Mace thought:,' might be in trouble after all.
Before the thought could fully form in his mind, the two shooters (a distant, calculating part of Mace's brain filed that they were both human) had flipped their weapons to autoburst. A blinding spray of bolts filled the alleyway.
Mace threw himself sideways, flipping in the air; a bolt clipped his shin, hammering his leg backward, turning his flip into a tumble, but he still managed to land in a crouch behind the cover of the alleyway's inner corner. He glanced at his leg: the bolt hadn't penetrated his boot leather.
Stun setting, he thought. Professionals who want me alive.
While he was trying to feel his way toward what they might try next, he noticed that his blade cast a peculiarly pale light. Much too pale.
Even as he crouched there, staring drop-jawed into the paling shaft, it faded, flickered, and winked out.
He thought: And this trouble I'm in just might be serious.
His lightsaber was out of charge.
'That's not possible,' hz snarled. 'It's not-' With a lurch in his gut, he got it.
Geptun.
Mace had underestimated him. Corrupt and greedy, yes. Stupid? Obviously not.
'T J' I' Jedi!
A man's voice, from the alley: one of the shooters. 'Let's do this the easy way, huh? Nobody has to get hurt.' If only that were true, Mace thought.
'We got all kinds of stuff out here, Jedi. Not just blasters. We got glop. We got Nytinite. We got stun nets.' But they hadn't used any yet. Mercenaries, Mace decided. Maybe bounty hunters. Not militia. Glop grenades and sleep gas were expensive; a blaster bolt cost almost nothing. So they were saving a few credits.
They were also giving him time to think. And he was about to make them regret it.
'You want to know what else we got?' Mace could hear his smirk. 'Look up, Jedi.' Over the roof rims above, the pair of speeder bikes bobbed upward, visored pilots skylining themselves against the blue. Their forward steering vanes scattered mirror flashes of the sunrise across the courtyard floor. Their underslung blaster cannons bracketed Mace with plasma- scorched muzzles. He was completely exposed to their crossfire-but they weren't firing.
Mace nodded to himself. They wanted him alive. A hit from one of those cannons and they'd have to pick up his body with shovels and a mop.
But that didn't mean cannons were useless: a blast from the lead bike shattered a chest-sized hunk of the baked-clay wall two meters above him. Chunks and slivers pounded him and slashed him and battered him to the ground.
Heat trickled down his skin, and he smelled blood: he was cut. The rest was too fresh to know how bad it might be. He scrambled through the rubble and dived behind a trash bin. No help there: the speeder pilot blasted the bin's far side and it slammed Mace hard enough to knock his wind out.
Shot. Concussed. Cut. Battered. Bladeless.
Haruun Kal was pounding him to pieces, and he hadn't been on-world even a standard day.
'All right!' He reached up and splayed his hands above the trash bin so that the speeder pilots could see. He let his decharged lightsaber dangle, thumb through its belt ring. 'All right: I'm coming out. Don't shoot.' The lead speeder drifted in a little as he worked his way out from behind the bin, hands high.
The other speeder hung back for high cover. Mace picked his way to the alley mouth, took a deep breath, and stepped out from the corner. The two shooters slowly uncovered: one from behind a trash bin and the other stepping out from a recessed doorway. The two backups stayed at the corners of the alley's far mouth.
'You're pretty good,' Mace said. 'Among the best I've ever seen.' 'Hey, thanks,' one answered. From his voice, this was the one who'd spoken earlier. The leader, then, most likely.
His smile was less friendly than his tone. He and his partner both carried fold-stock blasters in the crooks of their arms. The men at the end of the alley had over-under blaster rifles combined with something large bore: grenade launchers or wide-galvenned riot blasters.
'Coming from a Jedi like you, I imagine that's high praise.' 'You certainly do come prepared.' 'Yup. Let's have that blaster, eh? Nice and easy.' Slowly-very slowly-Mace switched his lightsaber to his left hand, inching his right down toward the Power 5's butt. 'I wish I could tell you how many times teams like yours have come after me. Not just in alleys. On the street. Caves. Cliffs. Freighter holds. Dry washes. You name it.' 'And now you're caught. Put the blaster on the ground and kick it toward my friend here.' 'Pirates. Bounty hunters. Tribals. Howlpacks.' Mace might have been reminiscing with old friends as he complied. 'Armed with everything from thermal detonators to stone axes. And sometimes just claws and teeth.' The silent one bent down for the Power 5. His blaster's muzzle dropped out of line. Mace took a step to his left. Now the talker was in the line of fire from the two behind him.
Mace reached into the Force, and the alleyway crystallized around him: a web of shearplanes and stress lines and vectors of motion. It became a gemstone with flaws and fractures that linked the talker and his partner, the two shooters at the far end, the speeder bikes and their pilots, the twenty-meter-high buildings to either side- And Mace.
No shatterpoint that he could see would get him out of this.
Doesn't mean I wont, he thought. Just means it won't be easy. Or certain.
Or even likely.
He took one deep breath to compose himself.
One breath was all it took. If the Force should bring death to him here, he was ready.
