Jedi Trial by David Sherman Read Free Book Online Page A

worst fear was to burn alive in his or her cockpit; crashing was no problem—that would be over quickly.
    This was the most target-rich environment Erk and his fellow pilots had ever encountered. Not even in the many simulated practice sessions had anyone thought to program this many marks. Already, three pilots in Erk’s wing had been killed crashing into enemy fighters—not on purpose, but simply because there were too many of them to fly through without hitting one. The fight continuedfar, far above Erk. The enemy was winning, but now Erk H’Arman was intent on saving his life and, if possible, his ship.
    A dust storm had developed below, obscuring the terrain. Erk’s suit was filled with perspiration, and he knew he must have lost two liters of fluid during the dogfight. Already that loss of fluid was making him thirsty. But he had no choice: he’d have to go down in that storm. He made his decision. “Well, old girl,” he muttered as he struggled to keep his starfighter level, “I’m not going to leave you.” He would go in with his fighter.
    Odie was only halfway back to the main army after guiding the engineers to the rock formation where they were to dig the new defensive positions when the storm hit with a suddenness and ferocity typical of such events on Praesitlyn. The wind quickly rose to fifty or sixty kilometers an hour, buffeting her from all sides and making controlling her speeder difficult. She stopped and zipped up. Millions of granules of sand blasted at her. When at last the storm was over, which could be in ten minutes or ten days, she knew her helmet would be scoured white by the sand. Right now, though, she couldn’t see two meters in front of her. She dismounted and, turning off the repulsors, she tipped her speeder over and curled up beside it to wait out the storm.
    A ground-shaking roar, momentarily louder than even the howling wind, washed over her as an enormous object passed no more than ten meters above where she lay. The ground trembled beneath her, andthe huge tail of flame that came out of the dust cloud was so hot she could feel it even through her protective clothing. She heard a screeching, smashing noise as if some metallic object had impacted. Some distance off to her right, there was a brief reddish glow that was immediately obscured by the rolling clouds of dust. A fighter had just crashed only a short distance from where she lay. She didn’t hear an explosion, so she presumed the fighter had come down mostly intact.
Would the pilot have survived?
she wondered. Then she wondered whose ship it was. She lay beside her speeder, undecided whether to investigate.
    The wind suddenly abated somewhat, and raising her head above the frame of her speeder, Odie saw a faint glow from the downed fighter’s engines. She was familiar with the design of all types of Separatist craft—that was one of her jobs as a reconnaissance trooper—but at this distance in the bad visibility she couldn’t tell which side the crashed machine might belong to. All she could see was that it hadn’t broken up on impact.
    She righted her speeder, mounted, and started out toward the downed machine. As she eased her way along, she unsnapped her holster and withdrew her hand blaster.
    When she got close enough to see the fighter’s markings, she identified it as a Praesitlyn defense force fighter. The canopy was closed and she couldn’t see the pilot. The fighter ticked and creaked and groaned like a living thing in pain as its overheated components began to cool. She wondered if it would explode. No time to lose. She jumped off her speeder and clambered onto the fighter’s airfoil. She couldn’t see through thecanopy. She banged on it with her fist, and suddenly it popped open. The pilot sat there in his harness, a blaster pointed directly at her face.
    “Don’t shoot!” she screamed, instinctively leveling her own blaster at the man.
    They froze there for a very long moment, weapons leveled at