A handful of meters away, in a chamber on the other side of the same living room, Luke Skywalker also sat up.
Beside him, Mara opened an eye and offered him a lazy smile. “Nerves?”
Luke shook his head. He turned his head back and forth, but his gaze was unfocused. “Something’s going on.”
Mara stretched and opened the other eye, giving her husband an exasperated look. “You think I couldn’t sense an attack or danger?”
“I think that looking for an attack or danger is a mistake.” Luke slipped out from beneath the blanket and stood, dressed only in briefs and undershirt. “If you look for banthas, you fail to notice hawk-bats.”
Mara cast the blanket aside and stood, now suspicious and alert. “I still don’t feel any aggression—”
“Not aggression, fatalism. Disease—” Luke threw up his left hand toward the door as if to ward off an attack.
With a boom that shook the floor and walls and deafened Mara momentarily, the chamber door blew off its tracks and hurtled toward Luke. Still in midgesture, Luke grimaced and the door instantly reversed direction, slamming back through the portal it had covered and crashing to the floor of the central living chamber beyond.
Luke leapt toward the doorway, gesturing with his other hand. From the nightstand beside the bed, his lightsaber flew into his grasp, and he thumbed it to life, its snap-hiss only faintly audible to his concussed ears, before he landed outside the doorway.
Ahead of him was the metal door. It was on the floor, warped to conform roughly to the shape of a large humanoid form—the man who’d triggered the explosion.
The circular room was thick with doors. Three more of them, like his, were off their tracks and smoking. To his left were black-armored figures, two pairs, one pair at each of two destroyed doorways that faced each other. Smoke curled from the barrels of their oversized rifles. To his immediate right was an armored figure within reach, swinging her rifle to bear on him, and farther down, another pair of armored figures stood in front of another ruined doorway. The attackers were moving into the doorways…
Ignoring the riflewoman next to him, Luke gestured right and left, and expulsions of Force power swept the armored figures in both directions off their feet, hammered them into doorjambs, caused them to drop their weapons. Simultaneously he twisted, bringing the center of his body out of line of the riflewoman’s barrel.
She fired. The shot should have passed harmlessly behind Luke’s back, but it was not a blaster shot. Something shining and thread-like expanded from the barrel. It settled across Luke, as unavoidable as a sudden forest fog, and tightened across his head, arms, legs. It was a silvery net, contracting as it touched its target.
He heard it crackle as it wrapped across the blade of his lightsaber, saw it blacken where it touched the green energy blade. In a moment, he knew, he’d be able to use his Force skills to wrench the net off him.
He didn’t have a moment. As the net clamped his arms to his sides and drew his legs together in an awkward, unbalanced pose, he saw the riflewoman twist a dial on the rifle’s barrel. The interior of the barrel glowed.
Mara’s blue lightsaber blade, flashing out from the doorway, cut up through the barrel at an angle and continued across the attacker’s neck. The front half of the rifle and the woman’s hand fell away, then her head rolled off, smoking at the point of the lightsaber contact, to topple to the floor.
Down the curved wall to Luke’s left, armored invaders who’d been preparing to enter the next chamber down turned to fire on him and Mara. One had a weapon like the riflewoman’s; another carried a bigger, shoulder-mounted device. Luke could feel their sudden, growing anger, and identical emotions from the invaders down the wall in the other direction.
Luke turned left, rotating on the ball of one foot. He dropped his lightsaber and gestured with the hand that had held it. Ahead of him, the ceiling, a cool-blue, sound-insulating foam over metal, buckled and tore free, slamming down across those invaders. The attackers must have fired; in an instant, the ruined ceiling began to superheat from the blasts, the insulation on the far side bursting into flame and sending sheets of smoke up into the air.
Behind him, Luke heard the hum and crackle of Mara’s lightsaber—and a scream from one of the attackers.
Luke flexed both his body and his control of the Force, and the remaining silver netting on him tore away. His lightsaber popped back up into his hand. His Force-senses focused, he walked forward, pushing the glowing metal panel before him, driving it toward his attackers.
—Legacy of the Force: Betrayal, Aaron Allston
