[Legacy Of The Force] - 07(106)

In the moment he had before those detonators went off, Caedus acted to whittle down the enemy numbers as they had been whittling down his. He gestured, exerting himself telekinetically, and Saba Sebatyne slipped laterally into the starboard pit, almost atop the doomed droid there.

Her leap toward safety was almost instantaneous, but almost wasn’t good enough. The detonators went off. The blast caught Sebatyne when she was only a meter or two in the air. It propelled her like an old-fashioned munition to the port-side wall, slamming her into that surface five meters above the floor, and she slid, flaming, down into the pit.

Luke and Ben looked Caedus’s way. He smiled at them and shrugged. “One down.”

The four droids nearest him kept firing.



As the wall crumpled, Han leapt backward, toward the door, hoping it was automated and would open for him. Leia drew and lit her lightsaber. Iella dived for the hole in the floor.

The exchange took place in what seemed like slow motion. Han’s shoulders did not hit the door-he staggered back into the corridor. Leia’s blade came up and deflected the first three or five thousand bolts from the droid’s right arm.

Someone shot the droid three, four, five times in the chest-Han was surprised to see the blaster in his own hand, firing as fast as his finger could pull the trigger, his brain not figuring into the equation-and then his shoulderblades hit the passageway wall behind him, throwing his aim off.

Aim off. He couldn’t hurt this thing by shooting it where a human would be hurt. But at a distance of three meters, he could hit anything he could see, including any symbol on a sabacc card.

He traversed his fire, letting muscle memory and reflex do the work. His blaster shots stitched a line acoss the droid’s chest, down its arm, to the blaster embedded in its arm…

To the barrel…

Han’s shot entered the barrel aperture and the lower portion of the right arm exploded. The laminanium armor of the forearm mostly contained the detonation. Han saw the composite skin split in places, the rents filling with fire, and felt a tear along his cheek as something grazed him.

The droid wasn’t down, though. It raised its other arm…

Relieved of the burden of deflecting blaster shots, Leia stepped in and brought her lightsaber blade down on the arm, just above the elbow, where the armatures were thinnest. Her blow didn’t cut through the arm, not immediately, but the force of her blow was enough to knock it sideways, and the arc of electricity emerging from it missed her by centimeters, plowing into the passageway wall above Han’s head.

Then the left arm did come off at the elbow.

Han continued firing, spraying bolts at the droid’s pho-toreceptors. The droid swung the remains of its right arm at Leia, a potentially deadly attack-it was strong enough to crush her skull, break her back. But she bent at the waist, allowing the blow to sweep harmlessly over her, and straightened, driving her blade up under the droid’s ribiike chest armor.

The attack sheared through systems, causing sparks to emerge at both the top and bottom of the ribs, and her blade point entered the skull from below. The droid jittered in place for a moment, raised its arm for a second blow-and collapsed. Rather than have her lightsaber be yanked down by its weight, Leia deactivated the weapon, then reactivated it when the droid was clear.

Iella, pale, emerged partway from their access hole. “That was interesting.”

Han nodded. “Want to do it again?”

“Noooooo.”



They found Allana two compartments down, a frightened little girl in a party frock, hiding in the closet of an armory. When Leia opened the closet door she lunged at them, an injector pen in her hand, but Leia caught her wrist, stopping the blow, and as quickly released the girl.

Such a pretty girl. And so familiar-looking.

Leia raised her hand, palm-out, a gesture of peace to forestall another attack. “I bring a message from your mother.”

Suspicious, scowling, Allana backed away from her. “Tell me.”

“I’ll show you instead.” She reached into her robe pouch and brought out a device, a hand-sized holoprojector. She set it on a table and activated it.

A hologram of Tenel Ka, doll-sized, swam into resolution. Tenel Ka smiled, her expression hopeful, and spoke. “Allana, time is short. First: bantha excess glow rod.”

Allana lowered her injector pen and smiled. Her gaze was fixed on the image of her mother, and her thoughts were so transparent that Leia could hear them as speech carried through the Force: The words. The real words.

“These people are going to bring you to me. Go with them, and trust them as you do me. And know that I love you, and I’ve missed you more than I can say.” Tenet Ka raised a finger to her lips and blew a kiss, then faded away.