He stepped down from the shuttle, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun. Yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.
She kept him still and held his beating heart with one gaze, feeding off of him. She was a succubus, beauti...
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Antifighter flak flashed on all sides. Even louder than the clatter of shrapnel and the snarl of her sublight drives, her cockpit hummed and rang with near hits from the turbolaser fire of the Separatist ships crowding space around her. Sometimes she spinning dive through the cloud of battle skimmed bursts so closely that the energy-scatter would slam her starfighter hard enough to bounce her head off the supports of her pilot's chair.
Right now Talia Shan envied the clones: at least they had helmets.
The battle in the skies was a storm of confusion and panic, of galvened particle beams flashing past starfighters so close that the cockpits rang like broken annunciators, of the boot-sole shock of concussion missiles that blasted into cruisers, killing the troopers that had trained together and eaten together and played and laughed and bickered together. From the inside, the battle was desperation and terror and the stomach-churning certainty that the whole galaxy was tearing itself apart.
Talia's gaze narrowed as new bursts of flak bracketed her path. She reached into the Force, feeling for a safe channel through the swarms of shrapnel and sizzling nets of particle beams.
There wasn't one.
She locked a snarl behind her teeth, twisting her starfighter around another explosion that could have peeled its armor like an overripe Ithorian starfruit.
Her patience was growing thin. This siege had gone on long enough.
Her cockpit speakers crackled. "I'll have to agree with you on that one, Shan."
Talia hummed, kicking into a dive that slipped a turbolaser burst by no more than a meter. "Was that out loud?"
"Wouldn't matter if it wasn't. I know what you're thinking."
"Do you?" She looked up through the cockpit canopy to find Anakin Skywalker flying inverted, mirroring her so closely that but for the transparisteel between them, they might have shaken hands. She grinned up at him. "Some new gift of the Force ?"
"Not the Force. Experience. That's what you're always thinking."
Talia grinned again. It was true. She had always been one for getting the job done swiftly and, admittedly, with a bit of flair. They had that in common.
However, their regularly swift and showy triumphs had been countered by the Separatists as of late, and each and every one had been turned right on its head. Because of this, the Outer Rim sieges had drawn on far longer than any had anticipated.
"Ah." Talia took a hand from the starfighter's control yoke to direct her upside-down friend's attention forward. Dead ahead, a blue-white point of light splintered into four laser-straight trails of ion drives. "And what does experience tell you we should do about those incoming tri-fighters?"
