"Survivors Quest (Timothy Zahn)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Zahn Timothy)

It was a risk worth taking. With every eye in the cantina on Sinker and
his disobedient lightsaber, no one was paying the slightest attention to the
droideka standing stolid guard across the room.
Not the droideka, and certainly not the barely visible tip of brilliant
green light stealthily slicing a circle through the lift floor around its
curved tripod feet.
"I'll blast you into a million soggy pieces, that's what I'll do," Huxley
shot back. "Now, let him go, or I'll?"
He never finished the threat. Across the room, with a sudden creaking of
stressed metal, the lift floor collapsed, dropping the droideka with a crash
back into the cellar.
Huxley spun around, screeching something vicious.
The screech died in midcurse. From the direction the droideka had
disappeared, a black-clad figure now appeared, leaping up from the cellar to
land on the edge of the newly carved hole. He lifted the short cylinder in his
hand to salute position, and with another snap-hiss, a green lightsaber blade
blazed.
Huxley reacted instantly, and in exactly the way Mara would have
expected. "Get him!" he shouted, stabbing a finger back toward the newcomer.
He didn't have to give the order twice. From the semicircle of gunners
behind Mara erupted a blistering staccato of blasterfire. "And you?" Huxley
added over the noise. He lifted his blaster toward Mara, his finger tightening
on the firing stud.
Mara was already in motion. Rising halfway out of her chair, she grabbed
the edge of the stone-topped table and heaved it upward. A fraction of a
second later Huxley's shot ricocheted off the tabletop now angled toward him,
passing harmlessly over Mara's head to gouge yet another hole in the ceiling
behind her. Mara heaved the table a little higher, and Huxley's eyes abruptly
widened as he realized she intended to drop its full weight squarely into his
lap, pinning him helplessly into his chair and then crushing him to the floor.
He was wrong. Even as he scrambled madly to get out of his chair and away
from the falling table before it was too late, Mara kicked her own chair back
out of her way. Using her grip on the table edge as a pivot point, she lifted
her feet and swung herself forward and downward.
With a lighter table, the trick wouldn't have worked, and she would have
simply landed on her rear in front of her chair with the table in her lap. But
this one was so massive, with so much inertia, that she was able to swing
under the edge now falling backward toward her, land on the floor beneath
where it had been standing, and get her hands clear before the edge crashed
into the floor behind her.
This put the heavy tabletop neatly between her and the twenty-odd
blasters that had been trained on her back.
Huxley, still completely off stride, had time for a single yelp before
Mara lunged forward, slapped his gun hand aside with her left hand, and then
grabbed a fistful of his shirt and hauled him down into cover with her. Her
right hand snaked up her left sleeve, snatched her small sleeve gun from its
arm holster, and jammed the muzzle up under his chin. "You know the drill,"
she said. "Let's hear it."
Huxley, his eyes on the edge of terror, filled his lungs. "Huxlings!
Cease fire! Cease fire!"