by Jude Watson
A new voice rose in his mind, not a voice of fear but impatience.
Well, if you’re going to die, show some guts, will you?
He slowly, painstakingly, raised his head, ready for it to be blown off at any moment.
The battle had moved to an upper level of the catwalks and landings that twisted so crazily below the cavern walls. But there wasn’t much battle left. He saw a few holdouts, but they were surrounded and soon would be dead. He wrenched his gaze away. He couldn’t watch anymore, couldn’t bear it anymore.…
Suddenly a streak through the smoke made him raise his head. Solace had made an incredible leap, jumping down from the topmost catwalk to the one just above Trever’s head. Stormtroopers were pouring down the ramps after her. In another few moments they would corner her.
And he was here, hiding like a coward.
He had to help her, and do it fast. But how?
Stop hiding, Trever. That would be a start.
He snaked behind the other speeders and was able to get a better look above.
The stormtrooper guarding the speeders turned away from the noise of battle to take a communication—he could see him speaking into his helmet, straining to hear over the noise—and Trever leaped closer to the stairs that led to the next level. He landed behind a smoking heap of twisted metal that had once been a house. He slammed into a body and nearly levitated out of the space in terror until a strong hand clamped on his leg.
“Don’t move.”
It was Oryon, the Bothan. His face was blackened with smoke, his long mane a tangled mass. His tunic was torn and a long scratch ran down his upper arm. His eyes were reddened from the acrid smoke. He was the fiercest thing Trever had ever seen.
“Solace is—” Trever panted.
“I know. Do you have any charges left?”
Trever nodded, ashamed. He had been too afraid to set off many of his charges. He had hidden instead.
“I’ve got some grenades,” Oryon said. “It might be enough.”
“What are we going to do?”
“Blow the whole platform.”
“But she’ll fall.”
“She’s a Jedi. She’ll survive. But they won’t.”
“Uh, and what about…” Trever gulped. “Us?”
“We’ll do it from below, then get back to this platform.”
Trever glanced down through the grate to the black sea below. “Below?” he squeaked.
“Are you ready?”
Ready? I’m ready to run the other way.
No—keep it together.
Trever nodded.
“Follow me.”
Oryon took two strides and suddenly flipped himself over the catwalk railing. Trever moved cautiously forward and hung over the railing in astonishment. He saw that there were handholds and footholds below the grating, just random pieces of metal that you could hang on to in order to scrabble your way across, moving underneath the grating like a crab. Far, far below he saw the moving black sea.
There was nothing else to do but go over. A small part of him was pleased that Oryon was treating him as a comrade, assuming without question that he would do this. Ferus would have told him to continue hiding behind the speeder.
Trever swung one leg over, searching for a hold underneath. Then he slowly slid his hands down until his other toe found a hold.
They made their way upside down, looking up through the grating. Sometimes they had to curl their fingers through the grating itself to make progress. He just hoped that a stormtrooper didn’t step on his fingers. Those boots looked pretty lethal. Trever knew his fingers would be raw after this, but strangely, the fear had left him and a grim determination to finish the job was pushing him forward.
When they were close, Oryon signaled him and spoke in his ear. “You have to go ahead. Set the timers for thirty seconds. That will give you enough time to get back. Then I’ll throw the proton grenades from here. Set the charges carefully so only that catwalk blows.”
Trever scrabbled forward, his fingers aching. He would have to find a good place to anchor his feet and one hand while he reached into his utility belt. He made his way more quickly now, used to the feeling of being upside down. When he saw the white stormtrooper boots above, he set one charge, wedging it into the catwalk, then another and another, his biggest alpha charges. By the time he finished, his fingers were scraped raw.
Counting in his head, he went backward to where Oryon waited. “Five seconds,” he grunted to the Bothan.
“Go,” Oryon whispered.
Trever quickly scrabbled back in the direction he’d come. But he couldn’t resist stopping to watch Oryon toss the grenades.
Oryon dropped one powerful arm and lobbed the grenade. It shot straight out then curled around the edge of the catwalk, sailing over the railing and onto the platform above. Without pausing, he threw the other three grenades.
Trever felt the explosion against his eardrums. Oryon was moving fast toward him, hand over hand. The catwalk had become a living thing, buckling and waving. It could break at any moment.
He risked another look back. The platform above was cracking, metal parting from metal with a groaning, scraping sound. The stormtroopers were starting to fall into one another as they desperately searched for traction. Some were trying to vault to safety to the catwalk or the platform below.
Solace was the only one who used the explosions to her advantage. She had ridden the blast like a wave and had shot into the air. Trever watched, breathless, as she somersaulted away from the stormtrooper army and fell—no, not fell, soared, completely in control—past the stormtroopers, over the groaning metal, over the heat, over the smoke, and down, down to the sea below.
“Hurry,” Oryon urged Trever, his voice hoarse. “We’ve got trouble.”
To Trever’s horror, he saw that the catwalk was melting from the heat, shaking loose from the platform above. It must have been weakened from the battle’s blaster fire. They couldn’t make it to safety, he could see that. The catwalk began to fishtail as the platform above broke into pieces, sending stormtroopers sliding into the sea below.
“You’ve got to let go!” Oryon shouted. “We’re not going to make it!”
“Let go? Are you nuts?” Trever felt his fingers cramp from trying to hold on to the twisting catwalk.
“It’s the only way!” Oryon looked at him, his eyes intense. He suddenly flipped his legs forward and wrapped them around Trever’s waist. Then he let go with one hand and pulled Trever against him. Trever felt the strength of Oryon’s arms and legs, pure thick muscle. “I’ll be with you.”
Trever looked down. The sea looked black and dangerous. And very far away.
“I just want you to know something,” he said to Oryon. “I can’t swim!”
And then he let go.
That brief conversation turned out to be one of the few Ferus had with his cellmate. Ferus knew his number—934890—but his cellmate never confided his name or anything else about himself. The only sentences he uttered were along the lines of “Move your boots.”
Within a day Ferus became used to the routine, because he had to. Any hesitation about where to line up or what to do was met with a blow and a curse from the Imperial guards. He was a step ahead of the other new prisoners. His Jedi training had taught him how to anticipate, how to read body cues, how to, as the Jedi said, “See without looking.” He was able to enter the flow of the prison without disturbance.
Also, like a Jedi, he was planning his escape. The only problem was the sheer impossibility of it. He had never seen so many guards for one prison. There were few exits that he could see. The prison itself was a square inside a square. The cells were in the interior, and the food hall was in the outer square in one corner. They left every day and marched down an underground tunnel to the factory. There didn’t seem to be any laundry facilities and the prisoners who had been here for some time looked half-dead and wore rags.
He had seen upon arrival—because they’d want
ed him to see it—that the prison was set on a small planet with a dense jungle surrounding it. There were no cities or spaceports, only the small landing platform outside the prison and a larger spaceport floating within the inner atmosphere above.
It was clear that his only opportunity to escape would hinge on the factory. They were forced to work and production levels were high. Obviously what they were doing was more than busy work; it was important to the Empire. That meant there would be a regular pickup service and a delivery supply service, most likely the same ship. That ship would be his way out. Somehow.
He would have to wait to discover the routine. He’d keep his head down, follow the rules, and not make a stir.
He wished he’d kept his lightsaber. He had handed it to Solace, knowing they would have taken it when they captured him. He couldn’t bear the thought that his lightsaber, the lightsaber that had once been Garen Muln’s, would be tossed on a pile with the hundreds of others, lying on a floor in a storage room at the Temple. He had seen that pile, each lightsaber representing a life, and it had been a heartbreaking sight.
Ferus adopted the shuffle-walk of the other prisoners. He didn’t try to catch anyone’s eye. He didn’t speak. He could tell that the silence would get on his nerves after a while. He had never considered himself a social creature, but he’d come to realize after he left the Jedi that a life of solitude was not for him. He didn’t like to live inside his own head.
The prisoners were kept on starvation rations. When they’d arrived, they were each run through a bio-scanner that determined the minimum nutrition their bodies needed to survive. Then their meals were calibrated by droids and individually dished out. That left them with just enough strength to work.
By the time the midday meal came, they were ravenous. Still they had to walk slowly and stay in line as they slid their trays along a long counter. Droids served the food, first flashing a scanner at the ID tag on their uniforms. This gave them the nutrition count for the inmate. They then used a machine to dish out some sort of mealy glop and another equally mysterious portion of something.
Still, it was nourishment, and Ferus found his mouth watering. He would eat whatever was given to him, because he’d need his strength when the time came.
The droid wheeled around, stuck a spoon in a large tin, then wheeled back and deposited it on Ferus’s tray. Then another scoop of the other mass, whatever it was. Ferus didn’t care. He began to shuffle forward, keeping his eyes on the back of the neck of the prisoner in front of him. They would all file to long benches at tables and would have a few minutes to eat.
He was so intent on the idea of food—he could not remember the last time he ate a meal—it must have been at that mangy bar down at the Coruscant crust—that he wasn’t alert when suddenly, the prisoner ahead of him turned and, in a movement so smooth it must have been done many times, scooped Ferus’s food off his tray onto his own.
But if Ferus was a bit slow, he caught up. He saw in a glance that the inmate was tall, with enormous feet and hands and gray stubble on his skull. In a lightning flash of reflexes, he put one knee in the small of the prisoner’s back and one arm around his throat. At the same time, he grabbed the food with the other hand and scooped it back onto his tray.
Lunch might be disgusting, but he wasn’t about to miss it.
The prisoner in front of him gagged from the pressure on his throat and tripped. His own tray went flying. Quickly Ferus released his hold and by the time the guard turned he was staring down at the floor, mimicking the exhausted shuffle of the others.
“Keep moving!” The guard lifted his force pike and brought it down on the prisoner’s shoulder. He fell, dropping his tray as he went down. Still he reached for the food, even as one arm dangled uselessly. Maliciously the guard kicked the tray away so that he couldn’t reach it.
Ferus kept on walking. He ate his food quickly. He had been lucky, he decided. The scene had been over quickly and the guards hadn’t seen him.
The prisoners lined up again to walk to the factory. Ferus felt someone behind him and realized it was his cellmate.
“That was a mistake.” The tone was low and guttural behind him.
Ferus spoke softly out of the side of his mouth. “At least I kept my lunch.”
“Your lunch is the least of your problems, my friend. You just tangled with Prisoner 67. Your problems are just beginning.”
Trever felt the impact of the water against his ribs and his teeth. He lost his breath and his ability to think. It was like hitting a wall. Everything was black, and he lost consciousness for a moment.
Somehow, Oryon kept hold of him. When he came to he was still against the Bothan’s body. They were plummeting down into the dark water. He could feel Oryon’s long tangled hair swirling around him like water snakes and was conscious of only one thought:
Up.
He didn’t want to die underwater.
Oryon began to fight the momentum pushing them downward. Trever could feel the effort in every muscle. He himself felt as though he had lost control of his own body. He had never felt so helpless.
He felt Oryon’s struggle to move toward air. He was kicking his powerful legs but his arms were still wrapped around Trever. With an enormous effort of will, Trever pushed himself away and began to kick on his own. Oryon kept hold of one of his arms, but now with one arm free he was able to make more progress. In this lopsided fashion they managed to stroke their way up.
They surfaced in a burning landscape. Trever gulped down air that tasted of smoke and burning fabric. He didn’t know how to swim, but he was able to keep himself afloat, treading water frantically. Dead stormtroopers and pieces of shattered white armor littered the water, though most had sunk below.
“Not so much motion,” Oryon said, trying to catch his breath. “You’ll tire yourself out.”
Trever discovered that he was able to stay up without using as much energy. He didn’t like water—never had—but here he was. Acceptance is the key to survival. Actually, it could be the key to everything.
Hey, thanks, Feri-Wan, Trever thought. Maybe there’s something to that Jedi stuff after all.
“We have to find Solace,” Oryon said.
It had been a tremendous fall, but they both had no doubt she was alive.
He found he was able to paddle behind Oryon. They passed chunks of floating wreckage, but it was too hot to touch and offered no perch to rest. They searched through the blackness for Solace. All Trever could see was burning material and black water. Twisted metal still hung overhead, threatening to crash down on them at any moment.
“Over here,” Oryon grunted. After a moment of paddling, Trever saw what he’d spotted—someone clinging to a piece of wreckage.
The man was so blackened and bloody it took Trever a moment to realize it was Keets.
“I thought you were dead,” Trever said as they made their way up to him.
Keets opened his eyes. “You mean I’m not?”
“Not yet,” Oryon said.
Keets was clearly exhausted and in pain. “I slid down the leg of the scaffold and fell in. Surprised I didn’t drown. This almost fell on top of me. It’s probably the only thing out here that floats. So…what’s the plan?”
“Find Solace,” Oryon said. “She’s got to have an escape route.”
“That doesn’t sound like much of a plan,” Keets observed, wincing.
“Okay,” Oryon said dryly, “now I know you’ll live. You’re giving me a hard time already.”
A ripple in the dark water made them tense and draw closer to the wreckage. Trever knew they were all thinking of the giant sea creatures they’d glimpsed on the long climb on the catwalks when they’d arrived. No doubt the creatures had dived deeper to escape the fire on the water, but there was always a chance that an inquisitive—or hungry—creature would return for lunch.
Then a dark head surfaced and they breathed a sigh of relief.
“Ready to get out of here?” Solace asked.
“I’d say so,” Keets said.
“The others?” Solace asked.
Oryon shook his head. Keets’s face tightened.
“They attacked so quickly,” he said. “Hume died trying to save a group they surrounded. Rhya…”
“I saw her die,” Trever whispered.
“Gilly and Spence went to the rear flank. That’s where the heaviest fighting was,” Oryon said. “They couldn’t have survived. And Curran was caught in a firestorm when they torched the houses.”
Keets shook his head. “Poor Curran. He was just a kid.”
“We’ll get out,” Solace said. “We can get to my transport. It’s not far—” She broke off suddenly. “Wait.”
It took them a few seconds longer, but they heard it—the whirring sound of an air speeder. They took refuge behind the wreckage, ducking in back of it as the silver craft zoomed over their heads and made a precarious landing on a partially collapsed catwalk directly over their heads.
“Malorum,” Solace breathed.
The commander of the stormtroopers hurried forward, trying to look purposeful despite the fact that he was picking his way carefully. It was clear he didn’t quite trust the buckled catwalk.
They could hear the voices overhead echoing off the cavern walls. “Report,” Malorum snapped.
“Over half our force has been lost—”
“I don’t care about your losses. Where are the rebels?”
“We wiped out the community, sir. Including the Erased we were tracking.”
“And the one called Solace?”
“Dead, sir.”
“Show me the body.”
Solace let out a breath.
“She…fell, Inquisitor Malorum. Into the sea.”
“Did you see her fall?”
“Yes sir.”
“Did you see her drown?”
“I saw her go into the water.…”
“Get some lights down there!” Malorum roared. “I want a body!”
Within moments, powerful halo lights began to sweep the dark water.
“We’ve got to swim for it, and fast,” Solace whispered. “Underwater. Oryon, you take Trever and I’ll take Keets.” She handed out Aquata breathers to Keets and Trever. Oryon had one of his own.