Jedi Trial by David Sherman Read Free Book Online

supply base.” He smiled reassuringly, seeing her expression. “Are you ready to leave right now?” He grinned. His confidence was reassuring, but that slight pause spoke volumes.
    “Yessir!” Odie replied enthusiastically. Since she wasn’t needed for any reconnaissance missions at the moment, she’d been put into the army’s field communications center to work in her secondary specialty—and she was bored to death.
    Reconnaissance trooper Odie Subu straddled her speeder as she closely watched the three hundred vehicles of the engineering battalion finish forming up for the rearward movement to the redoubt. There were dirt movers, bridgers, graders, ground clearers, diggers, and more exotic machines whose uses she couldn’t guess. The most numerous, though, were cargo carriers, many of which were marked with symbols she recognized as indicating their cargoes were explosive ordnance.
    She estimated there were enough explosives in the convoy to obliterate the army’s entire position. She briefly wondered why General Khamar didn’t order the engineers to use the explosives to destroy the droid army. Then she realized the army had no way to get the explosives into the midst of the droid army without whoever was doing the job getting killed before they could accomplish their mission. Still, she thought, it seemed a waste to not set some of them in the droids’path, to destroy as many as possible when they followed the retreating army.
    Well
, she decided,
General Khamar must know what he’s doing
. Besides, how did she know the engineers hadn’t already emplaced explosives to kill the droids when they passed over this ground?
    “Recon scout,” Lieutenant Colonel Kreen’s voice came through her helmet comm.
    “Recon here, sir,” she said into her mike.
    “We’re ready. Move out.”
    Odie took a last look at the convoy. Whatever route she chose had to accommodate the largest of the engineering vehicles. The shake of her head went unseen inside her helmet. The biggest of those machines was so big, she was going to have to lead them in a round-about manner.
    “Moving out, sir,” she said, and eased her speeder into gear.
    She wasn’t able to lead the convoy at speed, not even the paltry 250 kilometers per hour that was all her speeder was capable of. Over this rugged terrain, she had to keep her speed down to under fifty kph, which was the fastest the slower vehicles in the convoy could manage—at times she had to slow to little more than a trot for them to keep up, and sometimes she had to slow because Colonel Kreen said they were raising too much of a dust cloud. The distance they had to cover was only ten kilometers, line of sight. But the route she had to follow, this way and that, and sometimes doubling back, made it nearly four times that distance—and more than four times the length of time to cover.
    But at last they made it. She stopped and pulled aside, while the engineering vehicles trundled past.
    Colonel Kreen had his command vehicle pull off the trail next to her.
    “Well done, trooper,” he said. “I’ll see to it General Khamar and your platoon commander both get a report on how well you did. Now you’d better get back.”
    “Thank you, sir.” Odie saluted and waited until the engineering commander was back in his vehicle before she turned her speeder around and gunned it. She headed back at top speed.
    Lieutenant Erk H’Arman knew he was going down, but even as he plummeted toward the ground he remained cool, calling upon every fiber in his body and all the skill he could muster to save his starfighter. The hit from the enemy fighter had slammed into him like a hammer and sent him into an uncontrolled spin downward. He had only just been able to pull out and stabilize his machine at a mere thousand meters above the ground. His hydraulic system was failing fast, and he knew he had but two choices: eject or ride his fighter in. So far there was no fire inside the cockpit. A pilot’s