Star Wars_ X-Wing 02_ Wedge's Gamble - Michael A. Stackpole [111]
Mirax sat behind the heavy steel desk and watched Wedge force the technician’s choice of a new core with a big smile on her face. “Oh, the smuggler you could have been, Wedge Antilles! He’s got this guy thinking he’s made a totally random choice when Wedge had a core picked out from the beginning for him to take.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Corran paced back and forth behind her. The supervisor’s office had two doors. The one at the front of the office led to a waiting room with a window that overlooked the warehouse. The other door, built into the office’s back wall, led to a private stairwell and the private parking area below the warehouse floor. To avoid being spotted through the window, Mirax and Corran had taken up a position in the office. Down below, in the parking area, Inyri and several other Black Suns waited with airspeeders to whisk the Rogues away.
“Take it easy. We’re almost home free.”
“I’ll believe it when we’re away from here and Winter’s people can test the code.” He again dropped a hand to the heavy blaster he wore on his hip, just to check how it was seated in the holster, then looked at the blaster carbine he held and made sure the safety switch was off. “Wait, what’s that?”
“I don’t know.” Mirax leaned forward and poked at a sparking light at the edge of the hologram. “Someone’s burning through the door!”
Corran smelled smoke and knew he was too far from the loading dock to be getting it from there. Something else is burning. Too close. He reached out with his right hand and roughly shoved Mirax from her chair. “Get down.”
The wall between the waiting room and the office exploded inward. He saw it fragment and fire poured through the cracks. The pieces of wall disintegrated, breaking into smaller and smaller bits until they were nothing but pebbles and dust. The fire blacked the aluminum studs, ripping them free from the floor and ceiling, then propelled them into the office, gnarling and twisting them as they flew.
The force of the explosion lifted Corran off his feet and blasted him into the office’s rear wall. Wallstone sagged and buckled, studs bent, but the wall did not collapse. The door leading into the stairwell crumpled and tore free of the hinges, allowing a great deal of the explosive force to blow out through it. The desk slammed back against the wall and Corran’s legs fell across the top of it. His head and shoulders tipped down, his feet came up, and he crashed to the debris-strewn floor with blood streaming from his nose and an incessant ringing in his ears.
Through the dust and smoke he saw what appeared to be a quartet of stormtroopers dropping through a hole in the floor and standing on the ceiling. Dazed as he was it took him a moment to realize his perspective came from his still being upside down. Slightly more surprising than that discovery was the far more welcome realization that he still held the blaster carbine in his left hand.
He let his body sag to the right, then he rolled forward onto his stomach. The world swam into focus a moment later. He slid his right hand forward and got it wrapped around the weapon’s pistol grip. His left hand moved up to grasp the barrel and he tightened down on the trigger.
His first shots hit a stormtrooper in the knees and dropped him back into his fellows. Only one of them turned toward him, the other two looked out at the warehouse floor that was lit by back and forth fire from dozens of blasters. The stormtrooper who had made the correct guess brought his carbine up and over, but only managed to trace a line of fire across the wall above Corran’s head.
Corran walked his fire up the stormtrooper’s midline, burning three holes navel, heart, and throat before a fourth knocked the man’s helmet flying and dumped his body to the floor. The helmet bounced off the back of one of the other stormtroopers