40

“He’s not the fat guy,” said one of the three men facing Corran.

“Doesn’t matter. Kill him anyway.”

Corran pulled his right arm back and whipped it forward, sidearming the lightsaber toward the trio. The blade spun through a flat arc. The men on either side of the grouping dove for cover, but the center man’s eyes grew wide and glowed in the blade’s icy light. He shot twice at the light-saber, but missed with both bolts.

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 man lay still.

Corran extinguished the lightsaber, then clipped it to his belt. He shifted the belt around so the weapon hung at his left hip and wouldn’t bang against the bruised one. Pocketing his holdout blaster, he crawled over to the body of the first man he’d killed, loosened the chinstrap on the helmet and pulled it off. Inside it he found a comlink in a clip. He pulled it out and listened for a moment to see if other troopers were on the way, but the comlink remained silent.

He retrieved the second man’s blaster carbine and turned on the glowrod. He played it over the dead men and frowned. Their black uniforms weren’t any sort of Imperial uniform he’d ever seen before, and the men themselves were mismatched enough that he knew they weren’t storm-troopers. I’ve never seen a stormtrooper without a helmet on, but I can’t see them looking quite this ordinary. Still, the uniforms were paramilitary, so he assumed the three dead men were members of a local constabulary force. Another time I’d have thought you were allies, but in CorSec we didn’t shoot someone just because he wasn’t the suspect we were looking for.

Corran played the glowrod over the bottom of the corn-link and adjusted the frequency. Now to find out where we are. While he had long detested the Empire, it did manage to do some things with a remarkable amount of efficiency. One of them was the establishment and maintenance of standard measures. On each world broadcast stations had been set up to provide the exact time, both local and in relation to Coruscant. By tuning into that signal he could find out where he was and what time it was. It occurs to me I’ve not seen outside for a long time.

He held the comlink near his ear and slowly limped over to the hole the trio had blown in the wall on the far side of the chamber. “Must be a real backwater planet if they only sent three guys to catch an escaped prisoner—even if they thought I was Derricote. I wonder if I can ever get off it?”

Over the comlink he heard a mechanical voice announce, “8 hours, 45 minutes, Coordinated Galactic Time.”

“Great, I’m on a world that’s set its clocks to Coruscant time, no matter what the local situation is.” He hefted the blaster carbine, glanced at the power level indicator, then played the light out through the hole into the next room. Unlike the one he had found himself in, the room beyond the hole was clean and orderly. Even better, there is an open doorway to the outside.

He was about to step through the wall when two irreconcilable ideas collided in his brain. It was rather clear that he was inside some sort of storehouse filled with Jedi memorabilia. The mansion from which he had escaped had obviously been an Imperial Moff’s retreat, but what Imperial Moff would risk his position by hoarding so much Jedi material? The only Moff who could do that would be a powerful one, and powerful Moffs weren’t found on backwater worlds.

Actually, there were no Moffs so powerful that they would have dared defy the Emperor and Vader by hoarding this stuff. Only the Emperor could have … Corran’s jaw dropped open. And the clock here is set to Coruscant time…

Corran slumped against the wall. It can’t be. I can’t be on Coruscant. It makes no sense. I remember traveling on a ship. Then again, I was so doped up … Maybe I am on Coruscant and Isard just wanted me to think I wasn’t on Coruscant. He chuckled. It would explain why no one ever found Lusankya—it was here all the time, which means she is, too.

He glanced back at the dead men. And she has enough pull with local authorities to have them out hunting Derricote. I may be out of her clutches, but I’m not free, yet. He glanced at the comlink and thought about tuning into the military frequencies Rogue Squadron used, but rejected that plan for two reasons. I’m not going to have the right scrambler codes to let me hear and speak with them, and even if I did, there’s the traitor to consider.

He shook his head. I need someone I can trust. It’s a long shot, but it’s the only one I have. He set the comlink and opened a channel. “This is Corran Horn calling. I’m not dead—I only feel like it—and I could use some help returning to the land of the living.”