Keeping score

A Trandoshan was behind the attack.

Where: Dee’ja Peak, Naboo.

Feeling: I’ve got a fight on my hands.

Listening to: Jardena

Continued from here.

My first thought was that the "thunk" was a cone that had fallen from the tree. Then I saw the blinking lights.

Detonator.

In the holovids, in war movies and such, when the protagonists (or the villains) see a bomb or a grenade, they get to react to it. They get to shout, or jump on it heroically, or even flee in cowardly fashion. In reality, there was no time.

I think I did say something. I think I did shout a warning, though it was almost certainly unintelligible when mingled in with the sound of the blast that came a second later. I had only had time to register the reality of the detonator and start to spin away and throw myself behind the speeder when it went off.

Two things saved me – the sturdy rental speeder (if I survive this, I must remember to buy stock in that company) had acted as a partial shield, and the snow had dampened the blast and made the grenade’s effect sub-optimal. Still the shockwave rocked me. I narrowly missed being pinned by the vehicle when it flipped over, but I felt a searing pain in my knee.

A cascade of snow fell from the tree, but mercifully, the entombment that I’d feared didn’t happen. Everything got really quiet, which didn’t make sense until I realized that it probably wasn’t quiet – it was me. I couldn’t hear anything. I didn’t get to muse on whether that condition was going to last or not. We were under attack, obviously. Was Jardena okay? She’d been much farther away from the blast. I had to hope for the best.

I lunged for my DLT20 rifle that had been thrown from the speeder and had embedded itself in the snow tantalizingly just out of reach, That was when I was hit full force by a 150 kilo Trandoshan and whatever was going on with my knee was replaced by an all new pain.

A funny thing about Trandoshans. They have this religion that’s all about points and keeping score. They believe they get Jagannath points when they kill things. They get even more points when that thing is sentient. Still more when they kill something in a special way. Our Trandoshan friend here was going for bonus points, clearly. He’d softened us up with the grenade, then he intended to do us in, up close and personal. He pinned me with one scaly foot while he cracked off five shots from a small modified bowcaster in the direction of the shelter. I didn’t know if any of those shots hit her. I prayed they didn’t.

He swung the weapon towards me. I flipped him. He must’ve thought I was hurt worse than I was. He managed to crack off another shot, awkwardly aimed at me, before going down. Something tore through my right side.

Then we were grappling and rolling away from the tree and out into the snow. If he wanted those Jagannath points, he was going to have to earn them the hard way.

To be continued...

See Jardena’s blog for her point of view.

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