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  Half a minute later, it was over. Brolis blinked in amazement, wondering if it was always that easy for Jedi.

  And then, across the square, the hailfire droid stirred and began to roll forward.

  "Look out!" Brolis called. "There's a—"

  The rest of his warning dissolved into a fit of painful coughing. But Yoda was already angling across the square away from him, lightsaber held ready as he slipped from one pile of debris to another. The hailfire shifted direction toward the small Jedi Master, swiveling to keep its missile launchers trained on him.

  And then, midway between two stacks of rubble, Yoda stopped, facing the droid as if challenging it to a private duel. The droid stopped, too, and for a moment they seemed to be regarding each other. Then, almost delicately, the droid lowered its pods and sent a single missile sizzling through the air.

  Brolis tensed, watching helplessly as the rocket streaked across the open space. Jedi lightsabers, he knew, could defend quite well against the bolts from blasters or plasma weapons. But trying to block a missile that way would merely cause it to explode. If Yoda didn't do something fast, he was going to die.

  Then, just as it seemed there was no chance left, Yoda leaped almost casually to the side. The rocket burned through the space he'd just vacated, exploding harmlessly a dozen meters behind him.

  From somewhere deep inside the hailfire droid came an annoyed-sounding rumble, the first time Brolis had ever heard one make a noise like that. For a second

  or two it seemed to be pondering its next move. Then, in rapid succession, three more missiles burst outward, angling into a tight spread as they flew.

  Yoda was ready. He leaped back toward his earlier position to let the first pass by, dropped flat onto the ground as the second shot over his head, then rolled and bounded upward in time to avoid the third. He landed on the ground, lifted his lightsaber again to ready position, and waited. Brolis strained his ears, listening for a clue as to what the droid would do.

  And then, over the distance, he heard a series of calibration clicks. "Tracking lock!" he shouted toward Yoda.

  His lungs heaved with a fresh coughing fit, and he could only hope the other had caught his warning. By activating the tracking system, the droid was setting its missiles to follow their target no matter what. Yoda's only hope now was to find cover before the missiles got a clean lock onto him.

  But he remained where he was, waiting. Lowering its launchers again, the droid fired.

  Again, Yoda leaped upward as the missile approached. But this time something was different. Instead of simply arcing into the air, he twisted his body into a dizzying set of spins, twisting back and forth like a gymnast performing a com­plicated aerial routine.

  The effect on the missile was startling. It seemed to tremble as it flew, its nose shaking back and forth as if thoroughly confused. It shot past Yoda, still shaking, and continued on to explode across the square.

  Brolis grinned tightly. It was the same sort of evasive jinking maneuver he'd seen starfighter pilots perform in order to shake off a target-locked missile. He'd never guessed that any being, even a Jedi Master, could duplicate such a technique on his own.

  Neither, apparently, had the droid. Another growl rumbled across the square; and then, suddenly, it was rolling forward, filling the air with a fresh stream of missiles as it charged.

  Yoda was already in motion, leaping and spinning, hitting the ground and bound­ing off again at unexpected angles, making himself an impossible target for even a hailfire's weaponry to tag. Brolis found himself wincing as missile after missile slipped harmlessly past the Jedi Master, shaking the ground and lighting up the square with distant detonations. One of the missiles, which looked like it couldn't possibly miss, somehow bent aside from its path just far enough to collide with another of the salvo, detonating both midway between Yoda and the droid.

  And as that premature explosion momentarily blocked the droid's view, Yoda abruptly switched from defense to attack. He hurled his lightsaber toward the machine, the weapon spinning into the obscuring cloud of smoke from the mis­siles' collision and shooting out the other side.

  But the intended target was no longer there. Even as the missiles had collided, the droid had skidded to a halt and reversed direction to roll rapidly backward across the square. The lightsaber blade sliced through the space where it had been; and as the weapon hesitated in midair, the droid fired another missile straight at it. At the last second, the lightsaber dodged out of its way, streaking back to safety in Yoda's hand. The missile itself shot harmlessly past to add yet another crater to the distant landscape.

  With that the barrage ceased. For a few seconds Yoda and the droid again seemed to be staring at each other. Then, moving swiftly but warily, Yoda retraced his steps back to the broken building. "It just let you walk away?" Brolis asked, not quite believing it.

  "Clever, this hailfire droid is," Yoda huffed as he stepped in through the open­ing and retrieved his walking stick. "Close enough to engage it in direct battle, it will not allow me. Nor in futile attacks will it expend all of its missiles. That is why it has stopped now, the situation further to assess."

  "So what do we do?" Brolis asked.

  Yoda's ears flattened. "Allow it to destroy itself, we must," he said, closing down his lightsaber and gesturing behind Brolis. "Come."

  Brolis hadn't been to the rear of the ruined building for three days, not since he'd confirmed that there was no escape route there for him and his squad. He walked now past the scattered bodies of his troops, fighting against the pain of his injuries, wondering what exactly the Jedi Master had in mind.

  He soon found out. Where once had been merely stacks of collapsed wall and ceiling material, there was now a small, Yoda-sized tunnel stretching back through the rubble. So that was how the other had appeared so unexpectedly behind him. "A series of large caverns there are, in the cliffs behind this part of the city," Yoda said. "Beyond them, my transport is."

  "Yes, I know about the caverns," Brolis said, frowning. The Jedi had stopped beside the entrance to the tunnel and was looking back at him. "I'm not sure I'm up to crawling that far," Brolis warned him, eyeing the tunnel. "My side—"

  He broke off as, suddenly, he found himself rising gently off the floor, turning over in midair, and floating head-first toward the tunnel. "But the caverns have no other exit," he added, determined not to show surprise or panic in front of this creature half his size, "so we decided they were of no strategic use to us." He frowned as he was deftly threaded into the narrow tunnel. "Or is there a way out that I don't know about?"

  "There is no way out," Yoda confirmed as they moved together down the tun­nel. "Through the side of the collapsed building, I came. But the droid will not know that."

  The tunnel was suddenly rocked by a terrific explosion from behind them. The piles of debris they were traveling through shook violently, the pressure wave sending a fresh surge of pain through Brolis's injuries. "What was that?" he gasped.

  "The hailfire droid, it is," Yoda said, his voice sounding faint and distant through the pounding of the blood in Brolis's ears. "No longer, I fear, does it wish to take you alive. Now, I believe, it will be coming to kill."

  Another blast shook the tunnel. This time, as the shock wave washed over him, Brolis fell again into darkness.

  He awoke to find himself lying beside a boulder, staring upward at a distant and dimly lit ceiling of rock. Rolling over carefully, he got up onto his knees and eased his eyes above the boulder.

  He was in a vast, dome-shaped cavern, one of the group Yoda had mentioned just before the hailfire droid had attacked. Scattered around the floor were a handful of glowsticks, enough to show the Jedi Master standing by the cavern's side. He was slicing into the wall with his lightsaber beneath a wide band of rock

  that stretched up along the curved wall to the ceiling and down the other side, forming a sort of rough arch in the center of the cavern.

  Brolis frowned up at the formati
on. He didn't remember any arch being there when he'd explored these caverns two weeks ago. Could his eyes be playing tricks on him?

  He stiffened. Above the lightsaber's hum he could hear another sound: the creaking wheels of an approaching hailfire droid.

  Which meant Yoda's plan had failed. Obviously, he'd hoped the droid would try to follow them and get itself stuck in the collapsed buildings long enough for him to cut an exit through the cavern wall. But with persistence and probably a few carefully placed missiles, the droid had managed to batter its way through the rubble, enlarge the entrance to the caverns, and chase them down.

  It was approaching now. And they were trapped.

  Yoda heard the sound, too. Closing down his lightsaber, he leaped across the cavern to land beside Brolis's boulder. "Ah—awake, you are," the Jedi said. "Good. Be silent, now, and observe."

  Across the cavern, the hailfire rolled into view. Its cyclopean photoreceptor eye spotted Yoda at once, and it swiveled to face him. Missile pods aimed and ready, it continued forward.

  It had reached the center of the cavern when, from beside the two ends of the stone arch, a pair of clone troopers suddenly rose from concealment behind boul­ders and opened fire.

  Brolis's mouth dropped open in disbelief as the blaster fire raked across the droid. But his troops had all been killed in the fighting. Where in the world had Yoda found these men?

  The droid responded instantly to the sudden new threat. Swiveling hard to its right, it fired a missile at the clone trooper there, then rotated to face the opposite direction and launched another at the second trooper. The missiles hit their tar­gets dead-center and exploded.

  With a horrendous double crack, the bottom sections of the arch blew apart. Shock waves raced upward along the walls, shattering the arch into twin water­falls of falling stone. The waves reached the top of the dome, and with a roar the rest of the arch and the entire center of the ceiling collapsed.

  Burying the hailfire droid beneath a massive pile of rock.

  And Brolis finally understood. There had been no soldiers, merely empty sets of armor animated by the same mysterious power that had earlier carried him through the tunnel. Yoda hadn't been trying to cut an exit with his lightsaber, but had instead been putting the finishing touches on a booby-trap of loosened rock that he knew would collapse under the droid's attack.

  Just as he had promised, he had allowed the hailfire to destroy itself.

  "Come, Commander," the Jedi Master said quietly. "Await us, my transport does."

  END

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