Star Wars: Survivor's Quest

by Timothy Zahn

  “Especially when you add in the slaughter of a few unarmed crewers?” Fel put in.

  “Loss of life was neither necessary nor expected,” Formbi insisted, some heat seeping through the fatigue into his voice. “My ship had been specially prepared for this mission. All crewers had been provided with hidden areas near their duty stations where they could protect themselves from attack as they watched for the Vagaari to betray themselves. With a squad of warriors in the Dreadnaught docking bay, I also expected there to be ample warning if Bearsh and the others attempted to return to the vessel. We expected to merely catch them in the act of attempted theft or sabotage, which would have satisfied the rules of engagement.”

  He closed his eyes. “I did not expect such a massive attack to come from the other direction,” he said, the heat fading away. “The warriors whom I stationed in the Dreadnaught are certainly dead. So perhaps are all who we left aboard. Their blood now lies on my hands.”

  “It’s hardly your fault that you didn’t know about the Vagaari suspended animation trick,” Jinzler pointed out. “Car’das must have missed that one.”

  “He merely met them,” Formbi said. “He wasn’t given a tour of their technical facilities.”

  “He’ll have to do better next time,” Mara said. “What about the others? Feesa and General Drask and your other aides?”

  “Feesa knew the entire plan,” Formbi said. “That was why I insisted she come along, so that if anything happened to me she could direct the operation. No one else knew more than you yourself were told.”

  He smiled slightly. “Though I believe General Drask was able to deduce much of the truth.”

  “Much, but not all,” Drask rumbled. “It would have been better if you had taken me into your full confidence.”

  “If I had, you would have been as guilty as I of manipulating events to bring about this end.” Formbi shook his head. “No. On my hands, and mine alone, must this rest.”

  “You can sort all that out when you get home,” Mara said. “Can we assume the rules of engagement have been satisfied?”

  “They have been more than satisfied, Jedi Skywalker,” Drask said darkly. “We have been attacked without justification or mercy. A state of war now exists between the Chiss Ascendancy and the Vagaari.”

  “Good,” Mara said. “I’d hate to have to go through this again just because we’d missed something in the fine print. In that case, there’s just one little loose end left. That falling cable that nearly knocked Luke across the room when we first came aboard the Chaf Envoy. I trust you’re not going to try to blame that one on the Vagaari?”

  Drask cleared his throat self-consciously. “I am afraid I am to blame for that incident, Jedi Skywalker,” he confessed. “When Aristocra Chaf’orm’bintrano asked Admiral Parck who of the New Republic would be the best warriors to have at hand against possible trouble, he recommended you and Master Skywalker.”

  “He seemed to have firsthand knowledge of your fighting skill,” Formbi murmured.

  “Yes,” Drask said. “However, I did not entirely trust his tales of Jedi abilities.”

  “So you arranged a demonstration,” Mara said. “Did we meet with your approval?”

  “Let us simply say that you did not disappoint.” Drask smiled slightly. “The demonstration arranged today by the Vagaari gave you a far better opportunity to prove yourselves.”

  “Yes,” Mara murmured. “I should hope so.”

  Behind her, the door slid open and Evlyn and Rosemari stepped in, Pressor close behind them. “There you are,” Mara said. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m all right,” the girl said, looking around at the others as the door slid shut again. Possibly comparing bandage counts, Mara thought with a brief flicker of amusement. “Is Luke all right?” she asked. “I mean, Master Skywalker? He saved my life, pulling me down and protecting me when the pylon exploded.”

  “He’s fine,” Mara assured her as her mother steered her to one of the other recovery tables. “And as far as saving lives goes, I think the two of you come out pretty even on that scoring.”

  “What do you mean?” Rosemari asked, an odd edge to her voice. “Evlyn didn’t do anything.”

  “She most certainly did,” Mara insisted. “Evlyn reactivated that turbolift trap at exactly the right moment to shoot the car down the tube and into the eddy rotation just before the explosives detonated. If she hadn’t done that, it would have been the fractured ceiling that took the brunt of the explosion instead of the wall, and a lot more high-speed debris would have gotten through. That kind of prescient timing can only come from the Force.”

  “But you won’t tell them, will you?” Rosemari pleaded. “Please?”

  “They don’t like Jedi here, Mara,” Fel said quietly. “I don’t know exactly why, but they don’t.”

  “We don’t just not like them, Commander,” Pressor said grimly. “If the council sticks the Jedi label on someone, they get immediately sent over to Three.”

  “You mean D-Three?” Jinzler asked. “The Number Three Dreadnaught?”

  “That’s the one,” Pressor said. “The pylons between it and the rest of Outbound Flight were destroyed or collapsed during the attack and crash, leaving it isolated from everything else. So Uliar and the other Survivors set it up as a place where anyone with Jedi traits could be safely banished.”

  “I thought that was what the Quarantine on D-Six was for,” Fel said.

  Pressor shook his head. “Quarantine is for people they suspect of using the Force,” he said. “Three is where they get sent once they’re pretty sure.”

  “Pretty sure, you say?” Su-mil asked softly, his alien expression very still. In some ways, Mara reflected, he looked even more dangerous without his armor. “And how certain exactly is that?”

  Pressor looked away from him. “They’re completely sure,” he said. “The Managing Council is. I can’t speak for the rest of us.”

  He looked at Mara. “And it’s not a death sentence, really,” he added with an odd combination of earnestness and embarrassment. “The place has been set up with plenty of food and power. A person could live there for a lifetime in reasonable comfort.”

  “But in complete isolation,” Su-mil said darkly. “You sentence these people to a life of loneliness.”

  Pressor sighed. “We’ve only done it twice,” he said. “At least, up to now.”

  “They’re not going to send her there, Jorad,” Rosemari said. “They can’t.”

  She looked suddenly at Mara. “You can take her with you, can’t you?” she asked. “You can take her when you leave.”

  “The plan was to take all of you with us,” Mara told her. “Unfortunately, unless we can get out of here and back to the Chaf Envoy, neither option has much of a future.”

  “I spoke to the techs a few minutes ago,” Pressor said. “Most of the blast doors stopped working years ago, and most of the ones that did work have now been locked open by those cursed conduit worms. Unless we can get a few of them working again, we’re not going to be able to get either the turbolift doors or any of the outer hatchways open without losing all our air.”

  He looked at Drask. “I take it there’s still no word from your own ship?”

  The general shook his head. “No,” he said. “And I no longer believe they will be coming.”

  “You think they’re all dead?” Pressor asked.

  Drask closed his eyes. “Including crew members, there were thirty-seven warriors aboard the Chaf Envoy,” he said. “The Vagaari may have had as many as three hundred.” He opened his eyes into slender cracks of glowing red. “They would not have been prepared for such a devastating assault.”

  Mara felt her stomach tighten. The sudden multiple deaths she and Luke had sensed aboard D-l could have been all the Chiss, or a sizable fraction of them, or just the squad of warriors Drask had left in the D-4 docking bay. There hadn’t been any way to tell at the time, and there still wasn’t.

  Though if
there were surviving Chiss, it might not make any difference. Even if the Vagaari hadn’t bothered to hunt down and kill everyone aboard, they would certainly have made a point of wrecking the ship on their way out. “So in other words, we should assume we’re on our own,” she concluded. “All right. Pressor, you said D-Three was isolated from the rest of Outbound Flight. That means you must have vac suits to get back and forth. Any of them still in working condition?”

  “A couple dozen of them are,” he said. “But as I told you, we can’t get the hatches open.”

  “We don’t have to,” Mara told him. “All you need to do is build a small caisson around one of the turbolift doors with me in it. I can cut through the hull, climb up the pylon, and make my way cross-country to the Chaf Envoy.”

  “And how do you get back in?” Drask asked.

  “I’ll figure that out later,” Mara told him. “What do you think?”

  Above them, the lights flickered. “Terrific,” Pressor muttered, glancing up. “They must be getting to the generator.”

  “What, we’re running on generator power already?” Mara asked.

  “We are in this part of the ship,” Pressor said. “They’ve already gotten into the main power conduits.”

  “Wait a minute,” Jinzler said, frowning. “You have portable generators? How many?”

  “Probably ten that still work,” Pressor said. The lights flickered again—”Better make that nine.”

  “I never even thought to ask,” Jinzler said, sounding disgusted with himself. “Get them together as quickly as you can—all of them—and set them out along the corridors.”

  “Connected to what?” Pressor asked, sounding confused.

  “Connected to anything you want,” Jinzler said. “Lights, heaters—anything. Just crank them up to full power and then shut down the main reactors.”

  “It will not work,” Drask declared. “Even if the generators succeed in drawing the line creepers out, there are too many of them. They will quickly overload and destroy the generators’ wiring, then return to the larger sources of power.”

  “That’s right,” Jinzler said, smiling tightly. “If the worms actually get to them.”

  He turned back to Pressor. “But they won’t, because around each generator you’re going to create a moat of salt water. The worms will crawl in, short out their organic capacitors, and die.”

  “You’re kidding,” Pressor said. “I’ve never even heard of that.”

  Jinzler shrugged. “It’s a trick we came up with when I was bumming around Hadar sector after the Clone Wars. It’s fairly disgusting, but it works.”

  “I’ll get the techs on it right away,” Pressor said, pulling out his comlink. “You’ve certainly had a varied career, Ambassador.”

  Jinzler’s answer, if he made one, was lost as a sudden surge of distant emotion yanked at Mara’s attention. “Something’s wrong,” she said, pulling her lightsaber from her belt and heading for the door. Pressor got there ahead of her, slapping the release and ducking through.

  It was then that they heard the shouting in the distance ahead.

  “Come on,” Pressor growled, drawing his blaster as he and Mara sprinted down the corridor.

  They rounded a turn and nearly collided with a dozen techs and civilians running in the other direction. “They’re back!” one of the techs gasped, jabbing a finger behind him as he dodged around Pressor. “In the turbolift. They’re trying to break in.”

  Pressor swore under his breath, thumbing on his comlink. “All Peacekeepers to the forward starboard pylon,” he ordered. “The Vagaari are back.”

  “This doesn’t make sense,” Mara objected, trying to stretch out to the Force as she ran. But the flavor of the alien minds was too faint to sort out against the clamor of civilian panic throbbing in the air around her. “Why would they have come back?”

  “Maybe they decided they wanted to watch us die after all,” Pressor said grimly. “If so, they’re going to pay heavily for the privilege.”

  One of the other Peacekeepers was waiting in the darkness when they arrived at the turbolift lobby, the beam from his glow rod twitching back and forth as he fidgeted with apprehension. “They’re coming through,” he hissed, turning the beam on one of the doors. “I can hear them working on it. What do we do?”

  Pressor never had a chance to answer. Almost before the words were out of the other’s mouth, the door suddenly gave a violent creak and cracked a centimeter open. Three pry bars were in place before it could close again; and with another series of creaks the door was forced open. Pressor and the Peacekeeper leveled their blasters at the opening, and suddenly two combat-armored figures leapt out of the gloom, their own glow rods swinging back and forth. Behind the lights, Mara could see hand weapons tracking as they searched for targets—

  “No,” she snapped, reaching out to the Force and twisting all four muzzles to point into opposite corners of the lobby. “Don’t shoot. They’re friends.”

  She stepped into the middle of the standoff as a third armored figure emerged into the room. “Welcome to Outbound Flight, Captain Brast’alshi’barku,” she said, bowing slightly to the newcomer. “I thought you’d never get here.”

  CHAPTER 23

  “We never even heard the Vagaari leave,” Captain Talshib said disgustedly, his red eyes blazing even more brilliantly in the dim glow of the recovery room permlights. “We were sitting like fools in concealment in the command center, waiting for them to make their move. But they simply exited their own vessel, scattering line creepers along the way, and left. Apparently they had already decided to take the Old Republic vessel and had no time to waste with us.”

  “Yes, Bearsh would have informed Estosh of the new plan by that time,” Drask agreed. “They had had the foresight to appropriate a set of special operations communicators before traveling to Outbound Flight and were able to send pulse messages through the humans’ jamming.”

  “I wish I had known,” Talshib rumbled. “We could have deployed to intercept them.”

  “It’s just as well you didn’t,” Mara commented from the other side of Formbi’s recovery table. “You saw what happened to the squad we left in the Dreadnaught’s docking bay. They never even had a chance.”

  “Perhaps,” Talshib said reluctantly. Warriors’ pride, Jinzler thought as he leaned against the wall by the open doorway watching the discussion. Or perhaps just pride in general. Talshib would probably have preferred an overwhelming enemy attack, even if it had meant dying in combat, to the situation he currently found himself in.

  Mara must have sensed that, too. “No perhaps about it, Captain,” she said firmly. “If you hadn’t been around to rig that sealant tent across the broken pylon, we’d still be trying to figure out how we were going to get out of here.”

  Talshib snorted. “Thus permitting you to travel freely from one dead vessel to another.”

  “Neither of them will be dead for long,” Drask put in firmly. “If Ambassador Jinzler’s technique works, both vessels should be functional within a matter of days.”

  Talshib snorted again. That was probably a good deal of his attitude problem, Jinzler had already decided. The Vagaari line creepers had wiped out the Chaf Envoy’s communications with the landing party and otherwise crippled the ship before the crew, lurking in their hidey-holes, had even realized they were under attack.

  And then, as if that weren’t embarrassment enough, it was human ingenuity that was going to clear out his ship for him. That had to really gall him, and Jinzler was a little surprised that Drask had gone out of his way to mention where the plan had come from.

  Unless Drask had done it on purpose, a not-so-subtle reminder to his subordinate that even the Chiss could learn from other species on occasion. Certainly the general’s politely unfriendly attitude toward humans seemed to have warmed perceptively over the past few hours. Jinzler could only wonder what had happened to cause that change.

  “Here comes another one,” Evlyn stage-w
hispered from a few paces down the corridor. “No; two of them. No; it’s a whole crowd.”

  Jinzler moved away from the wall and the discussion and crossed to her side. In the much brighter light blazing away from a rack above the portable generator, he could see a group of perhaps twenty line creepers wriggling their way across the deck toward the enticing aroma of electric current.

  “Careful,” he warned as Evlyn started toward them. “If you get too close your own bioelectrical energy might distract them.”

  “Okay,” she said, backing up again. Together they watched as the fragile-looking creatures climbed briskly up over the lip of the wide, flat basin the generator’s stubby legs were resting in. One by one, they dropped into the salt water, twitched a few times, and went still. “That’s really cool,” she commented.

  “Effective, too,” Jinzler agreed absently, most of his attention still back on the snatches of conversation he was able to hear of Formbi’s war council. Drask and Talshib were discussing their options now, with Mara, Formbi, and Fel occasionally putting in a comment or suggestion. Luke, still in his Jedi trance, was across the corridor in the operating room where they’d finished patching him up.

  Unfortunately, none of the options being batted around sounded particularly hopeful, at least not from where he was standing. Borrowing extra generators from Outbound Flight might speed up the decontamination process aboard the Chaf Envoy, but even so the best possible projected completion point was at least three days away. Unless the Vagaari had mechanical trouble along the way, the stolen Dreadnaught would have far too much of a head start for the Chaf Envoy to catch up with it before it reached the Brask Oto Command Station and escaped from the cluster.

  “You’ll be leaving soon, won’t you?”

  Jinzler shifted his full attention back to Evlyn. “We all will,” he told her. “You, your mother—all of us.”

  “I mean as soon as the Blue—I mean the Chiss ship is fixed, you and Mara and Luke will be leaving.”