Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [78]
He scanned the room. Thirty-some mostly identical Pawns. Who had the liquefier? Was he supposed to search every single one of them? On the other hand, it occurred to him that the charge emitted by a liquefier was very similar to that of a blaster on stun …
He gazed down thoughtfully at his Crown, suddenly reflecting that it might turn out to be useful after all. He picked it up and went to the door.
“Guard!” he barked in his resonant Shadowspawn voice, lifting the Crown over his head. When one of the troopers outside opened the door, Nick hit him with it.
Hard.
The impact buckled the stormtrooper’s knees, and Nick—mindful both of the stormtrooper’s helmet and of his homeworld’s ancient adage that “anything worth hitting is worth hitting twice”—smacked him again, harder, which laid the stormtrooper facedown and twitching.
The other door guard cursed and brought his carbine around to open fire with impressive speed—but a couple of kilos of carbonite made an even better shield than it did a club. Nick shoved the Crown right into the carbine’s muzzle and put his shoulder into it, which knocked the trooper backward off-balance; before the trooper could bring his carbine back in line, Nick had the first guard’s carbine in his own hands … and stormtrooper armor, it seemed, was not quite as sturdy as carbonite when it came to absorbing blaster bolts.
Beyond the door, he found a long, down-sloping corridor that looked like it had been melted through shimmery black stone. He had time to mutter, “So on top of everything else, I don’t even know where I fraggin’ am,” before a door at the far end of the corridor opened to reveal a squad of stormtroopers, most likely wondering what all the shooting was about.
“This just keeps getting better and better.” Nick dragged the unconscious trooper inside and blasted the door panel, which exploded in a shower of sparks. The door slid shut, and Nick could only hope it might slow the oncoming troopers for a few seconds. It would have to be enough.
But when he looked up at the Pawns, all the Pawns were looking back at him.
He thought, Oh, this can’t be good.
The Pawns in front of him bunched together, blocking his shot at Skywalker’s pedestal tomb, while the others spread out and began to circle toward him, arms outstretched, without making a sound—and though Nick knew it was because most of them couldn’t actually talk, it was still excessively creepy. He bared his teeth and thumbed the carbine over to full auto.
And hesitated.
He had this instant, extraordinarily vivid vision of trying to explain to the sadly patient face of Luke Skywalker—the man who had spared Nick’s life a couple hours earlier based on nothing more than a pun and a vague intuition that he might be innocent—how I just blew away thirty-some innocent men and women so I could dig you out of there, because he had an overpowering intuition of his own: if Luke Skywalker thought he might save thirty innocent lives by sacrificing his own, he wouldn’t hesitate. Ten innocent lives.
One.
“Or, hell, one not-so-innocent life,” Nick muttered. “Like mine.”
He flipped the carbine’s power setting to stun. “I hate Jedi. Hate ’em. Really, really, really. Hate.”
He had no way to know how a stun blast would affect someone when channeled by the neural network of the Pawn Crowns directly into their unprotected brains, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t be good, and the only thing he was looking forward to less than explaining to Skywalker how he’d killed all these people because he was a bloodthirsty son of a ruskakk was explaining how he’d killed them all because he was too stupid to pour water out of a boot. Fortunately,