Watching Heir To The Empire

Chapter 7

/Help!/

A shout was heard, echoing and distant and the Jedi immediately recognised it as a communication through the Force.

Luke spun around, the ancient tapestry he'd been studying forgotten as his Jedi senses flared into combat readiness. Around him, the large top-floor Tower room was as it had been a minute earlier: deserted except for a handful of Bimms strolling among the huge wall tapestries and relic cases.  No danger here, at least nothing immediate.

/What is it?/ he sent back, starting for the next room and the staircase leading down.
He caught a quick vision from Leia's mind, a picture of alien figures and a vivid impression of a contracting noose.

/Hang on, /he told her. I'm coming. All but running now, he ducked through the doorway to the staircase room, grabbing the jamb to help with his turn-And braked to an abrupt halt. Standing between him and the stairway was a loose semicircle of seven silent gray figures.
Luke froze, his hand still uselessly gripping the door jamb, half a galaxy away from the lightsaber on his belt. He had no idea what the sticks were his assailants were pointing at him, but he had no desire to find out the hard way: Not unless he absolutely had to.

"What do you want?" he asked aloud.
The alien in the center of the semicircle-the leader,Luke guessed-gestured with his stick. Luke glanced over his shoulder into the room he'd just left.
«You want me to go back in there?" he asked.

The leader gestured again . .. and this time Luke saw it. The small, almost insignificant tactical error. "All right," he said, as soothingly as possible. «No problem."

Keeping his eyes on the aliens and his hands away from his lightsaber, he began to back up.
They herded him steadily back across the room
toward another archway and a room he hadn't gotten to before Leia's emergency call had come. "If you'd just tell me what you want, I'm sure we could come to some sort of agreement," Luke suggested as he walked. Faint scuffling sounds told him that there were still some Bimms
wandering around, presumably the reason the aliens hadn't already attacked. "I would hope we could at least talk about it. There's no particular reason why any of you has to be hurt."

"Forget it, Luke, even Obi-Wan couldn't talk this one out," Anakin said.

Reflexively, the leader's left thumb moved. Not much, but Luke was watching, and it was enough. A thumb trigger, then.

"If you have some business with me, I'm
willing to talk,"he continued. "You don't need my
friends in the marketplace for that."
He was almost to the archway now. A couple more steps to go. If they'd just hold off shooting him that long. And then he was there, with the carved stone looming over him. "Now where?" he asked, forcing his muscles to relax. This was it.
Again, the leader gestured with his stick ... and midway through the motion, for a single instant, the weapon was pointed not at Luke but at two of his own companions. And reaching out through the Force, Luke triggered the thumb switch. There was a loud, sharp hiss as the stick bucked in its owner's hands and what looked like a
fine spray shot out the end. Luke didn't wait to see what exactly the spray did. The maneuver had bought him maybe a half second of confusion, and he couldn't afford to waste any of it.
Throwing himself back and to the side, he did a flip into the room behind him, angling to get to the slight protection afforded by the wall beside the doorway.

Padme let out a breath. He just barely made it.

Even as he cleared the archway there was a stuttering salvo of sharp hisses, and as he flipped back to his feet he saw that the doorjamb had
grown strange semisolid tendrils of some thin, translucent material. Another tendril shot through the doorway as he hastily backed farther away, sweeping in a spiral curve that seemed to turn from fine mist to liquid stream to solid cylinder even as it curved. His lightsaber was in his hand now, igniting with a shap-hiss of its own.