Star Wars_ X-Wing 03_ The Krytos Trap - Michael A. Stackpole [134]
The lightsaber’s silver shaft scythed through his middle and dropped him in two parts to the ground. Two wet, meaty thumps swallowed the clatter of the blaster carbine against the floor. The glowrod attached to the barrel flared, then went out.
Corran dove to the left, rolled, and came up in a crouch. He tracked a moving cone of light and fired at its base. He heard no scream to indicate he had hit his target, then a spray of blaster-bolts from the right forced him to duck again. As he slipped back into the shadow of a statue, his two foes extinguished their glowrods, leaving the footlights as the only illumination in the larger room.
Two assumptions I can make: first, they have comlinks and are going to be coordinating their attack. Second, they can or have called for backup, which means they win the waiting game, I have to get out of here, and the only way to do that is by going out the way they came in. He glanced over at the doorway which the lightsaber’s glow backlit. They’re moving out to surround me, so now’s the best time to go.
Corran bobbed up and down twice, using the light-saber’s light to silhouette the obstacles in his way. The path looked fairly clear. He reached into his pocket and ran his thumb over the ruined face of the Jedi medallion. You’re not the one I used for luck, but here’s hoping there was some left in the dies when you were struck.
He took off at a dead run, cutting around one statue and then a display case before heading toward the doorway. Little holograms flickered to life behind him, drawing attention first to themselves, then to him. The first few shots fired at him burned holes in his cloak, but then his assailants shifted their aim and raked the doorway with blasterfire—blasterfire that should have exploded his heart and reduced his lungs to cinders.
And it would have except that the Jedi cloak caught the corner of the display case. It yanked Corran from his feet, then the throat clasp snapped. With his momentum thus slackened but far from depleted, he flew through the doorway feet first, centimeters below the line of blasterfire. He hit hard on his right hip and cracked his right knee on the granite floor, then slid toward the middle of the room.
His right hand closed on the hilt of the lightsaber. He switched it off and scrambled back toward the doorway through which he had just flown. He hoped to find the dead man’s blaster carbine, but as he settled his back against the wall beside the doorway he saw its outline two meters away on the wrong side of the opening. Hopeless, Gotta get up, gotta run for the exit—wherever it is. Even though he knew running was the only viable plan, the stiffening sensation in his knee and hip told him a weak limp was going to be the best he could manage. And I’ll get vaped for the effort, I’m dead.
Then he felt something solid thump against the wall behind him. Even before he heard the click of a comlink, he twisted around and rose up on his left knee. Jamming the lightsaber’s cup against the wall with his right hand, he flicked it on and raked it upward. It pulled free of the wall at the top of its arc, spitting and hissing as blood evaporated from the silvery shaft of light.
The bisected man on the other side of the wall fell across the doorway just as the third man, who had been approaching the doorway from the opposite side, opened fire. The dead man caught two bolts that would have killed Corran before the man shifted aim and started tracking the light-saber’s arc. One bolt singed the hair on the back of Corran’s hand, but the rest passed by without hurting him.
Corran’s left hand came up and he snapped off two shots toward the blaster carbine’s muzzle flashes. Both hit. The third man crashed backward into a display case, then hung there at odd angles. In the footlight Corran could see his hands twitch once or twice, as if still working the trigger of the weapon that had fallen to the floor, then the