"I want this to be over," Tories told him. He glanced at the Cranscoc twillers crouching down in front of the control system mud flow, wondering how they were taking all this.
But if they were worried, surprised, or even fully aware of what was going on, he couldn't see it. "Contact the command ship and order them to surrender."
"Impossible." Ashel made a cautious gesture toward the ruined droids. "We cannot communicate except through the droids, and you have destroyed them all.
"
"Really," Tories said. It was almost certainly a lie, but there was an easy way to call the other's bluff. "Fine. Come on."
"Where do we go?" Gehad asked timorously.
"It just so happens I know where there are other droids you can use,"
Tories told him. "And watch it. I doubt you want the kind of trouble I can make for you."
Keeping a grip on Ashel's robe, he led the way down the platform steps.
The Neimoidians' sealing of the tunnel exit had been achieved by the simple procedure of welding the leading edge of the ramp solidly to the floor, and it took him only a couple of seconds to cut through the weld with his lightsaber.
Ashel quivered in his grip as he did so, but said nothing.
Their footsteps echoed eerily as they headed east through the empty plant. Tories kept alert for a surprise attack, but apparently the Neimoidians really had sent all the rest of the droids outside.
The battle was still going on as they reached the east door and stepped out into the night air. "There are your droids," Tories said, giving Ashel an imperative push toward the light and noise. "Let's go talk to them."
"You cannot be serious," the Neimoidian protested, cringing back against Tories' grip. "We are not equipped for battle."
"Too bad," Tories said. "But if that's the only way to stop them..."
He broke off as, abruptly, the circle of blasters around Roshton's position fell silent. Something in the sky to the left caught his eye, and he looked over as a pair of STAPs plummeted to the ground.
He craned his head to look up into the night sky. There, almost directly above him, was the fading light of an expanding gas cloud.
General Tiis and the Whipsaw had come through.
"I guess we won't need to talk to the droids, after all," he commented.
He could see movement from Roshton's position now as the clone troopers abandoned their positions, running toward him and the plant now wide open behind him.
"Come on," he added, returning his lightsaber to his belt and nudging the Neimoidians toward the approaching troops.
The two groups met halfway. "I see you've been busy," Roshton greeted Tories as he trotted to a halt, gesturing his troops to continue on toward the plant.
"What's it like inside?"
"Empty, as far as I could tell," Tories told him. "The tunnel's been unsealed, too, if you want to get the techs back in."
"Excellent," Roshton said in grim satisfaction. "We'll get the Cranscoc to undo any retooling they did, then get back to work.
"I doubt the Neimoidians got very far with their retooling," Tories said.
"Speaking of which, what should I do with them?"
Roshton glanced past him toward the plant. "Would you mind taking them to Commander Bratt? He's in one of the gunships heading over to shut down the Number Two C-9979."
"No problem," Tories said. "I'll see you later."
Roshton nodded and hurried off after his men. Tories started his own party off in the opposite direction. "It is not yet over," Ashel warned as they walked.
"We have not yet been defeated."
"You just keep thinking that," Tories said. They'd reached the site of Roshton's stand now, and he paused for a moment, gazing across the battlefield. The ground was almost literally covered with the wreckage of droids, with the bodies of probably a dozen clone troopers lying among the debris, their armor no longer white. Fires were still burning in the remains of a couple of vehicles, one of them the gunship Tories had seen being destroyed. Standing amid the general carnage were probably a hundred more droids, still upright yet with an oddly sagging look about them, where the loss of their control ship had left them.
He was still gazing at them when, with a sort of collective twitch, they came back to life.
For perhaps half a second the sheer unexpectedness of it froze him to the spot. But for the Neimoidians, that half-second was all the time they needed.
At a barked word from Ashel, the Neimoidians dropped flat on the ground.
And Tories found himself standing alone in the middle of a ring of blasters. There was no time for anything fancy, and literally nowhere to go but up. He leaped up and sideways, igniting his lightsaber and slashing behind him as he arced over the revived droid army, trusting in the Force to guide his hand and deflect the shots. He hit the ground running and dodging, heading away from the plant toward the city, a hail of blaster bolts nipping at his robes.
"Yes, run, Jedi," Ashel's mocking voice wafted after him, more painful even than the blaster bolt near-misses. "Tell us again of this trouble you can make for us."
Tories didn't answer. Ahead, he could hear the sounds of renewed blaster fire coming from Foulahn City, and from the sense of startled anguish rolling over his mind it was clear that the rest of the Republic forces had been taken as much by surprise as he had. Unless he could get to them in time, to lend his strength to theirs, the battle would be lost.
He couldn't.
And it was.
"I guess the Separatists have finally learned from their past mistakes,"
Doriana commented as he, Tories, and Binalie stood on one of the mansion's north-facing balconies. "They must have found a way to make a control matrix compact enough that they could bring a backup down to the planet surface. My guess is that it's probably in one of the landing ships. Not that it really matters."
"And not that we'll ever know for sure," Binalie said bitterly, shivering in the cold night air. "They're all dead, then?"
"Dead, or scattered," Tories said quietly, and Doriana could hear the pain and self-reproach in the Jedi's voice. "Except for the ones Roshton took into Spaarti with him." Binalie sighed. "And they're as good as dead, aren't they?"
"I can't see it any other way," Doriana agreed, gazing out toward Spaarti Creations. Above the plant, a hundred STAPs were circling through the night sky like carrion-eaters, glinting with the light from a dozen distant fires.
On the grounds around the plant, invisible from where the three men stood, a thousand combat droids and a dozen battle tanks stood their own silent watch.
And between the Binalie mansion and the plant, acrid smoke still rose from the crater where the Separatist hailfire droid had emptied both of its missile pods into the ground, collapsing the tunnel and cutting off the clone troopers' last avenue of escape. The Separatists had been nothing if not thorough. "The only reason they're still alive is that the Separatists don't want to wreck the plant trying to force them out," he added.
"But then, they don't have to, do they?" Tories said quietly. "By the time General Tiis can return with enough ground troops, they'll likely have starved in there."
"Yes," Binalie said. "Ironic, isn't it? Commander Roshton spent all that effort to retake the plant. And he succeeded.
"And that's where he's going to die."