Faster than conscious thought, the Force guided Giran as he flipped himself over the nearby rail. With his black cloak fluttering above him, he fell twisting and rolling, threading himself through a hailstorm of particle beams. The air seemed to roar in his ears until he landed in a crouch on the floor of the hangar, out of his adversaries' sight.
His wounds screamed for attention, but he let them be, as he had been trained to. Scorched flesh and lost blood meant nothing; the Force would sustain him. And he hated the pain—not because it hurt, but because it meant he had made a mistake, meant that some impudent enemy had dared to strike him. Him! The pain fed his hate, and the hate became power. It made him sharper, fiercer.
It took barely a thought to bring his fallen lightsaber spinning back into his grip, but even as it snapped on, the hangar entrance directly ahead opened. From a hallway that still rang with the fracas of ongoing battle, a group of lowlifes, Human and alien, bounded inside, no doubt the crew of the starship that stood a stone's throw behind Giran.
They all had blasters and, just like the double-crossing Gran, were trigger-happy and stupid enough to open fire on the Sith as soon as they noticed him. Giran moved and his lightsaber spun before him in dizzying arcs, deflecting a salvo of bolts before cutting a gunman into three pieces as he tried to run past. Redirected lasers struck down a second, then a third, but that still left six to go, scattering in all directions like roachrats and screaming in panic. Just seconds later, several Gran mercenaries charged into the bay after them, adding a third side to the skirmish.
A howl of rage built up inside Giran's throat, and his vision tinted a darker red than the glow of his blade. Not only had he underestimated the Republic spies and been wounded, but now he was being sidetracked into a pointless battle. Normally he could spend hours slaughtering miscreants like these and take pleasure in it, but these were only impediments to his real goal. And he did not want Bevel Zanatsu to show him up on this mission.
With a grand sweep of his arm, he unleashed a wave of Force that sent half of his adversaries twisting through the air like ragdolls. As the rest of them gaped or dove for cover, Giran leaped back up to the catwalk. Sure enough, the Republic spies were nowhere in sight, but he quickly found the door that one of them—the Jedi, he remembered in amazement—had cut open with her lightsaber.
On the other side, Giran found himself looking down on a light freighter with gray and blue markings, suspended on repulsorlifts in the middle of the bay. Seeing that the heavy bay doors were shut, he allowed himself a brief moment of self-congratulation; it had been his plan to have Telthek Nest locked down, and now it would pay off. Even in a spaceport as remote as this, the doors were surely well-armored enough to keep the freighter trapped. All Giran needed now was a moment to get aboard and finish what he'd started.
He was just summoning the Force to himself for a leap when shafts of red light spewed from no less than four dual cannons—one on each wingtip, plus turrets on the dorsal and ventral hulls—an armament which, Giran realized, was quite illegal for a ship of that size. With an ear-splitting rumble, the salvo reduced the doors to a crumbling sheet of shattered, molten metal. The fragments had not finished falling when the vessel's engines flared with a triumphant roar as it streaked free of the hangar, away from Telthek Nest, and out of Giran's grasp.
