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He only had to stun the floor.

He opened fire on the ground in front of the feet of the oncoming Pawns, and around each shot, a meter or two of the meltmassif that layered the chamber’s floor instantly liquefied to roughly the viscosity of warm toknut butter. Pawns went down in heaps. Nick turned his fire on the floor between himself and the Pawns blocking the pedestal tomb, and they slipped and fell into a pile of their own, struggling and pawing at each other helplessly.

Not bad, he thought. Maybe not up there with slipping on a raballa peel, but still pretty funny. Now if he only had a real liquefier he could have rehardened the stone, which would have been even better. Loads of comic possibility. Though they were still struggling to rise and kind of climbing over each other, and if a few of them actually reached hard floor that would bring a sudden end to the chuckles. “And now, for my next trick …”

He flipped open the downed trooper’s medpac and loaded an ampoule of vivatherin into the chromostring canister. Then with the chromo in one hand and the carbine in the other, he took a three-step running start, jumped over the gooey floor, and landed on the chest of the nearest downed Pawn. He skidded and slipped and almost went down as the Pawn gasped and clutched at his ankle, but he kicked his way free and lurched forward, stepping on stomachs and legs and probably a head or two until he could claw his way to the pedestal and clamber up on top. As the Pawns tried to pull themselves up after him, he aimed the carbine between his feet and held down the trigger.

The pedestal collapsed into a spreading pile of slimy goo, and Nick found himself sitting on Luke Skywalker’s chest. Without pausing to consider how ridiculous they both must look, Nick triggered the chromostring canister against Luke’s neck. Given the chromostring’s ability to enhance systemic absorption of the vivatherin, Nick figured Skywalker would be jumping back to life any second now, which wouldn’t be a second too soon, because the pedestal’s collapse left Nick and Luke down on the floor with the goo-covered piles of Pawns, who were now climbing over each other to claw at Nick’s ankles and knees and pull him down and drag themselves up him like slashrats chewing down a turk-root trunk, ripping away his robes and gouging at his skin, and they were pushing him deeper and deeper into the muck, which was starting to flow up over his ears and into his eyes, and the more he struggled the more they piled onto him, until he heard what was, for a man in the midst of getting ripped to shreds by a pack of dark-sider-controlled zombies, the sweetest sound in the history of the galaxy:

spssshmmmm

The hum got louder, and took on a strange whop-whop-whop rhythm like some kind of mechanical toy, a kid’s gyrothopter or something. The Pawns stopped clawing at him and started falling limp, and Nick began to wonder if maybe he’d underestimated Skywalker’s own bloodthirstiness until he was able to push himself up to a sitting position and get a look at what Skywalker was actually doing.

Make that: what Skywalker’s lightsaber was actually doing.

It whirled through the air with no hand to guide it, spinning very much like the blades of a toy gyrothopter after all, and as it passed any Pawn it would dip and cant for a shaved second, just long enough to strike, and another Pawn would fall limp. Though they weren’t even injured.

Because the blade struck only each Pawn’s Crown.

A quick slash or two and a Crown would fall in smoking pieces, which folded each and every Pawn like a losing sabacc hand. Nick twisted to look at Skywalker.

“Shh.” Luke sat just behind him, eyes closed in a frown of concentration, right hand lifted, palm outward. He was coated head-to-toe with a black oily sheen of liquefied meltmassif. “This isn’t as easy as it looks.”

The shining emerald blade whirled through a last few revolutions; the last couple of Crowns fell to pieces, the last couple of Pawns collapsed, and the lightsaber flipped back to Luke’s hand