Shadows of the Empire (38 page)

X
izor realized two things: He was outgunned, and Skywalker could stop his fire. He was more startled than afraid, but he knew he had to get out of the hall fast. “Move!” he yelled at Guri.

She stepped in front of him and blocked him from the five down the hall as he stepped into the empty room from where she’d gotten the chair. A second later she joined him.

“That’s an interesting trick he does with that lightsaber,” Xizor observed.

“He
is
related to Vader,” she said. “Shall I call the guards now?”

He sighed. “Call them.”

She was already speaking into her comlink.

“T
hat was Xizor!” Leia yelled.

“Good. Let’s get him!” Luke yelled back.

“I don’t think so,” Lando said. “Look!”

A dozen guards rounded the far end of the corridor and started shooting.

“In there!” Dash yelled.

There was a door to their left. Chewie opened it by smashing through it. Leia followed him, Lando and Dash behind her. Luke went last, blocking and batting aside beams that zipped at them like angry hornets.

Inside the room, some kind of office, they looked at each other.

“Now what?” Leia said.

Blaster bolts continued to whiz past the destroyed doorway.

Lando looked at Luke, who nodded. “Well,” Lando said, “it’s time for desperate measures.” He reached into the small backpack he wore and came out with a round, silvery ball about the size of a man’s fist. There were some controls, a finger-wide slot around the ball’s equator and what looked like some kind of electronic diode on the top and in the slot.

Leia looked at the shiny ball, then at Luke. He nodded at Dash.

More blaster bolts sizzled past. They apparently hadn’t noticed out there yet nobody was shooting back.

Dash took the ball from Lando. “It’s a thermal detonator,” he said. “Lando’s got three of them. They run on a timer or a deadman’s switch. Flip that switch right there, press that button in and hold it. If you let go without disarming the deadman’s switch first, it goes off.”

“And does what, exactly?”

“Makes a small thermonuclear fusion reaction.”

“A small thermonuclear fusion reaction,” she said.

“Yeah, just enough to vaporize a good-size chunk of whatever is next to it.”

“I see. That includes us if it goes off in here, right?”

“Right. But we’re betting your friend the leader of Black Sun won’t want us to trigger it while he’s around, not to mention what it would do to his castle.”

She nodded. “Let me see it.”

Dash’s eyes went wide. Luke nodded at him.

Leia took the device, examined it. “And if you don’t use the deadman’s switch?”

“It runs on a timer. The default setting is five minutes. If you lock it in, here, once the timer starts, nobody can turn it off.”

“Got it.” She hefted the metal ball, then tucked it inside the bounty hunter’s helmet hooked to her belt.

The males all looked at each other. Luke said, “Uh, Leia …”

“You said you had more of them, right? I want to hang on to this one. It might come in handy.”

Luke shrugged. “Okay. We bought it with your money anyhow.”

The blaster bolts outside the doorway stopped.

“I guess we’d better have a little talk with Xizor,” Luke said.

Lando handed him another of the thermal detonators. Luke touched the controls. The device started making a beeping sound. Tiny lights winked on and off.

Luke took a deep breath.

X
izor moved out into the hall behind the dozen or so guards who moved toward an open door across from where he and Guri had ducked.

He heard a small noise, a repetitive beep. What was that?

Skywalker stepped out into the hall. The guards pointed their blasters, but the boy didn’t have his lightsaber in hand. Instead, he held some kind of small device—

Xizor had not always been an armchair commander.
He had paid his dues in head-knocking and strongarm work, and he knew a bomb when he saw one.

“Don’t shoot!” he yelled. “Lower your weapons!”

The guards looked at him as if he had gone mad, but they obeyed.

“Good idea,” Luke said.

The other intruders and Leia moved out into the hall behind Skywalker.

The beep was suddenly very loud in the silence. Tiny lights blinked on the device.

“You know what this is?” Skywalker said.

“I have a pretty good idea,” Xizor said.

“It’s rigged with a deadman’s switch,” Luke said. “If I let it go …”

There was no need to finish that sentence.

“What do you want?”

“To leave. My friends and I.”

“If you release the bomb, you’ll die. So will your friends.” He glanced at Leia. That would be such a waste.

The boy shrugged. “Like it stands, we’re dead anyway. We have nothing to lose. How about you? You ready to give all this up?” He waved at the building around them. “This is a Class-A thermal detonator, you know what that means?”

Some of the guards knew, to judge from the sudden intakes of breath and muttered curses.

“I think you’re bluffing.”

“Only one way to find out. Your move.”

Xizor thought about it. If the boy wasn’t bluffing and somebody shot him, a Class-A TD would take out several floors of this building in a heartbeat. With that many of the support girders erased, the eighty-odd stories above would collapse. The structure might topple like a logged tree, to smash into the streets below. Or it might telescope straight down and flatten whatever base remained. Either way, the castle would be a total loss—as would anybody trapped inside it.

He could build another castle. But if the bomb went off this close, he wouldn’t be around to do that. Was he willing to risk all he had worked for, his very life itself, that Skywalker was not suicidal? He was Vader’s relative, wasn’t he? Vader wouldn’t bluff. And these Alliance types had demonstrated over and over again how brave they were against overwhelming odds.

No. He could not take the chance.

“All right. Leave. Nobody will stop you.”

Alive, he would be able to chase them down. Dead, well, dead was dead.

Four of them edged past the guards, who nearly fell over themselves trying to get out of the way, as if a few meters would make any difference. Fools.

Skywalker stood facing him alone.

Xizor watched the others walk away. Maybe Guri could move fast enough to grab the thing before it exploded—

Where
was
Guri?

Maybe he could try a bluff, Xizor thought. To Skywalker, he said, “You’ve caused me a great deal of trouble.”

“That’s too bad,” the boy said. “You had it coming.”

“I could still shoot you.”

“You could try.” He still held the lightsaber. He flicked it on, held it loosely in one hand.

“I could shoot one of the others. Your friend the Wookiee. Or the princess.”

“We’d all be vapor before he hit the floor. You included.”

It was a standoff, and Skywalker knew it.

Xizor looked around. Suddenly the four stopped. The dark man reached into his pack and produced another shining ball.

Xizor smirked, said, “What’s the point of that? You can’t blow us up any more with two of those.”

The dark man grinned. There was a garbage chute
next to him, and he opened it. It led to the recycling bins in the sub-subbasement. He flipped a control on the device. It started beeping and flashing—

Xizor had an awful premonition. He yelled, “No!”

But the man tossed the bomb into the chute.

“You have five minutes to leave the building,” the dark man said. “If I were you I’d get moving.”

Xizor spun, faced his guards. “Get to the turbolifts, get to the basement, and find that device! Get it out of here!”

But he was wasting his time. The guards panicked. They broke and ran, yelling frantically. They nearly knocked him over.

By the time he’d recovered, Skywalker and Leia and the others had gone, and the guards were hurrying to do the same.

Blast!

In five minutes, Xizor’s castle was going to be destroyed.

Xizor ran, too. He had a private express turbolift. If he hurried, he’d have plenty of time to get to his personal ship and get clear.

His emotions raged uncontrolled. A cold fire cooked his reason into deadly anger. He would get his ship and he would follow them—to the end of the whole galaxy if he had to.

Then they were going to pay for this with their lives.

T
hey took the lift and told it to hurry. Less than a minute later, they were on level fifty. During the trip, Luke shut the thermal detonator off and gave it back to Lando. It wasn’t likely Xizor would have much luck getting guards to chase them now. Anybody with half a working brain would be heading for the nearest exit, especially given the alarms blaring so loud it was hard to think. Probably one of the outgoing guards had tripped the warning hooter.

They should have plenty of time to make their own escape—

If Threepio and Artoo had gotten there.

If not, they weren’t going to have long to regret it.

The doors opened, and as they exited, twenty or thirty very excited people jammed in past them, stuffed the lift so full there was no room left. Those people who couldn’t make it cursed or screamed or cried, moved to the next turbolift door, and pounded on the call button.

“Must be quitting time,” Dash observed.

“They have four whole minutes,” Lando said, his voice dry. “Better hurry.”

“That’s cold,” Luke said.

“They should have thought about that when they decided to go to work for Black Sun,” Lando said. “It’s a high-risk operation, being a crook.”

“The landing pad ought to be that way,” Dash said. “Come on.”

There didn’t seem to be many people left in the hall. As they watched, another turbolift arrived, and what room there was—it was already half full of people, presumably from floors higher up—was quickly taken. When the doors closed, the five of them appeared to be alone.

They hurried in the direction Dash remembered was the right one.

Fifty meters down the hall, Luke heard something. He reached out with the Force, couldn’t find anything. He waved the others on. “Go ahead, I’ll be right there!”

They did as he said.

He pulled his lightsaber, flicked it on—

“Behold the Jedi Knight,” a woman said. “The man of legend.”

He turned. The woman called Guri stood there. A droid. Lando had described her in great detail on the way here.

“You have caused my master much misfortune,” she said. “You should die for that.”

Luke aimed the sword point at her. She didn’t seem to be carrying any kind of weapon that he could see, but Lando had told him how fast she was. And how strong.

“But you have that blade and I am unarmed,” she said. She held her hands away from her sides, empty palms facing him.

He had maybe three minutes. The smart thing to do
would be to cut her down and get moving. Or at least herd her out of the way using his sword and head for the rendezvous with—he hoped—the
Falcon
.

But—why start doing the smart thing now?

He clicked the lightsaber off, rehooked it to his belt, made sure it was securely fastened. “What do you want?”

“A test,” she said. “My master pits himself against the deadliest opponents he can find. There is no man who is my equal in hand-to-hand combat. Except perhaps, if the stories are true, a Jedi Knight.”

“This building is going to blow to pieces in three minutes,” he said. “And you want to play games?”

“It won’t take that long. Are you afraid to die, Skywalker?”

Yes, of course he was—

But then, in a moment, he realized that he really wasn’t.

The Force was with him. Whatever happened, happened.

She leaped at him—

She was impossibly fast. On his own, he’d never have dodged, but he was permeated with the Force.

He stepped to his right and kicked at her as she flew past. Hit her on the hip and knocked her sideways, but not off her feet.

“Good,” she said.

Glad she thought so. She was supernaturally fast, and it was only by holding to the Force that he could begin to match her.

She circled, looked for an opening—

“Luke—!”

Leia’s scream distracted him. He flicked his gaze toward the sound of her voice, saw her and the others turn to look at him—

It was enough for Guri. She took a long, sliding step and punched—

Luke backpedaled, but even so, her fist hit him in the belly hard.

“Oooff!”

She followed up with an elbow, but he dived away, rolled and turned, came up with his hands lifted as she darted after him—

He lost contact with the Force. He was on his own—

She slapped him next to the ear and he went down, dazed.

If he didn’t do something fast, she was going to kill him!

The Force. Let it work for you, Luke
.

Luke heard Ben’s voice calling as if from a great distance, echoing across time and space. Yes. He managed a breath as Guri raised her hand, formed now into a blade instead of a fist, a grin of triumph lighting her features—

When he blew out his air, he blew his fear out with it.

He had to trust the Force
completely—

Guri slowed, as if she were suddenly mired in thickened time. He saw her hand descending, saw it moving to smash him, but it was so incredibly slow, why, he could easily just roll aside and stand, before she ever reached him …

He did so. He felt as if he were moving at normal speed, though there was a crackling feeling to his motion, a sound like a strong wind whistling about his ears.

He came up, pivoted, thrust his open palm against the descending chop, shoved it aside. He used his left leg, a sweep that caught Guri behind the right ankle. Her feet left the floor, still moving in slow motion, and she fell, floated down, hit flat on her back …

Time speeded up.

Leia’s yell still echoed down the corridor.

Guri hit the floor. He had never heard anybody fall
that hard; it was a thump that shook him where he stood.