by Timothy Zahn
"Certainly," Rosemari said. "This way, Ambassador." Walking side by side, she, Evlyn, and Jinzler headed down the corridor.
"What is it?" Pressor asked when he judged the group far enough out of earshot.
"I went to lock down the turbolift controls like you said," Trilli said, his voice tight. "The other two trap cars—Two and Six—aren't midtube anymore."
Pressor felt his stomach tighten. "You mean they—? No, that's impossible. We'd have heard the crash."
"I'd sure think so," Trilli agreed. "But if the cars aren't there, and they didn't smash themselves to a group pulp, it means the Jedi and Imperials somehow ungimmicked them and got out."
Pressor hissed softly between his teeth. This was not good. This was very not good. "All right," he said slowly. "They didn't come down here—there are enough people wandering around that we'd surely have heard about it if they had. That means they either went back up to Four, or else they're down in the storage core. Could you tell where the cars ended up?"
Trilli shook his head. "We messed up all the positioning sensors when we rewired the cars way back when. We'd have to physically go in there and see."
"Yeah," Pressor said. "Okay, go scare up a couple of maintenance droids and send them into the shaft, one in each direction. Then get hold of Bels and Amberson and have them lock down all access from Four. If they went up, they're probably planning to come back with reinforcements."
"And if they went down?"
Pressor grimaced. From the supply core, the intruders would have access to both the main colony here on Five as well as the nursery on Six. And, of course—
"You think they know about Quarantine?" Trilli asked, echoing Pressor's own thought.
"I don't know how they could," Pressor said. "But they're Jedi. Who knows what they know?"
"Well, we sure as vacuum can't let them get back there," Trilli warned darkly. "If they find those people—worse, if they spring them..." He shook his head.
"Right," Pressor said grimly. "Who's on Quarantine duty?"
"Perry and Quinze," Trilli said. "You want me to send reinforcements?"
Pressor snorted. "Like who?"
"Yeah," Trilli said with a sigh. "We don't exactly have an army here, do we?"
"Hardly," Pressor agreed, frowning back over Trilli's shoulder. In the distance, in the direction of the forward turbolift lobby, some of the lights seemed to have gone off. Odd. "About all we can do is warn them. Better alert the maintenance crews to be on the lookout, too. Wired comms only on those; I want the comlink jamming kept in place for now."
"Right," Trilli said. "This could get ugly, Jorad."
Pressor looked the other way down the corridor, where glimpses of his sister and niece and Jinzler could still be seen through colonists going about their business. "Yes," he said. "I know."
CHAPTER 16
The last ten meters of the turbolift pylon leading to the command Dreadnaught were crushed and twisted, as if that part of the pylon had been hit with a powerful impact. The final two meters of that, in addition, were blocked by what seemed to be the remains of a car that had been caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even with lightsabers, it was a delicate task to cut enough of it away to get through. "Finally," Mara said as she sliced through one last section of car wall to reveal the tube doors, as mangled and distorted as the tube itself. "Maybe we should have gone aft and tried the pylon back there."
"I doubt it would have been any faster," Luke said, stepping forward and carefully sniffing the air drifting in through the slightly open door. It smelled dank and stale, but otherwise livable. The door markings were upside down, he noted, which meant that the turbolift car hadn't made the usual rotation as it arrived, and D-1's gravity wasn't functioning. If the gravity was off, the rest of the environmental system probably was, too, with the air he was smelling just the leakage from the rest of the Outbound Flight complex. They would have to make sure they didn't get oxygen-starved. "Don't forget all the debris we had to wade through when we first came in up on D-Four," he reminded her as he stepped back and gestured in invitation toward the doors. "Thrawn probably made even more of a mess of the turbolaser and shield sections on this one."
"I suppose." With deft flicks of her lightsaber, Mara carved an opening through the door. "Shall we?"
It wasn't as bad as Luke had expected, at least as far as basic travel difficulties were concerned. It was strange to walk along the ceiling with the deck above them, and of course the planetoid's own gravity was far weaker than what they were used to, but that in itself didn't present any particular problems. The bulkheads and floors were horrendously crumpled and twisted, but there was relatively little actual debris lying around to contend with. Occasionally they had to use their lightsabers to clear away a support strut that was blocking a doorway, and twice they had to use the Force to move a wayward console that had broken away from its connections and was lying, dust-covered, across their path. But most of the obstacles were easily dealt with, and a handful of the permlights had survived to supplement the illumination from their glow rods.
The debris itself wasn't the tough part. The tough part was the bodies.
Not really bodies, of course, at least not the sort Luke had seen in the aftermath of the many battles he'd been through in his lifetime. After five decades, there was little left but piles of bones and scraps of clothing to show where someone had fallen. Sometimes he could see evidence of how death had come: severely broken skulls from flying equipment, or pulverized bone showing where a hit from a laser or missile blast had turned part of the inner hull into deadly shrapnel.
Most of the time, though, the remains showed no indication of what had happened. Those crewers, most likely, had either died of suffocation or from the impact when the Dreadnaught had slammed into the gravel pile where Outbound Flight now lay.
"You can see where the hull's been repaired," Mara commented as they picked their way forward toward the command deck. "See the weld marks?"
Luke looked where she was pointing her glow rod. The marks were very professional, precisely following the jagged hull cracks. "Repair droids?"
"Definitely," Mara agreed. "The attack must have smashed the hull in enough places to bypass the blast doors and emergency compartmentalization system, which then suffocated any of the crew and passengers still alive. But it didn't put all the droids out of commission, and they automatically began emergency repairs. By the time anyone else got here, enough of the ship was airtight again for them to fly it."
The damage seemed to increase as they moved forward. So did the number of bones. "The crew must have been trying to escape up here as Thrawn took out the turbolaser and shield blisters," Mara said as Luke sliced open yet another frozen blast door. "There normally wouldn't have been this many people this far forward."
"Especially since most of the ones on duty would have been farther forward on the command deck," Luke agreed, eyeing her closely. "How are you doing?"
"I'm all right," she said. "Why? Shouldn't I be?"
"I just wondered," he said. "I mean, down here with more..."
"With more evidence of what Thrawn and Palpatine did to these people?"
Luke winced. "Something like that."
"Oddly enough, I'm all right," Mara said, her eyes drifting around the room. "I guess I must have already worked through all that up above." She gestured toward an upside-down arch ahead of them, a doorway partially blocked by a half-closed blast door. "Looks like we're getting near the end of the line."
"I think you're right." Slipping through the opening, Luke looked around. It was a large room, with a lot of scattered chairs and broken consoles that had once apparently been lined up in neat rows, all of it covered with the same thick layer of dust that existed everywhere down here. "Definitely the monitor anteroom," he identified it as Mara joined him. "That would put the bridge just ahead, through that other archway in the middle of the far wall."
"What's left of it, anyway," Mara said, looking
around. "It may be my imagination, but it looks like there's less actual battle damage here."
"It does, doesn't it," Luke agreed, frowning. She was right: aside from a few of the droid-repaired fissures, most of the destruction seemed to be impact damage. "Either it happened when Outbound Flight plowed into this rock pile, or else Thrawn did some ship ramming during the battle."
"Thrawn, or someone else," Mara said. "Don't forget that according to Bearsh, the Vagaari were also at that battle."
"True." Luke surveyed the wreckage, a strange feeling of emptiness flowing into him. "I'd hoped we'd be able to find some intact records down here. Something about the Jedi of that time, maybe some details about how they'd been organized. But I can't see how anything like that could have survived."
"Doesn't look promising, does it?" Mara said. "Still, as long as we're here, we might as well go the whole way. You said that was the door to the bridge?"
"Should be," Luke said, ducking under a section of collapsed deck and stepping over to the archway and the warped metal door blocking it. Igniting his lightsaber, he sliced it open.
It was indeed the bridge, very much as he remembered from his brief time aboard the Katana some thirteen years before. Except, of course, that this particular bridge was littered with bones and broken consoles and ankle-deep in powdery dust.
And it was only about half as long as the other one had been.
"Now, that's impressive," Mara said. "I don't think I've ever even heard of a ship being crushed this badly, let alone seen it. They must have been really scorching space when they hit."
"Yes," Luke murmured. "Question is, whose idea was it to hit this hard?"
"You still thinking about those prisoners in the storage core?"
"Off and on," Luke said, frowning toward the crushed bow. There was something glinting dully over there amid the shards of the shattered observation bubble, something that didn't seem to fit with the rest of the wreckage they'd seen. "We know they escaped somehow," he continued, stepping carefully through the debris, wincing as something snapped beneath his boot. "We also know that there were eighteen Jedi aboard Outbound Flight, and yet Thrawn was still able to beat them. I keep wondering if there's some connection."
"It could be that Thrawn had a bigger fleet than anyone wants to admit," Mara suggested, leaning over one of the consoles for a closer look.
"Formbi said it was just his picket force," Luke reminded her.
"Formbi is also lugging around about two bantha-weights of corporate Chiss guilt over the whole incident," Mara countered, moving on to the next console. "Maybe there was more official Chiss involvement than he's letting on."
"Could be," Luke said, squatting down among the transparisteel shards. There it was. Gingerly, he reached into the debris and got a grip on it.
He froze. Not it; them. There were two objects buried in the rubble, both archaic in design and yet instantly recognizable as they lay among two distinct sets of broken bones.
Mara picked up instantly on his emotional reaction. "What is it?" she asked, abandoning her survey and coming to his side.
"Exhibit One," Luke said, lifting up a dented cylinder that could only be a lightsaber. "And," he added quietly, holding up a tarnished, dented hand weapon, "Exhibit Two."
Mara inhaled sharply. "Is that what I think it is?"
"I think so," Luke told her, standing up and turning the weapon over in his hand. "It's a few decades out of date, but the style is unmistakable.
"It's a Chiss charric."
* * *
For a moment neither of them spoke. Then, still wordlessly, Mara held out her hand. Luke placed the unknown weapon in it, and for another minute she studied it in silence. "Yes," she said at last. "You can see Chiss lettering on it. It's a charric, all right."
"So what's it doing here?" Luke asked. "Drask told us Thrawn never sent a landing party aboard."
"And how exactly would Drask know whether he did or didn't?" Mara pointed out. "He wasn't there. Was he?"
"Not that I've heard," Luke admitted, taking the charric back from her. An odd thought was starting to take shape around the edges of his mind...
"Not much we can tell from the skeleton, either," Mara commented, squatting down and gently touching one of the bones the charric had been lying beside. "Humanoid, but definitely not human. That covers a lot of species, unfortunately."
"Including the Chiss," Luke said. "Tell me, Mara. You spent a lot of time talking to the Chiss on the trip here. Did any of them ever say they'd actually seen any of the Vagaari? Or seen holos of a Vagaari, or even heard a description of one?"
Mara frowned, and he could sense her stretching to the Force as she searched her memory. "No," she said. "In fact, I remember Formbi specifically saying they hadn't been seen anywhere in the region since Outbound Flight. Though to be fair, I never actually asked anyone that particular question."
"Well, I did ask Bearsh once," Luke said. "None of his generation of Geroons ever saw a Vagaari, either."
"Which would make sense if they all disappeared fifty years ago," Mara pointed out. "Are you going anywhere special with this?"
"The Chiss were at Outbound Flight," Luke said. "According to Bearsh and Formbi, so were the Vagaari."
He lifted his eyebrows. "What if they were in fact the same people?"
Mara blinked. "Are you suggesting the Chiss are the Vagaari?"
"Why not?" Luke asked. "Or at least, some particular group of Chiss were. We both know how devious and creative Thrawn was. Would it have been that hard for him to invent a completely fictitious race for his own purposes?"
"Probably wouldn't have been more than a lazy afternoon's work for him," she conceded. "But why would he do that?"
"That's the real question, isn't it?" Luke conceded. "I don't know. I just find it oddly suspicious that when Outbound Flight disappeared, so did the Vagaari."
"Mm," Mara murmured, frowning off into infinity. "Maybe we should sit Formbi down in a quiet corner somewhere when we get back to the rest of the group. It's about time he was straight with us about what's going on."
"It's well past time," Luke said. "And we'll need to get him off alone. I don't think we'll want Drask listening in."
"That goes without saying." Mara gestured to the dusty weapons in his hands. "Either of those still work?"
"I don't know." Aiming at an empty spot across the room, Luke squeezed the charric's firing stud.
Nothing happened. "Dead as Honoghr," he said, sticking it into his belt. Pointing the lightsaber away from him, he touched the activator.
The weapon's snap-hiss sounded weak and rather asthmatic. But the green blade that blazed out appeared functional enough. "Whoever built this built it to last," he commented, closing it down and peering more closely at it. "I wonder if it was C'baoth's."
"C'baoth's?"
"He was apparently the senior Jedi Master on the expedition," Luke reminded her. "This is probably where he would have been during the attack. And look." He pointed to the activator. "See this? Looks like some kind of gem."
"You're right," Mara said, leaning toward him for a closer look. "An amethyst, I think."
"I'll take your word for it," Luke said, sliding the lightsaber into his belt beside the charric. "Come on, let's finish and get back upstairs. That talk with Formbi is starting to sound more and more interesting."
* * *
The turbolift creaked and moaned as it arrived at Dreadnaught-6, but it settled into place with only a couple of small bumps. "They've definitely been using this car," Fel commented.
"As we had already concluded below," Drask said pointedly.
With an effort, Fel held his tongue. Yes, Drask had noticed that the core's stack of supplies near this particular turbolift tube had been systematically raided; and, yes, Fel had agreed then with the general's conclusion that this probably meant at least part of D-6 was in use. But it didn't mean extra evidence shouldn't be noted and commented upon.
With a little more crea
king, the doors slid open. Grappler, at point, stepped out into the corridor, his helmet turning back and forth as he scanned the area. "Clear," he reported, moving aside to let the others emerge. "Which way, Commander?"
"The most direct path to D-Five, of course," Drask growled before Fel could answer. "That is, after all, our chief purpose in being down here."
With an effort, Fel controlled his temper. Drask had been nothing but a blue-skinned lump of impatience and disapproval since he'd left Luke and Mara and linked up with the Imperials. Maybe, he thought unkindly, that was why the two Jedi had been so eager to go down to D-l and foist him off on the Imperials. "We'll get to D-Five, General," he said with all the patience he could scrape together. "But as long as we're here, it wouldn't hurt to do a little looking around."
Drask rumbled something deep in his throat. "You do not understand," he bit out.
Fel looked aft along the corridor, trying to ignore him. The game of diplomacy, he decided, was rapidly losing whatever faint charm it once might have possessed. As soon as he reasonably could, he would indeed get back to the others, turn Drask back over to Formbi, and be done with him.
In the distance, somewhere beyond this particular Dreadnaught's fleet tactical room, he could see a glow that seemed stronger than anything permlights could put out. "Looks like the local civilization is back that way," he said, pointing. "Stormtroopers?"
There was a short pause as the stormtroopers turned their sensors in that direction. "Infrared and gas-spectrum analysis readings indicate approximately thirty to forty humans," Grappler reported.
"Picking up voices, too," Cloud added. "The pitch would suggest mostly females and infants."
Fel frowned. Infants? "Let's take a look."
Drask rumbled again. "Commander Fel—"
"We're going to take a look, General," Fel said shortly, sending the Chiss's glare right back at him. "If you choose to argue with me every third or fourth step, it's going to take a lot longer."
