• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“No talking. We know what Jedi can do.”

Luke shrugged and kept walking, a little stiffly until the knot in his back eased. “Please don’t hit me.”

This earned him a carbine stock across the back of his head hard enough to buckle his knees. “Didn’t you hear me?”

Luke straightened again and shook the stars out of his head. He paused long enough to look over his shoulder. “I heard you. But I don’t see any particular reason to obey you.”

“Obey this.”

The Force whispered a warning, and Luke whirled in time to catch the oncoming butt of the blaster carbine in the palm of his flesh hand and hold it fast. “I said please.”

The astonished stormtrooper tried to yank his carbine free, but instead Luke tightened his grip and let the Force add strength to his arm; a twist of the wrist shattered the carbine’s stock to plastite splinters. The other stormtrooper swore and triggered an autoburst from his carbine. Luke’s other hand, the prosthetic hand that had replaced the one his father had taken, came up in an arc that precisely followed the motions of the carbine’s muzzle and caught all five bolts squarely in its palm.

“Please don’t shoot me, either.” He turned the palm upward in a friendly shrug and let the astonished troopers stare at the only effect of the Force-blunted blasterfire: a faint curl of steam that trailed upward from his unmarked palm. “Let’s try to end the day with nobody else dying, shall we?”

The stormtrooper sneered, “Tell that to Lord Shadowspawn.”

“I plan to,” Luke said. “That’s why I’m here.”

CHAPTER 7

HAN SOLO WAS STRONGLY OF THE OPINION THAT SPACE battles, despite how much fun certain demented thrill-monkeys—say, any member of Rogue Squadron—liked to claim they can be, ranked somewhere below being kissed by a Traptoforian razor slug, and only a whisker above being dropped headfirst into a barrel of bantha poop. He’d been in this one for less than five minutes, and so far it had done nothing to change his opinion.

It wasn’t like he hadn’t been expecting trouble. He’d been expecting trouble ever since he’d ditched those Mando negotiations. That expectation of trouble had become absolute certainty when he and Chewie had hit the jump point three light-years from Mindor and been yanked out of hyperspace and ambushed by a couple dozen TIE defenders, which hadn’t been an actual problem because he was not, despite Leia’s occasional insistence, an idiot. He’d preset the final leg in the Falcon’s navicomputer, so they had been in and out of the jump point before those astonished Imps could so much as shout “Emperor’s black bones!” or whatever stupid pretend curse they liked to shout when caught with their armored pants around their armored ankles.

If he hadn’t been so worried about Luke, he might even have stuck around and taught a few of them the value of real cursing, Corellian-style—Corellian curses being a synergistic blend of vulgarity, obscenity, and outright blasphemy that were the only things really worth saying when one was in the middle of being blown to monatomic dust.

Also, the navicomputer preset should have dropped them out of hyperspace about twenty light-minutes from Mindor, which would, in theory, have given him and Chewie plenty of time to get a solid read on the situation with the Falcon’s medium-range sensors before deciding whether to go on in or head back out, because Han—recent military service notwithstanding—still tried, at least in spirit, to adhere to the principles outlined in the Combat Litany of the Smuggler’s Creed:

Never fight when you can bluff.

Never bluff when you can run.

Never run when you can sneak.

If no one knows you’re there, you win.

This was the theory, anyway. The distinction between theory and reality was announced by the mass-proximity Klaxon in the Falcon’s cockpit, which unleashed an ear-shattering blast that was underlined by the Falcon being unceremoniously dumped back into realspace in the middle of a battle between three Corellian frigates, half a dozen fighter wings, and a giant cloud of TIE interceptors that was, unbelievably, taking place