by Timothy Zahn
Luke nodded. Stretching out to the Force, he keyed open the doors.
Mara’s prediction had hit it exactly. The Vagaari who had been firing from just outside the doors were already halfway down the corridor, firing wildly behind them in full retreat. Mara sent her puppet charging after them, its arms and legs pumping madly. Luke’s was right behind it. The apparently terrified retreating Vagaari disappeared around the distant corner—
And with an earsplitting blast, the entire corridor exploded in a burst of fire and smoke.
Luke winced, feeling his puppet twist around as it was buffeted violently by the blast before sprawling out of his control onto the deck. His ears ringing, he caught Mara’s eye and nodded. She nodded back, and together they sprinted ahead through the smoke and heat.
They met the returning Vagaari just around the corner as the aliens headed back to check the results of their handiwork. The battle was over very quickly.
“Twelve down,” Luke commented as he looked down the corridor. There were no signs of trouble or activity, at least not up to the next jog some ten meters ahead. “Plus the four from the turbolift lobby makes sixteen.”
“Which might actually be a significant number if we knew how many there were to begin with.” Mara nudged one of the bodies with her boot. “Recognize anyone?”
Luke frowned at the alien face. “Is that Bearsh?”
“Sure looks like him,” she said. “These guys are a lot more impressive in combat armor than in those silly robes, aren’t they?”
“Most species are,” Luke said. “Looks like he was leading this particular charge personally. That’s a good sign.”
“How so?”
“Estosh called him a general,” he reminded her. “If he’s sending generals to handle field operations, it might imply he hasn’t got all that many warriors left.”
“Good point,” Mara agreed. “Between the dent we made in his troops on Outbound Flight and the people he absolutely has to have crewing the Dreadnaught’s duty stations, he may very well be hurting for bodies to throw at us right now.”
“Right,” Luke said. “Either that, or Bearsh was simply being overconfident.”
“You are so very helpful sometimes,” Mara said, shaking her head in mock annoyance. “I’m surprised you didn’t go into politics. Come on, let’s get moving before they come up with something else.”
They reached the corridor jog Luke had noted without further incident and paused there, looking carefully around the bend. Still no signs of enemies, but twenty meters ahead another set of blast doors had been closed across their path. “Looks clear,” he murmured.
“There are three sets of doors leading off each side of the corridor, though,” Mara pointed out. “Perfect place to hide while you’re waiting to pounce.”
Luke closed his eyes, stretching out his senses. He could feel the malevolent, brooding presence of Vagaari all over the Dreadnaught, scattered through his mind like vaguely defined bubbles of heat in a cold room. But none seemed to be very close. “I’m not picking up anyone in there,” he said.
“Neither am I,” Mara confirmed reluctantly. “I still don’t like it.”
“Then let’s get through it quickly.” Throwing a last look at the empty corridor behind them, he rounded the corner and headed forward.
He was just passing the middle set of doors when the left-hand door ahead of him slid open, and five growling wolvkils padded into the corridor.
He braked to a halt, lifting his lightsaber warningly toward the animals. From behind Mara came the sound of another door opening, and he glanced back as four more of the predators filed in from one of the aft set of doors to block their retreat.
“Well, this is cute,” Mara murmured. “You see what the stylish wolvkil is wearing this season?”
Luke hadn’t; but now his jaw tightened as he spotted the fragmentation grenade slung under each wolvkil’s belly. “I was wondering what they thought this was going to accomplish,” he commented, adjusting his grip on his lightsaber as he tried to think. So far the wolvkils didn’t seem inclined to attack, but were contenting themselves with growling from a distance. But that could change at any moment.
Mara had come to the same conclusion. “Let’s try a strategic withdrawal while we think this out,” she suggested, easing up to Luke’s right and tapping the release on the door beside him. It slid open, and Luke sensed her concentration as she gave the interior a quick check. “Clear,” she said. “Come on.”
Together, they eased into the room, lightsabers ready. The wolvkils made no move to follow. Mara touched the inner door control, and the panel slid shut. In the glow from his lightsaber Luke found the light pad, flicked it on, and closed down his weapon.
They were in what appeared to be one of the many pumping stations that were by necessity scattered around any ship this size. Sets of conduits snaked along the walls and high ceiling, most of them running into one or the other of two huge and silently chugging rectangular boxes with rounded corners set against the bulkhead across from the door. “Cozy,” Luke commented, looking around. There were no other exits from the room, but of course that didn’t mean anything to a Jedi with a lightsaber. “Let’s see if we can carve ourselves a back door,” he suggested. Stepping to the forward wall, he ignited his lightsaber—
“Wait,” Mara said.
Luke paused, looking over his shoulder at her. “What?” he asked.
She was gazing at the wall in front of him, her sense tight and suspicious. “Luke, what’s the usual procedure for sealing a hull breach?”
He frowned. “You send some repair droids to the vicinity, close the blast doors behind them, pump out the air to equalize pressures, then open the inner doors to give them access to the leak.”
“Right,” Mara said, nodding. “The Vagaari have had four days to seal the gash you cut in the turbolift lobby. We know there are housekeeping droids still working, and we know there were enough repair droids rolling around at one time to fix all the damage Thrawn did to the hull. And anyway, even if none of them works anymore, Estosh surely brought a pressure suit or two along they could have used to go in themselves and fix it.”
“But they didn’t,” Luke said thoughtfully. “Why not?”
“Because if we’d come up the pylon and found your gash all sewn up, we might have decided to come aboard somewhere else,” Mara concluded grimly. “This way, they could reasonably predict where we’d come in, and could concentrate on making this one corridor as much of a death trap as they could.”
She nodded toward the wall in front of him. “So why should this part of it be any different?”
“Good question,” Luke agreed, closing down his lightsaber and stepping aside. “In that case, you’d better do this.”
It took three delicate strokes for her to tease a scratch all the way through the bulkhead. And it was indeed a very good thing he’d let her go first.
“Terrific,” she said darkly, sniffing at the liquid trickling down the wall. “Secondary reactant fuel, which most certainly wouldn’t normally be stored next to a pump room. Estosh is kindly offering us the opportunity of immolating ourselves.”
“How generous of him,” Luke said, looking up at the ceiling. “I wonder if they’ve ever seen how high a Jedi can jump.”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “But it wouldn’t take a Jedi to climb that maze of pipes fastened to the wall. If they were being thorough, they’d certainly have booby-trapped the ceiling, too.”
“Right,” he conceded. “What about down? Any idea what’s below us?”
“Usually it would be substructure, environmental equipment, and other bulk stuff,” Mara said. “Not a place you want to go randomly swinging lightsabers.”
“So we can’t go down, up, or sideways, and outside the door there’s nothing but wolvkils and fragmentation grenades,” Luke concluded, looking around for inspiration.
“And we’ve got a reactant fuel leak going,” Mara reminded him. “Any ide
as?”
Luke’s gaze paused on the two humming pumps. Each of them was nearly two meters tall and a meter wide, with a casing built of heavy metal and a front access cover shaped like a rectangular, flat-bottomed bowl with rounded corners and edges. “Actually, yes,” he told her, popping the release on one of the covers and swinging it open. The cover was as strongly built as the rest of the casing, with a ten-centimeter lip all the way around the perimeter. “Let’s get these doors off.”
Igniting his lightsaber, he sliced off the hinges, catching the cover in a Force grip as it started to fall ponderously toward him. “I hope you’re not planning to use these things as shields,” Mara warned as she cut the other cover free. “There are an awful lot of grenades out there.”
“No, I’ve got something else in mind,” Luke assured her, leaning the cover up against the wall by the door and closing down his lightsaber. “Time to go for the high ground.” Getting a grip on two of the pipes fastened to the wall, he started to climb.
Mara followed silently, clearly puzzled but willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Midway through their climb, he could sense when she suddenly caught on. “Okay,” he said when they were about two meters off the deck. Looking down over his shoulder, he stretched out to the Force and lifted the two covers to hover in the air just beneath him and Mara, their bowl sides up. “You ready?” he said.
Her answer was the snap-hiss of her lightsaber. Reaching over to the dripping bulkhead, she slashed the blade through it.
With a sudden gurgle, the trickle became a flood, the aromatic fuel flowing down the wall and running across the floor. “Watch your timing,” Luke warned as the sloshing pool began to fill the small room. “Remember, the lips on these things are only about ten centimeters high.”
“I know,” Mara assured him. She had her lightsaber closed down and back on her belt now, with her sleeve gun drawn. “Get ready. . . now.”
Abruptly, the door slid open at her Force command, the pool of fuel flowing out into the corridor. There was a surprised yelp from one of the wolvkils—
And Mara fired a single shot from her blaster into the liquid.
It ignited with a tremendous roar, the flames shooting nearly a meter off the deck. Even with the hovering covers protecting them, Luke found himself wincing at the rush of heat that washed over and past him. The yelp outside had become a howl of pain and fear, and he could hear startled Vagaari voices mixed in with those of the wolvkils. The height of the flames diminished as the blazing liquid continued to flow out into the corridor, settling down to perhaps thirty centimeters.
It was time to go. “Take the right one,” he called to Mara over the noise of the flames, pointing to the hovering cover nearest her. He felt her take its weight. Then, focusing all his attention on the other one, he maneuvered it into the center of the doorway and settled it down onto the deck. Bracing himself, he jumped.
He hit the cover dead center, dropping into a crouch as he landed. The flames crackled all around him, flowing nearly to the level of the cover’s lip, giving him the sudden feeling of being in a boat floating on a river of fire. Recovering his balance, he straightened up and looked around.
The entire corridor was filled with fire and smoke and the screams and howls of the injured. Through the shimmering heat haze to his left he could see flame-sheathed Vagaari writhing in agony as they staggered around trying to find a way out of the rolling river of fire. To his right, the blast doors reflected back the light of the flames, making metallic pinging noises as the sudden heat created uneven expansion in the metal.
Surprisingly, he saw only a couple of wolvkil bodies lying burning in the inferno. Apparently, the animals’ speed was as good for escape as it was for attack.
Turning back to the room, he again stretched out to the Force, taking the second cover from Mara’s grip. Sliding it over his head through the blocked doorway, he maneuvered it along the corridor and set it down in the flames just in front of the blast doors. “Okay,” he called to Mara. “Let’s go.”
Bending his knees, he leapt over the fire to land in the center of this second metal boat. He glanced back to see Mara land safely in the cover he’d just vacated, then turned and slapped the blast door release.
There were no Vagaari waiting on the other side, though if there had been the flaming liquid now streaming out along the floor toward them would probably have sent them running anyway. Luke made another jump to get past the edge of the expanding fire and turned back around, ready in case Mara needed assistance.
She didn’t. Without having to pause to open the blast doors as Luke had had to, she did the final part of the trip in two quick back-to-back leaps, landing on the deck beside him. Even before she was down, he stretched back out to the control and closed the blast doors again.
“Well, that was fun,” she said, breathing hard after her trip through the smoke. With its source of new fuel now blocked, the fire on this side of the blast doors had settled into a small pool that was busily burning itself out. “Uliar’s going to have a fit when he sees what we’ve done to his Dreadnaught.”
“He can bill us,” Luke said, looking around. “I vote we get out of this corridor. The command deck’s another four decks up anyway.”
“Seconded and approved,” Mara said. “I take it you’ll want to avoid the turbolifts?”
“Absolutely,” Luke said, looking up at the high ceiling. “But as you pointed out, they haven’t yet seen how high we can jump.”
Igniting his lightsaber, he locked the switch on and hurled it spinning into the ceiling, carving out a neat hole just wide enough to pass comfortably through. “There we go,” he said, catching the weapon and closing it down as Mara fielded the circle of deck metal as it tumbled toward them. “Let’s go.”
* * *
They made it to the command deck’s level without further trouble. Either the Vagaari had been thrown into disarray by the turning of their firetrap against them, or else Mara had been right about their defenses being focused on that single corridor.
Still, there was a lot of distance yet to cover before they reached the command deck, and a potentially large number of Vagaari still available for Estosh to throw at them. Senses alert, lightsabers held at the ready, they started forward.
But for a while, Luke began to wonder if the aliens had indeed given up. As they’d already discovered on the lower decks, the damage was greatest in the Dreadnaught’s midsection, where Thrawn’s attack had methodically taken out the turbolaser blisters and shield projectors. The debris and twisted bulkheads made for ideal ambush points, yet the Vagaari made no attempt to use them. There were occasional stacks or lines of explosives, but laid out hurriedly and with no attempt at subtlety or camouflage, almost as if simply dropped there by Vagaari trying desperately to get out of the path of the approaching Jedi. The two clusters that couldn’t be bypassed were quickly disarmed.
They made it through the midsection and continued on into the forward operations and crew areas. Here the resistance was slightly better organized: teams of three to five Vagaari would lurk in doorways or curves in the corridor, firing concerted volleys of blasterfire as Luke and Mara came into view. But again, Jedi senses and reflexes were more than adequate to the task, and it usually took only a few seconds of fire for the aliens to realize that their surprise had failed and to break off, scattering away into the shadows. From all appearances, it would seem Estosh was in the last stages of helpless desperation.
Mara didn’t believe it, either. “He’s up to something,” she muttered as they passed the site of the latest would-be ambush, stepping over the bodies of the two Vagaari who had been unlucky enough to have their shots reflected straight back at them.
“Of course he is,” Luke said, glancing in both directions as they reached yet another cross-corridor. No one lying in wait in this one. “The question is, what? What else could Outbound Flight’s organizers have brought aboard that he could use against us?”
“We’ll find
out soon enough,” Mara said. “Another couple of cross-corridors and we should be there.”
They moved ahead cautiously. Three minutes later, they reached the command deck.
It was the same setup as they’d seen earlier on D-l, minus the extensive damage that the impact with the planetoid’s gravel pit had created down there. A wide cross-corridor ran across the width of the ship just aft of the command deck, with an archway and sealed blast door set into the bulkhead directly in front of their portside corridor. Thirty meters to their right was a similar entryway, this one set in front of the main starboard corridor. Beyond the two blast doors would be the monitor anteroom with its long rows of consoles; from the far side of the anteroom, a single archway and even heavier blast door would lead onto the bridge proper.
“They’re in there, all right,” Luke said, stretching out toward the thick bulkhead with his mind. “Quite a few of them. I get the feeling they’re expecting us.”
“They got that part right, anyway,” Mara said. “How do you want to work this?”
Luke looked down the cross-corridor toward the starboard entryway, considering their options. The fact that the Vagaari had sealed the anteroom blast doors implied they weren’t going to give up their territory quite so easily. “We go straight in,” he decided. “Whatever they’ve got planned, they’ve either got a duplicate trap at each of the two doors, or else they’ve saved everything for the bridge proper. Either way—”
“Hold it,” Mara cut him off, her head cocked. “You hear something?”
Luke frowned. A new sound had been added to the background noises of a capital ship in flight, a metallic rumbling coming from their right. He looked again down the cross-corridor toward the other anteroom door—
And suddenly, a giant wheel-like machine rolled into view from the starboard corridor. It braked to a halt and began to open like a strange metal flower.
“Oh, no,” Mara breathed, tossing her lightsaber to her left hand and snatching out her sleeve gun.
But she was too late. Even as she fired, the machine finished unfolding, its curved head rearing up over its tripod legs, its jointed forearms settling themselves into horizontal position, the hazy sphere of its deflector shield flickering to life and spattering Mara’s shot into the ceiling. The head shifted slightly toward them, as if noticing the intruders for the first time, the arms swiveling their permanently mounted blasters to point in their direction.
