Star Wars_ Shatterpoint - Matthew Woodring Stover [25]
His applicable flaw, here: he liked to fight. This, in a Jedi, was especially dangerous.
And Mace was an especially dangerous Jedi.
With rigorous mental discipline, he squashed his anticipation and decided to parley. Talking them out of attacking might save their lives. And they seemed to be professionals; perhaps he could simply pay for the information he wanted.
Instead of beating it out of them.
As he reached his decision, the men behind him reached their range.
Professionals indeed: without a word, they leveled their weapons, and twin packets of galvenned plasma streaked at his spine.
In even the best-trained human shooter there is at least a quarter-second delay between the decision to fire and the squeeze on the trigger. Deep in the Force, Mace could feel their decision even before it was made: an echo from his future.
Before their fingers could so much as twitch, he was moving.
By the time the blaster bolts were a quarter of the way there, Mace had whirled, the speed of his spin opening his vest. By the time the bolts were halfway there, the Force had snapped his lightsaber into his palm.
At three-quarters, his blade extended, and when the blaster bolts reached him they met not flesh and bone but a meter-long continuous cascade of vivid purple energy.
Mace reflexively slapped the bolts back at the shooters-but instead of rebounding from his blade, the bolts splattered through it and grazed his ribs and burst against a trash bin behind him so that it boomed and bucked and shivered like a cracked bell.
Mace thought:,' might be in trouble after all.
Before the thought could fully form in his mind, the two shooters (a distant, calculating part of Mace's brain filed that they were both human) had flipped their weapons to autoburst. A blinding spray of bolts filled the alleyway.
Mace threw himself sideways, flipping in the air; a bolt clipped his shin, hammering his leg backward, turning his flip into a tumble, but he still managed to land in a crouch behind the cover of the alleyway's inner corner. He glanced at his leg: the bolt hadn't penetrated his boot leather.
Stun setting, he thought. Professionals who want me alive.
While he was trying to feel his way toward what they might try next, he noticed that his blade cast a peculiarly pale light. Much too pale.
Even as he crouched there, staring drop-jawed into the paling shaft, it faded, flickered, and winked out.
He thought: And this trouble I'm in just might be serious.
His lightsaber was out of charge.
"That's not possible," hz snarled. "It's not-"
With a lurch in his gut, he got it.
Geptun.
Mace had underestimated him. Corrupt and greedy, yes. Stupid? Obviously not.
"T J'I"
Jedi!
A man's voice, from the alley: one of the shooters. "Let's do this the easy way, huh? Nobody has to get hurt." If only that were true, Mace thought.
"We got all kinds of stuff out here, Jedi. Not just blasters. We got glop. We got Nytinite. We got stun nets."
But they hadn't used any yet. Mercenaries, Mace decided. Maybe bounty hunters. Not militia. Glop grenades and sleep gas were expensive; a blaster bolt cost almost nothing. So they were saving a few credits.
They were also giving him time to think. And he was about to make them regret it.
"You want to know what else we got?" Mace could hear his smirk. "Look up, Jedi..."
Over the roof rims above, the pair of speeder bikes bobbed upward, visored pilots skylining themselves against the blue. Their forward steering vanes scattered mirror flashes of the sunrise across the courtyard floor. Their underslung blaster cannons bracketed Mace with plasma-scorched muzzles. He was completely exposed to their crossfire-but