[Legacy Of The Force] - 03(104)

Alema used the Force to hurl herself into a backward somersault, crashing upside down through the line of still-fleeing cantina customers. She alit on both feet on the other side of the corridor. An angry din began to build in the cantina as fleeing patrons stopped in the hatchway rather than run through the middle of a lightsaber fight.

There were a dozen questions Mara would have liked to ask Alema. Was she Lumiya’s apprentice? How had she escaped Tenupe? How long had she been back?

But Mara could feel through her Force-bond that Luke was fading fast. His energy was dwindling and his concentration slipping, and he was drawing heavily on the Force just to keep his pain in check and his body moving. Mara stepped into the middle of the corridor, bringing herself within striking range of Alema. The Twi’lek stepped away from the wall, buying herself room to maneuver and betraying the limp caused by her half foot, and Mara added one more question to her list: why had Alema helped kill Tresina Lobi?

Mara leveled her long blade at the Twi’lek’s throat. “I don’t have much time, so I’ll give you one chance to surrender,” she said. “After that, this is to the death-and it doesn’t look like you’re in condition to last long.”

Alema glanced toward the cantina, where the crackle of Lumiya’s lightwhip was growing both louder and more frequent, and the sneer that came to her lip was surprisingly confident.

“You could let us limp away,” she said. “We promise to go.”

Mara grew cold and angry inside. “That was your chance.”

She leapt in, attacking with both hands, beating AJema’s defense down with her Ughtsaber and thrusting for the torso with ,her shoto. Normally she would never have risked such an all-out attack, but Alema was not much of a challenge and Luke was running out of-As overconfidence always does, Mara’s proved costly. Alema dropped her lightsaber and stretched out her arm, driving her sharp Twi’lek finger talons into Mara’s throat and twisting aside so that the short lightsaber slipped past without hitting anything.

Mara’s breath stopped instantly, and she felt herself choking on something wet and warm. She started to bring her arms together, intending to cross her blades through Alema’s body, then realized they had dropped to her sides. She started to bring them up, but Alema’s eyes had grown dark, and tiny forks of energy were crackling across her blue face.

Mara did not have the half a second it would take to raise her arms again, so she simply threw herself backward, pulling her throat off the talons and bringing her legs up to either side of Alema’s. A bolt of blue lightning crackled past above her face so close she saw it even through closed eyes. Mara was already scissoring her feet, catching the

Twi’lek below the knees with one leg and above the knees with the other. The two foes hit the floor in the same instant, Alema coming down hard on the back of her head. The Twi’lek went instantly limp, her arms and body flopping to the floor as though her robe were filled with warm gelmeat. Mara sat up, already bringing her lightsaber around to lop off Alema’s head-then stopped the blade just centimeters above the Twi’lek’s throat. She could not kill an unconscious foe, even one who had betrayed the Jedi order … even when she was in a hurry to help Luke.

Having knocked out enough beings to be certain Alema was not faking her unconsciousness, Mara put away her weapons and spun to her knees. She could sense that Luke’s strength was continuing to fade and that he was starting to doubt his ability to prevail, but leaving the Twi’lek armed and free-even when she was unconscious-was not an option.

As the exodus of patrons resumed through the hatchway, Mara bound Alema’s hands behind her back and collected her lightsaber and blowgun from where they had been dropped. Then she opened the Twi’lek’s robe to check for concealed weapons and was suddenly very glad she had stopped short of killing an unconscious enemy.

Under the robe, Alema wore a black combat vest with a sensor pad blinking over the heart. A bundle of thin wires ran from the pad down into a chest pocket bulging with something shaped like a thick wafer. Very carefully, Mara opened the pocket and followed the wires to what she had feared she would find: a dead-man relay connected to the proton detonator from a baradium missile.

There was no question of returning to the cantina without disconnecting the relay. Head injuries were too unpredictable. The Twi’lek could die at any moment, and even if she lived, one of the fleeing patrons might trigger the device accidentally. Unfortunately, the wires had to be disconnected in a specific sequence to keep from triggering the detonator. Mara only hoped that Luke could hold Lumiya off until she finished. Even with the Force to guide her, this was going to take time.