by Timothy Zahn
“Storage core?” Drask asked, still firing as he ducked inside.
“Yes,” Fel said. Whatever reinforcements Bearsh had would undoubtedly be up on D-4, and Fel had no interest in taking them on just now. “Come on, hit it.”
Drask did so.
Nothing happened.
Drask hit it again, and again, then tried the switch to D-4. Still nothing. “What’s wrong?” Fel demanded, hurrying to his side.
“It does not function,” Drask snarled. “The Vagaari have locked it down.”
A burst of enemy fire splattered off the edge of the door. “Come on,” Fel said, grabbing Drask’s arm and dragging him to the back of the car. So that was it. The enemy had anticipated their final move, and they were now well and truly trapped. Fel had failed his men, failed Admiral Parck, failed Aristocra Formbi and the rest of the Chiss.
But if the Vagaari expected them to die quietly, they were in for a rude shock. Cloud and Grappler had sunk to the floor, semiconscious, their BlasTechs hanging loosely from their hands. Fel grabbed Cloud’s weapon, checked the power indicator, and swung it around to point at the door. Outside, he could see the Vagaari starting to move purposefully around, fully in control now and probably setting up their pattern for a rush on the car. Leveling the BlasTech toward the opening, Fel braced himself. . .
And with a sudden shattering of metal and plastic, the front part of the car’s ceiling exploded inward.
Instinctively, Fel twisted his head away, squeezing his eyes shut against the flying debris. The roar of the blast faded and he turned back, blinking open his eyes.
At the front of the car, barely visible through the roiling dust, stood a pair of Imperial stormtroopers.
Watchman and Shadow had arrived.
There were, Fel had estimated, about thirty Vagaari in the turbolift lobby. They never had a chance. The two stormtroopers stood shoulder to shoulder in the doorway, fresh and uninjured, taking the enemy’s attack unflinchingly as they systematically raked the lobby with blasterfire.
Fel sank down onto the floor beside Cloud and Grappler, the BlasTech falling loose in his hands as he listened to the firefight, the combat tension finally beginning to drain out of him.
And as it did, he slowly became aware of pain digging into his body from a dozen different places on arms, legs, and torso. Apparently, he wasn’t as uninjured as he’d thought.
By the time the battle was over, he needed Drask’s help to even stand up.
* * *
The two Vagaari fired another burst, their blaster bolts scattering from Luke’s lightsaber blade. He pressed forward grimly, letting the Force manipulate his defense, shortening the gap between him and the attackers. In the distance, the sounds of multiple blaster-fire from a minute earlier had gone ominously quiet. Wrapped in the tunnel vision of combat, he couldn’t tell what the outcome had been, but it was beginning to look as if he and Mara were already too late to be of any help there.
The Vagaari intensified their fire. Setting his teeth, he struggled to keep up with the attack—
And suddenly, the screaming of their weapons was joined by blasterfire of a more modern pitch and rhythm. For a handful of seconds the two sounds played a deadly duet, and then all weapons fell abruptly silent.
“Luke? Mara?”
Luke let his lightsaber slow to a halt in ready position, his lungs heaving as he relaxed his tight focus and began opening up his mind again. The voice and the sense accompanying it had been very familiar. . .
“We’re here, Fel,” Mara called out as she and Evlyn came up behind him. “Come on, Luke, they’re hurt.”
Luke blinked sweat out of his eyes as he closed down his lightsaber and joined the other two hurrying down the corridor. He could sense the pain now: waves of it, sweeping toward him.
The two groups met around the next jog in the corridor, beside the bodies of the three Vagaari Luke had been slowly pushing back. “These the last of them?” one of the stormtroopers asked, gesturing at them with his BlasTech.
“As far as I know, yes,” Luke said, eyeing him and the others with concern and a bit of awe. All four stormtroopers had been through the wars, all right, with blaster burns scattered and clustered all across their once-sleek armor. On two of them, the white color of their breastplates had been almost completely obliterated, with at least a dozen spots on each where the armor had been burned clean through. It was hard to believe they were even alive, let alone more or less on their feet. Fel didn’t look to be in terrific shape, either, and though he seemed to be walking on his own Luke could see that Drask was standing ready to offer him a helping hand. “I see you’ve been busy,” he said. The words sounded rather bland, but somehow seemed to fit the casual dignity and bravery he could sense from all six of the group. “I’m sorry we weren’t able to get to you faster.”
“We managed,” Fel said, his voice rigid with the strain of someone fighting back pain and determined not to show it. “Afraid we left a mess by the turbolifts that someone’s going to have to clean up.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Luke assured him. “What about Bearsh? Did you see him?”
“I didn’t, no,” Fel said, glancing around at the others. There was a general murmur of agreement. “He must have made it to D-Four before we were able to deal with their rear guard.”
“Rear guard?” Mara asked. “You saying there are still more of them up there?”
“Definitely,” one of the stormtroopers said. “We could hear them working in the turbolift pylon while we were bringing the car in.”
“I don’t suppose you got a head count,” Luke said.
The stormtrooper shook his head. “We were too busy getting the car moving and laying out the flash paste to give them much attention.”
“I have done a rough calculation, however,” Drask said. “From the size of the three inaccessible rooms aboard the Vagaari vessel, I estimate Bearsh could have brought as many as three hundred troops with him.”
Luke whistled. “Three hundred? They must have been stacked like data cards in there.”
“With their hibernation technology, that would be entirely possible,” Drask agreed.
“What were they doing in the pylon?” Evlyn asked.
They all looked at her. “What?” Fel asked.
“You said they were working in the turbolift pylon,” the girl reminded them. “You said you didn’t count them, but didn’t you at least look to see what they were doing?”
The two slightly-less-injured stormtroopers looked at each other. “Not really,” one of them confessed. “We could see the lights, and they were definitely working on the tube and not on any of the cars. But that was all we got.”
“We had more pressing things to think about at the time,” the other stormtrooper added.
“Well, let’s think about it now,” Luke said. “What could Bearsh be up to?”
“Maybe there’s a quick way to find out,” Mara said, stooping beside one of the Vagaari bodies and pulling off his helmet. “Let’s ask him.”
She glanced over the controls, then keyed on the built-in comlink. “Hello, Bearsh,” she called toward the voice pickup. “This is Mara Jade Skywalker. How’s it going up there?”
There was a long pause. “Bearsh?” she called again. “Come on, Vagaari, look alive.”
“I’m sorry, but General Bearsh is unavailable at this time,” a voice replied, sounding distant and oddly hollow as it came from the helmet’s headphones. “So you still live, Jedi?”
Luke grimaced. General Bearsh, no less. “That’s right, Estosh,” Mara said. “We still live, you’re up and around again—it’s just a glorious day for us all.”
“Not for all, Jedi,” Estosh said, an edge of malicious pleasure in his voice. “But for the Vagaari, this is indeed a day of satisfaction. Where precisely are you?”
“We’re standing around on a Vagaari-free Dreadnaught,” Mara told him. “You want something more precise?”
“No need,” Estosh
said. “I see you now, there in the corridor beside the Number Two Turbolaser Coolant Room.”
Luke glanced at the marker beside the nearest door in mild surprise. Apparently, the Vagaari had very precise locators built into their troops’ helmets. “What do you mean, Vagaari-free?” Estosh went on.
“Oh, didn’t you know?” Mara said. “Your rear guard’s dead. All of them.”
“Really,” Estosh said. “Interesting. You Jedi are more effective warriors than we realized. Our mistake.”
“A mistake others paid for,” Mara pointed out. “But I suppose that’s typical. I don’t suppose you’re brave enough to come down here and take any of the risks yourself?”
Estosh chuckled melodiously. “Thank you for your invitation, but no. The Supreme Commander never takes the same risks as the common soldiers. I have my duty, and they have theirs.”
“Supreme Commander, you say,” Mara said. “I’m impressed. Speaking of duty, you surely didn’t sacrifice forty-odd troops just to kill off a couple of hundred humans and a few Chiss, did you?”
“Of course not,” Estosh said. “Tell me, is Master Skywalker there with you?”
Luke hesitated, sensing the trap lying beneath the question. Estosh was willing to talk, but only if he knew he didn’t have a Jedi running loose and unaccounted for.
On the other hand, if Luke confirmed he was here listening, his own freedom of movement would be severely limited, at least for the length of the conversation. With Fel and the stormtroopers largely out of commission, it would be a bad idea to let the Vagaari pin both him and Mara down to this one particular spot.
Mara, he could sense, had come to the same conclusion. Fortunately, she’d also come up with the answer. Smiling wickedly at Luke, she pulled out the comlink Pressor had given her and lifted her eyebrows.
He nodded understanding, taking a rapid couple of steps aft down the corridor as he pulled the matching device from his own belt. Clicking hers on, Mara held it near the helmet’s voice pickup and nodded. “Yes, I’m here, Estosh,” Luke said into his comlink. “What do you want?”
“Nothing in particular,” Estosh said offhandedly, his voice coming more faintly now from the comlink as Luke continued down the corridor toward the aft turbolift lobby. It was time, he decided, to see what exactly was going on up there. “I merely didn’t want to have to repeat all of this for you later. You’re right, we did indeed come here for revenge. But certainly not for the few ragged handfuls of humans who will soon be dying alongside you. No, our revenge will be against the entire Chiss race.”
The colonists, Luke saw, were beginning to emerge now from the various nooks and crannies they’d been hiding in. Most of them shied back again at their first sight of him. “Nice to have goals in life,” Mara commented. “But I find it hard to believe there’s anything aboard Outbound Flight that’s going to help you take down the Chiss Ascendancy. Or are the Vagaari in the habit of using high-flying words that don’t really mean anything?”
“Mock me all you wish, Jedi,” Estosh snarled. “But I am up here, and you are down there.”
Luke had reached the turbolift lobby now. There was a single car waiting there behind the piles of Vagaari bodies, a car with an oddly shaped hole blown in the front part of the roof. He stepped inside and turned back toward the control panel.
It was only then that he saw that Evlyn had followed him.
He blinked at her in surprise, cutting off his comlink’s voice pickup. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.
“I want to help,” she said. “What can I do?”
His first instinct was to tell her to get back to Mara where she’d be safe. The only way he was going to be able to find out what the Vagaari were up to would be to go up to D-4 and take a look for himself. If they’d left a reception committee watching that approach, it could get messy.
But there was something about the expression on the girl’s face that was stirring old memories. . .
“And up there is about as far as you’re going to get,” Mara’s voice scoffed over the comlink, the tone carefully designed to draw Estosh out still further. “Or had you forgotten we’re in the middle of the Chiss Redoubt?”
“I want to go with you,” Evlyn said. “Please?”
Luke smiled as the memory clicked. I want to go with you. He could still remember his eagerness and frustration as he’d said those same words to Ben Kenobi, way back on the first Death Star. But Ben had refused him, going alone to shut down the tractor beam that was preventing the Millennium Falcon from escaping.
And thereby going to his death.
Would things have been different if he’d allowed Luke to go along? Of course they would. Leia might never have been found and rescued, for one thing. Han certainly wouldn’t have gone out on a limb for her back then, at least not alone.
Still, there had been many times over the years when he’d lain awake in the dark hours of the night, visualizing how he and Ben together might have been able to defeat or at least neutralize Vader, then go on to free Leia from her cell, then take R2-D2 and the precious Death Star data to Yavin 4.
“Ah, so there are things even the great Jedi don’t know,” Estosh scoffed back. “Perhaps it was merely your basic combat skills I underestimated.”
There was really no question as to what the logical, practical decision should be. Evlyn would be at risk up there, as well as being a possibly crucial distraction for Luke himself.
And yet, despite all the logic, his instincts were whispering the exact opposite.
Trust your instincts, Luke. . .
“Get ready to stop the turbolift,” he told her. Bending his knees, stretching to the Force for strength, he jumped through the ragged opening up onto the car’s roof. The reason for the odd shape of the hole became clear the instant he saw the multicolored wires crisscrossing the roof. Like the forward turbolifts, this one had been wired as a trap. The stormtroopers who had made the hole had rearranged and extended some of the lines, then shaped their explosive ribbon to avoid damaging the rest of them. “And if I tell you to get out of here, you immediately take the car back down and get Mara and the Imperials, without question or argument. Understood?”
Evlyn nodded. Stretching to the Force again, Luke reached down through the opening and keyed the switch.
The car began to lumber its way toward D-4, “downward” from where Luke was currently sitting. Pulling out his glow rod, he adjusted it to tight beam and waited.
“That’s a little unfair, Estosh,” Fel’s voice came from the comlink. “Even Jedi can’t be expected to know everything. That’s why they have allies like us. You see, we know all about the recorder you tapped into the navigational repeater lines.”
Luke frowned at the comlink. A recorder in the navigational lines, that Fel and the 501st had known about?
And that they hadn’t mentioned to anyone else?
“Ah, so that’s what the diversion with the line creepers was all about,” Mara said. Even at this distance, Luke could sense her own surprise and annoyance that Fel hadn’t let them in on the secret. But nothing but interested professionalism was coming out in her voice. “You knew you might be leaving this party early, so you made sure you’d have a recording of the route back to the Brask Oto Command Station. And your little chat with Jinzler in the forward observation lounge was because he happened to be too close to the action?”
“Yes,” Estosh said, sounding grudgingly impressed that she’d caught on so quickly. “If he’d left at the wrong moment, he would have seen Purpsh installing the device. Master Skywalker, are you still there?”
Luke clicked the comlink voice pickup back on. “Still here, Estosh,” he assured the other. “But even that recording isn’t going to get you all the way out of the Redoubt, you know. We were half an hour into the flight before you got it tied in.”
“That last part will be easy enough,” Estosh said offhandedly. “Leaving the edge of a star cluster is not nearly as difficult as navigating one’
s way inside.”
The turbolift car had hit the main gravity eddy field now and was rotating around in the darkness. A moment later it finished its turn, leaving Luke with a clear line of sight all the way to the curve where the pylon entered the underside of D-4.
He frowned. Even though he couldn’t see the far end of the tube, he ought to be able to hear the sounds of any activity going on around the curve. But all was silence. Whatever the Vagaari had been doing, they were apparently finished.
That was probably a bad sign. Flicking on his glow rod, he shined it upward.
And caught his breath. There, packed around the tube a few meters out from the curve, he could see a solid ring of flat gray boxes.
Boxes like the ones he and Mara had run into on their initial trip through D-4. Boxes Mara had identified as being full of explosives.
The Vagaari had mined the pylon.
CHAPTER 22
Luke gazed upward, feeling his throat tighten. There was undoubtedly an orderly and systematic method for detaching Dreadnaught-4 from the rest of Outbound Flight. Clearly, the Vagaari weren’t interested in finding out what that procedure was.
The car was approaching the ring now. “One thing that puzzles me, Estosh,” Luke said into his comlink, holding his free hand horizontally over the hole in the ceiling where Evlyn could see it. “You couldn’t have known any of the Dreadnaughts would even be in one piece when we set off on this trip, let alone ready to fly. And you certainly didn’t need all these troops just to track the Chaf Envoy’s path into the Redoubt.” The car reached the explosives, and he jabbed at the air with his finger. Evlyn was ready, and the car settled tentatively to a midair halt.
“That’s right,” Mara said. Luke could sense her concern as she picked up on his sudden tension, but again all of it was carefully filtered out of her voice. “So what was the original plan? Just out of curiosity, of course.”