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The stormtrooper collapsed like an empty suit of armor. Someone in the spaceport threshold screamed, then Corran saw two stormtroopers stationed near the Customs officer come running. Two more appeared from in front of the spaceport, entering the building closest to Sixtus and Elscol. She pulled a hold-out blaster from her bag and shot at one of them. He went down with a wound to the leg, and suddenly the whole building erupted with blasterfire as stormtroopers appeared on the elevated walkways on the narrow ends of the rectangular building.

Corran dove forward into the row of chairs and pitched them over backward. Mirax went with them and hunkered down beside him. She brandished the smoking ruin of the stormtrooper’s blaster carbine. “I appreciate the rescue, but did you have to destroy his blaster?”

“Can’t parry the bolts, so I just parry the weapon.” Corran ducked his head as crossfire from the far walkway nibbled away at the chairs behind which they hid. Above them, the stormtroopers on the balcony directed their fire toward Elscol and Sixtus. Corran knew more folks than just Elscol were shooting, since he saw one stormtrooper across the way go down, but the Imps definitely had them outgunned and outmanned.

Unless I do something, what I started is going to kill us all. He leaned over, kissed Mirax full on the mouth, then smiled. “Stay here, I have an idea.”

“Don’t get yourself killed.”

“What, and make your father’s day. Not going to happen.” I hope.

Lightsaber in hand, Corran ran low and fast toward the refresher station. He hit the door hard and cut inside as blaster bolts shattered tiles and burned into the duraplast door. He could all but hear the stormtroopers who had shot at him laughing about how screwed up his priorities were, and it struck him that a refresher station, especially in a public spaceport, would be a really ignominious place to die. Which is why I don’t plan to die here.

He kicked open the door to one of the stalls, hopped up on the commode, and climbed up on the edge of the durasteel partitions. He stabbed the lightsaber up through the ceiling and made three quick cuts. A triangular section of ceiling crashed down and a shower of tiles from the floor of the refresher station above spattered down in its wake. Corran worked his way a bit further along the partition, then boosted himself up into the second-floor refresher station.

Emerging from the stall into the empty refresher station, he felt a terrible calm wash over himself. He’d felt it before, long ago and far away, on Talasea, when he’d engaged other stormtroopers in combat. When I come out of here, the stormtroopers across the way will see me and warn their comrades. I’ve got five, maybe six seconds to get all of them. Any longer and I’m dead. He shifted the lightsaber to his left hand, wiped his right hand off on his jumpsuit, then grabbed the hissing blade again. I’m already dead, this is just to save my friends.

He ripped open the refresher station’s door and stepped onto the elevated walkway. One step out he brought the lightsaber around in a waist-high cut that caught the first stormtrooper in the back. He pitched forward, then rebounded off the guardrail, but Corran had already moved past him. In a continuation of the move that had taken the first man, Corran shifted his right wrist, raised the lightsaber, and used a backhanded cut to decapitate the second warrior.

That blow, though grandly struck to great effect, was a mistake and Corran knew it. Though it popped the man’s head off and sent it flipping up through the air, it also allowed Corran’s arm to carry too far back. Sliding forward toward the next stormtrooper in line—the third of the four he faced—he wasted a second bringing the lightsaber back into striking position. He tried a high, two-handed cut that should have split the stormtrooper from outside shoulder to inside hip, but the Imp had already begun to turn toward the attack and ducked it.

The stormtrooper lunged toward Corran, catching him with a shoulder in the ribs. The stormtrooper drove