“Drop your weapons!” he shouted.
Whirling around to face him, Dusque could see that he had her in his sights. There was no chance she could swing her arm around fast enough to take him out. But she could block his view of Finn, so that Finn, at least, might get to safety.
“All right,” she shouted, letting the blaster slip from her fingers. She slowly raised her hands, hoping to buy Finn a few more precious seconds.
“Move over here,” the stormtrooper ordered. But just as Dusque was about to comply, two things happened.
Finn shouted, “Got it!” and the detonator under the Imperial ship exploded, knocking Dusque off her feet and incinerating the stormtrooper. Dazed, Dusque felt Finn yank her by her shirt toward the shuttle.
“I got it,” she mumbled. “Just fire this thing up.”
After a brief, questioning look at her, he dashed inside. While the shuttle rumbled to life, Dusque crawled up the hatch stairs and tumbled on board. She staggered to her feet and slammed the door-control panel. The stairs retracted and the hatch sealed up.
“Go, go, go!” she cried to Finn.
He punched the controls and the shuttle took off at a frightening angle. From the viewport, Dusque could see that the small outpost was in flames. The image grew smaller and smaller as they left Dantooine’s atmosphere. Most important, Dusque didn’t see anyone in pursuit. They were safe.
She made her way into the cockpit and slumped down into the free chair. She looked at Finn and almost laughed aloud.
“We did it,” she said. “We really did it.” And she laid her pack, the holocron still nestled inside, on top of the controls for Finn to see.
He turned to her and said, “You’re right. We’re done.”
She wondered why he sounded so sad.
FOURTEEN
As Finn piloted the ship, Dusque stared into the silence of space. They had managed to escape the planet not only with the holocron, but alive. She let her head drop back against the seat and closed her eyes. A contented smile spread across her face.
“You okay?” Finn asked her.
She turned toward him and opened her eyes. “Yes,” she answered. “Yes, I’m fine.” She tried to include him in her smile, but he remained stoic. She frowned slightly, wondering why he was so serious. Then her gaze trailed down to his wounded leg and she saw that it was bleeding.
“C’mon,” she told him. “Let’s go in back so I can treat that more properly.”
“It’ll be fine,” he said dismissively. “Don’t worry.”
“It’ll be even better after I take care of it. We’re safe in hyperspace. No one’s following.”
Finn looked at her and then, to her relief, relented. “All right. I just have to check one thing. Head aft and I’ll meet you there. Okay?”
“Don’t take too long,” Dusque told him. She wondered why men could sometimes be so difficult and fight the only logical choice in front of them.
She got up and walked back to the main cabin. Only a few items had been knocked loose by their abrupt departure, and none of them was too damaged. She picked up some storage containers and returned them to their original locations. She was looking for the more comprehensive medkit she knew was on board. She found it in a cabinet.
Bringing it over to a small table, she sat on the bench behind it. The seat wrapped around the edge of the ship for about three meters. She didn’t understand why on such a small ship, the designers felt the need to place items like this on board. Perhaps, she thought, they recognized how absolutely unnatural space travel was, and so they added such touches to ground travelers and make things seem more familiar somehow. At any rate, it was coming in handy now.
She opened up the kit and started laying out some of the supplies. She was about to call for Finn when she heard him shuffling through the cabin. By his gait, she could tell that his leg was stiffening up; if they didn’t treat it soon, there would probably be some scarring. She got up to help him the rest of the way, but he waved her back.
“I’m not that bad off,” he told her, a ghost of a grin on his face. “At least,” he paused, looking at the supplies and then at Dusque, “I’m not that bad yet. You haven’t started, however.”
Dusque swatted at him playfully, glad that he was becoming more like the man she was getting to know. She was sure that after he was treated properly, his good spirits would return.
“Have a seat,” she said, indicating the bench. He lowered himself down gingerly and extended his injured leg. Dusque pulled over one of the empty containers, set it near him, and, using it as a small stool, cut away his pant leg well above the injury. Finn grimaced.
“Sorry,” she said, as she tossed the piece of cloth off to the side. With the wound more clearly exposed, Dusque could see that the damage was a little worse than she had thought. The bacta patch had probably kept the injury from becoming infected, but it hadn’t done much more than that.
“We shouldn’t have had you walk on it,” she said, after inspecting the wound more closely.
“There wasn’t a choice, was there?”
Shaking her head, she grabbed for a bulb of antiseptic wash. As she irrigated the wound and the surrounding area, Finn winced. He leaned his head back, and in a similar pose to the one Dusque had struck in the cockpit, he closed his eyes. But there was no smile on his tightly clamped mouth.
“That’s what it really comes down to, doesn’t it?” he gritted.
Dusque was so involved in cleaning out his injury that she was only partially listening.
“It’s the choices we make in our lives. And once we make them, we have to live with the consequences of our decisions,” he continued softly.
Dusque looked up and saw that he was staring at her with his jet-black eyes. She paused, holding up a sterilizer for the burn, and finally let some of his words sink in.
“That’s not always true,” she said. “Sometimes decisions can be modified; the results can be changed when someone else comes into the equation.”
She focused her attention back on his leg. “Like this, for example. You were wounded, but because we have the supplies, we can change the outcome. This wound doesn’t have to leave any marks or lasting damage behind. We can effect a change.”
She applied an antibiotic, but was concerned when the salve didn’t penetrate as deeply as she felt it needed to. She searched through the more extensive medkit, pulled out a small canister, and started to apply the contents to Finn’s wound.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s chromostring,” she explained. “It’ll allow a deeper penetration of some of the medications without nerve damage.”
“You know this stuff pretty well,” he remarked.
She glanced up at him and smiled. “Well, believe it or not, sometimes collecting samples and specimens can get a little dangerous.” She was rewarded by a smile from Finn.
As she rummaged through the kit, she continued with her previous train of thought. “While you’re right that we do make choices and have to live with them, sometimes we’re presented with the opportunity to make new ones. Like me, for example. I thought I had my life in order—”
“And I ripped you out of it,” Finn finished for her.
“And you gave me a set of new choices,” she corrected.
“Did I?” he asked. Dusque could swear she heard bitterness in his voice.
But her search in the medkit was distracting her. “Blast,” she swore softly.
“What is it?” Finn asked.
“There’s no tissue regenerator in here,” she said disgustedly. “I’ll have to make do with a couple of larger bacta patches. When we get back to Corellia, we’re going to have to get this treated immediately.” She rummaged through the kit once more, in case she had missed it.
“I thought for certain there would be one in here,” she complained. She finished placing the last of the patches on his leg. “All done. Not quite good as new yet, but it will be.” She smiled at him.
Although the cabin was temperature controlled, Dusque shivered. She placed both of her slim hands on his face. She could feel the rough texture of his skin, a new growth of beard starting to form. She delicately brushed away a lock of his unruly hair so that she could see his eyes more clearly. She realized that with such dark irises, there was no way to see his pupils; it made his eyes seem bottomless. She had never met a man like him before, she thought.
Lost in the depths of his eyes, Dusque wasn’t sure who kissed whom.
After what seemed an eternity, Finn broke away from her.
“Finn—” Dusque began.
A ringing tone from the cockpit interrupted her, and Finn looked relieved. “I—uh—it’s time to drop out of hyperspace,” he stammered.
Bewildered, Dusque didn’t know what to say. “I think I’ll stay back here for a bit. Call me if you need me.”
“All right,” he said with a sad smile.
For a long time Dusque sat alone, wondering what had just happened between them. Thinking about what Finn had said about choices and consequences, she realized he was right. That was what it came down to: deciding who and what you were going to be, and being able to live with those decisions.
She thought back on the last few days and realized that her life had been transformed. She had thought she’d left behind so much, but in retrospect the only thing she had abandoned was an empty shell. Not a real life, but the shadow of one. As she sat and swiveled from side to side in the chair, she realized that she didn’t even feel tired anymore. She felt invigorated and pleased with herself. The only concern she had was Finn.
She had always been so good at keeping people at a distance, from her family to the colleagues in her sterile work environment. The only one who had found a crack in her armor had been Tendau. With his death, that crack seemed to have become a split that Finn had slipped into. She couldn’t deny that she had strong feelings for him. That was something she had never expected.
She had to talk to him—that was all there was to it. When she felt the ship drop out of hyperspace, she figured that now seemed as good a time as any for that conversation. She got up and went forward to the cockpit.
What she saw made her stop dead in her tracks.
“Finn?” she whispered.
He was huddled over the control console, his back toward her. Then, as she moved closer, she saw the holocron. It was sitting in a receptacle on the panel, and a readout nearby showed a bar scale. Horrified, she realized that he was downloading the data from the holocron and transmitting it.
“What are you doing?” she shouted, running the rest of the way to him. Before he could say or do anything, she knocked the holocron out of the computer port. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him hit a switch—and with a dark certainty she knew what he had done. She slammed her fist down on the control panel, uncertain if she had stopped the entire transmission.
“What were you thinking?” she yelled at him. “Don’t you remember what Leia said? Under no circumstances were we to try to transmit any data from the holocron. If we thought we were in trouble, we were to destroy it!”
He looked at her with an unreadable expression. She ran over to the holocron and scooped it up. Looking about, she located the tiny chamber in the sidewall of the cockpit, tossed the holocron into it, and slammed the door shut. Before Finn could raise a hand to stop her, she jettisoned the holocron into space. Then she placed both her hands against the hull, swallowed hard, and tried to regain her composure.
“Why would you risk it?” She moved closer to him and touched his arm. “Why, Finn?”
A flash caught her eye and she noticed a blip on the radar. “Those are probably Imperials following us. They could have intercepted the transmission! We might have done all this for nothing!”
He shook his head. “It’s not Imperials.”
“It’s right there on the radar,” she argued. “And we don’t have time for this, if an Imperial agent is on our tail.”
Finn held his ground. “There’s no way that can be an Imperial agent.”
Dusque was startled by his flat monotone. “How do you know?” she whispered.
“I know there are no agents of the Empire following us because—” He paused and drew in a deep breath. “I am the Imperial agent.”
For a moment, Dusque felt as she had on the stone bridge inside the cave. She didn’t know which way was up or down, and everything seemed slightly unreal. She swallowed again, suddenly feeling hot and claustrophobic.
“What?” she whispered and her voice sounded like it was light-years away.
He turned and faced her fully. “I’m the agent,” he repeated.
“That can’t be,” Dusque cried. “It can’t be. You saved me when Tendau was executed, when the Imperials shot us down—”
“Stop and think for a moment,” he snapped at her. “You’re a scientist—use that analytical brain of yours.”
Dusque actually flinched at the tone of his voice.
“Don’t you think it was just a little too coincidental that after our first meeting, when you said you didn’t want to lose anything more to the Empire and you turned me down, the Hammerhead was so conveniently arrested? And who just happened to be there to drag you away after you saw him murdered?”
Dusque blinked rapidly as her eyes filled with unshed tears. “You killed him?” she whispered.
“I arranged it,” he admitted coldly.
“But I did see him talking with some Bothans in Moenia, and when I asked him about it, he denied it,” she said.
“Did it happen before or after I put the thought into your head that he might be a spy? My guess,” he added, “is that it happened after.”
And Dusque realized she had been more suspicious of everything after her first meeting with Finn. She had jumped to conclusions about Tendau and now knew he had died for nothing; the whole thing had been no more than a ruse to draw her out. She stared at Finn, unable to accept what she was hearing and even more horrified that he looked so angry. She was the only one who had a right to be angry, she thought.
“And now you’re furious that I didn’t somehow figure this all out? Didn’t somehow guess that the man I was falling in love with was a mask? That he didn’t exist at all? Congratulate yourself,” she told him bitterly, “because you are very good at your job.”
His shoulders sagged a little under the weight of her accusing stare.
“Don’t you see?” he entreated her, and he looked again like the man she thought she knew. “Why do you think I asked you about your loyalty? When I asked you where your loyalties were, I had hoped that you were going to turn out to have only been searching for revenge. I had hoped your loyalty to the Empire ran as deeply as mine. After some of what you told me, I thought it did.”
“Don’t mistake fear for loyalty,” she said through gritted teeth. “And don’t try to fool yourself that you’re loyal to them; you’re afraid as much as I was.”
She stood staring at him and she still could not believe what she was hearing. But, unbidden, some of the things he had said and done came back to haunt her.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she said, shaking her head. “If what you say is true and you are loyal to the Empire, why were we attacked on the way to Corellia? That was a little too close to have been planned.”
“It was close,” he admitted. “If I had been piloting the ship alone, I would’ve had a chance to signal where I was and the location of the Rebel base. But I didn’t get to in time.”
Dusque thought back to when the Mon Calamari’s ship had started to plummet and she had heard an explosion. It had come from inside the cockpit; from a weapon that Finn had explained to her wasn’t able to pierce a ship’s hull.
“You killed the pilot,” she whispered, dumbstruck.
Finn nodded. “I was able to get
them to break off the attack, but we crashed before I could do more.”
“And once we got to the base,” she finished slowly, “you never had a moment alone.”
“I just figured I would wait until we had retrieved the holocron. Then I could turn everything over to the Empire.”
“So you just used me,” she said bitterly, “to get everything that you wanted. The only thing I don’t understand is why you didn’t just turn me in back at the base. Why create all that damage when your superiors were probably there? I don’t understand.”
Finn was silent.
“Why?” she demanded. “You were, after all, done with me.”
His face abruptly twisted in anguish. “I couldn’t.”
“Why not?” she asked him quietly.
“Because it was you,” he shouted. “There you were,” he admitted more calmly, “ready to march toward your death all to save me and the Rebels, and I just couldn’t let you go. I couldn’t let them have you.”
Dusque could see that he was trembling slightly. There was no reason for him to lie to her now; there was no point.
“It’s not too late,” he told her. “We can both return to the Emperor. I can tell them some of the other Rebels arrived as backup and they were the ones responsible for the chaos at the base. If we return together with the information in this computer”—he tapped the console—“we’ll both be safe. And we can be together,” he pleaded. “Please.”
Dusque was in turmoil. And she was so torn, because she knew exactly how he felt. She knew what it was like to live in the shadow of the Empire. But the man in front of her had helped her step out of that shadow. And if he could do that for her, she thought that maybe, just maybe, she could do the same for him.
“I can’t go back,” she told him and stepped closer. “Not ever. But you don’t have to, either. Remember what you said about choices and consequences? Right here and now, you can choose to change your life. I know the Rebel Alliance—Leia and the others—will forgive you and take you in. It is that ability to forgive, that soul, that separates the Rebels from the Empire.” She moved closer still as she saw he was chewing his lip.
The Ruins of Dantooine Page 20