by Timothy Zahn
They headed down the corridor, Grappler in the lead, Cloud and Shadow behind him, Watchman bringing up the rear behind Fel and Drask. The general maintained a stony silence, and possibly because of that they hadn’t gone more than a handful of steps before Fel began to hear the sounds of infant squeals and gurgles and female conversation. A few steps after that, and he was able to see the light he’d noticed spilling gently out into the corridor from a large room he tentatively identified as the forward sensor analysis complex. “Easy, everyone,” he murmured as Grappler neared the archway leading into the room. “We don’t want to scare them. Better let me go first.”
Grappler nodded, and the three stormtroopers in the lead slowed their pace and moved apart. Fel passed through the middle of the formation; to his annoyance, Drask stayed right at his side. “General—”
“If you pause to argue, this will take longer,” Drask countered. “Let us finish and go to D-Five.”
Fel squeezed his hand into a fist. Having a stranger drop in on unsuspecting women and children would be bad enough; having two strangers, one of them a glowing-eyed alien, would be an order of magnitude worse.
But there was a set to Drask’s jaw implying that further argument would be a waste of time. Sighing to himself, Fel stepped into the archway.
Even at first glance it was clear why Cloud had picked up only female and infant voices: by its furnishings and decor, the room was clearly a large and well-equipped nursery. Perhaps twenty women were visible in the nearer section, sitting on comfortable-looking couches and chairs, some of them clearly pregnant, the rest just as clearly monitoring the activities of a herd of infants, crawlers, and toddlers. There were also about a dozen older children in the seven-to-eight-year-old range, that group standing in a half circle around another woman as if listening to a story or a lesson. He had just enough time to see every eye turn to him, and to catch the startled or frightened expressions on several of the women—
The attack came as a stuttering burst of full-auto blasterfire from somewhere farther aft, a screaming volley of red bolts sizzling and spattering across the stormtroopers’ armor. Instinctively, Fel ducked down, grabbing for Drask’s arm only to find that the general’s combat reflexes were better honed than Fel’s and had already put him flat on the deck. The stormtroopers’ reactions were just as quick: Watchman shouted something Fel didn’t catch, and suddenly a set of green blaster bolts was scorching the air in the other direction.
“Cease fire!” Fel shouted over the din. “Stormtroopers: cease fire!”
“No!” Drask barked. “Lay down protective fire and retreat to the fleet tactical room. Fel, come.”
Before Fel could even form a protest, Drask had the two of them back on their feet, rapidly retreating behind the stormtroopers’ moving defensive screen. They reached the fleet tactical room, and with a quick look inside Drask shoved Fel through the doorway and jumped in after him. A second later, with one final burst of covering fire, the four stormtroopers were inside as well.
“Report,” Fel ordered, feeling like an idiot and hoping the effects of the exertion would adequately cover his embarrassment. Getting shot at was hardly a new experience for him, but usually he was in the cockpit of a clawcraft at those times, with a familiar collection of sensors, shields, and weapons at his fingertips. Being attacked in dress uniform had startled him more than he would have expected. “Injuries?”
“No armor damage,” Watchman reported. “Those bolts were weaker than standard.”
“Comes of using the same Tibanna gas reserves for fifty years, I guess,” Fel said. “All right, I guess that’s that. Let’s see if we can get back to the turbolift without getting ourselves blasted.”
“No,” Drask said. “We go back.”
Fel felt his jaw drop a couple of centimeters. “What are you talking about? We’re here to help these people, not trade shots with them.”
Drask eyed him curiously. “Interesting,” he said. “You have more restraint than I would have expected from one trained under Syndic Mitth’raw’nuruodo’s authority.” He gestured down the corridor. “But in this particular situation, such restraint is inappropriate. Those warriors are protecting something. I wish to learn what it is.”
Fel took a deep breath, his opinion of Drask’s soldiering skills dropping a few notches. “They were protecting that nursery,” he said, as if explaining it to a small child. “Women and children. Remember?”
“No,” Drask said. “If that had been their purpose, they would have been positioned between the turbolift and that room.”
“Maybe there aren’t any good defensive positions this far forward.”
“We passed at least three of them,” Drask countered. “I am a ground soldier, Commander. Such things are my business.”
“He’s right, Commander,” Watchman put in. “Actually, for that matter, the position they were firing from wasn’t very secure. Best guess is that they were on their way forward from somewhere else when they ran into us.”
Fel stepped to the doorway and hooked a cautious eye around it. Beyond the open nursery door, he could see two figures jump-stopping toward them along the corridor. “In fact, I would suspect they are right now taking advantage of the lull to move to better positions closer to us,” Drask said from behind him.
“They’re coming, all right,” Fel confirmed, his estimation of Drask reluctantly returning to its previous level. “Looks like just two of them.”
“Then let us move quickly,” Drask urged. “If we hesitate too long before launching a counterattack, the subsequent battle will take place near the nursery and risk injury to the women and children. That is unacceptable.”
“I thought launching attacks in general was unacceptable to the Chiss,” Fel muttered under his breath as he gestured the stormtroopers forward.
“They fired first,” Drask reminded him coolly. “They are now fair game. Do we go?”
Fel clenched his teeth. “We go,” he confirmed. “Watchman? Clear out those snipers. Try to do it without killing them.”
“Copy, Commander,” the stormtrooper said promptly. “Grappler, Shadow, Cloud: Overrun Pattern Three. Go.”
Grappler touched his fingertips to his helmet in acknowledgment and swung halfway out into the corridor, dropping onto one knee and opening up with his BlasTech on full auto. The other two stormtroopers gave the pattern half a second to settle in, then ducked out into the corridor and charged out toward the waiting enemy, Shadow adding his own blasterfire to the barrage.
Fel held his breath. Five seconds later came the distinctive sputtering sizzle of a stun blast, and the firing abruptly ceased.
“All clear,” Grappler announced, getting to his feet and disappearing down the corridor toward his comrades.
Silently, Fel let out the breath he’d been holding. He’d worked with units of the 501st on several occasions, but never under actual combat conditions. This was going to be an educational experience. “Let’s go, General.”
The women and children, he noted as they passed the nursery, had retreated to the farthest part of the room and were standing huddled together, some of them visibly trembling. He considered pausing to try to reassure them, decided that anything he could say or do would only scare them more, and continued on without breaking stride.
The two gunners were sprawled on the floor as he and the others reached the spot. Shadow was kneeling beside them, checking for the heart palpitations that sometimes occurred with stun blasts, while Cloud stood guard with his BlasTech pointed aft down the corridor. “They’ll be all right,” Shadow reported as he stood up. “Shall I leave them their weapons?”
Fel looked down at the antique blasters lying beside the sleeping men. Disarming the enemy was standard procedure, of course. But he hadn’t come here to fight these people, and there was a chance that what had just happened had been some kind of misunderstanding. “Just put them up there,” he ordered, pointing to a makeshift ledge a meter and a half above the deck that was s
upporting some reworked cable connections. “We don’t want some kid from the nursery finding them.”
“Yes, sir.”
He watched as the stormtrooper complied, fully expecting Drask to object to his decision. But the Chiss said nothing. “Cloud?”
“I’m not picking up anyone else nearby,” the stormtrooper reported. “There’s a lot of the same sort of structural damage back there that we ran into on D-Four, though, and that could be masking them.”
“Not to mention providing them with lots of choices for an ambush position,” Fel said.
“Yes, sir,” Watchman agreed. “Shall we go clean it out?”
Fel very much wanted to say yes. Antique weapons or not, those blaster bolts could still do considerable damage to an unarmored body if they connected. Staying here while the 501st did all the dangerous work made a lot of tactical sense.
But he couldn’t do that. Not with Drask standing there listening. “We’ll go together,” he told Watchman.
“Yes, sir,” the other said. “Stormtroopers: escort formation. Move out.”
* * *
The council meeting chamber was simpler than Jinzler had expected it to be. There was a long rectangular table in the center ringed by a dozen padded wire-mesh chairs, with another eight or nine chairs lined up against each of the two side walls. In each corner of the room were a pair of pedestals with oddly shaped sculptures sitting on them, clearly handmade, while a few more pieces of local art hung on the walls.
Uliar was seated at the far end of the table, flanked on one side by Councilor Tarkosa and on the other by Councilor Keely. Facing them from the other end of the table, the end nearest the door, were Formbi, Feesa, and Bearsh, the latter hunched over in his seat like someone fighting a losing battle with disillusionment. The other three Geroons were seated together in the chairs along the left-hand wall, looking equally dejected, while the three Chiss warriors sat stiffly against the wall to the right. Each of the two latter groups had one of Pressor’s Peacekeepers standing watch beside its row.
The conversation, or perhaps more accurately the confrontation, was already under way as the door wheezed open and Jinzler, Rosemari, and Evlyn stepped into the room. “Not good enough, Aristocra Formbi,” Uliar was saying. “The actions of your people have cost us fifty years of exile and deprivation, not to mention the loss of nearly fifty thousand of our companions’ lives. If you genuinely wish to atone for this atrocity, you’ll need to do far more than that.”
He looked up at Jinzler. “Ah—Ambassador,” he greeted him gravely, gesturing to the chair beside Feesa. “Did you enjoy your tour?”
“Yes, thank you,” Jinzler said, moving reluctantly forward. This looked like a discussion he really didn’t want to get involved in, and for a moment he wondered if he should try to come up with another excuse to get out of it.
But the door had already slid shut behind him, and the others were all looking at him with varying degrees of expectation. He was apparently in for the duration.
So, it appeared, were Rosemari and Evlyn. Out of the corner of his eye he saw one of the Geroons bound eagerly from his chair and smilingly usher the mother and daughter to chairs beside the Chiss warriors. Uliar’s forehead wrinkled dangerously at that, but he apparently decided it wasn’t worth making an issue of. “We were just discussing the extent of reparations the Chiss government will be providing in contrition for the Devastation,” he said instead.
“And as I’ve already explained, I cannot make the sort of agreement you seek,” Formbi said. “I have no instructions or mandate for the situation we find ourselves in here. I can offer a certain level of monetary compensation from my own family’s resources, the amount of which I’ve already stated. But I can make no promise that will bind the other families.”
“On the other hand, the Nine Ruling Families had agreed to turn Outbound Flight’s remains over to the New Republic,” Jinzler pointed out as he sat down beside Feesa. “It shouldn’t be stretching that offer too much to include returning all the Colonists, as well.”
“And what makes you think we want to return to that part of the galaxy?” Uliar asked. “What makes you think we want anything to do with you or your New Republic?”
“Then what do you want?” Jinzler asked.
“In a perfect world, we’d want the slow executions of everyone involved with what was done to us,” Tarkosa bit out. “But Aristocra Formbi informs us that most of them are unfortunately already dead. So we’ll settle for a ship.”
Jinzler blinked. “A ship?”
“Not just any ship, of course,” Uliar cautioned. “We want a ship at least as big as one of our Dreadnaughts—no, make that twice as big—equipped with the best and most modern equipment available.”
“And weapons,” Keely murmured, his eyes staring darkly at something in the table apparently only he could see. “Lots of weapons.”
From Jinzler’s belt came a soft chirp, the same odd sound he’d heard back in the turbolift foyer just after they’d been brought down here. He glanced at Bearsh across the table, but if the Geroon’s comlink had made any such noise he wasn’t reacting to it.
“Yes,” Uliar agreed. “Plenty of weapons and defenses.”
“You already have most of that list,” Formbi reminded him. “According to Guardian Pressor, the uppermost Dreadnaught has been made capable of flight.”
“Capable of flight, yes,” Tarkosa said. “Capable of what we need, no.”
“What do you need, then?” Formbi asked. “What exactly do you want with this new ship?”
“To fulfill our mission, of course,” Tarkosa said. “Fifty years ago, we were commissioned to travel through the Unknown Regions to the edge of the galaxy and beyond in a search for new life and new worlds.”
He glared at Formbi from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “The Chiss denied us that opportunity. We will therefore make it for ourselves.”
Jinzler threw a startled look at Formbi. The Aristocra’s face was settled in diplomatic neutral, but Jinzler could see a hint of surprise in his glowing eyes. “That’s a rather ambitious project, Director,” he said carefully, turning back to Uliar. “Especially for a group as small as yours.”
“And what if your people don’t wish to go?” Formbi added.
“The people will come,” Keely said, his eyes still focused on the table. “If we lead them, they will follow. All of them.”
“Of course,” Jinzler said, a shiver running up his back. Was the councilor going senile? Or had the long exile driven him completely insane? “We will, of course, need to consult with our governments,” he said aloud, deciding the best approach right now would be to stall and hope he didn’t improvise himself into a corner. “We’ll need to discuss how to locate and deliver a ship that will suit your needs.”
“Good,” Uliar said, leaning back in his seat. “Go ahead. We’ll wait.”
“It’s not quite that simple,” Formbi put in. “First of all—”
“Of course, of course.” Uliar lifted a hand in an imperious gesture toward the young man standing beside the Chiss. “Peacekeeper Oliet? You may turn off the jamming.”
The Peacekeeper reached for the antique comlink in his belt; hesitated. “I’m sorry, Director, but I don’t think I should do that without Guardian Pressor’s permission.”
Uliar’s face darkened. “Then get it,” he said, his voice rumbling ominously.
To Jinzler’s left, the door again slid open, and with perfect timing Pressor stepped inside. “There you are,” Uliar said, his tone making the words an accusation. “Release the jamming. Ambassador Jinzler needs to contact his government.”
“It’s not the jamming that’s the problem,” Formbi said before Pressor could reply. “The fact is that communication with the outside galaxy is impossible from inside the Redoubt. If Ambassador Jinzler and I are to consult our governments, we’ll need to leave Outbound Flight.”
Uliar’s eyes narrowed. “Will you, now,” he said, his voice almost si
lky smooth. “How very convenient. Perhaps you won’t find it so necessary if I tell you that one of you will be required to remain while—”
He broke off as, with a squeak of boots on decking, the Peacekeeper who’d taken Pressor aside earlier appeared from the corridor and came to a halt at Pressor’s side. He grabbed the Guardian’s arm and began murmuring urgently to him. “Guardian?” Uliar demanded. “Guardian!”
“Your pardon, Director; Councilors,” Pressor said, most of his attention on the man still whispering to him. “A small matter that needs to be dealt with. I’ll be back in a moment.”
He flashed a hand signal to the two Peacekeepers standing guard over the Chiss and Geroons. Then he and the messenger hurried from the room, the door wheezing shut behind them.
Jinzler looked across the room at the guard beside the Geroons. The young man’s face was suddenly tight and nervous, and his hand was now resting on the butt of his blaster. Whatever was going on, it was apparently far more serious than Pressor was admitting.
And it seemed to Jinzler that there were only two places trouble could be coming from right now. The Jedi, or the Imperials.
Swallowing, he turned back to Uliar. “Well,” he said, searching for something to say. “As long as we have a few minutes, Director, why don’t we get some details. I’d like to hear exactly what kind of ship you’re looking for.”
CHAPTER 17
Mara was on her knees, studying the scattered bones and trying to visualize what the owner of the charric might have looked like, when she felt the faint and distant sensation.
She paused, closing her eyes as she stretched out to the Force. Bits and pieces flowed into focus—fear, surprise, anger, violence—then flowed away again into the general roiling fog. She worked harder at it, trying to pull back from the details to get a bigger picture.
The larger view refused to come, and a moment later the sensation itself faded into the darkness and dust and ancient bones. But that moment had been enough.