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[Thrawn Trilogy] - 01(137)

By:Timothy Zahn


“Hang on a minute,” Luke told him, looking up. Most of the speeder bikes had taken refuge under the arch, looking like some strange species of giant birds hiding from a storm as they hovered close to the stone, their laser cannon spitting toward the surrounding houses. In front of them and just below their line of fire, the Chariot had swiveled parallel to the arch and was coming down. Once it was on the ground …

A hand gripped Luke’s arm, fingernails digging hard into the skin. “Whatever you’re going to do, do it!” Mara hissed viciously. “If the Chariot gets down, you’ll never get them out from cover.”

“I know,” Luke nodded. “I’m counting on it.”

The Chariot settled smoothly to the ground directly in front of the arch, blocking the last of the attackers’ firing vectors. Crouched at the window, Aves swore violently. “Well, there’s your Jedi for you,” he bit out. “You got any other great ideas, Calrissian?”

Lando swallowed hard. “We’ve just got to give him-“

He never finished the sentence. From the arch a blaster bolt glanced off the window frame, and suddenly Lando’s upper arm flashed with pain. The shock sent him stumbling backward, just as a second shot blew apart that whole section of the frame, driving wooden splinters and chunks of masonry like shrapnel across his chest and arm.

He hit the floor, landing hard enough to see stars. Blinking, gritting his teeth against the pain, he looked up—

To find Aves leaning over him.

Lando looked up into the other’s face. I won’t forget this, Aves had said, no more than three minutes ago. And from the look on his face, he wasn’t anticipating any need to hold that memory for much longer. “He’ll come through,” Lando whispered through the pain. “He will.”

But he could tell that Aves wasn’t listening … and, down deep, Lando couldn’t blame him. Lando Calrissian, the professional gambler, had gambled one last time. And he’d lost.

And the debt from that gamble-the last in a long line of such debts-had come due.

The Chariot settled smoothly to the ground directly in front of the arch, and Luke got his feet under him. This was it. “All right, Han,” he muttered. “Go.”

Han nodded and surged to his feet, coming up right in the middle of the four stormtroopers standing over them. With a bellow, he swung his former shackles full across the faceplate of the nearest guard, then threw the looped chain around the neck of the next and pulled backwards, away from the pillars. The other two reacted instantly, leaping after him and taking the whole group down in a tangle.

And for the next few seconds, Luke was free.

He stood up and leaned out to look around the pillar. Artoo was still in the middle of no-man’s-land, hurrying to reach cover before he could be hit by a stray shot. He warbled plaintively as he saw Luke-

“Artoo!-now!” Luke shouted, holding out his hand and glancing across toward the southern end of the archway. Between the stone pillars and the grounded Chariot, the stormtroopers were indeed solidly entrenched. If this didn’t work, Han was right: Lando and everyone else out there were dead. Gritting his teeth, hoping fervently that his counterattack wasn’t already too late, he turned back to Artoo-Just as, with a flicker of silver metal and perfect accuracy, his lightsaber dropped neatly into his outstretched hand.

Beside him, the guards had subdued Han’s crazy attack and were getting back to their feet, leaving Han on his knees between them. Luke took them all in a single sweep, the blazing green lightsaber blade slicing through the glistening stormtrooper armor with hardly a tug to mark its passing. “Get behind me,” he snapped to Han and Mara, stepping back to the gap between the two northern pillars and focusing on the mass of Imperials standing and crouching between him and the southern pillars. They were suddenly aware that they had an unexpected threat on their flank, and a few were already starting to bring their blasters to bear on him.

With the Force to guide his hand, he could have held out against them indefinitely, blocking their blaster shots with the lightsaber. Mara had been right, though: the ysalamiri effect did indeed extend this far outside the forest, and the Force was still silent.

But then, he’d never had any intention of fighting the stormtroopers anyway. Turning his back on the blasters tracking toward him, he slashed the lightsaber across and upward—

Neatly slicing one of the stone pillars in half.

There was a loud crack as suddenly released tension sent a shiver through the structure. Another stroke cut through the second pillar—

And the noise of the battle was abruptly drowned out by the awful grinding of stone on stone as the two fractured pillars began sliding apart.