to right himself.
A couple more shots scraped my speeder, and I could actually hear the gears screaming inside it.
Black smoke poured out of the engine, stinging my eyes and burning my nose.
I had to do something.
The blaster leaped into my hand on its own.
A few shots, and I got lucky — my pursuer plowed into a pile of rocks and vanished in a flash of fire.
But going by how I felt right now, I might be joining him soon.
I barely had time to unhook the precious cargo before I shoved off with everything I had and jumped clear.
The blast hit me full in the eyes, blinding me.
Shrapnel scraped my cheek.
The shockwave caught me and slammed me into the ground, knocking the wind out of me.
My ears rang too loud to think straight, and I could barely see anything.
I could feel blood seeping from more than one place on my body.
Fear, pain, and fury churned together in my head, and they fed the Force.
Not as much as before, but now I could actually direct it.
I felt it more than saw it — a speeder bike bearing down on me, a droid on top.
He was already lining up the shot that would riddle me with holes.
I threw my hand out toward him.
A second later, his metal body flew into the air and crumpled into a shapeless lump of scrap.
With my other hand I steered the Force to keep his speeder from smashing into a pile of rocks.
I forced down the urge to tear it apart anyway and let out a long breath.
I was alive.
That meant everything was fine.
With a shaking hand, I dug out my comm, which had somehow survived.
Time to get out of here.
“Han, where are you?” Wind and blaster fire crackled through the receiver.
“Do you need help?”
“Master, I’m surrounded.
Generator destroyed, bike destroyed.
Requesting support.
I’m on the roof.
Repeat, on the roof.”
“On my way.”
————— com / BifrostFics