Mara deflects bolts with flickering lightsaber

He was facing an extraordinary sight. The person on the rail— a woman, he could see now, her hair glittering strangely in the red lighting—was on the move, running along the rail toward the stairs and the small room where Ferrouz's family was being held. She was swinging a lightsaber as she ran, the blade deflecting the sudden extra fury of blaster bolts now coming from Stelikag and the other kidnappers below her.

But the blade wasn't simply cutting across the incoming fire the way Luke blocked such attacks in his practice sessions. It was flickering rapidly on and off in an irregular pattern, flashing like a magenta strobe light.
She kept running, gradually twisting her torso around as she moved past her attackers, keeping the lightsaber blade between her and their fire as it began to come more from behind her than beside her.

Axlon had said there was an Imperial agent on Poln Major who carried a lightsaber. But after all the rest of the traitor's lies, Luke had assumed he'd been lying about that, too. Apparently not.

But what was she doing? The lightsaber was still flickering as she ran, and each time it went off it opened up the possibility that one of the blaster bolts would get through. Was there some kind of defect in the weapon?

Luke caught his breath as he suddenly understood.

She was turning her lightsaber on and off as she ran to keep from slicing through the rail's support struts while she swept the blade across the incoming fire.

For a moment he just stood there staring, frozen in amazement by the level of sheer control and artistry the maneuver demonstrated. She deflected a shot, swung the lightsaber toward the next one, flicked the blade off and then on to bypass a strut, deflected the next bolt—

A shot from the stairs sizzled past Luke's shoulder, abruptly breaking the spell. "Right," he muttered to himself, spinning around and firing another two shots of his own at the men on the stairs-