Outbound Flight (звёздные войны)

by Timothy Zahn

  "I doubt it," Pressor said. "Jedi stick together like molwelded deck plates."

  "Yeah, I've noticed," Uliar agreed sourly. "Probably just a difference of opinion on how to swat down this Mitth-whatever."

  "Probably." Pressor cleared his throat. "You know, Chas, it occurs to me that we still have one card we could play," he said, lowering his voice even further. "Back in the aft reactor storage area we've got a couple of droidekas packed away for emergency intruder defense. If we pulled them out and turned 'cm loose, even the Jedi would have to sit up and take notice."

  Uliar snorted. "Oh, they'd notice, all right. All the bodies lying around would be a dead giveaway. Those things are way too dangerous for amateurs to fool around with."

  "Maybe," Pressor said. "But still-"

  "Break time's over," Uliar interrupted as the Jedi conversation broke apart. Ma'Ning turned and left the hangar, while C'baoth and Jinzler conversed a moment longer and then headed back toward the shuttle. In Uliar's estimation, both looked even less happy than they had before.

  They reached the silent group by the shuttle, and for a moment C'baoth sent his gaze around at all of them as if memorizing their faces. "Jedi Jinzler, you'll escort these people back to Dreadnaught-Four," he said at last. "No. On second thought, take them to the storage core and put them in the Jedi training center."

  Jinzler turned to him, her eyes widening in surprise. "Thetraining center? "

  "Don't worry, there's plenty of room," C'baoth said. "I've ordered all the students to Dreadnaught-One's ComOps Center, where they can observe the upcoming meld in safety."

  "But they'll be locked in down there." Jinzler's gaze flicked past Uliar, lingering on the children as they clutched their parents' hands. "Besides, we're on full battle alert," she added. "They need to be at their stations."

  "Where they can preach their sedition to others?" C'baoth countered darkly. "No. They'll be out of trouble down there until I've had time to decide on a more permanent solution."

  Jinzler seemed to brace herself. "Master C'baoth-"

  "You will obey my order, Jedi Jinzler," C'baoth said. His voice was quiet, but Uliar could hear the weight of will and age and history behind it. "Between the Chiss and whatever game this Sidious impostor is playing, Outbound Flight has no time right now to deal with internal dissent."

  And as Uliar watched, Jinzler's brief flicker of defiance faded away. "Yes, Master C'baoth," she murmured.

  With one final look at the people still lined up on the deck, C'baoth turned and strode away. "If you please, Uliar?" Jinzler said quietly, her eyes avoiding his.

  Uliar gazed across the hangar at C'baoth's receding back. Someday, he promised himself Someday. "You heard our beloved Jedi slave master," he growled. "Everyone back in the shuttle."

  The pulsating hyperspace sky flowed past the Vagaari warship, closer and more vivid and more terrifying than Car'das had ever seen it. With only a single layer of thin plastic between him and the waves, he couldn't shake the sensation that at any moment they might break through and snatch him away from even the precarious safety of his hull bubble, leaving him to die alone in the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. He tried closing his eyes, or turning around so that his face would be to the hull. But somehow that just made it worse.

  And it would be a six-hour journey back to the Crustai base, six hours of uncertainty and mental 'agony along with the emotional strain of the hyperspace sky beating against his transparent coffin. More than once he wondered if he would make it with his sanity still intact.

  He never had the chance to find out. Less than two hours after leaving the Geroon homeworld, the hyperspace sky suddenly coalesced into starlines and collapsed back into stars. There was a click from somewhere beside him

  "Human!" the Miskara's voice snarled into his ear.

  Car'das jerked, banging his head on the cold plastic. What in the worlds-?

  "Human!" the voice came again.

  And this time he realized it was coming from the diamond-shaped device he'd puzzled at earlier. The Vagaari version of a comlink, apparently. Reaching awkwardly over his shoulder, he grabbed it. "Yes, Your Eminence?"

  "What is this trap you have led us to?" the Vagaari demanded, his tone sending a shiver through Car'das's body.

  "I don't understand," Car'das protested. "Did your people get the wrong coordinates from the transport's computer?"

  "We have been brought too soon into crawlspace," the Miskara bit out. "The stolen ship net has been used against us."

  Behind Car'das came the subtle clicking of locks as someone prepared to open his prison. "But how could the Chiss have planned such a thing?" he asked, fumbling to get the words out before the door could be opened. If he was brought before the Miskara now, he was likely to die a quick and very uncomfortable death. "They must have been using it on someone else, and we just happened to run into it."

  "With all of space to choose from?" the Miskara shot back. Still, Car'das thought he could hear a slight dip in the other's anger level. "Ridiculous."

  "Stranger things have happened," Car'das insisted, feeling sweat breaking out on his forehead.

  Behind him, the hull cracked open. Car'das tensed, but the Vagaari outside merely thrust a set of macrobinoculars from the Chiss shuttle into his hands. "Look forward," the Miskara's voice ordered. "Tell me the story of this vessel."

  The door was slammed shut again behind him. Exhaling some of his tension, Car'das activated the macrobinoculars and scanned the sky in front of him.

  The object of the Miskara's interest wasn't hard to locate. It was a set of six ships, big ones, arranged around a cylindrical core with tapered ends.

  It was Outbound Flight.

  He took a careful breath. "I've never seen anything like it," he told the Miskara. "But it matches the description of a long-range exploration and colony project called Outbound Flight. There are fifty thousand of my people aboard those ships, with enough supplies in the storage core to last all of them for several years."

  "How many fighting machines will they have?"

  "I don't know," Car'das said. "There'll be some, certainly, mostly those bigger tripod-type droidekas to be used as colony boundary guards. Probably a few hundred of those. Most of their droids will be service and repair types, though. They probably have at least twenty thousand of those types."

  "And these mechanical slaves will have the same artificial brains and mechanisms as the fighting machines?"

  Car'das grimaced. It was pretty clear where the Miskara was going with this. "Yes, they could probably all be adapted to combat of some sort," he agreed. "But the people there aren't going to just hand them over to you. And those Dreadnaughts pack alot of firepower."

  "Your concern is touching," the Miskara said, his voice thick with sarcasm. "But we are the Vagaari. We take what we want."

  There was a click, and the comlink shut off. "Yes," Car'das murmured. "So I've heard."

  "There," Mitth'raw'nuruodo said, pointing out theSpringhawk 's canopy. "You see them, Commander?"

  "They're a little hard to miss," Doriana ground out, his throat tight as he gazed at the hundreds of alien ships that had suddenly appeared at the edge of Mitth'raw'nuruodo's gravity-field trap. "Who the blazes are they?"

  "A nomadic race of conquerors and destroyers called the Vagaari," Mitth'raw'nuruodo told him.

  "What are they doing here?" Kav demanded, his voice shaking. "How did they find us?"

  "I would imagine we have Car'das to thank for that," Mitth'raw'nuruodo said calmly. "As it happens, this system is on a direct line between the last known Vagaari position and my Crustai base."

  Doriana stared at the other. "You mean Car'dasbetrayed you?"

  "Car'das has his own concerns and priorities." Mitth'raw'nuruodo lifted his eyebrows pointedly at Doriana. "As do we all."

  There was no real answer to that, at least none that Doriana was interested in voicing. "What are we going to do about them?" he asked instead.

  "L
et us wait and see their intentions," Mitth'raw'nuruodo said, turning back to gaze out the bridge canopy. "Perhaps they will be cooperative."

  Doriana frowned. "Cooperative how?"

  Mitth'raw'nuruodo smiled faintly. "Patience, Commander. Let us wait and see."

  "They arrived quite suddenly," C'baoth's voice came from Lorana's comlink, calm but with an edge to it she'd seldom heard before. "Some ploy of the Chiss, I imagine."

  "What are they doing?" Lorana asked, keeping her voice down as she gazed ahead of her at the line of men, women, and children walking alongside the stacks of storage crates toward the Jedi training center. There was no point in worrying these people any more than they already were.

  "So far, just waiting," C'baoth told her. "Captain Pakmillu informs me that their ship design is radically different from that of the Chiss, but of course that means nothing."

  "Have you asked the commander about them?" Lorana asked. Uliar, walking at the end of the line of prisoners, glanced over his shoulder and started to drift backward toward her. "Maybe they have nothing to do with him."

  C'baoth snorted. "With all of space for them to fly through? Please."

  "What's going on?" Uliar asked softly.

  Lorana hesitated. But all of Outbound Flight was in this together. "An unidentified fleet has arrived," she told him. "Over two hundred ships, at least a hundred of which seem to be warships."

  "Who are you talking to?" C'baoth asked.

  "We're trying to figure out whether they're Chiss ships, Chiss allies, or someone else entirely," Lorana continued, ignoring the question.

  "What are their reactor emissions like?" Uliar asked. "Is it a similar spectrum to Mitth-whatever's ships, or something different?"

  "Whois that?" C'baoth demanded. "Jedi Jinzler?"

  "Reactor Tech Uliar says we might be able to deduce their identity or affiliation from their reactor emission spectrum," Lorana said.

  "And what precisely is Reactor Tech Uliar doing out of the imprisonment I ordered for him and his fellow conspirators?" C'baoth asked acidly.

  "We're on our way there," Lorana said, feeling her resolve eroding beneath the weight and pressure of his personality. "I thought that since he's an expert in these things-"

  "We have experts up here, too," C'baoth cut in. "Loyalexperts. You concentrate on putting Uliar where he can't do any more harm and leave the alien fleet to-"

  He broke off as a melodious voice, or possibly two of them, began to speak in the background. "What's that?" Lorana asked.

  "They appear to be hailing us," C'baoth said. The alien voices grew louder as the Jedi Master moved closer to one of the bridge speakers.

  Lorana listened closely. It was a strange language, highly musical, with a distinct singsong component to it. "Uliar?" she whispered.

  He shook his head, his forehead creased in concentration. "Never heard anything like it before," he whispered back. "But it doesn't sound like the kind of language near humans like the Chiss would come up with."

  Lorana nodded agreement. "Master C'baoth?" she called. "It doesn't sound like-"

  "Get the conspirators to their holding area, Jedi Jinzler," C'baoth interrupted. "Then go to Dreadnaught-Four and report to Jedi Master Ma'Ning in the weapons blisters." There was a click as he shut off his comlink.

  Lorana sighed. "Yes, Master C'baoth," she murmured as she returned her comlink to her belt.

  "We're in trouble, aren't we?" Uliar asked quietly.

  "We'll be all right," Lorana assured him, trying to convey a confidence she didn't feel. First Mitth'raw'nuruodo, and now this new threat. . and with Outbound Flight's defense resting squarely on the shoulders of their handful of Jedi.

  And suddenly she was getting a very bad feeling about all of it. "I need to get up to D-Four to assist Master Ma'Ning," she told Uliar. "Get your people inside, and when these other matters are settled we'll get your problem straightened out."

  Uliar snorted. "It's notour problem."

  Lorana grimaced. "I know," she conceded. "Don't worry. Wewill straighten it out."

  "They're probably not answering because they don't understand you," Car'das explained as patiently as his pounding heart would allow. "As I said, they're from the same region of space I am, and we don't know the language of the mighty and noble Vagaari."

  "You will soon learn it," the Miskara promised him coldly. "In the meantime, you will serve as translator."

  Car'das grimaced. That was all he needed: the people on Outbound Flight assuming he was a renegade or, worse, a traitor. Whatever necessary. . "Of course, Your Eminence," he said. "I stand humbly ready to serve the Miskara and the Vagaari people in any way you wish."

  "Of course," the Miskara said, as if even a breath of hesitation on Car'das's part would be unthinkable. "Tell me first: how deeply within the vessels will the fighting machines be stored? Will they be at the surfaces, or deeper inside."

  "Deep inside," Car'das told him, not knowing whether it was true but not about to take the time to try to actually think about it.

  "Good," the Miskara said with satisfaction. "Then we may destroy as we will without risking our prize."

  An unpleasant sensation tingled across Car'das's skin. With a hundred Vagaari warships blotting out the starscape around him, the Miskara's words were as close to a death sentence as anything he'd ever heard.

  And he was the one who'd pointed the Vagaari in that direction.

  "Now: speak this," the Miskara continued. " 'You of the vessel known as Outbound Flight: we are the Vagaari. You will surrender or be destroyed.' "

  Chapter 22

  . . Or be destroyed."

  Lorana looked across the weapons blister at Ma'Ning, at the tight set to his mouth. The first voice from the unknown ships had definitely not been human. This one just as definitely was.

  And the human had been speaking Basic, as well. This wasn't good. "A captive from the Republic?" she suggested.

  "Or a traitor," Ma'Ning said grimly. "Either way, it's going to make this that much trickier."

  "Not at all," C'baoth's voice came from the comm speaker. "There's nothing even a traitor could have told them that will have prepared them for the kind of coordinated defense a Jedi meld can offer."

  "With a hundred or more warships at their disposal I can't see them worrying overly much about how tight our defense is," Ma'Ning countered.

  "Patience, Master Ma'Ning," C'baoth said, his voice glacially calm. "Trust in the Force."

  "They're moving forward," Captain Pakmillu's voice cut in. "All weapons stations stand ready."

  Lorana took a deep breath as she stretched out to the Force for strength and calm. This was it: the first genuine test of the Jedi control system C'baoth had spent so much of his time teaching the rest of them.

  "What in the name-?" Abruptly, Ma'Ning hunched closer to his sensor displays. "Master C'baoth?"

  "I see them," C'baoth said. "So this is the sort of enemy we face."

  "What is it?" Lorana asked, swiveling her chair to her own displays.

  "Look at the warships," Ma'Ning said. "See all those plastic bubbles on the hulls?"

  Lorana felt her chest tighten. "There arepeople in there!"

  "Living shields," C'baoth confirmed, his voice thick with contempt. "The most evil and cowardly defense concept ever created."

  "What do we do?" Lorana asked, a sudden trembling in her voice. "We can't just slaughter them."

  "Courage, Jedi Jinzler," C'baoth said. "We'll simply shootbetween the hostages."

  "Impossible," Ma'Ning insisted. "Not even with Jedi gunners. Turbolasers simply aren't accurate enough."

  "Do you assume me to be a fool, Master Ma'Ning?" C'baoth demanded scathingly. "Of course we won't fire until we're close enough for the necessary accuracy."

  "And meanwhile we just sit here and taketheir fire?" Ma'Ning countered.

  "Hardly," C'baoth said, an edge of malicious anticipation creeping into his voice. "The Vagaari have a surprise in store for them. All Jed
i: prepare to meld. Stretch out to the Force. . and then, to the Vagaari."

  "They make no answer," the Miskara said accusingly, as if Outbound Flight's silence was Car'das's fault.

  "Perhaps they're still consulting among themselves, Your Eminence," Car'das suggested, shifting his eyes back and firth across the sky. The Vagaari ships had started to close the gap between themselves and Outbound Flight, moving together into groups of tight-formation clusters that would provide them the protection of overlapping forward shields.