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Corran managed to rip off a burst that hit one of them in the thigh, then his blaster carbine stopped firing. The man he’d hit spun around and went down to one knee, but still appeared to be full of fight. Corran hit the power pack release button and reached down into his pants pocket for a replacement, but all he felt was tattered fabric and his own flesh.

Next to him the desk rose two centimeters off the floor, then tipped forward. It rolled awkwardly, half eclipsing him, and caught the full force of the last standing stormtrooper’s fire. Corran rolled to his right, trying to take advantage of the cover. As he did so, Mirax rose up on one knee and scythed blaster fire back and forth across the last two stormtroopers. Her shots took the standing man in the middle, doubling him over, and blew apart the helmet of the one Corran had only wounded.

Corran saw her look down at him and saw her lips move, but he couldn’t hear her past the ringing in his ears. He took a guess at what she was saying and forced a smile through the blood he could taste on his lips. “I’ll live. They used concussion munitions but the wall stopped us from being knocked out.” He scrambled up on his hands and knees. “Let’s get out of here.”

Mirax crawled over to the open doorway and slid down the door to the first landing. Corran followed, then the two of them ran down the remaining flights. Corran kicked the door to the basement garage open. Mirax went through low and he followed. What they found made her curse and the only good thing about it was the fact that he heard her oath.

Off to the right, heading out through the shadows, he saw four airspeeders going away. From the left, racing down a ramp and into the garage’s dark interior, came six Imperial stormtroopers on Aratech 74-Y military speeder bikes. Five peeled off their formation to go after the airspeeders and one swung around toward them.

“Mirax, go!” Corran cast aside the useless carbine and drew his blaster pistol. She darted off toward the left and got behind one of the garage’s massive pillars. She waved him toward her and made to come around and cover him, but a laser bolt from the speeder bike gouged a chunk of duracrete from near her head.

He shook his head and ran toward the approaching speeder bike. He cut to the right, snapped off two shots, then ducked his left shoulder and rolled to the side as the speeder bike’s laser bolts sizzled over his head. He came up into a crouch with only twenty meters separating him from the speeder bike. As his blaster came up he saw the stormtrooper’s right hand curl back, cranking the throttle. The bike roared forward and Corran knew the man intended to impale him on the spikes that jutted forward of the speeder bike’s vector-control surfaces.

Corran twisted to the right, willing his body to flow out around the sharp spearhead mounted on the front of the craft. The vector-control surface shredded the left side of his jacket, passing just beneath Corran’s left arm. He tried to bring his blaster around to get a shot off at the stormtrooper, but all he managed to do before the stormtrooper’s knee caught him in the hip and spun him to the ground was slam the weapon down hard on the driver’s left hand.

The blow to the man’s hand jerked the vector-control back making the speeder bike’s nose veer sharply upward. It struck sparks from the ceiling and a moment later the bike’s tail joined in producing fireworks as it scraped along on the ground. The forward control surfaces buckled and curled in as the bike jammed them hard against the ceiling. The bike began to invert, spilling the rider, then bounced against the floor and ceiling before it stopped and hovered.

The stormtrooper skidded along on his armored back, spinning around like a top. His legs finally smacked up against a pillar stopping his spin. He shook his head and tried to climb to his feet, but Mirax stepped out from behind the pillar and dropped him with a kick to the head.