"Michael Stackpole "The Bacta War"" - читать интересную книгу автора

the door hard and cut inside as blaster bolts shattered tiles and burned into
the duraplast door. He could all but hear the stormtroopers who had shot at him
laughing about how screwed up his priorities were, and it struck him that a
refresher station, especially in a pub-lic spaceport, would be a really
ignominious place to die. Which is why I don't plan to die here.
He kicked open the door to one of the stalls, hopped up on the commode, and
climbed up on the edge of the durasteel partitions. He stabbed the lightsaber up
through the ceiling and made three quick cuts. A triangular section of ceiling
crashed down and a shower of tiles from the floor of the refresher station above
spattered down in its wake. Corran worked his way a bit further along the
partition, then boosted himself up into the second-floor refresher station.
Emerging from the stall into the empty refresher station, he felt a terrible
calm wash over himself. He'd felt it before, long ago and far away, on Talasea,
when he'd engaged other stormtroopers in combat. When I come out of here, the
stormtroopers across the way will see me and warn their comrades. I've got five,
maybe six seconds to get all of them. Any longer and I'm dead. He shifted the
lightsaber to his left hand, wiped his right hand off on his jumpsuit, then
grabbed the hissing blade again. I'm already dead, this is just to save my
friends.
He ripped open the refresher station's door and stepped onto the elevated
walkway. One step out he brought the lightsaber around in a waist-high cut that
caught the first stormtrooper in the back. He pitched forward, then re-bounded
off the guardrail, but Corran had already moved past him. In a continuation of
the move that had taken the
first man, Corran shifted his right wrist, raised the lightsaber, and used a
backhanded cut to decapitate the second warrior.
That blow, though grandly struck to great effect, was a mistake and Corran knew
it. Though it popped the man's head off and sent it flipping up through the air,
it also al-lowed Corran's arm to carry too far back. Sliding forward toward the
next stormtrooper in line-the third of the four he faced-he wasted a second
bringing the lightsaber back into striking position. He tried a high, two-handed
cut that should have split the stormtrooper from outside shoulder to inside hip,
but the Imp had already begun to turn toward the attack and ducked it.
The stormtrooper lunged toward Corran, catching him with a shoulder in the ribs.
The stormtrooper drove him back, slamming him into the ferrocrete wall. Corran
felt something crunch in his chest, then he couldn't breathe. The lightsaber
fell from Corran's hand as the Imp drove him again into the wall, pinning him
there, crushing him. Corran stared into the black lenses of the man's helmet and
heard low laughter.
The laughter died as the stormtrooper's comlink came alive. "Get clear, Seven
Three, so I can shoot him."
The pressure in Corran's chest slackened for a moment and he knew he had only
one chance for survival. As the stormtrooper withdrew, Corran kicked off the
wall and knocked his foe into the guardrail. Launching himself at the man's
head, Corran grabbed him and held on as the metal guardrail shrieked and bent.
Overbalanced, they both whirled off the elevated walkway. Corran tried to twist
around so he'd land on top of the stormtrooper, but with a short fall and no
frame of reference, he only half-accomplished his goal.
He hit hard, his back slamming into the body of the first stormtrooper he'd
killed. His rear end hit the ferrocrete floor, sending a jolt of pain up his