Read Online Conquest: Edge of Victory I by Greg Keyes - Free Book Online Page A

shove that took all of her companions down, too. Then he whirled and made four quick slashes that opened a gaping hole into the turbolift shaft.
    “Go,” he told Tahiri. “You say you’re ready for all this? Jump.”
    Tahiri nodded and without the slightest hesitation leapt down the shaft. Anakin followed her, bolts flashing above him. Together, they hurled through darkness.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Anakin reached to Tahiri through the Force, and for an instant met a wall as hard as the stone of the temple. Then she reached back, and they clicked as if they had never been apart, so intensely that it actually frightened him. They fell in a sort of acrobatic dance, Anakin using the Force to slow Tahiri’s fall and she slowing his as they spun around a common fulcrum somewhere between them, like two children clasping hands and leaning back, turning around on their feet. If either let go, the other would go whirling off, out of control
    An old game, one they had invented long ago.
    He noticed something was falling with them—a pair of glop grenades. He sent them humming back up the shaft and out the hole he had cut.
    The two young Jedi touched down, feather light, on top of the turbolift.
    “Wow!” Tahiri said. “It’s been a long time since we did that. That was terrific. And the way you got the grenades, too—that was
art!
”
    “I—”
    The car of the lift suddenly started again.
    Desperately Anakin cut into the power couplings and superconductor casings in the walls. The lift jarred to a stop. Meanwhile, Tahiri sliced into the roof of the car itself and jumped back, in case there was blasterfire.
    But there was none.
    “I don’t feel anyone on the lift,” Tahiri said.
    “No. I sent it down to the third hangar level below the temple. I think Valin and Sannah got off, and then someone called it back up—probably someone on the ground level. Judging by our drop, we’re probably somewhere between—”
    An explosion six meters above him cut him off as one of the outer lift doors blew in.
    “There’s the ground floor, right there,” Anakin said. “Come on!”
    He jumped down into the car. With his lightsaber, he cut through the car and the wall beyond, revealing an underground hangar that hadn’t been used since the battle against the first Death Star.
    “You block their shots,” Anakin told Tahiri.
    As bolts rained down and Tahiri deflected them, Anakin cut the fail-safe magnetic bolts that had locked the turbolift in place. He flicked off his lightsaber.
    “Cut your lightsaber, now!”
    “But—”
    “Quick!”
    She did, flattening against the lift walls as blasterfire poured through the hole above them. Another grenade plinked against the lift floor.
    “There. Throw that back at them,” Anakin said.
    The grenade whizzed back up the hole. “Why didn’t you do it?” Tahiri asked.
    “Because I’m holding the lift car up.”
    Above them, the glop grenade went off, and Anakin let gravity have the car.
    It dropped like a stone.
    “Remember to jump up just before we hit bottom,” Anakin gritted, as the lift hurled down through the layers of hangars and Massassi caverns below the temple.
    “Somebody wasn’t paying attention in physics lectures,” Tahiri said.
    “Nope. Mind the roof.” And then they did jump, pushing away from the lift floor with the Force, up throughthe jagged hole, into the turbolift shaft. Below them, the car hit bottom with a terrific din. Once again they drifted each other down upon it, but this time the car wasn’t exactly level. It had wrenched the lowest doors from their hinges, and they were able to step through.
    The Rebel Alliance had converted square kilometers of Massassi caverns into hangars, but below that there were chambers and caverns more or less untouched. The turbolift went down only as far as the Alliance had used the caverns. After that it was stairs, winding corridors, and secret panels.
    “They’ll look up there first,” Anakin said. “They’ll think we went