Star Wars_ Planet of Twilight - Barbara Hambly [27]
Luke wound his left arm in the straps, twisted his body so that his right hand could reach the snap locks on his harness. Swinging down and bracing his feet on the wrecked console, he experienced a moment of surprise that he was still alive, much less relatively unhurt, barring a wrenched shoulder, strap bruises, and the general sense of having gone over the side of Beggar’s Canyon in a not very well constructed barrel.
The locker where he’d stowed food, water, a blaster, and spare power batteries was well and truly jammed shut.
And judging by the angry vibration in the Force, company would be arriving in five minutes or less.
Luke had used the kinetic displacement of the Force on occasion to open locks, but the door itself was jammed. He pushed up his right sleeve; shifted the relative strength of his robotic right hand to its highest; and, bracing the heel of his hand against the crumpled metal of the locker door, bent the least-solidly stuck corner inward until the triangular gap was large enough for him to reach through and fish out the water flask, with the intention of getting the weapon next because he could already hear the hum of badly tuned speeder engines and the clashing crunch of padded hooves on gravel.
He couldn’t get purchase on the blaster in time to free it before the weight of springing bodies rocked the fighter. Shadows fell across the gaps in the buckled hull as Luke snaked his arm free empty-handed, sprang to his feet, and slithered through the smaller split in the other side of the tiny cockpit moments before the crashing racket of expanding-gas percussive weapons echoed like thunder in the tiny space, and a shower of high-velocity stone pellets spattered the space where he had been.
There were a lot of attackers: Twenty or twenty-five, Luke estimated, dropping to the gravel in a long roll to get back under the shelter of the broken S-foil. Men and women both, as far as he was able to tell, for in the sharp cold they were wrapped in thick vests and jackets, sometimes covered by ragged burnooses, their heads further protected by veils or wide-brimmed hats. In addition to the scatterguns they had bows—both autobows and primitive longbows—as well as short javelins, and they surrounded the wrecked B-wing completely.
Luke didn’t want to have anything to do with any of them.
There are a thousand ways to use the Force in a fight, Callista’s old master, Djinn, had told her. And a thousand and one ways to use the Force to avoid a fight. Luke now used something Djinn had taught her, and she him, so simple a use of kinetic displacement that he was embarrassed not to have thought of it himself years ago. His mind jarred at the gravel underfoot, and the gravel coughed forth dust.
A lot of dust.
The problem with that trick was that you had to be ready for it yourself. Luke had already picked his line of retreat through the closing ring of Therans and was dragging up the neck of his flightsuit to cover his nose and mouth, squinting his eyes for what protection he could find, even as he launched himself out of the shelter of the B-wing. He’d always had a good sense of direction, and Yoda had drummed into him an almost supernatural ability to orient himself in an emergency. He knew in which direction the Theran speeders and riding-beasts lay and made for them amid a roar of gunfire and a rain of projectiles, half-seen ghostly bodies rushing about in all directions in the sudden gray-white obscurity of suspended grit.
The field effect of the dust was an extremely localized one, rapidly dispersing in the remains of the dying wind. The Theran