Star Wars_ Legacy of the Force 01_ Betrayal - Aaron Allston [98]
The other two fired at him. The first shot hit the back of the sturdy couch and picked the furniture up, spinning it toward the outer wall. Han and the couch hit the transparisteel of the viewport.
Han felt the viewport shudder under the impact and he wondered, for one eternity-long fraction of a second, if it would give way beneath the blow, buckling free of its housing, sending him into the coldness of space and decompression.
It didn’t. It rang metallically as he hit it, pain shot through his shoulder blades, and suddenly he was on the floor, the couch on top of him.
He heard Leia’s lightsaber hum and sizzle. He rolled out from under the furniture. In the moment it took him to come upright, blaster in hand, the situation was resolved. One of the two remaining attackers was down with his head off; the other, shaking in pain, was missing both arms at the elbow. Both of Han’s targets were down, smoke rising from where the blaster bolts had hit them.
Leia turned her attention to the door, and Han didn’t need Jedi powers to know what she was thinking. “Yeah,” he said. “You left, me right.”
They emerged into Kallebarth Way at a dead run, Han turning toward the chambers of the Corellian delegation, Leia turning toward the delegation from Coruscant.
The first door Han passed slid open and a man leapt out. Han aimed, wrenched his blaster back out of line—the man emerging was his own son. “C’mon, kid,” he said and ran past.
Han could see, up ahead, that the double-wide door leading into the Corellian delegation’s suite was open. Small-arms blasterfire emerged from the doorway to pockmark the passageway wall opposite. As he watched, a black-armored figure staggered back through the doorway, his chest smoking from what looked like blaster hits, and swung his oversized blaster rifle into line back toward the doorway. The blaster fired. A lance of red light leapt from the weapon, and the interior of the chamber beyond the door was suddenly illuminated in flame colors.
Han fired. His shot hit the attacker’s armor just under the armpit, staggering him but not penetrating.
At the same moment, Jacen hurled his lightsaber. It spun in flight, catching the attacker as he was still off-balance from Han’s shot, crossing him at knee level, and severing both legs at the joint.
Jacen put on a burst of Force-augmented speed, leaving his father behind, and kept the lightsaber spinning in the air just outside the suite’s door. There were more flashes of light from that chamber, more small-arms fire, and he took the last two steps with a sinking feeling.
He snatched the hilt of his spinning lightsaber out of the air and stepped into the doorway.
The room was on fire. No, that wasn’t quite right—three members of the Corellian security detail were on fire, their bodies burning briskly, smoke also curling up from their blasters. Oddly, the chamber’s fire alert had not activated.
There were three bodies on the ground that weren’t smoking; they were black-clad intruders. The burn marks on their heads attested to the accurate fire of the dead CorSec officers.
One of the interior doors was gone, wrenched free, the frame scorched by the power of the intruders’ blaster rifles. In the doorway stood Wedge Antilles, dressed in his shorts and ancient Rebel Alliance shirt, a blaster in his hand. He looked Jacen in the eye and shook his head, a sorrowful gesture.
Jacen entered and moved past Wedge. On the floor of the sumptuous bedchamber beyond lay Five World Prime Minister Aidel Saxan, a burned-edge hole the size of a dinner plate passing entirely through her torso, residual charring masking any expression she might have been wearing when she died.
Leia sped faster as she neared the door to the main Coruscant delegation quarters. Those doors were open, and she could hear blasterfire from