Anakin twisted the weapon in his hands, catching the blaster bolts and deflecting them backwards at the Imperials. It was a really dumb idea to shoot blaster-bolts at Jedi.
The front ranks of the Stormtrooper formation simply crumpled, white armour marred by bright red flashes.
Beside him, Tahiri had lunged forward, ducking her whole body low and fast beneath the line of fire, twisting her waist to avoid one of his own deflected shots, and flashing him a grin. She held her blade high and fast-moving in a dancing guard position that caught blaster bolts and spun them back, bouncing them off the roof and bulkheads and into the back ranks of the troopers. It was out of no lightsaber form manual Anakin had ever seen.
There was a shrill scream as someone disemboweled a stormtrooper, and a roar as Lowie charged past, swinging his massive sword horizontally at the white-armoured ranks. It went through them somewhere near their elbows.
Anakin grimaced, moving forward with the others, fighting without conscious thought. Jaina was beside him now, parrying with deft flicks of her hilt and blade, blaster pistol in her free hand, shots punching stormtroopers off their feet, as the fight surged forward, through the hatchway that separated the airlock from the the Imperial ship's interior.
Everything was happening at once, actions that only registered as after-images. An armoured blast-door sliding open, overlapping sections moving back diagonally. Security droids pivoting around, armoured in Imperial khaki. An officer yelling into a comlink, abruptly lifted off his feet by Lowie's charge. A soldier in a black uniform, who Anakin guessed was a Stormtrooper sergeant, spinning towards them and grabbing a gun from a belt holster.
Tahiri whirled through the droids with undisguised enthusiasm, and Anakin cut off the right fist of the black-uniformed NCO as she tried to shoot at him.
She?
She was a girl, with dark hair, wide dark eyes, a pink mouth open in silent shock.
"Sorry," he grimaced, punched her in the face - a sort of anaesthetic - and stepped past her. Two more stormtroopers appeared out of a side-passage, weapons raised, so he simply stepped inside their guard and slashed his lightsaber down diagonally to the right - Tahiri was performing a matching movement on his left. They sliced the barrels off the troopers' blasters just in front of their knuckles, and brought their blades up to slash down again, together.
The troopers stumbled backwards over the carnage on the deck, and simply turned and ran, fleeing down the corridor. Stun-bolts from Jaina's pistol pulsed out after them, sending them sprawling face-first, skidding along the deck in a tangle of armoured limbs.
And suddenly, the corridor was silent, except for the swarming buzz of four different lightsaber blades.
Anakin deactivated his weapon, and ran his free hand through his hair.
"Are we good?" he asked, glancing round at the sprawled pile of white-armoured limbs and torsos which tumbled out down the corridor, tangled up with droid parts and uniformed deck officers. Tahiri was perched on top of a fallen stormtrooper, doing something with her lightsaber to make sure he stayed fallen, while Lowie was near the blast door, holding two surviving soldiers up off the deck, one in each massive arm, smashing their heads together a few times, and roaring at them.
Anakin supposed that was one way to restrain the amount of force you used to put them out of action.
"We're good," Tahiri grinned, stepping barefoot off the white-armoured breastplate, lightsaber still dancing in her hand.
"Okay," he nodded. "Let's take the rest of this ship. Tahiri, with me. Turbolift to the bridge. Jaina, Lowie, Fiver, head back and take control of engineering. Meet us on the command deck when you've secured the drive section."
Jaina gave him a suspicious look. "Did you plan this, Little Brother?"
Anakin gave a shrug. "Sort of, yeah."
He stepped into the 'lift car with Tahiri before the others could object, punching the override codes that would take them to the bridge.
"This is fun," she said, bouncing on her bare feet. Anakin grinned, and nuzzled her, a tight embrace for a moment before the doors slid open, introducing them to the frigate's bridge.
"The Jedi are attacking the engine room," a panicked voice was saying. "They have several Wookiees, and they're slicing through the blast door..."
The officer trailed off, glancing round as the 'lift hatch opened. The quarter-sized holo of Grand Admiral Thrawn raised an eyebrow
Anakin stepped onto the bridge, igniting his lightsaber blade again. Tahiri hadn't bothered to turn hers off.
"Anakin Solo, Jedi Knight," he said, by way of introduction. Captain of the Yavin Turtle didn't quite seem appropriate. "That's my first mate, Tahiri. And we only have one Wookiee."
He wasn't sure there was any harm in letting a holographic Grand Admiral watch him hijack an Imperial frigate. But just for good measure, he palmed his blaster into his free hand, and shot the comm desk anyway. Thrawn's image distorted with static, and vanished.
The Imperial officer looked at him in disbelief.
"In case you've not worked out yet, we just stole your ship."
The bridge of the Imperial frigate was a compact one, with a small control area at the front, not that much bigger than a freighter's cockpit. Still, it managed to look convincingly like the command deck of a Star Destroyer. the cockpit area formed the central section of a raised command walkway, fronted by a row of angular viewports and manned by officers in khaki, with steps leading back down towards the 'lift doors at the rear to provide the sort of central approach axis that Imperial designers really seemed to like, and on both flanks of the entrance, there were supplementary deck areas with uniformed crewers at aft-facing consoles, stepped down from the officers' walkway so they functioned as subordinated crew-pits.
Anakin looked at the Bespin sky beyond the viewports. Then he glanced back at the mess he'd made of the corvette's communications transceiver. Belatedly, he holstered his blaster pistol. Then he looked at the Imperial officer who seemed to be in charge.
The abrupt termination of his comm call had taken all the fight out of him.
"Lieutenant Ames," he introduced himself, a little shaky. "I guess I should surrender or something, right?"
"Yeah." Anakin gestured with his lightsaber. "My girlfriend might kill people who resist."
A blood-chilling scream suddenly leapt from one of the crewers standing at the side desks. Tahiri had just done something fairly brutal with her lightsaber.
"He had a holdout blaster," she said, with a shrug that was less indifferent than it seemed. She had a hand tight on the crewer, to control whatever hurt she'd caused. She picked up his blaster under the toes of one foot, and scooted it across to the middle of the deck, just to make her point.
A tech ran up, and she left the man she'd hurt to be attended to, prowling back towards Anakin - looking sexy for him, terrifying to the Imperials.
Anakin had the craziest thought she might start making out with him right there, just to intimidate the rest of them. He grinned at her.
"Technically, he still hasn't surrendered yet," she pointed out to Anakin, with a grin at the Imperial officer.
"Oh," Lieutenant Ames blinked. The fight seemed to return, a little bit. "It's not easy to be the one who surrenders his ship to terrorist scum."
Anakin grimaced. The Empire had strict laws about surrender. They would probably shoot the Lieutenant, if he was released. After interrogating him extensively, too. "Would it be easier if we just put you under arrest and locked you in a cell?"
"Yeah, maybe."
"Done," Tahiri grinned, and thunked him on the head with the hilt of her lightsaber. The Lieutenant pitched, face-first, and drooled a little bit on Anakin's boots..
Anakin looked around the rest of the bridge crew. "Is anyone else wanting to be forcibly detained, or do we have to actually hurt some more of you?"
Silence.
Jaina and Lowie hurried in past them - a girl in a short Rogue Squadron jacket and a Wookiee with a massive sword, ousting the Imperial pilots from their seats up front at weapon-point. Fiver looped round onto the bridge wing, and found himself a computer to connect to.
None of the Imperials did a thing to stop them. Most of them were staring at Anakin in shock.
"I like the new you," Tahiri murmured softly, taking up a position at his side, slinked close and curvy and dangerous and perfect.
"Thanks," he grinned, and glanced around the bridge. "Anyone wanting to surrender?"
Somewhere far away, he could hear the sound of power being thrown into big engines. An urgent rhythm ran through the deck beneath his boots.
"Ensign Verrer," sighed an older man, with a moustache that had last been fashionable in the Clone Wars, and the look of someone who'd just been ejected from his duty station by a Wookiee. "I guess I could arrange a mass desertion, Captain Solo."
"Do that, then," Anakin said, watching Lowie punching the control buttons and Jaina figuring out the flight controls. "I'm sorry we had to do this the hard way."
But all the same, watching as his sister hauled back the flight sticks hard against her body, lifting the big ship up towards the sky like a starfighter punching out for space, a part of him was quietly elated.