Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 07_ Conviction - Aaron Allston [43]
This room had started out more crowded with furniture than Sel’s, and now those furnishings were scattered, strewn as if by the breath of some giant being. Electronics—datapads, entertainment monitors, art holoprojectors—rose to smash into the ceiling, crashed to the floor again, rose once more, hurling sparks in all directions as they performed their aerial dance of self-destruction. Luke saw a stuffed chair beginning to ignite.
Luke also saw a human arm flailing from beneath an upside-down sofa. He ran to it, uphill part of the way, downhill the second half of the distance as the dome’s floor tilted crazily, and stooped to heave the furniture away from the victim it trapped.
Beneath was a white-haired man, lean almost to the point of emaciation, with a look of pain on his face. As soon as he was free of the sofa, he rolled onto his back and clutched at his left arm. From his expression, Luke suspected there was a break there, at the elbow or just above.
Luke knelt, bracing himself against a dome exterior wall to help maintain his balance. He had to shout to make himself heard over the din of breakage, of sizzling electronics, of screams from elsewhere nearby. “How many more here? In this house?”
“Two.” The old man struggled to sit up. “My daughter, her son …”
Luke picked him up and turned to gauge the return path to the outer doorway. A bookcase of simulated wood scraped and slid past between him and his goal, then fetched up against an exterior wall and was momentarily still.
Luke ran. The floor seemed to heave and drop, causing him to stumble forward off balance, and he did not draw on the Force to stabilize his run. He twisted sideways so that he slammed shoulder-first into the entryway rather than hammer the old man’s head into the surface there. Then, staggering sideways, he made his way onto the recess just outside the door and leapt free.
He leapt farther than he expected to, actually, for the dome began another pivot as he jumped. He flew ten meters, took the brunt of the landing on his uninjured leg. His momentum was not checked, so he went forward into a somersault, wrapping his body around the old man’s, and came down on his feet again and ran another five paces, slowing.
Then he could stop and turn.
Vestara was already out of the dome. In her arms was a little boy of maybe three. Vestara, too, was turning to look back at the dome. Then she glanced down at the boy. She wrinkled her nose as though discovering she had just come in contact with a smelly substance. She unceremoniously set the little boy down on the dusty street.
Luke realized that the dome had twisted to face opposite its original direction; he and Vestara now stood on the street that had been behind it. It still twisted like a living thing, like an animal intent on ripping its neck free of a restraining collar.
There was a series of thumps from the second-story viewport and that piece of scarred transparisteel came free, rolling down the dome’s curved surface to crash into the dust below. Then Ben emerged, a young woman in his arms. He hopped onto the curved exterior surface and, quick and nimble as a monkey-lizard, ran down that curve, leaping free when he was three meters above the ground. He hit the dusty Hweg Shul street on his feet, rolled forward across his shoulders, came up on his feet again.
The dome pivoted around and its free end rose directly over Ben’s head. It came down—
Luke began to shout a warning. But Ben reversed direction, jumping and then rolling toward the one surviving permacrete stilt. The dome came down with a crash, obscuring him, a portion of it breaking free, and then rose again, and Luke could see his son and the woman Ben had rescued lying unharmed at the base of that surviving post.
The remains of the dome flapped up